“I know, sweetie! Those are just rumors. People are going to say awful things.”
“He’s the one who said the awful things. He started those rumors. He wanted people to think that she was drinking too much and that she was suicidal.”
“No, that’s—” Heather began but Owen waved her off.
“Mom wasn’t that like that,” Owen said. “It was him…”
“Him what?” Olivia asked.
“All those rumors about maybe she did it on purpose or was drunk—it’s all lies Dad invented,” Owen said.
“Tom wouldn’t do that,” Heather said.
Owen took Heather’s hand. “I was there,” he said.
“When?”
“I blocked it out with my wall. A big wall. The biggest. And I guess the Valium helped too,” Owen said.
“What happened, Owen?” Olivia asked.
“It’s still not completely clear, but it’s coming back…I was supposed to be at gym. But I hate gym and I got a nurse’s note to be excused and I just went home. It’s only a five-minute walk from the school.”
“You were there?” Olivia said, stunned.
Owen nodded. “I think so. No, I know so. I was there. Mom and Dad weren’t home when I got back and it wasn’t Maria’s day, so no one knew I was there. I was in my room playing Mario Kart when I heard Dad and Mom come in. I didn’t want Dad to know I was skipping gym and school, so I hid in my room.”
Olivia was shaking her head.
“It’s true!” Owen insisted. “Dad and Mom were arguing about something. She came up the stairs. It took her ages to get up the stairs. She was crying. I was going to go out and hug her but Dad came up after her. He was the one that was drinking. It was his whiskey glass they found at the bottom of the stairs.”
“What happened, Owen?” Olivia asked.
“Mom had found out about some woman Dad was seeing. They were arguing. She was so angry. She told him that this time, she was serious. This new girl was the final straw. When they divorced, he wouldn’t get a penny. She would ruin him. She would tell Granddad, and Granddad would fix him…”
Heather put her arms around Owen as he began to sob. Olivia held both his hands.
“What happened, Owen?” Olivia asked.
“I think Mom said that Dad would have to pay back the money Granddad had given him for medical school. Dad was laughing at her. I was peeking through a door. She went to hit him and she lost her balance and she fell down the stairs. I saw everything.”
“Oh my God,” Olivia said.
Heather was shaking her head. “Tom wasn’t home—”
“He was! And he’s a doctor, he could have saved her, I think, but he didn’t even try. He stood there looking at her. He didn’t help. And I didn’t either. I hid there. I didn’t help Mom. I didn’t say anything. I hid there and I built my wall. And Dad said he found her like that when he got home, and that wasn’t true. And then the ambulance came. And Olivia came home. And I was able to pretend I had just come home too. And Dad called Grandma. And she came. And they took Mom away. And I hid behind my wall. And everything got blurry. And I was able to pretend it had never happened.”
Heather was crying now.
She believed Owen.
Tom wasn’t guilty of murder. He probably wasn’t even guilty of manslaughter. Perhaps he could have done something to save her; they would never know. From his hiding place in his room, Owen couldn’t possibly have seen what Tom did when he eventually went down the stairs. Maybe she’d been killed instantly. Maybe all Tom had done wrong, really, was lie about what happened.
But the lie was enough and the inaction was enough.
His first reaction must have been shock but then a different emotion might have set in. If Judith was dead, it would solve so many of his problems.
There was another Tom underneath the Tom she wanted to believe in. There was the Tom who wouldn’t let her talk too much to his friends at dinner parties in case she embarrassed him. The Tom who would sometimes be rude to waiters. The Tom of the odd, inexplicable, incandescent rage. The Tom who made sure that Heather medicated Owen early in the morning so the boy wouldn’t hassle him as he dressed for work.
Carolyn had warned her that all surgeons were assholes. But it was more than that, wasn’t it? Owen’s story had shocked her but not, in truth, surprised her.
“I think I’ve hated him for a year. I’ll hate him forever,” Owen said in a faraway voice.
She nodded and understood something that had been bothering her.
This deal he said he’d arranged with the O’Neills didn’t make any sense. Not after all that had happened. The Tom she thought she knew would have seen that. But the Tom of Owen’s story would perhaps grab at any lifeline at any cost.
Even in that initial deal he’d made, he’d wanted to take Olivia with him and leave Heather with Owen. Olivia was his favorite. If things had gone wrong, at least he would have had her. Is that what he’d been thinking? What dad would think a thing like that?
Tom would.
She knew that now.
All three of them were crying.
Heather hugged Owen as hard as she could. And Olivia hugged him too. They sat there in the grass for fifteen minutes, hugging and crying.
They had a conversation without saying anything.
Heather knew what she had to do.
She wiped their tears and held their hands. She asked them if they were sure.
They were just kids, but they were sure.
They didn’t trust him. They did trust her.
“Go back to the cave. I don’t like any of this,” Heather said.
She sent them off and when they were gone, she crawled through the long grass until she was near the place where the bushfire had burned itself out. A great scorched area of the land, and in the middle of it a charcoal-black snow gum tree. A tree that had evolved with the fire over millions of years and that looked dead but whose slow patient heart was beating still.
She lifted the binoculars to her eyes and saw Tom sitting in a wicker chair underneath a branch in the shade. There was an IV in his arm connected to a bag of saline hanging on a jerry-rigged IV pole.
He had a walkie-talkie in his hand.
But there was something not quite…
He was pale and looked dead, but when she studied him through the binoculars, she saw that he was blinking.
He was alive. It was really him. No Weekend at Bernie’s trickery from the O’Neill clan.
But something was wrong.
She scanned the horizon. All around the tree, the vegetation had been torched, leaving only red dirt. There didn’t seem to be anywhere for the O’Neills to hide, but still, she approached cautiously, on all fours, sniffing the air like a lioness as she reached the edge of the grass.
Heather picked up her walkie-talkie. “Tom, are you there alone?” she whispered.
All she heard back was static.
She crawled closer and tried again. “Tom?”
She tried all the channels and looked again through the binoculars. He was breathing. And those eyes seemed alert enough.
It was just a hundred yards of burned grass from here to Tom.
The O’Neills had kept their word. They were nowhere to be seen.
She had one bullet left.