On Wednesday he emerged from his bedroom at ten, managing somehow to have slept for eleven hours. When he entered the lounge room, he saw through the open bench his mother was at the kitchen sink, washing up plates. The gloves she wore were pink like irritated skin. He rubbed his face with his hands.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Sleep well?’
He nodded. His mother shook bubbles from the dishes and stacked them in the rack. He still hadn’t told his mother about Kirsten. But his mother had known Kirsten and she would have to be told.
‘Mum, there’s something you should know.’
His mother turned around slowly and looked at him and for a moment, as her gaze struck his, he had the impression that she thought he was about to accuse her of something. He shifted his eyes to the floorboards; they were old and in places the varnish was gone and soft, raw wood remained. His father’s bare feet had touched that wood, he thought sadly, before he looked back up at his mother. There were traces of his father everywhere in this house, in this city.
On the calendar his mother kept on the fridge, he saw that it was already the second week of February and his return flight was at the end of the week. The days were moving impossibly quickly and he felt he’d achieved nothing since he came back.
He took a deep breath before he spoke.
‘Do you remember Kirsten Rothwell? Had you been in touch with her recently?’ He wasn’t sure why, but when they were together his mother befriended Kirsten; the two of them talked on the telephone, sometimes they met for coffee. His mother never spoke about Kirsten to him, but every time they met in his absence he felt slighted.
‘No, I haven’t heard from Kirsten in years. Not since before you left for Berlin. Why?’
‘She disappeared. Near Lake George. They think she may have drowned.’
‘Oh my god,’ his mother said and covered her mouth with a gloved hand. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she looked at him with a different set of eyes. ‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know very much about it. Stewart sent me an email to tell me when I was in Berlin.’
‘God, that’s just—it’s terrible,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is.’ He was aware of the inadequacy of his own words.
His mother’s body slumped. ‘So is this why you’ve come back? Is it to do with Kirsten?’
He didn’t want to answer her. He nodded and worried he might cry. She turned back around and continued with the dishes. In her reflection in the window, he could see her lips pressed firmly together. The mention of death had this effect on her. They could not speak of death in this house without it being a reference to the one that defined them.
He turned to go back to his bedroom then stopped. He was back in Sydney to confront the truth about Kirsten but suddenly he felt compelled to confront other truths too. Another person he had loved had died and now a need to know everything rose in him.
How many times, as a boy, had he been on the verge of asking? At night when they’d finished their evening meals, in the car after school or on the way to his aunt’s house in the mountains. He’d look away from her and resolve to ask, but then when he turned back towards her he wouldn’t say a word. He was too aware that he might hurt her. Somehow, he’d always lacked the courage, placing her need for silence above his own need for knowledge.
‘Mum,’ he said now.
She turned around.
‘How did he die?’ Speaking the words, he felt as though he was pushing through a false wall.
She looked up at him, her face turned smooth and white. ‘You mean your father?’
‘Yes, I mean Dad.’
‘I never told you?’ she said softly, shaking her head, as though unable to believe this oversight. Her features looked heavy. She removed her gloves and moved closer to him.
‘It was an aneurysm. In his brain.’
‘I’d always assumed it was a heart attack.’ He couldn’t believe that he’d lived under that misapprehension for the past twenty-five years. All his life he’d felt ashamed for not knowing and now he felt embarrassed for not having asked sooner.
‘Oh, Andrew. I’m sorry. It was so difficult for me to talk about it. Most of the time I felt I was barely coping myself.’ His mother was staring at the wall as she spoke.
She moved to the couch and sat down. ‘Maybe we should talk about it now? I know it was a long time ago, but do you think it would be useful?’ She looked tired. His mother’s words seemed to be floating, light and full of air, drifting towards him like paper lanterns.
His father had died twenty-five years ago and these were the first words she’d spoken to him about it. She opened her mouth to speak again and an impulse passed through him, a need to be away from her.
‘I should have been more open with you. I worry now. You were such a quiet child, afterwards.’ Her voice was soft. ‘It was my fault, the way you were. I know you felt like you never fitted in. You were so lonely. So often I think about you as a teenager and I worry that I did that to you.’
Her words settled in his bones, sharp and new like fishing hooks. What disturbed him wasn’t this information about the way his father had died, so much as that he had never known the truth of it and he felt ashamed for never having had the courage to ask. He could tell from the way his mother looked at him that she was seeking his forgiveness. But he couldn’t forgive her; he left the lounge room and walked down the hallway and out into the day.
Outside, walking the streets, he knew that to other people he looked like a man on the cusp of middle age, but inside he still felt small and folded up inside himself like a young boy.