House for All Seasons

by Jenn J. McLeod

  ‘Forget I asked. I have no right coming here and quizzing you. I don’t want to fight again. Truly I don’t. I guess that’s what mothers and daughters do, though, don’t they?’ Amber thought about the relationship—make that non-relationship—with her own daughter.

  ‘What’s that?’ Cheryl asked, confusion crinkling her brow.

  ‘They fight.’

  ‘Can’t say I know. Are you talking about you and Fiona? You haven’t told me anything about my granddaughter yet.’

  Do you give a toss? Amber was tempted to ask.

  Would it satisfy Cheryl to know karma was alive and kicking in Amber’s world; that Fiona had been angry with her mother for years and blamed her for God only knows what.

  ‘Ah, Fiona!’ Amber shrugged. ‘Not sure what to tell you, except that she has her grandfather’s ambition and Phillip is a wonderful father. They are all very close and between them, Jack and Phillip have her every whim covered. She doesn’t need me. Not much room in her life for me, anyway.’

  ‘A daughter does need a mother, whether they want to admit it or not. You’ll be there when she realises it, that’s the important thing.’

  Cheryl seemed to relax, her breathing slow but slightly exaggerated.

  ‘You asked me what Gypsy and I could possibly have to share,’ she said, finally. ‘Apart from being lonely, we understood each other’s pain. We helped each other. We … we’d lost daughters. Not until you’ve lost a child—no matter what age, Amber—can you possibly comprehend that desperate need to connect with someone who truly understands such hurt.’

  Oh but I can.

  While for fifteen years, her own loss had been too painful to talk about, even to Phillip, Amber now had the urge to tell her mother.

  ‘I do understand the desperation. I do,’ she said, taking the picture in the small silver filigree frame from her handbag, slowly sliding it over the table to Cheryl. ‘He’d be fifteen.’

  She watched her mother’s finger silently trace the image, coming to rest on the handwritten label the neonatal nurse had added: Christopher.

  ‘Oh, Amber,’ Cheryl said in a whisper, all censure gone, replaced with sympathy and a new appreciation. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I’ve never carried a baby to full term since. They said my size and a teenage pregnancy was …’ Amber struggled through the explanation, each word getting harder to deliver. ‘Oh well,’ she said trying for bravado. ‘It was my fault, I guess. There’s no greater punishment.’

  ‘The only person punishing you is you.’ Cheryl’s voice was calming and tender. ‘You have one child. That’s more than some women.’

  ‘I haven’t been a very good mother,’ Amber said, the admission surprisingly easy.

  ‘You didn’t have such a good role model.’

  ‘I’m not here to blame you for anything. I’ve done enough of that. Taking responsibility for how things turned out is something I need to do for myself. Coming back here … seeing you … Time I faced up to a few things.’

  ‘We have some catching up to do then, Amber. Let’s move over there.’ Cheryl jerked her head towards the park bench near one of the centre fig trees. ‘We can talk more freely.’

  They sat next to each, their bodies close but not touching, their eyes staring straight ahead.

  ‘I’m sorry about last night too,’ Cheryl said. ‘I haven’t known what to feel about seeing you after all this time. When you sent my letters back …’ She shrugged.

  ‘What letters? I never sent any letters back. I never saw any letters. You wrote to me in Sydney?’

  A thousand new questions formed inside a head already bursting.

  ‘Your father told me to stop. He said the letters upset you too much and made you angry. You needed time. I saw no sense doing anything to ruin your relationship with Jack. No sense having you hate both your parents.’

  ‘I don’t hate you … Mum.’ That word rolled off her tongue oddly, and when Cheryl turned to face her daughter, Amber saw a shimmer of tears. She reached across to where the older woman’s hands rested on her lap and wrapped her fingers around them: a testing touch, not knowing what the reaction would be. ‘I maybe thought I did, a little bit, once maybe.’

  ‘I made mistakes, Amber. Believing Jack’s promise—to tell me when you were ready for my letters and to start writing again—was one of them.’

  ‘So Dad sent back the letters you wrote?’

  Cheryl nodded.

  ‘If you still have them … maybe you could share them …’

  Another nod, this time accompanied by a small smile. ‘Perhaps not my finest work, but they said what I was feeling at the time. One thing the drink did was lay your emotions bare.’

  ‘Mum?’ Amber repeated the word, wanting to get used to it—again. ‘Did Dad know you’d got yourself sober?’ Her mother nodded. ‘And yet he never told me. In fact, he said you were worse.’

  ‘That’s true, in part. Things got bad. For a time I … I didn’t think there was much worth living for anymore.’ Cheryl slipped her hands away from her daughter’s, clamping them to her lap, but not before Amber saw the faintest of scars across the inside of her wrists. ‘I wasn’t strong back then, not in the beginning. I was never strong enough to stand up to your father, even though I tried. I tried so many times when you were young, but each time I came close to giving the drink away, I’d find more around the house to tempt me. He put them everywhere—the oven, the washing machine—places I never expected, when I wasn’t prepared or feeling strong.’

  Amber was not feeling too strong at this particular point in time either, but she had to play this right. No derailing the discussion like last night, even though she was desperate to understand the last twenty years of her mother’s life. Once everything was out and in the open, they could start fresh; Amber could start gluing back together the pieces of a shattered mother–daughter relationship.

  ‘Dad stashed all that booze? I always thought that you were hiding it.’

  ‘Of course you would. I probably would’ve thought the same. Still, I should have been stronger. No one poured the drink down my throat.’ Cheryl reworked her smile from sarcastic to sorry. ‘Some things I managed to do very well all by myself.’

  ‘You were right about one thing, there being a time to tell the truth.’ Amber was older and wiser now. Had Cheryl tried to say any of this when Jack was still the best dad in the world, she would have rejected it outright. ‘I’m so glad we’re talking now.’

  ‘Your father blamed me when you fell pregnant, saying the apple never falls far from the tree.’ Cheryl turned her body towards her daughter, the look on her face pushing Amber’s heartbeat up a notch. ‘I’ve never told you the truth about Jack and I’m certain he would never have told you.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me now?’ Amber silently prayed she would.

  ‘You need to know, your father was a very different man once and …’

  ‘Mum, I was blind to Dad for a long time, but I’ve seen the real man for a while now. Believe me, nothing about him would surprise me. So don’t worry. I want to know. I want to know everything.’ Amber sensed her mother’s hesitation. She reached over, took one hand and sandwiched it between her own, this time holding tight, like she never wanted to let go. ‘But only if you’re okay to tell me.’

  Cheryl nodded. ‘I fell pregnant with you before your father and I married. His parents—your grandparents, Warren and Elsie—had insisted we marry. Even though Jack wasn’t keen, his parents had the last word. They were staunch Methodists with high expectations of their only son. I loved him, but your father was a man with big dreams and something to prove. A teenage bride and a baby …’ She paused, sighed. ‘We didn’t fit with his plans, so for a while after we married, you and I simply didn’t exist for Jack. He took a job out of town before you were born and basically lived a single man’s life for twelve months.’

  ‘He wasn’t here for my birth?’

  Cheryl’s head shook. ‘I had you on my own. Do
ctor Wynter was wonderful. There was so much happening at the time. We were losing soldiers in Vietnam. Poppy’s father was …’ Cheryl stopped short, her face the picture of pain before she hid it behind a tissue she’d slipped out of the sleeve of her skivvy.

  ‘Poppy’s father what?’

  ‘Did I say Poppy’s? I meant Caitlin’s. I was talking about Dr Wynter, of course.’ Her smile was the cautious kind, as though a lie lurked behind the small expression lines at the corners of her eyes. ‘Dr Wynter helped me out until your father came back. But Jack was different, trapped, pushed too soon into fatherhood. Oh, but I promise, he did love you, Amber,’ her mother added quickly. ‘He really did. He just got very angry. Not at you, though. Never at you.’

  ‘Angry?’ Amber struggled to remember an angry father. Disappointed, dissatisfied—maybe. Never angry.

  ‘He couldn’t help it. I made things so difficult. He never meant …’ The woman paled, her shoulders fell and the small spark that had lit her eyes seconds earlier fizzled away.

  ‘Mum?’ Amber’s skin crawled, every pore drowning with dread as the truth sank deeper. ‘Mum, talk to me. Did Dad …? All those times you fell down drunk, the time you broke your nose, and that Christmas after the council party when you broke your arm? Did you fall or … did he …?’

  The answer was in her mother’s silence.

  ‘Bastard! He did, didn’t he? He was responsible. Why didn’t I see it?’

  ‘Shush, Amber.’ Cheryl’s grip on Amber’s leg pinned her to the seat.

  ‘No, Mum, no more shush. This is not something to be shushed, not ever.’

  ‘It’s all right. It’s in the past.’ Cheryl’s whisper comforted her daughter as if Amber was the one hurting, the one with the grazed knee.

  Amber was hurting, kicking herself for being so blind, so easily influenced.

  ‘Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you leave?’

  The look on her mother’s face told Amber she’d heard the blame in her words.

  ‘Because, Amber, despite what you might have thought then, I loved you too much to leave. I didn’t want to lose you. Your father loved me too, in his own way, and I was partly to blame.’

  A tremor took over Amber’s body, spurred on by anger and utter disbelief that her mother was claiming responsibility. Why did abused women do that?

  ‘Jack had to control everything.’

  ‘That much I do know,’ Amber said.

  ‘He controlled me by threatening to take you from me if I told anyone, or if I tried to leave with you.’

  Resentment and anger ripped through Amber so fiercely, she could hear the quiver in each word. ‘And the bastard told me—’

  ‘Shhh, Amber.’ Cheryl Bailey scanned their surrounds.

  ‘No, Mum, I won’t shush. He told me back then that if I stayed in Calingarry Crossing I’d end up a lonely drunk like you, hiding my flaws behind a bottle. Look at me now, though.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You’re beautiful, Amber.’

  ‘I’m lonely.’ The confession, the cynical little snort, the tears. ‘I’m lonely, Mum. Not only that, no one knows the real me. Hell, not even I know the real me anymore.’

  ‘I do,’ Cheryl said softly, the firm grip on her daughter’s hand now a gentle caress, calming.

  ‘How can you possibly know?’

  ‘Amber, I’m your mother. I knew you for the first sixteen years of your life. I know everything about you and I know you’re hurting and sad and I don’t understand why. You have such a good life.’

  ‘And it’s all so neat and pretty on the surface, like me. Only inside I had … I have this hole, like I’m not complete. Like I can see and hear, but I can’t feel, can’t touch, can’t taste. I feel numb. At least I did until now. I think I’ve missed you.’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart.’

  Amber hugged her mother’s neck and they cried silent tears, knowing they had only touched the surface.

  *

  ‘Why are you crying?’ Christopher was standing in front of them blinking, concern clouding the usual brightness in his eyes.

  ‘Look at us silly grownups.’ Cheryl dabbed her cheeks with her scrunched tissue, the brave face Amber had interpreted all those years ago as her mother’s indifference now back in place. ‘How about we go to Saddleton for pizza tonight?’

  ‘Cool. Amber too?’

  ‘Amber too,’ Cheryl confirmed without consultation. ‘We can make plans for the weekend.’

  Amber sniffed back her own tears. ‘The weekend?’

  ‘The Easter Fair,’ Cheryl said.

  ‘Oh, that. Good, I’m hoping you’ll have an idea about how on earth we can get a cow there.’

  ‘We’d best get a move on then.’ Cheryl winked at Christopher. ‘I’ll go and pay Will for the drinks.’

  ‘No, Mum, I’ll take care of the bill. You’ll be taking care of the cow.’

  35

  The rain predicted for the weekend of the Calingarry Crossing Easter Fair did not eventuate. Just as well, given that Cheryl’s idea for transporting Muddy the four kilometres to the sports oval was to take her on foot. As it turned out, Amber’s concerns about her mother’s ability to manage the walk there were unwarranted, with all of them enjoying the slow amble, especially Muddy. All the standing around waiting for judging and prize presentations had tested Amber’s patience, though, and she was actually glad to be walking again, in the direction of home, even though with a kilometre still to go her legs and feet hurt. Christopher raced ahead on the old BMX bike, a makeshift carry crate on the back stockpiled with the CWA jams Amber had purchased, as promised. She imagined Lorna and Val back at the fair, counting their takings with glee after Amber had ordered a dozen each of the persimmon and marmalade.

  No such glee for Amber with a stomach full of junk food. She’d challenged Christopher to try every carnival treat on a stick with her: a Dagwood Dog dipped in tomato sauce, cheese on a stick, a massive rainbow tangle of fairy floss, a barbecued corncob and for dessert—what else?—a toffee apple. She’d had great fun challenging him to the Laughing Clowns in sideshow alley, where he impressed everyone except the Knock ’em Down vendor with his ball skills. Even Muddy tasted victory, although no one would have guessed by the unenthusiastic meander home.

  While they walked, Amber and Cheryl chatted easily—albeit safely—mostly small talk concerning the different craft stalls and how fortunate they’d been with the weather. The day had been so incredibly warm that Amber hadn’t needed the hoodie tied around her hips. With the sun behind them, she let her old hat hang down her back, not caring that hat-head and curls was still not a good look. With nothing but an SPF moisturiser on her face, she felt blissfully unburdened, and the other pair of op shop jeans she’d bought—tight and tapered at the ankle—showed off a figure she’d hidden under tailored trousers for too long. Maybe the excitement of buying a show bag, being around her mother, or the faded jeans and dusty shoes were making Amber feel sixteen again. Whatever was responsible, Amber hoped there was a way to bottle it. Better than any pill or lotion.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ her mother asked.

  Amber hadn’t realised she’d laughed aloud. ‘Oh, just imagining what a sight I must be after today, and with a cow in tow, no less. What’s the old saying? If my friends could see me now.’

  They’d paused to let Muddy munch for the umpteenth time on some long grasses by the roadside.

  ‘Let me look at you,’ Cheryl said. She spun Amber around by the shoulders to face her. She fussed with her hair the way a proud mother does and smiled, filling Amber with even more childish delight. ‘I do like you better without all the makeup and hairspray. I also think your friends would be very jealous.’

  ‘Hmm, you don’t know my friends.’

  The joke fell flat and Amber cursed under her breath, yanking on Muddy’s halter. So insensitive. Where was that life button to fast-forward them through this watch every word you say stage to find ground less brittle. If the
remark had hurt her mother, nothing showed.

  With a few more tugs, the cow fell into step and Christopher amused himself racing ahead, stopping every now and then to do figure eights until the slowpokes—which is what he’d named them—caught up. For Cheryl’s sake as well as her own, Amber would be glad to reach the Dandelion House. She’d insisted she could manage Muddy fine on her own, but Cheryl won. Amber hoped her mother’s persistence was less to do with concern for the cow and more to do with being together. The pair now walked almost shoulder to shoulder, and in case Amber needed affirmation that Cheryl was experiencing the same bond, her mother casually slipped a hand through the crook of her daughter’s arm, no fuss, no fanfare. The touch charged and soothed Amber simultaneously, if that was possible, moving her to tears, reminding Amber of her earliest mother-daughter bond with Fiona. The memory of her precious baby’s tiny, translucent hand, with fingers half the length of a matchstick yet strong enough to curl around the tip of Amber’s little finger, had once had her swinging between awe and absolute panic, willing her premature baby to survive, to grow, be strong. Enjoying the euphoric sensation of her mother’s arm in hers, willing the still fragile connection with Cheryl to keep growing, keep strengthening, Amber wondered why she’d selfishly broken her own mother–daughter bond and walked away from her family.

  ‘You know Amber, in the beginning my friends were jealous of me. It’s true, your father and I … We were the talk of the town.’ Cheryl’s words snagged on a sigh, sparking Amber’s concern that the long day, combined with the walk home, was becoming too much.

  ‘Do you need to rest, Mum?’

  ‘I’m fine. Believe it or not, I actually feel remarkably good—and strong. I wasn’t always. I was shy, not a good combination with an ambitious husband. It was expected I’d fulfil a role and support him, but I hated it—all those dinner parties and civic events. Such things were of no interest to me. My children were all I wanted. They were my life.’

  ‘Your children?’ Amber tripped to a halt, her arm yanked towards the ground as Muddy’s nose immediately dropped, disappearing into the latest roadside banquet. ‘What do you mean children?’