Three Wishes (27 page)

“Max
ine,
I’m not senile!” snapped Nana. She gestured at her multicolored Sydney Olympic Games Volunteers shirt. “That’s why I’m wearing this. So that the judge will see that Cat comes from a real community-minded family!”

She gave the solicitor a cunning look. “Smart thinking, eh?”

The solicitor blinked. “Yes, indeed.”

As if to prove her point, a man passing by saw the familiar uniform and called out, “Good one, love!” and gave her a thumbs-up signal. Nana smiled graciously and waved one hand at him like the queen.

In fact, Nana had done about five minutes volunteering before she tripped and twisted her ankle. She spent the next two weeks enjoying the events on TV. Her ankle was fine by the time of the Volunteers’ Tickertape Parade. She marched through showers of colored paper with her head high, giving her regal wave to the cheering crowds.

“Cat’s a good girl really,” Nana told the solicitor. “Although she does like a little drink now and then.”

Gemma looked at Lyn and began to laugh with her usual abandon.

“Her sisters are
terribly upset,” confided Nana.

Gemma made a strangled sound.

Cat didn’t say anything. She was wearing sunglasses and looked pale and bad-tempered and not at all repentant.

The Kettle family squeezed into a row of seats at the front of the room. Lyn wondered if she should warn them not to applaud. Frank and Maxine held hands like teenagers at the movies. Nana complained loudly about the uncomfortable seats. Gemma, who was sitting next to Lyn, twisted back and forth, checking out the audience.

“What are you doing?” asked Lyn.

“Just seeing if there are any cute criminals.”

“What happened to Charlie?”

“Long gone.”

“Because of Cat?”

“Of course because of Cat.”

“That’s a bit sad.”

Gemma swung back around. “Well, you’re the one who
said
I should break up with him. The day Dan moved his things out.”

“If it wasn’t going anywhere!”

“Well, I guess it wasn’t going anywhere.” She was dismissive. Lyn took out her Palm Pilot and began scrolling through her day’s diary entries. Gemma looked at it and scrunched up her nose.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Lyn sighed. “It’s not pretentious. It’s practical.”

“Whatever.”

They had to sit through six dull cases before it was Cat’s turn, and by then the Kettle family was starting to fidget and whisper.

The magistrate herself seemed bored and businesslike. She
frowned deeply as she flipped through the evidence of Cat’s driving records. “Fifteen speeding offenses in the last five years,” she remarked.

Maxine coughed meaningfully. Gemma elbowed Lyn, and they both dropped their heads, sharing Cat’s guilt.

The magistrate’s face remained bland as the solicitor presented affidavits to prove Cat had been overwrought due to her miscarriage and the breakdown of her marriage.

“My client regrets her actions. They were the result of severe and unusual stress.”

“We all suffer stress,” the magistrate commented irritably, but she sentenced Cat to only a six-month license suspension and a thousand-dollar fine.

“The best you could have hoped for,” the solicitor said afterward.

“Six months will fly by!” agreed Frank. “Lyn and Gemma can give you lifts!”

Lyn gritted her teeth. “Or you can just pretend you’ve still got a license and keep driving.”

Everybody turned on her.

“What a silly thing to say, Lyn!”

“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” The solicitor spoke without irony. “The risk is too high.”

Lyn groaned and suppressed a childish desire to tattle, Ask her about the truck she’s been driving!

“I was joking,” she said.

Cat pulled her to one side as they all walked toward their cars.

“I’ve given back the truck to the smash repairers. So don’t get all fucking sanctimonious.”

Lyn felt her pulse accelerate in response to Cat’s contemptuous tone. It was like turning the dial on her gas stove. This is my biological fight or flight response, she reminded herself. Breathe! Cat was the only person who could make her feel this angry. It was like every fight they’d ever had over the past thirty years was all
part of the one endless argument. At any moment, without notice, it could be started again, hurtling them straight into the middle of irrational, out-of-control, name-calling fury.

“Do you know how hard it was for me to get here today?” she said furiously.

“You came because you wanted to gloat, and now you’re disappointed because you think nobody took it seriously enough.”

The colossal injustice of the first accusation, combined with the element of truth in her second, made Lyn want to pick up her briefcase and slam it into Cat’s face.

“That night, I was going to take the blame for you! I was going to try and get you out of it!”

Cat wasn’t listening. “I’m not an idiot. Do you think I don’t know I could have killed somebody? I know it! I think about it!”

“Well, good,” said Lyn nastily. “Because it’s true.” Suddenly Lyn felt her fury slide away, leaving her weak with remorse. “O.K. then. Well. Want to go for a run this weekend? Do the Coogee to Bondi?”

“Oh
sure! I’d love to!” Cat hammed it up, and they grinned at
the absurdity of themselves. “Could I trouble you for a lift?”

Lyn rolled her eyes. “Of course.”

It was always like that. They never said sorry. They just threw down their still-loaded weapons, ready for next time.

The weather chose to be kind for Maddie’s birthday. The air was crisp, the sun warm, and it was a pleasure to look at the sky. A birthday picnic at Clontarf Beach would be just right.

Maddie, thankfully, had woken up as sweet and sunny as the weather, but Lyn’s cold had gotten considerably worse. She dosed herself up on aspirin and felt wooly-headed, muffled from the world.

They were just about to leave the house when the phone rang.

“It’s for you, Lyn,” called Michael.

She called back, “Take a message! We have to get going!”

A couple of minutes later he came down into the kitchen and picked up the giant picnic basket to take out to the car.

“Who was it?” asked Lyn. She was squatting down, retying the laces on Maddie’s shoes. Maddie’s hands rested gently on her head.

“It was Hank.”

She looked at the bright red laces on Maddie’s shoes and felt as caught out as if she’d been unfaithful to him.

“Did he leave a message?”

“Yes. He said he got your e-mail about your panic attacks and to hang in there, because you’re not alone, and he’s got lots of really helpful information he’s putting together for you.”

Lyn finished tying up Maddie’s shoelaces and stood up, swinging her onto her hip. “O.K. Look. It’s nothing.”

“It’s
something.”
He was agitated, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, swinging the picnic basket. “You’re telling some bloody ex-boyfriend your problems. Some strange guy I’ve never met telling me about my wife’s problems!”

Lyn put a hand on his forearm and deliberately allowed a fragile note to creep into her voice. “I’ve got a cold. I’m really feeling terrible. Can we please talk about it after the party?”

He immediately, as she knew he would, lifted Maddie out of her arms and said without malice, “Of course.”

Oh, Georgina, no wonder you cried when I stole him.

With her head heavy against the passenger car seat and the Teletubby birthday cake safely on her lap, Lyn let her eyelids sink and wondered if she’d make it through the day.

Maddie kicked and chattered in her car seat between Kara and one of her more likable best friends, Gina. The girls were taking turns playing Around and Around the Garden, like a teddy bear tracing a circle on Maddie’s palm, causing her to chortle with rising anticipation until they tickled her tummy and she completely dissolved.

Every time she laughed, everyone in the car laughed.

As they pulled up at a set of lights on the Spit Road, there was a loud bip of a horn.

Michael looked out his window and said, “Look who made it after all.”

Lyn leaned forward and saw Cat in the passenger seat of Gemma’s car. They were both waving extravagantly. Cat wound down her window and held out a bunch of brightly colored balloons.

Watching their lips move excitedly and silently reminded Lyn of some moment in her life when she had understood something, for the first time. Something sad and inevitable. Her blocked sinuses and muffled head wouldn’t let her pin down the memory.

The lights changed and Gemma’s car sped off down toward the blue-green glitter of the harbor, the balloons still bobbing merrily out of Cat’s window.

Maddie went wild when they arrived at Clontarf and saw Gemma and Cat already unpacking picnic things and tying balloons to a tree.

“Mummy! Look! Cat! Gem!”

“This O.K.?” called out Cat.

Lyn waved an approving hand, and Maddie went running drunkenly across the grass to be scooped up by Cat and spun around.

Kara and Gina didn’t offer to carry anything from the car. They also went straight to Cat, both of them pulling out sheets of paper from their knapsacks. Lyn craned her neck to watch as the three of them bent their heads over the papers, the two girls laughing and pointing. She wished Kara could be as relaxed and natural with her.

“What do you think those three are talking about?” she asked Michael, as she slammed shut the boot.

“Homework?”

“In your dreams.”

The birthday picnic was well under way when Lyn got a call on her mobile from her play-group friend, Kate. They weren’t coming because her little boy, Jack, had just come down with chicken pox.

“Maddie probably has it too,” said Kate. “Nicole’s kid was the culprit; she would have been contagious at Julie’s lunch. Anyway, good to get it crossed off! Some parents have ‘pox parties’ to pass it around.”

“I had Maddie immunized.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I looked into it obviously but—”

A child roared in the background, so Lyn was spared the sweetly veiled criticism she knew she was about to receive. She felt far too woozy for it.

“You know,
you
missed out on chicken pox, Lyn.” Maxine looked up from her foldout chair, where she was delicately balancing a paper plate on her knees. “Gemma and Cat caught it when they went on that Christmas holiday with their father.”

“Oh, don’t remind their father,” said Frank. “What a nightmare.”

Now she remembered that memory. It was the day Cat and Gemma drove off in Frank’s car for the water-slide holiday. They were both up on their knees in the backseat, their faces pressed against the back window, shouting things to her that she couldn’t hear.

Different things will happen to us,
six-year-old Lyn had realized and felt a little sad and shocked but also almost immediately accepting. It was logical. It made sense. There was nothing you could do about it.

“We probably infected about a thousand kids on that water slide,” said Cat.

“Oh shit,” said Lyn. She was thinking about Julie’s lunch and how Nicole’s runny-nosed little girl had wrapped her arms around Lyn’s knees.

Everyone looked at her.

“I think I’ve got chicken pox.”

Gemma patted her shoulder in a motherly fashion. “Nooo, you’ve just got a little cold!”

Lyn pushed back her cardigan sleeve to look at her wrist where she’d been scratching. There was a tiny little red sore. “I think this is the start of the spots.”

Michael dropped his bread roll onto his plate.

“But what if you’re pregnant? Is it dangerous?”

“Pregnant?” said Cat. She was sitting cross-legged on the picnic rug, a bottle of beer in her hand. “Are you trying to have another baby?”

Lyn watched Cat and Gemma exchange loaded looks and closed her eyes. How many more people would she upset today? Suddenly she felt unbearably ill. She opened her eyes again.

“Where’s Maddie?”

Nobody took any notice of her question.

“So do you think you
are pregnant?” asked Cat.

“Where is Maddie?”

She got to her knees on the rug and looked around wildly, fear clenching her heart.

“She’s right there with Kara and her friend.” Maxine looked closely at Lyn. “Darling, I don’t think you
are
well. Feel her forehead, Gemma.”

Lyn saw that Maddie was in fact only a few feet away, sitting on Kara’s lap.

She collapsed back down on the blanket and looked mutely at her family.

Gemma put her hand against her forehead and announced, “She’s burning up!”