Chapter 7 Danika
Chapter Seven
Danika
“Noa has two mums,” Cami announces as they drive to the pitch the next morning.
“That’s right. Lots of kids have two mums or two dads.” They’ve had this conversation before, but Cami still finds it fascinating. And now, Cami has only one mum and no dad.
Once Cami and Sylvie have gone to join their friends, Danika climbs the grandstand to where Kim is and sits next to her. She hands her a takeaway coffee, then pulls the report from her bag. “I took a copy.”
“Thanks for the coffee.” Kim takes a sip.
“I’d say thank you for sharing the report with me, but I can’t thank you for something that’s destroyed my life.
” Danika looks at Kim’s profile, at the thick plait hanging over one shoulder.
At her high cheekbones and tanned skin, the almost invisible scars from teenage acne on her cheeks.
No make up. “I don’t know where I go from here, to be honest. I don’t know what to tell Cami. ”
“I haven’t told Bella either. I’ll tell her soon. Her last name is that of a man who doesn’t exist.”
So many things are affected by this, practical and emotional. At least she doesn’t have that to deal with. “How did you meet?” she asks.
“Nine years ago, I was flying to Adelaide to attend a conference. I’m a nervous traveller, so I went to the bar for something to steady my nerves.
The only vacant seat was at Chris’s table, and we got talking.
He bought me a drink. He was on the same flight, and he switched seats so he could sit next to me.
We chatted all the way to Adelaide. He said he had a day in the Adelaide office before heading north to a mine site.
We discovered we both enjoyed playing tennis, and he asked if I’d like a game early the next morning. ”
It’s like listening to a story, or overhearing someone talking in a café.
If she can stay dissociated, she can do this.
It’s information, that’s all, like when she types reports about people with inoperable cancers as part of her job as a medical transcriptionist. It’s sad, but it doesn’t affect her. “When did you see him again?”
Kim slides her a sideways glance. “That evening.” She hesitates. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”
So they slept together that night. A shaft of anger knifes Danika’s gut. She pushes it down, but the knowledge bubbles under her skin. That won’t help her now. She sucks a deep breath and nods.
“We went out to dinner, and I spent the night with him. He went off to the mine the next morning, but we made plans to meet up in Melbourne when he returned.”
How quickly he fell. How eager, how smooth. Danika wonders if it was his first affair—that’s all it could have been at the start. “And then?” Her voice sounds flat and bleak in her ears.
“He called me the day he returned. Then, a few days later, we met for dinner.”
Kim doesn’t say they slept together. She doesn’t need to. “How soon did it get serious?”
Kim takes a mouthful of coffee as if collecting her thoughts. “It didn’t, not for a while. I’d not long broken up with my girlfriend and wasn’t looking for anything serious.”
Somehow, despite Kim having been in a relationship with Chris, Danika’s not surprised she’d had a girlfriend. Kim seems the free-spirited type, unfettered by labels or boxes.
“We’d see each other a couple of times a week—mostly weekdays.
Sometimes he’d stay over; other times, he’d say he had work to do or an early start.
He was working away in South Australia a fair bit, too, and I couldn’t contact him then.
Chris always seemed busy, enough that I asked if he was in another relationship.
He assured me he was single, just busy studying for a master’s degree. ”
“So what changed things?” She pretends she’s a TV talk show host, drawing out a scandalous story from her guest, one dispassionate question at a time.
“I got pregnant.” Kim meets Danika’s eyes. “It wasn’t intentional. I was on the pill, but I had food poisoning.” She lifts a shoulder. “It obviously reduced the pill’s effectiveness.”
Danika draws a quick breath. Somehow, that hurts more than it should.
At that time, she was taking her temperature, tracking her fertile days, calling Chris and telling him to hurry home and get naked because now was the best time.
And Kim accidentally fell pregnant. “Did you give him an ultimatum?”
Kim’s mouth twists. “The opposite. I was idealistic. I said I wanted to keep the baby, but there was no need for him to be involved. He said…he said that he’d always wanted to be a father, and he loved me. He’d finished his master’s, he’d have more time, and he suggested he move in.”
The words turn on a roundabout in Danika’s mind.
He suggested he move in…he suggested he move in.
Why, for fuck’s sake? He could have ended it, walked away, but instead he’d dug himself deeper.
Why? She takes a deep breath. Kim said why: Chris loved her.
And he loved children and had always wanted them.
For a moment, she imagines what would have happened if Chris had come to her then and told her about Kim.
Told her she was pregnant and that he wanted to be a part of the baby’s life.
What would have happened? She bites her lip.
She would have dumped him. Instantly and finally—no second chances.
She would have ignored his pleas and tears, turned her back, folded her arms and kicked him out of the house.
Danika bows her head. But he hadn’t told her—and that implied he knew how she’d react. And he hadn’t broken it off with Kim, either.
He must have wanted both of them. Well, obviously. She has to clear her throat twice before she can speak. “When did he move in?”
“I wasn’t sure I wanted him to,” Kim says.
“I was young, and we only had a casual relationship—I didn’t want more.
Chris was persistent and wanted to try. He moved in when I was four months pregnant, in July.
He’d just started a new work schedule—two weeks in Melbourne, two weeks in South Australia.
That never changed the whole time we were together.
Except for brief holidays—which usually fell during his two weeks in Melbourne.
And he told me public holidays—Christmas even—were the same schedule, so sometimes he’d be there, other times he’d be gone. ”
“He told me the same,” Danika whispers. “When we first got together, he was rarely in South Australia—his job was office-based in Melbourne, but it changed. And it would have been around the time he moved in with you. I could seldom contact him when he was away. But when his schedule changed, he gave me a new work number, which went to an answering service, which would relay any urgent messages.”
Kim stares. “That’s what he gave me too.
But when…he disappeared, I called it and at first the receptionist said she’d pass on a message, as usual, but then a few days later, the number was disconnected.
That’s when I really started to worry. I called the Melbourne office of the company he said he worked for—DPA Mining—and they’d never heard of him. ”
“He worked for DDP Mining, not DPA,” Danika says through stiff lips.
Kim sighs. “So I found out when I got the private investigator’s report. The number he gave me was a virtual message service. I think you were given a number that went to the same service, which would answer differently depending on which number was called.”
“Yes. I know that now.” She licks her lips. “This is all so fantastical, so fucking unbelievable, like a prime-time TV serial, filmed with close-ups and heartbeats.”
And right now, she doesn’t know how she feels.
“When he died, I went into the office to collect his things. I never knew his colleagues—he told me they weren’t close as he worked away so often, and staff turnover was high.
His boss gave me a box of his things. So little.
Pens, a coffee mug, a book of word puzzles.
Nothing personal at all. No photos, none of Cami’s drawings that he’d said he was taking to pin on his cubicle wall.
Nothing. I asked his boss if there was anything to come from South Australia, and he looked at me strangely and said he didn’t think so.
According to the report you gave me, Chris only went to South Australia a handful of times in the past nine years.
” She falls silent, lost in the tangle of lies and misdirection.
“What are you going to do now?” Kim asks.
“I don’t know.” Danika presses her feet to the floor, preparing to rise.
She’s learned the truth, as much as it hurts, and right now, there isn’t a way forward from that.
Instead, she has to backtrack to a place of solidity, rebuild their lives, hers and Cami’s.
And think about what to tell her daughter.
And her parents. Friends. “What about you?”
“I have to tell Bella.”
“So we walk away now?” Danika stares at Kim. Her eyes are sympathetic; she seems more put together than Danika is—but then, she’s had months to process all this.
“I don’t know.” Kim sets her empty coffee cup down on the bench next to her. “I’d like to hear your story if you’re willing to share it. I’m still trying to understand…everything, really, so that I can move on. Rebuild my and Bella’s lives. Date, even. Will you meet me again?”
Danika bites her lower lip. “You have my number. It’s in the investigator’s report. Can I have yours? I don’t know if I’ll call it—now or in the future—but I’d like the option. And Cami, too. Bella. I don’t know what will happen there.”
“I understand.” Kim fiddles with her phone, and Danika’s phone pings with a text. She realises Kim already had her number programmed into her mobile, although she never called.
Down on the pitch, the kids are going into the clubhouse, the parents gathering up bags and belongings. The sky is dark with heavy-bellied clouds, and fat raindrops are falling.