Chapter 29
RAINBOW’S BIRTHDAY
On Rainbow’s tenth birthday, May twenty first, Ronnie lay in bed alone, looking out the screen into Blaise’s native plant garden. No rain again last night, cooler morning, mist rising off the mountains, autumn transitioning into dry season.
Quiet outside.
Reg’s flag hung limp. The ocean would be glassy, not even enough wind for mush burgers. Nature felt less alive this morning, except two small brown honeyeaters in the bottlebrush grevillea cheerfully took turns whistling “tyzuit.”
Next weekend they would pretend it was Rainbow’s birthday, decorate a cake, sing the song, blow out candles.
Feeling hollow, she lay in bed staring at the ceiling. An empty anniversary. Memories echoed in the closed zoo sounds of her dad and stepmom’s empty house. Wallaby water bottles rattled in the family room. Matilda and Maya’s nails clicked over tile as they padded around the kitchen.
When she closed her eyes, she saw her fingers delicately caressing the tiny lavender body.
Rainbow had been the size of a footy ball when she was born, a squishy alien with fat belly and skinny frog limbs.
Nothing had prepared her for that moment—suddenly being responsible for a helpless creature who owed her everything and nothing.
Ronnie had labored quietly. No one had known she was in active labor, alone at night in her cell.
Slow at first, then fast and bloody. Those first miraculous moments as a duo had been wild.
No audience. She had pushed out an organ, watched it come to life, breathe for the first time, flail her arms and legs for the first time without resistance, had seen Rainbow as she had been inside her: her-shaped, a piece of her attached by what looked like a white telephone cord.
Immediately after birth, Rainbow smelled like roast beef.
The first time Ronnie held her in her arms and hugged her to her breasts, Rainbow had relaxed. Home. It felt like she had always been there, like she had never left.
Ronnie’s womb was on the outside now, perched on top of her round postpartum tummy. Squishy mama shaped to hold a squishy newborn.
Rainbow opened her eyes.
Ronnie sang to her.
Rainbow’s wrinkled hand gripped her finger.
No one had warned her about the placenta. At first, when she labored to deliver the thick organ at the other end of Rainbow’s umbilical cord, she thought Rainbow had a twin.
After the placenta came out, she had fallen asleep holding her daughter against her chest in the silence and the dark, had woken alone in light and deafening noise.
A decade later, after years of therapy, she still missed her baby.
Ten years old. How was that possible?
In the kitchen, she stuck a pink and white candle in a banana, found a lighter in a drawer and lit it, careful not to burn her thumb.
The flame flickered, then held steady.
Happy birthday, Rainbow. I would be with you if I could.
She blew out the candle, thought about making a wish, but didn’t. Asking would jinx it.
It took everything she had not to jump in the truck and go to her, scoop her up in her arms and take her away, the way Matilda-Jane had disappeared her into the Outback in that goddamn white van.
A familiar truck engine outside jarred her back into the present. Nev knocked on the front door, whistling, carrying an esky. “Happy days.” Nev hung her Akubra on the hat tree and toed off her boots on the mat inside the door.
“You’re in a good mood.”
She watched Nev stack frozen packs of lamb and mutton from last year in Reg’s freezer like bricks.
Nev must be clearing out to make space at home, and that was why she was whistling.
A new batch was coming to fill the freezers at Upsend Downs.
She must have deposited a fat check that morning, hence the whistling.
Yesterday, Upsend Downs had sent eighteen hundred lambs and two hundred ewes to slaughter—the fruit of a year’s labor. Nev and Kazi had driven them on horseback to a neighboring farm to be butchered. Ronnie was a little disappointed that she had missed it.
“How did it go?” she asked. Droving days were her favorite.
“No problems,” Nev said, pulling groceries out of the cooler she had brought. “I came to cheer you ladies up.”
Nev slowly covered Blaise’s kitchen counter with produce, then proceeded to cook snails and amuse bouches, new potatoes, carrots, lambchops, rocket and toasted pecan salad.
For dessert she made lemon custard tartlets with strawberries and crème brulée.
Nev ate the green tops of the strawberries.
While she cooked, she sang along to Madonna’s “Material Girl” in a gravely alto with perfect pitch.
She had brought three wines that paired with the courses. A French country dinner party.
Ronnie had no appetite, but kept her company while she cooked. The spread on the dining table after Nev plated all the courses looked like something out of a magazine.
Reg took Nev’s picture before shaking her hand. “Mate. I know this isn’t for me, but I’m thanking you anyway.”
“You’re welcome.” Nev dug in, serving herself.
Afterwards, telly blaring in the family room, joeys wrapped in warm bath towels sucking bottles of milk on everyone’s laps except Ronnie’s, she accepted the steaming mug of tea from Blaise with a grateful, “Thanks, mum.” The word sounded twee from her mouth, but “step-mum” was too formal.
Reg grinned. He noticed that shit. She did it for him.
Nev perched on the arm of the couch. She scratched Nev’s back through the thin flannel.
After a while Nev stood behind her and massaged the tight muscles at the base of her neck. She closed her eyes. Another birthday in the books. On days like this it was tempting to be cynical, to lose hope.
The state had tried to sever the maternal bond.
But it had failed.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. An email from the lawyer, originally from Maude and forwarded. “It’s here,” she said. “The list of conditions from Maude.”
Reg and Blaise crowded around her to read it over her shoulder.
a. Do the social worker’s home visit at your parents’ house
b. My parents want to have a chat with your parents
c. I need to meet Nev. My parents want to see the farm.
Within minutes, Reg called a social worker to schedule a home visit, Blaise called Maude’s mother, and Nev was on the phone with the lawyer, talking over the logistics of what a supervised visit from Maude and her parents would entail.
When Ronnie woke from a nap, sunlight on the wall was warmer, golder, and her dad played folk songs from the sixties and seventies on guitar on the back veranda with Nev—Phil Ochs, “There But for Fortune,” and Gale Garnett, “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.”
She listened for a while, then walked to the kitchen to fix herself a plate of leftover lamb.
She walked out onto the veranda, sat across from her dad and Nev. They had been smoking cigars and drinking whiskey.
Cold slices of roast lamb were delicious.
After a few rounds of darts, Nev left in her silver pickup truck and Reg’s brother arrived.
Local news came on the television. She muted it.
Her dad and uncle talked politics while older orphaned rock wallabies and pademelons hopped around the fenced garden.
They would be ready to release into the wild soon.
The rescue had a system to reintroduce them into the wild gradually, involving progressively larger pens in the yard.
Reg voted with the Green party. He read all the political news articles, knew all the voting histories of the state and local candidates on Aboriginal issues as well as the Environment. She voted for whoever he supported.
A news anchor holding a microphone stood in front of a brick building with a shallow-pitched red metal roof. Behind him rose a cloud of black smoke. Burning tires? The building or something in the courtyard behind it must be on fire.
Ronnie reached for the clicker, turned the sound on.
Prisoners at the Youth Detention Centre down near Townsville were rioting. The campus was on lockdown. An unknown number of the kids had escaped their cells. The news station broadcasted footage from a helicopter circling the facility.
Ronnie felt sick.
Reg stood behind her. Her uncle looked at her, then back at the news.
Someone could get badly burnt, or asphyxiated by smoke if they were trapped in a cell or a wing of a burning building on lockdown.
The kids must be scared. The guards must be scared. Adrenaline on both sides. Staff worked there, cooks in the kitchen, janitors, nurses, women volunteered there as counselors or teachers.
Was anyone trapped inside?
Hopefully the standoff de-escalated before anyone got hurt.
“Reg, turn it off,” Blaise said.
If he did, Ronnie would turn it back on.
It was May, autumn, Second Term in the school year. Was the fire near the library? Would all of the books be ruined? Or was the fire near the dormitories? Was it in the male or female dormitory?
Men in black uniforms pointed machine guns at the doors and windows. She hoped people who complained Queensland was “soft on youth crime” were watching this shit. They must be satisfied to know that their tax dollars were paying for grownups to point loaded guns at kids.
Reg went outside on the patio to take a phone call.
Blaise stood watching from the kitchen. “We don’t have to watch this. It’s upsetting Brum.”
News anchors repeated old information but didn’t say anything new.
“I have to see what’s happening inside.” She needed facts, details, not random people’s conjectures about what might be going on behind locked doors.
“This will be on the news all day,” Blaise warned.
Ronnie’s phone vibrated. Call from Mikey. She answered, leaning forward and gingerly sliding to the edge of the couch. “Mate.”
“Mate. Are you watching this?” Mikey was an auto mechanic in Townsville.
“Unfortunately. Are you all right? How’s Jesse?”
On Mikey’s end of the line an engine revved. “We’re all right, other than the landlord situation.” Mikey was still looking for an apartment in a safe neighborhood with a landlord who didn’t hate her. “How about you and Rainbow?”
She and Mikey didn’t get together as often as they should, but when they did they bonded over their kids. Ronnie was one of the lucky ones from juvie who hadn’t been nailed for anything since they let her out. She credited that entirely to her dad.
“She’s good, I think. I’ve been better. I’m at my dad’s. Have you heard anything about what’s happening inside?”
“No, I wish. I was going to ask you. Looks heaps bad. I feel gross.”
“Me too.” She figured out how to stand up from the couch and took the phone outside.
“Have you found out if you need a character witness for the hearing?” Mikey asked.
Ronnie rubbed her forehead. She had completely forgotten. “I’ll ask.”
“If you need someone, I’ll take time off work.”
“You’re the best.”
“Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“I’m not in ace shape right now. Recovering from a thing.”
“Another half pipe injury?”
“Fuck off.”
Mikey snorted. “You don’t have Rainbow today, do you?”
Ronnie inhaled slowly, then exhaled. Her friend knew it was Rainbow’s birthday. Mikey had been with her when she started having contractions, early labor, and had been there when she returned from the infirmary alone.
“Man,” Mikey said. “That sucks. If I was there, I’d give you a hug.”
“Thanks.”
“Tell her happy birthday for us. We have a present for her. We’ll give it her next time we see you. Come visit.”
“I want to. I’ve been thinking about driving down there again. I can’t right now, but when I get over this thing I will.”
“Tell you what.” Mikey was always so thoughtful and kind—a better friend than Ronnie. “Why don’t you pick me and Jesse up a few days before the hearing? The kids can play together and I’ll be there for moral support, even if you don’t end up needing a character witness.”
That was a fantastic idea. She wished she had thought of that. “You’re seriously the best. Are you sure?”
“Of course. We have to get your daughter back.”
“Partially back.”
“Same thing.”