“Can I sleep in your bed tonight?” Annie suddenly asked through a yawn. “Because it’s your birthday?”
Bron’s hope plummeted. Ally would never—could never—deny Annie.
“Why do you need to sleep in my bed? It’s my birthday, not yours.”
Bron’s ears pricked at the objection in Ally’s voice. As playful as Ally sounded, she knew there was a seriousness to her words. She had a distinct feeling Ally hoped for the same thing, even if she wasn’t completely sure what that was.
“That’s okay,” Annie sighed tiredly. “When it’s my birthday I can come back again. I’ll even make you a coupon.”
With Annie in her arms, Ally stopped in Libby’s bedroom doorway. She met Bron’s gaze, and for a long moment, they looked between each other, unsure what to do. They didn’t have much choice. Once Ally denied Annie, she’d go to Bron’s bed or spend the next hour making curtain calls. It wasn’t going to happen. Nodding, Ally sighed in defeat.
Bron licked her lips. “You can get her into her pyjamas by yourself?”
“Yeah,” Ally whispered. “Leave her with me.”
“Okay, thank you. Happy birthday. Again.”
Closing her bedroom door, Bron drunkenly undressed, leaving her dress, bra and shoes in a pile on the floor. Under the cover of the thin top sheet, Bron slid a hand beneath the waistband of her panties, her fingers quickly finding that all familiar, almost forgotten rhythm. She closed her eyes and shamelessly thought about Ally Shepherd.
Chapter Eleven
“Something’s burning.”
Bron raised her heavy head from where it was resting on her folded arms upon the kitchen table. Annie was standing in the doorway in her pyjamas, rubbing at her drowsy eyes as they struggled to adjust to the sunlight spilling through the kitchen window. It seemed as though Ally’s birthday had taken it out of the six-year-old as well.
Jackie was wringing out two thick beach towels over the kitchen sink. “The bushfires have started, lovey,” she told Annie.
Ally placed a full cup of water on the table in front of Bron and dropped a Berocca into the water. The vitamin tablet fizzled to the base, colouring the water orange and promising salvation. Bron glanced up at Ally with thanks and readily brought the glass to her lips. The smoke was not helping her wine-induced headache, especially when Bron knew it wasn’t simple, routine back burning.
Annie sat down at the end of the table. She released a deep sigh and sank her chin into her hand. “Are we going to Sydney again?” she asked apprehensively.
Annie was too young to remember just how awful the bushfires of 2011 had been, but Jackie and Libby’s tales had clearly infused her with a deep reluctance to go to Sydney to avoid the smoke—or to evacuate. Bron had been back in Boston barely a week after spending Christmas in Australia when Libby had called to tell her about the evacuation and that they’d be staying with Jackie’s sister, Carol, in Sydney for a week or so.
“I really don’t want to go to Sydney,” Annie said, pulling her legs underneath her on the kitchen chair. “Because Scream Street is on Monday at six o’clock and last time Auntie Carol stayed here she wouldn’t let me watch the ABC kids channel, only the news.”
Between her fingers, Bron watched Ally shake her head, grinning. “Nobody’s going to Sydney at this stage. The fires aren’t that bad.”
Jackie shook the two wet towels one final time, and disappeared into the laundry. Annie leaned back to watch her grandmother. “What are you doing, Nanna?” she asked loudly, and then explained to Bron and Ally in a soft whisper, “She’s sitting on the floor.”
Jackie’s voice rang back into the kitchen. “I’m putting damp towels down at the bottom of the doors so the smoke can’t get in. Outside may smell like a dive bar, but I won’t have our home smelling like it too.”
“What’s a dive bar?” Annie asked.
Bron groaned at the thought of any bar.
“Are you sick, Aunty Bron?”
Across the table, Ally smirked. Bron blinked twice. “I have a headache.”
Annie’s expression fell compassionately. “Do you want me to give your head a smage again?”
Bron forced a smile at Annie’s offer of a massage. “No, thanks, baby.” The one time she’d allowed Annie to massage a headache away, her tiny fingers had dug so firmly into Bron’s skull that Bron worried she would have to see a neurosurgeon afterward to make sure Annie hadn’t shifted anything out of place.
The radio on top of the fridge switched to the half-hour newsbreak. The Blue Mountains bushfires was the first report.
“Do you think they’ll come close to the house?” Ally asked.
“They could. God knows they have before.” Jackie dumped a few plates in the sink and they crashed loudly. She turned and her gaze fell on Bron. “I want you to do something for me.”
Bron raised an eyebrow.
Jackie ran the dishtowel through her hands. “I want you to pack up all of the albums today.”
“Mum, the fires aren’t even close yet. And it’s Saturday,” she complained childishly. “And I’ve got a…headache.” Ally chuckled and Bron fought a smile as she sipped her Berocca.
“I don’t care if it’s Saturday,” Jackie exclaimed adamantly. She shook a finger in Bron’s direction. “You’re not taking this seriously because you haven’t been here during bushfire season in over a decade. If it suddenly gets worse, we can head off and go to the city to stay with Carol and Bill, but we can’t fit all of the albums in the car, not with everything else. At least take the negatives out of the back of the albums so that we can get reprints.”
Bron released a heavy sigh. “I would rather pay for a hotel than stay with Carol and Bill.” She hadn’t seen her aunt and uncle in years, and she had no desire to do so anytime soon. “Besides, Daniel wouldn’t leave the house to just let it go up in…” She trailed off, noting that Annie was watching her, listening closely. The little girl had a special gift for making a mountain out of a molehill. Watch what you say. “He’d want to stay,” she finished. And fight for it.
“If it comes to being evacuated, Daniel’s not staying,” Jackie said adamantly. “None of us are. If worse comes to worse, I may have to go to Carol’s even if we aren’t evacuated. If I stay here with my asthma the way it is, I’ll go through that whole bloody puffer in a day.”
“Well,” Bron decided, “you can go to Carol’s, but I’m staying here until we’re evacuated.”
“Um,” Ally started. “I can’t exactly leave here unless we’re actually evacuated.”
Bron looked to Ally. The thought of the parole agreement hadn’t even occurred to her.
“Well, darl, we’ll figure it out when the time comes,” Jackie decided. She turned back to Bron. “Can you just do the albums for me? I don’t want things to take a catastrophic turn again. Last time we just had to go…” She faltered, starting to get teary. “There are so many photos. Not to mention the framed ones.”
Bron swallowed over the growing lump in her throat. She hadn’t realised Jackie was so stressed about the albums. “Later today, okay? I’ve got a new page to start for the book, but as soon as I’m on track with it, I’ll get onto the photos.” Standing, she placed her glass in the sink and pressed a kiss to her mother’s temple. “Don’t worry so much. It’ll all work out.”
* * *
“Forty years old and you’re still doing what your mother asks.”
At the sound of Ally’s voice, Bron looked up from the photo album opened in her lap. Ally shoved her hands into her pockets and looked down at her.
She shifted, realizing she’d been sitting on the floor of the office for so long that she’d almost lost feeling in her legs. She tried on her poker face. “I’m not forty. I’m thirty-eight.”
Ally clicked her tongue in disbelief. “No, you’re not,” she teased. “You’re forty.”
Bron rolled her eyes. She sighed, her gaze darting across the floor, focusing on the six—no, eight—piles of photo albums su
rrounding her. More than half were to go with Jackie in the Nissan if the smoke got the best of her asthma. If it came down to an evacuation, Bron would take as many albums as she could with her, but there were so many other possessions that would demand rescue too, and she could only fit so much in her Toyota. Perhaps she’d be left with no choice but to take the negatives and leave the prints behind.
Bron blinked against the afternoon sunlight streaming through the window of the office. “How was your walk down to the lookout?”
Ally sighed. “Long.” She chuckled lowly, and Bron raised a questioning eyebrow. “We decided to trek it down the Grand Staircase to the Sisters, and Annie freaked out on the steps and wouldn’t move. When she finally got her legs working again, she was taking about one step per minute.”
“They are steep,” Bron said. “I used to freak out on them too. Vertigo,” she explained.
“Sure,” Ally teased.
The room fell silent but for the distant sound of Annie’s chattering somewhere down the hallway. Ally lingered, looking around the room.
“Do you need to use the computer?”
Ally shook her head. She crossed the room and slid down against the cool wall to sit next to Bron. Ally stretched her legs out next to Bron’s. Although Bron had certainly gotten some colour in the last few weeks, the contrast between their skin tones was still stark, like snow against desert sand.
Ally peered down at the photos of Jackie’s family reunion Carol had hosted back in the mid-nineties. Bron remembered the trip vividly. She’d been nineteen and in her second year of university. Libby had been twelve and begged Jackie and their father for Ally to come with them. And so all three of them—Libby, Ally and Bron, had squashed into the backseat of their father’s old truck, two-year-old Daniel babbling in his car seat beside them.
“Do you remember coming to Sydney with us?” she asked.
Their shoulders brushed as Ally peered closer at the album. “Yeah, I remember.”
Bron stretched her neck, following the breeze of the fan as it oscillated. It didn’t help much. The office was the warmest room in the house. She could see the perspiration across her own lightly-freckled chest, between her breasts.
“Found anything fun?” Ally asked.
Bron nodded toward a small pile of albums with an A3 portfolio on top. “Some portfolios from my first years of uni. I thought I threw them out during my ‘I’m completely untalented’ phase. The embarrassment has since worn off. They’re not that bad.”
Ally elbowed her lightly. “They’re probably Picassos.”
“Hate to disappoint, but Picasso isn’t really my illustration style,” she said humbly. “Nor in my talent range.”
Ally grinned. “So how many have you got left to go through?”
She motioned toward the pile next to Ally, distractedly turning another page of the album and trying not to think about how hot Ally’s skin was against her own.
Ally picked up another album. “I can go through this one for you.”
The controlling part of Bron urged her to reject Ally’s help. She wouldn’t understand the relevance of half of the photos, and Bron would end up having to do it herself anyway. But even if she would have to redo it, what was the harm of including Ally or accepting her offer of help?
“Only if you feel like it.”
Ally picked up the next album. “I feel like it.”
The album Ally opened was Annie’s birth album. Well that’s obviously a keeper, so I won’t have to go through that one later. The first few photos were of Annie in her hospital basinet and then a few of Libby and Annie. Ally turned the page. More photos of Annie, one of Libby, and then Ally.
“Were you the first one to hold her after Libby?”
Ally shrugged. “I suppose. I was there when she was born.”
Her head whipped around. “You were there for the birth?” she asked, something pulling in her chest for reasons she didn’t understand.
“Yeah,” Ally said softly. “Weirdest and best thing I’ve ever seen. And the longest. I didn’t eat for like twelve hours.”
She laughed. “My heart goes out to you.”
The petty part of her was angry at Libby for never telling her that Ally had been at the birth. Knowing Bron would come home to support her, Libby had sworn the family to secrecy, keeping the news that Annie’s father had left her two months before Annie was born under wraps. It was only after he returned when Annie was three weeks old that Bron had been told he’d gone AWOL on Libby in the first place. Apparently, another secret had been kept too. Bron wanted to be upset, but all she felt was relief—relief that someone who had loved and cared for Libby so deeply had been present when Annie was born. Besides, if she’d been told Libby planned on having Ally present for the birth, Bron probably would have talked Libby into having Jackie there with her instead.
She examined the photos of Ally holding Annie. She seemed so proud, like the newborn was her own daughter.
“She was so perfect,” Ally said roughly. “Most babies just look like old men, but she was so lively. And cute.” After a moment, she added, “She looked like you.”
Bron turned her head to fully take in the picture of a sleeping Annie. “You think?”
“Yeah, even more than she looked like Lib,” Ally chuckled. “Don’t worry. I never told Libby that.”
Smiling, Bron sighed. “She looks like Libby now.”
Bron continued flicking through the album, anticipating finding the picture of her first meeting with Annie. But the album ended with four-day-old Annie asleep in her car seat on her first trip home, and Bron hadn’t flown home until a month later.
Ally closed the album. “So should we just put this one on the Leave Behind pile?” she asked sarcastically.
Bron laughed. “Most definitely.” She placed it on top of the three mammoth piles to send away with Jackie.
Ally picked up a smaller, square album. “I made this one,” she said.
Bron looked over Ally’s forearm as she opened it. The scrapbook was carefully put together with white bordered photos on a plain black background, a single photo to a page. The photos inside Ally’s album were more artistic than those beneath the plastic slips of the other albums. Somebody who knew exactly how to use a camera had obviously taken the pictures. Ally turned the page and silence settled over them.
“I look so young,” Bron said softly.
The black-and-white photo had been taken on the veranda of their house, before the beams had been painted off-white. Ally had captured her midspeech. She was seated on the veranda railing—much thinner than she ever remembered being. Her eyes were wild, her jawline prominent. Barely twenty-three.
“Look at you,” Bron teased, “taking sneaky photos of me.”
Ally scratched at the back of her neck. “That was just before you left.”
She raised her gaze and looked at Ally. Her eyes were tinted dark as she stared reverently at the picture. Low in Bron’s belly, something coiled and burned. Ally looked at the photo for a moment before her fingers fumbled to turn the page.
She couldn’t help but note the difference between the way Ally looked at the next picture of fifteen-year-old Libby and how she’d looked at the picture of Bron. Ally looked down at Libby’s youthful smile with that same expression that flittered across her face when Annie fell asleep at the kitchen table or when Jackie patted her on the shoulder and said something motherly—like she was seeing home and family. With Bron’s photo, it was different. With Bron’s photo, there were traces of longing and blatant lust in Ally’s stare.
When Ally came to the end of the album, Bron told her, “I’ve made a rule that anything homemade goes with Mum.” She placed the album on the keep pile.
“You can leave it behind,” Ally offered.
Bron picked out a new album for herself and another for Ally. “No,” she said simply, smiling warmly at Ally as she sat back against the wall.
A comfortable silence fell upon them as they tur
ned pages.
“Should we talk about last night?” Ally asked softly.
When Bron looked up, Ally refused to meet her gaze, appearing deeply interested in a photo album from Jackie’s school days. “I mean, you clearly enjoyed it,” Ally continued. “Started it, even. But I know you’d had a bit to drink and you weren’t thinking clearly.” She blinked twice and Bron recognized it as a nervous tick she’d never paid much attention to until that moment. “So, yeah,” Ally said, redundantly. She dropped the album next to her and pulled her legs up, resting her forearms on her knees. “I don’t know where I’m going with this.”
Bron licked her lips. “It wasn’t just because I was drunk. I wanted it.”
She was expecting a cocky grin, a lust-filled glance, something. But instead, Ally shifted slightly so their upper arms were no longer touching. She focused her gaze on dragging her big toe back and forth across the straight line where two floorboards met. “I know what I said in the car that day in the cemetery but…Things have changed. I’m not going to have an affair with you if that’s what you’re after.”
Bron’s chest tightened at the implication. Ally wanted more than just sex. “I’m not after anything,” Bron said. She yearned to tell Ally she wasn’t looking for just an affair either, that maybe this was already more, but the words caught on her tongue. She couldn’t lead Ally on, not when each lascivious, tormenting fantasy of Ally that crept its way into her thoughts each night was closely followed by vivid daydreams of a new life with Annie halfway across the world. They sat quietly as Bron flicked through the rest of the album in her lap on autopilot.
Ally pointed to a photo in the album opened across her thighs. Libby was dressed warmly, standing Annie, a toddler, upright in the snow. “She wore the shit out of that jumper,” Ally said, her voice still husky.
Bron pursed her lips. “I don’t remember it.”
“Are you kidding?”
She looked up at Ally, whose eyebrows were raised in disbelief. “You really can’t remember it?” Bron instantly felt lightheaded with guilt.
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