Three Wishes (36 page)

“O.K. then,” said Lyn.

“Of course, your father likes to pretend that we are the same people and he never stopped loving me.” Maxine rolled her eyes but couldn’t hide her pleasure. “But that’s Frank.”

“As long as you’re happy,” Lyn was beginning to wonder where all this was leading.

“So. I’ve been worried about him lately.”

Lyn put a finger to her lips.

“I’m telling you, he can’t hear. I thought of something nice to cheer him up.”

“Yes?”

Her mother laced her hands across her stomach and looked slightly bashful.

“Tomorrow night I’m going to propose to him.”

“You’re going to ask him to marry you?”

“That’s what proposals are generally for, Lyn, yes. What do you think?”

“I think.” Lyn put down her teacup and wondered what she did think. “I think it’s a…lovely idea.” There were worse ideas, after all.

“Good!” said Maxine in a “that’s settled” tone. “I’ll go and check if that little horror is showing any signs of waking up.”

Lyn could hear her father still whistling in the kitchen. The tune wasn’t “Rhinestone Cowboy” anymore.

She picked up the empty cups and carried them into the kitchen.

Frank looked up from the saucepan of pasta sauce he was stirring and gave her an innocent look, as he continued to whistle.

Now she recognized the tune. It was a rather upbeat version of the Wedding March.

“You’re such a ham sandwich, Dad.”

And to her surprise Lyn found herself reaching up to plant a kiss on her father’s cheek.

“What a lucky fellow I am,” said Frank.

Bottles. Nappies.
Wipes. Lotion. Baby powder. Bedtime book. Pajamas. Overalls for tomorrow. Spare clothes for tonight. Funny bathtime toy. Cuddly, sleepytime toy. Noisy, quick-distract-him-with-this toy. Keep-for-full-on-wailing-emergency toy. Oh! What about one of the toys
they
gave him? That would look good. Favorite apple and pear baby food. Package of rusks.

What else?

Gemma was packing a bag for Sal’s first overnight trip. He was going to stay with Charlie’s parents while Gemma and Charlie went to the wedding.

His parents didn’t approve of Gemma. They found the whole business of their son becoming an instant Daddy upsetting and suspicious. Plus, they unfairly connected Gemma to Dan—their youngest daughter’s highly unsuitable new boyfriend who had taken her off to France before she finished her law degree.

On visits, Gemma sat stiffly and smiled inanely, while Charlie and his parents spoke in rapid-fire, angry-sounding Italian. His nonsmiling mother kept pushing plates of food in Gemma’s direction, while his father punched the tabletop a great deal. It was stressful. Gemma was used to people liking her.

“Well really, Gemma,” said Maxine. “What do you expect? I wouldn’t approve of you either!”

But his parents did approve of Sal and Sal approved of them, virtually shot-putting himself out of Gemma’s arms whenever he saw them.

Gemma zipped up the bulging bag and went through her mental checklist one more time. She’d probably forgotten something fundamental that would show her up as an unhygienic, unfit mother.

What if they just refused to give Sal back? What if they called the Department of Community Services and said, “Take a look at this overnight bag. Can you believe it? Calls herself a mother!”

She felt cold with fear at the thought. And then they’d find out that she had been planning to have Sal adopted, planning to abandon him. “You never wanted him in the first place,” they’d say.

During those first few months, when Sal would cry and cry for no reason, it sounded to Gemma like a cry of grief. “You never wanted me! You were giving me away!”

As she paced back and forth down the hallway of Charlie’s little flat, rocking and patting and begging him to please, please, please stop crying, guilt would knot her stomach.

One night at 3
A.M
., after Sal had cried for two hours straight, Charlie, with red-rimmed eyes, said, “Why don’t we get Cat on the phone? Tell her we’ve changed our minds. She can have him after all.”

Gemma burst into tears.

“I was joking!” said Charlie, and the genuine distress on his face made Gemma cry even harder because he was so sweet, so wonderful, and she’d abandoned him too. (“So you’re the girl who broke his heart,” said Charlie’s best friend when he met Gemma for the first time.)

“Maybe you’ve got that postnatal depression,” said Charlie, while Gemma and Sal wailed into his chest.

“I’ve got post-
me depression,” said Gemma.

The next day Charlie phoned Maxine, and she appeared like the cavalry.

“Three!” exclaimed Gemma, watching her rock the baby. “You had
three Sals, all at once! And you were twenty-one!”

“It was a nightmare of truly epic proportions,” said Maxine grandly. “It was the worst time of my entire life.”

“It must have been,” breathed Gemma. “My God.”

“Your sister said exactly the same thing a few months after Maddie was born,” said Maxine. “I’m looking forward to when Cat has a similar revelation. That will be especially satisfying.”

Sal’s head lolled drunkenly in the crook of Maxine’s arm.

“There was always one of you crying.” Maxine brushed a fingertip along the length of Sal’s eyelashes. “Always. I used to long for just one moment when all three of you were simultaneously happy.”

Now Gemma gave up trying to think of anything else that Sal could possibly need and carried the overnight bag out beside the front door.

“We need to leave here in twenty minutes if we’re going to make it,” called Charlie from the bedroom, where he was dressing Sal. “Did you hear me? Twenty minutes.”

He sounded slightly irritable.

In a funny way, Gemma quite liked it when he was annoyed with her. He didn’t become someone else. He didn’t frighten her. He didn’t make her feel ashamed.

He just got in a bad mood every now and then. Like people did.

Sometimes, she still felt the beginning of that icy breeze whistling around her bones, but now she had a cure. She simply thought back to the night when Sal was born and she was in the ambulance listening to Charlie’s voice on the mobile telling her how a lightbulb worked. “There’s a thin little piece of wire and it resists the flow of electricity. That’s why the filament glows…Everything has to flow back to earth, you see…Look, Gemma, you’re not planning on
rewiring
or something like that, are you?”

It was like remembering the words to a beautiful poem. “…
It resists the flow of electricity…That’s why it glows…”

She put her head around the door. Sal was chortling up at his
father, his legs windmilling wildly while Charlie attempted to hold him still to dress him.

“I love you,” she said.

Charlie said crossly, “I should think so.”

Frank and Maxine were married for the second time in the little white gazebo on the grassy area opposite Balmoral Beach. Picnicking families and hand-in-hand couples all watched the event with interest from behind their sunglasses.

Maddie was flower girl and was so entranced by her own prettiness that she managed to be good for the entire ceremony, swaying the silky skirt of her dress. Kara brought along a tall, skinny boy, who actually looked a lot like her father but fortunately nobody was foolish enough to mention it. Nana Kettle wore hot pink and spoke at length about her charming new neighbor, George. George’s wife, Pam, was very ill. Nana hoped Pam wouldn’t be in pain for too much longer.

Before they went off to dinner, the photographer that Lyn had organized took some spectacular shots of the family with the sun setting behind them.

But the best one, the one they got framed and blown up afterward, was one that he took without their even noticing.

It’s when they were all walking toward the restaurant. Nana Kettle has stopped to give a demonstration of her newly acquired tai chi skills and is squatting slightly at the knees, her hands curled in the air. Cat, Gemma, and Lyn are all doing their own untrained, unbalanced versions of tai chi moves, and Gemma is in the process of toppling over toward her sisters. Charlie and Michael are walking behind them, their heads thrown back, laughing. Maddie has stopped to admire her new shoes. Kara and her new boyfriend are also looking at their shoes and secretly holding hands.

Frank and Maxine are holding hands too. Frank is striding ahead, looking at his watch. Maxine has turned back to watch her daughters. One hand is shading her eyes. She’s smiling.

Epilogue

But wait, I’m not finished!

Listen to this! About six months later, I go and meet Cheryl from school one Saturday afternoon. She’s all la-di-da at Mosman now, so we go down to Balmoral Beach for coffee. Anyway, we were watching this wedding party come back from having their photos taken. These two old people had got married, which was sort of cute.

All of a sudden, this girl in the party calls out to me, Olivia! And it’s them! The weird triplets from the restaurant! I was like, oh my God, I don’t believe it! I was really flattered that they remembered my name!

So the three of them come over for a chat and turns out it was their parents getting married, for the second time! Seems like the whole family is pretty wacko tobacco.

The one who’d been pregnant was all skinny again and I’m freaking out, thinking, Oh no, what if the baby died from the fork? I didn’t like to ask. But then she said she’d had a little boy and he was fine and showed me photos. So that was a relief. I hate trying to work out what to say with, you know, tragedies and that sort of stuff.

The one who threw the fork, she seemed different. I couldn’t tell why. I think maybe she got her hair cut.

They asked me if I recognized the photographer—and I said, hey, he was there that night at the table next to you, wasn’t he? And they said, Yeah. Then the fork-thrower, she goes to me, Do you think he’s cute? When she said that, her sisters just went off! They’re going, Oooh, she likes him, she likes him! You know, even though they’re in their thirties, they still act really young and normal. Cheryl could not believe it when I told her how old they were! I’m going to be like that when I get old.

Anyway, the fork-thrower gives me a wink and says, I’m going to ask him on a date, what do you think? I said, I think you should. I thought her sisters were going to have heart attacks they were so excited.

So she went off to talk to the photographer.

By the look on his face, I reckon he said yes, for sure.

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Three Wishes