Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Kim
Saturday evening.
After soccer.
After pizza for dinner—Bella’s favourite.
This is the day Bella’s life will change. She only hopes Bella can handle it.
Kim sits in the stands, watching Bella dribble the ball through a line of cones, then pass it to Jorie. Her chest is tight; the knowledge she holds is jammed in her throat, making her wheeze.
She drops Jorie back to Suze’s after soccer, then she takes Bella home. She orders Bella’s favourite pizza: ham and salami and mushrooms, double cheese, and she’s distracted enough that she forgets to request the meat be on half the pizza only.
Kim listens to Bella chatter about Jorie, and how she’s getting a kitten for her birthday. She removes the meat from her pizza and gives it to Bella, then only picks at a corner of the crust. Drinks a glass of water.
“Can Cami come around next week?” Bella scrunches up her napkin, pizza all finished. “I wish she lived closer.”
Cami. Her opening.
Kim thinks about leading Bella into the lounge, sitting with her on the couch, holding her hands, but decides against it. Informal, casual. Maybe that is the way to go. She swallows hard and wishes she’d written down what she wanted to say and memorised it.
“I want to talk with you,” she says.
Something in her voice must have alerted Bella, as her eyes widen. “Am I in trouble?”
“No darling. Anything but.” She takes a deep breath. “It’s about Dad.”
“Dad?” Bella’s voice cracks, then rises in a hopeful query. “Have they found him?”
Kim’s heart splits. “No. Hella-Bella, he’s not coming back.”
“You said that before.” Bella clutches her water glass with both hands, stares up at Kim with Chris’s eyes.
Kim moves her chair around the table so they’re closer. “Bella, the reason Dad didn’t come back to us is that he was in a car accident.”
Bella’s eyes are holes in her face, which is already crumbling in anticipation of bad news. “Is he… Is he…?” Her lip trembles.
“Come here.” Kim opens her arms, and Bella climbs onto her lap and burrows in.
Kim will hold her until the end of time if it helps.
“Daddy is dead. It was the last day we saw him. He left the flat and went down the street in his car, and a van was on the wrong side of the road. He was killed instantly.”
“Would it have hurt?” Bella asks in a tiny voice.
Kim closes her eyes, pain pulsing in her chest at the hurt she must inflict on her daughter. “Only for a tiny moment,” she lies. Chris had been alive when the ambos extracted him from the wreck. He’d died on the way to hospital.
Bella is silent, but her fingers tighten on Kim’s jumper, twisting the knobbly wool into knots. “Did you always know?” she asks. Her voice is thick, and she draws a hiccupping breath and looks up. Tears track down her face, mingling with the snot from her nose.
“No. I would—” Her breath catches. She can’t lie and say that she would have told Bella if she’d known, because she had known. “Not for a long time,” she says instead.
“Why didn’t the police tell us?” Bella asks.
And now it begins. No going back.
“Because Daddy—your daddy—had another name. And the other name was his real name. So the police didn’t know the person in the car was our Chris.”
“Why did he have another name?” Bella asks.
Kim reaches across and yanks out a couple of tissues and hands them to her.
“You know how Daddy worked away a lot?” She waits for Bella’s nod.
“I found out that he wasn’t away in South Australia as he told us.
Your daddy, my Chris, had another family on the other side of Melbourne.
He had a wife, and a little girl. So the police didn’t know to tell us, as they’d already told his wife. ”
Bella freezes in her arms. “No. That’s a lie. He’s my daddy. Not anyone else’s. He told me I was his best little girl.”
He did. And now, with golden hindsight, Kim realises how clever he was with his words. What had been a joke is suddenly more sinister.
She wraps Bella tightly and speaks into her hair, her soft blonde hair, fine and straight.
“I’m so sorry Hella-Bella, but your daddy is another little girl’s daddy, too.
Daddies can have many kids, and they love them all equally.
” That was so not true for everyone, but Kim was sure it was true for Chris. “I know Daddy loved you very much.”
Bella sniffles. “Why didn’t he tell us?”
“I don’t know. He should have done.”
The million-dollar question, the one she and Danika are skirting around. Why, why, why.
“I hate him.”
Validate. Discuss. Hope that the hate doesn’t grow. What she should do rattles through Kim’s head. This knowledge is like grieving all over again. Denial, anger, depression, acceptance.
“I know. I hated him, too, when I found out, because he’d lied to us. But Daddy loved us both. We were special and important to him. He just loved his other family as well.”
“Did he love them more?” Bella asks. Her words are small, folded in on themselves, as if they’re trapped in her chest.
“No, he loved us the same.”
“He must have loved them more, ’cause otherwise, we would have been his real family, not his pretend one. The police would have told us when he was in the accident.”
Oh, you smart and clever kid. Kim closes her eyes. “He had his other family first. He met me after, when he already had a partner.”
“Did he have the other kid then?”
“No, you’re very close in age, though. You’re a little older.”
“Then I should be his best kid, not the other one. He should have lived with us always.”
So simplistic, like a game of tag. Tag, you’re it. Tag, you’re out. Tag, you’re number one.
“I hate her too.”
Kim’s breath freezes in her lungs, and she forces herself to exhale, then inhale again.
Once she’s sure she’s breathing, that she won’t sit here in suspended animation, she strokes Bella’s hair.
“You might hate what she represents right now, but you already know her. Your daddy’s other little girl is a friend of yours.
Someone you like very much. And right now, her mum is telling her what I’m telling you.
She didn’t know about us either. Nor did her mum. ”
Bella’s forehead scrunches.
Kim forces herself to keep breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Any moment now, Bella will put it together, and it will either be better, or so much worse.
“But you did.” Her brows lower into a fierce line. “You knew Daddy had another family?” At the last minute, it becomes a question, as if Bella still can’t bring herself to believe that Kim knew and didn’t tell her the second she found out.
“I found out a little while ago. I wanted to tell you before, but I needed to talk to Daddy’s other partner first.”
“You should have told me first.” Bella’s voice breaks on the last word.
“Maybe I should,” Kim agrees, “but I had to find out where we stood. What the other family knew. And it was so very, very hurtful to them, just like it is to you and me.”
Bella is silent, biting her lip. “The other little girl is someone I know? A friend? Who?” Her lips wobble. “Is it Jorie?”
“No, it’s not Jorie.” She takes a deep breath. Is she about to shatter something beautiful and fragile—Bella’s new friendship with Cami, a friendship that already seems so intense on both sides? “It’s your new friend, Cami. Her mum, Danika, was your daddy’s wife.”
“No!” Bella rears back, thumps both hands on Kim’s chest, and instantly she’s a metre away as if she teleported there. “Cami’s my friend. She’s not my sister—she can’t be. She wouldn’t do that to me.”
“It’s not something she could choose.” Kim’s ribs creak like old floorboards, and there’s a pain in her chest that’s not entirely due to Bella’s fists. “Danika’s telling her right now. She probably feels as angry and as upset as you.”
“She can’t be.” Tears stream down Bella’s face, which is blotchy and red. Her fists ball at her sides.
Kim takes a step toward her, and Bella takes two steps back until her legs press against the couch.
“Cami likes soccer. I like soccer. We both like spicy food. Coach said we look so much alike we could be sisters.” Her face scrunches. “Does Coach know too? Does everyone know?”
“Coach has no idea. She said it because you and Cami do look alike.”
“I’m not going to soccer ever again—I’ll do something else. I don’t want to see her.”
How does she handle this? Because it’s not just about Bella anymore, it’s about Danika and Cami. And herself. But right now, it’s Bella who counts, Bella she has to watch over and try to make it right for.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to. And you can still go to soccer if you want; you can just skip anything that would involve Cami’s team.”
“I hate soccer.” Her face is puffy, and her eyes are great black holes of accusation. “I’m not like Cami. She likes soccer. I don’t.”
“What do you want to do instead?”
“What did you play when you were eight?”
“Tennis. You can learn if you want.” As soon as the words are out of her mouth, she knows it was the wrong thing to say. Bella, with her memory like an elephant, and her immediate need to distance herself from the situation will remember that—
“You played tennis with Daddy.” Her lip juts. “I don’t want to do anything Daddy did.”
“I played netball too. That’s a fun game. Would you like to learn that? I can see if there’s a team in your age group.”
She can almost see the wheels turning in Bella’s head. She gives a quick nod. It’s acceptable.
Kim sits on the couch and pats the seat next to her. “Will you sit with me? I’ll tell you anything you want to know—if I know it, that is.”
Bella doesn’t answer, but she sidles toward the couch, and the next thing she’s burrowing into Kim’s side as if she wants to slide inside her chest. Kim’s shirt is instantly wet.
She closes her eyes and presses a kiss to Bella’s damp blonde head.
How can she make this right? How can she help her daughter accept this unbelievable, mind-twisting fuck up of everything they knew?
She mentally curses Chris for putting them in this situation.
How had he ever thought for a moment that he’d get away with it?
But he had got away with it, a tiny voice answers. For nine years. More than Bella’s lifetime. He must have truly believed no one would ever find out. Kim can’t fathom the conceit, the God complex, the arrogance Chris must have had to believe he could mess with people’s lives like this.
Was she so stupid she never questioned him?
Was Danika?
She and Danika agreed to talk once the kids have gone to bed.
Kim has no clue what to say.