Both cars were gone and the house was locked up tight. I’d taken off before Mum could pin me down to babysit Josey again, and it looked like he’d been dragged out with the rest of them to the various cricket games.
I let myself in. The last time I’d entered the house in such a quiet state was in the middle of the night, but even then there were rustles of life, the sounds of people sleeping. Now it was truly quiet. When had it last been this quiet? Before Grace was born, maybe. After we lost Frankie and my parents sat silently in different rooms and I didn’t have to be told to keep my voice down because I didn’t have anybody to talk to anyway.
It was hard to decide what to do. Put the TV on and try to find something to watch without a million arguments and questions? Or raid the pantry for chocolate—I know Mum has it stashed away somewhere, up high at the back—and eat until I made myself sick? I didn’t know how long I had until they all came crashing back in again, and I didn’t want to waste the time.
In the end, I compromised. I found a block of Dairy Milk and took it to the study along with Elias’ folder. The chocolate had already been opened but only the first row was gone. I snapped two more rows off and ate them like a Mars Bar, biting pieces off and letting each piece melt in my mouth.
The computer finally finished booting up. I had the folder flipped open to my notes page and I skimmed it, looking for somewhere to start. I was confused by Sephora’s motivations. I say I hate my family, but that doesn’t mean that I’d literally never want to see them again. What had happened for her to follow through on that threat? Was it to do with having Elias and giving him up? Or something else that had happened at the same time? What could possibly be so extreme that she’d want to cut off contact with her family?
I thought about Vogue and her reasons for running away from home. I thought about what might cause me to run away. That didn’t get me very far so I started trying to think about things that Sephora might have had to consider that neither Vogue nor I did.
Baby.
Boyfriend.
Random dead-end jobs.
I drummed my fingertips on the keyboard, trying to work out where to start searching. I’d already checked to see if there were any LinkedIn accounts in Sephora’s name, but as far as it was concerned—just like the rest of social media—she didn’t exist under that name. I couldn’t search for her under any other name because I didn’t know where to start, short of combing through résumés of tens of millions of people to see if any of them listed that particular random combination of jobs twenty years ago. Not doing that.
I snapped off another row of chocolate. Went to take a bite off the end and then stopped myself. It’s probably a good thing Mum keeps the chocolate hidden. At this rate I was going to finish the block.
Tax returns. The thought popped into my head. The tax office would have some sort of digitised record of where she’d worked, wouldn’t they? But how the heck would I get it? On TV this is where some genius hacker hits a few random keys and skips past a few dozen levels of security to extract information from the ATO databases.
Unfortunately, I have a total lack of skills in that department. In most departments, really. Now that the finding thing wasn’t going so well I didn’t know if I could claim to be skilled in anything.
Focus. If I was going to get anywhere with tax information, I’d need to get Sephora’s tax file number from her parents, and I was kind of hoping to avoid having to see them again. At least this soon.
It was almost a relief when I heard the squeak of brakes in the driveway. I shut down the computer and cleared out of the study, and had got all the way upstairs to my bedroom door when I remembered about the ceiling crashing in and the room change. Bugger.
Josey found me in my bed, in the new bedroom. His head popped through the curtains, and before I could protest the rest of him followed, climbing up on top of me. ‘Hi.’
‘I suck at everything,’ I told him.
I don’t think he understood what that meant, but he gave me a cuddle. That’s his main skill set.
I had another crappy night’s sleep. I dreamed that I found Frankie in Vogue’s house, in the empty upstairs bedroom. I told her that she had to come home with me, and she wouldn’t. I grabbed her arm and pulled, but somehow I couldn’t make her move. She didn’t want to come. She was happy in the house, in the afternoon sunlight with the dust motes floating in the air around her. I was begging and pleading and sobbing and she just smiled at me, and shook her head. And then I woke up and she was gone.
14
Elias picked me up again just before midday on Sunday. We’d organised it on Saturday after not getting anywhere, as if having a day to think about things would suddenly make everything magically clear. It didn’t.
He smiled at me across the parked Mr Whippy van. ‘So, where to?’
I wasn’t in a good mood. Mum had taken Evie off to church in the morning, leaving Dad to wrangle the rest of the kids, which meant several hours of near chaos. And noise. So much noise. ‘I don’t know. How about you come up with a plan for once?’
‘Whoa. Someone get out of the wrong side of bed?’
‘I hate comments like that. I mean, what are people trying to achieve when they make a crack like that? Instant mood change?’
He pulled back a bit with a nervous giggle. ‘Right. Sorry. I take it back.’
Maybe I’d overreacted. I’m not a nice person when I’m sleep-deprived. I sucked in a breath. ‘Okay, can you try toning down the whole “life is awesome, I love everybody” thing a little bit? Just so we can have a conversation?’
A very serious look appeared on his face. I took that as a yes.
‘We need to find out where she worked before she disappeared,’ I said finally. ‘Something might have happened there. Or someone might still be in touch with her. Like you said before, we need to find out who her friends were.’
‘See? You always think of something. You know,’ he went on, ‘nearly a hundred people are following my blog.’
‘What?’
‘Well, most of them were my Instagram followers, obviously.’
‘You have a hundred followers?’
‘No.’ A laugh. ‘Nearly three thousand. I only need six more. Wanna follow me?’
Vomit.
He grinned and slapped two hands down on the steering wheel. ‘So. What do we do?’
‘You need to visit your grandparents and try to get them to remember where she worked.’
‘We can do that now.’
‘You don’t need me for that.’ I wasn’t crazy about facing the grandparents again. Elias loved them already, which was nice, but if I wanted to be surrounded by chaos I could just stay home.
A laugh. Why didn’t he take anything I said seriously? ‘Yeah, I do. I need you to do all the investigatey stuff. I don’t know what sort of questions I should be asking.’
‘You ask where Sephora worked before she disappeared and who she hung out with. It’s not rocket science.’
His hands shot up off the steering wheel. ‘Ohmigod. Did you know they’re actually sending people to Mars? I read about it online. You can sign up and everything. They’re starting a full-on colony up there. How awesome is that?’
I blinked at the sudden change of topic. ‘That’s not what we’re talking about.’
‘I know. You just reminded me of it, that’s all. I was thinking about it. Like, actually signing up. But it’s a one-way trip and everything. I don’t know if I could do that.’
The talking. My God, the talking. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to listen to him for much longer. I knew for a fact that I wasn’t going to cope with Aurora.
I reached to undo my seatbelt. ‘You go see your grandparents. I’m going to stay here.’
Before I knew it he had his hand on my leg. ‘Wait. Stop.’
I looked at the hand on my leg. First time anyone outside my family had touched me in as long as I could remember and I just stared at it.
He took the h
and away. ‘Sorry.’
It was awkward. For some stupid reason, I felt like I was to blame for that. I felt bad. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d done my seatbelt back up again. ‘Fine. Let’s get it over with.’
*
Aurora had just baked a slice. We were barely in the door when she started to literally force-feed it to us. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ She brought another sliver to my mouth before I’d had the chance to chew the first. ‘Have some more.’
She was exactly the same as before. Benjamin was nowhere in sight but I was okay with that. I didn’t think I could handle his yelling on top of her constant chatter. My head might explode.
‘That’s a lovely colour on you, Lindsay. What do they call that—eggshell blue? It really brings out your eyes. Beautiful. Blue eyes always remind me of those Nordic goddesses. Especially with that long blonde hair. You must have some Scandinavian heritage, hmm? Am I right?’
‘Maybe.’ I had no idea. I knew I couldn’t tell her to shut up, no matter how badly I wanted her to. I pretended to be interested in a collection of old teapots on one of the kitchen shelves and she moved on to Elias.
We waited forever as she fussed with the slice and made coffees, but finally we got her to sit down at the kitchen table and Elias asked her about Sephora’s last job.
‘Oh, darling, I don’t remember that. It was so long ago.’
I’d been expecting that, so I gave it another go. ‘We don’t need to know the name of the place. If you can remember anything about it maybe we can work it out ourselves. Like where it was.’
Aurora swirled a teaspoon around in her coffee cup. ‘Where. Hmm. Let me think. I went to see her there, at least once. It was in a shopping centre. Not the local one; maybe Macquarie? Down the bottom level somewhere. Near Kmart, I think.’ She thought some more. ‘No, not Macquarie. That’s the one that used to have the clock, isn’t it? Not there.’
I’d come to accept that listening to her talk would make me feel like I was getting spun round in circles. But Elias seemed to have no trouble following her.
‘Was it Wentworth Plaza? Pharmacy at the bottom of the escalator, opposite Kmart? It’s been there forever.’
‘It could be. I can’t say for sure.’ She looked at the plate piled high with slice. ‘Would you like to take some of this with you?’
It took another ten minutes to get out of there. I buckled myself into the Mr Whippy van and took a deep breath, enjoying the silence for a moment.
‘Okay,’ I said finally. ‘Where to now?’
‘Why don’t you like people complimenting you?’
‘That’s not an answer to my question.’
‘No, it’s an unrelated question. You totally shut Aurora down. It was kinda rude. She was just being nice.’
His earnestness irked me. And I didn’t like him picking sides. I was the one who found Aurora and Benjamin. If he was going to pick a side, it should be mine.
‘My eye colour has nothing to do with finding your mum.’
‘She was just saying nice things about you,’ he said again. ‘You could have just said thanks, instead of getting all weird about it.’
I gritted my teeth. ‘Fine. Next time I’ll say thanks. Now, where do you want to go?’
He did a little shrug. ‘I guess we go to the pharmacy.’
I was dragging my feet as we entered the shopping centre. I don’t like shopping—it’s just not my thing. Also, you need money. But unsurprisingly, Elias was the complete opposite.
‘Come on, hurry up.’ He grabbed my hand to pull me along faster, excited that we finally had a lead to follow. I wasn’t convinced there was much to get excited about.
‘Twenty years ago?’ The girl at the checkout counter blinked. She didn’t look much older than seventeen herself. ‘Did this place even exist back then?’
She pointed out an older woman behind the prescriptions counter who waited patiently while Elias gave his whole spiel about his long-lost mum, and then shook her head. ‘Longest anybody’s been here is maybe ten years. Staff turnover is pretty regular. We’ve had three managers in the five years I’ve been here.’
I could see Elias deflating. ‘But aren’t there records?’
The woman shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue, darl.’
And that was the end of that. We left the pharmacy. A few steps out Elias stopped us both in our tracks as the shoppers surged and parted around us. He looked like he was thinking.
‘That was a total fail,’ he said finally.
I shrugged. I couldn’t disagree.
Elias looked at his watch. ‘You hungry?’
I was broke as usual. ‘You buying?’
That reminder seemed to bring him back to himself. ‘Ohmigod, I haven’t paid you yet, have I?’
I shrugged again. ‘We haven’t found her yet.’
‘Yeah, but the deal was I pay you for your time. Even if we don’t find her. I mean, we will, but I should pay you before then. Like, as we go.’
I resisted the urge to shrug a third time. ‘Buy me lunch and you can have the next hour for free.’
‘Deal.’
I thought of something. ‘And maybe buy me some phone credit.’
‘You’re on prepaid? Weird. I didn’t know people still did that.’
We took care of the phone credit, then got sushi rolls and peach iced tea and found a table in the food court. It was only as I noticed a couple of kids from my grade in the line at Maccas that I considered the fact that I was out in public with a guy. What if they thought I was on a date?
No. One look at Elias and it’s pretty obvious I’m not his type.
Elias interrupted my line of thought. ‘So, why don’t you like talking about your looks? Is it, like, too shallow or something?’
That wasn’t my reason at all, but I didn’t feel inclined to enlighten him. ‘Sure. Let’s go with that.’
‘Okay, you’re being sarcastic again.’
‘Maybe I’m not “being sarcastic”. Maybe I am inherently sarcastic and I’m just “being”.’
‘Whoa. That’s pretty intense.’
‘Actually, it’s a load of crap.’
He smiled widely. ‘Either way. She was right, you have really nice eyes.’
If another guy had said that, I would have wondered if he was hitting on me. But with Elias, there was nothing calculated about it. He was just so damn nice. What was wrong with him?
I gave him a look. ‘Not talking about it.’
He just laughed. Finished off his sushi roll then looked at the time on his phone. ‘Okay. Where to next?’
‘We forgot to ask Aurora about Sephora’s friends,’ I said slowly, knowing even as I spoke what I was getting myself back into. Two visits in one day. My head really was going to explode.
Elias’ face brightened. ‘We can swing by again. Aurora was going to try to find another photo album for me. Maybe she found it after we left.’
We reached the van. I tugged open the sliding door and climbed onto the worn grey leather passenger seat. There was a crack down the side of the seat that I now instinctively avoided as I climbed in. Like Elias, it had become weirdly familiar.
‘It’s strange,’ Elias admitted. ‘Ever since I found out I was adopted I keep changing my mind. Like, one day I think the only thing I want in the world is to find her, and find out why she gave me up. But the next day, I realise how awesome my life is, and think, Why mess with that? Why does it matter anyway? I mean, my parents aren’t going to suddenly stop being my parents if I find her. They did all the work.’
We reached a red light. Elias tossed me his phone. ‘Can you check the fastest route for me?’
There was no password on his phone. The wallpaper was a photo of Elias with a hat tilted dramatically down, covering half his face. A selfie with a bunch of filters over the top. Not surprising.
I was about to tap the maps icon when I stopped.
‘Oh…Shit.’
The light had turned green and Elias ha
d just started to accelerate. He hit the brakes suddenly, the van jerked to a stop and we both lurched forward in our seats. I lost my grip on the phone as my seatbelt snapped taut. I heard a car behind us also stop with a screech of brakes, but at least there was no sudden thump following.
I tugged at the seatbelt to get some slack and scrabbled on the floor at my feet for the phone. ‘Sorry.’
‘What did you find?’
I looked up to find him watching me intently, and I realised. ‘Sorry. I haven’t searched yet. I just realised the date.’
‘The fifteenth. So?’
‘It’s my birthday.’
A grin. ‘Ohmigod. Really? We should have got you a cake. Do you want to go back to the plaza? Michel’s has a black forest cake to die for.’
I shook my head quickly. ‘No, all good. I just hadn’t realised. I’m going to have to go home.’
15
The table was already being set for dinner when I got home.
Birthdays in our family are a thing. It means a big family dinner, with the birthday person’s choice of takeaway and a big cake custom-made by Mum. All the kids make a card or a present or something and wrap it in home-made wrapping paper. It’s a big deal.
‘Indian okay? You weren’t here so I had to go ahead and decide without you.’
I shrugged. ‘Whatever.’ I didn’t mean to sound like a surly teenager but I probably did.
We have takeaway food exactly seven times a year. With Micah and Elijah’s birthday, Elijah’s choice inevitably wins out. Frankie and I were more democratic. Or more accurately, we liked the same things anyway.
Birthday dinners have a specific structure. Dinner itself, followed by the obligatory gift-giving, then the cake, complete with candles and singing. I feigned enthusiasm through the procession of presents—underwear and school supplies from Mum and Dad, as predicted; a painting from Evie of a tropical landscape, copied from one of my pictures; a hastily painted terracotta flower pot with a cactus in it from Grace. Elijah gave me a pencil holder made out of Lego, on the condition that I return the Lego pieces to him when I was done with it. Josey gave me a Vegemite jar full of ants, holes punched in the lid.
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