Epilogue
Sunday, 11 pm
Green River Campground
Liss
Liss was sitting in the dark, her toes just touching the edge of the cool water.
She was listening to the gentle slap and suck of the river as it pulled in, pushed out.
It did it when she wasn’t here.
It would do it when they were all gone, tonight.
It didn’t need her to be here to keep going.
She was counting out the minutes until she would go and find her husband.
Liss had performed her parts of the plan.
She had pulled the kids’ old kayak from its hiding place, just inside the tree line.
She’d had to brush the leaves and webs and scuttling insects from the plastic bench seat, marvelling at how quickly the forest had begun to reclaim it.
She had considered its weight – surprisingly light, like the toy that it was – and for a moment wondered if maybe it wouldn’t hold a woman with adult thighs and an unusual amount of baggage.
And three phones.
Wrestled from guilty teenagers distraught about their loss even after everything, now wrapped tightly together in a sandwich bag with a rock in it.
She’d had to walk across the water’s silty bottom until she was up to her knees, and then sit in the flimsy canoe and paddle just beyond the fishing boats out to where the water was black, the high tide keeping her hollow oars clear of rocks and reef.
Twenty strokes to reach the deep water of the channel, where the river moved everything along.
And then, plop, she had dropped the package.
She’d had to turn the kayak.
Liss knew how to turn a kayak.
Even in the dark, illuminated only by the tiny guide lights on the few boats bobbing at high tide.
She was her mother’s daughter.
She wasn’t a splash-about.
She knew to push the oar down vertically to make the boat spin back towards the beach.
And she had sat there for a moment, rocking with the water in the quiet, in the calm, to say goodbye to her beach, her river, a place she had attached to that had never been hers.
All the versions of herself, and of her mother and her father, of her husband, of her ever-changing children.
All of those ghosts, running and dancing and swimming and fucking up and down this beach.
She’d had to paddle back, another twenty strokes, until the boat bumped onto the sand and she could step out and pull it in.
Give it back to the forest with an extra shove.
Here, make your nests and twist your vines and weave your webs.
Cover it, hide it, until another group of barefoot children banged a knee on it, and decided to make it theirs.
And she’d had to sit back down, with her toes just touching the water, feeling her bottom wet on the sand, and wait a little while for the others to hastily pack up.
The whole group had to flee in the middle of the night.
It was for their own safety.
There was a crazed man out there.
A man caught on camera in a drunken rage.
It was true, this would be a fitting place for Lachy Short to die.
But he wouldn’t.
All that would die here tonight would be his reputation, his ability to convince anyone ever again that he was anything other than an abusive, uncontrollable monster, drugged and drunk on a family camping trip, groping teenagers and attacking men and women.
Ask anyone how he’d been this weekend.
Ask Sadie.
Ask Aiden.
Look at the footage Juno had filled her phone with.
It wasn’t the true story of the kind of monster Liss had shared her life with, but it was a simpler story to tell.
And the world liked simple stories.
So Liss would wait.
And then she would walk back through the thick rainforest she knew so well, and she would find Lachy at the base of her fig tree.
And once she was certain, she would run to Ron and Shell’s and tell them that the dangerous man was collapsed in the forest.
That it was time for Ron to haul in the ambulance boat.
And then she would drive away.
She and Dani and their babies who were no longer babies, crammed in the old Land Rover with whatever they could fit, leaving the rest behind, strewn around Sites Four to Eight.
The best sites in the park.