Chapter 24
FRASER
I scroll through the contacts in my phone, shuffling between two numbers, imagining each woman responding to my call, reluctant to inflict this misery either way.
Maggie knows there was an accident. She had to leave work to collect Parker when the school called to break the news. It’s our week to have her. My week. But, of course, she’ll have her for as long as we need. As long as I need.
My brain won’t accept the truth, sentences spluttering as it corrects entrenched pronouns, outdated by events. It’s been ‘us’. It’s been ‘ours’. ‘Me’ and ‘my’ and ‘mine’ try to force their way into sentences, unnaturally, and it’s breaking my brain.
I need to tell Parker what’s happened. Parker, who, last night, was flitting about the house in a flower girl dress, twirling and dancing after her final fitting with the dressmaker.
My hand is shaking, holding my phone. Or is it my phone vibrating in my hand? Hard to tell. The world itself feels like it’s rattling. I glance at the screen.
It’s Rachael.
My heart drops through the floor. This will wreck her.
I hit the green button and lift the phone to my ear, only to sense worry in her voice already. News travels fast. Who told her? Maggie?
‘Fraser,’ she gushes. ‘Audrey’s left me on read! She’s not answering calls. I’ve got this horrible sense … Oh, God. I can’t breathe. Has something happened?’
It’s me who can’t breathe. Can’t confirm what she already seems to know, information gleaned from that sixth-sense bond they claimed, which I always tried to debunk with logic and reason. How can I destroy this woman?
‘Rachael, she’s—’ Can’t say it. Don’t need to.
There’s an aching pause between us that swallows their whole friendship. A giant void into which all their memories and future plans are vacuumed.
‘Where are you?’ she asks, after the longest silence engulfs us, the life having been sucked out of her voice, the way I can hear it’s been sucked out of mine.
Rachael now lives in an apartment in the award-winning Nishi Building, overlooking Lake Burley Griffin.
She bought it because she can glimpse both the sunrise and the sunset from the balcony.
Audrey called her a ‘look at the sky’ person.
Rach would make the three of us visit Mount Stromlo Observatory for the astronomy open nights and go stargazing along country roads outside Canberra. I guess all of that is over now.
I’ve been to the apartment countless times before.
Most recently last Friday night, when Audrey and I picked up Thai takeaway from a restaurant on London Circuit and the three of us ate it on Rachael’s balcony with a bottle of red before catching a comedy night at the theatre.
Tonight, I’ve arrived empty-handed. Arms hanging loose at my sides, nothing to offer but a barbarous story about how both of our lives have been bayoneted by this tragedy.
As I wait to have Rachael buzz me in, it’s as if Audrey is standing here, right beside me, just as she was less than a week ago.
That staircase is as good as half the sculptures in the National Gallery, she said, running her fingers along the wood.
I can almost smell her perfume—impossible, of course—as I touch the timber plank where she did.
The elevator doors open and Rachael appears, pale with shock, in a pale green dress—shoes kicked off.
It’s the bare feet in the foyer of the apartment building that gets me.
That’s more Audrey’s style—she didn’t stand on ceremony.
Rachael does not gallivant anywhere half dressed.
Let alone looking this fractured. This lost.
She steps out of the elevator into the foyer and into the blank space between us, where Audrey should be.
Into silence, which should be filled with her voice.
She was our conduit. She meant everything to both of us, and this feels all wrong, us being here without her as we hover beside the backlit staircase she loved, scattered timber up the walls, united in our loss.
I don’t know how many minutes go by before I say, ‘It happened outside Parker’s school. A distracted parent behind the wheel. She was crossing the road …’
Rachael looks like she hasn’t cried. As if it’s all trapped inside her. But this is what she’s like. Stoic. She’s not a crier.
‘What about Parker?’
Instant anxiety slams into every cell. I would do anything to save my child from this torture. She was so young when Maggie and I divorced, and we did such a stellar job cushioning her through that. Now we’ll have to break her all over again.
‘I told Maggie I need time to pull myself together. She’ll handle it tonight and we’ll tell her tomorrow.’
Rachael nods. ‘Makes sense. But, Fraser, it’s okay to fall apart, even in front of your child.’ Ironically, she’s all business herself. ‘You should come up,’ she announces, pressing the button for the lift. ‘You should not be alone.’
I think she means that she shouldn’t be.
The doors open and I am expected to follow her in. She calls the seventeenth floor and, as the elevator lifts, she looks at me, wretched expression on her face, a fresh formality carved between us by Audrey’s absence, and says, ‘We are not going on the balcony tonight.’