“Well, I think because she had some kind of injury. Mum needed to bandage her up. Her boyfriend did it. Mum keeps referring to her as a ‘domestic violence victim,’ in this breathless, excited way.” Amy paused. When she spoke again her mouth was clearly full. “I can’t believe you don’t know about this yet.”
Brooke couldn’t believe it either. Her mother phoned often, always on the flimsiest of excuses. Early last week she’d called three times in one day: once to tell her something she’d heard on a podcast about migraines, once to correct herself (because she’d found the piece of paper where she’d written it down), and once to tell her that the cyclamen plant Brooke had given her for Mother’s Day had bloomed. (Amy had given her the cyclamen but Brooke didn’t correct her mother when she gave her credit for it.)
“What are you eating?” she said tetchily.
“Breakfast. Orange-and-poppy-seed muffin. Citrusy. Not enough poppy seeds.”
Brooke sat back down and tried to work it out. Her parents were smart people. They wouldn’t have let anyone shady or dangerous into the house. They were only on the very outer edge of old age, they were not yet dealing with dementia or confusion, just bad knees and indigestion, some insomnia, apparently. They both seemed a bit bewildered and lost now that they’d sold the tennis school. “The days are so long,” her mother had sighed to Brooke. “They used to be so short. Anyway! Shall we meet for coffee? My treat!” But Brooke’s days were still short, and she didn’t have time for coffee.
“Well, I guess Mum and Dad are pretty good judges of character,” she began.
“Are you kidding?” said Amy. “Good judges of character? Shall I name every cheating, lying little brat who hoodwinked them? Starting right at the top with Harry fucking Haddad, who broke Dad’s poor fragile heart?”
“Okay, okay,” said Brooke hurriedly. “So did they take her to the police?”
“She doesn’t want to report it,” said Amy. Her mouth was full again. “And she has nowhere else to go, so they’re letting her stay there until she ‘finds her feet.’”
“But can’t she go to a … I don’t know, a women’s shelter or something?” Brooke picked up a pen and chewed on it. “I know that sounds bad but she’s not their problem. There are places she can go for help.”
“I think Mum and Dad just want to help.” Amy sounded airy and philanthropic now. Brooke could sense her deftly switching positions. She’d always had the best footwork in the family. Now that Amy had handed over responsibility, Brooke could be the worried, uptight one and Amy could be the help-the-homeless bleeding heart, a role that suited her far more.
“Did you say she turned up on Tuesday night?” said Brooke. “This girl has been staying with them for nearly a week?”
“Yep,” said Amy.
“I’ll call Mum now.” Maybe Amy had misinterpreted everything.
“She won’t answer,” said Amy. “She’s taking Savannah to Narelle.”
“Narelle?”
“Mum’s hairdresser of thirty years, Brooke. Keep up. Narelle with the identical twins, and the allergy that turned out to be cancer, or the cancer that turned out to be an allergy, I can’t remember, but she’s fine now. Narelle has opinions about all of us. She thinks Logan and Indira should have a baby. She thinks you should advertise in the local paper. She thinks Troy should go on a date with her divorced sister. Oh, and she thinks I’m bipolar. Mum started listening to a podcast called Living with Bipolar.”
Amy was speaking too fast now, in that weird manic voice she sometimes put on that made Brooke wonder if she actually was bipolar. She did it on purpose. She liked people to think she was crazy, because it made them nervous. It was an intimidation tactic.
“Of course, Narelle. Anyway. I’ll call Dad.”
“He’s out too. He’s looking at cars. For Savannah.”
“Dad is buying this girl a car?”
“I’m not one hundred percent sure,” said Amy. “But you know how he loves it when someone needs a new car.”
“Jeez,” said Brooke. The end of the pen slipped free and into her mouth. She spat it into the palm of her hand. “Do the boys know?”
“I don’t think so,” said Amy.
“Didn’t you call Troy?”
Amy and Troy were the closest out of the four of them. Brooke knew she would have called him first.
“I texted him,” said Amy. “But he didn’t answer. You know he’s flying back from New York today.”
Brooke couldn?
??t keep up with Troy’s glamorous, international life. “I guess I did.”
“And Logan never answers his phone. I think he has a phobia about it. Or he does when it comes to us. He talks to his friends.”