Chapter 41
FRASER
In the four hours that it’s taken Rachael to pack her bags and drive here, I’ve thought of little else but the way she looked on that video call and the fact that she has news.
She was withdrawn with the Bookies the other night, and it’s not like her to bolt to the beach on a whim. If she must experience the ocean, it’s from the balcony of a five-star hotel. Rachael is pro-planning. She is anti-sand.
‘Where’s Parks?’ she asks, fidgeting with an uncharacteristically messy blonde bun, her car parked beside our tent in the camping ground.
She’s in blue jeans, a white Tshirt and sneakers, which, on anyone else, would look like a normal weekend outfit, thrown on before running out the door.
Rachael is not the run-out-the-door type.
She’s not even wearing earrings. The whole situation is an unsettling glitch in the matrix.
I nod towards the playground, where Parker has struck up a conversation with another kid.
They’ve been in each other’s pockets since breakfast, going back and forth on the swings, liberated from the shackles of online connection and back in the real world.
With the morning’s momentous developments, I’m glad to see the childish exuberance intact.
‘Did you really come all this way just to see her?’ I ask, hands in my pockets, body on edge.
She lifts up her sunglasses. Even then, I can’t read her. ‘I remember the day I got my first period. I would not have wanted it to happen in a tent.’
‘You never want anything to happen in a tent,’ I argue. ‘But thank you.’
‘The long drive was probably good for me, too, Frase. I needed to clear my head.’
Clear it of what?
‘There’s a cafe up the road?’ Tea brewed over the campfire isn’t going to cut it. She’ll need a latte.
‘Does Parker want to come?’
‘I mean, if you want to debrief about your problems with a thirteen-year-old—’
She laughs. ‘They’re not really problems … More of a crossroads.’
No good can come from an announcement of a crossroads that couldn’t wait until our regular Monday night dinner back home.
Parker runs over when she sees Rachael, and throws herself into her arms for a long hug.
‘You came!’
‘I said I would! Might even go for a walk on the beach with you later!’
‘But you hate beaches!’ Parker’s eyes are wide. She knows Rach as well as I do.
‘Always willing to make an exception for you two.’ This is delivered with a pointed glance in my direction. Are too many exceptions being made? ‘Come with us to the cafe, Parks? Or do you want to stay with your friend?’
‘Bring me a milkshake?’
As she runs off, Rachael and I start off on foot, sunlight filtered through towering eucalypts as we saunter along the road.
Her hand flies to my arm when she spots a pair of king parrots, red feathers glistening, and we stand still while she watches them and I watch her.
Trying to shake a foreboding sense of unwanted, incoming change.
When we reach the wooden shack converted into a popular coffee spot, she orders her latte, but can’t face food, apparently. Another warning bell. She puts her keys and her phone down on the empty third seat, and I watch the subtle shift in her expression. Audrey should be sitting there.
I have been so constantly aware of Audrey’s glaring absence from this party of three, I seem to have missed our comfortable slide into a duo.
The shape of us felt wrong without her. ‘You marry one of us, you marry both of us,’ they once joked.
It was like having a live-in sister-in-law at times.
No, not a sister-in-law exactly. Not any sort of sister, now that I’m really looking at Rachael.
The thought ignites but barely has time to lift off before she slams me with ‘Frase, you know I’ve been wanting a baby?’
Is that it? The baby thing. A million questions jostle in my head.
‘I’ve booked an appointment with a fertility doctor,’ she barrels on.
Right. That Rachael wants a baby is not a surprise. Audrey had let it slip during one of our rolling conversations about her own decision on this front. I think she was checking that I hadn’t descended into the resentment she always feared, despite the reassurance I always gave her.
‘So you’re really going to do this?’ I ask now. It would make sense of a lot of things. Her having been withdrawn. The weird looks. The crossroads.
She’s shaking with nerves.
‘I’m forty,’ she says. ‘I’m almost out of time. Could already be out of it. I can’t wait any longer for everything else to fall into place.’
The everything else burrows under my skin like a fresh splinter.
Audrey and I once set up Rachael with a colleague of mine, Michael, a nuclear physicist—loves neatness and cats and galleries, hates being outside.
He found her clever and interesting, and she said he was fascinating and kind.
Everything had aligned, on paper. But she always found a way to call things off with a man before they became too serious.
‘Do you need my help?’ I say without thinking. What am I even suggesting?
She swallows a mouthful of latte, scalding herself, and splutters, ‘No, Fraser. That’s not why I’m here.’
The idea, just seconds old, is pierced now by a shard of disappointment. ‘Parenting is hard. We could make a good team?’ We already do. With Parker.
She rolls her eyes. ‘You don’t just jump into a lifelong parenting commitment with someone over a hot beverage.’
‘I’m not just someone!’ The argument presents itself before I can stop it. ‘Am I?’
‘I appreciate the offer, but I don’t want to have your baby, my friend.’ She places her hand on my arm briefly. ‘It’s cleaner this way.’
Cleaner? I must look injured, because she adds, ‘It’s nothing personal, Frase. You know I adore you. But I need a complete change.’
My heart really kicks off now, more than it did at the idea of suddenly becoming a dad again. Something tells me the baby is just the beginning of whatever Rachael’s working up to here.
‘I had a chat with Parker about this on the phone this morning. You two are doing okay now, aren’t you?’ She blows gently on her latte to cool it. And to avoid eye contact. ‘I mean, you don’t need me around as much now. Not like the early days?’
I’m hit with a big serve of regret. ‘Have you been staying around for us? Have we been holding you back from something?’
She shakes her head. ‘No! It’s not that. I just feel like you two have become my family. It’s been amazing and wonderful, and I don’t regret a moment of it, but spending so much time with you and Audrey, and then with you and Parker since she died, has become a bit of a … placeholder in my life.’
My toasted sandwich is delivered but now sits unwanted on the plate as I try to calibrate her words. I understand the concept of the placeholder. I can see why she feels that way. But hasn’t this been so much more than that?
I run a mental reel of it all. After we lost Audrey, Rachael swooped in to support us.
Events we would have had to endure on our own, she endured with us.
But hadn’t that support shifted over time into a friendship that had grown in its own right?
The kind of friendship that would have evolved naturally, even if Audrey had never been in the picture.
Looking at her across from me, earnestly discussing her next steps, I realise with a jolt that this woman is not in any way a ‘placeholder’ for me.
She is my closest person. She’s the closest thing Parker has to a mother figure when she’s with me—I mean, look what happened this morning with the period drama.
The fact is, I’m searching for the right words to define exactly what Rachael McKenzie has become in our lives …
In mine, in particular. And it’s terrifying.
‘I’m scared if I don’t detach myself and chase my own little family, I might miss out altogether,’ she confesses.
Detach herself? Why does this feel like grief?
We’d wondered once before if our convenient little arrangement was soaking up opportunities for us both to meet other people. But we barely gave lip service to the problem. Neither of us made a single move to change anything. We were too comfortable. Perhaps we kept each other safe.
The same conversation now cuts straight through me. I try to imagine her with a family of her own. I can see her with children—I’ve always seen that and wanted it for her. And with some amorphous man who’d be their father … Though suddenly, the latter isn’t settling so palatably.
‘Are you going to eat that?’ she asks, pointing at the sandwich.
I shake my head, and she picks up a triangle and bites into it, steam escaping, cheese dripping, which she wipes from her mouth with the napkin I pass her on autopilot.
I thought she wasn’t hungry? Perhaps getting all of this off her chest is bringing back her appetite.
‘I’m thinking of moving,’ she suddenly says.
‘Cities?’
‘Countries.’
Am I being dragged out in a rip?
‘Maybe Ireland?’
‘Ireland?’
‘You know, green fields, Guinness—’
Can’t see it. ‘But you hate beer. You hate … fields.’
And I hate the mental picture I now have of her and some brawny Irish poet, traipsing the moors until rain forces them into some cosy pub for a pint and a glass of red. She’d be all rosy-cheeked and alive …
The opposite of how she looks now, I realise. Trapped. Tired. Pale.
Have I done this to her?
‘I have relatives in Ireland, Fraser. An elderly aunt, for starters …’
She’s never mentioned Irish relations. ‘Is this the same elderly aunt related to my recalcitrant students? The one who keeps dying every time they have an overdue assignment?’
She laughs and pulls out her phone, scrolling through the photo app. ‘Here. Evidence. This is my great-aunt Aisling on my dad’s side.’
I take the phone and find myself staring at a grey-haired, wiry little woman with Rachael’s blue eyes, swallowed by a floral-printed, doily-covered armchair. She looks about a hundred and fifty.
‘The distance could be good for you, too, Frase,’ she suggests as I pass the phone back. And I know she is wrong.
Audrey would tell her to go. She’d fill out her passport application and research house swaps.
She’d pack her bags and drive her to the airport, where she’d cling to her and cry and then push her into the queue for the security screening and tell her to have a wildly brilliant, exciting, incredible life.
Because that’s what you do when you love someone, isn’t it?
You suck it up if they want to sever themselves from you and follow a different path.
You prioritise their happiness above your own and kick your convenience to the kerb because they mean so much to you that all you want is to see them fly.
When you love someone. When you really love them—
Shit.
‘Frase? What do you think?’
You let them go.