It was six months before Sam and Katie saw their aunt again. There had been no need for long court proceedings or investigations. Dettie pleaded guilty and never changed her story. She had taken the children to be reunited with their father. She had done it without permission, and had misled Katie and Sam and their parents. But she was trying to save her family, she said, and she would never apologise for that. As part of her agreement she was placed in a hospital facility for rehabilitation.
Sam and Katie’s mother made sure to explain to them exactly where Dettie was and all that was going on throughout the whole process. At Sam’s insistence she didn’t lie or dumb anything down. There had been enough lying, she agreed. Dettie was sick. She had been sick for a long time—since before Ted had left. She suffered from a form of mental illness that gave her mood swings, but she had never done anything like this before. It was called a ‘manic episode’, their mother said. Because she wasn’t taking her medication properly, because she was agitated and stressed, she’d done a very stupid, very dangerous, very frightening thing. And she was going to stay in a safe place until she was back to her old self. If, Sam thought, she ever came back to herself.
‘But the thing to also remember,’ their mother said, ‘is that your aunt Bernadette does love you.’ She did not call her ‘Dettie’ anymore. ‘What she did was inexcusable. Unforgivable. But in her own very, very misguided way, she did it because she loves you both very much.’
To Sam’s surprise, it was only a few weeks before Katie softened towards their aunt again. Based on what their mother had described, Katie seemed to feel sorry for her, and was soon sending letters and photographs in care packages, wishing her well and keeping her informed about school or what was happening around the house. In return, Dettie would send letters that Katie would read aloud to Sam, after struggling with their mother to disentangle the uncharacteristically sloppy script.
Sam’s feelings were more complicated. He was never sure which image of his aunt was going to surface from the complex tangle of memories in his mind. The stuffy, sombre oracle, warning him not to give in to death after his operation? The kindly guardian, plying them with lollies and ice cream, trying to keep their spirits up? The dishevelled, rambling creature clinging to a past already faded? Eventually he came to accept that she was all of them, and none, at once. This was just the way people were. Messier and more complicated and self-deluded than they themselves ever realised.
He’d thought much the same thing when they’d briefly met up with their father. It was for just an hour, immediately before flying back to Sydney. He’d met them for a short lunch at the airport cafe. Their parents were quiet and stiff with one another, and his father looked thinner than Sam expected. He had a moustache. He talked about how busy he was at work. He couldn’t believe how much the two of them had grown. He was friendly and smiled and marvelled at how brave they had been. But at the same time Sam could feel his father staring at his throat, could sense the discomfort in his posture as he tried not to look like he was turning away from him. When they said goodbye, and he promised to all meet up again soon, Sam knew it was just another story, more comforting words that he was telling himself as much as them.
The same was true of the news media and everyone at school. The week after they returned home, a television reporter had interviewed Sam, Katie and their mother for the news. But when they saw the report broadcast, they had edited out all mention of Jon, kept showing footage of their mother crying, and claimed that Katie and Sam had been afraid the entire time, continually cutting to some weird black-and-white slow-motion footage of a car driving through the woods. Their classmates had found it all fascinating, and were soon happy to make up their own stories about Sam driving the car to safety himself, or Dettie getting into a shoot-out with the police.
As the weeks passed, Katie and Sam would occasionally speak to Dettie on the phone. The conversations were always short, and their mother would make sure to stand beside them, letting them lean against her for support if they needed to, listening in on a second handset, and reading aloud whatever Sam wrote down to say. Sometimes it would take Dettie a long time to respond. Katie would ask her something—what the weather was like where she was; what did she have for dinner—and it would take a moment for their aunt to take the sentence in, think it over, sometimes repeating a few words in a slow moan, and then reply. She’d occasionally even forget the question, or repeat something she’d already told them. Their mother explained it was because of all the medications she was taking. They helped her stay calm, she said, but they also made her tired. Made it hard for her to concentrate. Mostly Dettie just talked about the other patients, many of whom, she said, complained too much.
Sam’s questions were almost always about Jon. What had happened to him. Where he had gone. But the few times Dettie seemed to hear what his mother was asking for him, her story remained the same. Exactly what she’d told the police officers, the doctors and the judge. Jon had decided to travel on his own. He’d taken his bags and hitchhiked the rest of the way alone. She would get confused and upset if they pressed her further.
For Sam, Dettie’s voice now was somehow even more unsettling than all the murmuring and frantic twitching he had seen overtake her in the car. At least then she had focus. Even in the last, crazed moments when they ran off the road, her snarling and clawing at him, the desperate, terrified look in her eyes. Now it was hard to tell what she believed. What she knew, what she had told herself or couldn’t recall. The truth had become even more slippery and unsalvageable.
He realised, finally, the true horror of the zombies that had lurked beneath the campy schlock in his comic book. Under the lumbering and the sharp teeth and the gore, what was so haunting wasn’t the threat of death, but the unhealthy clinging to life. To what had passed. He’d been afraid that it somehow represented him. Silent. Angry. That he, like the zombies, had been changed into something unfamiliar, something strange. But it wasn’t the changing that was so frightening—it was being unable to let go. He was now no longer clinging to some lost image of himself. Dettie, however, was lost. Wilfully detached from the truth. Hungry to be believed. Empty and thoughtlessly wheezing over the phone. She was still trapped, cold and haunted on the other end of the line.
Their mother was eventually able to contact Ted and fill him in on everything that had happened. He visited one afternoon for a cup of tea, to catch up and talk things through. Even he seemed surprised about what was happening to Dettie. Things were bad in the old days, he said, but she had never strayed so far from herself. He did laugh, however, when their mother said Dettie was telling people that he had fallen to his death from a skyscraper window.
‘Wishful thinking,’ he said.