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“About bloody time!” Hector’s face assumed a mask like quality as he processed his relief at Leilah’s reappearance. His tone sounded harsh and jarring. His bare feet rested on the low coffee table, the heels hard and calloused from spending his life on his feet. The television played in the background, snowstorm news impossible to follow.
Leilah shrugged in response, pressing his buttons for no apparent reason. “You know where I was.” She bent to remove her Roman sandals, noticing the blisters from the uphill walk.
“I know where I didn’t want you.” Eyes like gimlets, he fixed a hard gaze on her face. “You need to start towing the line, my girl. There are things you don’t know.”
Leilah huffed out a breath and tossed her hair. The graze and bald patch reminded her of the walk upstream. Inside, she cringed, not wanting to go again after dark, but knowing she had to. Yet another voice in her head warred with the notion of letting things take their course. Should she care if Hector went to prison for murder? She was leaving anyway. He’d spent her lifetime blaming her for her mother’s death, denying love as an act of will. It would serve him right to find himself physically incarcerated when he’d exacted that same fate on his daughter emotionally.
Mari’s soft voice came from the laundry and Leilah started. “Kai’s in the oven, kōtiro. Beef stew.” She appeared in the doorway, her hair mussed and her gentle nature pouring calm on the brewing argument. The jerk of her head took in Leilah’s dishevelled clothes. “Want me to wash those?” she asked, her brow puckering at the bits of twig and fern attached to the tartan skirt.
Leilah forced a smile onto her lips and shook her head. “It won’t dry before school tomorrow, thanks Mari. I’ll pick the bits out. We moved Horse’s mares into the bottom paddock but Red’s going crazy again.”
Mari nodded and pursed her lips. “It’s a bad do,” she breathed. “Me and your pa just talked about it. Horse is an idiot, but he wouldn’t kill some kid. The man don’t have it in him.”
Hector cleared his throat as though denying his complicity in any such conversation. It was no secret the men disliked each other. The real intrigue was why. Leilah opened her mouth to ask, but the scent of the stew pulled a rumble from her stomach and she faced her hunger, satiating it with a large bowl eaten by herself at the kitchen counter. It didn’t seem to matter that the raid involved drugs and not murder. The adults thought they knew everything.
Hector didn’t speak to her again and she retreated to her bedroom with the school bag he’d rescued. Vaughan’s sat by the front door like a crumpled sack, the books sagging inside the frayed cloth. Hector had gathered everything by accident and shown his displeasure by abandoning the boy’s on the doormat, as though even touching it contaminated him somehow. “Foolish old man,” Leilah breathed to herself. “I bet you won’t even miss me.”
Mari hung the washing on the line under the car port attached to the side of the house. Leilah heard her scratching around in the peg basket and felt a stab of guilt. The woman returned day after day, performing a wife’s tasks without thanks or appreciation. She doubted Hector even noticed or cared. Mari would miss her and it produced a tug of regret.
When Mari appeared in her bedroom doorway, Leilah stood and offered her a hug filled with genuine affection. “I love you, Mari,” she said, pulling the frail body close. “I couldn’t manage without you.”
Mari’s sniff of appreciation proved reward enough and she patted Leilah’s back. “Your mama was my best friend,” she whispered. “It’s my pleasure to help raise her baby.”
Leilah swallowed and let the moment of discomfort pass as the woman in the wedding photo threatened to become real. She couldn’t allow that. The energy needed to process such taxing emotional losses would prove better spent elsewhere. Like in saving her ungrateful father. And Horse. Mari left with a cheerful wave at the big man who barely nodded in return. Leilah scribbled her maths homework into the book, running out of pages and having to write on the back cover. She retrieved Vaughan’s bag without speaking to her father and faked his handwriting on maths and science, perfecting his strange, left handed looped scrawl after the second page.
“Down the bed,” Hector ordered, appearing in Leilah’s doorway. His looming shape occupied the whole space and he looked tired and careworn, a new greyness tinting his skin. “It’s late.” Up before dawn to check the beef herd on the mountain, he would spend his days training horses. He got paid well, but only when he presented the completed article of an obedient horse unlikely to throw its rider. However dire the rider may prove. In between, they lived hand to mouth, reliant on Mari’s leftovers from the cafe and whatever Hector could grow in the scorched earth of the vegetable garden.
Leilah winced. “I forgot to water the silver-beet.” She pushed the books aside on the bed and rose. “I’ll do it now.”
Hector frowned and shook his head. “I’ve locked up, girl. Do it before school tomorrow.”
“It’s fine. I don’t want to forget.” She waited for him to step back and then escaped into the hall, sensing his need to say more. She felt his gaze on her back as she turned into the laundry, digging her trainers from beside Hector’s boots on the shelf.
The outside door clicked behind her and Leilah heaved a sigh of relief. The brass tap squeaked as she loosened it and she cursed as the hose pipe filled and sprayed her with cold water. It writhed like a snake in distress, soaking her further as she launched to catch its spitting head. The electric pump whirred in its wooden shed near the water tank, drawing out a commodity more precious than gold for rural dwellers. The vegetables bowed beneath the jet, soaking the liquid into wilted leaves and beginning the healing process.
Leilah shut off the tap and twisted the end of the hose pipe to block the valve, not wanting to repeat her unwanted shower. She checked the washing in the car port, finding it still damp as it swayed in a light breeze running off the mountain. Hector’s old truck sat by the rusty barn, a hulking shadow under the moonlight and the keys likely left in the ignition. She heard her father clattering around in his bedroom, the sounds he made echoing off the plasterboard walls with a dull thud. Leilah listened as he settled in the double bed alone and experienced a moment of sadness on his behalf. He’d loved her mother, the lonely winter evenings a testament to her irreplaceable spirit. Leilah had been available, a walking incarnation of his wife, yet he chose not to look, not to hold, not to dare to love.
Reaching up to the door handle, Leilah made a deliberate noise entering the house. The floorboards creaked beneath her soles and she clattered around in her bedroom looking for a torch with working batteries. She settled on her bed and started a biology assignment, reaching the end of another lined exercise book and wondering if Hector would pitch a fit when she requested more supplies from the expensive stationary shop in town. Finding a pad of refill, she snipped a sheet to fit and fixed it to the cover with sticky tape. Then she continued her work until Hector’s snores resonated through the paper-thin walls.
Walking on tiptoe to prevent her trainers squeaking, Leilah left the house. She locked the laundry door behind her, Malcolm’s death uppermost in her desire to protect her father. The bush line hovered in the distance, dark and forbidding. Leilah shuddered, clutching the long torch in her left hand more as a weapon than an aid and not wanting to alert anyone to her presence. The moon slid in and out of cloud cover, its dark shadows representing hollow eye sockets and a clownish mouth. The welt on her neck smarted in the balmy air and she felt a flicker of gratitude that Hector and Mari hadn’t noticed it beneath the collar of her school shirt. Hector viewed all three boys as potential suitors, rushing to load his gun at the mention of their names and hyper sensitive to any potential signs of sexual activity. Mari accepted her protestations of disgust at the notion and more gullible, believed Leilah saw them as brothers. Which she did. All except one.
Hector’s dogs gave a low growl as Leilah approached their kennel and she whispered to settle them. The thought of trawling the bush alone made her flesh crawl along the ridge of her spine and she paused. “Promise you’ll be good,” she whispered, unlatching the doors one after another and holding her breath as the lithe Huntaways slipped free. Hector’s natural ability to train most creatures gave Leilah cause for gratitude as a click of her fingers brought both dogs to heel. Brindle and black, they blended into the dark landscape with just the tiniest splashes of white on muzzles and toes. Their excited pants and the way they dropped their noses into the grass gave her cause for comfort. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling less alone.
The cattle in the uppermost paddock stirred and moved away as they scented the dogs. “No, Patch,” Leilah whispered. “We’re not moving them.” The bitch’s soulful brown eyes glinted up at her in confusion, the tan smudges over her brows drawing into a frown. “I know,” Leilah agreed. “Why walk through a beef herd if you’re not rounding them up? I suppose it seems daft to you, doesn’t it?” Patch gave a sniff of disdain, followed by a snort of irritation as the younger male dog mounted her from behind. Leilah batted him away with her hand.
“Moss! No!” Her angry hiss seemed to echo off the mountain and she froze and looked back towards the house. Sitting in a patch of moonlight, the peeled weatherboards seemed to gather themselves ready to drop off the rickety frame. Remembering too late the reason Hector had temporarily switched to working the dogs one at a time, Leilah winced and justified letting them run together. She couldn’t take one without the other causing a ruckus in the darkness and waking the mountain’s scattered occupants. “No humping!” she growled at the male dog and he slipped into place at her side. In the moonlight, his eyes glinted with expectation and Leilah knew she’d lose control the first opportunity he got. “Leilah strikes again,” she muttered under her breath. Her nocturnal activities so far had led to Red’s randy rampage and possible extra mouths to feed in a few months. Puppies from Patch would sell well, but only if Hector kept them long enough and found the time to train them. “I mean it!” she whispered, tapping the top of Moss’ silken head.
At the final fence into the bush, Leilah took a huge breath and steeled herself for the scary search. The dogs bounced next to her, skittish and excitable. They scrabbled underneath the bottom rung and left her to clamber over, bounding off ahead before looking back in glittery eyed anticipation. “Here goes nothing,” Leilah whispered to herself.