Darcy heard tyres on the gravel the afternoon Fin first arrived in Mount Eliza; a taxi edging up the drive. He watched through the sitting-room window, from between the high-backed chairs, as a girl emerged in an African print dress. Darcy recognised the woman she was with from photos—Aunt Merran, his mother’s younger sister, the one who’d gone back to live on the orange grove near Montecito, somewhere in California, where Darcy’s mother grew up.
Out on the drive, where the gumnuts fell on the gravel and you could smell the eucalyptus, Aunt Merran gave Darcy’s father a quick peck on the cheek, but his father didn’t move his face towards it. The girl observed Darcy in the window, a frozen moment, his feet stuck to the carpet. She looked like him, but her ears were pierced with glinting silver studs—like a gypsy, his mother would have said, but luckily she wasn’t home, just the girl presenting his father with a small wooden carving from the pocket of her dress. A gift received awkwardly, his father glancing back at the window, his free hand around the back of his neck as he saw Darcy watching, squinting through the glare.
Aunt Merran kissed the girl’s hair and jumped back in the taxi before his father could stop her. She waved through the back window as the girl stood stunned and then came to life, chasing the car to the gate. Darcy’s handsome flummoxed father hurried behind her as the taxi turned onto Baden Powell Drive. His father’s arm about the girl and then he was kneeling, consoling her, his big hands on her small shoulders like calipers, holding her there.
Aunt Merran’s taxi was gone, back to Humphries Road, towards Frankston and the suburbs, a knapsack left in the gravel like a small dead animal. While his father comforted the girl near the gate, Darcy crept out and collected it. The smell was stale and sweet. A pair of sandshoes, washed so the dust had yellowed them, a sweatshirt that had Banana Slugs written across it in yellow and a T-shirt that said Big Sur. In the front pocket was a blue American passport with an eagle in the coat of arms. Los Angeles Passport Agency and a photo of the girl with her hair loose. Finola Bright, the same last name as Darcy’s. Born 13 June 1960. A year before him. She was eleven and he was ten. He blinked to himself as the fact of it crystallised in him. Their mothers were sisters. Their father was the same.
As Darcy looked up, he saw the girl’s narrow shape at the end of the drive beside his crouching father. The sun was getting red as it lowered in the gum trees behind them. A secret had been delivered.