Nine Perfect Strangers

Everyone held up their glasses and said after her, ‘To Zoe and Zach.’

Napoleon and Zoe didn’t do a toast.

Instead, Napoleon lit the candles on Carmel’s cake, and they all sang ‘Happy Birthday’ and Zoe blew out the candles and no-one said, ‘Make a wish,’ because every single person in that room was wishing the same thing. Frances could see him so clearly, the boy who should have been there, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Zoe, jostling with her to blow out the candles, their lives ahead of them.

After plates were handed around with the (excellent) cake, Zoe demanded that Ben play a song that Frances didn’t recognise, and Ben played it, and he and Jessica and Zoe danced together.

There were promises to keep in touch. People friended and followed each other. Jessica set up a WhatsApp group on their phones and joined them all.

Carmel was the first one to succumb to exhaustion and say, ‘Goodnight.’ Everyone was leaving for home the next morning. Those who were from interstate had changed their flights and transfers to the next day. Carmel was from Adelaide, and the Marconi family and Tony were from Melbourne. Tony was the only interstate guest who had hired a rental car, and he was going to drive Ben and Jessica to pick up their car from where it had been abandoned by Delilah. Lars and Frances, the only guests from Sydney, had declared their intentions to sleep late and have a lazy breakfast before heading off.

Frances somehow already knew that everything was going to feel different in the morning.

They would all feel the tug of their old lives. She’d been on group package holidays and cruises before. She knew the process. The further away they got from Tranquillum House, the more they would think, ‘Wait, what was that all about? I have nothing in common with those people!’ It would all begin to feel like a dream. ‘Did I really do a Hawaiian dance by the pool?’ ‘Did I really attempt to do a charade of the Kama Sutra just so my team would win?’ ‘Did I really take illegal drugs and get locked up with strangers?’

At last there was just Frances and Tony, alone at the long table, drinking a final glass of wine.

Tony held up the bottle. ‘Refill?’

Frances looked at her glass, considered. ‘No, thank you.’

He went to refill his own glass, changed his mind and put the bottle back down.

‘I must be transformed,’ said Frances. ‘Normally I’d say yes.’

‘Me too,’ said Tony.

He got that decisive, focused, I’m going in look men got on their faces when they’d decided it was time to kiss you.

Frances thought of that first kiss at Natalie’s sixteenth birthday party, how incredible and glorious it was, and how that was the boy who ended up telling her that he preferred smaller breasts. She thought of Gillian telling her to stop acting like the heroine of one of her own novels. Tony lived in Melbourne and was no doubt very settled in his life there. She thought of how often she’d moved for a man, how she’d been prepared to pack up her life and move to America for a man who didn’t even exist.

She thought of Masha asking, ‘Do you want to be a different person when you leave here?’

She said to Tony, ‘Normally, I’d say yes.’

chapter seventy-five

One week later

‘So, I’m not pregnant,’ said Jessica. ‘Never was pregnant. It was all in my head.’

Ben looked up from the couch. He picked up the remote and turned off Top Gear.

‘Okay,’ he said.

She came and sat down next to him and put her hand on his knee and for a moment they sat in silence and didn’t say a word, but somehow they both knew what it meant.

If she’d been pregnant, they would have stayed together. There was enough love left to stay together for a baby.

But she wasn’t pregnant, and there wasn’t enough love left to try again, or for anything else, except an inevitable, amicable divorce.

Two weeks later

The house smelled of gingerbread and caramel and butter. Carmel had cooked all her daughters’ favourite foods for their homecoming.

She heard the sound of the car pulling into the driveway and went to the door.

The car doors flew open and out tumbled her four little girls. They knocked her to her knees with their embraces. She buried her nose in their hair, the crooks of their arms. They burrowed into her and instantly began to fight over her like she was a favourite stuffed toy.