Red Dirt Heart 3 (7 page)

Her question forgotten, Laura nodded. “I, um, I guess I should explain…” she started nervously. “I should have come a long time before now.”

Probably
, I thought. Then immediately after, I thought,
Probably not
. But still I didn’t speak. I truthfully didn’t have a great deal to say.

“And I’d apologise a million times, but it would never be enough…” Her words trailed off.

Travis squeezed my hand, and I could almost feel his whole body vibrate beside me.

Her eyes flickered to Travis, and I had no doubt she could see his barely contained anger. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry,” she said. “So very sorry.”

I raised an eyebrow at her, like an apology from her—twenty-two years too late—meant a damn thing.

Biting her lip, she pulled her handbag onto her lap. “But I saw this,” she went on to say, unrolling a magazine she’d brought with her. It was the Beef Farmers Association magazine with my face on the front. “And I didn’t want to put it off any longer. I should have written or called. I can see that turning up wasn’t the best idea.” She shrugged. “I was halfway down your driveway before I realised what I was even doing. Can you believe I drove all this way without knowing…” She shook her head and put her hand to her forehead before flattening down her hair.

As far as conversations went, with the supposed rule of two people actually speaking, I knew I was probably obligated to say something. So I did.

“My father’s dead,” I said flatly. Coldly. A sorry, sorry matter-of-fact.

“I know,” she whispered. Her eyes were glassy and sorrowful. “I read about Charles,” she said, then cringed. “Your father. I was very sorry to hear about that.” She swallowed hard and frowned at me. “The day of the funeral… I drove out here.”

I raised my eyebrow in a sure-you-did kind of way, and her frown deepened. She near whispered, “I got to the gate, but couldn’t drive in. It wasn’t the right time. The last thing you needed was me turning up on that day.”

That day.

This day.

Travis’s hold on my hand was close to bone-crushin’, and he took a deep breath.

Laura bit her lip and spoke to her hands. “I just want you to know that I don’t expect anything, and I’m sorry for just turning up. I shouldn’t have, and I am truly sorry. You have every right to tell me not to come back. I wouldn’t blame you one bit.”

Nugget came sniffing at my feet again. Peeling my hand from Travis’s vice-like grip, I put the woollen beanie down at my feet and Nugget climbed into his makeshift pouch. I scooped him up and tucked him under my arm, where he loved to burrow.

She took out a small notepad and a pen from her handbag. She wrote something down and stood up. “I’ll leave now,” she said, and Travis exhaled loudly, as if he suddenly found it easier to breathe.

George stood up and followed her to the front door, but Travis made no attempt to move. “Just give me a minute,” I called out to George. I stood up and took Travis’s hand. He took a deep, trying-to-calm-down breath. I’d never seen him so mad.

“Hey,” I said softly. “Talk to me. What’s up?”

“What’s
up
?” he whisper-shouted, his eyes disbelieving and wide. “Do you even have to ask? Jesus, Charlie, that’s your
mother
?”

“So?”

“She just turns up, like she has the fucking right, and it doesn’t bother you?” He tried to quieten his voice. “After all this time? What the fuck is up with that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what she’s doing here or why. Or how I feel about it.” I shrugged again. I just didn’t know.

He groaned, a sound of pure frustration. He ran his free hand through his hair and squeezed my hand in his other. “I swear to God. If this ends badly, if she hurts you…”

I smiled at him. “Trav, for her to do that, for her to hurt me, it would have to mean that I cared. But I don’t, not one bit. She doesn’t know me, and I don’t know her. That woman out there,” I whispered, “might know George and Ma—and George seems to know her. He keeps lookin’ at me like he’s scared I’ll freak or bolt out the door. And you might reckon she looks like me, but Trav”—I shrugged again—“she’s nothing more than a stranger to me.” Then, not caring if Laura heard me, and kinda hoping that she would, I said, “My
mother
is in bed, asleep in the back room.”

He looked flustered. And Travis was never flustered. “Do you want to go?”

“Go where?”

“Anywhere,” he said. “We’ll take Shelby and Texas, and we’ll just go.”

“Travis,” I stopped him. “I’m fine, really.”

He looked at me like I was the most complex, most infuriating puzzle he’d ever tried to solve. “Charlie.” He shook his head. “You have every right to be angry, to ask questions. You
should
ask her questions. Go yell at her or something. Jesus, how can you be so calm?”

All I could do was smile. I leaned down and pecked his lips. “Like I said, Trav. She can’t give me anything I don’t already have.”

His eyes softened and he sighed. “Just when I think I got you all figured out…”

I laughed quietly. “I really do love you. You got that figured out, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he whispered. Travis finally smiled, and he lightly scratched the fidgeting wombat in my arms.

I kissed the top of his head before I followed the sound of quiet conversation out onto the veranda, and Travis was right behind me. George and Laura stopped talking and both eyed me cautiously, probably expecting me to bombard her with questions or tell her she wasn’t ever welcome.

And maybe Travis was right.

I
could
have asked this woman a million questions. And maybe I
should
have. Like why did she leave? How
could
a mother leave her child? Where had she been the last twenty-something years? What life did she have now? Did she ever think of me? On birthdays? At Christmas? Did she even care? Why did she come back? Why now? What was she after?

She handed me the slip of paper, which had a phone number and an address on it. “I’d really like it if we could talk,” she said. “When you’re ready. Doesn’t matter how long it takes. I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” she said.

“No,” I answered. “I don’t really.” If she was expecting some profound, happy-tears reunion, she was very, very wrong. “Just one, actually. Just one question.”

I could see it in her eyes, that flicker of fear, the bracing for you-are-not-my-mother impact. “Of course.”

My question was really quite simple, yet it would change my life forever. “Who is Samuel Jennings?”

“Breathe for me, Charlie,” Travis said. His hands cupped my face, his voice was close and warm. He was pressing me against the wall in the foyer, holding me up.

I still had Nugget in my arms. I could feel him wiggle between us, and Travis lifted him so he wasn’t squashed.

Why was it so hard to breathe?

Then I remembered.

Like it was being played in reverse, in slow, slow motion, I remembered. I remember George telling Laura it might be best if she left. I remembered Travis taking my hand and pulling me inside while I stood there shaking my head, trying to make sense of what she’d said.

How could it hit so hard?

How could it hurt so much?

My mother turns up and I really couldn’t have cared less. I had it all under control. She was no more than a stranger to me. She was nothing I didn’t already have. I have a mother. I have Ma, so this Laura turning up meant nothing. Just a fill-in-the-blank detail, a face to put to the memory I’d long ago forgotten.

But this? This was different.

“Charlie?” Travis’s voice was close, like an anchor, a lifeline. “Look at me, just open your eyes.”

I did as he asked, and I don’t know what he saw in my eyes, but his face crumpled. His hand touched the side of my face and slid around my neck to pull me against him. My face buried in his neck. “Charlie,” he whispered. “Do you trust me?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

He snatched up my hand and led me down the hall. We passed the kitchen, and Trav handed Nugget over to Nara, and without another word, he walked me out the back door.

As we crossed the yard, he whistled loudly and Shelby trotted over to the fence with Texas not too far behind. He opened the gate, grabbed Texas by the mane above the hock and hauled himself up onto his bare back. He waited for me to do the same on Shelby, and then with a kick to his horse and a loud “Yah”, he galloped out of the yard.

And I followed him.

I leaned low down to Shelby’s neck and let her take flight. The feeling of her under me, the rapid three-step galloping thud-thud-thud as her hooves barely touched the ground was a comforting sound. The cool air and warm sun, the isolated and barren, familiar land was absolute,
absolute
mind-clearin’, soul-breathin’ peace. I’d gone from barely keepin’ it together to feelin’ like I was free in a matter of seconds.

I don’t know how, but Travis just knew what I needed.

Or maybe he needed the space for thinkin’-through-shit too.

Maybe he needed the open air, the vastness, the feeling of insignificance that only this landscape can bring as much as I did.

The immensity of open desert gave me perspective and room to breathe, and Travis understood that. He understood me.

I let Shelby run herself out before bringin’ her to a stop, and Travis did the same. I slid off her back and walked a few metres in the red dirt, finally breathing in gulps of air. I ran my hands through my hair and screamed, “Fuck!”

I had to let it out. The frustration, the anger, the unknown.

I turned around and Travis was right there.

“How could she do this?” I asked. “How can she just waltz in and turn every-fucking-thing upside down?”

Trav nodded, but he never said anything. Like the desert, he just listened.

“Who the fuck does she think she is?” I ran my hands through my hair again. “You know what? I don’t care about her—
it’s not about her
—I have a mother, and it is
not
that woman.” I pointed back toward the homestead, back to where Laura had been. “I sat across from her and felt nothing. But this?”

Travis swallowed hard, his eyes were full of love and concern.

“Do you know how long I spent alone out here?” I asked him. “Do you know how I wished—how I wished so hard—that I had someone? Someone to hang out with, someone to talk to, someone on my side? Jesus fucking Christ,” I groaned. “I had to ask one of the station hands or George to play cricket or handball, because I had no one! My whole fucking life.”

Travis put his hand to my face, his thumb wiping away my tears. “Oh, Charlie.”

I threw my arms around him and hugged him so damn hard. He didn’t seem to mind, he held me just as tight. I buried my face into the crook of his neck, and Laura’s words replayed in my mind.

She’d gone a bit pale, her eyes wide. “How do you know that name?” she’d whispered.

“I found newspaper clippings in the things my father hid in the roof.”

“I didn’t want to tell you like this, but I won’t lie to you, Charlie,” she’d said, more to herself than to me. She’d looked scared as hell and as though she was trying to swallow but her mouth was too dry. “Sam is my son. Charlie, he’s your brother.”

My world went all quiet after that.

There was a barrage of information. Her words kept spilling out, like a gunshot wound that kept bleeding, darkness seeping from the skin. And all I could hear was my pulse in my ears.

“When I told your father I was pregnant, he made me leave. You have to understand, Charlie, I didn’t want to go. He told me not to come back until I got rid of it. He was a troubled man. He was…”

I shook my head. None of what she was saying made sense.

“I stayed in Alice until he was born. I thought your dad might see reason. I tried to see you, Charlie, I tried so many times…”

She’d put her hand out as if to touch my arm, and I’d pulled away quickly, unsteady. Then Travis had pulled me inside the house and George was telling her to leave, and I couldn’t breathe.

And there it was, a heaviness that pressed against my chest, a feeling so familiar and horrible.

How could so few words weigh so damn much?

* * * *

Travis and I sat not far from where we’d stopped. He’d found a bit of a rise, and we sat there until the sun headed toward its western bed. First he listened to me rant and rave, and then he listened to me sayin’ a whole lotta nothing. He was just there, so full of patience, that it was clear how stupid I was thinkin’ I could possibly live without him back not so long ago.

I took his hand and threaded our fingers together. “Thank you,” I said.

“What for?”

“For everything. For knowing what I needed. I needed room to breathe and to think, and you just knew. For knowing when I need silence or a kick in the pants.” He smiled at that, and I shrugged. “I dunno how you do it.”

He sighed, long and loud, and looked out over the desert. “Some days I think I’ve got you all figured out, then other days I realise I don’t have the first clue.”

“Sorry to keep you guessing,” I said quietly.

Travis’s laugh carried across the open plain. “Don’t ever apologise for that. I like that I have to keep guessing,” he said. “I thought you once told me that life out here was boring.”

I scoffed out a laugh. “My life used to be boring! I can still remember thinkin’ nothing ever happened out here. It wasn’t that long ago.”

His eyes went wide. It matched his smile. “You make it sound like it’s my fault!”

“It is!” I told him. “Since you got here, it’s been not-boring every day.”

Travis laughed again. “Sorry about that.”

I squeezed his hand. “You deciding to come here was the best thing to ever happen to me.”

“Ah,” he said. “I’ve told you before. I didn’t decide to come here. I
had
to come here. Once I saw the list I got to pick from, the name Sutton Station wouldn’t let me go anywhere else.”

“Like fate or something.”

“Exactly like fate or something.”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “What do you think he’s like?”