The Australians' Brides

BOOK REPORT Lockie had typed, centered on the page like the words REECE and NAOMI. The heading vibrated and blurred and shouted at her.

She couldn’t breathe. Words tangled in her head, a nightmarish mix of dialogue lines from Heartbreak Hotel scenes she’d written months ago and lines that Kurt had delivered to her in person—those velvety threats, and pseudocaring pieces of advice and upside-down accusations. A black, cold, reasonless pit of fear and dread opened in her stomach and flight was the only possible response.

Out of here, out of here, out of here.

Dimly aware that Lockie was talking to her, answering her question about the book, she fled the room, out through the screen door, past a startled Carly, down the steps, out across the wide, hard-baked piece of red ground to a stand of trees grouped around a shiny metal windmill and an open water tank. She came to a halt, gasping, blood thundering in her ears.

The black pit inside her slowly closed over, leaving a powerful memory of her fear, but not the fear itself. She grasped one of the trailing branches of the willowy tree and felt a trickle of tiny, dusky pink spheres fall into her hand. Fruits? They were dry and papery on the outside and, when she rubbed them between her fingertips, they smelled like pepper.

A breeze made the top of the windmill turn. It was shaped like a child’s drawing of a flower, with a circle of metal petals like oars, and it turned with just enough force to pump an erratic stream of water up from the ground and into the tank, whose tarnished sides felt cool and clean in the sliver of midday shade.

Jac began to breathe again, but she was still shaking.

“What happened, Jacinda?” Callan said behind her. She’d heard the screen door and his footsteps, but hadn’t really taken in the sounds of his approach. “He wasn’t rude, was he?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” She turned away from the tank’s cool side. “It was me. My fault, completely.”

“So what happened?” He stepped closer—close enough to see the tiny, convulsive shudders that vibrated her body. “Hey ….”

He touched her arm, closing his fingers around the bones just above her wrist. His hand felt heavy and strong and warm, and before she knew it, she’d pulled her own hand around to grab him in the same place—a kind of monkey grip.

They stayed that way, too close to each other. He could easily have rested his jutting chin on the top of her bent head, could have hugged her or breathed in her ear.

“Lately I’ve been having panic attacks,” she said. “Please apologize to Lockie. He was in the middle of telling me about the book and I just … left.”

“Bit more dramatic than that, Jacinda.”

“I can’t even remember how I got out of the room.” Without planning to, she pushed her forehead into Callan’s shoulder, somehow needing to be in contact with his rocklike steadiness. She smelled hot cotton, and the natural fragrance of male hair and skin.

He held her gently and made shushing sounds, the kind he’d have made to a frightened animal—which was exactly what she was, she thought. There had certainly been no human rationality in her flood of fear.

When he made a movement, she thought he was letting her go, and the cry of protest escaped her lips instinctively. She wasn’t ready yet. He felt too good, too right. The air between them had caught fire with shared awareness, sucking the oxygen from her lungs. Again, it was animal, primal, physical. Her body craved the contact, needed it like warmth or food. You couldn’t explain it, plot out the steps that had led up to it; it was just suddenly there.

She could feel his breathing, sense his response and his wariness. Grabbing on to his hands and kneading them with her own, she gabbled something that was part apology, part explanation, and didn’t make much sense at all. Then she felt him push her away more firmly.

“Carly’s worried about you,” he murmured on a note of warning. “She’s coming down the steps now. And Mum’s behind her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. Will you stop that? The apologizing?”

“You can let me go, now. I’m fine.”

“Not sure if Mum’s going to stop Carly from coming over here. This must look pretty, um, private.”

He’d felt it, too. The awareness. She knew he had.

But he didn’t like it any more than she did.

“Yes,” she said. “Okay. Yes. Let me talk to them.”

“Wait, though. Listen, I don’t want to push, but I really can’t afford … don’t want … for my mother to get the wrong idea.” He stepped back, making it clear what kind of wrong idea he meant. “Jacinda, when you can, as soon as you can, please, you have to give me some idea of why you’re here.”

Chapter Four

“Mum’s giving the kids some lunch,” Callan reported. “I’ve told her you and I needed to talk.”

“Thanks. We do. I don’t want to keep you in the dark about what’s been going on.”

“Sit on the bench. No hurry. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

“I’m fine. I can wait.”

He’d brought her out to the garden, and it was beautiful. She’d never realized herbs and vegetables could look so pretty. There were borders of rosemary and lavender and thyme, beds of young, fist-size lettuces set out in patterns of pale green alternating with dark greenish-red, orange-flowered marigolds like sentinels at the end of each row. Shade cloth stretched overhead protected some of the beds from the harshness of the midday sun, while brushwood screens kept out the dusty wind.

The soil looked rich and dark, nothing like the red- and ocher-hued earth of the surrounding country, so it must have been trucked in from elsewhere. Beyond the garden there was a chicken run, and she could see several rusty-brown and glossy black birds scratching happily, watched over by a magnificent rooster. Carly would love a newly-laid egg each morning.

Jac whooshed out a preparatory breath, knowing she couldn’t spend the next hour admiring plants and hens. “Where to begin,” she said.

“You had a bad divorce,” Callan prompted. “But I thought that was over. Property settlement, custody, all set.”

“So did I, but Kurt has other ideas. He wants Carly.” Did he really? She still wasn’t sure what game he was playing. “Or he wants to terrorize me with the idea that he wants Carly,” she revised. “Which is working, by the way. I’m terrorized. His actions have gone beyond industry power games.”

Kurt had always loved to play those, too.

“Yeah?” Callan studied her face for a moment with his piercing blue gaze, then seemed to realize it might be easier if they both looked away, that she wouldn’t want her emotions under a microscope while she talked. He picked up some bits of gravel from under the bench and started tossing them lazily, as if they both had all the time in the world for this. Somewhere overhead, a crow cawed.

“Can I copy you with the rock-throwing thing?” Jac asked, and he grinned and deposited half his handful into her open palm. They threw gravel together for a minute in silence before she could work out how to begin. Decided in the end just to tell the story as straight as she could. “Last week, a woman that Carly didn’t know, a complete stranger, tried to collect her from preschool. And she looked just like me.”

The memory was still very fresh, and the words came tumbling out as she told Callan the full story. She’d seen the woman herself. Hadn’t thought anything of it, had just idly registered that a slender female with long dark hair was getting into the same make, model and color of car as her own, fifty yards down the block from the preschool gate.

Maybe, yes, she’d had some idea in the back of her mind that Kurt himself might try to pick up Carly one day, even though he wasn’t supposed to and the preschool staff knew it. She’d started coming ten minutes earlier than usual because of her suspicion, but she hadn’t imagined a strategy as devious as this.

She had gone inside and found the head teacher, Helen Franz, sitting at her desk pale and shaking and unable to pick up the phone to call the police. The stranger had known Carly’s name, her best friend’s name, the teachers’ names.

“This woman, this … this … me look-alike, comes past Helen toward Carly,” Jac told Callan. “She says to Helen, ‘Hi, Mrs. Franz, I’m a touch early, I signed her out on my way through,’ and Helen says that’s fine—because, you know, I have been coming early, the past few weeks—and that Carly is right here. ‘Here’s your mom, honey.’ And she doesn’t really look closely at this woman, but she has no suspicions at all and she’s all set to let Carly go. That was what made Helen start shaking, afterward, when she realized what she’d almost done. I started shaking, too, as soon as she started telling me. So Helen’s actually ready to let Carly go. ‘That’s fine, Jacinda,’ she tells this woman. No suspicions.

“Except that Carly knows it’s not me. She won’t budge. Digs in her heels. Throws a tantrum, which isn’t like her. The woman says, ‘Sweetheart, you don’t have time to finish your game.’ And she has my mannerisms. My voice. Carly starts screaming. Helen comes closer to see what the problem is. Carly screams out, ‘That’s not my real mommy. It’s an alien!’ She’s terrified. Completely terrified. Partly because the deception is so neat and close. It would have been less frightening for her, I think, if the woman hadn’t looked anything like me at all.”

“I can understand that,” Callan muttered. He stretched his arm along the garden bench. He’d finished with the gravel. He looked skeptical, but interested. “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s … yeah … scary if someone looks right and wrong at the same time. It really gets to you.”

“Meanwhile, Helen’s still one step behind, at this stage. She looks up to find the woman heading out of there, just quietly slipping away. But fast. As if she’s been given instructions to abort the mission the moment she’s seriously challenged. She had my style of sunglasses, an outfit like one of mine, my hairstyle. She was really well rehearsed. Coached, Callan.”

He looked at her, eyes narrowed in the bright light, and she saw the doubt still in place. Dropped her bits of gravel. Grabbed his arm with dusty fingers. “Yes, I know it sounds paranoid … crazy. But my ex-husband is a big-time TV producer. He has access to desperate actresses, expert makeup artists, wardrobe people, acting and movement coaches. He could pull it off like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I can put you in touch with Helen Franz if you want to hear it from her. We never called the police, in the end, because nothing actually happened, but she wrote up a full report. There were two other teachers in the room who witnessed the whole thing from a distance. It did happen, Callan!”

“I—I guess I’m not doubting it. But who would have gone along with something like that? It was a kidnapping attempt!”

“Kurt wouldn’t have called it that when he hired the actress. He would have called it a reality TV show with hidden cameras, or a method-acting audition for a big movie role. He would have paid in five figures. And he’s Kurt Beale. So people listen. Desperate actresses sure listen! They listen to anything! And they believe him. And they do what he says. He has the power, he has the control. He loves to use it. He’s Kurt Beale,” she repeated.

“Yeah?” Callan said. Then he gave a slow grin. “Well, I’ve never heard of him.”

She closed her eyes. “I know. That’s exactly why I’m here.”

She told him about not being able to write anymore, about being scared the inspiration might never come back, about resigning from Heartbreak Hotel for Elaine’s sake, about fleeing to Sydney and getting all those hang-up calls at Lucy’s.

“And panicking,” she added. “I know I’m panicking. I do know it. Overreacting, obsessing over worst-case scenarios. Do you know what a curse it can be, a writer’s imagination? But there’s no place I can draw the line, Callan. If you seriously asked me, is Kurt capable of taking Carly and hiding her somewhere so I’d never see her again? Is he capable of stalking me in the entertainment industry so that I’ll never write again? Is he capable of murder, that kind of if-I-can’t-have-her-then-no-one-can awful thing that some men do? There’s no place I could draw the line and say, “No, I know Kurt, and I know he wouldn’t do that.” He could do it. Any of it. I know it.”

“Hey … hey.”

“Yeah, enough about me, right?” she tried to joke. “You look like you’re thinking six hundred thousand acres isn’t going to be big enough for both of us.”

“No, no, the opposite. I wanted to tell you that six hundred thousand acres is big. We’re isolated. You’re safe here. For—well, for—”

He wanted the bottom line. How long did she want to stay?

“A month, okay?” she told him quickly. “Our return flight is in a month. I’ll have something worked out by then.”

I’ll know if there’s a chance I can ever go back to writing.

I’ll decide on somewhere Carly and I can safely live. Texas, maybe. Vermont, or Maine. Somewhere like this, where there’s space and air, and where Kurt has no power.

I’ll have talked myself out of the panic attacks, and Carly won’t sleepwalk anymore.

“Carly sleepwalks,” she blurted out.

“Does she?”

“Yes, I should tell you, and the boys, and your mom. It started a couple of months ago, before we came to Sydney that first time. The doctor thought it might be the stress of the divorce and all the conflict, Kurt’s games. She doesn’t do it every night. Maybe once or twice a week.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“No, but it’s unpredictable, and she can get upset if she’s woken up in the wrong place or the wrong way. I’ve been sleeping pretty lightly, though, so I always hear her getting up. If she’s handled gently and not startled in any way, I can just lead her back to bed.”

“I can’t think how it would be a problem from our end. The boys are pretty sound sleepers. And Mum’s in the other house.”

“Yes, it’s probably fine, but I thought you should know.” They both sat silently for a moment, then she added, “You say Mum, not Mom.” She imitated the clipped sound of the word, compared to the longer American vowel.

“Yep. Short and sweet.”

“I like it. What should I call her, by the way, your mom?”

“Just Kerry.”

“And Carly?”

“I’d say keep on calling her Carly.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Might confuse her if you changed it to Goldilocks, at this stage.”

Jac laughed. “Well, Goldilocks is in fact her middle name, but I take your point.” The moment of silly humor was nice. Unexpected. “No, I meant—”

“I know what you meant. What should Carly call Mum? Just Kerry. Or Gran, like the boys do. She won’t mind either way.”

“Thanks. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for this, Callan.”

For seeming so relaxed about it.

For making her laugh when she wasn’t expecting to.

For not being Kurt.

“Does she have any grandmothers of her own, your Carly?” he asked.

“No, she doesn’t. Kurt’s mother died just before he and I met. Mine, when I was twelve. My dad lives back east.” She stood up, didn’t want to talk about any of that, right now. “I love those chickens.” She walked toward the wire mesh that separated them from the vegetable garden and called back, “I never realized their feathers would be so beautiful. The black ones are almost iridescent on their breasts.”

“And they’re good layers, too.” His tone poked fun at her, just a little. Iridescent feathers? These birds weren’t for decoration. They had a job to do!

“Is egg collecting something Carly and I could handle? She’d love it, I think.”

“Sure.” He stood up and came over, and they looked at the chickens side by side.

“Do they … like … bite? I’m good with horses. Kurt and I used to ride on his ranch.”

If you could call six thousand acres a ranch.

She had, once.

But she’d seen Callan’s place, now.

“But chickens …” She spread her hands. She didn’t know anything about chickens. They hadn’t fit with Kurt’s image.

“They’ll peck at anything that looks like it could be something to eat,” Callan said. “Shoelaces, rings. But they’ll stop when it doesn’t taste good. And they’re not aggressive. You can pet ’em and feed ’em out of your hand.” He pulled some leafy sprigs of parsley from a garden bed and gave half of them to her, then bent down to hen level and stuck his parsley through the wire. A red-brown bird came peck-peck-pecking at once. “See? Try it.”

She squatted. “Well, hi there, Little Red Hen.”

“The boys have names for them. They can introduce you and Carly properly after lunch.”

“Her ex-husband was stalking her,” Callan told his mother. “Professionally and personally. She needed somewhere safe, and far.”

“Well, Arakeela should be both,” his mother said.

They stood on the veranda, watching the two female figures in the chook run—the adult and the little girl. Their clothing was bright in the midafternoon light and their hair glinted where the sun hit, one head dark and the other blond. Lockie and Josh had introduced Carly and her mum to the rooster, Darth Vader, and the hens, Furious, Gollum, Frodo, Shrek, Donkey, Princess and Hen.

Carly thought those names were great. Callan and Kerry could both hear her little voice saying, “Tell me which one’s Frodo, again, Mommy?”

“Well, I know it was one of the black ones ….”

The boys had gone, now, having shown Jacinda and Carly the chooks’ favorite laying places. They were working on the quad-wheeled motorbikes in the shed, changing the oil. Most outback kids of their age got to ride quad bikes around the property when they helped with the cattle, but Callan was pretty strict about it. If Lockie and Josh were going to ride, they had to know how to take care of the bikes and they never rode one unless he was there.

“How long are they staying?” Kerry asked.

“Their return flight is a month from now, she said. I don’t know how it’s going to work out, Mum, to be honest, but I couldn’t say no.”

“Of course you couldn’t! Do you think I’m suggesting it?”

“You seemed a bit doubtful.”

“I could tell something was wrong, that’s all. That she wasn’t just a tourist friend wanting an outback stay.”

“She’s been having panic attacks. That was what happened with Lockie’s book report before lunch. She doesn’t know what she’ll do for an income instead of writing, if the … you know … drive and hunger and inspiration never come back.”

He knew nothing about writing. Couldn’t imagine. How did you create a plot and action out of thin air? How did you dream up people who seemed so real that they jumped off the page or out of a TV screen like best friends? How did you string the words together, one by one, so that they added up to a story?

And yet he understood something about how she felt. He knew the same fear that the drive might never come back. He knew the huge sense of loss and failure, now that the hunger was gone. He had the same instinctive belief that without this certain special pool inside you, you were physically incomplete, even though the pool wasn’t something tangible and solid like a limb.

“She probably just needs to rest her spirit,” Kerry said. “Take the pressure off and forgive herself.”

“I guess,” he answered, not believing it could be that simple. Not in his own case.

Take the pressure off? Rest the spirit? Forgive yourself?

Was that all it took?

His mother didn’t know.

Hell, of course she didn’t! And Callan would never tell her.

He hadn’t breathed a word about the freckled blonde at the Birdsville Races three years ago. When he’d gone down to chat to the Scandinavian backpacker camping at the water hole a few months later, Mum had thought he was only protecting their land. He’d reported that he’d told the young woman about where it was safe to light a campfire and where best to photograph the wildlife that came to drink at the water hole at dusk.

Mum had no idea that he’d seen a phantom similarity to Liz in both those women, and that the women themselves had picked up on the vibe. As Jacinda had said before lunch, however, when she’d told him about the woman at Carly’s preschool, it was more terrifying to confront the differences when someone bore a passing resemblance to the person you loved.

They hadn’t been Liz’s freckles, her kind of blond, her skin, her body, her voice.

Why had he gone looking for something that he could never find?

No one, but no one—not Brant or Dusty, no one—had known about the Danish girl’s open-eyed seduction attempt, or Callan’s failure. No one ever would.

“We got eggs!” Carly shrieked out, coming out of the hen run. “Look, guys, we got eggs! Six! Mommy has four and I have two because my hands are too little. I have one brown one with white speckles and one brown one with brown speckles.”

“Carly? Don’t run so fast, honey,” said her mum, coming up behind her, “because if you trip and fall, they’ll break.”

“But I want to show ’em to Callan and—” She slowed and looked back at her mother for guidance, asking in a stage whisper, “What’s the lady’s name?”

Jacinda looked at Callan and shrugged, asking a question with her face. Kerry or Gran? They’d discussed it—that joke about Goldilocks—but Jacinda clearly didn’t know what to say. She had that vulnerable look about her again—the loss of grace, the slight slouch to her shoulders. It made her look thinner. And it made him want to give her promises about how he’d look after her that she would be bound to read the wrong way.

Before he could answer, Kerry stepped off the veranda.

“It’s Gran, love,” she said, in her usual plainspoken way. As she spoke, she leaned down to admire the eggs that had made Carly so excited. “You can call me Gran.”

Jet lag crept up on Jacinda and Carly a short while after the evening meal. Jac tried to hide her yawns and droopiness, but Carly wasn’t so polite. “Mommeee! I’m so tired! I wanna go to bed right now!” They were both fast asleep before eight o’clock.

At midnight, according to the clock on the table beside the bed, Jac woke up again. At first she couldn’t work out why, then she saw the pale child-size shadow moving near the door. Carly was sleepwalking, and subconsciously she’d heard her daughter’s familiar sounds.

She caught up to her in the corridor and tried to steer her back to bed. Carly wouldn’t come. “Honey? This way … Come on, sweetheart.”

“Butter banana on the machine in the morning.” She talked in her sleep, too, and it never made any sense.

“Let’s turn around and come back to bed,” Jac repeated.

Carly’s eyes were open, but she wasn’t awake. She had a plan. She wanted something. And as always when sleepwalking, she was hard to dissuade. “I’m coming in the morning up,” she said, pushing at Jac with firm little hands.

“Well, let’s not, honey.”

“No!” Carly said. “Up in the, in the out.”

Maybe it was best to let her walk it off. The doctor had said that it wasn’t dangerous to waken her, contrary to popular myth, but it did always end with Carly crying and talking about bad dreams that she would have forgotten by morning if Jac could get her back to bed while she was still asleep.

“Okay, Carly, want to show me?” She took her daughter’s hand and let her lead the way.

They crept along the corridor, through the big, comfortable living room and out of the front door, first the solid wooden one and then the squeaky one with the insect-proof mesh. Oh, that squeak was loud! Would it wake Callan and the boys? Jac tried to close it quietly behind her.

Carly looked blindly around the yard, while Jacinda waited for her next move. An almost full moon shone high in the sky, a little flat on one side. It didn’t look quite right, because it was upside-down in this country. Even with the moon so bright, the stars were incredible, thousands of pinpoints of light against a backdrop of solid ink. No city haze.