Where the Light Falls (19 page)

‘It's never too late.' He hoped his words didn't sound feeble.

‘No,' Pippa said vaguely. ‘Well, her father—I don't know how to put this any other way: he wasn't the man I would have chosen to start a family with. It was one night and I got pregnant and I decided to keep the baby, even though we were both young. I told him he didn't need to be involved.

‘Afterwards, when Phoebe was a baby, I didn't want
her to see her father. But I knew that when she grew older and started school, she'd begin to wonder about him. I knew that I couldn't keep him from her, that it wouldn't be fair.' The way she said the last word, the way her other words seemed to halt around it, made him aware that fairness was something that was important to her.

‘He was just irresponsible, but he did try. He really did try to be a good father to her. And it didn't go as badly as I thought it might, so I let Phoebe start staying with him overnight. Then over weekends.' It struck him that what she was saying was something she hadn't told anyone else, but had thought about over many years. Her words had an evenness, a pacing, that suggested she had already put them in order in her own mind.

‘I'll never forget that day. It changed everything, even more than having Phoebe. That day set the course for the rest of my life. A friend and I drank a bottle of wine together in the sun on Bronte beach. It was the first warm day of the year. It had been so long since I'd been able to do anything like that and I felt, I don't know, reckless. The way I used to feel before I had Phoebe, when I only had myself to worry about. Him taking Phoebe, it was the first time since having her that I had more time to myself.'

‘That sounds natural to me,' he said.

‘When I walked in the front door that afternoon, the phone was ringing,' she said. ‘And I knew. It was the doctor from the hospital. I was her legal guardian and they needed my permission to operate.'

‘What happened?' he asked. He felt he was tilting in a direction he hadn't expected to go.

‘He had let her ride in the back of a ute on his parents' farm. She fell out when he was driving in a paddock and hit her head on a rock. She was knocked unconscious. A nerve in her face was damaged and they tried to repair it, but they couldn't.' Pippa looked at him with a resolute face, as if expecting to be blamed.

‘Oh, that's awful,' he said. ‘But it wasn't your fault.' He said this firmly, as though his words were capable of changing something as large and painful as what she had told him. Even as he spoke he knew that what had happened was something that could only ever be mended inside her, and it was something that might not ever mend at all.

‘I don't know. People do things. Things they don't intend. It can cause just as much damage to a person. Maybe in some ways the things people do unintentionally are more difficult to understand,' she said and her words resonated long after she'd spoken them, like the striking of a bell.

23

That afternoon at home, as he flicked through the pages of the Diane Arbus book, his telephone rang on the table beside him.

‘Hi, Andrew. It's Renee Rothwell speaking.'

‘Oh, hi,' he said. He felt himself clench. He hadn't expected to hear from Kirsten's mother again. When he had left her house that day, he had the impression that he'd been filed away in her life, like an unpleasant task she had completed once and would never have to repeat.

‘How are you?' she asked, but her words sounded perfunctory, a necessary segue to something else.

‘I'm fine, thanks.'

‘I wasn't sure if you'd still be here. I thought you said you were heading back to Europe,' she said, pausing.
He wasn't about to explain to her the problems he was having with Dom or his exhibition. ‘You see, they just called me. From the coroner's court. I thought you might like to know. The coroner handed down her findings. You can read them on the website.'

‘Thanks for letting me know,' he said.

She didn't respond, but he could hear her breathing. She was lingering, as though there was something else she wanted to discuss.

‘I haven't read them myself yet,' she said and gave a small, nervous laugh, a girl's laugh.

‘Well, I'll get online straight away,' he said, anxious to hang up the phone and read the findings for himself.

‘Yes, okay,' she said, hesitating. ‘Goodbye.'

He ended the call and turned on his laptop. He went to the coroner's website and found the decision straight away. What he wanted were definite answers. He wanted a fixed point that he could look at and distance himself from. What he wanted most of all was to be told that what had happened was somehow inevitable, that Kirsten had always been this way and he couldn't have done anything, all those years before, to have prevented it. But the word that was used was
inconclusive
, an uncertain word that hovered between two places.

The coroner said that Kirsten had most likely died by asphyxiation caused by drowning, although her body was never found. She appeared to have taken an indeterminate amount of Xanax, which may have contributed
to her death. The coroner couldn't rule out
misadventure
.
Misadventure
—it sounded like an ordinary and harmless word.

Andrew scanned the document again. What he read was expressed in words that were conditional, they brushed across the surface of what had happened that day at Lake George and closed over no holes. The coroner didn't delve into why a person might have died so silently; that question was left for the people who knew her and remained.

He moved to his window and below him the street looked closer than he expected it to, a small leap to the ground. There was one thing left he could do now to find out about Kirsten. He could drive to Canberra and speak to Kirsten's sister. Kirsten had driven up and down her sister's street in Ainslie that day, pacing like a person trying to gather the right words to say.

He would visit Kirsten's sister. There was more to what had happened than was contained in the coroner's report and, since her mother had said so little, maybe her sister could tell him what he needed to know. He hired a car that day.

•

Andrew had forgotten that drive out of Sydney, how the suburbs continued on and became at first older and then newer and finally more spread out the further he drove from the centre of Sydney. The houses might have
been spun in a centrifuge and dispersed that way. When he was cruising out along the highway, he remembered why he liked driving, aware of the movement, of seeing the world slide silently by, the feeling of being sealed off from it and all that mattered was his destination.

The further south he drove, the land seemed to change from green into a paler colour, the landscape yellow and parched. Closer to Canberra, in a creek that ran beside the highway, willow trees grew from the water, deposited there by banks that had collapsed under their own weight. In the water their leaves billowed out around them.

He started to see on the sides of the road dead creatures bundled up like sacks. At first he didn't understand what they were until he saw a creature that must have died that day, the long pink smear of it along the surface of the road. He swerved to avoid it and the car beside him honked loudly. There seemed to be too many of them, little brown bundles on the shoulder of the road where the bitumen was soft.

•

When he reached Canberra, he had an immediate sense of the city's spaciousness. The streets were long and wide, with gentle curves, as though to accommodate a procession. There was nobody out on the streets, though, and it felt like a town that had been built but abandoned. Everything that happened in Canberra seemed to take
place behind closed doors, in meeting rooms or malls. It was a city in which the streets had been planned before the buildings and houses, a giant thoroughfare designed for ease of movement from one place to the next. A place in which nobody actually stopped.

On his way to Ainslie, he stopped beside Lake Burley Griffin. The water was as dull and unmoving as a flat piece of rusted tin. It had been such a long time since he had been there and he wanted to get a sense of the city, this small, quiet place from which his country was governed; a place he had seen most often as a thin and static background on the news. He parked beside a tree with leaves that were red. In the lake, the water was a milky-brown colour, thick and silty like the water in a dam. A fountain dispersed a stream of water that was pushed sideways in the wind.

Across the lake stood Parliament House, its windows darkly tinted like those of a limousine. The Australian flag snapped on its mast in the wind. His gaze moved to the National Gallery, where Kirsten had told her mother she was going on the day she came to Canberra, and he understood why she might have decided not to go inside after all. He had felt the suffocating effect of looking at art when he was producing none of his own.

•

He drove to Ainslie along a straight road that led to the War Memorial, a monolithic arch of concrete built to
honour the dead. He turned left towards Mount Ainslie, where the houses seemed to press up against the hill making the suburb feel enclosed.

When he reached Campbell Street, the street that Kirsten had driven up and down that day, a sudden shiver moved through his body. He was driving the same route she had, following the path of a woman who was now dead, the trail left behind by a ghost. It seemed to him that what she had been doing that day, driving around Canberra, was looking for a reason to live—and she hadn't found it there. She hadn't found it anywhere.

He braked and the car behind him, large in the rear-view mirror, sounded its horn. The sudden noise unsettled him. On the letterbox beside the car, he saw the number he had parked beside was forty-eight; the house he was looking for was number fifty-two. The handbrake was stiff, resisting as he pulled it into place and he waited in the car, knowing that as soon as he stepped outside, he would have to make an investment in what he had come to do. He extracted the keys from the ignition, stepped out of the car and breathed in air that was cool. Gum trees lined both sides of the street and they had outgrown it, set to a different scale than the houses in the suburb.

Number fifty-two was a single-storey, cream-brick home, as neat and compact as a model. There was a clean, white car parked outside the double garage. It was the sort of house that gave away nothing about the people who lived inside it and offered him no sense of what to expect.

As he crossed the lawn, dried gum leaves crunched under his shoes like snail shells. He rang the doorbell, and waited, but couldn't hear any movement from inside the house. He had a sudden need to leave. What could this woman really tell him about Kirsten that he didn't already know? But before he could leave, the door opened.

The woman standing before him wore a white shirt, the top button undone to reveal a silver pendant. She had her mother's awkwardness and her lips were pursed, as though in response to an insult delivered many years before. Her arms were lean and toned—she was someone who worked to look thin. She frowned at his appearance at her door.

‘Yes?'

‘Hello, my name is Andrew Spruce. Are you Lydia Thomas?'

The woman folded her arms, nodded, and scepticism moved across her face, a quiver of movement like someone suddenly aware of the cold. He wondered if she thought he was there to sell her something. And perhaps in a way he was seeking something from her, some reassurance that he was not to blame for her sister's death. That what had happened to Kirsten was not in any way attributable to him. He wanted someone who knew Kirsten better than he had to touch him on the arm and tell him that he was not responsible. He thought of Kirsten's death and the first feeling to surface in him was guilt.

‘I know this might sound strange to you, but I met your mother last week,' he said, thinking the woman would soften at the mention of Renee. But instead he saw something else—a stung look; the look of someone unexpectedly hit with bad news. But she recovered herself quickly and he had the impression that she had grown used to controlling her own emotions.

‘Did my mother tell you to come here?' she asked, and he had another glimpse of Renee in her daughter, the way her face was so carefully held. It looked as though she had tried but never quite succeeded in leaving her mother behind. Every day she would see Renee staring out from her own reflection.

‘No,' he said. ‘Nothing like that. I just wanted to talk to you about your sister.'

She didn't respond immediately, but finally she said, ‘Kirsten.'

‘Yes,' he said and worried for a moment that she might be about to shut the door on him, to turn him away. ‘I used to know her. I was Kirsten's boyfriend. We lived together when we were at university.' He felt he was pushing his words up a very steep hill.

Lydia looked to her left, aware of someone else in the house, although it seemed silent to him, clean and undisturbed.

‘You had better come in,' she said. The understanding of who he was and how he was connected to Kirsten seemed to tug at her. Her shoulders slumped; a
sudden new awareness of gravity seemed to weigh her down. She stepped back and let him in. He followed her into the lounge room and sat on a sofa of soft, beige leather that gave way underneath him too easily. He fell backwards into it.

Lydia disappeared into the other room and he heard the murmur of voices. A few moments later, a man walked down the hall and out the front door. He heard a car start and drive away. Lydia returned and sat on the chair opposite him. ‘My husband,' she said and waved her hand in the direction of the door.

‘I don't think I saw you at the coronial inquiry,' he said.

‘No, I didn't go to Sydney for it,' she said. She held her hands out on either side of her body, touching the lounge with the tips of her fingers, as though to assist her with balance.