Where There's a Will

by Virginia Hale

  Neither do I. Dylan’s fingers flexed lightly on Beth’s skin. “It happened after Cyclone Sally hit up north—we copped the winds pretty badly. A few places in town lost roofs, that kind of thing. Nothing too bad. But because Mascot Farm was so close to Reed Lake, the edge of the park flooded, and some of the larger rides collapsed into the mud. It had flooded before, but after Sally, they closed it up for good.” She paused. “There was a group of about six kids from our street who’d all ride over and jump the fence into the abandoned amusement park, play in the wreckage, use the slides, skateboard and stuff. It was the school holidays. Kyle told Dad he was going over there with the kid next door, but he made that up. He went alone.

  “The Big Dipper slide was right at the edge of the park, right where it’d flooded. There was a ditch at the base, bit of a sinkhole from the storm. Kyle used to come home and tell Dad and me about how they’d skid down The Big Dipper, stop themselves at the bottom just before their toes touched the water. Mom hated that he went over there, worried that the water was toxic, that the structures were unstable, so it was a secret, just between the three of us.” Guilt pulled tight in her chest. “The police found his backpack at the top of The Big Dipper with the hessian sack Dad had given him weeks before to use as a mat. There wasn’t any sign of Kyle at first, but then they drained the ditch. And that was when they found him.”

  Beth tensed beneath her touch.

  “He’d slipped right in and his foot was caught between planks. He’d drowned.”

  Beth was quiet.

  “If there’s anything you want to know,” Dylan said, “you can ask. I’m not good at just straight out talking about it, but if you ask, I’ll tell you.”

  “I don’t think anybody would be good at straight out talking about it.”

  “Yeah but…I’m really not good at it.”

  Beth turned her head, just slightly, enough for Dylan to see her lips part, and then close again.

  “What?” Dylan asked. “Whatever it is, you can say it.”

  “I don’t have any questions. I mean, of course I do, but…there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “When you picked me up that night when my car broke down, I sat on a Ritalin bottle on your passenger seat.”

  “Oh.” Her fingers started moving again. “I’m okay, Beth. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  Beth’s voice was barely a whisper when she said, “Please tell me you didn’t start taking it recently.”

  “I’ve been on Ritalin since I was a teenager.”

  Beth exhaled. “I thought it was because of what I took from you.”

  “No.”

  Silence.

  “I honestly thought you were on the meds because of me.”

  “I guess I sort of am.” When Beth stiffened beneath her touch, she quickly corrected herself. “No, no. I mean that…I may have never realised I needed Ritalin if it weren’t for you.”

  Beth pulled back. With her hand at her neck, she shifted across the step to sit against the wall. “What do you mean?”

  “So, when I came out of surgery on my wrist, you know, after my bike accident, I just lost it over my brother. Cried and cried and cried. I mean, it had only been a few months since Kyle died and I guess it all caught up with me. I was only supposed to stay overnight, but I was such a mess that they had to put me in the psych ward for another two nights. I wasn’t hysterical or anything, but I just couldn’t stop crying, and when I did stop, I just…I don’t know…collapsed. The doctor recommended a therapist. I saw her for a while, and she figured out that there was more going on than just the whole Kyle thing. She diagnosed me with ADHD, put me on Ritalin. So, if I’d never met you and gone over the handlebars, I’d never have broken my wrist, and I probably would never have been diagnosed.”

  Beth smiled sympathetically. “Nobody ever saw the signs?”

  “Nope,” she said. “I was never full on, you know. I mean, I was always chatty, the classroom helper, that sort of thing. I did soccer and swimming and anything that got me away from homework. Then when I got older, I knuckled down with the study, I really did, but my marks just didn’t show it. My HSC mark was fucked.”

  “I’m sure it was fine—”

  “No, it was fucked. Still got into uni, but that was only because I got ten extra points for being a rural student and another five for special consideration for having ADHD.”

  “You’re a strong reader, though.”

  “Yeah. That part threw my therapist a bit. But everything else outweighed it. Especially the mood swings.” She paused. “Lately, I’ve been thinking of lowering my dose.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know if it’s been doing much for me these past few months. Think you could handle me if I go off the deep end? I tried to lower it a few years ago and it didn’t work out so well. One night, I ran the perimeter of the lake seven times.”

  Beth laughed. “It can’t be all that bad,” she said. “And if worse comes to worse, I’m sure we could get you a skipping rope.”

  * * *

  The lights flickered for a second time. Dylan knew the homestead like the back of her hand. One more flicker and they’d lose power.

  Lightning cracked across the late afternoon sky, and the downpour began ferociously. Dylan huffed as she remembered her sheets on the line at home. When had she grown up enough to care about her washing getting wet? And she’d used that special fabric softener, too. Goddamn it. She should have hung them last night when it was still…she froze on the stairs at the memory of a white corner sticking out of the homestead mailbox that morning. Shit!

  She skidded through the kitchen and charged out the back door. Beth had warned her that her publishing contract would be arriving that week and asked her to look out for it in case it arrived at the homestead and not Rose’s.

  As she raced the two hundred yards to the end of the driveway, she tried not to think of something they’d worked on together being ruined—the thought left her more breathless than running. If there was one positive, unalloyed consequence of their complicated winter, it was this. Their friendship and comradeship had produced a body of work and led Beth to an offer of publication. That was special. That deserved preservation.

  She slid the envelope as deep into her shorts as the crotch would allow and tucked her shirt around it. As she sprinted back, she clutched the envelope protectively against her belly. Better creased than wet, she thought.

  Beth was coming down the hallway, her high ponytail bobbing as she heaved a garbage bag of linens behind her. She’d insisted on washing every quilt in the house to keep that “fresh” morgue scent alive. “I was stripping Sarah’s bed and next minute the lights—” She stopped and gasped at the sight of Dylan. “Oh my god! You are absolutely saturated!”

  Dylan swatted water from the line of her jaw and watched Beth’s eyes bulge as she peeled her soaked shirt from her abdomen and drew the envelope from her shorts. She slid it across the table. “It’s your contract.”

  “My god, you shouldn’t have run out in the rain! It’s torrential! If it got wet, I could have just asked for another!”

  She fought for breath. “I saw it in the box earlier today on my way in, but I was already running late and the parking bay was jam-packed, so I figured we’d just get it on our way out. See, this is why my toilet letterbox works—letters never get soaked.” Her bun, loosened from her panicked sprint, bounced against the nape of her neck as she toed off her sneakers and flung her saturated socks toward the doormat.

  “Thank you so much, Dyl.” Beth struggled with the large envelope. “I need scissors,” she grumbled. “It’s tight, I think it’s lined with plastic…”

  Dylan snatched the envelope from her. She tore at the corner with her teeth.

  “Wait, let me get a knife!”

  She shook her head and gripped with her bite until she had the sticky strip loose enough to peel the envelope open. Carefully, she pulled out the thin wad of
stapled pages. Rain water had seeped in and the corners were light grey, delicate with dampness. Beth reached for them.

  “Wait, wait, they’re wet. We need to air them.” With her thumbnail, she pried open the back of the staple and unpeeled the pages.

  “Careful you don’t rip—”

  “I am, I am…”

  One by one, she laid the dampened pages out across the kitchen table. The cooling breeze swirled through the screen door. Dylan’s hands shot out, and Beth handed her the salt to weight the corners. They gathered the few utensils from the drawer and laid knives and forks across the edges like paper weights.

  When Dylan looked down, her heartbeat slowed.

  Written by Dr. Elizabeth Hordern, with Dylan O’Connor.

  There, beside the curve of a spoon, was her name beside Beth’s.

  She could feel Beth studying her face, gauging her reaction. “It’s your work just as much as it is mine,” Beth whispered.

  Thunder crashed.

  “No, it’s not.” Dylan’s throat tightened. “You wrote the whole thing.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Desperately, she searched Beth’s gaze for confirmation that her name wasn’t inked on the contract out of pity, or guilt, and she found it, blazing in blue. That dotted line didn’t await her signature solely because it was a crafty way to win her trust. Beth genuinely believed she’d contributed to the book.

  Dylan dropped her gaze back to the pages. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Yes,” Beth murmured. “I did.”

  Hail rained like rocks on the veranda.

  Dylan looked up to find Beth’s eyes on her diaphragm. She looked down. Transparent, her shirt clung to her middle.

  Caught, Beth quickly averted her gaze. “There’s umm…there’s a spare shirt upstairs in the office bathroom for the trainee tomorrow. I have another one for her at home that I can bring in. It’ll swim on you, but…” Beth trailed off, her sentence unfinished.

  “Cool.”

  Lightning struck brightly as Dylan climbed the back stairs to the loft. In the bathroom, she peeled the new shirt from the hanger and hooked her wet one over the shower railing to dry. God, I miss the water pressure in here, she thought, and then it suddenly hit her—they’d removed her old shower curtain and replaced it with a stark white one. The grump who cleaned out this place obviously lacked a sense of humour…It broke her heart to think of some asshole ripping down poor Janet Leigh.

  As she took the stairs back down, she buttoned the new shirt. A flash of lightning flared across the hall in Sarah’s bedroom window. Dylan stopped for a moment on the landing and waited for the crack of thunder. Why did she feel so wired tonight? Was it because all of a sudden, Beth knew about Kyle? She thought back to that morning on the staircase. Maybe it was best that she made her way home as soon as the storm was over…

  From the bottom of the stairs, she could see Beth out on the veranda. She pushed open the screen door. Despite golf-ball sized pellets of ice blanketing the grass, it was still steamy and hot.

  “We can’t drive in this,” Dylan said. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “No,” Beth murmured. “We can’t.”

  She knew that the creek would be up for an hour or so, that the torrent would block off the intersection where Beth’s car had broken down. It didn’t take much. Her Jeep would be fine to cross it, but she wasn’t so sure about the low front of Beth’s hatchback.

  Dylan cringed as she watched her bonnet take a beating. “I know a girl across town who just got a Mercedes,” she said. “Hope it’s under cover.”

  “I hope she has insurance,” Beth said, her voice raised over the volume of the hail.

  She thought back to her conversation with Holly. “Why do you think so many storms are named after women? Hurricane Wilma, the Regina Cyclone, Cyclone Tracy, Hurricane Katrina,” Dylan murmured.

  Beth thought for a moment. “I don’t actually know. Maybe it has something to do with the idea of ‘Mother Nature.’ We could Google it.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?”

  Lightning chased across the sky, and at the flash, Dylan sobered. The winds were picking up. “I still remember when we copped the aftermath of Cyclone Sally,” she said.

  She’d seen a post-storm photo of flooded Mascot Farm before Kyle’s accident, an “It’s Playtime!” sign swimming in the foreground of the photo. The amusement park had looked more intriguing in its devastation than it had in its short-lived glory days. Swallowed up by the battered bush, the wooden tracks of the roller coasters had been damaged beyond repair, washed out, mellowing in a pool of corrosive brackish floodwater.

  An admission burned on the tip of her tongue. She hesitated. “What?” Beth asked. Dylan could feel her curious eyes on her.

  “Sometimes I think that if Sally had never happened, Mascot Farm would never have been shut down, and Kyle never would have gone mucking about there all the time. Maybe he wouldn’t have been alone that day, and maybe he would never have died.”

  Beth looked at her strangely and then returned her gaze to the hailstorm.

  “What?” Dylan said. “What were you going to say?”

  Beth sighed. “I was going to say that I think that if I was in your shoes I would think the very same thing. I’d blame the storm, too.”

  “You would?”

  “Yeah. I think it would break my heart a little less to blame Mother Nature.”

  Beth’s frankness was comforting, like slipping into a warm bath on a frigid night. Nobody had ever just listened, let her voice her feelings without trying to make her feel better.

  “I’m starving,” Beth said softly.

  Dylan bit the side of her mouth. To stay and eat together would be a huge step. Other than working together most days, they hadn’t spent time alone—not like they used to. She hadn’t really thought it a good idea. She still wasn’t sure that it was, but her desire to leave was quickly receding, her resolve to distance herself from Beth slipping away. “I could eat,” she said.

  Beth attempted to mask her surprise.

  “I’ll go and see what I can sort out,” Dylan offered. The fridge was barren. Their sandwiches and Tupperware containers were mostly all that went in there. There was a carton of milk for tea, a tub of butter, a bottle of tomato sauce… “We have a bag of pasta left from when you cooked lunch the other day. And we have butter. And salt.”

  “That sounds fine.” Beth looked around. “It’s going to get pretty dark in here soon.”

  Dylan thought for a moment. “Have you cleaned out the cellar?”

  “All but the two lockers.”

  “The candles should still be down there. I’ll be right back.”

  The cellar reeked of mould. When was the last time Beth had aired it? Christ, it looks like a tip in here…Had they just taken all the crap from the house and shoved it in the cellar to collect dust until somebody else dealt with it? No wonder the cleaners were out of the homestead in a few days.

  The high, double box windows in the corner offered just enough light to help Dylan navigate. So that’s where the old kitchen table went, she mused. Unwanted furniture was stacked against the wall, obstructing access to the locker. Piled atop the chairs, plastic crates were filled to the brim with stuff she’d left behind—a frypan, the toaster—and collected items from the bedrooms, the sitting room, the parlour. She hadn’t even realised they were missing. She swung a leg over the barrel of the poltergeist Hoover, and her eyes locked on her shower curtain, folded between two crates. She thanked the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. “I’ll be back for you later, Marion Crane, don’t you worry.”

  She returned to the kitchen with an armful of candles to find Beth trying to light the stove top. The smell of gas was strong. “Christ, you’re going to blow the whole place up.”

  “For the life of me, I cannot get it to light.”

  Dylan felt inside the cupboard for the box of matches she’d always kept there. She struck a match
. “You know, the strangest thing just happened.”

  “What?” The tip of Beth’s tongue poked out as she continued with the stove.

  Dylan held the orange flame to the wick of an ancient Christmas candle. “You know how the vacuum is in the bottom of the locker downstairs?”

  The stove top caught light, but Beth paid it no mind, pivoting in an instant at the mention of the vacuum. “What about it?”

  “It turned on.”

  Beth’s eyes widened. Dylan watched her swallow.

  “Gotcha.”

  Beth pressed a hand to her chest. “Oh my god.” She swatted at Dylan’s arm. “Don’t do that,” she stressed. “I’m getting rid of that bloody vacuum.”

  “Don’t be like that. It’s a Hoover. They don’t make them like that anymore.”

  With Beth’s back turned, her focus on cooking, Dylan indulged herself for a moment. The candlelight highlighted the way Beth’s hair had frizzed in the humidity and exposed the dark roots at the back of her neck. Her skinny arms were bare. Dylan’s gaze tracked lower, to the tail of Beth’s shirt untucked from her skirt. She was a beautiful, unkept mess, but she looked healthy. Suddenly, it struck Dylan how much she had mistaken Beth’s guilt for shyness in the winter. She’d always seemed so fragile, so delicate. Now she was strong, glowing, like she’d discovered a lease of life.

  The cooling breeze swam around them. As Dylan placed the butter on the counter, Beth pinched the abundant fabric at the back of her borrowed shirt. “This really is too big on you,” Beth chuckled. At the rake of fingernails across the ridge of her spine, goosebumps travelled up Dylan’s neck.

  She bit her lip and pulled away. “We should eat outside.”

  Beth’s expression clouded. “Okay. Whatever you’d like.”

  As they ate their buttery pasta, they kept conversation light. Dylan wanted to know how Beth planned on working the trainee into their routine. Would they take fewer tours each, or the same amount of tours but fewer guests per tour?

  “I think it’s going to be good having a third person around,” Beth said. “It’ll take the pressure off of us.” Hopefully it would mean more time for Beth to take care of office duties, too—she never complained, but she stayed back at least three times a week. “The Association restricts tours in their other museums to groups of six. We shouldn’t be any different just because we’re not actually in Sydney. As it is, we get a hell of a lot more traffic.”