Page 58 of The Family Across the Street
She moved his bed a little, tilting him up. He didn’t feel any pain, which he assumed meant he was loaded up with drugs.
Debbie took a cup off the table next to his bed and let him take a few sips. ‘Not too much,’ she warned in her most competent nurse voice.
‘What kid?’ he asked again, his brain struggling to understand.
‘Our kid. Turns out that I get a runny nose along with everything else when I’m pregnant.’
‘You’re pregnant?’
‘I am and…’ She grabbed his hand then, tears appearing in her eyes and spilling onto her cheeks. ‘I was so scared, Logan. They called me to come in to emergency and I explained I was sick but then they told me… you were here and I’d been waiting for you to call…’
‘But I’m okay?’
‘You’re okay. The bullets missed all the important bits.’ Her light tone made it sound like a joke even as her face told him how worried she was.
‘A dad needs his important bits,’ he rumbled.
‘He does,’ she laughed, swiping away stray tears.
There have been a few rough nights, nights when he has wrestled with raging anger at Patrick for what he did to Maddy, and at himself for allowing the man to be in his sister’s life, even though he knows that he couldn’t have stopped her.
‘It’s not like I would have listened, even if you told me I couldn’t see him,’ his sister has since said. ‘You did your best – and I’m an adult. I’m going to make mistakes and you can’t save me from them.’
‘Maddy, growing up and making your own mistakes usually involves buying a lemon of a car, not getting involved with a psychopath.’
‘Yeah, well, big lesson learned there.’
Maddy has just been released from hospital in Melbourne. Logan was so relieved to hear that she has a friend to stay with until she heals. She told him they’d met at university. ‘He’s also training to be a primary school teacher and he’s been to visit every day. He says I can stay with him when I get out of hospital. He lives with his grandmother so I’m not sure how that’s going to go, but he says she’s knitting me a scarf for winter so maybe we’ll get along.’
They FaceTime every day, and Logan is used to the way her face looks now, has watched the bruises lose their purple colour and fade to a sickly yellow. She will need dental work and her arm is still in plaster with pins to help it heal. He’s not sure how she survived.
‘He just kept saying, “I won’t be him; you won’t make me him,”’ Maddy said. ‘He hated his mother so much and he was so angry when I read the emails from her and started asking questions. He had one version of reality and he didn’t want another.’
‘He wouldn’t be the first person to view the world that way.’
‘I felt sorry for him,’ Maddy told him.
‘I worry that your good heart leaves you open to men like him, Mads, I really do.’
‘Okay, more time for another lecture tomorrow. Give Debs my love, and hopefully I’ll see you guys soon.’
‘I’ll send you a ticket.’
‘I’m counting on it. I will be the best aunt the kid has ever met.’
Logan had been fearful when the detectives first visited, worried that they had somehow found out about that one desperate night, the night of his last break-in. He didn’t take anything, that’s what he keeps reminding himself – he didn’t take anything. The broken lock was probably easily fixed the next day. Some secrets are okay to keep.
He told the police everything he could remember about the day he knocked on Katherine West’s door, parcel in hand.
‘What made you suspicious?’ the detective asked at least ten different ways.
Logan described Katherine’s voice, the strangeness of the whole experience, and finally he said, ‘Honestly? Instinct. I’ve been on the wrong side of a situation enough times to know when something is not right.’
The detective nodded that he understood. ‘You’re a bit of a hero, mate. Sure you’ve seen the press – enjoy it,’ were his parting words.
Logan doesn’t feel like a hero, despite what they were saying on television. There were kids and a woman who had to be protected, that was it. George is only five years old and his life very nearly ended that day. Logan knows that if he had died saving the child, he would have been okay with that. It seemed a fair trade: his messed-up life for the life of a child who had not yet begun to make mistakes.
He will always marvel at the fact that the universe chose him to turn up at that house that morning. Someone else could easily have been given the package to deliver. Someone else could have shrugged their shoulders and just gone on with their day. Someone who had not been in prison, had not learned to read people and voices and the atmosphere the way he had. And he still doesn’t know why he stopped that last time but the nearest he can get is that he felt a pull to the house – something wanted him there.
