December (5 page)

‘I don’t think so. This is big, Cal. Mum ran right out of the house. I thought she’d left me behind!’

‘Mum would never do that,’ I said,
unconvincingly
.

‘Rafe raced out after her, begging her to relax and come back. He wanted her to take her
medication
. She just told him to get away from her, then she ran back into the house and grabbed me from where I was on the stairs. I was really scared. She dragged me out the back, then we climbed into the car and drove off. Rafe was
yelling
out the front that she shouldn’t be driving in that state. It was horrible!’

‘Where are you now?’ I asked.

‘Marjorie’s place. Marjorie helped calm her down. They’re out the back talking now. Mum’s still crying, I think. I tried to hear what they’re saying … but–’

‘Where’s Rafe?’

‘I don’t know, we just left him standing in the dark, outside the house. Cal, I don’t know what to do–Mum’s not the same as she used to be. She’s never lost it before like she did tonight. Can you please come and see me?’ my sister cried.

I didn’t know what to do.

‘Please, Cal!’ she begged, in between sobbing and sniffling.

‘I’ll come round as soon as I can,’ I decided, impulsively. I hated hearing her sound so upset. ‘You’ll have to sneak out front to meet me. Nobody can know about this. You’ll have to be very careful, OK?’

‘OK.’

I hung up the phone and turned to the others.

‘We’re coming with you,’ they said together.

‘I’ll be quicker alone,’ I said, ‘and more discreet. I’ll meet up with you both at the cenotaph in two, maybe three, hours?’

‘Cool,’ said Boges. ‘Hey, look, a taxi’s coming. It’d be a lot quicker than walking from here to Richmond…’

‘I’m grabbing it,’ I said, making a rash decision and rushing out to the road.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Winter. ‘It’ll be faster, but it might not be safe.’

I nodded, flagging down the taxi. I needed to get to Gabbi as fast as possible. ‘Let’s hope the taxi’s a good omen.’

I hung my head low and paid the driver. Luckily
he’d been completely focused on a phone call to another driver that he was taking on speaker. I climbed out and he drove away, leaving me at the end of my old street.

I tried not to look at our house as I passed it, now inhabited by strangers. It sat there surrounded by bushes and trees that were so much taller than I remembered.

Gabbi was waiting for me behind Mum’s car, parked outside Marjorie’s house. She threw herself at me and hugged me so tight it felt like I was being smothered by a small bear.

‘Hey, hey, steady, Gab,’ I gasped as she squeezed me. ‘It’s OK. I’m here now.’ I eased her off me and ducked down with her behind the car again.

‘But I don’t want to stay here,’ she said, her eyes bloodshot from crying. ‘I want to go back to Mum and Uncle Rafe’s place. I feel weird here.’

I took her hands in mine. ‘Gab, you might have to stay here at Marjorie’s until Mum sorts out whatever problem she’s having. You can go back home later.’

Gabbi’s eyes shone with tears as she swung round and pointed over to our old house. ‘
That
’s my home! That’s where I want to go! I want it to be back to when we were all together again, living there in our proper house, just like it used to be before Dad died. Before all those bad things
happened to you … and before Mum changed … and went crazy.’

I put my arms around her. ‘We’d all love that, Gab,’ I said, helplessly, as she snuggled into me.

Then she leaned back to look me in the face. ‘Please come home soon, Cal. I hate not having you around. It’s so quiet. I miss my brother.’

‘I promise it won’t be like this for much longer. But for now, both of us have to stay strong. I know it’s not easy, living with Mum the way she is right now, but having Rafe helps, doesn’t it?’

‘It does,’ she nodded. ‘He’s all right. I never liked him much before, but he’s different now.
Better
different. He’s been getting along so well with Mum–he still wants to marry her, you know–but you should have heard her yelling at him tonight.’

‘What was it about? What set her off?’

‘I don’t know, she wouldn’t tell me anything. Rafe rang Marjorie a few minutes ago and said he was going to come by as soon as he’d picked up Mum’s prescription. He said he was on his way to a twenty-four-hour chemist in the city.’

That trip would take him at least an hour, I figured. It gave me an idea.

‘Gab, I have to go now. Look, you and Mum will be OK.’ I thought about the 365-day countdown and looming deadline. No matter what happened
to me, this mess was going to be over soon, one way or another. ‘Go back inside. We’ll see each other again soon.’

‘OK,’ she said, her voice muffled by tears once more. ‘But where are you going to go now?’

‘I have something I need to check out,’ I said, not wanting to give too much away, ‘and then I’m going to meet Winter and Boges at Memorial Park.’

Gabbi hugged me and touched the Celtic ring on my finger before sneaking back into the house. She glanced over at me one last time as she quietly closed the door.

I started sprinting towards Dolphin Point. There was something I really wanted to check out there, and time was going to be tight.

There was no sign of Rafe’s car outside his house, but there was a light on inside. I was hoping that in the craziness of Mum and Gab’s exit, Rafe had simply forgotten to turn off the lights and, more importantly, forgotten to set the security system.

I raced round the back to the patio and my eyes darted to the glass doors. They
were
open!

I held my breath as I eased the doors wider and stepped through.

Silence. The alarm was
not
on.

The living room looked a mess. Mum’s
favourite
purple mug lay on the floor in pieces, the remainder of her herbal tea forming a small, wet, brown puddle in the middle of them. Books and papers were scattered all over the place, as if someone had been impatiently looking for
something
, sending everything flying without care. Or was this just the proof of Mum’s irrational outburst, when she’d gone crazy like Gabbi had said, throwing things around?

Mum sure had changed over the last year. She’d never been the sort of person to lose her temper and throw things. She used to have everything under control. She used to be calm. She used to be reasonable.

Mum
used to
be a lot of things.

Rafe’s old photo albums were stored on a low bookcase next to his vinyl records. I’d noticed them when searching through his house before, but had never actually stopped to look at any of the pictures inside.

In the last few weeks, so many things had happened that made me curious about Rafe. It was almost like he’d lived two completely
different
lives. The ‘Twin Tragedy’ article I’d read, for
instance, where he’d sadly spoken of my missing twin, and lovingly of his own twin, my dad, had made me look at him differently. Even Eric Blair had said that in college Rafe was always by my dad’s side. Everything pointed to him living a completely different life before the abduction–before Samuel was taken, and before I was returned.

But was it true?

Rafe had admitted knowing I had come to his ‘rescue’ at Chapel-by-the-Sea, and he also knew so much more about the DMO than I ever realised.

I cleared the space on the floor beside the shelf, kicking some loose papers out of the way. I knelt down and pulled out a couple of the fattest albums and began turning their pages, all the while listening carefully for the sound of a returning car.

The first album was filled with photos from Uncle Rafe’s wedding. There were mostly pictures of him with Aunty Klara, posing together. Rafe was smiling in the pictures, but I could almost see something like sadness in his eyes.

I didn’t know Aunty Klara that well before she died. From what I remembered, she was pretty quiet and kept to herself, even though she seemed nice enough. I never really thought about how lonely Rafe must have been after he lost her.

I slotted the wedding album back into place on the shelf.

The next album I opened was older and dustier. Straightaway I recognised Rafe and Dad together when they were young, probably about my age. I frowned, looking at them more closely.

In almost every photo, Dad had his arm over Rafe’s shoulder, or the other way around. They both wore wide grins. They looked identical. They looked happy.

I pulled the album closer and flicked through it, eager to see more. Photo after photo showed the pair together; pulling silly faces and poses, blowing out candles on shared birthday cakes, dressed up in matching powder-blue suits at friends’ parties, proudly holding their surfboards. There must have been hundreds of photos of the pair.

Rafe’s words returned to me; ‘a special bond’ he’d said, about being a twin. I sat back on my heels.

I frowned over pages of baby photos I
recognised
were of me, hauling myself up by a chair leg and standing up. My dad and Rafe stood side-by-side in the background. I wondered for a second about the discoloured squares in the album, where pictures had been removed … before realising that Rafe must have taken out all the shots of Samuel.

There wasn’t much more to see after that. There were a few random shots of plants and buildings, but it seemed like Rafe had lost
interest
in tracking his life.

As I placed the last of the albums back on the shelf, an unopened envelope fell out from one of the film negative pockets.

Curious, I read who it was addressed to.