Chapter 10 Kim
Chapter Ten
Kim
“No tomatoes,” Bella says. “Cami doesn’t like them.”
“I’ll add it to the list.” So far, Bella’s said that Cami doesn’t like tomatoes, spinach, radishes, or smelly cheese—all the things that Bella dislikes. Genetics, or maybe Bella’s pulling a fast one and making sure lunch is something she likes the most.
“And she loves ice cream and chicken nuggets and anything spicy. Like really spicy. We’re gonna have a spicy-food contest one day.”
“She does?” That was one for the genetics side of the argument. How many little kids liked hot food? Only Bella that she knew of—and now Cami.
“Yup,” Bella says. “So you could’ve made your spicy noodles, as long as there was no—”
“Tomato, spinach, or radish. I get it. Next time.”
Kim wonders at Bella’s enthusiasm for Cami. Bella has lots of friends, but she’s got close to Cami quicker than anyone. All week, Bella’s chatter was all about Cami, and she hardly mentioned Jorie.
“I can’t wait for Cami to get here.” Bella pirouettes then twirls and narrowly avoids crashing into the shelving. “I’m gonna show her my bedroom, and Sam Kerr’s autograph, and then we’ll go down to the beach and practice.”
“What, no lunch?” Kim teases.
Bella gives her a ‘duh’ look. “After lunch.”
The doorbell rings, and Bella leaps into the air and races to answer it. Kim follows more sedately.
“Hi, Cami. Hi, Danika.” For someone so keen ten seconds ago, Bella has now gone shy.
“This is cool,” Cami says. “I like that you live on the top floor. Can we go on the roof?”
“Sure, if our mums come too. Kids can’t go alone.” Bella’s hesitation vanishes in a flash, and she takes Cami’s hand and tugs her down the hall. “I’m glad you’re here. Come see my room.”
The kids disappear, leaving Danika hovering at the door.
Kim smiles. “Please, come in and make yourself at home.”
“Thanks.” Danika offers a tentative smile in return and follows Kim down the hallway.
In the kitchen, she turns to offer tea, coffee, water, or wine, but Danika isn’t there.
She’s still in the hallway, staring through the open door to Kim’s bedroom.
For a second, Kim is puzzled, but then she gets it with a bang.
Danika’s staring at the bed Kim shared with Chris.
The king bed is the same; she can’t bring herself to change it.
But the sheets—pale mint green—are new, as is all the bedding.
But Danika doesn’t know that. She’s standing, her hand on the doorframe, taking in the bed, the bench with Kim’s costume jewellery spilling over the surface—and the photos of Chris, Kim, and Bella.
Kim hasn’t removed them for Bella’s sake.
Too late, Kim realises she should have closed the door, especially so that Cami doesn’t see the photos.
She’d asked Bella to remove photos of Chris from her room, saying that it might upset Cami whose own father had recently died.
Bella had nodded and let Kim take them. But she’d assumed no one would see in her room.
“I’m sorry.” She hurries down the hallway and reaches past Danika to pull the door closed. “That was unthinking of me.”
Danika dashes at her eyes with the backs of her hands.
“No, I’m sorry for prying. I didn’t mean to.
I just glanced around as I followed you, as you do when you go into someone’s home for the first time, and I saw your room, and realised…
It sank in that this is where you lived with Chris. That was your bed.”
“I gave all the bedding to the op shop… after I found out. I couldn’t afford a new bed. Plus, it’s really comfortable.” She lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug.
Danika turns to face her. “Those photos. May I…? Could I?”
Kim’s heart thunders. This feels like a bigger intrusion than simply Danika coming into her home, getting to know Bella. This is Danika studying her life, the expressions on her face in the photos.
She originally put those photos there for a reason—because love and happiness shine like the sun from the images.
At first, when Chris was missing, Kim would take her favourite photo and trace his face, hold it to her chest and try, in some woo-woo psychic way, to sense where he was.
There had only been blackness and blankness, as if Chris was forever out of reach. Which he was, on so many levels.
Fear and longing are scrawled across Danika’s face as she stares at the closed door to the bedroom, and Kim can’t deny her request. She nods.
For a moment longer, Danika stares at the doorway. Then, with a hitch of breath, she enters and walks across the room to where the three framed photos sit.
Kim follows, closing the door behind her.
Danika reaches out, and her hand hovers as if the frame will burn her, or maybe she thinks if she touches it, it will all become more real. But then, with an audible breath, Danika picks up the first picture and studies it.
Kim stands to one side, not wanting to intrude. The photo she’s holding is an early one. Kim, cupping her baby bump with both hands. Chris stands behind her, his chin on her shoulder, his hands resting over Kim’s. It’s a study in intimacy, hope, and love.
Danika’s face smooths like marble, but her lips tremble. She puts the frame down with hands that shake, and the picture falls over. She sets it upright and picks up the second.
It’s a photo taken at Moomba when the three of them went to the carnival.
Bella, who was three, sits on Chris’s shoulders.
One hand clutches a stick of fairy floss, and lumps of it have fallen on Chris’s head.
He’s grimacing and laughing all at once.
Bella looks delighted with herself. Kim remembers taking that photo and thinking how normal their lives were, how ordinary.
Just a happy family having a day out at the fair, eating too much crap, then feeling sick on the carnival rides.
How little she knew.
The last photo is Bella’s favourite. It was taken at a soccer game, and seven-year-old Bella is about to kick the ball, concentration etched on her face.
Chris and Kim are in the background cheering her on.
Chris is yelling, his blond hair on end, and she’s pressed close to him, quieter, but her eyes intent on her daughter.
A photographer who was covering the game took it for the local paper.
They didn’t print it, to Bella’s disgust, but Chris came home with the prints and said he’d purchased them.
Now, she wonders if he’d persuaded the paper not to print them because of the freak chance Danika might see them.
She’ll never know.
Danika turns to her and makes no attempt to hide the tears in her eyes. “He loved you.” She says it with wonder, like she’s just learned a fact she thought not to be true.
“I thought so,” Kim says. “Now, I think I was wrong. I don’t know his game, or why he played it, but I’m not sure love came into it. Power, maybe? Manipulation? The thrill of the illicit?”
“No.” Danika reaches out a hand and takes Kim’s, uncurling her fingers one by one. She holds Kim’s hand pressed between her own palms. “He loved you. Those photos…” She stares at their linked hands. “It’s difficult for me to look at them, to be honest.”
Her raw honesty slices into Kim’s chest, along with Danika’s pain. She grips Danika’s hand, lowering it so their linked hands hang by their sides.
“Mum! How long ’til lunch?” Bella’s voice comes from the kitchen.
Danika gasps. “Please don’t let Cami see these. I don’t want her to find out this way.” She disengages their hands and flees from the bedroom into the hall. “Your mum’s just coming,” she says to Bella. “I’m sure you can wait a little longer.”
Kim presses her palms to her cheeks. She can still feel the imprint of Danika’s hand on her own. Steady, reassuring, kind. Unlike her heart, which is wild, panicky, troubled. She leaves the bedroom, closing the door carefully behind her, and goes to the kitchen.
“Lunch,” she says, and her voice has a brittle, artificial gaiety to it, even in her own ears.
She takes the platter of sandwich quarters from the fridge and puts it on the table, adds the bowl of salad, and some of the cheese portions Bella loves.
The fruit bowl is full. She’s proud of the healthy eating in this house.
Bella fills water glasses from the ceramic filter and carries them to the table one by one.
“Sit anywhere and help yourselves,” Kim says. “Meat sandwiches on one side, vegetarian on the other.”
The girls squash up together on the bench seat, leaving the chairs for the adults.
“This looks lovely,” Danika says. She snags two sandwiches—chicken and ham—and a portion of salad. “Are you both vegetarian? There was no need to do differently for us.”
“Mum is,” Bella says, through a mouthful of cheese-and-pickle sandwich.
“But Bella eats meat. She can choose to go vegetarian later if she wishes.”
“Chris was—” Danika’s cheeks flare red.
“Bella, slow down on the eating,” Kim says, as much to cover Danika’s gaffe as to stop her daughter choking. “There’s plenty for all of us.” Chris ate meat; that was doubtless what Danika was going to say.
Bella is still swallowing the first sandwich as she reaches for the second. “We’ve got lots to do. When are we going to the beach?”
“In an hour,” Kim says, and to Danika, “We can walk there.”
Danika’s barely touched her sandwiches. She takes tiny bites and swallows with seeming difficulty. She’s also quiet. Thinking about Chris, no doubt, but maybe she’s also thinking of the photos she’s just seen.
Kim slows her eating to match Danika.
Cami matches Bella sandwich for sandwich, and they both reach for their third at the same time.
“Take some salad, please, Bella,” Kim says.
Cami slides her mother a sideways glance and takes some, too, but Danika isn’t paying attention.
Cami eats a couple of mouthfuls, and the rest stays on her plate.
Bella shuffles in her seat.“Can we get down?”
That raises a smile from Danika. “Such a cute expression. Like you’re in a highchair.”
“My mother’s from England,” Kim says. “I got it from her, and Bella got it from me.”
“Tell her what you got from Grandpa,” Bella says with a giggle.
“Not for your ears. I don’t know how you know that.” To Danika, Kim says, “Hungarian swear words. Loud and colourful.”
The girls disappear, and Taylor Swift starts up loudly from Bella’s room.
“Are you okay?” Kim says the words softly. She knows Danika’s not okay; it’s there in her rigid posture and faraway eyes. “I’m sorry. I should have closed my bedroom door. Seeing those photos must have been a shock.”
“It was,” Danika says. “But I think I needed it. I’ve been spinning tales for myself as to why…
why the situation happened. Most of them are to do with Chris making a terrible mistake and being an honourable man.
They last about five minutes. Then I’m back to anger directed at him mainly, but partly at you.
Seeing the photos… Well, I’d accepted the shades of grey in this situation.
Me, Chris, you. The girls. But the photos, well, they brought in the colour.
The colours of love, rainbow colours. It all came alive.
Became real. If I were at home, on the couch, with a glass of wine watching this as a TV drama, I think I’d see both sides.
I’d have sympathy for both women.” She gulps her water and sets the glass down empty.
Rather than stare at her across the table with what must likely be an annoying fixed expression of sympathy, Kim rises and clears the plates.
She covers the remaining sandwiches and puts them in the fridge, scrapes the unwanted salad into the bin, and stacks the dishwasher.
With her back to Danika, she says, “I’m not pushing, and I don’t know if this would make it worse or better, but I have lots more photos.
And I’d like to see some of yours—if you’re willing. ”
The silence behind her hums with hurt. Then Danika says, “I’d like that.
But not now, not with Cami here.” She takes a deep breath.
“Do you have an evening free during the week? My mum can take Cami for the night, if you have someone for Bella. Would you like to come to my place? Have dinner, a couple of glasses of wine? We can look at photos—yours and mine—and maybe start to figure a way through this mess.”
Kim considers. Suze will take Bella for a sleepover. Jorie will be delighted. The last week has been Cami this and Cami that, and Kim’s caught the hurt in Jorie’s eyes.
“I can do that. Let me check with my friend and get back to you.”
Danika’s smile is less fixed, more free than at any time since she walked in the door. “I’d like that. Any day except Tuesdays.”
Kim nods. Already the butterflies are trembling in her stomach.
Her nerves are jumping, although why, she’s not sure.
It’s more than spending the evening with Danika—she’s already done the hard yards on that.
It’s more that she doesn’t know where they will go with this…
relationship, she supposes. For that’s what it will be, in some form or the other, because of their daughters.
If there ever was a script for this, it’s been well and truly burned.
She’s winging it.