Sliver Moon Bay: The Looking (18 page)

The door is ajar. It’s not like
her to leave it open but so what? She probably sat on the doorstep
drinking tea and forgot to shut the door when she went back in.

‘Mum?’

Yep, she did. Have her tea. Her
cup’s on the table, empty with just a tea stain dried at the
bottom. The brew we made in the morning is still on the hob, with a
bit left in the pot. So she drank quite a lot throughout the
day.

‘Mum?’

She’s lying on her bed, sound
asleep. Drooling. So that’s that.

I close the partition. I make
myself a snack and then clean up the kitchen quietly. I empty the
pot and wash the cup. Put the dishes away. She’s going to notice
when she gets up and she’ll be pleased. Then I go lie down on my
own bed. It’s the right sort of afternoon for a snooze.

Emily? Emily-darling, what are
you doing?

She’s smiling at me. I show
her.

It’s my dolly. I’ve cut her
hair. See, Mummy?

Oh, Emily. You’ve cut Dolly’s
hair. She’ll have no hair now. See?

Her hair will grow back,
Mummy.

I point to my own hair. I know
it grows.

Fairy’s shaking her head. No,
silly, Dolly’s hair is all gone.

I feel like crying. I want
Dolly’s hair back.

Fairy gives me a hug. Emily,
Emily, sweetheart. It’s okay. We’ll make Dolly a hat.

Fairy’s making a hat for her.
She’s cutting the paper. We glue sparkles on it. Then Fairy folds
it and I put it on Dolly’s head. And Dolly’s looking nice
again.

It’s time for bed. Fairy lies
down next to me and we count elephants together.

One elephant, two elephants,
three elephants… goodnight Emily. Fairy kisses my forehead and
goes. Emily can sleep now.

I wake up when the sun’s gone
down. I see the last of it from my pillow. It just dipped below the
tree tops, leaving an orange line, hovering. It’s fading to red,
pink, opaque blue. Then I have to go pee.

When I come back inside, the
trailer is quiet. My head feels funny, like it’s stuffed with
things I don’t want to think about. And I’m thirsty. In the fridge,
the water jug’s as full as it was this afternoon. So Lilian’s
either gone out or she’s still asleep. It can’t be.

But it is. She’s on her bed,
like she was.

Oh dear.

‘Mum! Mum! Mum!’

But she won’t move. I don’t
even need to touch her to know this. But I do. Touch her.

69

I really don’t know what
happened after I touched her. I know people came, Amy and Captain
Josh, and I allowed them to take me away. So I never even saw Mum
going out, of the trailer, for the last time. I know she went past
me when I sat in Captain Josh’s car, but it wasn’t really her.
Lilian had gone long before they took her away in the ambulance. I
don’t remember if they had sirens on but I hope they didn’t. It
just would have been so pointless, so disrespectful. To me cause I
knew and I told them, and to her. Cause clearly she didn’t want to
be here anymore and her wishes should have been respected.

I wish I hadn’t. It felt
strange. Her skin was clammy. Slack. Felt as if it were peeling
from her. But it took me a while to understand what was going on. I
think I watched her. I might have talked to her. I don’t know.
Maybe one day I will remember but even if I do, I will never tell
anybody what I said. I won’t even write it down. Except for this. I
kissed her. I leaned over her and put my lips to her cheek. And
that’s when I saw the note. A single sheet of paper, lying on the
bed next to her. It had been torn out of her notebook where she
kept important numbers, emergency numbers like the gas company in
case we got a leak, and the snake catchers in case we got a
dangerous reptile crawling through the house. Well, the thing is;
we don’t cook on gas—we’ve been running the cooktop on a
generator—and the one time we did get a dangerous reptile in the
house, it was a tiny little thing curled up in the corner. Chris
banged it over the head with a shovel. It stunned itself into
dying. It was fun to watch. Its beady little eyes stared a bit,
then dimmed, and then it was over. Anyway, these were the numbers
deemed relevant to our life, kept in this notepad on the kitchen
counter next to her phone where very important messages were to be
noted. So finally this pad had an important message to convey.

I picked up the note of course.
Read it. And got the message, loud and clear. Lilian apparently did
too. So that was that.

I guess I could have kept it;
showed it to people, Amy, Captain Josh, others who were invested in
this situation, in our lives. It might have cleared up a few things
for them but this was, is, a family matter and these folks are not
family. Chris might have found the note useful, relevant even, to
his life, to the decisions he had made in it but he’s not here so
what am I meant to do? —Exactly. It’s good enough that I know.

I turn the tap on and place the
note under it. The words go, disappear, like Starling, into
nothingness. In a little while the paper disintegrates. It’s
over.

70

After I turned the tap off, the
ambulance came. Amy came and took me home with her. Captain Josh
stayed behind. Maybe he was looking for clues. I don’t know. I
remember sitting in his car, waiting for Amy who was inside packing
my things. My mum went by, strapped to a stretcher. Her head was
turned away from me. I only saw her hair, on top of the sheet. She
still looked pretty.

I’m going to miss you, Lilian.
I really am.

71

Hours go by and I’m left alone,
put to bed in a strange room. On the other side of the door,
strange noises fill the space out there. Amy’s shuffling about,
putting on her pyjamas across the hallway. I’m guessing she is. I
don’t know. I don’t know her routine, what she does when the family
goes to bed. It’s really none of my business. I am exhausted.
Inside my head, everything’s sorted. It’s clear to me what I ought
to do.

I don’t think there’s much left
for me here. In all honesty, it wouldn’t be too bad if my turn
came. Look at it from my perspective; I’ve really only got Fairy
left. I love her; however. She’s not reliable. I don’t have control
over her. And believe you me, I’ve tried. But she’s no Lilian.
She’s strong. So if I stay, I’ll be mostly alone.

This is, more or less, what I
said to Amy. Didn’t mention Fairy, of course. She wouldn’t have
understood what I was on about, obviously.

Course, straight away, she
seized on the lonely bit. We were in her study; me lying on the
couch under the open window and her facing me, sat in a chair,
looking concerned. Really out of her depth, she was, but who
wouldn’t be, thrown into this situation?

‘Sarah, I can only imagine how
very difficult this is for you. I want you to know that you can
always count on me. And Josh. We are here to help you…’ she trailed
off, kind of embarrassed, the poor thing. I know I should have said
something kind, something to make her feel better but I was tired.
I just couldn’t be bothered to think about anything else but my own
fucked up life. So for a while, we both remained quiet. I was
listening to the ocean.

‘Do you need anything,
Sarah?’

Well, duh… but what can you do
about it, huh?

‘I’m fine, Miss.’

‘Amy. You can call me Amy if
you want to.’

‘Okay. Amy.’

We grimace at each other. I
suspect Amy wants to be here as much as I do. But she’s a trooper.
A battler, that’s what she is.

‘I need to ask you one thing,
honey. Do you have any idea where your dad might be?’

I shake my head. ‘We haven’t
heard from him for months.’

Amy nods. ‘I know. But I don’t
want you to worry, honey. Josh is going to find him.’

‘I don’t think my dad wants to
be found.’

Amy shrugs. ‘Well... we’ll find
him and bring him back. You can count on it.’

I don’t want to count on it.
But I’m not telling her that. It’s none of her business. So I just
nod, like I’m on board. There’s not much else to say.

After a while Amy leaves. It’s
late and we should all try to get some sleep, is what Amy says at
the door. It’s like she doesn’t know how to relate so she’s saying
things people usually say in the movies. Ah, well. At least she’s
trying hard; confused and unsure of what to do she’s saying all
these foolish things. It shows she’s a genuinely caring person
cause if she weren’t, she’d have prepared a better speech. I feel
like telling her that she’s doing a good job but of course, I say
no such thing.

She shuts the door.

I lay in the dark and cry. It
is surreal, how it’s all turned out. As if anything could be worse
than this. First Starling, then Chris, and now Lilian. They’ve all
gone away. So where does that leave me?

I cry and cry until my head
hurts. My temples are pounding. And it’s hot in the room. I sit up
and lean out of the window.

The night out there is cooler.
A big fat pale marble moon sits in the middle of a star studded
sky, looking down at the ocean washing the Earth clean under its
watchful eye.

It is a beautiful night.

The ocean below me is calm. A
silver streak of moonlight shimmers across its surface, expanding,
contracting, endlessly shifting shape. It is beautiful to be alive
on a night like this.

72

I stayed up watching the ocean.
I thought about my family, Fairy, all the promises I ever made, to
me, to Lilian, to Chris and Starling. I made a new resolution. I
intend to make good on all of them, for all of our sakes. Just
watch me.

End of Part 1

Sliver Moon
Bay: The Finding
concludes the story
started in
Sliver Moon Bay: The
Looking.

Sliver Moon
Bay

The
Finding

Sliver Moon Bay: The Finding ©
Ivana Hrubả 2015

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be
reproduced, copied or used in any form or manner whatsoever without
written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in
reviews and critical articles.

Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction.
All events described herein are imaginary, including settings and
characters. Any similarity to real persons, entities, or companies
is purely coincidental and not intended to represent real living
persons. Real brand names, company names, names of public
personalities or real people may be employed for credibility
because they are part of our culture and everyday lives. Regardless
of context, their use is meant neither as endorsement nor
criticism: such names are used fictitiously without intent to
describe their actual conduct or value. All other names, products
or brands are inventions of the author’s imagination. The author
and the publisher of this work, its distributors, retailers,
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for how this work is interpreted by its readers. The author and the
publisher assume no responsibility for factual errors,
inaccuracies, or omissions.

Dear Reader,

Thank you so much for reading
Sliver Moon Bay: The Looking
. Your review of this story
posted online will be much appreciated.

Cheers, Ivana

About the
author
:

Ivana Hrubá is a lovely, lovely
girl and a writer of some “notable” talent, the sum of which will
be, just for your entertainment, very modestly noted here.
Specializing in writing bold, quirky and outrageously entertaining
fiction, Ivana is what we call an undiscovered gem, an exotic
island waiting to be explored or, as some people say, a territory
best left uncharted.

Ivana devised her first novel
at the tender age of twelve when she was but a wee little girl
wearing out her brother's hand-me-downs, chasing the geese off the
village green in her native Czech Republic which was then under
communist rule. Filled with poultry and very long sentences,
Ivana's idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end in 1983 when she
and her family crossed the Alps on foot to seek a new life free of
communists and their blasted queues. After a year spent frolicking
in a West German refugee camp, the family finally had a gutful of
that sort of adventure and settled in Australia in 1984 where
they've been living it up ever since.