Christina waited.
“Are you sure?” she said gently. “Are you sure you don’t know?”
Two spots of color rose on Brooke’s cheeks. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“So back to your parents’ houseguest,” said Christina. “She was alone with your father? While your mother was in hospital?”
“Yes,” said Brooke. “It was only two nights.”
“Right,” said Christina. That was long enough. She waited. Brooke didn’t flinch.
“Then your mother came home from hospital and Savannah stayed on.”
“Yes,” said Brooke. “We were grateful because she was doing all the cooking.”
“I believe it’s around this time that your brother Logan discovered something unwelcome about Savannah.”
This time Brooke definitely did flinch. Had she not expected this information to be passed on? If not, why not?
Brooke recovered fast, although she had to work too hard to maintain eye contact.
“Did Logan tell you that?”
“He did,” said Christina. Logan had mentioned it in a sudden rush, just before he had to hurry off to teach a class. “Can you tell me more?”
“Well,” said Brooke, and she spoke gingerly, as if she were tiptoeing her way through broken glass. “Logan was just sitting at home one day when he discovered something about Savannah that made us all feel a bit…” She broke eye contact to try to find the right word.
Ethan wobbled on his balance ball.
“Nervous,” finished Brooke.
Chapter 26
LAST OCTOBER
It was the middle of the day, the middle of the week, the middle of his life. Logan had taught an early-morning class and now he was back home, on his green leather couch, in his half-empty town house, on a clear, sunlit day filled with birdsong, lawnmowers and leaf blowers, and the sound of his next-door neighbor learning the cello. She’d left a preemptive note: Thank you for your patience while I learn the cello!
Logan channel-surfed, drank warm beer, and ate cold leftover pizza for his lunch, and tried to stop his eyes continually leaving the television and returning to all the blank spaces in the apartment left by Indira.
There was a blank space in front of him where Indira should have been standing right now, hands on her hips: Do you realize the sun is shining out there?
She thought it was illegal to watch television when the sun was shining. It was because she and her family had emigrated from the UK when she was twelve, and she still appreciated Australian sunshine in a way that Logan, who grew up with the sun in his eyes, never could. He saw sunlight as a peril, an obstacle to overcome on the court, like the wind. She saw it as a daily miracle.
She’d left behind literal blank spots too, like the faded rectangle on the wall where she’d hung that god-awful abstract painting she’d bought from an artist at the markets in Hobart, and the flattened carpet by the front door where her pointless vintage hat rack used to stand, except apparently it hadn’t been pointless because Logan kept going to chuck things on it, like his hoodie, and it kept right on not being there, its absence so surprisingly consistent, like the balls of dirty gray fluff that still floated disconsolately around the space in the laundry where Indira’s bamboo laundry hamper once stood.
She’d left behind her washing machine. It glared at him each time he attempted to use it. It was a small, fiddly front-loader with too many cycle options. Indira had done all their laundry. She loved laundry. She’d sometimes peeled socks off his feet just to wash them.
/> At least the fridge still liked him. He’d had it for years. It stayed, solemn and stolid, humming softly to itself through each relationship breakup as the tubs of Greek yogurt and containers of strawberries vanished, to be replaced once again by pizza boxes and multiple six-packs of beer.
Faithful old fridge.
For Christ’s sake, he was turning into his mother: personifying his appliances.
He stared at the blank rectangle on the wall, as if it were a bricked-up window and he was uselessly looking for a view that was long gone, for an explanation that was not forthcoming.
“It’s beautiful,” she used to say, about the god-awful painting. “It makes me feel alive.”
“It’s god-awful,” he would say, and he’d heard the echo of his parents in their banter, or he thought that’s what he heard. Maybe Indira heard something else. Her parents had an unhappy marriage. She might have heard the echoes of something entirely different. He thought he was being funny and flirty, but maybe she thought he was being nasty. Maybe she hated doing the laundry. Maybe they’d been living side by side in entirely different realities.