23
Saturday, 9 pm
Green River Campground
Liss
The palest of pinks and a glitter-sprinkled rainbow and a deep, dark red. The adults’ toes had been painted by the little girls after dinner, ticking off the traditional pedi-party portion of the weekend.
The campground was newly dark, still and quiet, just the insects’ whirr and snippets of conversations drifting over from other sites, a few notes travelling on the wind from someone else’s novelty-shaped portable speaker, an occasional shriek from a tired child not ready to sleep.
Aiden had gone for green nail polish, Lachy for blue, and the two men were making awkward small talk side by side in their rickety bucket chairs, bellies full of pasta, one man down.
‘Did you at least get a look at the ring?’ Ginger was asking Dani. ‘Was it huge?’
Liss could tell Dani wasn’t ready to gossip about whatever had happened with Craig on the beach. They had all seen him coming up the path at pace, his face a mask of all the most avoided feelings: anger, distress, embarrassment.
It had been Sadie who intercepted Craig as he climbed out of Site Six’s tent, blue-checked duffel bag in hand. Liss, trying to focus on counting bowls for the kids’ dinner, watched them talking, heard Sadie swear and throw her hands up. Then Craig had climbed into the ridiculous red truck and driven away, not without spinning his wheels a little on the muddy path. And not without throwing Liss a look that she could still feel stinging her cheeks.
But Liss was feeling a lot of confusing things this evening.
‘Dani turned him down,’ Sadie had said to Liss back at the table, which was groaning under pots of red spaghetti and brown noodles and yellowy-white macaroni. ‘Can you believe that?’ But she’d looked at Liss with eyes that said, Of course you can believe that.
‘Turned him down?’
‘He proposed,’ Sadie told her, bothering her pasta pot. ‘Sundown. Champagne. Ring. He told me last night. Dani didn’t suspect?’
‘And you . . .?’ Liss’s eyebrows were up. If Craig had told her that he was planning to propose to Dani, Liss knew exactly what she would have said in return.
‘I told him to go for it.’ Sadie shrugged. ‘Dani’s a big girl.’
‘Jesus.’ I should go to Dani, was what Liss thought. Reassure her it was all okay, but she didn’t think she could face it right now. ‘I would definitely have told him not to bother.’
‘Well, that’s probably why he didn’t ask you.’ Sadie smiled.
Liss waited for Dani to emerge from the beach path, which she soon did, all pale face and pink eyes, holding an open bottle of champagne.
‘Cheers,’ she’d said to her gathered friends and some nonplussed pasta-eating kids. ‘I’m going to need a lift home.’
Lyra Martin almost looked happy, Liss thought, as she went to hug her mother. ‘What happened, Mum?’
Liss didn’t hear Dani’s answer, murmured as it was into her daughter’s neck.
Liss watched Lyra pull away, look into Dani’s face and tuck her hair behind her ears and rub a thumb on her mum’s cheek. Dani was looking at her with uncertain, wet eyes and Lyra was saying something to make her laugh.
Now Lyra had gone again, swallowed by the pull of the woods or a fire at the beach, Trick following at her heels, Tia by her side. The adults sat in the heavy evening air and chased their dinner with red wine, trying to prise details from Dani.
Liss knew that her friend would tell her the whole story when they were alone. But she couldn’t possibly be alone with Dani right now. Because if she was, she’d have to tell her what else she’d seen Lyra do this afternoon.
This morning, Liss had wanted to follow her muscle memory up past the caves and into the wild edge of the national park. She’d wanted to sit on the cushion of a mossy log, or the smooth seat of a healed tree stump, and push her bare feet into dirt, and let it all go. Sadie. Lachy. Her dad. All of it. This beautiful weekend felt more complicated than ever and she couldn’t shake the feeling that, somehow, this was the last one, the last time, that she and her friends would be here at Green River. That maybe, after all these years of braided stories, the rope that connected them all was too frayed, too threadbare. The feeling twisted in her stomach, and she needed to sit with it, and blow it off.
But Liss had barely made it to the caves before Lyra Martin almost knocked her over, all streaming hair and rushing legs. Liss had stepped back into the green cover of the tall fringing palms and hardly counted a beat until Lachy followed right behind Lyra, walking slowly, his breathing calm. He’d passed right by her, close enough that she could have reached out and grabbed him. By his hair, by the collar of his stupid polo shirt. She could have made him look her in the face and tell her why he was in a cave with a fourteen-year-old girl. The fourteen-year-old girl they had known all her life, who Liss considered a daughter, Tia considered a sister, and who Lachy had, only hours before, denied touching in a way no grown man should.
Liss had seen Lyra pause, turn, then run to the toilet block. She had watched her husband play with the hat in his hands as he headed back towards HQ, pull it onto his head against that high afternoon sun. Watched him check for her at their tent, even heard him call her name. And then Liss had gone into the cave herself. Sat there in the quiet, cool gloom and tried to make sense of what she had just seen, as if maybe the rock walls could tell her. As if there might be a trace of something, she had no idea what, that would signal the scene she had just missed.
‘The ring was huge,’ Sadie was saying now, cradling her soda water as if it were something precious. Her face, like all their faces, was in and out of shadow, illuminated by the solar lamps and string lights that flickered around and above them.
‘How do you know?’ asked Juno.
Juno was filming everything. The gumboot wine cooler, the pasta pots, the bugs that must be picked from Sadie’s salad leaves, Emily’s swaying hips as she danced to the table with a plate of cupcakes, somehow smuggled past the children and saved for dessert. Dani’s shift from sadness to relief.
‘He showed it to me.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Juno asked, as Dani looked over at Sadie with confusion.
‘He wanted my reassurance, I guess . . .’
‘And knew better than to ask Liss,’ Ginger finished the sentence.
Dani looked over to Liss. ‘Did you know?’
Liss shook her head. She still didn’t trust her voice. No-one seemed to notice that she’d said so little tonight. Or that she hadn’t been urging them all into some card game or jukebox challenge now that the small kids were off watching screens in their tents. Or that she could barely speak to her husband.
Liss watched Lachy turning his newly blue toes this way and that in the golden light. ‘Good riddance, I say,’ he said, to a collective groan. ‘We don’t need any new husbands around here, do we? Pretty pleased with the ones we’ve got, hey?’ He leaned over to punch Aiden lightly on the arm. Aiden cringed.
‘You said that last time Dani lost a husband.’ Sadie’s voice was calm and clear.
‘I didn’t lose a husband today,’ Dani said. ‘It was just a misunderstanding.’
‘A misunderstanding that you might want to marry a perfectly decent man who’d spent a small fortune on an engagement ring?’
‘Sadie, drop it, please.’ Dani sounded exhausted. ‘I had no idea you were such a fan of Craig’s.’
‘Oh God no, not a fan,’ she replied. ‘He was much too boring for me, but I thought he might be just right for you.’
‘Jesus!’ Lachy laughed. ‘And I thought you were a bitch when you were drinking, Sadie.’
‘Sorry! I just meant . . . a normal, nice guy, maybe. Dani might want one of those.’
‘Sadie, stop talking,’ said Juno, raising her filming phone as she did. ‘Sober you is too honest.’
Sadie pulled a face for Juno’s camera then toasted with her soda water.
Lachy reached into the esky for another beer without leaving his seat in a long, well-practised movement. ‘Let’s change the subject,’ he said. ‘What do we think the teenagers are doing in the woods?’
Another collective groan. ‘I don’t want to think about it,’ said Ginger. ‘After all these years they deserve a bit of freedom out there, but I am so happy not to know. I did wonder, though if it was . . .’
‘Was what?’
‘Condom year.’
Huge groan.
In the glitchy gloom Liss was looking at Dani, then Lachy, then Dani, then Lachy. If she was going to bring up the cave, who would she speak to first? What would she say and how would she say it? After twenty-four hours of reassurance and denial and resetting, how could she be sitting here, thinking of upending everything, now?
‘It’s not condom year!’ Juno screeched. ‘That’s horrifying. They’re children. And they’re like cousins.’
‘Cousins can have sex.’ Ginger laughed. ‘I’m almost certain there are some kissing ones in my family.’
‘I think they’re just doing standard stuff,’ Emily said, calmly. ‘Vaping. Plotting our demise, you know, the usual.’
‘Well, I know that Trick might wish he needed condoms around Lyra,’ Sadie said. Her voice was still loud. ‘But it’s pretty clear you don’t think he’s good enough for her, Dani.’
Dani’s head snapped around to Sadie. ‘What are you talking about?’
Lachy leaned forward. ‘Yeah, Sadie, what the fuck?’
‘I told you earlier today, I think Trick has a crush on Lyra –’
‘Ha!’ shouted Lachy, and Liss’s stomach clenched.
‘And you made it pretty clear that was a non-starter.’
‘Sadie, I just meant . . .’
‘What did you mean?’
‘All the things we’ve spoken about,’ said Dani, her voice high, irritated. ‘They’re kids. They know each other too well. Lyra’s oblivious to all that, anyway. Jesus, Sadie, it’s been a rough night.’
Liss thought she heard Sadie snort.
‘Yeah, come on,’ Juno said. ‘We’ve never fought over the kids, let’s not start now.’
The tension wasn’t fading and clearly Dani was done. ‘I’m going to go to bed,’ she said, standing and stretching. ‘Not really in the mood after everything today.’ She looked over to Liss. ‘Walk with me, Liss? I need to talk to you.’
Liss couldn’t move from her chair. A look of confusion crossed Dani’s face for a split second and then Lachy was up, walking his blue toes over to Dani and wrapping her in a hug. ‘You did the right thing,’ he said. ‘Didn’t she, Liss?’
Liss managed a dumb nod and what she hoped was an encouraging smile.
‘For fuck’s sake.’
It was Sadie. Of course.
‘This is ridiculous.’
‘Sadie.’ Juno’s tone was warning.
‘Well it is. It’s obvious why Dani said no to Craig. He suspected it, it’s what he came to ask me about last night, and of course I lied for you. But he’s gone and it’s clear what’s been going on here for years, and yet we all just go along pretending that we haven’t noticed.’
‘Sadie!’ Ginger was shaking her head.
For Liss, Sadie’s words sounded a little like they were coming from behind glass.
She just kept seeing Lyra Martin’s face as she ran away from the cave.
It wasn’t happy.
It wasn’t calm, or amused, or reassured.
She’d looked scared.
What if Sadie was right, and Liss was wrong? What if the edge of danger she was so attracted to in Lachy, right from the beginning, was not so impotent and harmless? What if she had made that terrible mistake, the one she thought she was steps ahead of, too smart for? Building a life that was entwined with his in great big ways and silly small ones.
Sitting next to him at polite couples dinners, standing beside him at interminable company cocktail parties.
Making him a home, feathering him a nest.
Fucking him and hugging him and crying in his arms.
Almost killing herself giving him children.
Looking into his eyes and seeing something that wasn’t there.
Defending him.
Laughing with him and laughing him off to so many of the people around them. Endlessly making small, uncomfortable excuses for him.
He would never.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ Sadie went on. ‘Right in front of your face, Liss! They’re right in front of your face.’
Oh. Sadie was yelling at her. Liss brought herself back to HQ, where Dani and Lachy were standing in the centre of the circle, and Sadie was leaning forward in her seat, her eyes glittering. To Liss, she looked as if she was shimmering with a furious energy.
‘Here we go again.’ Lachy had stopped hugging Dani, whose arms had remained by her side. ‘Liss, I told you we should have asked her to leave.’
In contrast to Sadie, Liss knew she looked dumb, empty. It was how she felt.
‘Dani is in love with your husband,’ Sadie said, pointing a steady finger at Dani and Lachy. ‘It’s why she excuses his creepy behaviour. It’s why Dani can do no wrong in the Short house. It’s why the girls’ dad left in the fucking first place.’
‘Shut up, Sadie.’ Dani sounded remarkably calm. ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about. No idea at all. Liss, come on.’
Why did Liss’s tongue feel so thick and slow?
‘Liss, I know you know,’ Sadie pushed on, her voice trembling. ‘I saw you all. I know the deal you’ve made.’
‘Sadie. What about today, at the pool?’ Dani asked in a voice much softer than Sadie’s. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘What’s wrong with me is that I’ve been going along with this charade. And I’m living a different kind of life now, of truth. I know it’s awkward for all of you, and even for my Trick, who just wants to fit in, but . . .’ She choked a little, running out of fuelling fury at the thought of her son.
‘Sadie.’ Liss found her voice. ‘Please.’
‘I saw you that time, you know,’ Sadie repeated.
‘Sadie.’ Liss realised now that she might finally be shouting, because the eyes that had been focused on Sadie had turned to her. ‘Stop it.’
Sadie pulled herself up, put her glass down with the others on the crowded Formica table.
‘I saw you all that day, on the beach,’ she said. ‘Everything I’m saying is true. And I’m going to bed now.’
Part Three