“Has your mother shown signs of depression recently?”
“Absolutely not,” said Brooke. She blinked. “Things haven’t been great recently, but Mum is not the sort of person to get depressed.”
“What about your father, then? Is he the sort of person to get depressed?”
“He can get grumpy,” said Brooke carefully. “But never violent. If that’s what you’re implying.”
“I don’t want to imply anything,” said Christina. “I’m just gathering information about your parents’ states of mind.”
“I wish you could see my father coaching a child,” said Brooke. “Even a child with no talent. Especially a child with no talent. He was so gentle and patient, so passionate about tennis, he just always wanted everyone to love tennis as much as he did.”
This told Christina nothing. Gentle people snapped. People who were patient and kind in some circumstances were cruel and vicious in others.
“But he’s not coaching anymore, right? Your parents are retired and you said they loved to work. So I take it they haven’t been enjoying retirement?”
“They’ve been floundering a bit,” said Brooke. “They tried traveling, but they didn’t know how to holiday. We didn’t really do holidays in our family.”
“You never went on a holiday?”
“Well, we did. Every summer we went for a week to a caravan park on the Central Coast,” admitted Brooke. “Which was kind of fun.” She frowned. “Kind of not.” She sighed. “But there was never time for many holidays because we all played competitive tennis. We were either traveling to a tournament or training for one, and my parents were trying to run a coaching school at the same time.”
“Was it a happy childhood?” asked Christina. She hadn’t got a handle yet on this family. On the surface they seemed loving and cheerful, but she could sense dysfunction bubbling ominously beneath their sporty, matter-of-fact demeanors.
“I don’t know,” said Brooke. She picked up a ballpoint pen, chewed on it, and then seemed to catch herself, removed it from her mouth, and put it back on the desk in front of her and pushed it away. “I mean, yes, it was happy. It was very busy. It was dominated by tennis. Tennis hijacks your childhood. There’s no time for anything else.”
“Did you resent having your childhood hijacked?”
“Not at all. I loved tennis. We all loved tennis.”
“You still play?” Christina looked at the framed print of a tennis player on the wall.
Brooke’s nostrils flared. “Not competitively. I play with my dad every now and then. For fun.”
“So growing up, did your parents put a lot of pressure on you to win?”
“We put pressure on ourselves,” said Brooke. “We all wanted to win.” She followed Christina’s eyes to the picture of the tennis player, who was stretching for a backhand as if a life depended on it. “It’s hard to want something so badly and give it your all and then not get it. There’s this idea that all you need to do is believe in yourself, but the truth is, we all can’t be Martina.”
“Martina?” Christina checked her notes. Was that the older sister?
“Navratilova,” said Ethan. He pointed at the poster.
“Oh, of course,” said Christina. The only tennis player she knew was the angry one from the eighties. McEnroe. She had an uncle who used to put on an American accent to imitate his tantrums: “You cannot be serious.”
Ethan said to Brooke, “When you said ‘things haven’t been great recently,’ is that because there was some fallout following that Father’s Day lunch?”
Astute question. Christina watched Brooke’s body language as she answered. Her shoulders went up, and she stretched her neck in a turtlelike manner to make them drop.
“There was no fallout,” she said definitively. “There were just a few things said out loud that day that had never been said out loud before, that’s all. Then Mum was sick in hospital, and we all focused on that.”
Was that the truth? Or was that when things began to fray?
“Okay then, so why do you think things ‘haven’t been so great’ lately?” asked Christina.
Brooke went very still. “I don’t know,” she said, and she didn’t blink.
There was the lie. Right there. Christina could point at it like a doctor points out a fracture on an X-ray.
She did so know.