‘You might leave here,’ she said, ‘but I never will. I’ll have to live in this house forever. Even if it’s only in my head.’
I walked to the door across the islands of sun, carefully avoiding the dark sea that threatened to swallow me.
For a few weeks, my parents trod carefully around Devin, treating her like something of a fragile and foreign doll. ‘She needs a psychologist,’ my father said.
‘She’s not a fruitcake,’ was my mother’s response. ‘She’s actually very smart.’
‘Could have fooled me. Trying to die is a crazy thing to do. Either that or a big attempt to get attention. Smart people go to psychologists too. A guy at work’s wife sees one.’
‘The doctor gave her some anti-depressants. He says it’s possible she’s going through some hormone changes.’
‘What if she does need help?’
‘We can’t afford a shrink anyway,’ my mother’s voice drove Samuel back. ‘They charge by the hour and solve nothing. Maybe what we need is to get away for a bit. Be a family together. A small rest might do us all good. That’s all we need.’ She flashed a rare smile at him, and its signal that the conversation had ended was clear.
My father slammed the door of the old car as my mother piled tins and boxes of food on the grass beside the boot.
‘You’re taking too much,’ he growled low at her, while she adjusted her sunglasses and tried to find spaces for all the food at her feet on the passenger side in the front.
‘We need to eat, Samuel,’ my mother said.
Devin sat in the shade beneath a giant oak on the pavement, her sunglasses shielding her eyes. She wore the bandages on her wrists like jewellery, an accentuation or ritual marking, some transition that had taken her further into herself.
‘Come on, Monkey,’ my father called me. I threw my walking shoes into the back seat and followed. I sat behind the driver’s seat, so I could watch my father’s head, be near to his broad shoulders. If I leaned forward, I could softly smell his skin.
‘Devin, time to go.’
My sister rose silently in response to his voice, and she climbed into the car beside me. ‘Fuck off,’ she whispered beneath her breath. At first I imagined the words were for our family. Then I saw Marshall standing in the doorway as my parents took their places in the front of the car, and we moved slowly out of the driveway.
‘Where are we going, anyway?’ Devin asked as the suburbs sped by, then grew more sporadic.
‘We need to get you out of that house,’ my mother said, ‘and to make some decisions as a family.’
‘It’s just a weekend away,’ Samuel said. ‘We’ll have some fun, be together, and then go home again.’
‘That’s not home,’ Devin said.
‘That is home. That’s where we live now. Marshall’s my brother and he’s family too. One more word against him and you’re headed for a hiding.’
‘He’s not my fucking family,’ Devin responded.
‘Devin!’ That was my mother.
‘What?’
‘You’re not too old for discipline. Watch your language and show us some respect!’
‘What is respect?’
‘Just calm down.’ My mother’s jaw pulsed as she fixed her eyes on the landscape. ‘Let’s all relax and look at the scenery and imagine that we get along.’
‘You know nothing.’
‘Devin!’
‘Okay.’
The journey took only an hour or two and the change in surroundings was so marked it felt that it happened inside us as well as outside the car. We grew quiet as the mottled mountains emerged. My sister kept her eyes outside the car and I watched her put her thumb into her mouth. It was an old habit from when she was little and recently, subtly, it had emerged again.
We found the cabin wedged between two rock faces that created a dry valley that baked when the sun rose high in the day. We fell from the car, relieved, carried the food and our belongings inside. My parents placed theirs in the room with the double bed, while I put mine in the only other room, expecting to share it with Devin. She looked around the main room of the cabin. ‘I’m sleeping here,’ she said. ‘On that sofa.’
We unpacked and afterwards we sat around. ‘Anyone want some tea?’ Devin asked.
I looked at her, surprised. I thought she was joking. She never offered to do anything.
‘I do,’ Samuel said.
The kettle flicked off and Samuel hovered as Devin placed the cups side by side.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Do you want to make it yourself?’
‘I don’t like a lot of milk.’
‘So you want to make it yourself.’
‘If that’s okay.’
‘So even the way I make you tea is unacceptable to you.’
‘Devin, don’t be like that.’
‘Like what? I’ve made an effort. I try to be nice and even that’s not good enough. I’m fourteen! I can’t even make tea well enough for my own father.’
‘Devin, calm down,’ my mother said.
‘I’m sick of this family. I’m sick of how rude you all are. I’m sick of never being good enough.’
‘You’re good enough, Devin, you really are—’ My mother tried hard. I’ll give her that. But she didn’t get up from her chair. She didn’t move across or put her arms around her oldest daughter. Perhaps she thought that words would be enough.
Devin left the cabin and slammed the door behind her.
‘I can’t do anything right,’ Samuel said. His arms hung down.
‘You don’t understand her,’ I said.
‘I don’t need to understand her,’ said Samuel.
‘Oh Samuel,’ my mother chimed with a voice like a silver bell, predictably. ‘We really do.’
I found her about half a mile away, in a thicket of scrub, building a small tower of flat stones.
‘I’m going to leave,’ she said.
‘Leave what?’
‘Leave home.’
She said nothing else. We sat while the sun rose higher, and we built those small towers until the height of them caused their downfall and we’d start all over again. Later my mother found us there, and we walked until the sweat dampened our faces in rivulets. We sipped from a hip flask of water and contemplated the intensity of the sky, the parched earth all around. It was then that she tackled it.
‘You need to be nicer to your father, Devin,’ my mother said. ‘You’re still a child, you’re still living under your father’s roof and so long as that’s true—’
‘It’s my uncle’s roof.’
‘Your father’s working very hard for Marshall, and he pays our way.’
‘You don’t know anything about Marshall. He—’
‘What?’
She put her head down. She was so small and fragile. ‘He hurts me,’ she whispered.
My mother looked up, to the top of a mountain as though there was strength there. ‘How can you say that, Devin? Uncle Marshall has been kind to us. You’re a selfish little girl and you’ve caused enough harm already. He’s been so good to us! We’d be on the streets if it wasn’t for your uncle.’ She paused, her eyes now on the girl’s bent head. Her voice softened, but it was no more gentle. ‘It’s always someone else’s fault with you. If you’re depressed we can help you, but don’t start with your lies.’
Devin said nothing. Her eyes closed. Our mother looked to me.
‘Catherine? Is it true? Does Marshall hurt you girls?’
I fumbled for the right answer. I desperately wanted to please both of them right then. ‘Uh … Devin doesn’t like him.’
‘But has he ever hurt you?’
‘No.’
My mother’s eyes returned to Devin. ‘You know that boarding school is still an option. You’re giving your father and me a headache. We love you, but we can’t defend you, because your behaviour is appalling. Don’t start this terrible lying too. Please Devin. I’m warning you. Any more from you, and we’ll find the money somewhere,
but we’ll have to send you away.’
Twenty-Four
This morning I wake and dress and it is the kind of morning that I have loved since I was a child. The air is clear with crystal sunshine but there’s a chill that enters even through my skin. I wash my face and let my hair down so that it covers and protects my ears. I wake my child with a hand on her head and a kiss on her sleepy eyes. In the kitchen I prepare eggs and toast, but she wants cereal this morning. I don’t argue. I put the box and a bowl and spoon on the table and I watch her eat with her head bent and one hand clutching my iPhone. Auster comes in and kisses us both, an abstract movement that is rooted in the rituals of everyday love.
‘Will you take Hayley to school today?’ he asks between mouthfuls of eggs.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m going to see Samuel; I’ll take her on the way.’
‘I want to see him too,’ Hayley says. She looks up as she says it, the first words she’s spoken all morning. ‘I haven’t been there for a whole month.’
‘You’ve got school,’ I say. ‘Tough luck.’
When she looks down into the milky bowl I feel bad. I tell her I’ll take her to Samuel on the weekend.
She’s quiet all the way to her school, in the back seat of the car with her belt on. Leaning back, looking out the window at the traffic. When I pull up outside the school, she gets out with her bag in one hand and some sort of cardboard folder pieced together with grey masking tape in the other. ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Don’t I get a kiss?’
She puts her head to one side to demonstrate deliberate reluctance and effort for effect, and she comes around the car to the driver’s door. She puts her face forward and closes her eyes and it’s my lips that find the side of her face while hers are turned away. ‘Have fun,’ I say.
‘School’s work, Mom. It’s not fun.’
‘Work can be fun,’ I say. ‘What’s that?’ I nod in the direction of the cardboard folder she’s holding.
‘Nothing.’
‘Can I see?’
‘No. They’re just some drawings.’
‘Did you do them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why can’t I see?’
‘Not now. I don’t want them messed up. I’m taking them to show my teacher.’
I nod, try to kiss her again but she’s moved away, she won’t respond to my gesture.
‘Bye Mom.’
‘Bye love.’
She walks away from me cradling the precious cardboard and whatever it contains. Has my child moved away from her electronic fetish and become an artist without my noticing?
I find the freeway through queues of traffic and red traffic lights and people making their way towards work and school. I open the window to let in the coolness of the air; the mountain is a watercolour painting cut out and pasted onto the clearest sky.
As I drive away from the city, I see that parts of the old pine forests are missing now, eliminated from the landscape because they are no longer thought to belong. Making and breaking, doing and undoing, again and again, the repetition through time. We change the environment and so we think we can change ourselves. All this talk and nobody speaks of the fact that the world is way bigger than we are. I move along the edge of the mountain and the landscape of my childhood lies below me. A flat wide sea, another, deeper world that waits.
I park the car outside the red brick building and go in through the wide glass doors. Jeanette is behind the desk, eating a white-bread sandwich. She waves at me and greets me by name.
‘He’s up and dressed, in his room,’ she says. ‘We got him ready for you this morning.’
‘Thanks, Jeanette.’
It is her job, but Jeanette has become my father’s new family. Someone prepared to wash and dress him, comb his hair for him. To hold his face gently with her hands as she shaves the whiskers off his chin.
In his room he is back in bed, the covers pulled up right over him, only wisps of his hair sticking out. I shake the mound of blankets gently. Dad. Dad. I want to say it aloud, but the word chokes me still, even in thought-form, and I cannot voice it. At the end of the bed his shoes emerge, brown lace-ups, tied this morning by the nurses.
He starts awake at my touch and from his fright I see that he has genuinely been sleeping. ‘What? What?’ he says. ‘Dear God, does nobody ever leave me alone?’
I keep my hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s nearly nine,’ I tell him. ‘I thought that we could go out for a bit, get a cup of coffee on the beach.’
‘I drink bad coffee all day in this place. Why the hell would I want to go to the beach to drink it?’
There’s a gooey substance in the corner of his eye. It stretches on his lashes as he blinks. I want to reach out and wipe it away, but I’ve never touched him so intimately before, not since I’ve been an adult. I watch it settle, a small pale glob of yellow on the rim of his eyelid.
A head appears around the door. It’s Jeanette. When she sees the situation her body follows with the kind of optimism that it takes to run this place. ‘C’mon, Mr Landsberg, your daughter’s come to take you out today. You’re nicely dressed and warm; let’s get you up and out of here, into the sunshine.’ She has a teacher’s voice, the sound of someone who won’t take no for an answer, someone you listen to because deep down you know you have no choice.
‘I’ve seen enough bloody sunshine in my life to burn both retinas right out of my eyes,’ he jokes, but he listens to her like a school child, a boy really who longs for direction. As he pushes himself upright and over onto the edge of the bed, Jeanette handles the blankets, folds them efficiently from corner to corner and then again, places two neat rectangles at the end of the bed.
My father stands and smooths down his hair with both his hands. We close the door behind us and I lock it and place the long string from which the key hangs about his neck. ‘What’s this necklace?’ he says. ‘What are you putting on me?’
We walk the sloping ramp that winds itself back and forth down the centre of the building and I am always two steps ahead of him. He is slow and I am impatient and I must check myself constantly so that he can keep up. The carpet that runs along the centre of the ramp is a vivid red and the pictures on the walls look like they have been there for decades. He puts a hand on my shoulder to steady himself and I have no idea when it was that he got so old.
We get down to the beach and the tide is full. There is kelp along the sealine and the sand is empty; it’s too late for the dawn bathers and too early for the children who are still at school.
‘Look where we are!’ he says. He says it as though he really had no idea, as though he hasn’t been here for years. ‘Monkey, you used to swim at this beach!’
‘I know.’
I look for whales, but there are none. It’s too early in the year and the surface of the sea is calm and flat. I look away and back again and nothing has changed apart from us.
‘Samuel,’ I say. ‘Do you think people change?’
‘Change, not change; what does it really matter?’ he says. ‘What does my life matter now?’
‘It matters to me.’
‘Only because you think it must. Because I looked after you and now you think you have to look after me.’
It’s a rare moment of startling rationality, and the sharp clarity from his usually murky mind cuts me down. For a moment I think I prefer the confused rambling, but guilt accompanies the thought, and I contradict him. ‘That’s not true.’
‘That is true. If you could have your true heart’s desire, you’d leave me here for others to take care of until I’m gone. You don’t really want to see this, to watch things get ugly. You want to remember me as I was. You want to get on with your own life.’
‘Do I?’
‘You’ve made the separation now, Monkey.’ He stops, breathless, turns to look at me. ‘But you still can’t look your father’s death in the face.’ His words glint like the water and I wince at the sharpness of his words.
Across the water I see
a bird skimming the surface. It swoops and dives and makes me believe that I too could be that. Below the bird’s freedom I am earthbound with my feet in one small square, and what is blue and limitless before me and above me, and I do not know how to move. A crab rises and scuttles and sinks again into a hole. Small waves snack at the sand. I turn my face to the sun for warmth and benediction. What he says then makes my heart freeze over, as though it makes no difference where we are, and in what climate. He places his hand on my shoulder and his voice is a fierce whisper on the breeze and I think it might even be a dream, or the echo of another. ‘Please let me go.’
I walk and he follows with his hand still upon me. I look to the sky and dream that it’s not possible that he’s become what he now is. I watch the birds and his voice comes again in my ear. ‘Monkey, I don’t want this. I want to go before I don’t know it’s happening any more. Please help me. Help me to let go. I’m so scared. I don’t even know where my own pyjamas are any more. This world has had enough of me already.’
A gust of indrawn air moves swiftly into my mouth and down my throat and my lungs fill as though I might have enough breath for something to say, but again words fail me. I exhale without a voice, just a breath that’s carried away on that air.
Twenty-Five
‘Do you know who I am?’
She said it with the kind of calm that penetrates the still, cuts through with a blade of words.
‘Of course, you’re Devin. You’re my sister.’
She laughed, a depth from the base of her throat. ‘No. Catherine. Listen to me. Do you know who I am?’ She held up her hands next to her head and I saw the scars that had long ago healed over. She wanted me to witness them again.