“Yes,” she said to Troy. “You’re right. You have to say yes. It’s the right thing to do.”
“Well, I don’t know,” began Stan uneasily.
“It’s the right thing to do,” Joy hissed at him.
He shut up.
Yes, this was the right thing to do, but it was also the wrong thing.
What if this child, this dear little redheaded child who she already loved but might never meet, turned out to be Joy’s only grandchild?
She said suddenly, “Maybe you should all go home now.”
Everyone stared at her.
“I’m not feeling the best,” she said. “I feel like I’m coming down with something.”
All of a sudden she recognized the combination of symptoms she’d been experiencing for the last few days. What a foolish old woman she was. She had a damned UTI, just like the one she had on her honeymoon, because of the recent unusual sexual activity.
Now she was furious with Stan, sitting there like a silent, stupid monolith at the end of the table with his balloon, contributing nothing except a UTI! At her age! She picked up her glass and took a long drink of water, although that ship had clearly sailed. She needed antibiotics, and it was Sunday, so she couldn’t go to her lovely GP, Susan, she’d have to go to a medical center, and she’d have to tell a kid straight out of medical school about her sex life.
“Dammit to hell,” she said to Stan.
“Eh?” said Stan. “Why are you looking at me? What did I do?”
“Well, for one thing, you killed Dennis Christos!!” she said, and it was so strange because she hadn’t even been thinking about poor Dennis, what with everything that was going on, but the accusation had been sitting there these past six months, ready and waiting in her subconscious for just the perfect moment.
“Dennis Christos died of a heart attack!” Stan responded instantly, without any confusion at all, conclusive proof of his guilt.
“You made him think he was going to break your serve and his poor heart couldn’t handle it!”
“He could not really have believed he was going to break my serve,” scoffed Stan.
“You let the game get to love–forty!” cried Joy.
“Well, I’m sorry,” said Stan, sounding not at all sorry.
“Don’t apologize to me! Apologize to poor grieving Debbie Christos!”
“Never admit liability, Dad,” said Troy. “That’s my tip.”
“I bet it is,” said Logan.
“Dennis Christos once made a very inappropriate remark to me,” commented Amy. “If that makes you feel any better, Mum. Very inappropriate.”
“Should we give Dad our gifts before we go?” asked Brooke anxiously.
“What have I done wrong?” The words exploded from Joy without her permission.
“You haven’t done anything wrong, Mum,” said Amy soothingly.
“Then how is it that not a single one of you can maintain a long-term relationship? Did your father and I not set a good example to you? Of a good marriage?”
Her children all dropped their heads as if she’d called for volunteers for an unpleasant task.
“So your dad and I weren’t perfect,” she said. “But, well, we weren’t that bad, were we? Are you punishing us for something? For what? For making you play tennis? We did not make you play tennis! Never! You loved tennis! You were all so talented!”
“We’re not punishing you,” said Troy. “That’s crazy talk, Mum.”
“It’s just bad luck,” said Brooke. “Bad timing.” She shot Logan a steely look. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard that Logan and Indira had broken up too.”
“Mum,” said Amy. “You will get to be a grandmother. I mean—obviously I won’t have kids, but someone will.” She indicated her sister and brothers. “One of them will! In the normal way. Not like what Troy is doing. Which is obviously weird and upsetting. But you will get a proper grandchild. I promise you.”
“How can you promise me that, Amy? I don’t see your brothers and sister rushing to agree with you! And what do you mean, you obviously won’t have children? Why not? Anyway, why are you talking about grandchildren? Have I mentioned grandchildren? Ever? Not once!” Joy’s whole body burned and shook with the injustice of it. “Never once! Did I? Well, did I?”
If she wasn’t to be rewarded for her forbearance, it should at least be recognized.
“You never did, Mum,” said Brooke, and she sounded so sad, as if she might cry, and also frightened, as if Joy were drunk or mad or sick.
“Just like you never said how much you wanted us to win,” said Troy, quietly.
Joy stood. Her legs were wobbly. The only person whose eyes met hers was her damned husband.
She could see what he wanted to do right now. She could see it settle over him: a deadly stillness, or silence, like everything was shutting down. It had been twenty years since he’d done it, but she still recognized the signs. She always used to know when it was coming. She’d see it before the children did, and if she acted fast she could intercept, she could avert the crisis. The feeling had been like running to catch something before it shattered, except you weren’t allowed to run. Maybe it was how bomb disposal people felt.
But she was no longer in the business of bomb disposal. She was too old for it and she could not believe she had ever put up with it in the first place.
“Don’t … you … dare.” She pointed a shaky finger at him. “Don’t you even think about it.”
She swayed on her feet. The ache of grief and humiliation spread not just across her stomach but all the way up her left side.
It was Savannah who got to her first, and supported her with a surprisingly strong grip.
“Make them all go,” Joy said to her. “Make them all go home.”
Chapter 25
NOW
It was now fifteen days since Joy Delaney had been seen by her family.
“My mother got very sick on Father’s Day,” said Brooke Delaney. “She collapsed. It turned out she had a kidney infection. We had to call an ambulance.”
“That must have given you all a fright,” said Christina.
Christina and Ethan were interviewing Joy Delaney’s youngest daughter at her physiotherapy practice, surrounded by exercise equipment. There were only two chairs. Ethan had accepted Brooke’s offer to sit on the balance ball, which he did with great aplomb, diligently taking notes. Christina would have fallen off.
They had met Brooke at the press conference, but it had taken a few days for this interview to be scheduled. Christina couldn’t be sure if Brooke had been deliberately delaying. Right now she seemed keen to be cooperative, or at least to give that impression.
“Well, yes, it did give us a fright,” said Brooke. “We didn’t know what was going on at first. Mum was behaving so oddly. We thought it was because she was upset, not sick.”
“What was she upset about?”
“I felt especially bad,” reflected Brooke. “Because I’m the one with medical training. She had a fever. I should have realized.”
“She was upset about something?” pushed Christina.
“Just family stuff,” said Brooke. “My brother and I had both broken up with our partners. Oh, and Dad decided it would be a good day to do a comprehensive analysis of our failed tennis careers.” She gave a faint smile.
“So what was your impression of Savannah?” asked Christina. She burned her tongue sipping the too-hot cup of tea that Brooke had made for her.
“She was just a sweet, quiet girl. She’d cooked all this food for us, but then she was kind of serving us, in our parents’ house. It was odd and uncomfortable. It was like she was Cinderella, barely eating anything herself, and both my parents had become strangely … enamored of her. Dependent on her. It was like she’d turned up and solved a problem we didn’t realize needed solving.”
“What problem was that?”
Brooke considered the question. “I guess, maybe, the problem of cooking? Or the pro
blem of retirement? My parents aren’t the sort of people who dreamed of retirement. They loved to work.”
“Has your mother shown signs of depression recently?”
“Absolutely not,” said Brooke. She blinked. “Things haven’t been great recently, but Mum is not the sort of person to get depressed.”
“What about your father, then? Is he the sort of person to get depressed?”
“He can get grumpy,” said Brooke carefully. “But never violent. If that’s what you’re implying.”
“I don’t want to imply anything,” said Christina. “I’m just gathering information about your parents’ states of mind.”
“I wish you could see my father coaching a child,” said Brooke. “Even a child with no talent. Especially a child with no talent. He was so gentle and patient, so passionate about tennis, he just always wanted everyone to love tennis as much as he did.”
This told Christina nothing. Gentle people snapped. People who were patient and kind in some circumstances were cruel and vicious in others.
“But he’s not coaching anymore, right? Your parents are retired and you said they loved to work. So I take it they haven’t been enjoying retirement?”
“They’ve been floundering a bit,” said Brooke. “They tried traveling, but they didn’t know how to holiday. We didn’t really do holidays in our family.”
“You never went on a holiday?”
“Well, we did. Every summer we went for a week to a caravan park on the Central Coast,” admitted Brooke. “Which was kind of fun.” She frowned. “Kind of not.” She sighed. “But there was never time for many holidays because we all played competitive tennis. We were either traveling to a tournament or training for one, and my parents were trying to run a coaching school at the same time.”
“Was it a happy childhood?” asked Christina. She hadn’t got a handle yet on this family. On the surface they seemed loving and cheerful, but she could sense dysfunction bubbling ominously beneath their sporty, matter-of-fact demeanors.
“I don’t know,” said Brooke. She picked up a ballpoint pen, chewed on it, and then seemed to catch herself, removed it from her mouth, and put it back on the desk in front of her and pushed it away. “I mean, yes, it was happy. It was very busy. It was dominated by tennis. Tennis hijacks your childhood. There’s no time for anything else.”
“Did you resent having your childhood hijacked?”
“Not at all. I loved tennis. We all loved tennis.”
“You still play?” Christina looked at the framed print of a tennis player on the wall.
Brooke’s nostrils flared. “Not competitively. I play with my dad every now and then. For fun.”
“So growing up, did your parents put a lot of pressure on you to win?”
“We put pressure on ourselves,” said Brooke. “We all wanted to win.” She followed Christina’s eyes to the picture of the tennis player, who was stretching for a backhand as if a life depended on it. “It’s hard to want something so badly and give it your all and then not get it. There’s this idea that all you need to do is believe in yourself, but the truth is, we all can’t be Martina.”
“Martina?” Christina checked her notes. Was that the older sister?
“Navratilova,” said Ethan. He pointed at the poster.
“Oh, of course,” said Christina. The only tennis player she knew was the angry one from the eighties. McEnroe. She had an uncle who used to put on an American accent to imitate his tantrums: “You cannot be serious.”
Ethan said to Brooke, “When you said ‘things haven’t been great recently,’ is that because there was some fallout following that Father’s Day lunch?”
Astute question. Christina watched Brooke’s body language as she answered. Her shoulders went up, and she stretched her neck in a turtlelike manner to make them drop.
“There was no fallout,” she said definitively. “There were just a few things said out loud that day that had never been said out loud before, that’s all. Then Mum was sick in hospital, and we all focused on that.”
Was that the truth? Or was that when things began to fray?
“Okay then, so why do you think things ‘haven’t been so great’ lately?” asked Christina.
Brooke went very still. “I don’t know,” she said, and she didn’t blink.
There was the lie. Right there. Christina could point at it like a doctor points out a fracture on an X-ray.
She did so know.
Christina waited.
“Are you sure?” she said gently. “Are you sure you don’t know?”
Two spots of color rose on Brooke’s cheeks. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“So back to your parents’ houseguest,” said Christina. “She was alone with your father? While your mother was in hospital?”
“Yes,” said Brooke. “It was only two nights.”
“Right,” said Christina. That was long enough. She waited. Brooke didn’t flinch.
“Then your mother came home from hospital and Savannah stayed on.”
“Yes,” said Brooke. “We were grateful because she was doing all the cooking.”
“I believe it’s around this time that your brother Logan discovered something unwelcome about Savannah.”
This time Brooke definitely did flinch. Had she not expected this information to be passed on? If not, why not?
Brooke recovered fast, although she had to work too hard to maintain eye contact.
“Did Logan tell you that?”
“He did,” said Christina. Logan had mentioned it in a sudden rush, just before he had to hurry off to teach a class. “Can you tell me more?”
“Well,” said Brooke, and she spoke gingerly, as if she were tiptoeing her way through broken glass. “Logan was just sitting at home one day when he discovered something about Savannah that made us all feel a bit…” She broke eye contact to try to find the right word.
Ethan wobbled on his balance ball.
“Nervous,” finished Brooke.
Chapter 26
LAST OCTOBER
It was the middle of the day, the middle of the week, the middle of his life. Logan had taught an early-morning class and now he was back home, on his green leather couch, in his half-empty town house, on a clear, sunlit day filled with birdsong, lawnmowers and leaf blowers, and the sound of his next-door neighbor learning the cello. She’d left a preemptive note: Thank you for your patience while I learn the cello!
Logan channel-surfed, drank warm beer, and ate cold leftover pizza for his lunch, and tried to stop his eyes continually leaving the television and returning to all the blank spaces in the apartment left by Indira.
There was a blank space in front of him where Indira should have been standing right now, hands on her hips: Do you realize the sun is shining out there?
She thought it was illegal to watch television when the sun was shining. It was because she and her family had emigrated from the UK when she was twelve, and she still appreciated Australian sunshine in a way that Logan, who grew up with the sun in his eyes, never could. He saw sunlight as a peril, an obstacle to overcome on the court, like the wind. She saw it as a daily miracle.
She’d left behind literal blank spots too, like the faded rectangle on the wall where she’d hung that god-awful abstract painting she’d bought from an artist at the markets in Hobart, and the flattened carpet by the front door where her pointless vintage hat rack used to stand, except apparently it hadn’t been pointless because Logan kept going to chuck things on it, like his hoodie, and it kept right on not being there, its absence so surprisingly consistent, like the balls of dirty gray fluff that still floated disconsolately around the space in the laundry where Indira’s bamboo laundry hamper once stood.
She’d left behind her washing machine. It glared at him each time he attempted to use it. It was a small, fiddly front-loader with too many cycle options. Indira had done all their laundry. She loved laundry. She’d sometimes peeled socks off his feet just to wash them.
Faithful old fridge.
For Christ’s sake, he was turning into his mother: personifying his appliances.
He stared at the blank rectangle on the wall, as if it were a bricked-up window and he was uselessly looking for a view that was long gone, for an explanation that was not forthcoming.
“It’s beautiful,” she used to say, about the god-awful painting. “It makes me feel alive.”
“It’s god-awful,” he would say, and he’d heard the echo of his parents in their banter, or he thought that’s what he heard. Maybe Indira heard something else. Her parents had an unhappy marriage. She might have heard the echoes of something entirely different. He thought he was being funny and flirty, but maybe she thought he was being nasty. Maybe she hated doing the laundry. Maybe they’d been living side by side in entirely different realities.
It was an awful painting, but he missed it, just like he missed her questions, her perfume, her insistence he eat bananas (for the potassium, she was obsessed with potassium), her sneakers by the front door, her high-pitched sneezes, the unfathomable pleasure she took in capturing the Pokémon that apparently loitered invisibly throughout their apartment (were they still here? Waiting hopefully for her to capture them on her phone?), her butterfly kisses on the back of his neck early on a Sunday morning, her—Jesus.
Enough.
He picked up his phone and called his friend Hien, because Logan was not fucking passive. He was keeping a daily inventory of his nonpassive actions. He was the only one in his circle of old school friends who ever picked up the phone and all his friends’ wives noticed this and told their husbands, “You’re all so lucky you’ve got Logan.”
“You thought about it yet?” asked Hien as soon as he answered.
“Eh?” Logan hadn’t thought about anything. “Thought about what?”
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