It was dark out there, and the light didn’t work, so it was difficult to make out the shape of a person in the shadows. But Alison could see immediately that it was a woman. She saw Luca’s whole body relax.
“Christine. Shit. Why are you knocking? You woke up the girls.” As she spoke Luca stepped back, enough to let his wife through the door. Alison shrank into the wall as Christine pushed past her.
“Left my keys and my bloody phone in the office like an idiot. Alison, good to see you again.” The words didn’t match the tone, or the look Christine shot Alison as she moved into the hall and up the stairs toward her crying daughters. Luca pushed the door shut, made sure it was dead bolted.
“Give us a minute, Ally, I’ll be back soon.” He bounded up the stairs behind his wife, leaving Alison alone in the hallway. The glass in the door looked out on a quiet street. She could see the soft outlines of the lights, the cars parked at the curb, the trees swaying in the slight summer breeze. She retreated to the kitchen, went back to nursing her cuts. Upstairs she could hear the lullabies, and then the hushed argument of the house’s adult residents enticed her back out into the hallway. These old Sydney terrace houses didn’t allow for much privacy.
“Ah, come on, you’re the one who woke the girls. Don’t be a fucking stick-in-the-mud. She’s my friend. She needs a place to crash. Be a little more generous.” Luca’s tone was placating.
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“You fucking know. Don’t make me the problem when you’re the one inviting a strange woman to stay at our house on a Wednesday like it’s no big thing.”
“Don’t be such a killjoy, Christine. Strange woman? She was at our wedding. She needs my help.”
“Alison is a person you have trouble saying no to.”
“Come off it.”
“You can’t bear for her to think you’re not cool. But, Luca, my love, you’re not cool. You’re a dad. You make puns. You are a middle-class, middle-of-the-road guy. You drink Corona with lime like it’s fancy. It’s not fancy.”
“I know that. I don’t care about that.”
“You do.” Alison heard her laugh. “You looked actually wounded when I accused you of being middle-class just then.”
“Corona is off-limits, OK? You’ve gone too far.” His voice was playful now, light and sweet. In the dim hallway light Alison could see their shadows dance softly on the double-height cream plaster. They moved closer together, the lines around them merging in the middle. She heard the smack of lips on skin. “I also have trouble saying no to you.”
“That’s entirely appropriate. I’m your wife.” She spoke now with begrudging warmth. On the wall their heads had become one giant bauble, engulfing their individuality. Alison strained to hear their murmurs now. Felt on her brow the uncomfortable sweat of eavesdropping and decided to retreat into the kitchen, heard the creak of the stairs, but no one came down. Alison scrolled through her messages, wanting a distraction, and read some of Billy’s for the first time.
I need to talk to you please
Al I’m sorry I pushed you away and didn’t take your questions about Michael Watson seriously
Come home I’ll tell you what I know
She stared at the words. What he knows? What could he know? Probably more than her. But he didn’t know about Simone having her address. He didn’t know about Gil thinking Alison had something of his. He didn’t know how exposed she felt sleeping with the sheets off, but how impossible it was to sleep with them on. He didn’t know shit.
The stairs creaked again. Luca and Christine tiptoed into the kitchen, rosy. Christine’s fine features were bright. A dewy mist of sweat on her unpowdered brow. Her brown eyes danced around the room, wide-awake. The suit she’d come home in replaced by worn old jeans and a T-shirt. Christine was the kind of beautiful that Alison longed to be. Completely uninterested in it, entirely stunning. Luca, who’d pursued her relentlessly, breaking up her university romance and basically camping on her doorstep until she agreed to see him, was transfixed by her. It pissed Alison off sometimes. She’d had a crush on Luca back then, but he didn’t want her. He loved her, like a sister, or a cousin, or some other woman whom he cared for deeply but never thought about naked. She thought about Billy, felt a little worse than she had before. Resolved to call him tomorrow.
“Alison, I’m sorry about earlier, I get a little cranky when the girls are unsettled.” Christine smiled warmly.
“Oh, no, it’s totally fine. I’m sorry to have dropped in like this. I didn’t know where else to go.”
“You were right to call, we’ve been watching the news—the coverage of the fire. You must’ve had a stressful couple of weeks.”
“Yeah.” It hung there in the air between them. Even though it shouldn’t, hearing Christine reduce it to stress pissed her off.
Luca was busy over at the sink, slicing something with a knife on the drainer, glasses clinking. He turned around with a flourish and set three glasses of beer on the table. On the rim of each, a wedge of lime.
“To old friends!” he proclaimed, raising his glass and meeting Christine’s eyes. She was giggling as she raised hers back.
“To old friends and cold beers.” Christine openly laughed.
“Yes, to old friends and fancy beer with lime.” Alison saw them look at each other. The color rose in Christine’s cheeks again. Everyone drank.
Over the beers they talked through it all. The fire, Simone, Gil, the note, Chris Waters, the tapes Gil thought Alison had. Alison felt a lightness that she couldn’t describe and that wasn’t fueled just by alcohol.
“What could she possibly have that he’d want that bad?” Luca took a long swig of his beer. Christine reached up and pulled his stubbie down, gave him a look that said take it slow.
“I don’t know. I don’t understand any of this. He was gone from my life, and that was good, and I was doing OK, and then on the worst possible day, at the worst possible moment, she comes up my drive, gets killed in a fire, and now—now—he thinks we were conspiring against him somehow?”
“It doesn’t make any sense.” Christine picked at a chicken leg she’d dug out of the fridge. “Why now? Why you?”
Alison couldn’t answer the questions. She genuinely didn’t have anything of his. When she’d ended it, she’d left all traces of him behind. And that had been years ago now—almost three of them, actually. He’d been with Simone that whole time, and she’d never met her. Never known who she was until now. She didn’t see what it could possibly be.
“Proof of something damaging for him, right?”
“Was he dealing drugs? Cheating on his taxes? Stealing from work?” Christine reeled off these options as though these sorts of things were commonplace. Although Alison thought maybe they were, she’d never seen Gil get into any of them.
“No, not that I know about, and what would tapes have to do with that?”
“Could be security footage? His hand in the till, literally? Luca, pass me another beer, would you?” Christine wiped grease from the chicken on her T-shirt and screwed the top off the beer.
“It doesn’t seem likely, does it? If Simone had that, and she was scared of him, why wouldn’t she just give it to the police? Why try and involve me?”
They all sat silently for a minute.
“You’re scared of him?” Christine asked it gently. Like she’d already figured out the heaviness to it.
“Yeah, he’s . . . I mean, what if he killed her?” She felt Christine’s eyes on her, scrutinizing her.
“Whatever is on it, you have to assume Gil wants it bad enough to come after you.” Luca had been musing on the possible contents of the tape for a good twenty minutes.
“But we don’t know what it is, so it’s useless,” Alison replied. They didn’t even know if it was audio or video. They were stumped.
“What makes someone run so far? Why would she come to you? Usually they go to a shelter, or a relative. A stranger, two states away—I don’t know why she would.” Christine worked at a legal aid service.
“It has to involve me somehow. I just don’t know how.”
“Find out what it is, find out why,” Luca said.
“OK, sure, but how do I find out without letting him know I don’t have it?” The annoyance spilled over into her tone.
“And without putting yourself in harm’s way,” Christine added.
No one talked for a while.
“Maybe we should call it a night.” Christine drained her beer and reached her hand out to the empty Alison was nursing.
“Yeah, I’m too tired. I need to sleep.” Alison had felt like sharing all this with them was the right decision, but now she was just frustrated. As Luca pulled out the couch and tucked in the corners of the fitted sheet, Christine gathered up the glasses, put the empty bottles in the recycling box. Alison climbed the stairs as quietly as possible to wash her face and teeth in the small bathroom tucked onto the hallway landing.
In the fluoro light her skin was garish. Every pore, every nick and ridge and stretch and crater and angry risen bump, illuminated. She picked at a blackhead too pronounced on her chin. Pushed the accumulated cream of a whitehead out from below the skin on the smooth of her right cheek. Fingernails left red canyons. She splashed cold water on her face to surprise it. Felt it tighten with the shock. Stared too long into her eyes, swimming a little from the beer. They took on the gray-blue hue of her imagined doppelganger. She swayed, felt dizzy from those beers, grabbed the cold porcelain to steady herself. The mug on the rim of the basin laden with tiny toothbrushes and kids-formula Colgate teetered and fell, smashing onto the tile next to Alison’s bare foot.
“Shit.” The word was out of her mouth at volume before she could stop it. The combination of the smashed mug and the loud, unfamiliar voice woke the girls. Alison heard a drowsy “Mummy!” and a backup chorus of cries. She winced, stuck her head out into the hall. Christine was already halfway up the stairs, but Luca overtook her, gently pulling her back with his arm.
“I got it, go to bed.” He kissed her as he continued up the stairs, shook his head at Alison as he rounded the landing.
Christine got to the top of the stairs as the soothing low tones of Luca’s voice began to quiet the girls. She looked pissed again, but also too tired to really care.
“Sorry, my hand slipped and knocked it.”
“It’s fine. Let me clean it up if you’re done in here. The bed’s made.”
“OK, sure, I’m really sorry.”
“Alison, I don’t think you even know what you’re apologizing for. Go to bed.” It was a mother’s tone. Admonishing, businesslike, annoyingly insightful.
She stepped around Christine and tiptoed as quietly as possible down the stairs into the lounge room. Sat on the edge of the foldout couch, the flimsy mattress sagging with her weight. Not bothering to change into pajamas, she stretched out on top of the covers, felt their crisp coolness on the backs of her legs, against her cheek, pressing into her elbows. She closed her eyes. Listened to the murmurs of Luca’s lullabies and promises. She heard the heavy fall of Christine’s footsteps above her. The slow progress toward silence upstairs made as the minutes creaked by. She drifted for a while but was woken by the buzz of a message on her phone. Too tired to deal with Billy right now, she pushed the phone away and rolled over, her face toward the bar-covered window that looked into the back courtyard.
As she closed her eyes again she thought she saw a blur of movement. Probably a possum. She fell asleep to the rise and fall of Luca’s too-loud snores and the quiet murmurs of the girls’ dreamworld. No closed doors, no sound too small to carry on the hot summer air. The weather wrapped her up as if in a cocoon and carried Alison away for a few sweet hours. Cicadas on the breeze, the clack of skittering cockroaches under the boards below.