Thornwood House (32 page)

But I’d waited too long. Corey was studying me, a tiny frown etched into her brow.

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I kind of . . . suspected.’

‘Oh? You did? What gave me away? It was the boots, wasn’t it, the Blundstones? Eliza always says my dress sense is too boyish – ’

Corey’s large earnest face with its smattering of pretty freckles and halo of red-gold hair was unnervingly close, and nearly my undoing. Her milk-chocolate eyes echoed the question, but I dared not open my mouth, even to put her mind at ease. I longed to confess the truth and be done with it, to lead her out to my room and pull open the bottom drawer of my bedside, reveal the water-buckled diary that had once belonged to her best friend.

But I couldn’t tell. Not yet.

I lifted my shoulders in poor mimicry of Jade’s easy indifference. ‘Not the work boots. It was just a hunch.’

‘Oh,’ she said, and I was amazed to see her face relax with relief. It made me suspect that Glenda’s outraged reaction all those years ago at the creek had scarred Corey, made her doubt herself on some critical level. Rejection at the best of times is a bitter pill to swallow, but how much more bitter must it have been for a teenage girl exposing her secret self for the first time?

Corey was still watching me, evidently as curious about my thoughts as I was about hers.

‘So the boots are okay?’ she asked doubtfully.

Despite my dark musings, I was suddenly laughing. ‘The Blundstones are good. More than good – in fact, they’re kinda cute.’

Her face rumpled into an uncharacteristically shy smile, which gained force until she was beaming at me with full voltage. ‘Wait ’til I tell Eliza you said that. She’ll be furious.’

We grinned and clinked bottles, swigged in unison. The beer was cool and sweet, quenching any guilt I still harboured over keeping Glenda’s diary to myself.

Just then the thump of feet – two small pairs in sandals, one large pair in boots – thundered through the kitchen. The screen door clattered wide. Jade and Bronwyn burst onto the verandah, followed by Danny.

‘What took you so long?’ Corey demanded of her brother, not bothering to sign.

Danny’s arms were full: a bunch of crimson gladioli wrapped in pink tissue, a bottle of red wine, an assortment of paper bags that bore the bakery logo, and a huge floral cake tin. Unable to sign, he shrugged at Corey, moving his lips in silent explanation.

I discovered that lip reading was not my forte; I had no idea what he was telling her. I kept my eyes on his mouth, intrigued. How did he communicate on the job when he had his arms full of injured animal? How did he manage to reassure frantic pet owners or worried farmers who didn’t understand sign, didn’t lip read? Did he resort to writing notes for everyone as he’d done for me in the church yesterday? Or did he dazzle them with his luminous thousand-megawatt smile and hope for the best?

He turned his attention to me. I’d been staring, and he seemed delighted to have caught me. With a flourish, he held out the flowers and trapped me in the headlight beam of the smile I’d just been contemplating.

I jerked out of my seat, slopping beer on my wrist as I launched across the verandah toward him.

‘Let me help you with those,’ I said, grabbing the flowers and the wine and making a beeline for the table. ‘Gosh, these are beautiful, deep red too, my favourite, I just adore gladdies – ’ I snapped my mouth shut, mortified. Not only had I just babbled, but I’d been facing away from him – he wouldn’t have been able to see my lips in order to read them.

I heard a soft snort from Bronwyn’s general direction and cursed under my breath. My cheeks felt hot. Aware that they must rival the flowers for colour, I stalled for time by shuffling dishes around to make room for the wine.

‘What’s burning?’ Corey said, springing up to check the Weber. I heard a riotous hissing and crackling as she muttered over her sausages and repositioned the kebabs. ‘You could toss on those steaks now,’ she told me, ‘everything else is done.’

‘Righto.’ I turned to Danny.
Thanks for the flowers
, I signed clumsily.
I’m happy you’re here
.

He had unburdened himself of the bakery bags and cake tin, and was uncorking the wine. He paused to catch my eye and offer a speedy sign: pulling his hands away from his face, he hooked a finger back to his chest.

Thanks for inviting me.

He was wearing a pale green shirt and jeans that were flecked with dry grass. He looked a little rumpled, and his hair – curly, in need of a trim – stuck out in clumps as though he’d been dragging his fingers through it. I had a flash of him and Nancy the Firecracker in a hay barn: both of them pink-cheeked, aglow with sweat and beaming languidly as they dusted fragments of chaff from each other’s clothing –

I realised I was staring again, and cleared my throat, making a hasty attempt at polite signage:
Your little sheep okay
?

A quizzical look, a half-smile. Then: Thumbs up.
All good
.

We inhabited a moment of awkwardness, Danny’s smile gone now, just his curious gaze lingering on my face, as though waiting for me to speak further. I was grappling to think of something else to say, something to ask him that would alleviate the unease of our mutual silence. Instead, I found myself cataloguing his features, comparing them to Corey’s. He had faint freckles like his sister, and a broad well-shaped face, but that’s where the resemblance ended. His skin was paler than hers, his eyes verging to emerald rather than Corey’s milk-chocolate. There was no hint of red in his hair, it was dark brown, lighter at the tips where the sun had touched it.

‘Audrey, those steaks . . . ?’

I joined Corey at the grill and busied myself arranging the marinated salmon in the space she’d made for them. The steaks’ raw underbellies met the hotplate with a splutter, sending up clouds of fragrant steam.

‘Ready in five,’ Corey proclaimed, wiping her forehead with the back of her hand then taking a thirsty swig of beer.

I fetched a wineglass for Danny, concentrating on pouring the wine so I wouldn’t risk another babbled outburst, then helped Corey serve up. Tofu snags for her and Jade, salmon for me and Bronwyn and Danny, capsicum and feta kebabs all round.

Somehow we managed to eat heartily while debating a variety of topics – why vegetarian sausages were ideologically unsound; whether Jade would one day replace Nancy as her father’s vet nurse; at what exact moment had Bronwyn first realised her passion for insects; and wasn’t it exciting that Audrey had agreed to take Corey’s portrait – all the while communicating with a jumbled amalgam of sign, finger spelling, lip reading, and way too many charade-like hand gesticulations.

Midway through our meal, I found myself wondering why Danny never spoke, why he rarely uttered a sound of any kind – except for the occasional raspy laugh.

I remembered my deaf friend from art school, Rhonda, the one who’d been so determined to communicate verbally despite never being understood. She always spoke at full volume, snorted and howled at jokes, yelled across the street to her hearing friends, and generally clattered about the place as if she was trying – by the sheer force of her loudness – to crash through the boundaries imposed by her deafness and connect more fully with the rest of the world.

Danny, on the other hand, seemed to be at home with his silence. Comfortable to converse via notes or lip reading or sign. Not bothered by the occasional misunderstanding. Corey had said he hated to admit his limitations. But perhaps it was more than that – perhaps he didn’t feel the need to crash through any boundaries? Perhaps he was happy with who he was?

Mad thoughts. How did I know what Danny really thought or felt?

When the food was gone and the dishes cleared away, we sprawled on deckchairs and passed around the cake tin – which, to my eternal joy and gratitude contained a batch of Danny’s mind-bogglingly delicious chocolate cherries. Corey seized control of the coffeepot and soon the dark bittersweet scent of coffee flavoured the onion-tinged air. The girls were lost somewhere in the garden, probably in Bronwyn’s secret bower under the jacaranda. I could hear their muffled prattling punctuated by occasional giggles.

‘Oh, this is bliss,’ Corey declared, stretching back in her chair, swirling the dregs of her coffee as she gazed across the garden. Shadows were shifting, the trees had grown gloomy and mysterious. Mosquitoes tried – without success – to infiltrate my stronghold of citronella candles and mozzie coils. Large floppy moths reeled drunkenly about us, and hordes of tiny black
kamikaze beetles bombarded the chocolates, the beer, the table, and embedded themselves in Corey’s hair.

Danny signed to Corey, his hands moving too quickly for me to catch more than the gist: something about shouting.

Corey glared at him, then looked over at me, her brow puckered. ‘He always complains that I talk too loudly. Do I, Audrey? Do I shout all the time?’

She was doing it now, but I’d become so accustomed to her loudness that I barely noticed anymore. Even so, I had to bite my lips to stifle a laugh.

‘I wouldn’t say
all
the time,’ I said, ‘just most of it. But how can Danny tell?’

She slumped and let out a sigh. ‘He says he can feel the vibrations of my voice from all the way over there, can you believe that guy? He has a hide, considering my volume is his fault.’

With a grimace at my questioning look, she explained. ‘When we were kids, Danny could hear faint words if we shouted with our lips pressed against his head. Right here – ’ She tapped behind her ear. ‘I guess the habit never left me.’

Danny slapped his palms and made another rapid sign.

Corey rolled her eyes. ‘I
need
to play my music loud,’ she argued, ‘it helps me think. Anyway, there’s no cause for you to be rude, you’re signing way too fast, Audrey’s struggling to keep up. Slow down for goodness sake.’

Danny looked over at me and signed,
Sorry
.

Okay
, I gestured smoothly. I’d been practising that one in the mirror. It seemed a good all-rounder, a handy one to fall back on in moments of linguistic uncertainty. It was one of the few signs that now felt second-nature to me.

Danny’s smile lingered a moment too long. There was a spark in his eyes that made me want to start fidgeting. How could anyone be that gorgeous? One side of his face was shadowed, while the other was burnished by the gold light of a lantern. I went to look away, but then he was signing again, this time with slow precision.

Her shouting doesn’t bother you?

I gave him a lopsided grin. ‘My old Aunt Morag was a shouter, on account of her dodgy hearing aid. I guess I’m used to it.’

Danny looked baffled, but Corey updated him with a series of swift gestures. When understanding came he snorted, the only vocal sound – other than his raspy, wheezy laugh – that I’d ever heard him make. He was signing again, grinning. Dimples appeared, and his eyes glinted. I found myself captivated by the sight of his face, his gesturing hands forgotten.

Corey launched into another story, something about Danny and Tony finding a haunted cottage.

‘It was a hut built by the original settlers,’ she explained for my benefit, ‘yonks ago, 1870s I think. A pretty rugged old outlook hidden away in the bush up there near the national park boundary. Anyway, the boys used to sneak up there sometimes and hide out, and one day Danny came home white-faced, sick with fright. He said that he and Tony had seen a woman’s ghost – ’

I was interested in hearing the tale, as it provided another glimpse into Tony’s childhood. But the sight of Danny spellbound by his sister’s story, his eyes intense and his mouth so serious, combined with the fluttering gold lantern light on his perfect features . . . and somehow my thoughts were straying again. Back to my college days, and my deaf roommate Rhonda. Near the end of first term she’d snared herself a boyfriend, I recalled. He seemed nice, a good-looking hippyish graduate. I was pleased for her . . . until the boyfriend started staying over. Unable to hear herself, unaware that her ecstatic cries must echo throughout the entire house, Rhonda hadn’t been bothered by the thin walls. I, on the other hand, had cursed them. In the adjoining bedroom, I’d been forced to smother my head under the pillow, equally appalled and awestruck by the noise emanating from the room next door.

Danny was slumped forward watching his sister, his hands clasped between his knees. The semi-gloom seemed to exaggerate that rumpled, half-wild look he had about him. Maybe it was
the windswept hair, or the brooding mouth that could at any moment flash a killer smile. Maybe it was the fact that he never spoke, that my conversations with him always left me feeling out of my depth. Or maybe it was just that in the five years since Tony left, I’d had so little to do with men – and certainly none as dangerously fascinating as Danny Weingarten.

My traitorous thoughts rushed back to the hay barn, but this time it was
me
there with him – me brushing straw off his arms, his broad back; me reaching up to smooth my fingers over that untameable hair –

Of course, Danny picked that exact moment to look at me.

I felt the heat rush to my cheeks and pretended interest in the label of my beer bottle, which I’d already half shredded off, meanwhile thinking how lucky it was that the verandah was so dark, and that the lanterns cast such patchy light . . .

When his attention drifted back to his sister, I looked away across the garden. The sun was plunging lower, deepening the eastern horizon to indigo, painting it pink in the west. The hills were turning from purple-grey to deep rose, a scene straight from one of Tony’s watercolours.

Out of the blue, Corey remembered an urgent phone call she had to make, which I suspected was a ploy to leave me and Danny alone. As her voice drifted from the kitchen, Danny’s green gaze remained on my face – as though observing someone without comment was the most natural thing in the world.

At first, it unnerved me. I shredded the label off my beer bottle while I ran through possible conversation starters: Had Thornwood changed much since he was here as a kid? Had he and Tony spent much time swimming in the creek? Did he ever get the urge to pursue a career as a city vet? It all sounded so trite, so far removed from what I truly wanted to ask: Are you and Nancy an item? Why won’t you speak? Are you really the enigma you appear to be? I clamped my teeth together, then tried on a smile. When that didn’t fit, I simply stared back at him.