Ricochet Baby (27 page)

Glass wants to kick her when he sees her.

‘Where’s the woman’s family?’ he says. ‘Come on, I want to hear it.’

‘I told you, the same as I told the police — she’s got a
daughter
in Palmerston North.’

‘They need more than that.’

‘Wendy never told me,’ says Edith.

Glass studies her. ‘She must have let something drop, all that talk, all the time you spent together.’

‘It’s the truth,’ she says, closing her eyes.

‘I should kick you out, you old soak.’

‘Why don’t you then?’ Daring him.

And for a moment, he almost does. Instead he picks up her feverish hand, and drops down beside her. ‘I’m thinking about
leaving
the farm,’ he says, after a silence. ‘Whatever happens. I reckon I’ve had enough.’

‘You’re just saying that, Glass. Expediency. You want
something
.’

He drops her hand back into her lap.

‘I mean, it’s a bit late, isn’t it?’

He doesn’t answer her; probably she’s right, the accumulation of wreckage between them is hard to believe.

‘I do love you, Glass,’ she says, inconsequentially.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘of course. I know that.’

‘I never cared about anyone else. Know what I mean?’

‘Well, then, it’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘Glass, I don’t know where Wendy is. Cross my heart.’

‘Her daughter? You can’t think of a name?’

‘It might have been Sarah.’

The door swings open. Their daughter looks down at them, full of rage and contempt.

‘Roberta,’ says Glass.

‘What the fuck do you two think you’re doing?’

Roberta stands in front of her mother. ‘Get up,’ she says.

‘That’s enough,’ says Glass. But Edith is clutching at the wall behind her, pulling herself to her feet. Mother and daughter stand glaring at each other.

Roberta turns on Edith. ‘You and your crazies. Where is she?’

‘Don’t know. Just told your father.’

‘Is that the best you can do?’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Stop hiding behind all this crap. Tell the truth for a change.’

‘Sorry. Wish I knew.’ Edith hiccups and wipes her mouth on her sleeve.

‘You do,’ says Roberta. ‘For Christ’s sake, remember. I mean, for
Christ’s
sake,
Mum.’

Edith crosses herself, swaying. Her eyes lock with Roberta’s, in and out of focus. Father and daughter hold their breaths.

‘Perhaps in the kitchen? Might be something there.’

They take off their gumboots at the back door, habit
overriding
their haste. The policeman seems to have gone home, or perhaps he is asleep in the car. Nothing stirs. The house feels still and close.

Edith opens the drawer of the dresser, rummaging among bits of string and plastic bags and corkscrews and preserving jar lids, old shopping lists and the draft of her seed catalogue.

‘Yes,’ she mutters. ‘Daughter. Sarah Lord. I have the number. She rang me one night.’

Glass is dizzy with relief. ‘I’ll ring the police.’

‘No,’ says Roberta, snatching the paper from her mother’s hand. She picks up a set of keys from the ledge above the bench, the keys to Bernard’s wagon, recovered from the airport. It stands in the driveway of his deserted house.

I
T IS SURPRISING
how calm Sarah Lord sounds, as if she has been expecting my phone call. I ring from the phone box near the
general
store out in the middle of nowhere, praying that my ancient Telecom card is still operational. As I dial, I am raking the
landscape
for approaching headlights, ready to make a run for it if I see a police car. My card has a dollar left on it. Sarah answers straight away.

‘It’s Roberta, isn’t?’ she says.

‘Can I come and see you?’

‘Of course.’

She may think I’m deranged. I don’t know what she will know about me, whether her mother has been in touch with her, talked about me. I half-expect the police to be parked outside, although I have broken no laws, am free to come and go. But they will expect me to lead them to Nathan. They have no reason to trust me. I park Bernard’s four-wheel drive around the corner from her house.

‘I’ve just made some tea,’ Sarah says. Although it is spring, she has an open fire burning in the grate. She hands me a toasting fork with a crumpet on the end of it.

‘You’ve had an amazingly long day,’ she says. ‘What time did you talk to Holmes?’

I tell her how he came out of the sky in a chopper and took away my image and my fears, leaving me to wonder what on earth I’d done.

‘You were good,’ she says, ‘really straight up and down.’

‘You didn’t think I sounded vindictive?’

‘About your ex and his girlfriend? It’s nothing to what I would have said.’

‘Really?’ When I had met her in the garden for those few
minutes
, the day of Wendy’s appearance at the farm, I would have said she was scatty, but I’m liking her more and more by the minute.

‘I expect she’s in love with him, all the same,’ she says
reflectively
. ‘It happens.’

There doesn’t seem any proper response to this.

Sarah has made tea in a pot shaped like a pumpkin with a stalk to lift the lid. I know this is chic kitsch — some of Paul’s and my friends in the city used to specialise in it — but Sarah’s
unconventional
house doesn’t seem contrived, just put together with a touch of fun and drama and a fair bit of romanticism. I look at the books, the kooky china, the artwork, roll my finger over the dragon on the piano. Kids’ stuff is thrown around, roller blades and tapedecks and posters. I feel a kind of envy for Sarah.

‘I wouldn’t mind this,’ I say.

Sarah sits down with her hands around a mug. ‘It has its moments. I get lonely. Now what about your baby?’

‘That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me. Where d’you think Wendy’s taken her?’

‘You’re quite sure it’s Wendy?’ says Sarah.

I stare at her. ‘I thought this is what it was all about.’

‘She hasn’t been in touch with me,’ says Sarah.

‘I wondered if you didn’t get on.’

‘Not exactly that. We’d just cast each other off, if you see what I mean. Well, maybe you don’t. I’m adopted, actually. I’m still trying to sort it out in my head. She’d left me to it, I think. I did tell her to.’

‘But it’s not sorted?’

‘No, I don’t think so. But I miss her, you see.’

‘She’s pretty weird.’

‘Yeah, I know, but she’s what I’ve got.’

‘So possibly you think I can live without my baby?’

‘I didn’t say that. I don’t know whether my natural mother could or not. In a way I don’t want to know.’ Her look is harder, more penetrating than I expect. And I can see what is going through her mind — I can give my baby away and go on television and drive around in the middle of the night and look at the things in her house. I’m still alive. I’m a sort of living proof that she doesn’t have to seek out her history and live all its pain.

‘I’ve been in hospital,’ I say abruptly. ‘Psych ward.’

Sarah is still. ‘Shit,’ she says. ‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘On television?’

She gives a half-hearted grin. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Let’s look at what we’ve got. Look, you’d better see this.’ She unfurls a letter and hands it to me. ‘What do you make of that?’ The letter is about Wendy invading someone’s privacy, the likelihood of her having information which she is using to the detriment of others.

‘Is there any way that this affects you?’

‘It doesn’t make any sense at all. I can’t think how it’s anything to do with me. Perhaps I should have rung and asked them.’

‘I don’t expect they’d tell you, if it was for real.’

‘You think it’s phony? Look, it’s on letterhead.’

‘That doesn’t make it real. People can get access to
letterheads
, copy them, all sorts of things. The technology’s changed things like that. Even the officialese doesn’t sound quite right.’

‘Don’t you think so?’ Sarah is curious about how I know all these things.

‘I worked for the Inland Revenue Department.’

‘I don’t believe it. You don’t look the part.’

‘We’re mostly pretty normal, just like real people.’ I smile for the first time in days.

‘Okay, so wouldn’t you send a letter like this?’

‘Not up front like this. It’s not very subtle. Somebody wants her to shut up, that’s all.’

‘But whatever they were on to her about, Wendy wouldn’t know, would she, because she never got the letter.’

‘Look,’ I say, ‘there’s something I should tell you. When I left Nathan, I left him with my mother-in-law. I went to her house and simply walked out on him. I hate what I did, but I couldn’t help myself.’

‘She didn’t try and stop you?’

‘I’m sure she would have, but she didn’t know what I was going to do. Somebody came to the house and made it easy for me. A woman who frightened her. I’m sure it was Wendy. Is she a
blackmailer
or something?’

‘No,’ says Sarah, her head in her hands. ‘She’s not like that.’

‘I don’t know what she’s like,’ I say. ‘She wanted to be friends, but I couldn’t let myself. You know, she was my mother’s friend, she seemed to get between her and everyone else.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really. But perhaps I wasn’t fair, because I can see my mother’s never had a friend.’

‘Wendy lives in a world of make-believe. I’ve got no real idea of her personal history — some of it’s true, and some of it’s fantasy. She sees herself as the heroines in the books she reads, some of it I think she makes up as she goes along.’ Sarah, with a distracted air, walks to her bookshelf and takes down
Brewer’s
Dictionary
of
Phrase 
and
Fable,
opening the volume at a marked page. ‘This was one of my mother’s books. I found this entry ringed, a long time ago. I’ve never thought of it again.’

In astonishment, I read:
DOMIDUCA:
the
goddess
who
brought
young
children
safe
home,
and
kept
guard
over
them
when
out
of
their
parents’
sight.

She wouldn’t hurt Nathan,’ Sarah says.

‘Where would she have taken him?’

‘To her cottage by the sea, up the north of Taranaki. It’s near a camping ground. If she’s not there already, I’m fairly certain that’s the direction she’ll be heading. I could take you there if you like.’

‘Could you?’

‘Yes, but I’ll have to get someone to look after my kids. Their father, I suppose, although I wouldn’t want him to know where we were going.

‘How soon could we go?’

Sarah looks worried. ‘Not before morning. But we need some sleep. It’s a long way.’

I know I can’t go much further without collapsing. All the same, I don’t want to stay around here, now that I have a lead.

Sarah is thinking. ‘One of us should wait here, in case she turns up. If I gave you directions, would you stay here till dawn, have a kip first?’

‘This isn’t a brush-off?’

‘Why should you trust me?’ says Sarah. ‘Well, I can see that you mightn’t, but what else have you got?’

I know I have to go on my own. That is, if I want to see Nathan again. If I have any chance of restaking my claim upon him. I have no idea how it might turn out, or what I will have to do when I get there, but I must go. First, before anything, I have to know that he is alive and safe.

S
ARAH WAKES ME
at dawn, just as she promised. She is still wearing the same sweater and jeans that she wore the night before, so I guess she has sat up and kept watch. I hadn’t expected to sleep but as soon as I lay down on the comfortable mattress on the floor of her room, I went straight into the deepest and most dreamless sleep I can recall since long before Nathan was born.

We sit on either side of her drop-leaf kitchen table, snatching a quick cup of fresh coffee. We talk very quietly because her
children
will wake soon and we don’t want them to know I have been here. I am beginning to see Wendy in a new light — a woman missed by grandchildren, a provider, of sorts, for her daughter, a strange, passionate lost creature.

‘Have you got a boyfriend?’ I ask. Boyfriend sounds juvenile, but lover feels presumptuous.

‘I did,’ says Sarah, ‘but it turned to shit. I’d like another one but there’s not much going that hasn’t got a return-by date. What about you?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Sort of. He doesn’t know what he wants.’

‘Do you want to marry him or something?’

‘I don’t want to share him,’ I say. It’s not the time to explain all of this, but I have come to the conclusion, in the past few strange days of my life, that I want more than my mother seemed to want: to be wooed, corrupted and defiled, and then, contrite, return to the life she had lived before, without responsibility for her absence, without the need to make decisions about change. I see how that has failed her. Besides, Paul was never like my father. He was never half as good, and I couldn’t have him back even if I wanted to. But I want Josh for myself, not just as an interlude in my life. I feel that we could sit here talking for days, two serious, quiet young women, interested in books and men …

‘It’s time for me to push off,’ I say. Sarah hugs me in a fierce, affectionate embrace, as if we have known each other much longer. It feels lonely setting off on my own, driving through the quiet streets of the town.

N
ATHAN IS WELL
, as it happens, although he is fretful and as tired, in his way, as his minder. He has been travelling, so Wendy tells
people
, with his English grandmother, who looks, at the moment, like other people’s ordinary grandmothers. Wendy had a haircut in the first hours after she took Nathan from the supermarket. Cut above her ears, and shaped up the back of her head, her hair now looks like that of other perky elderly women. The hairdresser’s assistant held him during the haircut, feeding him morsels of flaky
chocolate
. Wendy was sure it was bad for him, but she hadn’t wanted to draw attention to herself.

‘What a good gran you are,’ said the hairdresser, handing him back.

‘Oh, no more than most,’ replied Wendy. She wore a sensible floral dress and a cardigan.

Nathan sat up in his new stroller and smiled. The first night they were together, the pair stayed in a good hotel on The Terrace in the city. Wendy sent for room service to bring soft-boiled eggs and fresh bread for them both. Nathan had a new bottle which she filled with milk or juice. She gave generous tips. In the morning she paid with cash when she left.

The second night was not so easy. She had started the day with the intention of going to Sarah’s, but the bus had been booked out, and the train had already left. Later in the day there would be another bus, but Nathan was showing signs of wear and tear, and she couldn’t duck and dive out of shops any more. She had half-expected Nathan’s photograph to be on the front page of the paper, but the story must have broken too late, or it hasn’t been picked up by the papers yet. They went to the library, where Wendy scribbled a letter, then they set off for the bus station again, but she became afraid. A stream of people was heading towards the railway station and, on an impulse, she decided to go back there. A unit was about to leave and she boarded it without seeing its destination. The reason for this excursion was
becoming
difficult to remember.

On the train, she rested her head against the window and watched the sea rushing past, while the child wriggled and
struggled
in her arms. She thought about her father, the tall man
wearing
a waistcoat, properly buttoned, and plus-fours. The rough landscape, the baby, the end of the line when the train stops, were not what she saw. She regarded the boy with positive dislike as she got out of the train and walked him, in his stroller, to a motel. She paid cash up front at the desk and asked that she and the child not be disturbed.

Nathan sleeps, wakes, she feeds him a tin of baby food and a mashed banana. It is not his fault, she decides, recovering a little of her affection for him. In the evening they watch television together, or she thinks he is watching, his eyes overbright, his cheeks flushed.

Wendy sees Roberta on television. She sees Nathan’s picture. And there is Edith’s garden, not as manicured as it was when she had first visited it a year earlier, but still opulent with spring blooms, still the beautiful place she has left days before. It would
be possible to leave the child here; he would be safe enough until they found him in the morning.

She rings reception. ‘Please give me an early morning
wake-up
call,’ she says, ‘and order me a taxi for seven a.m.’

I
HAVE TRAVELLED
some hours. I pass police cars, think I’m being watched. I am erratic and unstable, I have that on expert authority. A little madness goes a long way. It can haunt you for the rest of your life.

The country towns trickle past me: Waverley, Patea, Kakaramea, the names roll off my tongue as I say them to myself. I turn the radio on, Melissa Etheridge is singing. Will she love you, I ask myself, dancing in my head. Will anyone love you the way I do? I catch sight of myself in the mirror when I look up to observe the car behind me. You look like a dyke, Josh had said, a woman with huge eyes and a furry matt of spikes on my skull. My heart hurts so much it feels as if it will burst my chest. Will Leda love Josh the way I do? Does Prudence love Nathan? What’s happened to me? I’ve become a different person. I have, in my mind’s eye, a snapshot image of us three kids — Mike, Bernie and Rob. What’s happened to us all?