“This.” She gestured to the door he’d locked. “You were good, weren’t you? I saw enough to know that. So why…?” Suddenly, she was as close to weeping as she’d come in the last terrible thirty hours or so.
He was watching her. She saw that he looked ineffably sad, and in that sadness she understood that while they were a family?the four of them then, the three of them now?they were a family in name only. Beyond a common surname, they were and had always been merely a repository of secrets. She’d believed that all of these secrets had to do with her mother, with her mother’s troubles, her mother’s periods of bizarre alteration. And these were secrets to which she herself had long been a party because there was no way to avoid knowing them when the simple act of coming home from school might put her in the midst of what had always been referred to as “a bit of an embarrassing situation.” Don’t breathe a word to Dad, darling. But Dad knew anyway. All of them knew by the clothes she wore, the tilt of her head when she was speaking, the rhythm of her sentences, the tap of her fingers on the table during dinner, and the restlessness of her gaze. And the red. They knew from the red. For Kerra and Santo, what came on the heels of that colour was a prolonged visit to the elder Kernes and “What’s the cow up to now?” from her granddad. But “Say nothing to your grandparents about this, understand?” was the injunction that Kerra and Santo had lived by. Keep the faith, keep the secret, and eventually things would return to normal, whatever normal was.
But now Kerra understood there were even more secrets than those which she’d kept about her mother: arcane bits of knowledge that went beyond Dellen’s convoluted psyche and touched upon Kerra’s father as well. Embracing this stinging piece of truth, Kerra realised there was no solid place to put down her foot if she wished to walk forward and pass into the future.
“I was thirteen years old,” she said. “There was a bloke I liked, called Stuart. He was fourteen and he had terrible spots, and I liked him. The spots made him seem safe, you know? Only he wasn’t safe. It’s funny actually because all I’d done was go to the kitchen to fetch us some jam tarts and a drink?less than five minutes?and that’s all it took. Stuart didn’t understand what was going on. But I knew, didn’t I, because I’d grown up knowing. So had Santo. Only he was safe because?let’s face it?he was just like her.”
“Not in all ways,” her father said. “No. Not that.”
“That,” she said. “You know it. That. And in ways that affected me.”
“Ah. Madlyn.”
“We were best friends. Before Santo got his hands on her.”
“Kerra, Santo didn’t intend?”
“Yes, he did. He bloody well did. And the worst part of it was that he didn’t need to pursue her. He was already pursuing…what…three other girls? Or was it that he’d already been through three other girls?” She knew that she sounded what she was: bitter. But it seemed to her in that moment that nothing in her life had ever been secure from depredation.
Her father said, “Kerra, people go their own way. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Do you actually believe that? Is that how you defend her? Defend him?”
“I’m not?”
“You are. You always have done, at least when it comes to her. She’s made a fool of you for my entire life and I’ll put money down on the bet she’s made a fool of you since the day you met her.”
If Ben was offended by Kerra’s remark, he didn’t say so. Rather he said, “It’s not your mother I’m talking about, love, and it’s not Santo. It’s this Stuart lad, whoever he was. It’s Madlyn Angarrack.” He paused before finishing with, “It’s Alan, Kerra. It’s everyone. People will go their own way. You’re best off to let them.”
“Like you did, you mean?”
“I can’t explain things further.”
“Because it’s a secret?” she asked, and she did not care that the question sounded like a taunt. “Like everything else in your life? Like the surfing?”