Black Dog Summer (33 page)

“But then she still made a choice, didn't she?” Lesedi asks.

Bryony presses her heel into one warm pebble and thinks of her cousin's trembling fingers pulling the cord from her throat and the way her chest had exploded with darts of fire when she'd taken that first free breath. “She did.”

A slight breeze ripples down the Cortona Villas street, shaking the branches of the fever tree.

“Well, I am going in now,” Lesedi says after a long pause. “Good to see you up and about, Bryony.”

The girl nods. She touches the trunk of the tree with both hands and looks up to watch the leaves dance against the sky.

When Adele's white Mercedes pulls up outside the school gates, the hissing snake inside Gigi's belly stops writhing (it is a dark snake with bands of white around its throat, just like the rinkhals that Johan once caught under Simone's bed). Adele is no more than ten minutes late, but Gigi has spent every second of them imagining herself waiting and waiting until nightfall, and then finally crawling into the corridor with the abandoned desks piled up inside it to spend the night.

She is careful not to run towards the car. When she reaches it, Tyler climbs out of the passenger seat and slides into the back. He does not look at her.

“You sit up front,” he mutters in a gruff voice. “Ma wants to talk to you.”

“OK,” Gigi says, and her stomach snake is alert once more. She gulps back a little acidic burp and gets into the passenger seat, bumping her shins on her school bag as she jams it in by her legs.

“How was school?” Adele asks. She doesn't look at Gigi; her eyes are on the line of cars.

“Um, all right,” Gigi says. She'd spent the whole day with the worry snake growing in her guts.
Where are they going to send me? Am I going to be taken to juvenile court and tried for kidnapping and
attempted murder? Am I too young to go to jail?
She'd sat inside a cubicle in the bathroom throughout both breaks, but hadn't stabbed or sliced herself. She hadn't even wanted to. She'd just practiced watching her breath. It was the only way she could get the snake to lie still.

“Bryony's got her voice back,” Adele announces.

Gigi grips the webbing strap of her school bag with both hands.

“She told us what happened.” Adele pulls out into the traffic. The car behind them gives a loud hoot. Gigi closes her eyes, squeezing the lids together as hard as she can. “It was really very irresponsible of you to tie Bryony up just because she asked you to. I know you're going through all sorts of difficult stuff since your mom died, but that's no excuse for letting her put her life in danger like that.”

Gigi opens her eyes. Blood thumps in her ears. The snake goes very still.

“It was a very stupid game for you girls to be playing, and you're old enough to know better, Gigi.”

“A game?” Tyler pipes up from the backseat. “What kind of retarded game involves strangling someone half to death?”

“Aunty Sally was strangled,” Adele says, her voice catching on the words. “Your dad and I didn't mention it before, so I'm not sure if you knew, Tyler.”

“No. Still, what does that have to do with Bryony?”

“Well,” Adele says, glancing at her son in the rearview mirror, “Gigi told her all about how Aunty Sally died.” She addresses Gigi once more: “That was also very irresponsible, by the way. She's just a little girl, for goodness' sake.”

“I know. I shouldn't have. It just came . . . out.”

“So you strangled Bryony?” Tyler barks from the backseat.

“No, I . . . I didn't. It was . . .” Gigi trails off, unsure of how to explain any of the blind panic and frantic, flickering darkness of that afternoon.

“Bryony told me, Gigi. She told me that she asked you to tie her up. She called it a game, but you, as a much older girl, should've known better.”

“Bloody hell,” mutters Tyler.

“She was taking her own medicine, which means that she
probably took way too much and was most likely high as a kite, the poor child. Personally, I find it quite shocking that you saw the state she was in and still let her goad you into playing such a dangerous game.”

“I'm . . . sorry.” Gigi's voice is so soft that Adele barely hears it over the hum of the engine. Gigi feels a strange pressure beating against the insides of her ears.
A game. Bryony said it was a game? She asked me to tie her up?
Gigi presses the button to roll down the window and takes a gulp of rushing air.
Why?

“Needless to say, there will be absolutely no games of that sort played anywhere, anytime, ever again. Do I make myself clear?” Adele says in an icy voice.

“Yes,” Gigi says through dry lips.

“Tyler?” Adele demands.

“What are you asking me for? I never even—”

“Tyler?” Her voice rises to a shout.

“OK, ja, all right. Yes. No strangling games or anything of the sort.”

Adele nods. They drive along in silence for a minute.

Finally, Adele speaks again: “And as for you, Gigi, I want you to promise me that you will start acting like the young woman you are, and make sure that Bryony doesn't do anything daft like this again. Can you promise me that? Will you watch out for her?”

“Yes,” Gigi says, and then again, with more emphasis, “I promise.”

“Good.”

The snake vanishes with a wriggle, just as the rinkhals did when Johan let it out of the pillowcase and set it free in the grass by the dam. One twitch of the tail and it was gone.

ADELE DOES
not drive Gigi straight home right away; instead she takes her to Dr. Rowe's consulting room, hands her a tub of shop-made lentil and butternut salad to eat while she waits for her appointment, and zooms off to drop Tyler at the house. When Adele returns to collect her an hour and a half later, Gigi emerges from Dr. Rowe's office pink-eyed and wrung out from talking. She climbs into the front seat once again and sits like a statue, only really breathing easily when the car pulls into the Wildings' garage at Cortona Villas.

By the time she finally climbs the stairs, it is early evening, and she opens Bryony's bedroom door to find the room flooded with thick, buttery light from the lowering sun.

“Hey,” says Bryony. She has changed out of her pajamas and is sitting on top of her bed reading a book. She shuts it now and places her palms flat against the cherry duvet.

“Hey.” Gigi steps into the room and closes the door behind her. She lets her school bag drop to the floor. For a long moment, the two girls are silent. Gigi can hear the muted sound of the TV and someone's feet on the stairs.

“You—” Gigi is cut off by a knock on the door followed by Tyler's voice.

“Mom wants you girls to come help with supper. You're on salad duty.”

“OK,” Bryony calls back. She listens to the scuff of Tyler's feet on the carpet outside the door as he moves away, and then she slips off the bed and puts on her slippers. Gigi has not moved. “We'd better go down.”

“You lied for me. You . . . Why?” Gigi asks. Bryony halts, but she does not turn. “Why are you protecting me after what I did to you?”

Bryony rubs her purple wrists. Her eyes meet Gigi's and then dart
away again. “Because . . .” she says. She licks her lips. “Because then they would've gotten you too.”

“Who?”

“The black men.”

At those three words, Gigi thumps backwards, hitting her shoulder blades on the wall and sliding down it until she is sitting on the carpet. “What do you mean, they would've gotten me?”

“Ended your life, just like they did to your mom, only without actually killing you.” Bryony drops down to her haunches in front of Gigi. Her cousin's pale skin is tinted gold from the light of the setting sun; her freckles look like flakes of copper. “I could tell that Mom and Dad were really freaked out about you, and I figured that if they sent you to some horrible place, or took you to the police and put you in jail and stuff, your life would be . . . I don't know . . . totally messed up. It seemed wrong. Not fair. So I lied.”

“Oh,” Gigi breathes. Her eyes are locked on Bryony's now.

“You see, I know that what you did to me,” Bryony whispers, touching the welt around her throat, “was really them, not you.” She leans closer, her eyes searching Gigi's. “But now they're gone.”

“How do you know?” Gigi can feel tears welling up and spilling down her cheeks.

“Because the shadows have gone, and so has the black dog.”

Gigi nods her head, not understanding about the black dog, but not really needing to. She knows about shadows. Tears plop down onto her school tunic.

“I didn't say anything about you actually being there that day and seeing what happened to your mom and everything, though; I figure you'll know when's the right time to tell people that.”

Gigi nods again and wipes her damp cheeks with the backs of her hands.

“Now we'd better go down and get that salad started or Mom will freak out.” Bryony stands up and opens the door. The sound of the TV from downstairs mixes up with the thud of Tyler's iPod and floods into the room along with the smell of something savory that Dora prepared earlier warming in the kitchen.

Gigi gets to her feet. She tries to move her mouth to speak, but
nothing comes. Instead, she reaches out and touches a lock of Bryony's hair. It is the exact same color as her mother's was. It feels like feathers beneath her fingertips.

“Come on then,” Bryony says, grinning. “Now that you're a Wilding, you'd better get used to the slave labor in this house. I bet you Mom's going to make you chop the tomatoes again.”

ADELE CARRIES
her empty tea mug into the kitchen just as Liam switches on the dishwasher. “Sorry,” she says, handing it over to him with a small smile. “I always seem to get the timing wrong.”

“No problem.” He presses a button to pause the cycle, opens the dishwasher, and pops her mug into it before shutting it again. “I always leave a spot for one more mug.” The kitchen fills with the swishing sound of water as the machine starts up again, and Liam and Adele both stare at its blank white surface as if waiting for a TV show to start.

“Going to empty the bin,” he says after a long pause. Liam lifts the full bag out of the kitchen bin, ties up the top, and heads out of the back door into the night.

After a moment, Adele follows. Moths spin around the light fixture above the door. She can hear the thumps that their soft bodies make as they bang into the glass.

“Hey, one of these boards is broken.” Liam's disembodied voice floats out from the darkness.

“What?”

“On the dustbin-cover thingy. Looks like one of the kids has been buggering around out here.”

Although the night is warm, Adele tugs her cardigan across her chest before jogging around the side of the house to join her husband at the dustbin housing.

“See here? One of the slats has been snapped.” He steps aside to show her the broken piece of wood. She can just make it out in the gloom, and reaches to touch one of the splintered ends.

“Oh.”

“I'd better get a replacement piece of wood for that tomorrow. I'll go to Timbercity, see what they've got.”

“Ja.”

Adele looks up. There is no moon tonight, and the sky is inky black with little pinprick stars.

“She's different, don't you think?” she says after a while.

“Who?”

“Gigi. I spoke to Dr. Rowe after her appointment today. He said they had a bit of a breakthrough.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she actually talked.”

“I guess that's a good start.” Liam leans his back against the wood and stares out towards the end of the garden, where the remaining green limbs of the fever tree, illuminated by a Cortona Villas streetlight, stick up above the front wall. “She did seem a little less . . . weird at dinner. A lot more like the Gigi I used to know.” Liam catches his breath as if to suck the words back in.

Adele does not move. Somewhere close by, a cricket starts its shrill, incessant song.

“Tell me what she was like,” Adele whispers. Liam glances over at his wife, but cannot make out her features.

“She was . . . well, she was sweet, I guess,” he begins and then stops, waiting. Adele says nothing. “Man, but she loved all those animals they used to look after at Simone's place,” he continues. “She was so capable with them, and always eager to tell me every little detail. She was pretty clued up, actually. Really bright.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She used to collect things”—Liam's voice strengthens as he slips back into the past—“like feathers and bones that she'd found, and arrange them all on her windowsill.” He laughs. “Every time I came to visit she would have to show me her latest treasures. Some of that stuff was pretty macabre.”

“I see.” Adele tries and fails to keep the hurt out of her voice.

“Sorry. I'm going on a bit. I . . . Sorry.”

“No. I asked.”

For a while they stand in silence, staring into the dark.

“How often did you visit Sally and Gigi out there at the farm?”

“Once or twice a year. Sometimes more.”

“Every year?”

“Every year.”

The cricket stops chirping.

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yes. Why did you visit them? Why did you keep making trips behind my back to the other side of the country?”

“I figured I had no choice but to do it behind your back, doll. You wouldn't even let me mention Monkey's name.”

“OK. But still, why go at all?”

“At first I was really worried about her,” Liam says. “You knew Monkey, she was never as . . . I don't know . . . together as you, and when you kicked her out of your life she kind of fell apart. I wanted to see if she and Gigi were going to be OK.” Liam takes a breath. Alongside the clean, soily night-air smell is a slight undertone of garbage from the bins at his back. “And after that, well, I just . . . wanted to see her, check in, you know? Monkey was my friend. I know that sounds lame but she was. She always made me feel, I don't know, like I was this really great person.”