Bron smiled. “I couldn’t help it.”
Ally scoffed. “If you’re going to set your sights on straight women, at least set an age difference of no more than ten years. The odds are better.”
“Sounds like you’re talking from experience.”
Ally shrugged.
Bron took another sip of water. “It was probably for the best. I’m not ready to settle down with a seventy-year-old wife.” Ally didn’t say anything to that. She checked her phone. 9:22. She’d have to leave soon to pick up Jackie and Annie. “I heard you had a surprise visitor when I was out last night.”
Ally hummed in confirmation that her parole officer had come by. “They’re trying to catch me out. But they won’t win. I’m doing everything by the book.”
Bron raised an eyebrow. “Everything?”
Ally winked teasingly, but she seemed hurt by their discussion moments before. Had her quick dismissal of Ally’s crush seemed rude?
“Is prison as bad as they make it out to be on TV?” she asked, searching for anything to make conversation.
Ally chuckled. “When it’s bad, it’s pretty fuckin’ horrible. When it’s not so bad, I guess it’s just…not ideal.” She paused. “You make family in there. Keep them close. When my parole’s up, I’m going to go back and visit.”
“That’s really nice. I’m sure the other women will be happy to see you.”
Bron caught the way Ally smirked, and she knew what it meant. “I imagine you would have been popular,” she pressed.
Ally cocked an eyebrow. “And what makes you say that?”
“You’re…charming. Rough around the edges, but—”
Ally nodded down to her stomach. “You mean rough around the scar tissue?”
Bron swallowed over the tightness that immediately seized her throat. “I’m sorry.”
Ally swirled the inch of water at the bottom of her glass like it was vodka. “Whatever.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure.”
“Was that when you stopped volunteering? After you were burned?”
“Had to,” Ally said. “I couldn’t move fast enough for a long time. You know when you get a bad paper cut right on a joint of your finger? And suddenly you can’t move the whole finger because you don’t want to make it worse?”
“Except your finger was your entire body,” Bron guessed.
Ally smiled across the swing at her. “Something like that.”
“Would you go back to volunteer? You know, if you didn’t have a criminal record for arson?”
“I don’t think I could after getting burned the way I did,” Ally said. “I’m not as fearless as I used to be.”
Bron found Ally’s honesty and her abandonment of pride deeply attractive.
“There are safer ways to be a hero,” Ally added.
Bron shifted on the seat. “And is that what you want? To be a hero?”
Ally’s gaze dropped to her lips. She stared blatantly, hesitating. Bron swallowed over the sudden dryness in her mouth.
“I want…to fuck you,” Ally breathed.
Slowly, Bron shook her head. “We can’t.” Her throat felt like it was closing over.
“You don’t want to?” Ally asked softly, the neediness in her voice entirely foreign.
Bron bit her tongue, attempting to gather her thoughts. “I need to pick up Mum and Annie.”
“I could come with you,” Ally suggested, standing when Bron did.
“No, I should go alone,” she said quickly. “It’s almost nine thirty, and after I pick them up we usually stop by the lookout for Annie to get an ice cream and Mum and I get a cup of coffee, and…We won’t be back before your curfew.”
“Oh.” Looking for something to do, Ally awkwardly placed her hands on her hips. Her T-shirt rode up, the black waistband of her underwear completely exposed.
Bron looked away sharply. “I’m just going to grab my keys—”
“Bron, are we okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she nodded, backing away. “Don’t worry about it,” she said.
“Are you sure? I didn’t mean for this to be a repeat of earlier…It just came out. Being around you all the time is just making me—”
“It’s fine,” she said, cutting Ally off. “I really need to go.”
Chapter Eight
Bron stilled Annie’s bedroom door before it could squeak and wake her niece, the light sleeper. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the semidarkness. The dim nightlight wasn’t much help. She stepped farther into the room, cursing herself for forgetting to wash Annie’s school uniform earlier that day.
Her gaze darted across the floor in search of the dress. Next to the bedside table were the clothes Annie had been wearing when she went to the hardware with Daniel and Ally that morning. Bron frowned at the memory of Annie swaggering into the kitchen dressed exactly like Ally had been earlier that day—denim shorts, a navy singlet, gumboots in lieu of steel-capped work boots, and her long blond hair pinned up. Annie had the whole shebang down pat. Looking between each other, all four adults had been largely amused.
A floorboard creaked under her step. She stopped and listened to the soft rustle of covers as Annie rolled over in her sleep. Bron looked to the wardrobe, remembering that she’d spotted a spare in there months ago. It was a size too big. Libby had probably picked it up at the secondhand school uniform pool shop, but Bron was fairly confident that she could do wonders with a needle, thread and duct tape.
As she moved closer to the wardrobe, she spotted the school dress in a heap around the side of the twin bed. She scowled as she picked up the uniform and, to her absolute delight, the pair of soaked shorts that she told Annie were to go straight into the wash after she ran around beneath the sprinkler that morning.
A glimmer under the claw-foot of the bed frame caught her eye. She peered near the end of the bed, certain of what she would find, the way it somehow caught the glow of the nightlight, before she could even examine it by touch.
It was the ring, deliberately placed under the claw-foot of the bed, out of view. Listening to Annie’s gentle breathing while holding Libby’s ring between her fingertips, something shifted inside of her. With the dirty clothes under her arm, she quietly closed the bedroom door. She returned to her bedroom and hid the ring beneath the paper drawer-liner at the back of her underwear drawer. Well. There you have it. Mystery solved.
After picking up the bathroom towels to throw into the wash, she made her way down the stairs, blinded by the huge pile in her arms. The dun-dun of a Law and Order rerun echoed from the lounge room before the green and blue hues glowing from the TV danced across the hallway wall. Ally was still up.
At the other end of the house, she dumped the pile of towels and Annie’s dirty clothes on the laundry floor. The lid of the machine was already open. She absentmindedly dropped the uniform in first, her brain barely registering the flash of shiny, scaly brown at the bottom of the barrel before, as though possessed, the uniform rose back up, higher and higher…
Her entire body seized.
The snake hissed angrily, shaking its head to rid itself of Annie’s uniform. The clink of the uniform’s buttons as they hit the base of the metal tub sent a deep tremor through her.
Standing stock-still, she held the snake’s gaze.
“Hey, Bron, if you’re doing a load do you mind if I chuck in my—”
Ally halted in the doorway, her eyes widening as she took in the snake standing in the barrel of the washing machine.
“What do I do?”
“Okay,” Ally said. She dropped the overalls in her hands and the buckles hit the tiled floor. At the sound, the snake immediately coiled its neck to appraise Ally. “Don’t move,” Ally whispered. “It’s a brown snake.”
“They’re not supposed to fight,” Bron argued.
“Well…”
The snake coiled itself further into an S-shape, ready to strike.
“Don’t move,” Ally r
epeated firmly. “It’s young, so it’s a lot fuckin’ worse.”
When it twisted back to Bron, she couldn’t stop the keening noise, which etched its way desperately from her throat. “It’s going to bite me.” Her entire body broke out in a sweat. “Oh, Jesus. What do I do?” she rasped.
“Nothing,” Ally commanded. “I’m going to hit the lid back down while it’s looking at you, okay? It’s going to fall straight back into the tub.” Slowly, she inched closer. “Then we’ll call WIRES.”
The snake hissed at her again. It was fuming. She choked on a whimper. “Ally, don’t hit the lid. It’s gonna jump at me.”
Ally moved closer to the lid. “It’s not.”
“It is, it is.” The snake reared its head, its bright fangs evident. “Ally, please, don’t—”
“Just shut up,” Ally snapped. “Shut. Up.”
The very moment Ally reached forward for the lid, the snake made to jump. But Ally was too quick, knocking the reptile back into its newfound home and out of sight. Her hands pressed tightly against the lid of the machine. “See?” she said knowingly, but the slight tremble in her voice reached Bron’s ears.
Inside the machine, the snake thrashed around. The two women stood listening to the metallic thump, thump, thump, attempting to regulate their breathing.
Bron’s heartbeat slowed. She cupped a hand to her lips and released a deep, shuddering breath. “Thank you,” she husked.
Swallowing, Ally nodded. “We’ll call WIRES in the morning.”
“No, we need to call them now. It can get out through the drain hose or into the body of the machine.”
“Honey, WIRES isn’t gonna come out here at midnight just because we’ve got a snake in the tub…”
“But it’s a brown snake!”
“You think you’re the first person in the mountains who’s had a brown snake in the house?”
She scowled, but Ally was right.
“We’ll lock the laundry door. If it gets out of the machine somehow, it won’t be able to get into the kitchen. It’ll just go out the back.”
Bron sighed. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Fine. But Annie absolutely cannot find out.”
* * *
“What’s that man here for?”
Bron looked up from the fridge. Annie stood by the back screen door in her unwashed uniform, retrieved from the tub just twenty minutes before. Outside, the WIRES volunteer stood by his truck talking to Daniel.
“He was looking at the washing machine,” she said casually.
Annie reached for the bowl of cereal Bron had prepared for her. “Why’s he here so early?”
Worriedly, Jackie looked over the top of the newspaper.
“He’s a repairman. We need a new part for it,” Bron lied.
“Oh,” Annie said. “Did we need wires?”
“What do you mean?” Bron asked. How does she know?
“His van says wires on the side. Did he bring us wire?”
She looked out the window, catching on. Phew. “No, no, he was fixing wires in the washing machine,” she said, relieved that Annie had no idea just what the ‘Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education Service’ did. “Why don’t you go eat your cornflakes while you watch cartoons?”
Annie looked up. “Serious? I can take my breakfast into the lounge room?”
“Don’t spill.”
“Promise,” Annie muttered, her attention completely focused on not splashing the milk over the rim of the bowl as she made her way out of the room.
“Hey, baby,” Ally muttered as she passed Annie in the doorway.
“Watch out, Al,” Annie said, her tongue poking out between her lips in concentration. “Can’t spill…”
When Annie was gone, Ally turned to Bron and Jackie. “Is it taken care of?”
Bron nodded. “It stayed in there all night, thank God. Kept the uniform company.”
Jackie shook her head. “Sending the poor little girl to school in an unwashed uniform. You should make her wear that other one hanging in her cupboard. Or better yet, you should have let me wash it when I offered on Friday night.”
“Well, Mother, if I’d remembered that I’d tossed the uniform in with the snake before I woke up this morning, I would have had time to adjust the spare uniform, wouldn’t I? I had worse things, like, I don’t know, vengeful brown snakes to lose sleep over last night. The uniform was the least of my problems. Besides, it’s not even dirty. Wearing an unwashed uniform for one day won’t kill her.”
“I don’t know, Bron. It was pretty crushed,” Ally stirred. “She’s really going to look like little orphan Annie.”
Bron raised an eyebrow. Not funny.
“It’s a joke,” Ally drawled, chuckling as she dunked a tea bag into her mug. “Relax.”
Jackie piped up. “Speaking of clothes.” She looked at Bron. “You need to go through Libby’s stuff and see what Annie would like to keep. I can call the Salvos to pick up the rest.”
Bron shook her head, shuddering at the idea of Libby’s clothes hanging on a rack in some cluttered Salvation Army store. “I’m not ready, Mum. I’ll do it when I come back from Boston.”
Jackie sighed. “Bron—”
“Mum. Not yet, okay? When I come home.”
Monday afternoon brought a sweltering, stuffy heat to the Blue Mountains. The sun had such a bite to it that Bron deemed it too hot for Annie to be outside running around under the sprinkler. She would rather have a stir-crazy six-year-old on her hands than spend the night rubbing aloe vera gel into Annie’s red-raw alabaster skin while she whimpered from heatstroke.
“I’m just so bored, you know?” Annie repeatedly sighed all through dinner, pushing the peas around on her plate and digging caves into her mashed potatoes. When Ally suggested they take a walk down to Echo Point for ice cream, Bron quickly agreed.
It was just the three of them. Jackie had gone over to the bowling club for dinner with friends to escape the heatwave and Daniel had fallen asleep on the lounge immediately after dinner. Bron was amazed at his work ethic. The mercury had risen over 104 degrees—no, forty degrees Celsius—and Daniel had spent the hottest part of the day perched on top of a ladder under the fiery sun painting the eaves of a two-story house, his neck craned back like Michelangelo. Not once had he complained, Ally told Bron as they reached the platform overlooking the Three Sisters.
Perhaps it was because her hair was still damp from her shower after dinner, but Bron thought it seemed cooler down at the lookout. Only a few tourists were on the platform, their cameras and travel backpacks giving them away. She assumed they belonged to the crowd further up the street standing near the bus parked outside the tourist centre. The ice cream shop and café inside the centre would be busier than usual.
Ally rested her elbows on the railing. Too short to do the same, Annie looked between the wide bars.
The three golden rock faces standing in darkness was a breathtaking sight.
“Do you know they all have names, Annie?” Ally asked.
Annie looked up. “What are their names?”
Next to Annie, Bron leaned against the railing, the iron still warm an hour after sunset.
Ally pointed to the left rock. “Well that one is Meehni, and the middle one is Wimlah, and the one on the other side is Gunnedoo. They’re all sisters.”
“Why do they have weird names?” Annie said.
Bron was about to interject but Ally spoke up. “Well, they belong to the Aboriginal legend, so their names are very beautiful.”
“Oh,” Annie said. “What’s a legend?”
“A legend is like a made up story. The made-up story is that these rocks used to be people.”
Annie raised an eyebrow. “Like humans?”
“Yep. The three sisters were from Katoomba—”
“I’m from Katoomba,” Annie interrupted.
“I know you are. Anyway, the sisters wanted to marry three brothers from another tribe—a tribe is another g
roup of people—but marriage wasn’t allowed.”
Annie looked puzzled. “Why not?”
“Because that was the rule. The girls couldn’t marry outside of their tribe. Anyway, the brothers got really mad and kidnapped the girls. There was a big fight between the two groups. While the fight was happening, a witch doctor turned the girls to stone—just for a little while—to protect them. But the witch doctor got hurt in the battle and he died. And nobody else could turn the girls back. So they stayed like this forever.”
Annie clicked her tongue. “That’s not real is it?” she asked, sounding so much like Libby.
“It’s not real,” Bron inserted. It wasn’t even entirely correct, but she decided not to tell Annie and Ally that the story was fabricated as an ‘Aboriginal legend’—by a white local—to attract tourists.
Annie turned to Ally. “You and Aunty Bron and my mum were like sisters,” she said with great certainty.
Ally bit her bottom lip for a moment before she replied. “Yeah, a little bit.”
“Like the Three Sisters,” Annie confirmed.
Bron and Ally were quiet.
“You two should marry brothers from another tribe and then you’ll be just like the story.”
Bron’s gaze darted to the top of Annie’s head, and then at Ally, who was looking at Bron, her lips twisted in amusement. “No, Annie,” Bron said gently. “Remember when I first came home and we had a talk about how I like girls, not boys?”
“Oh, yeah,” Annie said vaguely. “I forgot.” She paused. “Then you should marry a lady from another tribe. Or you could just marry Ally if you can’t find a different lady ’cause Ally likes girls too.”
Ally slowly turned her head and looked across the railing at Bron. Her eyes were bright and vivacious, but Bron saw something else in that stare. Something more. Her eyes dropped to Ally’s full lips. I want to fuck you. Bron swallowed. The admission had played over and over in her mind all week, distracting her, terrifying her, thrilling her…
“Ow,” Annie murmured, slapping her upper arm. “A bloody mozzie got me! Can we go and get ice cream, please?”
Bron was right. The line outside the ice creamery was at least five people deep on three separate queues.
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