‘What was she like?’ I ask.
‘She was great,’ says Mary. ‘She was fiery. She liked helping people – she was always making meals for friends, always on the phone, talking them through things. Dad adored her. I read somewhere that parents love their kids more than each other, but Dad always loved her the most. And we knew it. She loved the ocean. Reckon that’s why Kelly moved so close to the beach but can’t bring herself to actually walk along it or swim.’
‘Oh.’
‘Can’t ask Kelly, huh?’
‘No.’
Mary yawns again and I hear the sound of a coffee machine being switched on. ‘Mum was so accepting of you . . . the idea of you. I think that was the main difference between Mum and Dad after what happened to Kelly. Dad was so bogged down in the horror of it. I think being a school principal, he felt like he’d failed Kelly somehow. I don’t know. He couldn’t even look at her. But Mum . . . Mum was just there for her, you know? She was trying to get Kelly to report everything to the police and then . . . she died. And it never got reported. And you got adopted. And Kelly never got over any of it.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Her name was Katrina. She’d have loved you, Stell.’ Mary’s voice catches. ‘She never would have let you go.’
***
She never would have let you go. It hits me all at once. I’m watching Kelly smiling at something and she doesn’t have dimples and I do. One more thing about myself that I don’t want. Don’t like. And I want to look like my grandmother, like Katrina, who loved me before she even knew me, but all I can see are the parts of myself that I so badly don’t want to be there.
I must have made some sort of weird, strangled noise because Kelly looks up from the television. ‘Stella?’
‘I have bad blood,’ I say and burst into tears.
At first Kelly just sits there, gazing at me blankly. I cry and touch my dimples and Kelly stands up and stares at me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry it happened to you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m here.’
‘Stop it,’ she says. She hesitates for a moment, as though she wants to touch me. ‘You’re being ridiculous.’
I keep crying.
‘Give your mum a call.’
And then my phone is in my hand and Kelly is out in the garden. I can hear the sound of weeds being pulled from the beds, the sucking sound of dirt meeting air.
***
I explain it to Mum. How I’ve been alone so much. How I’ve been living off chips and spending most of my time at the library. I tell her about the mirror and all the parts of myself that I want to excise away. I tell her that I hate how I came into the world. I hate my story. That sometimes I wish it all away. I wish myself away.
‘And she won’t talk about it. She won’t talk about what happened to her. And I need to hear it. I need to know.’
‘Some people can’t. Some people can’t ever talk about that sort of thing,’ Mum says, her voice very gentle.
‘But I need her to. Doesn’t that matter?’
‘Stella. You need to come home.’
I don’t say anything.
‘School term’s started and it’s obviously too much for you. Too much for Kelly, too.’
‘It’s not too much for us!’ I tell Mum about Katrina and how much she was there for Kelly when Kelly needed her. I tell her everything that Mary said. She never would have let you go.
‘Stella, come home.’ There are tears in Mum’s voice. They become mine and lodge in my throat. I don’t know who they’re for. Whether they’re for Kelly or Katrina. Whether they’re for us or Dad.
‘No,’ I say. ‘No. I’m not coming back to Fairyland, yet. I’m staying here for a bit longer. I’m staying here. I need to.’ I take a deep breath and channel all of the self-help books I’ve ever read. I am calm and collected. I am a doer and a goddess. I am powerful and brilliant. But they’re just words. I wipe my eyes and look out the window at the wire-topped brick wall of Kelly’s garden.
***
The next afternoon, Kelly texts me to tell me that she won’t be home until eight. I get the train to Graceleigh, where Kelly’s father lives. Mary had given me the address. I’ve never been to that side of town before.
The house has a cream picket fence and silver birches and roses in neat beds. I open the little gate and walk up to the flagstone verandah. I think of Katrina, wondering if she planted much of the garden.
I knock on the door and when my grandfather answers, he tenses. The door rattles.
‘Stella?’ he says tentatively. Like he’s not quite sure who I am.
‘I don’t like how you treated me the day before,’ I say. My hands are shaking, so I hold them behind my back and stand up tall. It’s meant to help when you feel like you might throw up. It can make you feel strong. ‘You didn’t even look at me.’
‘I’m sorry.’ The door continues to rattle.
‘I don’t deserve it. I haven’t done anything wrong.’ I take a deep breath. ‘And neither has Kelly.’
‘You didn’t know her back then.’
‘What? What don’t I know?’
He frowns. ‘She . . .’
‘She what? You think it was her fault, don’t you? Getting pregnant? The stroke? It wasn’t.’
‘How the hell would you know anything about it?’ he snaps.
‘You shut her out. It’s why she’s . . . why she’s the way she is. And you don’t even see it.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I know you miss your wife. I know you’ve had a hard time. We both deserve better,’ I say, turning back towards the garden because I can feel myself tearing up. I start walking away. ‘Both of us.’
‘Stella!’
I stop. I think he’s going to stay quiet, but he holds the door open. ‘Please. Come in.’
The house is small and dark. It smells of coffee and plastic. There are landscape paintings on the walls and faded carpet on the floor. I follow Simon down the narrow hallway. He pauses.
‘This was her room,’ he says flatly, pointing into a space crammed with boxes and books, old towels and space heaters. ‘When she lived here.’
‘Can I go in?’
He frowns. ‘I suppose so. If you can fit. I’ll be in the kitchen.’
I squeeze into the room. There’s a sash window with green curtains and I look out into the front garden. This is where Kelly was, after she was raped. This is where she was when she found out she was pregnant. This is where Kelly was when she was waiting for me to be born. This is where she slept after her mother died. I’ve been in this room, I think. Before I was born, I was in this room. I stay in there for a while, hoping to piece all the unknown parts of Kelly together.
Finally, I squeeze back out into the hallway and into a little kitchen, which overlooks a wild backyard, full of flowers and weeds and fruit trees.
‘I’m sorry,’ Simon says. He puts the kettle on and stands at the bench with his back to me, touching the kettle’s handle.
‘It’s okay.’
‘It’s probably hard for you to believe, but I did the best I could.’
I look at him, at the creases around his eyes. The grey hair at his temples. His chipped front tooth.
He takes a deep breath and turns to face me. ‘You’re tall like her. She was tall, Katrina. His face softens. ‘Yeah. I see it now. Maybe you do have her eyes.’
***
I walk to Mary’s place through the school where Kelly had gone before I was born. The place where Simon had been the principal for twenty-five years. I walk across the oval and the basketball courts. I touch one of the bubblers outside the art room. It has that schoolyard smell, of plastic and soggy sandwiches and tanbark. I try to imagine Kelly here, I try to imagine her young, but I can’t and eventually I hoist my bag up a bit higher and jump the fence on the far side of the basketball courts. When I get to Mary’s she makes me a smoothie and we sit on her freshly oiled back deck and listen to the birds c
alling from the neighbour’s yard.
I stir my smoothie around the glass with a spoon. ‘She won’t talk to me about any of it. What she went through. What it was like for her.’
‘It’s not just you. She won’t talk to me about it, either. I don’t think she can really stand to think about any of it.’ Mary studies me. ‘I still can’t believe she wrote you those letters and had you come to stay, Stell. She’s so boxed in about the whole thing.’
‘I just wish I knew about her, you know?’
‘What about her, specifically?’
‘How can you go from being a pregnant teenager to being how she is? Like, how?’
Mary sips her drink. ‘Mum loved roses. That’s why she has so many. Roses and lilacs. After Dad made Kelly give you up, she just slept. She wouldn’t go to school, she wouldn’t eat. She just curled up in a ball and slept. And it was Mum’s garden that got her out of bed – everything was getting overgrown and Kelly couldn’t stand it. So she tidied it. And then she tidied her room. And then she tidied the house. And then she decided she wanted to do some sort of work with gardens – that Mum would like that. So she went back to school. She never . . . she never went back to the high school she’d been at when it happened. I don’t know the details – she’s never talked about it – but I’m pretty sure it happened at the school. So she enrolled in another school. Dad wasn’t happy about it, but he knew it was the only way she was going to graduate. So she finished Year Twelve and got a job doing landscaping, and she read every book and design magazine she could get her hands on, did lots of extra hours, and eventually she learned enough to set up her own business. She worked from home, to start off with. Back when she was in a flat near the train tracks outside Harrington. She’s so single-minded and has such a good eye for detail, her business just went from strength to strength. Soon she had enough money to get a loan out for her house, and then it expanded enough for her to get an office space in Lockwood. But it’s the gardens she loves. It’s where she feels Mum. Does that answer your question?’
I think about how my own mum sits and sews and thinks of her mother making clothes for her as a child. How there are so many different ways to feel connected to the people we’d loved and lost. ‘She put flowers in the envelopes that she sent me.’
‘She did?’ Mary blinks. ‘What type?’
‘A lilac. Roses. Leaves from things. I don’t know – I’m not very plant savvy.’
Mary shakes her head. ‘She’ll confuse me forever, that one. But she does love you, Stella. It’s a weird, broken kind of love, but it’s real. She loves you.’
***
Mary gives me a photo of my grandmother, of Katrina, standing in amongst her roses. I press it to my heart, where I’d kept Kelly’s letters, and then I tuck it carefully into my bag. At dusk, I go down to the beach and watch people jogging past and walking their dogs. I text Taylor, but she doesn’t text me back. As it’s getting dark, I wander back to Kelly’s and sit against the brick wall, watching cars driving slowly past. My stomach grumbles and I wish I’d thought to get something to eat when the places between here and school were open.
The sky continues to dim. My phone goes flat. A cool breeze picks up from the direction of the sea so that I can taste the salt of it on my tongue.
It’s after ten by the time Kelly gets home.
‘Sorry – appointment ran late and then I had a conference call.’ She shakes her head as she unlocks the gate. ‘One of those days! You’ve eaten?’
‘No.’ We go into the kitchen and I unhook my schoolbag from my shoulder. ‘Kelly?’
‘Hmm?’ She bites into an apple and opens up her laptop on the kitchen bench.
‘Did you have a name picked out for me?’
‘What?’
‘A name. When you were pregnant.’
‘No. I didn’t.’
‘Did you have names that you liked, though? That you might have used? If things had been different?’
‘No,’ she says.
I think about what Mary said about the key, about how Kelly wanted to give it to me but probably wouldn’t. ‘Is that key cut yet?’
‘What?’
‘The key. My key.’
She doesn’t look up from her laptop. I see her swallow. Her voice, when she speaks, is too casual. Forced. ‘No, not yet. I keep forgetting. Sorry, Stell.’
***
I write out text messages for Clem. Snippets of our time together. Do you remember . . . ? Do you remember . . . ? I write them out until my brain hums with memories and stories and I feel bereft at the thought of us not really speaking. I write out a message telling him about the key that Kelly hasn’t given me. It’s humiliating, that absent key. But the idea of telling Clem doesn’t make me cringe. But then I let memories of the last few weeks wash over me like water and I feel the void that I’m not sure we can claw our way out of. I write and write and then I delete them. I don’t send a single one. Outside, a seagull calls and I wonder what it’s doing, awake so late at night.
***
The next day, Kelly and I eat breakfast at her kitchen table. I stare at my phone. Taylor has been texting me, but when I text back, she never replies. I suppose she wants to know I’m still here, but she’s too mad to actually have a conversation with me. I haven’t told Kelly about visiting Graceleigh and I’m sure her father hasn’t, either. She scrolls through her laptop and I flip through a book, knowing that soon she’ll go and brush her teeth and leave me money for food that I won’t use.
This morning, the radio’s on. Something about homelessness. Kelly looks up from her laptop and shakes her head.
‘They choose to be homeless and then expect handouts,’ she says. ‘It’s ridiculous.’
‘What?’
‘The people on the street. They make choices and then expect to be rescued. It’s disgusting.’
‘People don’t choose to be homeless.’
‘People make bad choices, Stella. People make bad choices, convince themselves that they’re not responsible for them and expect help. There are too many people out there completely unable to stand on their own two feet.’
I think of Fairyland, how so many people there are skimming on the edge of living in cars or on the street. Of how many would have been completely homeless if the floodwaters had risen that little bit higher. I open my mouth to say something angry – the sort of thing Lara or Taylor or Clem would say – but no words come out.
‘Some people need help,’ I say instead.
She raises her eyebrows. ‘Wow. Didn’t realise you were such a bleeding heart.’
‘I’m not a bleeding heart – I just know that sometimes people are up against it and it doesn’t make them less human or less deserving of help.’
Outside, a magpie lands on Kelly’s brick fence and warbles for a moment before landing near the fishpond.
Kelly looks down. ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you.’
I don’t look at her.
‘I know I said you could stay as long as you wanted, but I’ve got a work thing. It’s just cropped up. I’ll be gone for three months and I think it’s best if you go home to your family.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s just one of those things.’ She clears her throat. ‘Anyway, I’m leaving in a couple of weeks, so no rush. It’s been great having you.’
‘Yeah . . . yeah, thanks.’
‘You alright?’
‘Yeah. I’m fine.’
After Kelly leaves, I feel sick. I keep thinking about things. Thinking about Dad. About Mum. I put on a load of washing and wipe down the kitchen table, even though there aren’t any crumbs. I think, with a pang, of what the breakfast table looks like after my family’s eaten. Crusts and dollops of jam and rings from mugs of tea. Cleaning up after them is always a big task, but Kelly and I, it’s like neither of us have even been here.
She never would have let you go. The words have become a talisman.
I stand in the doorway of Kelly’s room and take
a deep breath, and then I go in. I rummage and I don’t even feel bad about it because there are things I need to know that Kelly won’t – can’t – tell me.
I don’t know what I’m looking for. Diaries would be nice. In chronological order, so I can skip straight to the most important parts. But I know I won’t find them. The things I want to know about are things that Kelly doesn’t have the words for.
What I do find in the bottom of her wardrobe is a book of pressed flowers. There aren’t any dates or names or details written about them. Just the flowers, with their flaking petals and browning stems. I flip through each page. Roses. Lilacs. Daffodils. Flowers I don’t know the names of. Flowers that are obviously precious to her, that mean something. Some of the pages have flowers missing and I wonder if Kelly had tucked them into envelopes and sent them to me, but there’s no way to know. I’m glad I’ve kept the flowers she’s sent. Maybe I’ll tuck them into a book like this and keep them, always, without any words.
I grab my schoolbag, make sure everything in Kelly’s house is just how it’s meant to be, and then I walk to the train station. I catch the train to Sutherbend then walk past the station pub, but I don’t go in. Even if Dad’s in there, spotting him won’t do any good. Remembering the time with Clem where we found Dad at the track is still enough to make me curdle with embarrassment.
I sit in the school library, staring into space, when Zin comes in and sits down next to me. We sit in front of the air-conditioning in the languages section and I stare up at the scorch marks on the ceiling and feel tired already. Not the best way to start what’s meant to be one of the biggest years in our life.
‘How’s Monica going?’ I ask.
Zin grins. ‘She’s so great. We’re going out tonight. And her sister’s wedding is going to have the best flowers Sutherbend’s ever seen.’
‘I have no doubt.’
‘Hey, you know that blow-up pool Lara wouldn’t stop whingeing about?’
How to Grow a Family Tree Page 24