The Forrests (25 page)

In the glove box of the van they found a piece of paper from a notepad with a real estate agent’s face on the right-hand corner, and Susan had a pink glitter pen in the back seat. The girl buckled herself in and picked up a comic book. Rena wrote her number on the paper, and
Urgent
across the top. ‘I need to see him,’ she said quietly. ‘Can you tell him that, Dorothy? Even if he doesn’t want what I can give. I need to see him before I die. I have to make amends.’

‘Oh, Rena.’ Dorothy took the note. She didn’t want to ask
for what
. ‘Michael’s had a hard life.’ She hugged the older woman, her velvety purple jacket, inhaled her smell of citronella. Ribby Mei stepped forward to be held too. From the van’s back window, through a rubbed hole in the condensation, Susan blinked.

‘Happy birthday for the other day,’ Mei said.

‘Oh yeah. Thanks. Same to you.’

The dog arrived at Dorothy’s side, half-jumping up at her. ‘Down!’ she said, but the dog kept barking as they drove off.

Halfway up the path to her house Dorothy smelled burning. The kitchen was on fire.

Late the next night, after Hannah was in bed, some kind of dreamy folk music emanating from Donald’s room and Amy on the back steps locked in a phone call with a friend, arguing over her new veganism – ‘Vegetables are nature’s meat’ – Andrew answered a short hard rapping on the door. Dot heard male voices. Sometimes she hid from unexpected visitors, as though her agoraphobic self had reappeared. She and the kids made it a game, soundlessly gleeful as one extended a smooth leg and nudged the door of the television room so that it swung slowly to a soft close. But now she emerged from the blackened, soaked, foul-smelling kitchen into the hall, apron on, dishcloth and grater in hand. It was Michael’s bulk in the doorway, and Andrew said, ‘Mike’s back. He says his house has been broken into.’

Her brother was sweating, breathing hard, distress on his face.

‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

‘Do you have to know everything? Fuck man, this neighbourhood is totally unsafe.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Andrew said. He was shattered from sitting up all night guarding the open back door while they aired the kitchen. Half sleeping with his head on a pillow on the table, a tennis racket propped up next to him where another person would have had a shotgun.

‘Come in,’ said Dot. ‘We had a bit of an accident.’ She wasn’t sure how Michael was going to react. Her older brother sat on the living-room sofa with his elbows on his knees. A crane fly stroked
the window with one of its fine, hairlike legs. In a blur it batted across the glass sideways and settled again, resuming its thin lines.

‘They found that guy,’ said Michael, ‘the one that escaped from Mount Eden. I was helping look for him.’

Dorothy picked up Donald’s homework book and held it to her chest.

‘Michael,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen Rena.’

‘Rena.’ It was as though she’d slapped him. Before she could mention the woman’s illness, or the commune, or the inheritance that waited there, her brother lowered his big head to his arms and wept.

ONLY TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
since they’d finally determined to go, Dorothy and Amy found themselves halfway around the world. A different time zone, everything awry, from the row with Andrew about leaving in the first place to the dream-long flight to LA. Ruth’s husband Ben, a wealthy, pigeonish banker, met them at the airport, where they hired a rental and followed him through the haze and tangled freeway, humming with Amy’s buzz at the vast spread of city, Dot’s own ongoing meditation about
observing the loss
. A month ago her parents had moved across the country to California, to be nearer to Ruth. Two days ago, they had died. The car tipped head first into a shallow ravine; consensus was that Frank had suffered a heart attack while driving, Lee in the passenger seat beside him, neither of them belted in.

People Dot didn’t recognise gathered outside St Mary’s, the modest Episcopal church in her parents’ adopted neighbourhood. She embraced Ruth, whose hair was professionally set. A few
rushed introductions while Dot tugged at her formless aeroplane cardigan: Ruth directed them to Frank and Lee’s friends and the second cousins, the other Forrests. ‘But you’ll come back to the house afterwards. There’s an afternoon tea. I’ve had it catered.’

‘Yes. We’ll see you there. Wait, Ruth – where are your girls?’

But Ruth had gone to greet more people, perfect in low heels and tan stockings.

A tall skinny young man, one of the cousins, blatantly appraised Amy through his tortoiseshell specs, worn in the style of Frank Forrest. He was disappointed to learn that she and Dot were not staying on.

‘The return flight leaves tonight,’ Amy explained. ‘We’ll sleep on the plane.’

‘Why not come for longer? I could show you round.’

‘We’ve got to get back. We nearly didn’t come. I didn’t really know my grandparents.’

‘Aha. Tell me more.’

Inside, caught in a patch of sunlight on the left of the aisle, Rena sat away from the other mourners, bolt upright in a special padded seat. ‘You came all this way,’ Dorothy said. ‘My god. You’re amazing.’ Light limned the wiry shock of hair, her skin, hair and bone just held together by her electric will, her rage.

‘Your mother was a dear friend,’ Rena said. ‘A dear, dear friend.’ Her hands twisted.

‘How’s Michael?’

‘He didn’t want to come.’

‘I know.’ After Ruth’s phone call Dot had rung him to break the news. He lived at the commune now, with Rena, ‘Until it’s her
time’, as he put it, having been transformed by the rural life into someone who spoke like a medieval pastor, a crowing rooster in the background. When she told him about the accident there had been a long, long pause. Wind rushing the wires.

There they were. Ruth’s twins. In the doorway, a welcoming committee, teeth gnarly with metal braces but so poised, shiny brown hair and black dresses, shaking the hands of the elderly mourners, accepting condolences, giving them. Dot went to say hello and let them check her out, the weird auntie from that place they couldn’t find on a map. They were polite, told her about school and horse riding and drama class.

‘You must have been close to your grandparents?’ she asked, and both girls said together, ‘Oh, yes.’

She waved her daughter to come over from the speccy flirt, but before she reached them the minister took the podium, and the girls melted away, and Dot and Amy quickly ducked into a pew.

The service flowed with loving testimony from incredibly old people about Frank and Lee’s capacity for friendship. White-frosted men and women sticklike inside pressed cotton pastels, clean shoes. Maybe it was the jetlag, making her sway in her seat, as though one of the California fault lines had opened and was torquing the earth slowly. It wasn’t until the flirtatious cousin stood up to read a letter from Daniel, ‘who couldn’t be here in person’, that Dorothy really accepted he wasn’t going to come. No – even then a corner of her mind imagined him outside, smoking, ready to throw an arm out as she walked past. But this was a long way, no doubt, from wherever he now lived.

Overwhelmed by the gravity of the situation, the cousin lingered
too long over Danny’s simple lines, delivered them in a suspenseful boom. ‘ “Lee and Frank gave me a home when I needed one most. They gave me a family”.’

‘He should do voice-overs for blockbuster ads.
This summer
…’ Dorothy whispered to Amy in the movie-trailer voice. ‘
Two people
…’

Her daughter looked at her. ‘Oh Mum,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

The pew rocked. Her body felt the motion of the plane, still sleeping in the awkward chair, holding there the knowledge of her own safe bed at home. In Auckland it was midnight. Little by little her parents’ car approached the bend in the road. Funerals go by so fast.

Later they sat outside Frank and Lee’s house in the rented car and watched people stream through the gates for the catered afternoon tea, rich yellow light dripping over the afternoon. ‘Come on,’ Rena said from the back seat. ‘Let’s go in.’

Dorothy turned to Amy. ‘I think this is what’s called losing your nerve.’

‘I’ll come in,’ said Amy. ‘Moral support.’ She kissed her mother’s cheek. ‘Follow when you’re feeling up to it.’ She helped Rena’s crabbed body out of the car and across the road, hobbling.

The magnolia in the front yard was broad and luscious, the white plaster freshly painted. Inside, Amy walked a cup of tea through the Forrests’ retirement bungalow, watching her aunt and uncle and an antique-dealer friend in conversation that threatened at times to reveal itself as negotiation, linger over this sideboard, that rug. Pieces she described later for Dorothy to visualise,
furniture that had bobbed back and forth on the ocean and crossed this country by U-Haul.

When Amy appeared in the front doorway after about half an hour the tall cousin was with her, and Dot gripped the steering wheel and craned forward to see better. He kissed Amy on both cheeks and they made a false attempt at parting and smiled, her fingertips to his chest both deflection and touch. From the shadowed hall, Ruth joined them and embraced her niece. At that distance she looked just like their mother. When they were younger Ruth had most resembled Eve, but now she had long passed Eve in age, the little sister outgrowing the elder. Dot waited for Ruth to glance over, walk down the steps and cross the road, but she did not. After a moment Dorothy tooted and waved. Ruth, to her credit, just stood on the doorstep and looked evenly at the car, then was swallowed back into the house. Amy slid into the passenger seat and pulled a small framed square from the inside of her linen coat.

‘What’s this?’

‘A memento. Do you want it?’

It was a needlework piece, a picture of a cottage garden, little blue and purple stitches for flowers and a yellow thatched pattern on the cottage roof.

‘No thanks. But you should keep it.’

‘Cool. I love it.’

‘Did you talk to your cousins?’

‘Yeah, they’re nice. Pretty upset. They kept talking about how their dog died only last year.’

‘No Rena?’

‘Apparently she’s staying a few days. I wouldn’t be surprised if the trip kills her. She’s absolutely crazy. She tried telling me he did it on purpose.’

‘Who?’

‘Your dad.’

Dorothy had a pleasing image of running Rena over in this car.
Crunch
. ‘What, he drove off the road on purpose, or had a heart attack on purpose? Or both?’

‘Exactly. I mean she’s nuts. When I left she was having a sleep on their bed.’

‘Frank and Lee’s bed?’

‘Yes.’ The children had never been sure what to call them; Dorothy knew this was her fault.

‘Did you have a nice talk to your aunt?’

‘She’s my aunt? I thought she was the real estate agent.’

‘Are you being funny?’ The car bunny hopped at the lights. She wasn’t used to a manual. ‘Sorry.’

‘Yes. But she did have that price-sticker vibe.’

‘Noting the value of things.’

‘Maybe it was just the pearls.’

‘I mean what things are worth. Not the value of things. That would be a different question.’ Dorothy turned on the radio. ‘How was it in there?’

Amy smiled. ‘Pretty nice house they ended up in.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ It would likely be sold now, she supposed. Ben had made sure to mention that there were complications with the will, which was fine with her; she’d rather that was all broached when they were safely home again through the sky, clouds
reforming in the aeroplane’s wake, covering the trail. ‘They were privileged.’

‘Why didn’t they ever some to see us?’

‘Because they were cunts.’

‘Jesus, Mum.’ Amy leaned forward and turned off the radio.

‘Sorry.’

‘Oh, just let’s not talk about it.’ She put the radio on again.

‘Well, money sort of – bookended their lives. They came from money and they ended with it.’ Dorothy gestured around her. ‘Look at this neighbourhood. Do you see any graffiti, any homeless people, any social problems? No, it’s perfect, beautiful – see, people drinking cappuccino on the street, look at the little dogs, they don’t even shit, those dogs, they’re just little balls of fluff, it’s paradise.’ She leaned on the car horn. The people in the cafés and outside the boutiques looked over.

Amy yanked her mother’s arm away from the horn. ‘Stop it. Why did you even come? You’re so crazy.’

‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s a nervous reaction.’ A small keening escaped from her, somewhere between a laugh and a cry.

‘Oh, whatever.’ Amy stared out the window as though she could melt it.

‘Amy. You know I’m one of four children too.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘That I love you. Thank you for coming with me. Now let’s just leave. Oh dear.’ Tears came properly now, slipping hot. She dropped a hand from the steering wheel to brush them away, and the car wobbled over the centre line and a passing horn blared.

‘OK crazy lady, pull in here. I’m going to drive.’

After a while cruising the balmy streets, taking in the high-end health-food shops and the bicycles and prams and pretty trees, the freeway loomed and Dorothy fell asleep, drifting off with her daughter at the wheel, clutching the framed tapestry in her hands.

With something like disbelief, Andrew and Dorothy looked back on their thirties as their financially comfortable years. Something had happened to money; not just theirs, other people’s too, even those like them without investments. There was less of it. Andrew was made redundant and the teachers’ union lost a pay dispute. The kids needed help with student loans. Petrol. Food. The cost of moving house. To take the pressure off they sold up the burn-scarred cedar place in Waterview and moved to a brick-and-tile rental in the hills thirty minutes from the city, a suburb with the outlier’s sense of itself, peopled by young hippies and retirees who liked their stories told. Donald and Hannah were in the thick of social lives, Amy was studying, subsisting in a fungal student flat in town, and Grace had become a series of South American postcards and video calls. This was the awful, dawning joke of parenting: that the early shock of children, their need and clamour and inescapable attachment, just as quickly became their blithe withdrawal. And they took everything. They took their friends, their jokes, their daily fresh discoveries, the gorgeous, ungraspable newness of the world. Look sharp, the tide’s gone out. There was room for Dot and Andrew to look at each other for the first time in ages, bewildered. She was no longer a young mother. She was not a hippy or a retiree.