‘No, Charlie,’ Elizabeth says warningly. ‘You don’t know where it’s been.’
He drops it, but skips back to present her with the dandelion, grinning before he pirouettes away. As his head turns he looks so much like Jon that this time it’s her heart that responds, jerking in her chest, and the tears in her throat turn into a sob.
What she didn’t expect about grief – if one can ever expect anything – is how physical it is. How much her hands long to hold Jon again. How her skin wants to touch his. Before, when it was abstract, she’d thought of grief as an experience of emotions and of the mind: thoughts turning turbulent, sadness becoming a state of being. Yet it’s her body that tells her how much she is missing Jon. There are actual pangs, sometimes – pains in her abdomen, or her leg, or her neck.
‘What’s wrong?’ Charlie says, coming back to take her hand as they near the house and its garden and all the evidence of his life that Jon left behind.
What’s wrong?For Charlie, most days are fine. He still has her, and the day-to-day details of his life haven’t changed much. It’s not for her to try to make him see the world differently.
‘Absolutely nothing, my darling,’ she says, pushing open the gate that leads into the garden and following the path to the back of the house. ‘Now, how about some morning tea?’
Charlie looks just as thrilled as if she’d said the Easter Bunny was about to visit, and it’s in moments like these that Elizabeth starts to believe that, just maybe, there truly is absolutely nothing wrong.
CHAPTER SIX
Itis almost impossible, Cynthia thinks, to not see the baby in your grown-up child. To not remember the first time you saw her, so tiny, her features indistinct yet uniquely hers. It seems like last week that Odette was so small. Now she is nineteen, and while Cynthia knows exactly how that time passed and where, this fact seems unreal. Her daughter is nineteen. An adult. She is not that baby any more. Sometimes, though, Cynthia wishes she were, just so she could cuddle her. Just so she could whisper in her ear that everything is wonderful, like she used to do. An incantation for them both.
While Odette’s hair is different to how she kept it in Los Angeles, Cynthia would recognise the shape of her head anywhere. She sees it now from the back as her daughter sits on the verandah, looking out through the trees at the side of the house to the ocean beyond, although it’s not that visible any more. Cynthia’s father used to keep the trees trimmed so the view was clear; since her mother died he seems to prefer that they provide a screen for him instead. She’s going to talk to him about it, because that view really shouldn’t be denied.
As Cynthia steps on the threshold between sitting room and verandah, the wood creaks and Odette’s head turns. Cynthia watches her daughter’s expression range swiftly from surprise to consternation to affection to annoyance.
‘Mum,’ she says flatly.
‘Hello, baby.’
Odette presses her lips together. She used to like it when Cynthia called her ‘baby’; maybe she doesn’t now.
‘You didn’t say you were coming.’ Odette’s eyes stare into hers. They’re harder than they used to be.
Maybe that’s because she’s cross at Cynthia or maybe it’s just what happens to pretty girls after years of being subjected to the needs and wants of the men around them. Armour has to be developed, and that flint is part of it.
‘I … wanted to surprise you.’ Cynthia’s smile is as big as she can make it.
‘You did.’
Odette glances to the side gate, which is now being opened by Pat. Cynthia hasn’t seen Pat, Odette’s father, since … well, it’s been years. He last came to Los Angeles when Odette was fourteen, and two years later Odette was living with him in Noosa. Cynthia and Pat spoke on the phone – they’d always done that – but their conversations had become more strained after Odette’s return because Cynthia would try to tell Pat how to be Odette’s parent, which he didn’t appreciate. Still, they’d remained civil.
Cynthia tried so hard to make her marriage to Max work, partly to show Pat that she wasn’t the problem. She’d left him, yes, and she’d left the surfer she left him for. But her second husband had come along when she was in her early thirties and in a better position to know what she wanted. Although not, as it turned out, to exercise better judgement. Maybe she and marriage just aren’t made for each other. It doesn’t matter if Pat thinks that too; she has to keep reminding herself of this. His opinion on anything except Odette is irrelevant.
Their eyes meet as he puts a foot on the bottom of four steps leading up to the verandah.
‘Cyn,’ he says, smiling. ‘What a lovely surprise.’
Cynthia turns to Odette and raises an eyebrow.See, she wants to say,some people can pretend to be happy I’m here.
‘Nice to see you, Pat.’
Now she’s the one surprised as he kisses her cheek. He smells the same: Old Spice and salt water. The scent does what scents tend to do: evokes memories. For a few seconds she’s a teenager again and so is he, and Odette is a speck of stardust waiting to come to earth.
But he doesn’t look like a teenager; nor does she, of course. He has a healthy beard with the odd fleck of silver and his thick brown hair has similar traces of ageing. And she – well, just before she left Los Angeles she marched into her hairdresser’s and asked for her shoulder-blade-length locks to be cut off. She was severing her marriage and it seemed appropriate to do the same to the hair that her husband had insisted she keep ‘long and luscious’. Just thinking about that makes her shudder. So she looks properly middle-aged now even though she’s only thirty-nine. She feels it too, given that Odette may be about to make her a grandmother.
‘What do you think about our girl, huh?’ Pat says, gazing at Odette with adoration. He was besotted from the second she was born; Cynthia had never been able to fault his devotion as a father. Nor as a husband, really.
‘I think she’s wonderful, as always,’ Cynthia murmurs.
Odette glares at her. ‘Is that why you hardly ever call me?’ she snaps. ‘And now you think you can show up and be my mother again.’
Cynthia starts to protest, except that would suggest she thinks Odette has said something wrong – and she hasn’t. She is trying to be Odette’s mother again, because Odette still needs her; because everyone needs their mother even when they think they don’t. But clearly she was foolish to think that sixteen years of being a mother could outweigh the past three years of barely being there for her daughter, no matter the reason.
