Through the window of the cubby house, I saw the tree shimmer its leaves. Megan and I were baking a pretend cake in a cooker made from a cardboard box. We slid a bowl of hot water in it to bake the mixture of flour, water and milk we had stirred together.
‘Do you know what?’ The movement of the tree prompted me to want to tell Megan about my dad.
‘No what?’ asked Megan.
‘I . . . um.’ Then I remembered the promise I’d made with my mother to keep the tree a secret. I so wanted to tell Megan. It only seemed right. We told each other everything.
I dived out through the cubby door with a saucepan. ‘I’m getting more water,’ I said, as I sped down the cracked path to the laundry.
It wasn’t fair not to tell Megan, but somehow I had to find the strength to swallow my secret. I didn’t trust myself, so I trotted back up the path with the saucepan of hot water and said: ‘I’ve got so many spellings to learn,’ and I ran.
Megan was calling after me, but I kept running. I jumped through the fence, not stopping until I got to the top step where I took one last look at the umbrella of tree that covered our house. Megan was still calling to me, but I didn’t reply. I crashed into the kitchen to find the three boys at the kitchen table, their heads bowed.
‘I had to tell them,’ my mother said.
I dropped into a chair, out of breath. I couldn’t believe it. I’d just left my best friend in the most awkward way so as not to betray our secret and my mother had blabbed, just like that.
She must have seen my fury.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
I sat beside Gerard who seemed unaffected by the news. Edward had slumped into a silence similar to James’s normal state, and James was, for the first time since the day at the graveyard, crying.
‘They had to know,’ my mother said on her way to the sink.
That night we were instructed to behave as normal, kiss our little brother goodnight, then when he had gone to sleep we were to assemble at the back door and wait till dark, then take turns climbing the tree. But the boys had no desire to be involved in the venture. Edward sat in his alcove by the back door, occasionally looking up from his study, and James, who also declined the suggestion of climbing the tree, preferred to stay sitting on the top step. I joined him there and we waited for our mother, listening for sounds of her interchange with the night.
The evening wore on and the rise and fall of the cicadas buzz eventually died away and in the interim before the tree frogs began, we slumped, bored with waiting but too nervous to go to bed without her. James leant against the railing of the stairs and I fell back against the weatherboards of the house. I picked at the flaking paint wondering if she would ever return. I began to think she had gone to join our father, when I heard a faint snuffling. I stood to see if I could site myself in a better position to see what was going on.
Edward was inside pouring himself another rum. The lock on the mirrored door of the drinks cabinet clicked shut. He scraped his chair back towards his desk and hid his rum and coke behind his physics book.
It became obvious once the tree frogs symphony had reached its crescendo and died away and the fruit bats took off from the mango tree by the back fence that our mother wasn’t coming in. Edward packed away his books and we all went to bed leaving the back door open.
Much later I heard her sneaking up the stairs. There were her foot steps heavy down the hall, not the same light gait from the evening before. There was a density in her step and the way she fell on to the bed, an emptiness and something more terrible than all the nights I had heard her sobbing, a screaming silence. I stood in her doorway.
‘This is worse, much worse.’ She rolled to face me. ‘I remember now what I’ve lost.’
Her words jarred, they made me sad. I wondered when she would be able to be our mother again.
‘I miss him more now than I did before,’ she said.
But it didn’t stop her climbing the tree most nights and hassling him. Sometimes the commotion coming from the top of the tree was as noisy as a flock of bickering galahs. The tree would sway with their squabbling on those nights. Other times it felt frozen with restlessness and, occasionally, every so often, it would buzz with a joy. On those nights I was pleased for her, but resentful because her occupancy of the tree stopped me from visiting my father. I missed him and could spend days locked in my own thoughts with him, but I felt my mother needed to visit him more than I did.