Pictures of You

Chapter 8

8

Evie

I don’t know how Drew gets me back down the steps and up the path. I’m losing feeling in my limbs as we walk to the Range Rover. He takes my elbow gently and prompts me to get in, passing me the seat belt, which I don’t have the strength to pull across my body. Without a word, he reaches over me to latch it, his concerned face inches from mine. Then he gets in and drives to the Merewether Beach parking lot, where he pulls me out of the car again and makes me sit on the grass in the sun on the clifftop, overlooking the ocean.

They lost their daughter.

“What does that even mean? They lost me?” I’m right here. Aching for them from inside the shakiest situation I’ve ever faced, longing for their steady hands. Their wisdom. Their love, which let me mess things up without ever messing us up. What could possibly have brought us to this point?

Someone’s selling coffee from a vintage caravan in the parking lot. Drew checks his jeans pocket for his wallet. “I’ll get you some water,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”

A flock of seagulls settles on the grass nearby, fluttering and squawking like preschoolers tumbling out of the bus on a school excursion. I watch the ocean as it drags in and out over the sand and salt spray whips across my face.

I used to come here, right to this spot, as a teenager and stare at that beach and this ocean, whenever things were worrying me—which they often were. I was always a little anxious, I think, despite the rock-solid foundations I had at home. Perhaps it was some kind of psychic premonition about this moment in my future, the cocoon of love that sheltered me for the first sixteen years of my life smashed open by some invisible force I can’t fathom. Every atom in my body is dislodged. I’m disassembled into billions of microscopic pieces, none of which add up to a life I know, or even like. And I’m totally alone.

Well, except for Drew, who hands me a bottle of Evian water and sits on the grass beside me, taking “strong, silent type” to a whole new level. His atoms are entirely intact. His grip on the world is robust. Which it needs to be, because he brought me an hour or two up the freeway to Newcastle thinking he could leave me with my parents, and now the plan is in tatters. He’s staring at the ocean too, dark brows knitted against the blazing sun. Or perhaps against the blazing problem.

“What will I do?” I ask him, after a long while. Maybe he’s come across similar mysteries in his career as a photojournalist and will know exactly what process to adopt when your husband is dead, your family has ghosted you, someone has frozen your accounts, and you’ve lost your memory.

He checks his watch. The innocent action flares my growing anxiety. Don’t leave me. You’re meant to notice the small things to calm your heart rate. I fixate on the way the wind ruffles the sleeves of Drew’s T-shirt. Zoom in on the dark hair on his forearms and clenched muscles that are the only indication that perhaps he is not as well assembled as I thought.

When I meet his eyes again, he’s observing the audit I appear to be taking of his upper body, which now includes defensively crossed arms. “Are there people you could ask about where your parents might have moved to?”

He’s right. Someone must know. They were entrenched in this place.

“We should find somewhere to stay, shop for a few basic supplies, and spend tomorrow on this,” he suggests.

Tomorrow. He’s buying me one more day before he flings me into this new reality, alone.

This man owes me nothing. Maybe it’s Oliver he owes? Either way, I’m suddenly panicked about what will happen when he leaves.

“Don’t you have photos to take or news to break or something?” I ask.

His focus is pulled to the spectacular view in front of us, from the sheer cliffs and rock pools out to the blue-on-blue horizon. How does a photographer sit here without his camera?

“That’s the benefit of being freelance,” he explains. “I’m actually taking some space at the moment while I weigh up a job offer from a New York magazine.”

Wow. What could there possibly be to toss up?

“You’re so grown-up,” I observe. It sounds so silly. We must be about the same age, but he’s talking about a midcareer move, while it feels like I’m effectively stuck at the preuniversity stage, wondering if I’ll even get my first-preference course.

“So are you,” he replies.

Yes. And no. Suddenly I’m wildly envious. Age-old ambition courses to the surface, white-hot. Hunger for the level of success Drew has, and that I always imagined and strived for whenever I saw myself scaling the path I was so set on. And here he is, with what might as well be overnight success from where I’m standing, while I’m stagnant, years behind where I want to be.

“A proper magazine job in New York sounds like something that happens after a full chapter of a career has passed,” I clarify.

“It has,” he admits quietly. “Anyway, Evie, the point is I can take a few days off and nobody’s chasing me.”

“I wish nobody was chasing me . Social media feels like death by a hundred thousand DMs.” I’d throw my phone off this cliff right now if I wasn’t clinging to the tiny hope that my parents might call me. If they even have this number.

A flash of memory jostles to the surface. Losing Breanna in a crowd at a party. I’d been far too introverted to be untethered from my best friend in a large group of our high school peers, and I remember the escalating panic as people who took up more space and sound than I did pushed past me, their laughter brash, their bodies confident. They seemed to own the air we shared in a way that sucked it from my lungs. The “big people,” I used to call them, secretly.

Wait. Was I alone?

It’s not a proper memory, just a mirage of one. More a feeling than anything specific. That sense of loneliness and abandonment when Breanna went off being swept away and replaced, in an instant, by something else. Light. Warmth. Enough to block out all the other people …

But now the light is so bright I can’t see. Like a starburst on a lens. Brilliant. Overexposed. A boy’s silhouette. And this all-consuming, extraordinary emotional rush …

“Evie?” Drew says.

His voice snaps me back to the clifftop.

“I asked you what you thought about staying in Newcastle tonight. We can start the search tomorrow? Seems pointless driving back to Sydney.”

His words break the spell. I can’t recapture that glimpse from the party, despite how intensely I want to. I’m not even sure it was real and not some subconscious longing for absent connection. In any case, Drew is right. We should make a plan.

“I’ve got a notebook and pen in the car,” I offer. I’ve been using them to collect random assumptions about my life.

“Do you drink, Evie Roche?” he asks.

It’s a simple enough question. I assume I do—I used to. Breanna and I once wrote ourselves off with Smirnoff Double Blacks at sixteen. It’s a miracle the amnesia didn’t set in then. My stomach churns. I’d be amazed if I ever drank again in the years following that mistake. Maybe I’m one of those wellness fanatics now who drinks only the green smoothies with ginger and turmeric that keep being pushed at me online …

I check my body. No, I do not look like a wellness fanatic , exactly, more someone who has a passing acquaintance with a gym. The type where I use the treadmill occasionally and the coffee shop more often. Mainly as a backdrop for Instagram.

“I probably do drink,” I deduce, on balance. My jaw clenches and I try to ignore the dull pain in my chest, a deep ache from the exertion of trying to figure out my life.

Meanwhile, a man is asking me to a bar. I wouldn’t even know what to order! I assume I graduated from vodka cruisers to something more sophisticated, like wine? But white or red? And what about all the different varieties? What even is sauvignon blanc? How do you pronounce sauvignon ? I don’t even know my own palate …

“We’ll have a beer,” Drew says decisively. “There’s a craft brewery on King Street.”

Right.

“Come on, Versace.”

And he stands up and pulls me to my feet.