After the Smoke Clears, page 19
‘Wait …’ She backed off, stepped away, her arms crossed. ‘Not before you tell me what’s going on.’
I nodded. I needed to tell all – code or no code, let her in on everything I had. The choice to keep her out of this had been lost the second she drove past that sign that said “Welcome to Eldham, population 3145” and didn’t turn away.
‘Can we just backtrack?’ She paced around as if plotting something. ‘You got my message then, about being here. You know I tried to see you – at the station?’ She blurted through snorts and sniffles. ‘Did they just let you out?’
I nodded.
‘Is it all sorted now? Can we just go home?’
‘I need to wait till they’ve finished with my truck, but soon, maybe.’ I waited for the logical flow of questions to follow but they didn’t arrive, and I wondered how much Becca had told her, and how much of it was true.
‘Has Otto been okay? Is he pissed at me? I need to see him.’ I gestured towards the bathroom where she’d stored him for safe keeping, as if asking permission.
Lotti shrugged. ‘He’s your son …’ She shook her head. ‘Except, that’s right, he isn’t.’ She laughed as if this was all some stupid practical joke, not her life. And then it began. She exhaled, then her eyes refilled with tears.
‘I get it.’ My hands were up, palms exposed. ‘I have a lot to explain but, to be fair, I never said he was my actual son.’ I sat on the bed, when all I wanted was to see the kid, hold his wiry little arms.
‘He calls you Dad.’
‘I gave him that choice when I adopted him. Margo told you about the situation with my sister, I’m guessing.’
Her face became rigid. ‘And some …’
I nodded, felt it all surge up my throat, three days of guilty mistakes, wrong choices, and fear of what was to come. I’d kept it together for Brookes, but I couldn’t sustain it any longer and my face crumbled without my permission, my vision misting over in a way that hadn’t happened for years. I’d thought they’d dried up, after Freya.
She noticed, and I felt weak for not trying harder to keep it together. But then I just let go of it, let my feelings guide my actions, and stepped over to the bathroom, opened the door, and there he was, sitting on the closed dunny seat with his Nintendo DS.
‘Daddy!’ he yelled, throwing his arms around my neck as I bent down to pick him up, carried him out to the bedroom. ‘Knew we’d find you!’
Lotti’s stood, hands to her mouth as she watched us, conflicted, and I cried like a moron into Otto’s hair, snorting like a toddler with a cold.
‘Missed you, kid,’ I said when his eyes met mine.
He was beaming, rattled off highlights from the last few days; a Mario Cart level completed, getting stuck in a fridge, playing fetch with Margo’s dogs, eating a whole packet of chips on his own. His legs were swinging like a pendulum off the side of the ugly bedspread and his ease, his happiness, gave me the rush I needed, the sense of hope everything might just still work out.
‘How’d you even get onto Margo?’ I looked at Lotti and she didn’t elaborate, but she clicked her tongue in that way she did when she was buying time. She was never dishonest, but she was also the kind of girlfriend who would help you look for chocolate that she knew damn well she’d already eaten. ‘Quite the detectives, aren’t you?’ After another hug with the boy, it seemed as though I was caught up, and he returned to his game as if all was right in Otto’s world. The band was back together.
My new strategy to just go with my feelings seemed to be working out, so I approached her like a cat, slow and cautious. The tip of my nose, my lips, grazed along her cheek to her hairline and I let myself breath her in.
Her hands fanned across my chest, like a brake, a way to keep me at bay. ‘I can’t reconcile the man I knew with all this … Did you do what they think you did?’ she asked, her eyes petrified of the answer.
I felt like a mongrel for ever getting involved with her. I should have walked away, never pursued her like I had a chance. It was a wall she couldn’t get past, and I got that.
Then she looked puzzled, raised her fingers to my damp hair. ‘Is it raining?’
I shook my head. ‘I went to Becca’s, got cleaned up.’
She pulled away. ‘Becca’s?’ Her smile held no warmth. ‘Is she the reason you’re here?’
‘What?’ Tiredness hit me like a wall. ‘Lotti – I’d been up for days, slept up a tree, spent a night at a cop shop … I just needed a shower.’
‘Oh, for a minute I thought it might be because I messaged you to say I was on my way there. Silly me. It’s not like I left you a thousand messages telling you I was in town looking for you.’ She shook her head.
‘I didn’t get those messages.’
‘They why did you go to Becca’s? Not because you knew I was going there.’
I got up. ‘Listen, I’m really sorry to fuck up your week, but this is my life going down the toilet. You can walk away any time you like. I never asked you to come here. I never wanted you involved.’
She frowned but in a way that a three-year-old did before they stomped their foot and asked for more ice cream. This woman didn’t have an aggressive molecule in her body. She couldn’t even get mad when she had every right to.
She struggled to find words. ‘It’s not a choice. When you love someone, you are involved, August. Or Gus. Or whoever you are today.’ Lotti’s face fell, and she wiped tears, continued to try to join two halves of a suitcase that would never close, and my heart sank. She was leaving. This was it.
But then she went on. ‘You just don’t get it – I was worried sick, drove half a day to find you, petrified you were in trouble because you didn’t answer my calls, and then discover you’re in jail! But the second you get out, you don’t call me, you go to your ex-girlfriend’s to take a shower?’ She had tears in her eyes. She’d circled back to the present, to my wet hair, as if that was the issue at hand.
I, on the other hand, had no problem displaying anger, chopping the air with my hand with each thought. ‘My phone was dead. The cops had it in their filing cabinet all day. I had no car to get home to you, anyway. No money. Seriously, Charlotte. All this shit they’re throwing at me, and you want me to explain that? I didn’t drive all night back to this dive to sleep with her if that’s what you think.’
‘But you have …’
‘Not today. And it was long enough ago that it doesn’t even count.’
A sad smile I’d never seen shaped her face and she seemed less familiar. She took my forearm, and ran her finger over the curl of the B. ‘Do you always get tattoos of women who don’t count?’ Her face hardened, another new look. ‘I was fiercely jealous of this, figuring it was some old flame, but knowing what I know now, I’m guessing you probably got it in prison.’ Lotti squared her jaw then looked away.
I closed my eyes, feeling like less of an arsehole now she was acting like one, too. Lotti had never done ‘mean’ before. I didn’t have the energy to rebut. I didn’t have a right to be angry.
She swallowed hard. ‘She’s beautiful.’ She approached as if about to land one on my lips, but then pulled away with a scowl. ‘I bet she missed kissing you, you’re annoyingly good at it.’ She retreated, fiddled with the broken edge of the table, a sullen look on her face. ‘Did you? Just then, at her house. C’mon, all these years of wondering how she’d turn out – pretty well, if you ask me. She the one that got away, Gus?’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Why not, it’s your name, Gus.’
I twisted my jaw. ‘Is this what you meant when you said you’re a pain in the arse when you get hurt?’
She tilted her head to one side. ‘Did you kiss her?’
‘Not the way you’re suggesting.’
She stepped closer, again. ‘So, like, in a way you’d kiss Otto, or a way you’d kiss me?’
‘Neither. Jesus.’ My best friend is facing murder charges and she’s upset about a fucking pointless kiss? ‘You know how petty you sound? You know what they think I’ve fucking done? Why is that small detail the thing you’re pissed about?’
She jumped a little, stepped away from me and it was only then I realised how angry I was. I took a breath, tried to calm down.
‘Because how you feel about her changes what I am to you, and that’s what matters to me. That’s about right now. Not your past, not what Gus Nash did or didn’t do before. I only care what Augie Silverfell’s done.’
I was out of breath. I was gasping for air but couldn’t fill my lungs. ‘Gus Nash. August Silverfell. Cottage Nine, Bed Two. They’re all me, Charlotte. And I’ve learned to live with that, but you don’t have to. I don’t want you to know that guy.’
She swallowed hard. Charlotte Hill was hell-bent on trying not to appear like a fragile woman – forever wearing boots and minimal makeup to tone down her femininity. But those curves. Those lips. Those eyelashes. She wouldn’t pass as a bloke in a welder’s mask and overalls. And she looked every bit as vulnerable now as I’d ever seen her. All I could think was, I did this to her. She let me in, and this is what she got back. Uncertainty and secrets. I wouldn’t stay with me. Right now, I didn’t even want to be around me.
Otto paused his game down the other end of the room, where he’d set up a haven of pillows, rubbed his eye. He couldn’t hear but he didn’t need noise to read a room. He was already better at it than me.
She pulled me into the kitchenette out of view of the kid but she kept the cold detachment. ‘So, it’s true – those remains – you know who they are, why they’re there. It’s not just a misunderstanding?’ Lotti asked.
I shook my head, hoping this place wasn’t bugged, that she wasn’t wired. But even if she had been, I couldn’t lie to her. ‘No, the cops are right. I put ’em there. And they’ll figure that out sooner or later.’
She inhaled sharply.
Otto stepped over to her, the side he was on clear as hell.
She squeezed his hand and folded him behind her, like a chick tucked under a mother’s wing. Her eyes misted over. ‘But you didn’t mean to kill, right? It was an accident. You didn’t want them dead.’ Her hand was shaking. She was convincing herself to love me. She had to lie to do it.
‘No, I wanted them dead. I just didn’t want to get caught.’
Her face stiffened. Lotti ushered Otto further behind her legs, shielding my kid from me. She was scared for herself. Scared for Otto.
He looked up at Lotti. ‘Miss Hill?’
‘What does that even mean, Augie? Just tell me what the hell’s going on.’
The words sat on my tongue, but I couldn’t spit them out.
Pressed into the side of Lotti’s hip, Otto’s eyes locked with mine. ‘Did you do something bad, Daddy? We say sorry if we make bad choices.’ My kid, my life, stood there, his hand securely in hers yet his eyes fixed on me, alert and waiting for me to answer.
I’d already gotten mine. I wasn’t needed here.
I approached him slowly. He didn’t flinch when I reached to kiss his hair, but she stiffened. I decided not to push my luck with her - none of the versions of me had ever had much of that, and walked away.
Chapter 20
LOTTI
The motel’s rusty fan oscillated with clear direction, the pipes rattled with purpose, but as per the default setting for Charlotte Hill, I was clueless, paralysed into inaction.
Seeing his tired, worried eyes framed by that substantial browline, all plans to make Augie explain his wild omissions (at best) or blatant dishonesty (at worst), loosened and dissolved. Was my brain that fickle that it had stored neural maps of Augie making me weak at the knees, and instantly interpreted his presence as safe? I’d never seen Augie cry. It was unexpectedly hurtful to witness. At first glance, I just wanted to dry his tears like he was a wobbly-chinned child with a gravelly elbow. I could hear his voice say he missed me. I could taste him on my tongue. I could smell his skin as his fingers traced my cheek, wanting them all over me.
The simplest solution was to take this beautiful man and his adorable son, get in my dusty car with my broken suitcase and leave this stinkhole motel for good. But could I trust my gut? The way the skin of my stomach shuddered a little as his hand touched my hip – but did that mean anything? It wouldn’t have been the first time my senses had betrayed me.
But then he admitted he did something unspeakable, and the previous hurt I’d witnessed seemed insignificant in comparison. Going with your gut was dangerous. I finally did what Jess had been begging me to do since this whole thing started – I defaulted to my tried-and-true method of surveying the facts, and let my head take over from my heart. My monkey mind had me chasing a man across the country, but I’d spent barely a moment considering the facts of my reality. When my dad campaigned, we didn’t go by instinct, we polled, we crunched the numbers and relied on facts. All I had accomplished going with my gut was absenteeism from work, a thousand k’s on my odometer and a question mark over the first relationship I’d chosen entirely for myself in years.
I needed answers, but he wasn’t giving them to me, hovering in my musty hotel room, slowly depositing a few scant (but harrowing) details in the air between us. I was ambivalent, flip-flopping between the emotions clamouring for my attention – reassuring me there was an acceptable explanation for how the skeleton in that scrubland wound up there, to my logical brain cautioning that no man was worth risking my mental wellbeing and physical safety, to grab the boy and run.
I was still reeling from the shock of Augie’s appearance and days of worry after he vanished as swiftly as he’d appeared. Where would he go with no car? Did my wariness force him back to the green-eyed redhead and that snog of indeterminate nature?
The moment Augie said he killed someone, I wanted him gone.
The moment he left, I wanted him back.
The decision I had to make felt pivotal.
If I went with Jess’s suggestion, and shared my predicament with my pragmatic father (who until recently, held the reins of my life by his wallet), he’d say to gather evidence and listen to my analytical brain. My heart and my head were clearly at odds and my terminal ambiguity was counting on a resolution so I could avoid another relationship failure. I’d let my father spend a hundred grand on a reception that was only a tad shorter than the marriage. To be fair, my current perspective on that pivotal, atrociously bad-mannered decision (based on pure instinct on my part) was that it turned out to be the right one – it was the decisions made during the five years before it (with my head) that were questionable.
From the day Grayson Wright (back when he fact-checked my father’s speeches as a law grad) shimmied up to me with his neon-white grin and his voting sign, he had remained the logical choice of life partner. Rich, handsome (unlikely to have ever spent the night being questioned about human remains) and most likely to change the nation’s view that politicians were unmemorable, balding, middle-aged blokes. He had the charm of McDreamy from Grey’s Anatomy and the shoulders of Thor, which made him a born candidate. But despite social pressure to comply, I never really warmed to either character (or the way Grayson’s tongue-heavy kissing technique came across as a little reptilian). In short, he just didn’t make my brain come alive.
Otto paced around the room after his dad abandoned us again, leaving a scrape mark as he trailed a one-armed Spiderman figurine along the wall. After picking it out of the lost property box at the station, the policewoman let him keep it. Was that only this morning? ‘It’s been a pretty crap day, kiddo, but I’m glad you’re still here with me.’
He shrugged. ‘Dad told me to look after you.’
A lump formed in my throat, and I wasn’t sure who it was getting all bothered for.
Otto made adjustments to the haven he’d built with all the pillows in the corner, his little face peering out like ET in the closet. Randomness was the best thing about little kids. Why did I hate randomness in life? Was it the stats major in me, wanting predictability, aiming for certainty without too many confounds throwing out my data?
I felt entirely clueless on how to handle this.
It was past Mum’s bedtime, but I needed her. I needed her arms around me, the smell of talc – fresh and clean, her skin, now mottling and thin but soft and familiar as old sheets. Mum was lucid when I’d called her from the diner, and I clung to the hope she was still orientated to the here and now. Mothering worked better in person, but the phone would have to do. ‘Mum?’
‘Charlotte, love?’ Her recognising my voice was a strong start, and even hearing hers grounded me. I realised how late it was, but she was spritely for the hour, rattling on with tales about Watson’s jowls blowing up after swallowing a bee, and the aqua aerobics instructor being easy on the eye, which sounded within the realms of possibility. It was calming just to have a benign conversation. She grew silent and I worried she’d slipped and fallen into the abyss, but then Mum said, ‘You’re quiet. This is about a boy, isn’t it?’
Then it came out, all bluster and snot. My whole life, Mum had been my safe place, the recipient of my unbridled truths, and the person I trusted more than anyone. ‘So … now I have no clue if he’s the man I thought I knew, what will happen to Otto if he does get arrested …’
It was rambling drivel, but she distilled my dilemma like a research question as the brilliant economist she was. Before dementia, she built her life creating statistical models to predict future trends. What was August’s likely trajectory?
‘You don’t know whether to trust your head or your heart. But who said you had to pick one? Your father raised you to believe sound decisions can only be arrived at after extricating the emotion – but you, my daughter, have always shot from the hip. You know what you must do – you used to do it for all his campaigns unconsciously – sure, establish the facts, but you must view them through the lens of your gut instinct.’
Her wisdom, her brevity and relevance to my predicament amazed me, and tears welled at capturing a moment with the mum I grew up with. But then she said, ‘It’s your senior year, Charlotte, you need to focus on study, not boys! Plenty of time for that at university!’ And the conversation swerved to a decade before, pulled the sense of connection from under me, and left me feeling more alone than ever. ‘Are you still leaning towards Political Science or sticking with Statistics? Can I not persuade you to economics?’
