Page 7 of The Vanishing Place
Dad had got it wrong. He’d made a mistake. Dad always said that it was impossible to skin possums when they were still warm—that you had to wait until they were cold and proper dead. But Mum was warm. She wasn’t proper dead. Effie hurried from the door and out onto the porch.
“Dad!” She shouted his name at the dense bush. “Dad! Come back.”
Then she hurried across the deck and down the steps, the baby screaming, and aimed her scrawny frame at the wall of ferns and rimu and rata trees. Dad would have headed for the river. It was the only way out. There were no paths or tracks other than the occasional deer trail. Every few months when they went to town, it was the water that guided them out. Other than the Roaring Billy River, it was just bush—thick green forest for kilometer after kilometer, farther than Effie’s legs could take her.
“Shh, baby.” She kissed his head. “You need to come with me.”
Effie turned, her mind in a whirl, as she scanned the outside of their small hut. There was no Aiden. No Tia. The only sign of her siblings was an upturned basket, the fresh pikopiko ferns spilled out on the ground. And next to it was Aiden’s wooden rainmaker.
“I can’t leave you here, baby. You have to come too.”
The baby’s face crumpled as he screamed. His eyes wrinkled into two slits, the thin lines lost in puffy flesh, and his mouth formed a dark hole. The noise hurt both her ears and her heart, like how she loved and disliked him all at once. The confusing little thing made of the same stuff as her, the same blood and other ingredients, flailed his tiny arms and legs, and she tried to soothe him.
“Don’t cry, baby.” She didn’t want him to be sad. She didn’t want him to hurt or cry. “Shh. Shh.”
But she didn’t want him there. She wanted Mum. It wasn’t a fair trade. No one had asked her. Having both of them might be okay—the baby and Mum—but not just him.
“Come on. Let’s get Dad.” Effie bounced him in her arms. “He can help Mum.”
Spying a length of rag on the deck, she picked it up and wrapped the baby to her chest, just like she used to do with Aiden. It helped a bit, having him all squished in; it quietened him a little. Then she headed into the forest. The river wasn’t far—fifteen minutes if she didn’t miss the marked trees. As Effie slipped into the bush, the kahikatea and totara towering above her like green giants, she felt the first drops of rain falling from the high branches. Her feet stumbled with the extra weight as she navigated the carpet of ferns and moss, but she bashed through the thick vegetation without pause, digging her feet in as it got steeper.
Effie was Dad’s favorite. He never said it, never did anything to make the young ones suspicious. But Effie knew. Dad always kissed her last before bed, and he let her do things that the others couldn’t. Like cleaning out the trout and going bush with him to check traps. Mum said that Dad loved them all the same. But he didn’t. Dad had given Effie his red hair and his green eyes—made her just like him. And when Dad had been out all night, tracking deer or chamois, he’d always leave a handful of supplejack tips on the table for her, and Mum would fry them up in oil. Even when Dad was tired and grumpy, maybe a little scary sometimes, he aways had a smile for Effie. But not that afternoon. He’d left without even looking at her.
Like he wasn’t Dad at all.
Effie pushed the ferns aside, using her other hand to shield the baby’s head from the spits of rain as the first rumble of thunder rolled through the green valley. She paused and looked up through the thick trees, the blue sky almost gone as the storm clouds movedin. On any other day, she would have turned around, respecting the black sky, and curled up in the safety of Mum’s bed. But on no other day had her mum been almost dead.
“We’ll be okay, baby.” Effie reached out, touching the pink strip of plastic that Dad had tied around a tree. “Not too far now.”
The bush thinned as she neared the river, and the ground became less steep. But the rain had turned from spits to heavy drops, and the baby was too quiet. Holding the back of his head, Effie sped up.
“Dad!” she tried screaming, but the wind gobbled her words.
She kept running another fifty meters or so, until she caught sight of the Roaring Billy River—a thread of dark silver that cut through the trees. Then she saw him.Dad. He was wearing his waterproof poncho and he was waist-deep in water, already a third of the way across the river. Effie blinked against the rain as she stepped from the cover of the trees. Her heart raced and she tried to shout, but the sky was too heavy; it squashed her voice. She stumbled across the small white rocks, getting closer to the river. Dad was in the wrong place. He wasn’t at the shallow bit. He was too deep. Too far down. They always crossed farther up where the river got thinner over the gravel bar, where Dad had shown them, again and again, that it was easier to wade across. There the water was only thigh-deep and the current was slow enough that Effie could catch herself. On their last trip to town, Dad had encouraged Effie to cross the river by herself, rather than on his back. She’d waded out slowly, positioned between Mum and Dad, fighting as the water tugged at her feet and cringing as the icy liquid neared her waist. Twice she’d felt the river snatch her. Twice her dad had saved her.
“Effie?”
She turned at the whisper of her name. “Tia?” Effie stumbled across the stony ground, the baby silent now, and knelt down. “What are you doing here?”
Her little sister, tiny for six, sat on the rocks with her knees tucked under her chin, swatting away sandflies. Her wet top clung to her shoulders, soaked by rain and a mass of sopping black hair.
“You’ll freeze out here,” said Effie. “Or get eaten. Where’s Aiden?”
“Dad said that…” Tia’s face streamed with tears. “That if he gets swept away…that you’ll watch me. But I don’t want him to get swept away.”
Effie pulled at her sister’s arm as thunder tore through the sky and she tried to shield the baby from the rain.
“Where’s Aiden?” she shouted.
“He wouldn’t stop crying,” Tia sobbed. “He was screaming and screaming.”
“Where is he?”
Tia raised an arm, her body shaking violently, and pointed at the river. “He’s…”
Fear seized Effie’s chest as she turned and squinted through the rain. Dad wasn’t alone. He was hunched under the weight of his big rucksack, and Aiden was in it. His little head popped out of the top, lolling from side to side. The river was too high. It was too fast.
Effie lurched forward and screamed into the air.“Dad!”
