“But you did abandon your daughter, Annabelle, when she was in her senior year at high school, didn’t you?” Maxine Mathers was asking Annie, somehow managing to look both damning and sympathetic at the same time.
I had just gotten off the phone with Simone and was sitting on my bed, biting my nails and hypnotized by the train wreck that was Annie’s interview, watching her eyes widen as she abruptly leaned forward, startling Maxine Mathers into the folds of her chair.
“I find it very interesting,” Annie said slowly, “that you would use the term abandoned.”
“Why’s that, Annie?” Maxine asked, her hand tucked underneath her chin, her features rearranged to appear faintly amused.
“Because, Maxine, I did not abandon my daughter, as you so dramatically put it. I left for a few months to the Solomon Islands to paint a picture, which is what I do, and very well. Annabelle was with her father, and I hope that period taught her that she could stand on her own two feet, and that women do not stop being who they are once they become mothers.”
“But you ran off with her father’s brother,” Maxine pressed, as I bit down to the quick of my nail.
Annie sighed. “I did not run off with him, I fucked him,” she said, and, as the switchboard at Channel Nine presumably exploded, she added, “which is another thing I do very well.”
Maxine Mathers, looking like an extremely well-groomed stunned mullet, turned to the camera, her face in search of a suitable expression.
“After the break,” she said, “Annie speaks exclusively to Today, Tonight, and Tomorrow about her complex relationship with her daughter, Annabelle, and the heartbreaking betrayal of Annabelle’s childhood friend.”
I got up from the bed and switched off the television. I already knew how this part of the story ended.
Going to sleep that night, I thought about Annie’s words, which gave the impression that she thought she’d done her daughter a favor when she left all those years ago.
It was true that for a time the wheels of the River House kept turning, and Annabelle had never said she felt abandoned—in fact, most of the time she acted as if Annie’s absence was a blessing: “No more bloody patchouli candles stinking up the house.”
But I was never convinced by her nonchalance toward Annie’s absence; it seemed to me like an act she was putting on, although I wasn’t entirely sure for whose benefit. Sometimes her own, sometimes mine, but mostly, I thought, for Frank, who was slowly coming undone.
He seemed increasingly incapable of finishing anything: he would leave washing half-hung on the line, dinners half-cooked, and never had the name “Half-baked Frank” suited him more.
A melancholy had settled around him, a quiet sadness that traveled with him as he roamed the River House looking for a place that still felt like home.
“Frank’s gone,” Annabelle said about a week later, on our way home from school.
“What do you mean he’s gone?” I asked. “Gone where?”
“Wouldn’t have a clue,” she said. “Don’t know, don’t care.”
“Well, you must have some idea where he’s gone. Has he gone to get Annie?”
“What? No, don’t be stupid, Tallulah. As if Frank could work out how to get to the Solomon Islands; the man can’t even work out the bus route.”
“Well, how long has he been gone?”
“Two days.”
“Two days?” I shrieked. “Have you reported it to the police?”
“ ‘Have you reported it to the police’?” she mimicked. “Stop being so melodramotional, Tallulah.”
“Annabelle,” I said, “I am not being melodramotional. If Frank really is gone, you should have told me, or Harry and Rose . . . Annabelle, I just don’t . . . are you sure he’s gone?”
“What do you mean am I sure he’s gone? He’s gone, Tallulah, as in he’s not here anymore, he’s not at the house, I came home from school on Wednesday and I called him and I called him and I went to every room and he’s gone, all right, as in no longer around, disapanished. . . .”
“Well, we have to do something,” I said. “First of all, you have to come home with me until Frank turns up—and he will turn up; second of all, we have to tell Harry and Rose; and third of all, we have to get in contact with your mother and tell her to haul her fat, sorry arse back here.”
Annabelle giggled.
“What is so funny?” I demanded. “This is not a funny situation, Annabelle, this is not a joke—”
“You said arse.” Annabelle smiled. “You never say words like that.”
“Actually, I said, fat, sorry arse,” I corrected her.
Rose made up a bed in the spare room for Annabelle, bustling and fussing around in Phoebe, fluffing the pillows and opening windows to “let some air in.”
“Thanks, Mrs. de Longland,” Annabelle said.
“Pleasure, treasure. Now, come on, you girls, help me with these sheets,” Rose said, billowing white cotton into the air.
Later that night, when the boys had gone to bed, Harry and Rose asked Annabelle and me to sit with them in the lounge room.
“Not the kitchen,” I noted to Annabelle. “Must be serious.”
Rose came in carrying a tea tray and wearing Alexis.
“Verily serious,” whispered Annabelle.
Rose put down the tray, said kindly, “Annabelle, do you have any idea at all where your father has gone?”
Annabelle shook her head.
“Well, I know you don’t want us to call the police, but Harry and I both think that if your dad doesn’t turn up by tomorrow, or if we haven’t heard from him, we really should.”
Annabelle looked out the window.
“If he’s hurt, or in some sort of trouble,” Rose continued gently, “it would be wrong of us not to. You can see that, can’t you, love?”
Annabelle nodded, an almost imperceptible shrug of her head.
“All right,” Rose said, “that’s settled then—now, the other thing we need to talk about is your mother.”
Annabelle shifted in her seat.
“She should know what’s happened, Annabelle, and I would like your permission to call her,” Rose said firmly.
Surprising me, Annabelle nodded again.
“All right,” she said. “Can I go to bed now?”
All that night, I shifted in my bed, caught between awake and dreaming.
Words and pictures looped in the darkness: Frank laughing with Annie on the grass; Frank hunched over a picture, paintbrush behind his ear; Annabelle saying, “Dad drinks”; Annie saying, “Keep both eyes on Frank”; and then my own face, my own voice—“Frank says now that we are fourteen and young ladies, we need a place of sanctuary.”
I sat up and as a growing wind slapped at my window, I had an idea of where Frank Andrews might be.
Outside, the dark was giving way to light, and I got out of bed and tiptoed down the hallway to my parents’ room.
“Rose,” I whispered, kneeling by her side of the bed. “Rose,” I tried again.
Rose rolled over.
“Lulu? What is it, love, are you all right, is Annabelle all right?” She went to turn her bedside light on, but I put my hand over hers.
“Sshh, Rose,” I said. “I think I know where Frank is.”
Wordlessly she slipped out from under the covers and followed me out into the hallway. “What’s going on, Lulu?” she said, glancing at the clock. “It’s half past five.”
“I think I know where Frank is,” I repeated.
“You know where he is? Is he all right? I think we should wake your father.”
“No,” I said, still whispering, “Frank wouldn’t want that—he’d hate that, and he wouldn’t want Annabelle either.”
Rose looked at me. “What do you want to do, Lulu?”
“I want us to go to him, on my bike.”
I’d thought it through: Rose couldn’t, or wouldn’t, drive, and riding would be faster than walking.
“Now?”
“Yes, before everyone wakes up.”
Rose nodded.
“Go and get changed,” she said, “I’ll meet you out front.”
I went back to my room to pull on a T-shirt and some shorts. At moments like these, I was glad that Rose was my mother. She hadn’t asked where we were going or, like most mothers would have, made a fuss. We had been through so many of her own moments of madness, she wasn’t about to question mine.
I slipped my shoes on, feeling surer now that Rose was coming with me. If anyone could help Frank it was my mother. When I wheeled my push-bike around to the front of the house, she was waiting for me under the sign, in Phoebe.
She hitched the hem up and perched sidesaddle on my bike, the daisy clips dancing on its spokes. “I haven’t done this since your dad used to pick me up from work.” She laughed. “Forgotten how much fun it is.”
I smiled, climbing on and concentrating on keeping us balanced, arms on either side of her, breathing her in, just like Harry must have done all those years ago.
“Hold on, Rose! Corner!” I yelled, as we lurched to one side, threatening to tip over, shrieking and giggling and half hoping we would.
“That was close.” Rose laughed. “I thought we were goners!”
I laughed out loud at Rose suddenly acting like the child she should have had the chance to be.
Nearing Annabelle’s house, I slowed down and wobbled the bike to a stop outside the gates guarded by the twin gargoyles, baring their grinning teeth and fat little tummies at us.
“Good morning, Lulu, Annabelle,” Rose said, nodding at them.
“Very funny, Rose,” I said, leaning the bike against the fence. “Come on.”
Making our way past the house and the shed, as the earth sloped toward the river, Rose took my arm, slowing me down. “Are you sure this is where he is, love?”
“Pretty sure,” I said, my foot on the first rung of the steps that Frank had somehow managed to curl around the tree without using a single nail—“You don’t want to pierce a tree,” he’d explained to us. “Breaks its spirit.”
“I’ll go up and see.”
The wind whipped at my legs as I began to climb to the place where Frank had built our nest, shadowy in the branches that held it in their gnarled claws.
Reaching the last rung, I hoisted myself through the hole in the floor, pulling myself up by the dangling rope to the veranda, and peered through a window.
“Frank,” I whispered, “Frank, it’s me, Tallulah, are you there?”
No answer. Only the rushing breath of the growing wind and the screech of a flying fox startling me and rousing the shape on the floor.
“Annie?” Frank said. “Is that you, Annie girl?”
When I think of that night, I think of the wind that tore at it, and of the strange journey that was Frank’s descent from the tree house.
At first he was hesitant to leave, his eyes flicking from Rose to me, then back to Rose, where they widened for an instant.
“Ah,” he’d said, then, “a fellow traveler.” And let himself be led.
Rose sent me home to tell Annabelle he had been found, and after that, Frank’s mother, Christa, took him in, the apple from his father’s tree.
Frank was cleaned up and sobered up, Christa telling an interviewer years later, when Frank’s In My Mother’s House came out, that when he first arrived she had pointed him to his room and handed him a paintbrush.
“It’s how the Andrews men heal,” she said.
How the Andrews women heal she did not say, but the day Frank left for his mother’s, Annie rang to say she was coming home to claim her daughter.
“How’s your dad?” I’d asked a few weeks after Annie’s return.
Annabelle shrugged. “All right.”
We were sitting at Snow’s, waiting for Josh to show up.
“Is he doing any work?”
“Don’t know.”
“Yes, you do, Annabelle, he writes to you all the time.”
“Well, he writes to you too, Tallulah, so you already know the answer to that question.”
“Are you going to go and see him soon? Maybe I could come with you. We could go during the holidays?”
“No.”
“Annabelle, why don’t you go see him?”
“I don’t want to,” she said. “Stop going on about it.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I just think it would be good for him if we went to see him.”
“Well, I don’t want to see him,” Annabelle said, holding up her hand. “End of conversation, Tallulah.”
I sighed and looked out the window for Josh, Frank’s latest letter burning in my pocket.
Dear Tallulah de Lightful,
Well, things at Christa’s are going as well as can be expected.
She watches over me like a hawk and swoops in if she sees me falter, a mother’s prerogative, even if I am fifty-seven years old.
I am painting again, a new series, which I think you might like, and Annabelle also. I think it’s quite enchanting, if you’ll forgive some immodesty.
How is Annabelle?
I do not wish to burden you with all our family’s ills, and I do not intend for you to become our go-between, but as she does not answer my letters could you tell Annabelle this for me?
Could you tell her that I think of her every day and the last thing I do when I close my eyes at its end is to kiss her good night?
Tell her I have not touched a drop.
Did you know that the name Tallulah has its origins with the Native American Indians, the Choctaw people of the Mississippi region?
It means “leaping waters,” and having seen you in the swimming pool, I do not doubt it.
Good-bye, my friend,
Whatever happens, don’t stop leaping.
Frank X