by S. A. McEwen
Olivia, they think, knows exactly what went on.
Olivia is too pretty and too silent to be innocent.
“We spoke to Paul O’Brien,” Rolands says, watching Olivia carefully.
Nick is with her, one hand on hers, but the gesture is no longer protective. He does not emanate warmth and strength. He seems, Rolands thinks to herself, even less present than Olivia.
“Oh, yes,” Olivia says. She tries to sound curious, but her attempt falls flat. Her mind is elsewhere. Even the flash of nerves has passed. She no longer cares what Rolands thinks or doesn’t think.
“Patricia left Wolfie two hundred thousand dollars,” she goes on, her eyes still fixed on Olivia, who doesn’t respond at all.
Nick, however, stiffens beside her.
“What?” he says.
Rolands shifts her gaze to him. He looks like he is trying to drag himself out of somewhere heavy and hazy, struggling to make sense of Rolands’ words.
“Did you know about this?” she asks him, but turns her gaze back to Olivia. Her eyes flick to Nick sporadically.
Nick glances at Olivia. “You said a few thousand,” he says. There’s no malice, or even any curiosity in his words; he has registered the peculiarity of this information, but confusion is his main response.
His son is still missing. His fears are crushing his chest. His culpability in choosing what was easy over what was right is suddenly, starkly clear to him, and memories of Patricia, so well-buried until now, are flashing before his eyes, blindsiding him with the pain and the force of them.
He can barely breathe, let alone compute complex information or ascertain anyone’s motives in this instance.
Nevertheless, something nags at the back of his mind. Something not quite right, an elusive memory just out of his reach. Something about money and his wife. He tries to chase the thought, pin it down, but it skips out of his reach, and his attention is drawn back to the present.
“What happens now?” Olivia asks. She’s staring blankly off to the side, disinterested. Whatever plans were attached to this inheritance previously, she is unmoved by them now. They don’t, in fact, even seem to exist in the same reality that she currently inhabits.
Rolands drones on about trust accounts and signatories. These things take time. There’s administration. A whole lot of administration. Olivia and Nick need to sign things, set up accounts, talk to the executor. Most of this information drifts over Olivia’s head. For all her earlier planning, she can’t remember anything of the sort—did Paul explain to her all these steps and complications?
It’s all moot now, anyway.
The money was to provide for Wolfie.
And Wolfie is gone.
32
The final day of their camping trip, Olivia had screamed at Charlie.
It wasn’t a rebuke; it wasn’t losing her temper a little, like she sometimes did with Wolfie.
It was screaming, and hatred, and rage.
She had risen early. She loved watching the sunlight dance on the leaves of the gum trees. With everyone else asleep, she could lie back in her camping chair with her eyes half closed and listen to the birds and the sounds of the bush.
She’d already been down to the river to get some creek water to boil for their morning tea. Wolfie was curled up in bed with Nick—he’d crawled into Olivia’s side of the bed at some point in the night, his warm little body curling into her. He smelt like a baby still, all warm skin and baby shampoo and something earthy and wholesome. Olivia didn’t want to encourage sleeping in her bed, but she secretly loved it and found it hard to direct him back to his own. Even on the small mattress she was sharing with Nick camping, she loved his delightful little body next to hers. The expansiveness of him: the way he flung his arms about in his sleep as though to take in the whole world. On a physical level, it did not make for the greatest night’s sleep—but on an emotional level, something about that carefree ownership of her, and her bed, and the world, melted her heart.
When Nick and Charlie finally stirred, Olivia felt refreshed. An hour of solitude did that for her: reset her worries, her agitation, the splintery feeling she got when too many things were coming at her at once. Sixty whole minutes of the birds and the sunlight and the stillness had soothed parts of her that she didn’t know were agitated.
It was a new day. Charlie would be going back to London in just a few more days—Olivia wanted to try harder. Her worries and her negativity felt burdensome. She thought that she could actually feel the changes in the lines around her mouth, getting more and more set into a stern, stiff, unbecoming frown. Nick had caught her expression in a photo, and she had recoiled slightly. When did she become so negative, so…old? She didn’t even recognise herself.
A good night’s sleep—even with a toddler in her bed—and some natural beauty and solitude filled her with vigour. She would be a better stepmother. She would understand and guide and if there were corrections to be made, she would make them with love and gentleness.
She would unset her mouth from that rigid, hard line.
She handed Nick and Charlie a cup of tea each, smiling benevolently. She felt so full of love and lightness. Nick had smiled at her appreciatively, leaning in for a kiss, as though he could see the change in her already.
Life looked so full of promise.
Later, she would tell Jodie that it felt a little like losing her mind.
To anyone watching, it would have looked like losing her mind. All the dark thoughts that she had harboured, and tended, and fretted over all week were not banished by a morning of solitude, as she had imagined: they were churning inside her head, dampened down but not eliminated. Trapped in a tent with no privacy and no one to unpack them with, they were in fact festering and growing and wrapping around everything. And for all her goodwill and calm that morning, it was now late afternoon. Olivia had been sipping chardonnay and nibbling biscuits for an hour, or was it two? Never a big drinker, the tight coil of angry, suspicious, resentful thoughts loosened, along with her tongue.
Charlie did what he’d been doing all week: he inserted himself into Wolfie’s solo game, upset him, and removed himself. And Olivia was certain she saw the hint of a smile as he turned away.
Wolfie was sobbing on the floor, the truck he had been tending to so lovingly discarded. Somehow, Charlie had taken away its shine. More than that: he’d rendered it worse than joyless, an object of pitiable worthlessness.
Perhaps it reminded Olivia of Bing: a lifetime of someone taking the sunshine out of everything. Someone claiming to love you, while secretly, furtively always trying to make it rain over your head. Maybe that was the trigger, the thing that she couldn’t bear.
The thing that made her snap.
Olivia had been preparing them a snack; she hadn’t heard the exchange that preceded his change in mood. She had turned toward them at the first wail, and had seen Wolfie throw the truck aside, the despair on his little face palpable.
Something about the discarded truck caught in her throat.
How did a thirteen-year-old manage to take the joy out of an object, adored a minute earlier, so completely that she could see its lack of value in the angle of Wolfie’s face, turned now away from it, like he couldn’t even bear to look at it?
It wasn’t just that though: Wolfie’s crumpled little face said so much more to her. He had no words for it, but he could grasp the murkiness of Charlie’s intentions. She saw the injury right there in his face: the confusion as to why his beloved big brother would make him feel bad.
She didn’t even need to ascertain the details.
Charlie had upset Wolfie. On purpose. For his own pleasure.
“Get back here!” she had screamed at Charlie’s retreating back, and he’d turned back to her, shocked. “Why do you keep doing that?” she’d continued, shouting, letting all the hatred and fury she’d spent all week—years, really—concealing, spill across her features with unrealised relief. Her animosity was cartoonish, monstrous, a s
hifting, brown, gruesome shape she could almost see as she shouted and spat.
She felt like a blocked hose, the blockage finally dislodged, her wrath writhing and bucking and spraying indiscriminately, everywhere. And she had no control over it whatsoever.
What’s wrong with you?
Why do you like to make my child unhappy?
It’s evil, you’re evil, get away from him! Go back to London, I don’t want you here! I don’t ever want you near my child again!
Nick had come running, glaring at her, leading Charlie away, his turn to be furious now, their angry exchange in front of both children ricocheting around the trees, and Olivia had felt drunk, and devastated, and so, so alone.
“You’re imagining it,” Nick had hissed, turning his back on her. Comforting Charlie.
They’d eaten dinner in silence, then Nick had packed up the tent, banging and hurling and muttering to himself, driving them all home a day early, fury emanating off him in the harsh, hard way he moved, in the glances thrown at her as he did so.
“Don’t you ever speak to my son like that again,” he’d said, clearly and purposefully, right in front of Charlie, as they pulled into their drive.
That night, he had slept on the couch.
But after that night—miraculously, unbelievably—things went back to normal.
It was hard to fathom. Olivia kept waiting for the fallout, some consequences, her life to fall apart. And it…didn’t.
Nick carried on the way he’d always done. He was busy at work, and loving at home. He was tired, but rushed straight in the door to bathe Wolfie and read him bedtime stories, delighting in fatherhood in a way that was somehow intensified after camping. After the first night, he was back in their bed without so much as a telling look or a frosty, turned back.
He didn’t go so far as to suggest that he’d work part-time to share in the day-to-day parenting, but he was fully present and engaged when he was home. And he did more than a lot of other fathers, Olivia reasoned to herself.
He didn’t seem, in fact, to have been affected by the camping trip at all. He started talking about another baby, his eyes glowing. Olivia was confused. Had he not seen the gaping rift between their ideas of good parenting? Between their ideas of what was appropriate behaviour and what was not?
For the second time in her life, she was ashamed of her conduct. She turned it and twisted it this way and that, trying to make sense of it—and she could, to some degree.
She was alone with her worries and fears.
Nick dismissed them, dismissed her.
He assumed his interpretation of everything was correct; it didn’t even occur to him to consider that she was right, and he was wrong. It didn’t even warrant a conversation.
Camping was a pressure-cooker of heightened emotions.
She was drunk.
She should not have been drunk with the children.
But she also knew that something had shifted between her and Charlie, and her and Nick, that could not be shifted back.
Nick was oblivious. Or was he? Sometimes, she had the disconcerting idea that Nick had decided he would love her, and so everything he saw was through that lens: committed to her, believing in her. This was so set in stone that he didn’t need to—and therefore didn’t—examine it or think about it or reassess it. He loved her, and he would readjust everything to accommodate that.
Even when the evidence of her deserving such faith was under question.
The thought unsettles Olivia. It makes their relationship feel fixed, rigid—like Nick might not be engaging with reality, but some airbrushed, shiny version of her that isn’t real. She can’t quite put her finger on it. It’s comforting to be accepted for who you are, sure, but this seemed to go one step further. Is he afraid that she won’t love him if he isn’t one hundred percent supportive, one hundred percent of the time?
It wasn’t always like this. Like so many things, she thinks things changed when Wolfie was born. Was it laziness? Was he just too tired to engage with complexity anymore?
Did he just not care? Was this superficial version of themselves as a couple good enough for him?
She had tried to talk to him about it, but he was always resolutely positive: he was happy, they were happy, life was good.
Olivia thought it was disconnected with reality somehow.
But besides that, life was good.
Patricia had extended her contract by a year in London, again. Nick was devastated, and Olivia was overjoyed. She focused her energy on Wolfie, and work, and without the pressing issue of Charlie between them, she could even relax into loving Nick more freely too.
He wasn’t quite what she had imagined in those early days. Later, she had learnt that there is research about this: that when you meet someone, you’re basically high. Your brain releases a chemical cocktail that in effect means you’re making decisions about a potential life partner while tripping off your head. And she does think she saw Nick through I-want-to-settle-down-and-have-kids-one-day glasses: he was so committed to Charlie. He got down on the floor and played with him for hours, like no man Olivia had ever seen. He loved him stupendously. He answered his questions thoughtfully.
He was nothing, nothing like her own father.
She was hopelessly smitten.
And her, well. They’d lie on the couch on the nights they didn’t have Charlie, talking through each other’s designs and projects, talking about what they wanted in their futures. In their families.
Now, Olivia is acutely conscious of all the things they didn’t talk about. Who would work? Who would look after children? What did they each think about discipline and additional support and healthy eating and screen time? The big picture—well their dreams and desires converged and soared, a kaleidoscope of beauty and wonder and possibilities without limit.
It was the day-to-day stuff they never bothered to talk about.
The little, inconsequential things that did, indeed, have consequences.
33
Olivia cries when Abby leaves.
Her mother has told her, over and over again, that he is going to a special school where he will be able to learn all the important things that she is learning at school: things that he can’t learn currently, at her school, because he disrupts the class and the teachers can’t teach.
At night, eavesdropping, stealthy, Olivia hears other phrases—"difficult behaviour,” “violent outbursts,” “unmanageable.”
Olivia is torn.
She has seen Abby at school. Her bumbling, good-natured big brother turns into someone else. He lurks and crouches. So kind and smiley at home, with her, at school he is angry and mean. He trips the other boys over. He once slammed Michael’s head into a wall.
But Olivia sees why, too: the way the other children taunt him. The way he is excluded. His odd way of moving, his hulking size; the way he doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes. The way he tries to share the chocolate cake in his lunch box—his hopeful, misplaced, heartbreaking attempts to make friends.
At recess and lunchtime, Olivia rushes to find her brother. She will take him to a far corner of the playground and sit with him, play finger figures, hum softly. Often, they don’t even talk. She feels responsible for him. She just wants him to have a sliver of kindness and quiet in his days.
Sometimes she cannot find him, and on those days, she listens furtively to the whispered conversations between her parents: what the school said. What had happened.
Her little heart rails at the unfairness of it—but it turns toward hopefulness, too.
Might Abby make some friends in this new, special school?
Might he be happier there?
Bing is nowhere to be seen in the playground. If any adults were watching, they might notice how hard Olivia works to save her brother: from loneliness, from bullying, from hurting. Even at eight, Olivia understands that Abby is different to the other kids. Mostly, she wants to protect him from their jibes and cruelty.
They might also noti
ce how hard Bing works to pretend it is not happening—to shut it out. How she sets up her entire days so she doesn’t have to see it.
But no one is paying much attention.
Occasionally, Olivia wishes Abby would just be normal so she could go and play skipping or tag with her friends, shrieking and running around madly and being eight. So even though she feels, deeply, that sending him away somewhere else will not fix things, and not help things, she’s a little bit relieved, too.
A little bit unburdened.
So she holds on to her hope that everything will get better, even while knowing, instinctively, that they will actually get worse.
34
Two Months Earlier
Have you told Olivia yet?
Hannah hits send on the text message without thinking. She’s finding it hard to wait.
She wonders what things will look like with Olivia once Nick is living with her. What the fallout will look like. She thinks back to the last fallout. She was only trying to help her little sister, for God’s sake. Just like she always did. And Olivia—pre-emptively—had attacked her for being slack.
It escapes Hannah’s notice that she had in fact forgotten to make the cake for Wolfie’s birthday. So if she ever thought self-critically about it, she would see things differently than the narrative she holds on to tightly, with such conviction. We all said hurtful things, she told herself at the time. Sure, she’d texted, Don’t try to blame me cause you failed to organise your kid a cake. She might have even said something mean about Charlie, about how Olivia had never made him a cake. But Olivia had called her a “bad sister,” a “shit person,” “despicable.” Though once, when she had scrolled back through the messages to show Nick how crazy his wife was, how vicious and violent, she couldn’t find the ones that said those things. All she saw were flashes of her own words, with enough ugly words, enough animosity, enough flashes of twenty-year-old grievances that were irrelevant to the discussion—all of them on her side of the conversation—to not want Nick to see them, and to not want to ever have to see them again herself. So she abruptly told him there was no point holding on to bad energy, and deleted the whole conversation—years and years of text messages to her sister.