84
Lisa
I watch Griff through the large window of the Airbnb unit as he tapes up boxes with slow, deliberate movements. Suitcases
are lined by the door, keys on the table, the last of his things crammed into a box he’s sealing shut. There’s a hunch in
his shoulders now; he looks older, like he really could be my father. His mouth moves slightly as he folds the flaps—maybe
muttering a checklist or talking to Beau.
He clocks me, mouth agape, and motions to the front door.
I draw a breath and walk around. “Hi, Griff.”
“Lisa . . .” His voice is as rough as gravel. “I . . . I’m so happy to see you. Please, come in, take a seat. Sorry about
the mess, I’ve been packing, got to be out of this place this afternoon.”
The room smells of citrus and the faint must of newspaper. I move some cookbooks off the black leather couch and sit. “Where
are you going?”
He lowers himself into the chair opposite. “Booked a train out to Adelaide tonight and then on to Perth. Plenty of small towns
near there where I won’t bother anyone.” His smile is strained.
“I saw you on the telly. Took some guts to do that.”
He shrugs. “It was the least I could do.”
“Thanks for the box of Beau’s things.” I pause. “You couldn’t bear for him to be alone, could you?”
Griff’s hand curls into a fist on his knee.
“He was scared out of his mind. I . . . I couldn’t leave him anymore.
What I did was unforgivable, but I wanted him to have some peace, some dignity; for us to have a little time that was ours, before it slipped away.
I know that he was your best friend, but he was my entire community. ”
“I see that now,” I whisper. “You weren’t trying to push me away, you were holding on to what mattered. I should have understood
it wasn’t about me at all.”
Something shifts in Griff’s posture. Cautiously, he moves from the chair across from me to the couch. Still a cushion between
us. His presence beside me is unfamiliar, the careful stillness of someone who doesn’t know if they are allowed to be here.
“I’m so, so sorry, Lisa,” he says, voice low, gaze on the floor. “For what I’ve put you through this past year, and that I
never forgave you for what happened at our engagement party.”
“I know I’ve said it a hundred times before, Griff, but I should never have shown up drunk. I said awful things. I was jealous
and stupid and hurting . . .”
He lets out a soft, hollow laugh. “Beau was pretty spectacular. I’d have coveted him too, if he wasn’t mine.”
“The thing is . . .” I reach across the cushion and rest my hand gently on his. “I wasn’t jealous of you, Griff. Not really.
I was jealous of him. Because he had what I always wanted: a place in your life.”
His voice splinters. “There’s a place for you now . . . I’ve got nothing but a place for you now.”
I hesitate. “There’s something I just can’t move past, Griff. Why donate to me now? Why not to Mum?”
He takes a long slow breath then meets my eyes. “Lisa, it wasn’t me who refused the donation . . . it was her.”
“What?” My voice is barely audible.
“Mum refused to accept my kidney, even though I desperately wanted to donate. She wanted me to save it in case you ever needed
it.”
The words hang in the air.
“She made me promise never to tell you. She didn’t want you to carry any guilt or think she gave up her chance to live for
your sake.”
I close my eyes, feeling everything and nothing at once. The itchy tag of my T-shirt, the blast of the aircon, the weight of the past pressing in. Everything else—time, space, logic—folds in on itself.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for leaving before she died.” The words catch in his throat. “That I wasn’t there when you needed
me. I should have stayed and helped you. Protected you.”
A bitter laugh slips out before I can stop it. “It’s not like you were ever the protective, brotherly kind, you didn’t even
fight the imaginary monster I thought lived under my bed.”
“No,” he says quietly. “But I did fight a real one.”
I frown, the shift in his tone pulling me upright.
“The kidney wasn’t the only secret Mum made me keep from you.” His voice is fragile. “It was your dad too.”
“I know you hated him. I figured it must’ve been hard getting a stepdad and an annoying baby sister dumped on you all at once.
I . . .”
He shakes his head, his eyes dropping to his arm. He turns it over and touches a pale ridge below the elbow—a scar from some
kitchen mishap, no doubt. “He hit us, Lisa. Me and Mum.”
“He what?” The words scrape out of me, razored and thin.
“When I pushed you away, when I shouted—it wasn’t because I didn’t care. It was because I was trying to keep you out of it.
I didn’t want him to touch you. Or for you to see what he did to her.”
For a moment I wonder if I’m having an episode. Turns out that ripping open decades-old trauma feels a lot like a heart attack.
Everything flashes before my eyes. Dad shouting, Griff dragging me under his bed. The biscuit recipe, read in soothing tones:
One cup oats, One cup flour, One cup coconut . . . I know every damn word because it was the soundtrack to my early childhood.
My hand flies over my mouth. “The Anzac recipe . . .” I gasp. “It’s all coming back. I thought I knew it because Mum baked
them so often. But it wasn’t her, was it?”
A whisper of a nod. “I wasn’t sure if you remembered. I’d recite it to you under my bed when things were getting rough. Things
got rough a lot. Fairy tales were always too mushy for me—I found recipes far more comforting.” He shrugs like it’s nothing,
but his hands are shaking.
I reach out slowly, brushing my fingertips over the scar. “He . . . he did this?”
Griff doesn’t flinch. “And more. Until I got strong enough to make him leave.”
I stare at him, as my tears begin to fall, trying to line up the two versions of my brother and father in my head.
“He was a bad man, Lisa.”
Bad man.
Beau’s voice ripples through me—that night at the kitchen table, his eyes foggy. The bad man . . . he’s gone, but he’s still living in Griff’s head.
I’d thought he was confused. Thought he meant Griff. But he’d been trying to tell me the truth—about my dad. About what Griff
carried and what I was too blind to see.
My breath catches. “I think Beau tried to bring it up, when he was sick. It didn’t make sense at the time.”
Griff closes his eyes, pain flickering across his face. “I swore him to secrecy. Told him it wasn’t his truth to share. But,
god, Lisa, I was so selfish. I put him in an impossible position. He never should’ve had to bear that burden for me.”
“Why on earth would Mum keep this from me?”
“The same reason she didn’t tell you about the kidney. She thought it would protect you. That if you didn’t know, you could
grow up untouched by it, with something close to a happy childhood.”
“Oh my god.”
“I know now it doesn’t work like that. Trauma’s not something you can scrape off like a burnt layer of toast. It seeps in,
flavoring everything . . . even when you don’t know it’s there. We should have trusted you with the truth, Lisa.” His eyes
meet mine—tired, red, and honest. “I hated what he did. And that you reminded me of him. You looked so alike. You tied us
to him without even knowing it. I was hard on you because of that, and I should’ve known better. You were just a little girl.
I’m so sorry.”
“You were young too, Griff. That’s a hell of a thing for Mum to ask of you.”
He blinks hard; he’s trying to hold it together, to take the comfort but not fully believing it’s his to have. “The things he said . . . I . . .” His voice trails off.
Scraps of memory appear, jagged and out of order—Mum’s voice too bright when Dad came home, Griff shouting when I tried to
follow him, doors slammed, nights I lay in bed listening but not understanding. The names, the yelling: I never understood
them then, but now they become clear—the way Griff’s shoulders stiffened, the way the words cut the air. I shift closer, my
eyes trailing his forearm as the true depth of the trauma clicks into focus.
“Griff . . . that scar . . . it wasn’t the worst mark Brent left on you, was it?”
Griff’s face shutters closed, as if there’s more he could say but won’t.
I pull the paper from my bag. “I saw this letter, the one to Beau. It was in the viola.”
He looks away, reddening. “I never meant for you to see that.”
“It was my dad, wasn’t it—‘the voice that made you hate yourself’?”
Griff gives a shaky nod, his voice fragile, almost younger. “He made me feel like I was wrong just for existing. For who I
was and who I loved. I didn’t even have the words for it back then, but he did.”
The truth strikes deep, icy and unforgiving. All these years I assumed Dad had been decent, even good, and that Griff was
the problem, difficult, and unkind. My memories of Dad were patchy but sweet: him playing lions with me, picking me up, swirling
me through the air. Maybe I stitched those scraps together, imagination filling in the blanks with happy scenes that never
happened. And all along, he had been the one poisoning the air in our house. My stomach twists with shame. I never questioned it, never saw it. How colossally
wrong I’d been.
I grab his hand. “Oh Griff, I’m so sorry! How could I have been so blind? So naive? You loved someone, and you were loved
exactly as you are. That’s not wrong. That’s real and beautiful! What you and Beau had . . . it was the kind of love most
people spend their lives hoping for. What my dad said, what he made you believe, that was the lie.”
Griff goes still. His eyes flick over my face like he’s trying to find the part where I take it back.
“He convinced me I was the reason everything broke, that what he did to me, what he did to Mum, was punishment for my mistake. And by extension, that you were punishment.” He bites his lip, taking both my hands in his.
“But you aren’t the consequence, Lisa, you were never part
of what was broken. You were the proof we hadn’t been destroyed. That something beautiful, something worth loving, came out
of my mistake.”
“Oh, Griff . . .” I whisper. “Your mistake?”
“Yes. I kept Mum’s secrets because I believed I owed her everything. I took the man she loved—it’s a debt I can never repay.”
“Griff, look at me. You didn’t cause your dad’s death.”
He flinches.
“You were a kid, it was a terrible accident. Mum told me. The other driver ran a red light.”
He shakes his head, eyes filling with tears. “If I hadn’t—”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say again, firmer. “You didn’t deserve any of it. Not the blame. Not the bruises. None of it. There
is no debt.”
He tries to turn away, but I won’t let him, cupping his face gently in my hands. “It. Wasn’t. Your. Fault.”
He breaks. The sobs come fast, like a dam finally giving way. I move closer, wrapping my arms around him. His body tenses
for a moment, then he hugs me back. I hold him while he cries the tears of an eight-year-old boy who never got to be a child.
And in that quiet, something shifts. Something deep and old. The silence that’s lived between us for decades—one that started
long before the dementia—begins to lift.