My Brother’s Keeper

by Malane, Donna

  She puts the pen down and looks right at me. She says, ‘Do you remember Mum stopping the car?’ She’s not her mum and I want to say that, but I don’t. I just look at the buttons. ‘Do you remember the car stopping?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, because I do remember. ‘There’s heaps of swans there.’

  The policeman looks up when I say that. He puts Robot Man on the table and then because we’re all looking at it he picks him up again. Then he doesn’t know what to do with him.

  ‘You and Falcon were making a lot of noise,’ the police lady says.

  Out the window behind Mum’s head, the sky is white. Sometimes a sparrow flies past, its little wings beating fast, chirruping like mad. Every time it happens Pearl chirrups back but she has to stay in her cage. I can’t see Mum’s face because of the white sky.

  I try to explain to the lady policeman but the words don’t work properly. ‘Falcon wanted Mum to take us to The Warehouse but Mum was fed up with us making all that racket,’ I say. ‘She had the yips.’ I look at Mum to make sure it’s okay to say that but she turns around to look out the window again. I can’t see what her hands are doing.

  The lady policeman writes it all down and doesn’t look up at me. ‘You and Falcon were making a racket and your mum got out of the car.’ She looks at me like she wants me to answer a question but I don’t know what it is. Then she does ask a question. ‘Do you know what a handbrake is?’ I know the answer and nod. I hope she’ll smile at me for answering right but she doesn’t. ‘And do you know where the handbrake is in your mum’s car?’

  This time I say ‘Yes,’ out loud but just watch her hand write down the words. My bony arse is sore from sitting on Dad’s leg. The sky around Mum’s head hurts my eyes. A seagull flies past the window. It disappears into Mum’s head like she’s eaten it, then it comes out the other side crying and flies off safe.

  ‘Do you remember your mum doing anything to the handbrake, Sunny?’ She’s wearing pink lipstick but it’s rubbed off a bit. ‘Before she got out of the car?’ She’s looking at me like she wants me to say yes and get it over with like Mum did. My hair sticks to my neck where it’s hot. I wish I’d taken my pyjamas off and not just put my sweater on top. Dad lifts me off his knee but keeps his hands there so I’ll know he’s not angry with me. His hands are hot and his fingers squeeze into my stomach but he doesn’t mean to hurt me. I tell him I need to pee and he lets me go. I walk straight out the door without looking back at him or the policeman with Robot Man or the lady policeman with the notebook. Mum has the tips of her fingers on her lips like she is trying to stop them from saying something.

  Outside, the white clouds have taken over all of the sky. A blackbird with a bright orange beak jumps across the grass. It pokes its beak into the squishy mud looking for a worm to kill. Whiskey doesn’t look at me even when I make the special food-time call, ‘Whis whis whis.’ My voice sounds funny and then Dad comes and takes me back inside.

  Mum isn’t there. She must be lying down. The policeman is leaning against the fridge door. He’s jumbled all the letters up and they don’t spell Falcon’s name any more. I’ll have to fix it when he goes. The lady policeman is still sitting at the table with the notebook in front of her. Dad’s hand is on my shoulder. ‘It’s okay, love,’ he says, ‘nearly there,’ as if we were on a trip in the car. A green letter C is on the floor next to the policeman’s big black shoe. My stomach feels funny but I don’t know if it’s hungry or sick. Dad pulls out the chair beside the lady policeman and I sit on it because that’s what I’m supposed to do. I don’t mind because it means I can’t see the weird white sky where Mum was standing.

  ‘No one is angry with you,’ the lady policeman says, and smiles her lips to show me she’s lying. She has dark hairs on her lip but she’s a lady.

  I don’t know what to say to make it better so I say, ‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ but he doesn’t look at me. The way that he’s sitting there like he’s broken, with his big Adam’s apple going up and down, he looks like someone else’s father, not my dad.

  ‘Look at me,’ the lady policeman says, and I look at her eyes, which have freckles in them. ‘You and Falcon were in the car making a racket and your mum got angry with you because she had the yips,’ she says, and then she stops talking but she nods her head up and down so I nod, too. ‘Good girl,’ she says but she doesn’t smile. ‘And then your mum took the handbrake off and got out of the car and the car rolled into the water.’

  The policeman’s foot makes a glucky sound on the lino where Falcon’s juice tipped over. He closes the door softly behind him. He must be going to check on Mum. The blue F for Falcon has fallen under the fridge door and Whiskey’s hair is all stuck to it. I guess Mum will have to throw it in the rubbish. The lady policeman is still looking at me, so I nod. I hope Mum has her drugs so she doesn’t have the yips with the policeman. Then the lady policeman asks me if I remember the man rescuing me from under the water, but she doesn’t ask about Falcon and I don’t tell her about him crying when the car filled up with water. She stops writing and draws a line under her last words like it’s The End.

  I don’t like the part of the hallway that goes past Mum’s bedroom. The door is open and I hope Mum is lying down asleep, but she isn’t. She’s sitting on the little stool in front of her dresser where the round butterfly box with all of her make-up is. I’m not allowed to touch Mum’s butterfly box. She’s staring at the mirror so I see two of her, two mums looking at each other. I’ve gone all the way past her door and I’m nearly at mine when she says, ‘Sunny,’ and I stop, but she doesn’t say anything else so I have to walk back to the doorway. The policeman is in the room with her. He’s got his arms folded and he’s staring at the back of her head like he’s waiting for her to hurry up. I put my hand up to hold on to the door. I don’t know which mum I should be looking at, but they’re not looking at me anyway. It’s only six steps from here to my room. I want to lie in my bed with the duvet pulled up over my head and make a tent for Baby Bear and me. I don’t want the white sky looking in my window and making me sick.

  Then Mum slides her eyes at me, but she doesn’t move her head, and I have to press my feet hard into the floor so I don’t fall over. My stomach feels like it’s got runny poos.

  ‘I’m going away for a while, Sunny.’ She watches me but she doesn’t move. ‘It’s for the best.’ She just watches, as the big white clouds eat the sky behind her and again in the mirror where that other mum is watching me, too.

  Chapter 3

  TUESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2012

  Wolf was performing his habitual morning tap-dance routine around the dog bowl when Sean gave a perfunctory knock and pushed the door open. From the way Wolf behaved you’d think my ex-husband was the love of his life, returning from the battlefield years after being declared missing in action. Maybe it was like that for Wolf. For all I knew he was still waiting for Sean to come home. I’m not projecting. Sean was wearing a charcoal suit which looked really good on him.

  ‘How’s the baby?’ I asked, reminding myself.

  ‘Good. Good,’ he repeated, squinting at me as if my question was other than innocent. As if. ‘Not so much a baby any more though.’ He reached for the little coffee pot that used to be his.

  I took it off him. ‘You could knock, you know.’

  ‘I did,’ he said.

  This little exchange pretty much sums up our relationship now: both right, both saying the complete opposite. I started the coffee-making routine while he hunkered down and ruffled Wolf’s neck fur. It wasn’t so much the suit that looked good, but him in it. He’d lost a bit of weight around the midriff and muscled up in the thighs and biceps. I thought men were supposed to go to seed when they had babies. Oh no, that’s right: it’s us, the dumb sex, who do that. I shifted my focus back to the coffee-making but not before noticing his shoulders had muscled up, too.

  ‘How’s Robbie?’ he asked, as if sensing my appraisal.

  He was always good at reading me. I didn
’t want to discuss my lover with my ex, even if they had buddied up. Especially now they’d buddied up. I put his coffee on the table and took up a defensive position against the sink bench.

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this early morning visit?’

  He brushed dog hairs off that good suit and watched Wolf shovel biscuits into his mouth. It was Sean’s way of avoiding eye contact. I can still read him pretty well too.

  ‘I want to talk to you about selling the house.’ He looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. ‘With Patrick and all, it’s time Sylvie and I bought a bigger place. Together, that is. Her place is tiny and anyway, it’s time I put in my share.’

  I bit the tongue that wanted to say he’d obviously put his share in already, which is why they’d gone from being a twosome to being a happy little family threesome. Instead I poured myself a coffee and kept silent. It wasn’t Sean’s fault he’d left me and taken up with a little pixie of a woman he worked with at Police HQ. Well, it was his fault. But on my grown-up days I accepted some of the responsibility. When my little sister Niki was murdered I’d become obsessed with finding the person responsible. It didn’t help that Sean was a cop; in fact, it made things worse. I was on at him all day, every day about it. There was no room in my life for anything else. Sean was great at first but weeks turned into months and I kept hounding him all day and closing him out all night. Eventually he gave up on me. Some months before that I’d pretty much given up on myself. We separated. It was my idea. By the time I was ready to find my way back to him it was too late. He’d gone and found someone who was the complete opposite of me. I’m a rangy uncouth tomboy with a mean mouth and a habitual frown. Sylvie the pixie is friendly, feminine, finessed and fucking my husband. Okay, ex-husband, but still. Obviously this wasn’t one of my grown-up days.

  ‘Sell the house. Right,’ I said. ‘I’ll get on to it. Anything else?’

  ‘Diane …’

  I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He just looked at his cup and let my name hang in the air between us. Oversensitive as always, Wolf slunk under the table and dropped his head on Sean’s regulation polished shoes. I refused to take that as a declaration of whose side he was on.

  ‘It’ll be tough letting the place go. Tough for both of us. I know that. But can we please try and not make it harder than it needs to be?’

  At least he hadn’t said selling our house would be good for me.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘We need to sell. It’ll free us both up.’ I hadn’t meant the words to sound so heavy with meaning. ‘Money-wise,’ I added. That still wasn’t right but I didn’t trust my voice to say more.

  I told him I’d contact an agent and promised to keep him in touch with how it went. We made small talk and finished our coffee. Sean lovingly stroked Wolf’s ears and gave my shoulder an awkward pat as he left. Of all the things we imagined when we were together, I’m sure neither of us imagined this. I watched him walk down the path.

  His new butt looked good in that suit too.

  While my resolve was still clear and before I could mull too much I phoned a real-estate agency. There’s good mulling and bad mulling and I was pretty sure selling our marital home so Sean could buy a place for his new family would fit in the bad mulling basket. The receptionist was enthusiastic; an agent was free to come to appraise the property later in the afternoon.

  ‘Good for her,’ I said, and then into the uneasy silence added, ‘thanks. That’ll work for me too.’ No need to take my churlishness out on her. That done, I put it out of my mind, wrung a third cup of coffee out of Sean’s pot and took it through to the office. Wolf followed, climbed onto his sofa and prepared himself for a hard morning’s work of lucid dreaming, punctuated by orchestral farting.

  I started with the bulging plastic bag Karen had given me. She’d arranged the file roughly in chronological order, which gave me an easy overview of how events had unfolded. Opening a new file on my computer I dutifully copied down the dates of marriage, divorce and the births of their two children. Karen and Justin married shortly before Sunny was born, followed two years later by the arrival of their second child, Falcon. I flicked through the jumble of baby and little kid stuff: vaccination cards, first crayon scribblings and illustrated lists of milestones that all bore Sunny’s name.

  There wasn’t much evidence of Falcon’s arrival. Not a single photo of either parent holding the new baby boy. Occasionally he appeared propped up on a sofa in the back of a shot and in one photo Sunny was lying with him asleep on a play mat, but there were no proudly dated drawings or finger paintings as Falcon stumbled into toddlerhood.

  The few family photos from that time showed a rake-thin Karen with dark rings under her eyes. It was pretty obvious this was when she had started using. Justin was thin, too, with no sign of the narcissistic body building he would take up after the death of his son. In photos close to the time of the killing, Sunny was often on the edge of frame as if she was trying to get as far away from her parents as possible. I warned myself against reading too much into this. At six or seven she was at an age when trying to escape parents’ clutches is the norm.

  Further down the pile I found a kindergarten photo of four-year-old Falcon, squinting suspiciously at the camera. He was small for his age. A tight, pinched little face and sandy-haired like his father, he wore a grubby woollen jersey that was unravelling at the neck. I copied the scribbled date on the back and then flicked forward through the documents to find the date he had died. Karen had killed him less than a month after the photo was taken.

  I carefully returned the photo to the pile and then put the whole lot back in the bag. I couldn’t rid myself of the memory of that photo of Falcon, the last image of him alive. Did Karen carry it with her? Was it pinned up on the wall of her cell for those seven years? The son she had murdered. The little five-year-old boy who thought his mother was taking him to The Warehouse to buy a PlayStation.

  Tracking Justin on the net turned out to be simple enough. After half an hour googling I knew Justin Alexander Bachelor was now married to a woman called Salena Kosovov. Salena owned and managed an ‘exclusive’ gym, Apricot, in Herne Bay, Auckland. From googled photos of the couple at charity and media events it was obvious both made use of the gym. Justin was pumped and polished and Salena had augmented the toned, bronzed body with expensive teeth, Botox and a boob job, which had miraculously failed to completely destroy her natural beauty.

  I tracked back to find earlier photos of Justin. In the twelve months following Karen’s sentencing, Justin pumped himself up to body builder size, met and married Salena and sired another son they called Neo. In the past couple of years Justin had deflated back down again to a more normal size, so maybe men do lose their bodies when they have kids after all. He was still a big guy, but nothing like what he was six years earlier. On his Facebook page he listed fourteen-year-old Sunny and five-year-old Neo as family members. Salena made no such ‘family’ claim to Sunny, not even the unfriendly sounding ‘stepdaughter’.

  Neo had the high cheekboned beauty of his mother, but not the same discipline with calories. A computer boy rather than a gym boy was my guess. A couple more minutes’ searching and I found a photo of the whole family outside Salena’s gym the first morning it opened. Sunny was in school uniform, which made it a simple enough match to search. Within five minutes I had the address of the private school she attended in St Mary’s Bay and a quick click to the white pages gave the family’s listed home address. The internet makes tracking people frighteningly easy.

  I threw a Frisbee down the back yard for Wolf and thought about all this. Even allowing for the fact that Karen had only just got out of prison, where she’d been for the last seven years, she could probably have found this information herself. It occurred to me that Karen might not have hired me to find her daughter or even to check she was okay, but to make the first contact for her. It would be pretty hard to turn up unannounced on your teenage daughter’s doorste
p seven years after you tried to kill her; seven years after you’d successfully murdered her little brother.

  As much as I wanted to convince myself it was okay to contact Sunny directly, I knew it wasn’t. Plus I was pretty sure the police, who I liked to keep vaguely on the right side of, wouldn’t think so either. I’d have to approach Justin first and hope he’d let me talk to his daughter. Nothing in the papers Karen gave me or anything I’d found on the net suggested Justin had been blamed for Karen’s actions. No one had questioned his right or suitability to take over Sunny’s custody either — not publicly, anyway. Given how closely the authorities must have investigated him, if Justin was using he must have been very good at hiding it. Or he had successfully stopped at the time of his son’s death. It was possible, of course, that he’d never used — possible, but unlikely. I wondered if giving up drugs was what kicked the body building into action. Maybe they’d dealt with their guilt in parallel ways: Karen found sanctuary in the church and Justin had taken on the whole ‘my body is a temple’ number.

  Wolf gave me what I swear was an ironic look as he dropped the Frisbee at my feet. He was bored with this game and knew my attention was elsewhere. With commitment this time, I hurled the Frisbee down the path again. Two things happened at once: a voice yelled in high-pitched outrage, and Wolf, barking and slavering with the kind of enthusiasm only a bored, one-eyed, overprotective ex-police dog can muster, launched himself at a besuited man, clutching his head with one hand and my Frisbee with the other.

  Two cups of tea and a dripping packet of frozen peas later, Jason Baker had finally stopped shaking. But his mouth was still going strong. According to him, my reckless behaviour with the Frisbee had given him concussion and my dangerous dog should preferably be destroyed or, at the very least, be chained up at all times. Oh, please. I thought real-estate agents were made of tougher stuff. When he finally finished with the complaining I threw the peas back into the freezer, took Wolf into the office with me, closed the door and left Jason to click his well-polished heels through the house in what he called his ‘appraisal process’. I’d offered to walk him through but he clearly thought Wolf and I were both dangerous. He was probably right — about me anyway. I’d pointed out that Wolf, as a well-trained ex-police dog, had merely pushed him to the ground and had not ripped his heart out as he was perfectly capable of doing. Jason remained unimpressed by my dog’s restraint. Personally, the more Jason grizzled at me the more I admired Wolf’s control. My dog’s behaviour had been non-discriminatory; he’d have knocked over anyone who came onto the property uninvited, whereas I’d taken an instant personal dislike to the man. And that was after hitting him on the head with a Frisbee. He was just lucky I hadn’t taken up the attitude before I let the Frisbee go.