Trust (29 page)

Finn was pretty sure, but he shook his head anyway, because he wanted his mum to go on talking to him. It was better, having her near, and talking.

‘It means that all those people who died in the fires have been taken up to heaven. God sent the angels to bring them to live with him, in
his
home. So they’re all safe and happy now, with Jesus.’

Finn frowned, his fingers plucking uneasily at a frayed spot on the arm of the couch. ‘But – what if you didn’t die in the fires?’

‘Oh, the angels still come, baby,’ she assured him, smiling sadly. ‘You still go to heaven and live with Jesus, no matter how you die.’

‘So … Jeejee’s gone up to heaven, too?’

He was watching his mum’s face, and saw her smile go tight. ‘You have to believe in God before you can go to heaven. And Jeejee didn’t believe in God, I’m afraid.’

‘So she’s not in heaven?’ Angie shook her head
no
, in big slow side-to-sides. ‘But what about the people in the fires? How does
he
know —’ Finn’s finger jabbed briefly in the direction of Gabriel’s voice ‘— if all
those
people believed in God?’

Angie started to say something, then seemed to change her mind. She started again. ‘The important thing is that
you
believe in God, Finnie, and you know he’s watching over you, all the time.’ She sat down on the edge of the couch, right by him, putting her face very close to his, and her hands draped softly on his shoulders. ‘It was
God
that spared you. He let you – just you! – walk away from the car crash without a scratch, didn’t he? You see? There’s a reason for every single thing that happens.’

‘What’s the reason?’

‘The reason? That you were spared?’

Finn nodded.

‘Because when you’re a good boy and love the Lord Jesus, then he loves you and takes care of you. You see?’

‘Why didn’t God spare Stella? Stella is good.’

‘Well … maybe because he wants her to be
truly
saved.’ His mum was looking right into his eyes, very seriously. ‘Maybe when Stella wakes up, she’ll take God into her heart too. Like you.’

‘But she should have been spared!’ Finn’s voice had risen, and Angie raised a warning forefinger to her lips. He whispered fiercely, ‘I really
want
her to wake up.’

‘I know, honey,’ she whispered back. ‘And I know this is hard for us to understand, but sometimes God has to teach people a very big lesson, so they learn they mustn’t waste a single day longer not believing in him. He might even have to
punish
them sometimes, before they learn.’

Suddenly Gabriel’s voice, clear and commanding, came from his little music room down the hall. ‘Angie! Come in here please!’ Mother and son jumped apart from each other.

‘You just keep praying for our Stella, Finnie,’ she said. ‘My special little guy,’ and hugged him quickly and hurried from the room.

Finn waited till Gabriel’s door had closed again and then slipped quietly to his bedroom. He looked at his books on his shelf, and his toys, but he didn’t feel like reading or playing. He lay down on his bed and pulled the cover over him and tried to figure it out. Why did God care if people believed in him or not, as long as they were good? Wasn’t being good the most important thing? Why would he want to punish someone like Stella? That was just mean. That was
bad
.

He could hear his mum singing with Gabriel, and then just Gabriel’s voice again, a new bit of the song:

‘He said, Suffer the little children,

And bring them unto me …’

Finn held very still.
Suffer the little children.
God said that, Jesus Christ our Lord. Why did God want little children to suffer?

Maybe he knows what I really think of him. Maybe he’s spared me just so he can punish me for thinking he’s mean.
The more Finn thought about this, the more likely it seemed.
That’s why he sent Gabriel here. Gabriel is God’s big lesson, come to punish me.

Susanna invited Leonard Styles to do two things: deliver the eulogy at Jean’s funeral, and have dinner with her the evening before, in Jean’s unit. He replied, in his courtly fashion, that each would be an honour.

The car seemed almost to drive itself to the retirement village and, stepping inside her mother’s front door, it would have felt so natural to call out,
Mum? It’s me!
Susanna didn’t: she just stood there, looking, taking in the orderliness, the care, and the quietness. She put down the shopping she’d brought and silently counted the nights since her mother had stood up from that chair, picked up that phone, and then closed this door behind herself for the last time.
Five.
Five nights, since the world spun off its axis.

A cup and saucer, a bread and butter plate, a knife, rinsed and sitting in the dish rack. Susanna replaced them in the cupboard. On the coffee table the TV guide was folded to last Wednesday’s program. A spiral-bound notebook was on the table, a pencil lying at a neat diagonal across its cover. Susanna picked it up, flipping through the pages, but it was all in shorthand, of which she didn’t understand a single squiggle.

In the bathroom, she picked up her mother’s hairbrush, put it down again, unscrewed the top from the bottle of Oil of Olay, the only moisturiser Jean had ever used. It smelt familiar, but it wasn’t quite the smell of Mum.
Because it’s not
on
Mum.
What would become of this bottle, of the hairbrush, and of the silver hairs caught in its bristles? Throwing any of it away seemed unendurable.

She went into the bedroom, stood looking at the aqua slubbed silk bedspread, drawn up precisely over the pillows. It had graced her parents’ bed in the old house as well, before Dad died and Jean moved here. There were neatly folded clothes in a laundry basket sitting on a chair. Susanna opened the wardrobe door: she was familiar with every single garment. Inhaling, she caught her mother’s smell. This cardigan, this dress: she gathered them to her face, one by one, and then, impulsively, stepped inside the wardrobe, and pulled the door to behind her. There was no one to see her, no one to call her crazy. With the soft swish of Jean’s clothes touching her face, her body, she drank in that sweet, clean, adored perfume.
Oh Mum
,
stay close to me.

When she emerged from the cupboard, feeling like one of the children who went to Narnia, she felt a little better, a little strengthened
.
She could just about hear Jean’s voice:
Leonard will be arriving soon, dear. Time to get dinner ready, there’s a good girl
.

Leonard’s face, when he knocked at the door promptly at six-thirty, looked thinner, older. As she welcomed him in, both understanding, with an exchange of sad smiles, that this would probably be the last time Leonard visited Jean’s pretty, tidy home, Susanna knew this had been the right thing to do. She could feel the warmth of her mother’s approval.

Over a glass of wine, they discussed the funeral arrangements. Susanna had told everyone it would be simple, as her mother would have wanted, and Leonard agreed that Jean would, indeed. ‘However,’ Susanna said, ‘my sister wants her pastor to speak.’ There was a note of apology in her voice; she knew that Leonard too was an atheist. ‘It’s very important to her. I felt — I didn’t feel I had the right to say no.’

‘Quite so,’ he said.

‘Mum told you Angie’s a Christian?’

‘She did. I used to joke that it was her cross to bear,’ said Leonard, and they smiled.

Susanna served grilled lamb chops, boiled potatoes, a lettuce and tomato salad. It was, Leonard commented, the sort of plain-cooked meal Jean would have enjoyed. Their conversation over dinner surprised her with its effortlessness.

‘Do you know, I think I’m going to stay here for the night,’ she said impulsively. Leonard nodded solemnly, chewing. ‘I feel … peaceful, here. I … I’ve found it hard to sleep in my bed at home since it happened.’ She didn’t know why she was telling him this. ‘Mostly I sleep in a chair by —’

Abruptly, she stopped.

‘I imagine you and your husband are at the hospital a great deal,’ said Leonard gently.

‘Yes. This is actually the first night I haven’t been with my daughter. And my husband …’ But Susanna couldn’t go there, couldn’t go near the reason she hadn’t slept with —
no
. ‘My husband’s coping by being busy, twenty-four hours a day. He’s everywhere at once; he knows every nurse and every doctor, in both the hospitals. Every acronym. What all the machines do.’ She sighed softly. ‘And then there’s his work. His company. He can’t just go on leave.’ As he’d snapped at her, earlier today.

Leonard gave her a judicious look. ‘Yes, I see. That certainly sounds like the way many men cope with what might otherwise overwhelm them.’

‘I’m overwhelmed,’ said Susanna simply. It was a huge relief just to say it.

He reached out his thin, veined hand and touched hers. ‘This has been a terrible week, and not only for us. I think the whole state feels overwhelmed. The country.’

‘Yes. Leonard, this might sound … I don’t know, discourteous, or masochistic, or even ghoulish, but I have to watch the seven o’clock news. I have to know what’s happened with the fires.’

‘Of course,’ he said.

They sat side by side on Jean’s floral couch, looking at the catastrophe that had befallen the hill towns – outer suburbs, almost, they were so close to Melbourne – the Saturday before.
Black Saturday.
Fires were still burning. Thousands of homes had been destroyed and more bodies were being discovered each day. The death toll was nearing two hundred, with fears it could climb much higher. Footage of Marysville appeared. The pretty little resort town had been wiped out as if by a massive bomb blast.

‘You and Mum were there,’ said Susanna softly, turning to him. ‘Just last —’ Silent tears, she saw, were coursing down Leonard’s face. They held each other’s hands and cried, watching the images of the firestorms, listening to the stories of families incinerated in their homes, or in their cars as they tried to escape, and the terrifying tales of those who’d managed to survive.

When the news ended and the television was turned off, Leonard said, ‘I’m sorry, my dear. In the face of this vast tragedy, my own grief over your mother’s passing seems almost selfish.’

Susanna shook her head. ‘Not at all. Please. Not at all.’

‘I had come to feel so close to Jean. I’d hoped to become … more.’

‘I know.’ Susanna felt a new kind of pain, for the relationship that had ended so prematurely.

‘May I … may I make you some tea?’ he asked, and she had to smile. It was precisely the thing her mother would have asked, at such a moment.
They were so well matched
.

‘Only if you let me tidy up the kitchen while you do,’ she told him.

As Susanna was putting things away, her eye fell on her mother’s notebook.
I wonder what Mum was writing?
On an impulse she asked, ‘Leonard, do you know anyone who can transcribe shorthand?’

‘I do,’ he said promptly. ‘My former secretary, Mrs Henderson. Why, if I may ask?’

Susanna showed him the very ordinary lined notebook, explaining where she’d found it. ‘Did Mum say anything to you about what she was writing?’

‘Nothing specific,’ said Leonard. But Susanna saw in his face that some thought had occurred to him.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Some … musings, perhaps. Things she was considering.’

‘Would you ask Mrs Henderson? If that’s no trouble? I’d be more than happy to pay her, of course.’

‘It will be no trouble, Susanna. None at all.’

After Leonard had gone home, she called Gerry and told him she was staying the night at her mother’s. He seemed barely to be listening. ‘I’m still at the office, I haven’t been off the phone all day. The Kansas City people want to pull the pin.’ He sounded like he was at the end of his tether. ‘The fires: we’ve got four or five clients who’ve lost houses, plus that beautiful winery we did a couple of years ago in the Yarra Valley. And Marcus has bloody gone AWOL; some crisis with John.’ He paused, but Susanna could think of nothing to say. ‘Just make sure you’re at Northern General in the morning to pick up Seb,’ Gerry went on. ‘I’ve done all the paperwork.’ And he hung up, even before she had a chance to ask if they would be going to the funeral home together.

Susanna stood outside in the little courtyard, thinking about the people Gerry knew who’d lost their homes; homes he’d designed, and they’d loved, and everything in them.
Loss, loss; so many things to lose.

The gardenias she was staring at, she realised, and all the other plants, were gasping for water. Quickly, hoping they’d not been left too long, she filled the watering can again and again.
Mum will be so upset if her garden
— She caught herself. All the plants could die, every one of them, and Jean would never be upset, or plant more, or do anything, ever again.

It’s not fair
,
it’s not fair!
And then recalled what Leonard had said. ‘My own grief seems almost selfish.’
None of it’s fair. Fairness has nothing to do with it.
She thought of all those families, reading the Saturday papers, cleaning up after children’s birthday parties, enjoying a weekend in the cool of the hills …

Susanna knew where her mother kept blank typing paper, pencils, pens. She fetched some, sat at the table, just where her mother had sat writing in that notebook, and began to draw.

The drawings were not only of the horror, but of what the horror had roared in upon. Small things at the heart of it, like the crockery found piled on the passenger seat of a woman’s car overtaken by the fire. Susanna imagined that scene unfolding and showed it, covering sheet after sheet as rapidly as her pencil could draw: the woman watching from her verandah as the inferno approached, sheltering in her house, frightened, brave. The flames taking hold. The frantic dash to the car clutching the box of her mother’s crockery (Susanna assumed it was her mother’s crockery), the desperate drive, her little dog in her lap with its paws on the steering wheel. The road blocked by the fallen tree, the ravenous flames —