He’d found Aunty Nic wide-awake on the spare bed. It was a miracle she’d made it there without another serious accident. He nearly stacked it trying to get across to help her up, then again fleeing when she barked at him that she could move on her own, thank you very much.
True to her word, she made her own way to the kitchen when the food arrived. She was sulky at first, refusing to look at him, shrugging or grunting when he offered her a drink or bread or salad. Eventually, though, the spag bol worked its magic and she began to answer his questions with more than one-word answers. He learnt that the pain was better than yesterday, that she had slept half the day or more and that her phone was missing. Her tone suggested that he might have something to do with its disappearance; he told her he had no idea, promised to find it for her after dinner.
‘Weird thing happened today,’ he said, as he was clearing the plates. ‘Nearly got hit by a bus. Fella pulled me back just in time.’
‘Will! God! Where were you? You all right?’
‘Yeah, good now. I need to confess something, though.’ He kept his back to her—cowardly, he supposed, but he didn’t know how else to do it. ‘I was spaced out because I’ve, um, I’ve been knocking off your tablets. The Endone. Had this killer toothache and couldn’t afford to get it looked at. So I’ve been—’
‘Why didn’t you just ask, for goodness sake? I would’ve given you some. Would’ve paid for the damn dentist.’
‘Yeah, that’s the other thing. You did pay. I mean, I used your Visa. Emergency dentist costs a shit ton. I’m really sorry. I’m gonna pay you back soon as I get another job. Or sooner if you need the money. I can call Mum, ask her to transfer it.’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s fine. I’m happy to pay for my nephew to not be in excruciating pain! I just wish you’d asked me. I don’t understand why you felt you had to sneak around. You know I would’ve helped.’
He wished Lena was here to appreciate his amazing self-control in this moment. No laughing in disbelief. No: Are you fucking kidding me? Not even a sarcastic smile, though that was as much to do with the post-dentist ache in his mouth as it was the desire not to let Aunty Nic know how ridiculous she sounded.
‘Didn’t want to bother you,’ he said, filling the sink with water and dish soap.
‘Haven’t I always treated you and Lena like my own kids?’ Aunty Nic’s voice broke like a thirteen-year-old boy’s. ‘Who makes their own kids pay back money for a dentist’s bill, for god’s sake?’ Will turned off the tap, leant against the kitchen counter. She
had always treated him and Lena like her own. Dropped everything to mind them, stepped forward with the cash if there was a school excursion Mum and Dad couldn’t afford, always took the time to crouch or sit at their level and hear their winding, pointless stories or mediate their petty fights. Except.
Maybe the strong gear he’d been taking was still in him because he couldn’t stop himself from saying it. ‘You know, I used to imagine moving in here with you.’
‘I know. You kids used to say it all the time. Why can’t we live with Aunty Nic? No wonder Michelle’d get the shits.’
‘Nah, I mean later. When I was in prison. After Mum moved. I thought about it a lot. But you never came to see me or rang or anything. Figured you didn’t want much to do with me.’ Will plunged his hands into the hot suds, washed their dinner plates and cutlery. Dried each item, put it away.
Finally, her voice small and scared behind him: ‘You have to know, Will, that I’m not a very strong person. And that’s what you needed.’
He turned, saw she was crying silently, said it anyway: ‘I needed whatever kind of person I could get.’
‘If I thought about you, I couldn’t bear it. So I stopped.’
‘You didn’t stop thinking about Lena when she went away.’ He hated how whiny his voice was. Might as well have been five years old, complaining that Lena always got first pick of the iceblocks.
‘That was different. Your mum took her away and it hurt. I missed her, but I knew she was okay. I knew she was safe. Like you and your little ones, Will. Those kids, I know you miss ’em, but they’ve got their mum and their dad and that. They’ll be all right and so you can … can … You can think about them without …’ She threw her hands up, grimaced, stopped the motion short of a full arc.
‘It’s okay.’ He was afraid she’d burst a stitch. ‘Forget it. It’s okay.’
‘It’s not. I should’ve … I’m not good in a crisis. Never know the right way to help.’
‘You do, though. You did.’ He took a breath, sat across from her. ‘Remember the story we used to love, me and Lena? The one about you getting suspended from school?’
Flicker of a smile. ‘You’d beg for that one. Funny kids.’
‘We’d beg for it the way Haymish and Taylah beg to rewatch Moana. You were our hero, Aunty Nic. You were who we wanted to be when we grew up.’
‘Pity my heroism peaked at twelve.’
‘Bullshit. You stuck up for us all the time when we were kids. Remember the nit incident?’
There was a head lice outbreak in fourth grade, and when the teacher lectured the class about it she stood behind Will and said that long, dirty, messy hair made a perfect nest for nits. His hair was down below his collar because he wanted it to be like his Dad’s, and it was dirty and messy because he refused to wash or brush it more than once a week, but he didn’t have nits and when he told Mum and Aunty Nic what happened they went bananas. Yelling and slamming fists. Mum started writing an angry letter but then Aunty Nic had the idea to borrow a nurse’s uniform from a work friend’s sister and march up to the school herself. And she did it! Mum called the school, said her sister the nurse had kindly offered to do a factual presentation on head lice and the principal let her. Aunty Nic up there all prim and proper, explaining how nits love shiny, clean hair and then, with the teacher’s help, she inspected all the heads and found nits in nearly half and none of them were Will’s.
‘That was your mum, egging me on. Never would’ve had the guts otherwise.’
‘Only time the two of you got along was when you were defending me or Leen. But listen, point is, you didn’t have to do that stuff but you did. Do you remember the other day, what you said to me about Haymish? How he’d always remember I stuck up for him? That’s me and Leen. We always knew you’d have our back.’
Aunty Nic was red in the cheeks, her eyes streaming. ‘That was easy stuff, though. When things got really hard I couldn’t deal with it. I let you down.’
‘Yeah, you did.’ Tempting to leave it at that, leave her to feel the ache of it. But Lena. ‘Now we’ve got something else really hard to deal with and I need you to do better this time. Need you to be the Aunty Nic we worshipped as kids, okay?’
‘Will, please. Please don’t touch Lena’s room. The spare room. Please, it’ll be the end of me. You can’t.’
‘No, that’s—we can talk about that later. Right now, I need your help with a different hard thing. With Lena.’
She swiped at her eyes. ‘Your sister can look after herself.’
‘I don’t know if she can. She’s in trouble.’
Aunty Nic flicked her gaze at him, the rest of her stock-still. ‘Tell me.’
It was hard to know how, what language to use. He wasn’t sure if she knew about internet porn or file-sharing sites or any of it. But after a couple of awkward, euphemism-loaded sentences she interrupted with a firm hand in the air.
‘Enough. I get it. The turd taped them doing it and put it online for other turds to share.’
‘I don’t think you … It’s really bad. Like … I don’t know how to describe to you—’
‘You didn’t watch it, did you?’
‘I skipped through it. Fast. I needed to know what was on there so I could …’
‘So you could what?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Does she know you know?’
‘If she’s checking her messages she does, but … God. I keep thinking about how glued to her phone she’s been this last week. Pissed me off how much she was staring and poking at the thing.’
‘Does your mum know?’
‘Nah. I mean, I’d have heard from her if she did. She can’t find out, Aunty Nic. That’s the one thing I’m sure about.’
‘It’s not up to you. It’s up to Lena.’
‘I don’t particularly trust her judgement right now, though. If it was any good she wouldn’t be in this situation.’
‘Bad judgement, you reckon?’ Too slow, too calm. Shit. ‘What, the decision to have sex with a boy she liked?’
‘Come on, Aunty Nic. She let herself get filmed. Not real smart, you have to admit.’
‘Tell me, Will. Last time you got busy, did you check the room for recording devices first?’
Will pressed his palms together, trying to find the right way to say it. ‘Girls need to be more careful about this stuff. I’m not saying it’s fair, but it’s reality. She should’ve known better.’
Aunty Nic was quiet for an alarming amount of time. Will refilled her lemonade, got himself a glass of water from the tap, sat back down and she still hadn’t spoken. He opened his mouth to ask if she wanted to lie down again but she cut in before he could speak.
‘I don’t disagree she should have known better. The repulsive bullshit those college boys pull has been in the news on and off for a month. If I knew about it there’s no way she wouldn’t have. I can’t imagine what she was thinking, hooking up with one of those grubs. But the thing about Lena is …’ Another deep, long breath. ‘The thing about Lena is that she expects the best from people, expects they’ll be as up-front and generous as she is. She thinks well of people and opens herself to them and, and, it just sucks, doesn’t it?’ Her voice broke again. ‘This world where someone like her has to be guarded and suspicious and, and, and make these small scared choices so as not to be brutalised.’
‘Have some more lemonade. It’s important you stay hydrated.’ He didn’t know if that was true, specifically, but it was never a bad idea.
She sipped, breathed, settled more calmly in her chair. ‘Do you remember when you were little and you came home from a sleepover at a mate’s place carrying on about the glow-in-the-dark stars on his bedroom ceiling?’
‘Yeah. Ronnie. You turned the lights out to sleep and it was like there was open sky above.’
‘Yeah. And you remember that almost a year later you climbed into bed and your mum turned off your light and there they were, all those stars shining away?’
Of course he remembered. When had he ever, ever, ever felt joyful surprise like that before or since?
‘You know it was your sister did that. Saved all of her car-washing money since you told her about the stickers. Finally had enough to buy two packets, because one wouldn’t give a flash enough result. Spent hours sticking those tiny stars up, crawling back down the ladder and pushing it a few centimetres before climbing back up, over and over and over again, refusing to stop for a break because she might not finish before you were home from cricket and she was determined to give you the full, glorious surprise of the night sky in your room.’
‘I know. She did well. She did.’
‘Your face when you saw it, and hers seeing yours—brighter than all the stars that had ever shone. That’s what your mum told me. Brighter than all the stars, the two of you that night.’
‘She was a good little sister.’
‘And you were a good older brother. You were. Don’t give me that look.’
‘Tell that to her arm.’
‘A stupid accident. And it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad if your bloody father had got her stitched up properly.’
Will’s stomach lurched. ‘Wait, what are you saying?’
‘That damn scar. Your dad was at the medical centre with her and the doctor said it didn’t need stitches even though it clearly bloody did. And your dad—not having a go, truly, I know he loved you both to pieces—but he wasn’t good at talking to people in authority, standing up to them. He knew Lena needed stitches but the doctor said those stupid damn sticky butterfly clips would do the job and Joe didn’t argue, took her home with a great bloody crevasse in her arm, useless little stickers pulling the edges together. If they’d sutured it like they should’ve, all you’d see now is a tiny neat trail, like an old bit of spiderweb or something.’
‘I didn’t know.’ Made horrible sense. Dad so scared of doctors he didn’t go see one until his body was already swarming with cancers. All his comments about Mum being a firebrand and a troublemaker, about her insistence on arguing over incorrect bills and parking fines and people pushing in queues. Someone had to do it. Pity for Lena Mum’d been at work when Will slammed the stupid glass door that day.
‘Mum would know what to do with this situation, I think. She would. But it’d gut her.’
Aunty Nic sighed, looked pretty gutted herself. ‘When Lena comes back,’ she said, ‘we’ll find out what’s what, sort it out.’
‘She’s not going to want to talk about it.’
‘No, but that’s too bad. She’s going to have to whether she wants to or not.’
Will raised his eyebrows and Aunty Nic raised hers back. ‘That’s what you two said about chucking all my stuff out, wasn’t it?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Well, there you go.’
‘It wasn’t right, though. You were devastated.’
‘I was. Am. You understand that, Will? It’s all still …’ Aunty Nic inhaled, tilted her head from side to side, exhaled. ‘So let’s try to handle this situation a little better, hey? We’ll talk to her, listen, not decide we know what’s best and go behind her back? Yeah?’
Will nodded. Felt hot shame at what they’d done to her.
‘And just for the record,’ she said, ‘I would have loved you to move in here after you got out. Entirely my fault you didn’t know that. My fault, my loss.’
‘It doesn’t matter now, Aunty Nic. It’s in the past.’
‘Maybe, but I’m feeling it in the now so it needs to be said. I would have loved having you here and even with everything that’s … Even with everything, I’m glad you’re here now.’
Hot shame surging but something else, too. A shadow of hope, cool and kind.