Chapter Sixteen
Will planned on being on the front steps of Carol’s house when Jodie returned from the hospital. He didn’t care how late it was—or how early—because night could roll into dawn, dawn through day and into night again, and December could roll on into the new bloody year … He wasn’t moving.
After an hour or so of waiting, he heard a meow in the bushes—not a weak meow, but more of a hunting meow. It was too dark to see in the shadows beside the house, so he switched on the torch app on his phone and stood up to investigate.
‘Well, hello, you,’ he said to the ginger cat.
It was eating something noxious that might have had a wiggling tail.
‘Don’t you like rump steak scraps from the pub kitchen?’ he said.
The cat looked at him unblinkingly before giving its face a cursory wipe with one paw, then sauntering off to hop over the low side fence and into the next garden.
‘It’s not as though I needed the company,’ Will called after it.
Eleven o’clock passed. Then midnight. He was slumped in a half-doze against the screen door when the rumble of engine noise roused him.
He opened his eyes. Headlights were travelling up Lillypilly Street at a pace far too swift to have Jodie behind the wheel …
but then, she hadn’t gone in her car, had she?
The taxi—because now he could see the glimmer of a logo on the car’s exterior—didn’t turn into the hotel-motel.
It didn’t slow as it travelled through the small string of shops the locals fondly referred to as ‘downtown’.
But it did slow when it reached the little section of footpath abutting Carol’s house.
He heard a car door slam. Footsteps. The creak of the gate.
And then Jodie was on the front path, looking at him.
She looked tired, and whatever hair tie had been holding her hair back earlier in the day must have been lost because she looked even more dishevelled than she had the day they’d gone swimming, and her hair had blown itself dry in the breeze through the window of her car as they’d driven home.
He liked it. He liked everything, except perhaps that wary look she was giving him.
‘How’s Carol?’ he said.
But she didn’t answer. Not at first.
Instead, she dropped her bag to the ground and a brown paper sack that might have held—He didn’t know what and didn’t have the brain bandwidth for conjecture. Then she sat on the step next to him and rested her head on his shoulder.
The relief in his guts was instant.
‘Do you hate me?’ he said.
She moved, and it might have been a nod, but it might also have been a shake.
‘Was that a yes or a no?’ he said.
She reached over, grabbed his hand and pulled it back onto her knee so she could hold it between both of hers.
‘I don’t hate you, you big idiot. Carol told me you hated medical intervention; it just took me a while to remember that this evening, what with the whole fainting drama and everything.
Sure, at first, when you made yourself scarce in our hour of need, there may have been some hate cells forming, I cannot deny.
But then I remembered, with a bit of prompting from Carol, and she kindly pointed out that I was in no position to be throwing stones at people with unresolved emotional baggage. ’
He breathed in the night air and smelled jasmine from the front fence. ‘That’s a very generous way to think,’ he said.
She squeezed his hand. ‘Not generous. Understanding.’
‘Yeah.’
They sat in silence.
‘Carol’s doing well,’ she said after a bit.
‘Sleeping now, I hope, but she was cheerful when I left. The nurses found her a clean, hospital-issue nightie to wear, she’s been given a cup of tea and a biscuit, and she very much enjoyed flirting with those two beefcake paramedics once she gave in to the idea of being looked after for a change. ’
‘That sounds like my Carol,’ Will said.
‘So … are you going to tell me?’
He could have pretended he didn’t know what she was talking about, but there was something very real and very raw about sitting on a small wooden step in the garden in the quiet of night. This was not a time for prevarication or obfuscation.
‘When I was last in a hospital,’ he said, ‘the very last time, I saw a kid being rushed into emergency. And I knew who the kid was. Although, when I say “kid”, he was a young adult in the law’s eyes. But a kid, you know? I doubt he’d even kissed a girl. Or a boy. Or anyone.’
She leaned in closer to him, so they were pressed together from knee to shoulder, but she didn’t say anything.
‘It was one of those full-alarm moments—where doctors are being paged and alarms are sounding. But the kid was dead. Pills. He was my patient. I worked in the clinical psychology department at the hospital. He’d been released against my wishes, but bureaucracy and bed availability counts for more than good sense sometimes.
And the thing about this kid was he was bloody good at convincing the people around him that he was in a good place; that he was gonna be okay. ’
Jodie’s hand patted his in a rhythmic sort of way. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Yeah. Me too. It set off a cascade of events. I put in a complaint to the hospital about letting the kid check himself out. The family put in a complaint about me. I chucked in my job. Did nothing for a while, then I found my calling as a publican. Long story short: even a psychologist can’t get their shit together when life goes bad. ’
‘And I thought it was just me.’
He smiled into her hair. ‘We’re a pair, aren’t we?’
‘It’s funny you should say that.’
‘Yeah?’
‘These last few weeks, I’ve been feeling very much like we could be a pair. If we both wanted it. It wasn’t until you dragged me into that romantic clinch by the dumpsters earlier that I truly believed you felt the same way.’
‘The dumpsters did it, huh?’
‘Oh, yeah. Only a besotted fool would think a declaration of love would be acceptable with a side serve of prawn heads on a thirty-four degree day.’
‘I am besotted. And a fool. Also—now that you know how very good at not coping I, too, can be sometimes, maybe you need to think about that.’
She shook her head. Then she shimmied herself up a little and over a little until she was sitting across his lap and she had her arms around his neck, and she had her face so close to his face.
‘I’m done with thinking. Maybe we both need to realise it’s time we forgive ourselves. It’s time we decide that it’s okay for us to feel happy again.’
‘I’ll be happy if you stay in Clarence,’ he said, and he pressed a kiss just below her jawline. Just below her ear. ‘Be a physio, be a couch potato, be whatever you like. I don’t care, I just want you here.’
‘I’ll be happy,’ she said, ‘if you drive with me to Katoomba to collect all my belongings and then drive with me back here so you can be a publican.’
‘It’s a deal,’ he said, then he shifted his head a little, because if ever there had been a time to seal a deal with a kiss, this was it.
He pressed his lips to hers, and she started to kiss him back and wrap her arms around him even tighter and run her fingers into his hair, along his scalp, in a way that was doing very lovely, urgent things to his nerve endings, but then she pulled back and said, ‘Wait.’
‘Let’s not wait,’ he said. ‘I’m done with waiting.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘we’re forgetting something.’
He racked his brain. What more was there? Him and her, together. Sure, the future was completely unsorted, but did that matter? Not a scrap.
‘Carol,’ she said. ‘Joan Sloane. The Christmas cake war.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That.’
‘I’m going to have to go and see Carol tomorrow at the hospital. And you know what? I’m going to take the cake tin, and I’m going to go through her drawers here and find that scrapbook. I won’t read it, but I’m going to take it all in tomorrow and tell her what we know. At the hospital.’
‘Really? You won’t wait till she comes home?’
‘I think definitely at the hospital. It’s neutral territory. And if she does react badly and relapse into some sort of fainting event, we’ll be close to medical help. And by we, I mean me and Carol, obviously,’ she said, patting his cheek. ‘I can tell you all about it when I get home.’
He took a breath. Pressed his forehead to hers. ‘I’ll come with you.’
She moved back a smidge—just far enough so he could see her eyes as she frowned at him. ‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know I don’t. I want to.’ That wasn’t quite true. ‘I want to want to.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
He could feel himself getting a little sweaty and a little heated, and it was probably anxiety because he had just committed to doing what he really didn’t want to be doing: visiting a hospital.
But Jodie was squirming on his lap a little more, and she had her teeth on his earlobe, and one of her hands was unbuttoning his shirt, and he was feeling very much like things were about to get a little too frisky to be conducted on Carol’s front steps, when she said: ‘I know the perfect way to distract you between now and when we head into the hospital tomorrow.’
She stood up, dangled a set of keys provocatively, then unlocked the door and sauntered inside, leaving the door wide open behind her.