Pictures of You

Chapter 7

7

Drew

She stares at me from the passenger seat, processing my words. We’ve sat in cars like this before, windows down, the hot breeze a distracting cocktail of her perfume and eucalyptus. We’ve had difficult conversations. I’ve waited while she’s collected her thoughts and I’ve watched them play out across features so familiar to me, they’re etched into my brain. Watching her now—scared stiff, messy bun windblown from having the sunroof up and the windows down, mascara smudged, accusatory expression forming as she realizes what I’ve just admitted—my head is scrambled again, like everything happened yesterday.

“You knew him?”

I can see the cogs whirring. I knew her husband: ergo, I can help her get her memory back.

When Evie and I fell out, she made me promise never to speak to her again. She’s already forced me to break that promise once, and here we are again. She might have had a serious knock to the head, and I know she’s lost her husband, but I’m not the savior she thinks I am. I need to quash the hope that’s breaking across her face.

“I can’t help you,” I say quickly, and her expression falls. “It was all a long time ago.”

To be fair, it wasn’t all a long time ago, but it won’t help her to know that. There’s not much I could disclose to Evie about the two of us and her husband that she’d actually want to hear. Yet she’s searching my face for details. Scrambling to read between lines that aren’t there, because I’ve worked so fucking hard to erase them.

“What was he like when you knew him?” she asks.

“Evie—”

She wants confirmation of the fairy tale and my whole body aches from holding it back.

One exposure, and he swept you into his orbit.

It was an inevitable collision course.

He reeled you in the way he reeled in everyone: with that deep, inherited cellular knowledge of how to disarm people.

Seeing how hungry she is for him, even when she can’t recall a scrap of an actual experience with the man, only goes to show how powerful he is.

Was.

“I’m sure your memory will return,” I tell her. Memories of Oliver are too commanding to be thwarted by a little bump to the head, at least in my experience. They’ll find a way around the bruises. They’ll forge past damaged neurons, push through whatever carnage the accident caused, and slide sinuously into an area of the brain that will explode into recollection. I know her and I knew him. The amnesia doesn’t stand a chance.

“Why didn’t you go inside the church?” she asks. She’s clutching the strap of the seat belt like we’re still in motion.

“Well, I would have,” I answer. “But some woman hijacked my car, so …”

She almost smiles. And slightly loosens her grip on the belt. “You were going to pay your respects?”

I was going to get closure.

“Sure,” I tell her.

Something like regret creeps into her body, shifting muscles awkwardly, and I try to stifle it before it takes over.

“I can do that some other way,” I reassure her. “Funerals aren’t for everyone.”

She doesn’t seem convinced but nods.

I look over her shoulder and out through the open car window. Really, I chose the most inauspicious location for this conversation. It’s nothing but a dusty road and a picnic table, but that’s the thing with Evie. She blurs backgrounds. When we were younger, she’d let me practice street photography down dirty city alleyways, beside dumpsters and graffiti-covered walls. Even now, I want to take pictures of her, raw and messy and anxious. I’m shocked at how easily I could let her slip back into the role of muse in my world. For so long, she was the story I wanted to capture, until the images corrupted and all the editing in the world wouldn’t rally the happy ending I’d hoped for.

“Thank you for … going along with the hijacking,” she says. “If you hadn’t—”

My journalistic colleagues are out for blood. Since the accident, Evie has had a target on her back. Add to that the uproar her exit would have caused in the family itself, and I can see why she took a chance on me. That, and the fact she has no idea who I really am.

Evie’s childhood home is a turn-of-the-century terrace house in Cooks Hill, Newcastle, just a block from the bustling cafés and boutiques of Darby Street. The weatherboard cladding is sporting a fresh coat of duck-egg-blue paint, and the wrought-iron fence is rusty, its hinges squeaking as she pushes through the gate.

“Every crack in the concrete is familiar.” She places a hand on the trunk of a fig tree beside the front steps, tracing the knot in the bark as if she’s greeting an old friend.

I watch as she scans the items on the veranda. Terra-cotta pots filled with tired annuals. A white macramé hammock chair, swinging in the afternoon breeze. Her body stills at the sight of a blue-and-red plastic tricycle. Then she knocks on the door, hard and sharp. Ready to put an end to this agony.

Footsteps approach.

“It’s not them,” she whispers before the door opens. Footsteps are like fingerprints. Indelible proof of a person, locked in from years of tramping the earth.

A woman is standing there barefoot in a faded denim sundress. Late thirties. Fractious toddler on her hip. The little girl is wielding a yogurt-covered spoon, which she drags through her mother’s blond hair, and along what looks like her last nerve.

Evie can’t seem to speak.

“Hello,” I say, stepping forward.

The child beams at me, and the mother shifts away from us, wary. “I’m not buying anything,” she says, already reaching to close the door. “Sorry, it’s not a good time.”

It looks like it never would be.

“We’re not selling anything,” I offer quickly, worried she’ll shut us out.

“I grew up here,” Evie adds, her voice thin. “I’m looking for Christine and David Hudson?”

The woman visibly relaxes after hearing Evie’s parents’ names, now that it’s clear we’re not hawking solar panels or eternal salvation. “Oh, yes,” she says more openly, shifting the toddler to her other hip. “They were the previous owners.”

Evie’s body stills as mine moves unconsciously into the gap between us.

“Was this a deceased estate?” she asks, her hand shooting to my arm.

“Gosh, no! I couldn’t buy a house from dead people!”

There’s visceral relief. Evie lets go of me, then smooths the creases she made in my sleeve until I shrug her off and step back. She’s always been touchy-feely to my keeping people at arm’s length.

“No, the Hudsons were lovely.” The woman pops the squirming toddler on the floor at her feet. When she stands again, her face is a picture of compassion. “Did you know them?”

Evie tries to answer, but chokes.

“It was a reluctant sale on their part,” the woman continues. “They said there were too many memories here, in the house. And in the city. Moved north, I think. Or maybe west?”

“Too many memories?” Evie asks.

The mother glances at her child and puts her hand to her chest. “Yes, poor loves. Grief can destroy you, can’t it?”

Evie takes a step back as my muscle memory kicks in and braces against her proximity. Her scent. Every tiny movement she makes, from the way she tucks her hair behind her ear to the curve of her back as it arches against the world when things are hard. I’ve seen it all before. I thought I’d successfully blocked it from my mind, but the familiarity of her is almost overpowering.

“I don’t understand …” she says. And suddenly I don’t want her to.

I silently implore the woman not to utter the next sentence, but of course she does, and everything happens very quickly. Evie’s weight falls against my body as the truth tumbles out and catches alight.

“I’m sorry to break the news,” the woman says, “but the Hudsons lost their daughter.”