My Brother's Keeper

Chapter 28



SATURDAY 1 DECEMBER 2012

Robbie put his arm around Sunny’s gaunt shoulders. He’s the kind of guy who can do that without thinking too much about it. It was good of him to be there and, even though she’d only met him an hour before, Sunny leaned into his shoulder. I took that as a good omen. Being able to take comfort from someone is a good place to start when it comes to relationships. Sunny hadn’t had a great start in life but little signs like this made me optimistic for her.

There were just three of us in the front pew on the family side of the church. Justin had agreed to Sunny attending her mother’s funeral, which was something, I guess. Sunny didn’t want Neo there and I’m pretty sure Justin wouldn’t have let him come anyway. Both Ned and Salena, though nominally family, were otherwise engaged, aka in prison awaiting bail hearings. Ned continued to claim his innocence. He was sticking to his story that Karen’s death had been an accident; in the midst of their argument she had fallen down the stairs and had hit her head. Seven years earlier Karen had accepted her penance and served a prison sentence for a crime she hadn’t committed. To be killed only hours before she was to begin a new life both for herself and Sunny … well, that was a crime I hoped wouldn’t go unpunished. It would be up to a jury to decide if Ned was telling the truth — or not. As for me, I was in no doubt he had killed her. Whether he had done it hot-bloodedly or in cold-blood made no difference really. Karen was still dead.

Manny was the only occupant of the front row on the friends side of the church. Aaron Fanshaw was sitting in a back pew, probably hoping to make a quiet getaway part-way through proceedings. I counted ten other people in the congregation of mourners but I was pretty sure most of them were ring-ins from the minister or habitual funeral-goers who weren’t fussy about whose big day it was. If I’d known there would be so few people I’d have hauled in a few ring-ins of my own, Gemma certainly, and maybe even Smithy, though he may have a code about going to funerals of people he has autopsied. Hard to know with Smithy.

The police were still ‘looking into’ what they would do with Sunny’s confession for Falcon’s death seven years earlier. No one wanted to reopen the case. No one wanted to admit they’d been wrong in sending Karen to prison, particularly now that she was dead. As for Sunny, once the truth had surfaced she had refused to back away from it. She’d insisted on giving a straight-up factual statement to the police. Justin had talked her into waiting until he engaged a lawyer for her but, despite the lawyer’s advice, Sunny stated categorically that she had known what she was doing when she took the handbrake off: she had intended both her and Falcon to die, but had succeeded in killing only her little brother. No one wanted to prosecute a fourteen-year-old girl for something she did when she was only seven. The criminal age of responsibility being ten, she was too young at the time of the offence to be now charged with murder or homicide, but the authorities were still arguing among themselves over whether she should be punished for not admitting her guilt sooner. And it would involve different authorities to decide whether she comprehended her guilt even now. The arguments would go on for a very long time and without doubt none of those arguments would go to the heart of what Falcon’s death had really been about. Things would take their course now but the process would be slow. In the meantime Sunny had booked herself into an exclusive boarding school somewhere in Vermont. The kind of place rich kids are sent to keep them as far away as possible from their parents’ lifestyles. It was the kind of place Sunny could go to reinvent herself. With Norma’s inheritance now going directly to her, there was no lack of money. Justin made no claims to any of it. He told her she was welcome to come home in the school holidays but they both knew it would be avoided if possible. She wouldn’t come back if she could be somewhere else, not for some years to come, anyway. She’d make friends at the school and go to their homes in the breaks. Sunny was, as Manny had reported, a very capable sort of a girl. She had never had the chance to be anything else.

Manny shuffled his way to the front and I readied myself for the big God speech from him. The old ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted’ or some other all-time funeral favourite, but he surprised me. Instead of stepping up to the microphone, Manny stood beside the coffin, one hand resting lightly on it as you do on a friend’s shoulder. He spoke simply about Karen and what he said was all the more eloquent because of it. He talked of little things, such as her love of ’sixties television shows, like Hogan’s Heroes and Doctor Who. Sunny squeezed my hand and when I turned to her she whispered, ‘I love Doctor Who.’ Her eyes were bright and it wasn’t just the tears. Manny talked of demons, but it wasn’t the pitchfork fiery-hell variety; he talked instead of Karen’s struggle to overcome the demons of her drug habit and he praised her for her eventual victory over it. He talked of the love she had for her children and how much she had been looking forward to spending time with Sunny again. I glanced at Sunny, expecting to see a sneer but she was looking at the coffin as if it was Karen herself speaking to her and she nodded. Manny was an honest and warm speaker and when he finished we were all smiling. Before walking slowly back to his pew he knocked three times on the lid of the coffin. I don’t know if it was a rehearsed gesture or what it meant. It may have been a simple tattoo of farewell or a private superstitious code. It didn’t matter. He’d earned the right to farewell his friend as he saw fit.

While we joined the minister in a tragically thin and tuneless version of ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’, Manny fumbled with the keyboard of a laptop. Sunny watched him, then pushed past me towards him. Robbie and I exchanged a look but let her go. She leaned across Manny and clicked confidently at the keyboard and then straightened up as an image on a screen at the side of the altar appeared. It was a photo of a young Karen holding a newborn baby, Sunny. Karen’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining as she held the brand new soft-cheeked being to her face and breathed her love onto her. The photo faded and was replaced with another and then another. I hadn’t seen any of the images before. Manny must have found them at Norma’s or maybe they were from a personal collection Karen had kept to herself. The hymn petered out and was thankfully replaced by the soundtrack accompanying the photos. It was a version of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ that I hadn’t heard before. It was perfect. Sunny and Manny exchanged a look; this song was obviously Sunny’s choice and they’d organised this tribute of photos and music together. There were early photos of Karen with baby Falcon too; Sunny still a toddler leaning over to kiss his little scrunched-up new baby face. One by one, the images faded to be replaced by another. There were photos of Karen as a young girl. One was of her holding a rabbit almost as big as her; another of her on a three-wheeler bike, her head thrown back in laughter, a gap where her front teeth had once been. Sunny was transfixed by these images. Her mouth partly open, her eyes shining.

Outside the church the ring-ins wandered off. Fanshaw raised two fingers to his temple in salute and threw a grin in my direction. I caught it and gave him a wan smile in response. I stayed back from the hearse and watched as Sunny leant forward to say something to Manny. He nodded and moved away from the coffin to give her privacy. She reached into her pocket and withdrew what looked like, from where I was standing, a small plastic toy robot. She placed it carefully on the coffin and then stepped back as if an important task had been completed. It meant something to her, this toy, but I had no idea what.

I waited until the coffin had been slid into the back of the hearse, then wandered off to join Robbie, waiting for me beneath the big pohutukawa tree smothered in the crimson blooms of summer; New Zealand’s Christmas tree. It reminded me of the first time I had spoken with Karen, when she’d phoned me at the swimming pool while I was awkwardly waiting out the two minutes’ silence in memory of the anniversary of the dead Pike River miners. The pool had been decorated with the first of the early Christmas decorations and I had been feeling less than festive. As I looked down the street I noticed it was festooned with bells and angels and Santa Clauses. Two weeks had passed since Karen had first called me and I still wasn’t feeling all that ho-ho-ho. Mind you, a lot had happened in those couple of weeks.

‘You think she’ll be okay?’ Robbie asked.

I glanced over at Sunny. She was listening to Manny, nodding. One foot was turned in and her head was tilted to the side like a little girl’s. She was still very young and the young heal well, I think. ‘I hope so,’ I said.

‘What about you, Di? Will you be okay?’



I looked at him directly. ‘I’m sorry, Robbie. Sorry about all of it. I f*cked up.’

‘Hey, careful. God is just in there, you know,’ he said, angling his head towards the church. We exchanged droll looks and then scuffed our feet in the gravel as the silence between us lengthened. Both Detective Inspector Aaron Fanshaw and my ex-husband had used the same phrase to describe Robbie; they’d both said he was a great guy. No argument from me there. Robbie Lather was most definitely a great guy. But even though I would most likely live to regret it, Robbie being a great guy wasn’t enough to make me stay.

‘Can I come visit Wolf in Auckland? We might even let you join us for a walk, if you wanted.’

‘Yeah, definitely. We’d both like that,’ I said, and it was true.

He tipped an imaginary hat at me and walked off towards Sunny to say goodbye. And he took that fabulous hitched grin with him. I missed it already.

There’s a theory that ghosts aren’t apparitions of the dead but echoes of the living. That house hauntings are the memories, thoughts, passions and dreams of past inhabitants. According to the theory, it’s the living who haunt as often and as convincingly as the dead. All those dreams where you walk through houses you’ve lived in; well, that’s you haunting the rooms, causing shivers up the spines of the inhabitants. You’re the glimpse out of the corner of the eye, the shimmer on the stairs. And the stronger the emotions you experienced when living in a place, the more powerful the haunting. That’s how the theory goes anyway. If it’s true, then I didn’t envy the people who had bought our house; the place Sean and I had bought and lived out our marriage in together. The new owners may have thought they’d got a bargain but, if that theory of hauntings was correct, my guess is that pretty soon they’d be running from the property screaming for ghostbusters. Something about that haunting theory always fitted with me. It seemed right. And my own addition to this theory is the belief that the only way to exorcise those old ghosts is to beat them at their own game; have even more powerful emotions and experiences in the place you inhabit than those ghosts did. Fill it with your own vibrations, inhabit it fully with all the life you can muster. Become your own haunting.

The furniture had been sold. Our belongings finally divided up between us. It was much easier than I think either Sean or I imagined it would be. There were no arguments. No ‘That book’s yours’, ‘This one’s mine’, ‘Whose is this?’, ‘I don’t like it anyway so you have it’. The detritus of a relationship, when all said and done, is tragically inconsequential. Our footsteps echoed through the empty rooms, loud on the wooden floorboards, recycled demolition rimu. I’d sanded, Sean had pollied. We kept our voices low out of respect for the ghosts who howled all around us. It was good of Sean to do this, walk through the house with me one last time. But it had the opposite effect to what I thought it would; I felt the distance between us, not the closeness. He’d moved away from me and, with heart sinking into my gut, I finally had to admit I had moved away from him, too. There was no suggestion of anything as crass as a goodbye f*ck and we steered clear of any declarations of everlasting or any other kind of love or promises we’d once so willingly made each other. We kissed goodbye and held each other for long enough. Then Sean walked to the door for the last time and closed it quietly behind him. I stood, rooted to the spot, listening to the creaking of the house, the rattle of the loose glass in the frames.

And in that big empty room, I danced. It wasn’t something I’d planned to do, which is probably why it was okay. I danced with the ghosts of friends, of family, parties, laughter, tears. I danced with the years that were gone and could never be recovered. I danced with the beauty of what had been the beginning of our love and I danced with the tragedy of it ending. I danced for our imagined children who would now never be born. And I danced to my dead sister, Niki, whose voice still echoed in these empty rooms. I danced to the youthful love Sean and I once had and the mature love we’d lost. And I danced because if I didn’t dance, I’d crouch down in the corner by that bit of skirting we’d always said we’d fix but never did, and I’d weep. And this house, our shelter, our home, deserved to be honoured in some way that wasn’t about weeping and wasn’t about real-estate agents or mortgages or settlements. I danced because it seemed right to dance.

And that dance would undoubtedly haunt the house forever.

And when the dance was ended, I put the keys and a bottle of wine for the new owners on the benchtop, picked up Wolf’s smelly old sheepskin and walked quickly out of the house. I drove away with Wolf’s familiar breath huffing on my neck and I didn’t turn back around. Not once.





Surrender

Donna Malane

‘Malane weaves a gritty and clever plot, creating a terrific

novel of suspense and action.’ — New Zealand Listener

Missing persons expert Diane Rowe is used to making sense of other people’s lives. It’s just a pity she’s not having much luck with her own.

The brutal murder of her little sister, Niki, and the break-up of her marriage have tested her usual tough optimism. When Niki’s suspected killer turns up dead, Diane sets out to nail the truth.

But uncovering Niki’s seedy past reveals truths and dangers she never expected — or wanted — to face.

Diane is determined to make sense of it all — whatever it takes.

Winner of the inaugural 2010 New Zealand

Society of Authors/Pindar Publishing Prize