Page 26 of The Sirens
25
LUCY
SATURDAY, 16 FEbrUARY 2019
Lucy’s hands shake as she puts the journal down, her stomach churning. When did she last eat? She can’t remember.
She is sitting on the sagging couch in the living room of Cliff House. Cliff House, where her parents had once lived. Had her father sat at the worn kitchen table, pencils and paper spread out around him? Had her mother chopped vegetables in the tiny yellow kitchen, humming as she looked out to sea? It was her mother’s bird-feeder that hung from the tree outside, her mother’s magazines she’d found dust-choked in the eaves.
She closes her eyes to stem her tears and sees the tabloid headline, neon bright on the canvas of her eyelids.
She imagines her mother, white-faced and pregnant, struggling down the treacherous steps to Devil’s Lookout. Imagines her crouched in the cave’s red womb, alone and terrified as she pushed a child from her body … a child that mental illness drove her to abandon …
She cannot bear it. She cannot bear to think of her mother like that, helpless and prone and ill. But she cannot bear the alternative, either: that her mother never birthed her sister at all.
That her sister isn’t her sister.
Oh, Jess.
A thundercloud glowers over the sea, a grey crouched creature. The first drops of rain hit the windowpanes, gunshot loud. The house creaks in the wind, low and mournful. She thinks of all the pain it has witnessed over the years.
Jess’s pain.
Was this why she had always kept her distance from Lucy? Had she feared that Lucy would reject her, once she learned that they were not biologically related?
That they weren’t really sisters?
Tears sting at the thought and she realises that she can’t accept it. It doesn’t matter to Lucy that they didn’t come from the same womb, that they didn’t journey into the world from the same place. They might not have grown up together, but they were raised in the same home, by the same parents, with the same rules and rituals. The same mysteries.
She closes her eyes, focusing on her memories of Jess, as if doing so might summon her home. Sitting on her knee as a small child, listening to the soothing rhythm of her heart. A warm, gentle hand over hers, guiding bright crayons over paper. The harmony of their voices, singing nursery rhymes and Disney songs, and later, Nick Cave …
My sister.
She thinks now of that night at Jess’s flat in Sydney, the taste of hot chocolate laced with alcohol and the soft murmur of the record player. The question she’d asked so clumsily, the way that Jess had seemed to shut down.
It must have brought all of it back. The year she’d lost her virginity was the year she’d discovered she wasn’t who she thought she was, that she wasn’t from Dawes Plain but a sea-swept cave, mere metres from where Lucy sits now. That she’d been abandoned, unwanted. And then, she’d had no one to turn to. No one except Hennessey, who had sowed poison seeds of trust in her young mind, and waited for them to bloom.
What had he done to her?
How she wishes she could return to that moment in Jess’s flat, that she could approach the conversation with the experience and insight she’s gained since. She could tell Jess that she understands. That she knows how it feels, that need to be wanted. How vulnerable it makes you.
‘I’m so sorry, Jess,’ she whispers to the empty room. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Lucy’s words are lost to the rain, now so loud it might be falling on her body, great big drops clattering against her bones, breaking her open.
She cannot bear to read on, but she must. She must know the truth.
But then there’s the hammering of a fist on the door. Lucy climbs from the couch, nervous as a child. She can see the front door from here, the blur of dark figures behind the glass panel.
‘Hello?’ comes a stern voice, barely audible over the lash of the rain. ‘Police. Open up.’