‘It was nothing,’ Dettie chuckled. ‘I was being silly, that’s all.’ She sipped from a bottle of water and wiped her forehead with her wrist. ‘Now, don’t you kids run off now!’ she called.
Jon was standing in front of her, scratching his eyebrow with his thumb. ‘You just seemed a tad jumpy, love.’
‘Oh, goodness, no.’ Dettie screwed the lid shut. ‘My licence,’ she said, and swallowed. ‘I left it at home. My licence.’ Her smile crept wider. ‘A couple of thousand kilometres away.’ She giggled, a sound Sam was sure he had never heard her make before. ‘And I didn’t particularly want to turn around and drive all the way back to get it.’
Jon was nodding, but he didn’t say anything. His eyes flickered towards Katie and Sam, who were taking turns sipping from a plastic travel mug.
Dettie had driven east almost twenty minutes before finding a side route over some raw, unpaved roads that led around the police block. She’d spent the detour muttering to herself and telling Sam not to worry, while Jon distracted Katie with a whispered game of I Spy. Now they were stopped on a country lane that fed back onto the highway a few dozen kilometres along.
‘I tell you, I’m a complete duffer sometimes.’ Dettie tossed the bottle through the open door and tugged a cigarette from her handbag. She offered one to Jon, but he shook his head.
Katie, meanwhile, had turned her back on them and huddled closer to Sam, almost pushing him back against a wire fence, whispering, ‘She’s getting really strange.’ Her eyes were wide and wet.
Sam nodded. He felt a drop of water roll down his neck.
‘Have you seen how her head wobbles?’ Katie said.
He looked over at Dettie, who was clutching her cigarette with both hands and leaning on the car. Jon was watching the way her foot kept scratching at the dirt, shuffling it into small mounds and then dusting it flat.
‘I know you wouldn’t have wanted to worry the kids,’ he was saying, speaking slowly. ‘But I think they might have been a little confused.’
‘Oh, no.’ Dettie picked at her tongue as if there was a hair stuck to it. ‘No, they both know they can trust me.’ She nodded.
Katie slurped from the cup and dried her lips with their mother’s handkerchief. ‘I heard Mummy talking on the telephone to Uncle Ben once.’ She leant even closer to Sam’s ear. ‘She said Aunt Dettie needed to go see a doctor. About being sad. She said she probably should have kept going.’
For a moment Sam wondered if that was why Dettie had been so against him visiting Tracey at first. Did it remind her of some therapy she had needed once? But as he glanced up he realised that their aunt was staring straight at them both, her cigarette smouldering in her hand. He felt his chest tighten, and his legs. His whole body clenched in place, electric. When she didn’t look away he raised his arm, timidly, to wave. She didn’t respond, though, and slowly he realised she wasn’t staring at him, but rather was fixed upon Katie’s hands and the small white embroidered handkerchief she was gently folding away.