Page 2 of The Vanishing Place
The baby was impossibly tiny, all smooshed and scrunched up, and his skin was pale purple. It was impossible that he was even there—his miniature body wrapped up in Effie’s wool jumper—because Mum hadn’t been pregnant. There had been no bulge under her T-shirt. No swelling in her bra. With Aiden, Mum’s belly had swollen and grown white lines, but this time, her stomach had stayed its normal shape.
Effie held her new brother in her arms and tried to push the tip of her finger into his tiny mouth.
“Shh, baby.”
When Aiden was tiny, Mum had spilled over with milk. Sometimes it had dripped through her shirt and Effie had looked away, embarrassed, the damp circles reminding her of a leaking cow.
“Sorry, little boy. I don’t have anything for you.”
The baby opened and closed his wrinkly purple fists and tried to push his face into Effie’s jumper. At almost nine, her chest was still flat, but the baby didn’t seem to notice.
“Stop it.”
The boy’s searching lips creeped her out, and Effie wanted Mum to take him away. Mum needed to feed him and bathe him like she did with Aiden. Babies needed to be fed all the time, but Mum hadn’t moved since the baby had slipped from between her legs an hour ago. Dad had thrust him at Effie, his newborn body sticky with white slime, and slammed their bedroom door in her face. Dad’s face had been strange, his familiar eyes dark in a way that Effie didn’t recognize.
She stared at the closed door. Other than the main living area, where they cooked and slept and did schoolwork, it was the only room in their back-of-beyond hut. Effie adjusted her position on the sofa, careful to hold the boy’s head. The younger kids had been sent outside to pick mouku and pikopiko to steam for dinner. There was no noise apart from the baby’s cries and the totara trees knocking on the corrugated metal walls. Mum’s screams had stopped ages ago, when the little hand on the clock was pointed at three. Effie held the boy tight, afraid she might drop him. She’d seen Mum hold Aiden a thousand times, but the baby was so floppy and fragile, and he didn’t seem to do anything but cry.
“It’s okay, little boy. Mum will be out soon.”
Effie tried not to look at the bedroom door, or to imagine what was happening on the other side of it. Feeling bad things made them real, that was how the game worked—Mum’s inside-out feelings game. Sometimes in the winter, the hut got so cold that Effie’s toes went blue. Then Mum would knit them all bright-colored hut socks and odd-shaped quilts. But Effie hated the hut on those freezing days. It was too cold. Too small. Too ugly. It wasn’t like the proper houses she saw in town. But Mum said it was. Mumsaid that it was a proper home. She decorated their hut with pots of ferns and hung homemade art from the walls. Mum said that home was a feeling, a warm yellow tingle. So, they’d practice. They’d picture lots of yellow things. The sun. Kowhai trees. Bumblebees. Hurukowhai. Buttercups. Until the warm outside feeling became real and her toes didn’t feel so blue.
But it wasn’t working now. Effie needed Mum to make the game work. She needed Mum to come out of her bedroom and make everything normal again.
“Shh. Please.” Effie shook the baby gently. “I don’t know what to do.”
Before Aiden came out, Mum had walked the six hours through the bush to the Roaring Billy Falls. Then she’d taken the tinnie across the river and hitched to Koraha to find a midwife. Mum had lined up small bottles by the sink—important baby vitamins—and she’d stopped hunting with Dad. But Mum hadn’t done any of those things with number four. He’d just arrived, screaming like thunder.
Effie reached across the sofa for one of Aiden’s old wooden toys. She shook the homemade rattle above the baby’s head, but it was no use.
“Please, please stop crying.”
Then, over the noise of his wails, she heard a crash from the bedroom—something breaking—and a pained angry yell. Effie wanted to run at the bedroom door, to batter at it with all her might. But Dad had been clear. No kids.
She held the baby tight, as if squeezing him might spare his tiny ears the sounds of anger. Then she closed her eyes. After the second crash, Effie slumped to the floor and pulled her knees in, supporting the baby. She needed to run, to get help. But there was nowhere to go. Just trees. No one to help them.
Effie rocked the baby and whispered words she’d only read in books, about a man in the sky who could save them. She was stillrocking and muttering when the bedroom door creaked open and Dad appeared.
He was crying. Full, ugly tears. Effie froze, not wanting to be noticed. He would be embarrassed; Dad hated the weak bits in people. She’d never seen him cry, not even when the skinny hunting dog died. But now his face was a blotchy angry mess and his shirt was stained dark red.
“Get up,” he muttered.
But she couldn’t. He didn’t look like Dad.
“Dad?” she whimpered.
But he didn’t hug her. He stepped past them and yanked his jacket from the hook. Then, without looking at her or the baby, he stormed out.
The boy stirred in Effie’s arms and she crawled forward, the wooden floor bashing against her knees. It was too quiet, too still—the hut limp like a gutted pig. Like there was no heart in it.
“Mum?”
Effie peered into the wrecked room. Mum’s chair was broken in two, and her mirror lay in splinters across her favorite braided rug. The sheets and the floor were damp, stained with blood and another clear liquid. Effie stumbled to her feet, fighting pins and needles, then inched toward the bed. Toward Mum.
“Mum?”
Effie shook her arm.
“Mum!”
