24

Nina was not at home.

She hadn’t left a message, hadn’t picked up when Teddy tried calling her back. They discussed Choker’s threats, reasoned that they were just checking up on someone who’d called them for help, and vowed that they would not say Art’s name first. Satisfied with their flawed reasoning, they headed to Nina’s house.

It was too much, really, being at Art’s. While most of the collective time the three of them had spent together was at Teddy’s apartment, where there were no sisters or partners or children, there were still memories here, pulling gently at them. They had been soundly beaten by him at tennis on his backyard court. They had sat on rickety chairs on his rear patio and drunk beer while he had told stories about his adventures up mountains and on the sea – and while Nina had called out through the open kitchen window at them, ‘He’s full of shit! That’s not what happened!’

Now, Teddy went to the letterbox and opened it up.

‘Ted!’ Alice said. ‘Are we mail thieves now?’

‘The mail’s old,’ Teddy said. ‘Look.’

She was right. There was a small pile of mail, some a little weathered, some eaten by snails, addressed to both Art and Nina. Alice and Teddy looked at each other, and went back to the house.

They both had a key. They hadn’t told Art they’d had them cut, but there was always a moment you needed a key, and today was that day. They knocked again, went around the side, banged on the windows, tried to see inside: nothing. The tennis court that took up their backyard had loose tennis balls in the corners, and empty Corona bottles rolling in front of the net; the gate to it was locked. Teddy thought about scaling the high fence into it, then thought about her shoulder, then thought, as she did every day: I deserve how much it would hurt if I did this, because at least I’m not fucking dead. But Alice was already walking away, and Teddy followed her to the front, where they let themselves in.

‘Nina?’ Teddy called from the door.

It was cold inside the house. The lounge was messy, but not like someone had tossed the place. Messy like if you lived there and didn’t care anymore. The kitchen was clean enough, no fruit decaying on the bench, and Alice opened the dishwasher and saw dirty plates and cutlery with food crusted hard onto them. The house didn’t smell like much.

They went into Art’s room first. The bed was unmade, his drawers half open, clothes on the floor, which was normal for him. There was sand in the carpet, gritty underfoot; he was always shedding it after he’d been to his parents’ house. Everything else was neat, a little dusty. Teddy didn’t like that the last time he’d touched the shirts around her feet, he would have been figuring out what to wear on the day that he died.

Teddy touched a coaster on Art’s bedside table. It was the same one, rattan with a woven blue border, that Art had been spinning at Adrian’s house. She left it where it was.

Nina’s room was next. She was not in there, and they both breathed out. Teddy had been half-convinced they would find her dead on the sheets – from a broken heart, or maybe a drug overdose, like they expected from Alice’s sister, Pick, every time they saw her. Nina’s cupboard was open and bare.

‘She’s gone,’ Alice said.

They looked around the rest of the house. Back in the kitchen, on the bench, there was a piece of crumpled paper next to a bowl of seashells and, feeling nosy, Teddy flattened it out.

ANSWER THE FUCKING DOOR

She showed Alice. They went back outside and looked at the front door; there was no damage, no sign of forced entry.

‘I hope she made it out,’ Alice said.

Teddy was already on the phone, calling her again.

They waited, Alice with her hand on Teddy’s shoulder.

‘Teddy?’ Nina said, in a faraway voice, and Alice dropped her hand.

‘Hi, Nina,’ Teddy said. ‘How are you doing?’

‘Not great,’ she said.

‘Where are you? We came to your house, but I don’t think you’re here anymore.’

‘I’m not. I’m at my parents. Can you come over?’

Alice checked her watch: they had to pick Cherry up from kinder in an hour. ‘Is it an emergency? Or can we see you tomorrow, say, ten o’clock?’

‘Ten o’clock,’ Nina said. ‘And thank you. I need your help.’

~

They collected Cherry up from kinder and took her to the park. She climbed a tree while they watched, until she got an ant on her hand and cried until they took her back home. Alice gave her a bath and washed the ant’s invisible trail off her, while Teddy slowly and badly made up a shepherd’s pie and left it in the oven for them to bake, then kissed both Cherry and Alice on the nose and, for the first time in a long time, went home.

She did her stretches in the apartment and touched the puckered, red bullet scar on her shoulder gently. It could have been much worse, everybody said. Part of that was true: she was not dead.

Rusty rarely left the house – people always went to him, not the other way around – but he had left for Teddy, Ubering to the hospital to sit next to her with red eyes and remind her that he was her last living relative, and that if she ever died, he would have to deal with the bullshit logistics of it, and Teddy had some nerve almost making that happen.

Nina had been able to go back to her parents when something bad happened, and it laid Teddy down afresh with her loneliness. Art was dead because of her, and she’d leaned on Alice for so long. She didn’t want to lean on Rusty. She wanted to lean on her father, who would drop everything and pick her up wherever she was and never ask any questions except if she was hungry or cold. Now she was both, and he wasn’t there to fix either of them.

There were pies in the freezer. Teddy put one in the oven and saw the fifty-minute wait ahead of her, and knew there was only one thing for it. She lay down on the tiles, her face on the ground, and waited the day out.