By the time her parents returned from lunch at the boat harbour, Lou had stopped crying. She had examined everything in the box over and over again until she had absolutely no doubt. Everything made sense now. She had thrown herself down on her parents’ bed and sobbed, pummelled her fists into the mattress, gripped her hair in her hands and pulled, but then she had stopped. She hadn’t gone further, hadn’t reached for something sharp, because she knew now that she hadn’t been imagining things. The whispers, the loaded glances, the disconnection in her home. She – Lou – wasn’t the problem. The problem had existed long before she was even born.
Lou had taken the box through to the kitchen, and arranged the documents and photos on the table in neat piles. Then she had gone to her bedroom and lay on her bed listening to music until she heard the car pull up outside. She was calm as she stood up and walked out of her room to meet her parents.
‘Lou!’ her mum shouted through the door as she tried to open it against the security chain. ‘Lou!’
‘Coming!’ Lou walked slowly to the door. She still had time to gather up the contents of the box, close it and put it back in her parents’ wardrobe, and keep from them a powerful secret – that she knew. Her parents were no longer in control. She clenched her fists again. How dare they? They had no right to lie to her about how she came into the world, about how she was passed backwards and forwards like a toy. Or, if she was to use the language she had just read, commissioned and relinquished.
She stood with her hand on the chain, the door slightly ajar. It took all her self-control not to slam it in her mother’s face; instead she closed it softly, slid off the security chain, then swung it open.
‘Thank God we’re home,’ her mum said, walking straight past her. ‘I’m exhausted.’ Her dad followed, and closed the door behind him. Lou walked behind them into the kitchen.
‘What’s — Oh!’ Her mum clasped her hand over her mouth as she stared at the open box on the table, the pile of photographs and court documents.
Lou’s dad stopped too. ‘Oh, Lou,’ he said.
‘When were you going to tell me?’ Lou said quietly.
Her parents looked at each other, their faces pale, trying to communicate with their eyes, ask the other what to do, what to say.
Her dad cleared his throat, took a step back towards Lou, put his hand on her shoulder then steered her into the kitchen. ‘Sit down.’
Her mum was breathing quickly, and her hands shook as she sat on a dining chair, still clutching the car keys.
Lou let herself be guided to the table. She sat opposite her mum, with her dad on her right-hand side. None of them looked down at the documents. They didn’t need to; they all knew what was written there.
Lou’s mum reached for her hands, but she pulled them away. ‘Is this true?’ she asked.
Her mum nodded, her face pale. ‘Louise, we wanted to tell you before, but you’ve been going through so much lately and we thought it would be too much for you right now, when you’ve been so upset —’
Lou raised her hands in front of her in exasperation. Didn’t they understand that she was the way she was because of them? Because of their lies? ‘Upset? Seeing as you’ve dragged me to counsellors and therapists, I think it’s fair to say that the way I’ve been feeling is a bit more than upset! But it all makes perfect sense now, don’t you see? You’re the reason I’m like this, why I’m your problem child. I always knew there was something!’ She paused to take a breath.
‘Lou, please …’
She looked at her mother’s bloodshot eyes, her smeared mascara. She knew now, looking into that face, that this was why she felt so alone, because this woman was nothing to her. There had always been something blocking the relationship between them, she had thought, but now she knew it was the opposite – it was a lack of something. How could she have missed it? They looked nothing alike. Who was this woman who called herself her mother?
Lou snorted with laughter, though she wanted to cry. ‘Now I know why Grandma always used to say to me, “You’re your father’s daughter”: she was trying to tell me! No one ever said I was my mother’s daughter, did they? Because I never was. I was my aunt’s daughter.’ She turned to her dad. ‘How could you keep this from me?’
He looked up. ‘You heard your mum, Louise. We did what we thought was best for you. We were always going to tell you, but it didn’t seem like the right time …’
‘Did Ross know about this? Is that why we always had to have secret sessions, why I wasn’t allowed to know what you were whispering about in his room? It all makes sense now, all the questions he asked me about my childhood. He was trying to see what I knew! Did you put him up to it? Did he come running to you afterwards and reassure you that I knew nothing?’
‘No, of course not. He didn’t tell us anything about your sessions. Those sessions were for you, to help you!’
Lou pointed her finger at her dad. ‘I’ll tell you how you could have helped me – by being honest with me! By telling me this years ago, not waiting until I found out! You … you lied to me!’
‘We didn’t lie …’ Her mum stood up and moved around the table towards her.
‘Yes, you did! You lied to me every day by calling yourself my mother!’
Zoe froze, then retreated back to her side of the table. She nodded a few times, and spoke quietly. ‘I’m sorry. Louise, I’m sorry we didn’t tell you. But it doesn’t change anything.’
Lou shook her head. ‘Of course it does! This is my life. This changes everything!’
‘Lou …’
She swiped away her dad’s hand and swivelled in her chair to face him. ‘Don’t! You were in on this too! You all were!’ She stood up, her chair scraping on the floor, and pushed past him towards the kitchen door. She stopped there and turned around to face them. ‘This is my life, I’m not your little project!’
Lou expected them to stand up and run to her, to grab her and stop her from leaving, but they stared at her, stunned. Zoe’s face was deathly pale and she looked like she was going to pass out; Lachlan didn’t move except for the rapid pulsing of a vein in his temple. Lou hesitated for a moment, giving them one more chance, then shook her head at them and ran to her room.
She kept her door closed all day, all evening. She ignored her mother’s pleas for her to come out and eat something, and let the scrambled eggs that her mother left outside her room go cold. She felt that old familiar numbness, but now at least she knew why she felt that way. There was a part of her missing. Her aunt – no, her mother – had given her away. She had been traded, a commodity to be commissioned and relinquished. Lou had also seen, in the box, letters to and from the lawyers, showing that Nadia and Eddie had tried to fight for her, to get her back, while Zoe and Lachlan did everything they could to keep her. Who could she blame for this: Nadia, who had given her away then fought – and failed – to get her back? Or Zoe, who had been her mum since the start, but had lied to her all these years? The court order had said that Nadia and Eddie should be involved in her life, and that Lou should have spent every second weekend with them, getting to know them and Charlotte, Violet and Harry, but that had never happened. Her aunt and uncle and cousins had lived overseas, and then in Sydney, for years, sometimes coming home for Christmas, but more often not. Why had Nadia given up on her so easily, after all that?
They were all as bad as each other: Nadia, Zoe, Eddie, Lachlan. They had all kept this from her. Had they thought about her when they sat in a lawyer’s office and wrote her life story into a contract?
She took her school dictionary from her bookshelf and flicked through the pages. Relinquish – such an awful word. To voluntarily cease to keep, or claim. To give up. And that’s why she should have been told. Because she was the one who was given up, given up on, the one whom someone – her own mother – ceased to keep. There was someone else waiting to claim her, to keep her, someone who didn’t want to give her up, but that didn’t matter to Lou as much as the fact that her mother – her real mother – had let her go.
The next morning, she walked into the kitchen. Her parents looked as if they hadn’t slept – their eyes were red and puffy, with dark shadows. Lou could feel the air of defeat surrounding them both. She watched them for a moment until they suddenly realised she was there. Her mum stood and rushed towards her. ‘Lou —’
‘Don’t.’ Lou held up her hand. ‘I need to see Nadia, I want to talk to her myself.’
There were no protests. ‘OK, darling,’ her mum said. ‘I’ll call her.’
Lou nodded, looking at the floor, and watched as a tear splashed on the tile next to her toe. She turned around and walked out again.
Lou hadn’t slept, even for a moment. She knew this for certain because she had watched the digital clock next to her bed change, minute by minute, until she heard the clunk of the pipes that meant her dad had turned on the shower. She waited ten minutes until she knew he’d be finished, then went into her bathroom and showered too. If she was honest, she didn’t really want to go any more, but she had to. She’d made such a fuss about it, caused so much hurt, and now everything had been arranged. Zoe was scared, Lou could tell from her desperate hugs, as if she was clutching onto Lou to stop herself from falling. She turned away to hide her tears, but Lou could see traces of them on her face.
Once she had dressed, Lou went through to the kitchen. Her dad was already there, wearing jeans and a checked shirt, freshly shaved. He was sitting at the table, eating toast spread with marmalade. There was a crumb at the corner of his mouth, shining orange in the light from the pendants hanging above the table. Lou wanted to reach over and flick the crumb away. Instead she smiled a little, then pointed to the corner of her own mouth. Her dad quickly wiped his face.
‘All gone?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘All gone.’
‘Did you sleep OK?’
‘Yeah, not bad.’
‘Can I get you some breakfast?’
‘I’ll do it.’ She walked to the pantry and scanned the plastic tubs filled with different cereals, then chose the muesli. The last thing she wanted to do was eat, but if she didn’t he’d know how uncertain she was about doing this. What did she really think would happen? She wanted some answers. But to what questions? What could she ask that wouldn’t make her sound selfish? ‘How could you do this to me?’ That would make it sound like her mum and dad were terrible parents, and Lou knew that really they weren’t. She needed to find where she belonged amongst all this confusion, but she was frightened of pulling too far away from her parents in case she stretched their relationship so far that it broke.
‘Is Mum coming?’
He sighed. ‘No, I don’t think so. She – we – thought it might be better to give you the space to do this without worrying about her feelings.’
‘Is she OK?’
‘Yes, darling, she’s fine. Don’t worry about her, or me. We’re grown-ups, we know today is important for you, and we knew it would happen one day.’
Lou took the yoghurt from the fridge and added two dollops to her bowl, then sat down opposite her dad. Without looking up, he lifted the business section out of the paper and slid the rest over to her, then raised his eyes a little and smiled at her. Lou grinned, then looked down at the table to hide her sudden tears. She stirred her muesli, then brought the spoon to her mouth. She felt sick. Would it have been better not to know? If she hadn’t broken in to her mum’s work all those months ago, this would never have happened. She had been so stupid; she should have said no to Theo when he asked her to get the drugs. And where was he now? Funny how quickly people deserted you when things got tough. She wished she could go back to that day and, instead of telling him to pull into the car park of the practice, make him take her home. Then she would never have found out. But even as she thought it, Lou knew she didn’t really mean it. She had to go through with today, because even if she’d never uncovered the truth, this secret had always been there, drifting around the house, and ever so softly slipping between them. The only way to bring them close together again, to make herself whole, was to clear those spaces by finding out the truth.
They arrived too soon. Lou wasn’t ready. They had driven without speaking; she hadn’t even complained that her dad had listened to an AM talkback show, because she knew that neither of them really cared what it was as long as it filled the silence in the car. She had thought it would take longer, thought that each moment would stretch out and she’d have plenty of time to work out what she was going to say. But the city was already behind them and they were climbing over the scarp, high into the hills.
Nadia had moved back to Western Australia just over a year ago. Lou hadn’t been to visit her aunt at all, but she knew that Zoe had. Lou had overheard her parents whispering about it, about how Nadia had moved into a run-down old house in the same street that she’d lived before, when Lou was a baby, and that Eddie had stayed in Sydney. Lou also realised that it was when Nadia moved back that the fights between her parents had started. And when she herself had started to unravel.
The car shuddered as they drove up the long dirt driveway. The single-storey house ahead of them was made of timber, surrounded by native bush. Gum trees towered over the roof, cluttering the gutters with clumps of leaves. A wooden deck surrounded the house, with a faded red hammock swaying between two of the supporting posts. Cerise blooms of bougainvillea clambered over the fences, and puffs of yellow wattle flowers littered the few steps up to the house. The deck was dulled with dust.
Her dad switched off the engine, and the car ticked while Lou sat motionless in the passenger seat. ‘Here we are.’
She nodded, then undid her seatbelt. Her dad did the same and got out of the car, then came round to her side and opened the door for her. She took a deep breath, swung out her legs and stood up.
He hugged her as they stood beside the car, looking at the house. ‘I’ll come up with you, then I’ll go for a drive,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long, I’ll just give you some time to yourselves to talk. Call me if you need me back sooner.’
Lou tried to smile at him. ‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘I love you.’
‘Me too.’
Her foot slipped a little as they trudged up towards the house. Just as they started to climb the wooden steps, the front door opened. Nadia was dressed in dark blue jeans as worn and soft as her face, looking far older than Lou remembered; but then again, it had been years since she’d seen her. Her fair hair was tied back in a ponytail with wispy grey hairs around her temples, and she held onto the door as if she might fall without its support. Lou stopped moving, unsure what to do: shake her hand, kiss her politely on the cheek, or run to her. She looked up at her dad, who put his arm around her and walked with her a step closer. As she looked back into her aunt’s eyes, she saw Nadia’s chin begin to twitch, and she no longer had a choice. She ran up the steps into her embrace.
Lou sat on the edge of the dining chair and looked around. A potbelly stove was in the centre of the space and the smell of years of woodsmoke lingered in the room. There was no television. In one corner of the room were two wicker couches on either side of a wooden coffee table. Beside one of the couches was a tall bookcase, the old-fashioned type with locked glass doors at the top. It was crammed with books, horizontal stacks piled on top of the vertical rows. Two frayed rugs covered the floorboards: one under the coffee table, one under the dining table where Lou now sat. Nadia fussed behind her in the kitchen, which was small, with wooden cupboards. Utensils, blackened around the edges, dangled from a row of hooks above the old oven.
Nadia walked over and put two mismatched side plates down on the dining table, then returned with a white teapot and two mugs. ‘I made a cake,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if you’d be hungry. Do you like tea? I did buy some lemonade, if you’d prefer. I didn’t know what you liked …’ She smiled sadly.
‘Tea is good, thanks.’ Lou squirmed in her seat.
Nadia was back in the kitchen now. ‘I hope it tastes OK, the cake. I just iced it but I think it was still a bit warm so I’m praying it hasn’t run too much. Hopefully it still tastes nice, anyway. It’s lemon. From the garden. I always have so many lemons and limes and I don’t know what to do with them all. When your cousins …’ She paused. ‘When Harry and the girls were little, I used to make them homemade lemonade. But now … it’s not the same on my own. But I like the quiet, you know. Your uncle Eddie, he needs to be in the city for work. That’s why he stayed in Sydney, he’ll visit when he can …’ She looked out the window.
Lou nodded. ‘I’m sure the icing will be fine.’
Nadia brought the cake over on a plate, then sat down opposite Lou. ‘Would you like some?’
‘Please.’ The last thing she wanted was cake, but she could see how hard Nadia was trying.
Lou watched her cut a big slice. She knew she wouldn’t be able to eat it; her mouth was dry. She watched Nadia’s hand as she gripped the knife, then looked down at her own, searching for similarities, shared imperfections. The way Nadia frowned as she tried to lift the slice of cake onto the small plate without dropping crumbs was the way she herself frowned. How could she not have noticed it before? Because her parents had kept her away from Nadia so she couldn’t work out the truth. As her anger resurfaced, although she was no longer sure who she should be furious at, Lou twirled her ankle then tapped her foot, her ballet flat wiggling. How dare they all keep this from her?
‘Here.’ Nadia slid the plate towards Lou, then cut herself a slice. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
‘Me too.’
‘Do you remember our old house?’ Nadia said suddenly.
‘No,’ mumbled Lou.
‘No. You wouldn’t. It was close to here.’ Nadia gazed at Lou with sad eyes. ‘Louise. I never wanted it to be like this, you know?’
Lou shrugged. ‘It’s not your fault. Mum never wanted me to see you.’
Nadia shook her head slowly, then took a small piece of cake from her plate with her fingers and stared at it. ‘It was hard. Hard for us all.’ She suddenly raised her head. ‘I’ve got something for you.’
Nadia stood up again, disappeared briefly down the hallway, then came back with a while muslin bag, tied with a ribbon at the top. ‘Here,’ she said, then sat down again.
Lou looked at the bag, then untied the ribbon and looked inside. There was a solid silver chain-link bracelet, laden with charms. Lou frowned, and looked up at Nadia.
‘On your first Christmas, I don’t know if you still have it, but I gave you a present, a bracelet with a charm on it.’
Lou nodded, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Yes, it’s always been in my mum’s – Zoe’s – jewellery box. It’s too small for me now, though.’
Nadia smiled. ‘It would be. You were so tiny then, I got the smallest bracelet I could. I bought you a new charm every Christmas; there are another sixteen here. I was worried I’d lose them so I put them all on a new bracelet for you. I should have sent them to your mum and dad every year, but …’ Her voice trailed off.
Lou’s eyes filled with tears as she handled the heavy, cool charms. A teddy bear, a horse, a little house with a door that opened. She spoke in a hoarse whisper as Nadia helped her fasten the bracelet around her wrist. ‘Did Mum tell you not to contact me?’
Nadia’s voice cracked. ‘No, no. This wasn’t your mum’s fault. She tried to keep me involved, sent me pictures and videos of you, said I could come and visit you. It was my fault.’
Lou spoke loudly now. ‘Don’t defend her. She should have told me. I heard her, she told Dad that she wished they’d never done it, that they’d never had me.’
‘Oh, Louise.’ Nadia leaned over the table and put her hand on Lou’s. ‘She didn’t mean that. I’m absolutely certain she didn’t mean that. This … situation has been so hard on us all. There are so many things I regret – and I’m sure your mum feels the same – but you are not one of them! We could have done so many things differently, not been so naive. I … I thought I could just detach myself from you, think of you as my niece, myself as a babysitter. But as soon as I was pregnant, that was it. I just couldn’t stop myself thinking of you as anything but my child. The day I had to hand you over …’ She sat back again, held her hands palm to palm, then shook her head. ‘That was the most devastating moment of my life. Letting you go.’
Lou looked up to the ceiling and tried to blink back her tears. ‘Then why? Why did you? I hear you say that but all I know is that you just shut yourself off from me. I saw the court order – you had the chance to see me, for us to have some kind of relationship – the court said we could spend weekends and holidays together, I could have known you, known Charlotte and Violet and Harry instead of having no one.’ She looked back at Nadia, into eyes fringed by fair lashes like her own. ‘But you didn’t. You gave me up again and I don’t understand why!’
‘I didn’t want to!’
‘But you did! You ran off to Singapore and never came back! You had me, then you let me go, then you had me again and then you did it all over again! No wonder Mum and Dad hate you! You shouldn’t have done this to me, to us!’ Lou stood up and gripped the edge of the table, still looking at Nadia. ‘You have no idea, do you, no idea what you did to me.’
‘Oh, Louise, you were just a baby …’
Lou gritted her teeth. Did she really not understand? ‘I don’t even know why I came here!’
‘Louise —’
Lou’s face was streaming with tears now. ‘Did you think that we could just pick up where we left off?’
‘I didn’t … You were the one who wanted to see me! I would never have barged in and expected anything from you, I would never have disrupted your life like that if you —’ Nadia’s face was full of panic, and Lou could see how desperate she was to explain, but Lou didn’t understand.
‘So it’s my fault?’
Nadia stood up and came round towards her. ‘No, no, of course not, that’s not —’
‘Don’t come near me!’ Lou screamed. She could barely breathe; her chest was tight and she felt the familiar tingle around her mouth and in her fingers that told her she needed to get away, to calm down. Nadia’s face loomed, distorted, and the space around it blurred. All Lou could hear now was the sound of her own blood whooshing in her ears, and the air whistling into her lungs and rushing out again too quickly. The room began to spin. She staggered backwards a few steps, then turned around and wrenched open the front door. She had to get out of here, away from the lies and the self-pity. She heard Nadia shouting, ‘Louise! Come back! Where are you going?’
Lou jumped down from the deck; without thinking about what she was doing, she ran down the driveway, avoiding the fallen branches and tree roots that jutted into her path. Nadia was still calling behind her, but Lou wasn’t listening any more. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, trying to clear the tears that continued to pour out. At the end of the driveway she turned right, away from the direction her dad had driven them from the city. Where had he gone? They had all passed her around like a doll, a toy, pushed her and pulled her, and they were still doing it, even now. Lou kept running, though her calves and hamstrings burned on the steep road. Her flat shoes flapped and threatened to slip off as she ran. When she reached the top of the hill, she turned a corner and saw a clearing in the bush ahead of her. She stopped, gasping for breath.
She knew where she was. It was the place from the photo. Mundaring Weir. The dam where the body on the news was found, floating in the still, calm water.
Trying to catch her breath, she began walking towards the lookout on the hairpin bend ahead of her, listening to the loose dirt grinding under her shoes, the cries of the birds around her, and the vast, watery silence ahead. She reached the lookout and leaned on the railing. Below her, the water was still, and it stretched out across and along the valley. The massive concrete wall of the dam seemed much bigger than in the images she’d seen. The water level was low; the sheer wall, stained with water levels from years before, dropped away into the lake. Lou thought about that man, the one whose body was found here, wondered what he was thinking before he fell. Or jumped. She looked along the length of the dam wall, the round white building in the centre, and the flimsy fence on either side.
She turned and walked quickly away from the lookout, down some steps and onto the path that formed the top of the wall, the same path that she’d been on with Nadia in the photo. Where was the exact spot that it had been taken? It seemed important to find it. She kept moving, looking around for something she recognised. She had stared at the photo for so long that it was etched in her mind, impossible to forget.
‘Louise!’ The cry echoed around her in the still air. The birdsong paused as her own name repeated and faded in the vast hollow of the dam. Now she felt it again. The memory of being here.
‘Louise!’
Lou looked back. Nadia was running along the path towards her, and behind Nadia was Lachlan. Nadia must have called him as she ran after Lou.
‘Go away!’ she yelled. ‘Just leave me alone!’
‘Come back. Please, Louise, just stop, stay right there!’
Lou covered her face with her hands and screamed. Why did they do this to her? What did Nadia care? She hadn’t cared enough before, she had just disappeared with her other kids, her other family, and forgotten about her. And her dad, he was no better. Lying to her, along with the woman who called herself Mum, who hadn’t even bothered to come out here with them and stand up to Nadia and fight for her daughter. She’d had it, with all of them. With her friends. With Ross and counselling. This wasn’t her fault. They had done this to her. They all said that everything they had done had been for her, for Lou. But that wasn’t how it had started. At the beginning, she was just an idea, a whisper of an imagined person. A dream. When did her story even begin? Her story began not at her birth, not even at her conception, but before that, at a moment of grief, at the agony of loss. And what was ever in it for Nadia? People didn’t do things out of altruism, not really. People were selfish, Lou knew that. Nothing they ever did was completely about someone else, never mind an unborn child: that was just something people told themselves so they wouldn’t have to admit their real reasons. Even saints did things because, ultimately, they wanted to end up in heaven. Nadia did it to prove something, to gain something. To be a martyr.
Lou felt the sun beating down on her shoulders, burning her skin, but she didn’t move. Were there other children like her, children who had been relinquished? Children believing the myths that their parents had told them, stories trotted out so often that they became true? The whole lot of them – Zoe, Lachlan, Nadia, Eddie – had tricked themselves, tricked her, because it made it that bit easier. The truth, the truth that it was never about her, was brushed aside, like tucking back a hair that tickles your eye, until eventually you do it by sheer habit alone. Well, Lou had had enough of their lies.
She could no longer hear Nadia and her dad shouting, just her own sobs as she gripped the metal fence and thought about how it would feel to just fall down, down, down …