The Grass Castle (23 page)

But as the circumference of her search expands, Abby begins to wonder what she would do if they came across his car and no Matt? Would she really want to look for him? There are plenty of rugged rock faces in these mountains . . . good for jumping from if that’s what you want. She could search for months and never find him. And there are so many obscure places where nobody goes. Her heart thuds a sick slow beat as she thinks of losing him, perhaps forever. If he’s gone, it’s partly her fault.

On the cusp of evening, she chooses a high place to set up camp, looking out across the fading horizon of jutting peaks. In the blue light of encroaching dark, Cameron helps her fetch wood for a fire. She cobbles sticks and lumps of rotting branches together to form strong flames that flow like liquid in the lick of the breeze. They eat pesto pasta and tins of peaches, and they talk as the flames subside to smouldering orange embers—the slow trickle of fire drawing patterns on their faces.

Abby speaks of Matt, her bond with him and this country. In quiet lulls, Cameron speaks of his own family: the lack of love shown by his parents, his estranged sister living in Perth, as far away as she can get from his parents. Abby has always thought her family was dislocated and strange, but despite their difficulties, they have always enjoyed love in its convoluted and twisted shape. Cameron has lived a privileged existence, but there are gaps in his upbringing where affection should reside. His family bonds are loose at best, whereas Abby’s run deep.

As the evening chill tightens its grip, Cameron moves closer and wedges her against him near the fire. She leans against his chest, soaking up the warmth. A few days ago, she was pulling away from him. Now she is closer than ever, piggy-backing on his strength. She feels a tug of guilt. It will be harder than ever to make the break that has to come.

The cold deepens, the fire subsides, and they retreat to the tent. Inside they unzip the sleeping-bags and make a cloud of down to hide beneath. Bodies close, they strip off and press skin to skin. They make slow, sad, tender love then fall asleep in a tangle of arms and legs and pillows and bags.

20

‘Why didn’t we ever talk about Mum’s death?’

Abby is in the kitchen of the Mansfield farmhouse with her father. She and Cameron returned late that afternoon from their unsuccessful mountain search, and she’s been teary and down ever since—it was far easier to keep a cap on her emotions when she was doing something constructive. Now that she is back in the house her guilt hovers like rain clouds in winter. Outside, it’s a wild night. Wind roars in the pines, and the dead leaves on the oaks rattle like the voice of death.

Cameron has gone to bed with a book, and Brenda is in the lounge room watching TV.

Her father leans over his cup of tea and shrugs. ‘I dunno,’ he says. ‘It was a difficult time.’

‘But we
never
talked about it,’ Abby says. ‘Not even after, and I mean years later. Why not?’

Steve scratches his head as if mulling on a maths problem. ‘I suppose I just couldn’t cope,’ he says slowly. ‘I was a mess. All those years of watching out for your mother and then she was gone.’

Abby remembers the emptiness of her own struggles, and for the first time she contemplates how it might have been for her father, alone with two teenagers. Grace had been a central pillar, the lynchpin around which their lives revolved. They were bound to her cycles of depression, and then suddenly the structure was gone, and the way it was taken from them was horrific.

‘I guess it was too hard,’ her father is saying. ‘I found it tough enough just trying to find a way to survive. It didn’t seem like talking would help. I thought it would just bring up all the stuff I was trying not to think about. And I felt terrible because I couldn’t help you and Matt. I was so messed up with grief.’ He takes a sip of tea. ‘I’ve always felt bad about that.’

‘We managed because we had to, Matt and me,’ Abby says.

‘The way you kids coped put me to shame.’ Steve shakes his head.

Abby hadn’t even known about bipolar disorder till she was at university. She’d been at a party in Melbourne when she heard someone talking about mental illness—they were talking about someone who’d been hospitalised. It had been such a dawning to discover what her mother had suffered, to categorise it. And in some bizarre way it helped to know her mother’s condition had a name. Abby had hit the internet and conducted a search. The list of brilliant and artistic people who’d been afflicted with bipolar disorder was astounding. Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, Ludwig Beethoven, Isaac Newton, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Kurt Cobain. Reading accounts of the illness had been enlightening. It was her mother exactly: impulsivity, insomnia, mood shifts, heightened energy, fast speech, distractibility, reckless behaviour, depression, inability to get out of bed—Abby was able to tick off every one.

‘The doctors thought they were pretty smart when they put a label on your mother’s head, because it explained everything,’ Steve says. ‘But they couldn’t do anything much to help her, except remove her personality with drugs—and as you know she hated that, the way the drugs wiped her out.’

‘Do you think medication could have saved her?’ It’s something Abby has always wondered.

Her father stares into his cup and fiddles with the handle. Maybe he doesn’t want to answer this question, and maybe he can’t, maybe no-one can. And what difference would it make if he said yes, anyway? How would it change things, except to dredge up all those useless emotions that bog you down: regret, sadness, guilt and blame? Abby thinks of Matt and her fear swells with the destructive potential of a tsunami that might rise and rise and collapse over her and claw her out to sea.

‘I could have done something for Matt, you know,’ she says, guilt-racked. ‘For a while I was ringing him every day because I knew he might be down. But then I got caught up with Cameron and I let Matt go, I neglected him. I’ve been a terrible sister.’ Tears are building, but she fights to hold them back.

Her father contemplates her with a furrowed brow, serious. ‘You can’t blame yourself,’ he says. ‘Matt’s a grown man. He could have asked for help—he knew you were there.’

Abby is unconsoled. ‘But maybe it’s not like that,’ she says. ‘Mum didn’t call for help, did she?’

Her father’s face is suddenly very grey, very haggard.

‘I hate to say this, Dad, but she left us.’

Her father is shaking his head. ‘She wouldn’t have seen it that way. She couldn’t cope anymore. Weird things went on in her head—you know that. She loved you and Matt more than anything.’

Abby hears what he says, but it doesn’t help. The despair is still there, the ache of loss, and the feeling that it simply isn’t fair. ‘I know she loved us, Dad, but she let us down. I need her in my life. Not dead in the ground.’

Tears brim in Steve’s eyes. ‘Don’t fool yourself into thinking she made a choice,’ he says.

Abby feels a pulse of anger. She can’t see how things could get that bad; her mother should have known her children needed her. ‘There’s always a choice,’ she insists.

‘Not when you are as sick as she was.’

But Abby knows her mother must have planned her death—things like that don’t just happen. Her mother must have thought it through, and there must have been a point at which she made a decision. But Abby’s flare of anger subsides as quickly as it arose. She doesn’t want to consider what hell her mother had crossed to arrive at that place.

‘It was very different with your mother,’ her father says. ‘Matt’s not like her.’

‘How do you know?’ Abby asks, teetering now on the slippery edge of control, tears threatening. ‘He told me he gets awfully down sometimes and can’t dig himself out. What if he’s done something to himself?’

Her father grips her arm with a rough dry hand. ‘I know you’re worried,’ he says. ‘We all are. But you know how Matt likes to be alone, and this isn’t the first time he’s gone bush for a week or two. He’s bound to show up. You didn’t find any signs of him out there in the mountains, and that has to be a good thing. You should try to see it that way. We have to stay positive.’

Abby wipes her nose on her sleeve like a child. ‘I’ve been worried that I might have Mum’s illness too,’ she says. ‘It’s possible, isn’t it? I have her genes.’

Her father’s craggy face spreads into a kindly smile. ‘I don’t think you’re bipolar.’

‘How can you know that? It might surface if I have kids, like it did for her. How can I consider having a family if there’s even the slightest risk?’

Her father tightens his grip on her arm. ‘Abby, you haven’t got it. You’re normal, not like your mother. She was always different, always a bit strange. If Gran was still around she would tell you. The illness showed up when your mother was a teenager. Her father had it too. You never knew him—he died before you were born.’

Abby looks at him as her thoughts shift slowly into place like puzzle pieces sliding together on a computer screen. Suddenly she understands. ‘Grandpa suicided too, didn’t he? It wasn’t a heart attack.’

Her father scrapes wearily to his feet and pours the dregs of his tea down the sink. Abby knows she is right, she feels it in his silence. Poor Gran: first her husband then her daughter. No wonder she was so available to help. Maybe she felt she owed it to them.

Her father turns from the bench and sits down again, his face long and sad. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t a better father,’ he says. ‘And I hope when you have kids, you’ll understand. Because you should seriously consider having a family one day Abby, you’d be a good mum. And Cameron’s a good man. I like him. He’s here putting up with all this, and he’s supporting you. You don’t want to let that go.’

Something in Abby tightens, like water turning into ice. ‘I’m not interested in getting married.’

‘Well, Cameron is,’ her father says. ‘It’s written all over him. He’s in for the long haul.’ He stands up, stiffness clogging his limbs as he straightens.

Abby stands too. Her father comes round the table and encloses her in a bear hug. It’s hard and firm and close, good. She hugs him back, feeling the lean wiriness of his back, like Matt’s, all ribs and bony knobs.

‘I reckon Matt will come home,’ he says, releasing her and briefly running a hand over her head. ‘You have to keep your hopes up.’

‘I’ll try,’ she says.

She follows him out of the kitchen then splits off to her bedroom where Cameron, still reading his book, looks up at her with a smile.

The trip back to Canberra begins quietly. Cameron allows Abby her silences in which she mulls over her father’s observation last night that Cameron is angling for commitment. The thought sits like a stone in her guts, and she finds it difficult not to flinch when he reaches every now and then to squeeze her leg. She knows he simply wants to show his support and let her know he’s there, but fear is roiling in her like a storm. It’s enough to be worried about Matt, and now she has this to think about: this plummeting feeling that she has allowed things to go too far.

She’s aware that her anxiety around permanence is not a rational beast. Just by wanting her in that way, Cameron is asking more than she can give. The butterflies of escape are whirling in her feet. She needs to carve off, needs to project herself elsewhere, shift herself into a future where she is safely alone. Matt would understand.

Cameron is oblivious—he must think she is stewing on her missing brother. He plays soft music to fill the spaces: Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
, Pachelbel’s
Canon in D
, Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake
. Abby submerges in the fluctuating tide of the music. She holds her emotions inside and stares out the window.

They are spinning along the internal bypass through Albury when her phone rings, flashing Matt’s number.

‘It’s him,’ she mouths to Cameron as she rams the phone to her ear. ‘Matt?’

‘Hey. How’s things?’

Relief floods her when she hears his voice. He sounds jolly and cheerful, unforgivably relaxed. For a moment, she wishes she could hug him then sudden anger shoots through her like a charge of electricity. ‘I’m crap actually,’ she says. ‘Where the hell have you been?’