Anchor Point (25 page)

‘They – we – thought you drowned, you know.' Sweat rolled and broke across her ribs.

Katja cocked her head. ‘Drowned?'

Laura steadied herself, gripping the edge of the table, and began to speak about what had happened to them after the disappearance, feeling again the dampness of Vik's tears in her lapels at night. The memory coloured her telling. She didn't hold back, describing in detail the weeks of wet-weather searching, Bruce's hoarse calling, the whistle sadly shrieking through the trees. At points she stumbled, confusing timelines and events, backtracking, correcting herself. She spoke of Vik's awful clinginess, her night terrors; the whispers they copped in the streets.

Laura brandished her palms, displaying calluses on calluses that were no longer there, knowing that no amount of narration could make Katja really feel her loneliness, the exhaustion, being bent by unending chores. She would never experience Bruce's frightening energy for clearing the land, and no amount of talking could make her know what it was to hold a small child in the night whose heart was badly broken. Katja would never understand, not really, what they had been through, but Laura couldn't help but unload.

‘And that was only the first few months!' she finished, realising that it was pointless. How much time they would need to cover it all, and still there would be days and weeks, years – Katja could never catch up. How much would inevitably be lost.

Laura stormed out into the backyard. The sky was pink, falling into night, and a few stars blinked weakly. She had heard that the stars seen from earth are suns from long ago. Not solid, but some trick of time and light and distance, projected across the sky. Maybe Vik had told her that.

Bruce's face was vivid as the trunk of the tree she leaned against. ‘Ready, love?' he had said one rainy day, broom in hand. ‘Can't let Mother Nature get in our way, can we? Still plenty to do in here!' She had noticed the strange gleam in his eye, a kind of terror that the weather might force him to sit still and be with his sad self. It didn't rain much after that.

When Laura was back inside at the table, ashtrays emptied, fresh tea and toast that she couldn't really remember making – the way she sometimes arrived home in the car without remembering the drive – Katja lit a fresh cigarette to explain. She had been living remotely in the months after she left, she said shakily, unable to meet Laura's eye. A commune, no running water, set up by two writer friends of her boyfriend. At first, Katja had enjoyed herself. She said it shamed her to admit it, but she did. The freedom. Parties. Groups of artists working together.

Her depression came later, like a punch she hadn't seen coming, once the novelty, the boyfriend, were gone. She stayed on at the place after he left, flat broke. Things got hard.

‘Breakdown, some of them said. I don't know.' She shrugged, eyeing her smoke.

For so long Laura had carried anger in her body, a spine, but now she allowed herself to imagine what Katja's life had been like. Like peering at it through a crack in a door, she saw her mother's terrible decision to go away and leave them, hoping things could be better, that she could find love. Saw that dream come crashing. Another strange place filled with strangers. To be abandoned, knowing she had abandoned them.

Laura felt genuinely sad for her mother. Katja had thought about coming home. Laura was wondering if it was her fault, if she should shoulder some of the blame for the way Katja's life had gone. She had destroyed the letters.

Then Katja straightened suddenly. ‘So,' she said. ‘I saw in the paper. Bruce is dead?' Her tone was accusing, as if Laura had killed him herself.

After Katja was gone, returned in the taxi to town, Laura lay between sheets feeling smashed. Her body was bruised by exhaustion – so much talk. More than tired, she was angry. To think, she had almost allowed herself to be fooled. Had almost fooled herself.

Why are you here
? She should have asked the question straight away.

She remembered the way it had felt all those years ago, dropping Katja's note into the fire. The weight of the daily vigilance had almost crushed her, but she had shouldered it on her own regardless, checking the mail, intercepting, keeping her secret. It was difficult to remember what she had made of that task, of her mother's departure, at the time. Hard not to impose adult hindsight on a ten-year-old's experience. She tried to throw herself back, but she couldn't trust her memory, knowing that a story gets tinkered with, adjusted, rewritten.

The one thing she was certain of was that it had all grown more complex, far-reaching, than she had ever been able to conceive as a child. Katja had made her choices, leaving them. In turn, Laura had asserted her own freedom to choose. Only, burning the note was a stone thrown in the dam. Shockwaves turned ripples were still visible in the water, decades later. She was still being washed along.

Turning Katja's visit over in her mind, Laura tried to accustom herself to the idea that the woman was her mother. When she really thought about it, what hurt most was not that Katja had left. It was an irreconcilable failing: Katja's inability to possess a job that was hers alone to do. Even worse, a job she never warmed to, wanted, even after they were born. The rejection was scalding. Laura knew she would always feel it.

She didn't know much about Katja's childhood. There had never been the time to ask. What little she did know – the war freshly over, a grieving mother who had died young – made it possible to understand why Katja was the way she was, if you were feeling generous enough to see it. Now that she was grown, Laura could understand the way one thing led to another. Katja had her own dangerous waves to deal with, rippling across time. But understanding was not accepting, not forgiving. It still made Laura livid to consider her mother's awful weakness.

Staring at the ceiling, Laura felt the years of her life like the wood she had stacked. So many heavy logs. She was tired of it: carting, carrying, hefting along. She had made her choices and lived with them. Really, Vik was the one who had suffered. Thinking her mother was dead.

Part of Laura wanted to leave things as they were, stabilised in the wake of Katja's absence. But she couldn't face it. Perhaps she was no longer the person she had once been – not as determined, weakened by age. She knew that Vik was safe, long grown up. It wasn't that Laura couldn't shoulder more responsibility, more secrets. She would always do what she had to, contorting herself beneath whatever needed carrying for them both.

Laura got back out of bed in the night with the black heat around her and slowly went down the hall. Standing in her underwear, she picked up the phone and dialled.

Michael answered sleepily, passing the phone to Vik.

‘Lor?' Vik said anxiously, yawning. ‘Something wrong?'

‘Something's … happened,' Laura said, not knowing where to start, fearing she was already making a hash of things. ‘I need to talk to you.'

Vik's voice changed immediately, growing brisk. ‘Tell me. I can help.'

‘It's not like that,' Laura said.

She went quiet. Imagine believing that Katja could ever be erased. Their mother.

Laura took a deep breath. She explained. It took a long while to give an account of the visit. She kept tangling who said what, backtracking.

‘Oh my God. Oh my God,' Vik repeated like she'd been whacked.

Laura heard Michael saying, ‘What is it?'

There was a long silence when she was done. Laura listened for Vik's familiar breath. Though her heart was hammering, she allowed her sister some time. Having said all she could about their mother's visit, she felt lightheaded, as though she'd stood up too fast.

‘But,' Vik stammered after minutes, like concussion wearing off. ‘You're saying she's alive. She was always alive?' Laura could just about feel Vik's mind ticking over, cogs churning. ‘So, what? Dad hid her letters, she reckons? Is that what she said?' Her voice rose, despairing, breaking Laura's heart. ‘But why go through all that if he knew? The search?'

Laura steadied herself against the wall, feeling the boundaries of her body dissolving. She had not turned on any lights. The hall was a dark tunnel. She might have been five, or fifteen. She might have been dead. With a jolt she recognised that she was standing in the most important minute of her life. Thousands of moments pressed in around her, with all those yet to come. But none were as important as the present. Laura saw that she had a chance, there, in that instant, to erase what had happened and make the future new.

When she spoke, the evenness of her voice surprised her. ‘No. Viko,' she said. ‘Listen. Not Dad. He didn't know anything. It was me.'

Laura replaced the receiver shakily, silencing the electronic drone of the disconnection. She thought Vik might call back, so stood watch in the hall, rocking herself on her heels.

When her sister did phone a few minutes later with more questions, frantic and disbelieving and shocked, Laura did her best to answer honestly. She reminded Vik about the fights between Katja and Bruce, their mother's ambivalence. The cruelty.

‘She wasn't like that!' Vik wailed.

Laura could hear her pacing up and down. ‘Not always,' she said. ‘Not to you.'

‘I can't fucking believe it,' Vik was saying, repeating to herself.

‘I know,' Laura said softly. ‘I'm sorry, Viko.' But part of her wasn't sorry, not for all of it. She told herself that she remembered better than Vik what their mother had been like, envying her sister's freedom to invent another kind of mother from inherited scraps of knowledge. ‘You were so little. You're not remembering things. You don't remember what it was like.'

When Vik hung up, cutting off the sound of her own raging, Laura returned to her bed. She lay on damp sheets, short-circuited. Unable to fix on a thought, her head felt full of static. When Vik called an hour later, Laura dragged herself up again to explain what she could, calmly copping the strap of Vik's accusations.

‘Listen,' she interrupted, feeling a rush of protectiveness for her sister, balling her fists. ‘Just stop for a minute. I want to tell you something. You see her, she won't be what you think. What you … want.'

‘I've had enough of you deciding what I want,' Vik snapped, banging the phone down again.

It went on like that all night. Vik phoning up, pushing her away, the dial tone trilling like an accusation. Laura was patient, doing her best. She knew she deserved Vik's anger, but the sorrow was hard to hear.

‘I tried to look out for you,' she told Vik as the night began to lift, making way for fresh heat. ‘I don't expect you to forgive me. Just want you to know.'

All of the next day, Laura would turn the conversation over in her mind, trying to work out if there was anything else she could have done, said, to make things easier for them both. Perhaps – but it needed to have been said years before. Horrible sentences from the call kept resurfacing while she went about her work: stacking kindling she didn't need to burn, watering wilting houseplants. Even while she slept. ‘I've taken the anniversary of the service off every year! I bought flowers! … You let her miss my wedding … What should I tell Cait?'

Near the end of their last phone call that night, voice rough with tears, Vik had whispered, ‘Why didn't Dad ever really like me?'

By then Laura had endured so many recriminations and angry silences, but she found this question harder. She stuttered, coming up sharp against the limits of her own capacity to explain.

‘He did!' Laura said. ‘He loved you!'

But Vik insisted.

Eventually, painfully, Laura conceded. She didn't know the answer. She just didn't know.

A week of late-night conversations and Laura still hadn't explained why Katja had shown up when she did. Overwhelmed with information, numbed with the task of recalibrating so much of what she had for so long believed to be true, it took Vik time to ask. Laura allowed her the space, feeling it was perhaps the last big kindness she could provide her sister. She knew that when she finally shared that part of the story, it would change things again for Vik. Perhaps this would continue to happen for them both, she reflected, searching for and failing to find the whole of their story: its end. Pieces of information would continue to surface, requiring examination, piecing together. Changing the shape of the whole.

‘Come stay in the apartment, Lor. Cait would love it,' Vik said down the phone, going on about how Laura seemed depressed, overwhelmed by all that had happened. When had things shifted? When had Vik started worrying after her? ‘We'd
all
love it. Do you good to get away from there for a while. Cheer you up.'

But Laura didn't want to be in Melbourne, and said so. She roused herself enough to sound vaguely cheerful; anything to get Vik off the line. The concerns she had about her mental health went far beyond what she saw – after Bruce's view – as the mere lethargy of depression. Bruce had been vocal about the condition: it was suffered by those who just didn't try hard enough to make themselves useful. But Laura knew that she was not depressed. Her problem was something else.

‘I don't see why you won't come,' Vik grumbled, explaining that she was flying Katja down for a weekend, their first proper meeting. Laura heard the way Vik stumbled over their mother's name. Neither felt really comfortable calling her ‘Mum' – or worse, ‘Mutti'. Even ‘Kath' felt oddly intimate and wrong, out-dated and ill-fitting. But ‘Katja' made her even more a stranger.

It took all Laura's energy to channel some life into her voice, ‘I'm okay.'

‘It would be easier with you here,' Vik said quietly. ‘When she comes.'

But Laura didn't think so. As much as she longed to offer her sister protection, she knew her limits. Meeting their mother was an experience Vik would have on her own. Laura just didn't have it in her to be there.