Getting Real

48. Visitor



The dog had his nose pressed onto the wire flyscreen mesh and every time Rielle moved he barked. From somewhere off the hallway she heard Trish Reed call, “Be with you in a minute.” She came to the door with a mixing bowl in her hands, flour on one cheek and dismay in her eyes.

“Arielle, is that you?”

“Hello, Mrs Reed.”

“Trish. Come in, come in. Can you open the door, yes just push it. Sorry, I have flour all over my hands. Down, Monty! I’m trying to get scones on for afternoon tea. Down, Monty.”

Rielle let herself in and followed Trish Reed into the kitchen. She’d been careful; she’d cased the house. No sign of Bonne, so Jake wasn’t around, which meant she’d have a chance to do what she came for.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.

“Why don’t you put the kettle on? We can have a cup of tea while I finish up.”

Trish moved aside to let Rielle near the stove and went back to her dough. Her movements had a bristling quality to them, like she’d rather sweep Rielle back onto the street than give her access to a copper kettle.

“I came to see you and Mr Reed—Mick—because I want to know if there was anything my brother and I can do for you. We didn’t know until recently Mick had a stroke. We’d have offered to help much sooner if we’d known.”

Trish thumped the dough. “Oh!” She started rolling it out.

“We make a very good living from our band, so we’d be happy to help with money for anything you need: physical therapy, household help, anything really.”

“Oh.” More dough rolling. No eye contact.

“Please, I don’t mean to embarrass you. We know how expensive healthcare can be. It’s one of the reasons we started singing; we had huge debts from my father’s illness to pay off.”

Trish abandoned the scone dough and sat on a kitchen stool. She gave Rielle a look she remembered from Maggie. The one that said, ‘I’ll know if you’re lying.’ “Did Jake ask you to come?”

“No. Jake doesn’t know I’m here. But he’s very important to my brother and me, so we wanted to offer our support.”

“I see.”

Rielle picked up the scone cutter and pressed it into the rolled out dough, spacing out a dozen scones on the pan. She wasn’t sure what Trish Reed was thinking, but she looked both embarrassed and annoyed. She was twisting her wedding ring around her finger and looking at the dog asleep at her feet.

“What happened?”

“To my father? He had cancer, a brain tumour. He died two weeks before my sixteenth birthday.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, but actually, I meant between you and Jake.”

Now it was Rielle’s turn to say, “Oh.” She slid the baking tray into the oven and set the timer. It gave her a chance to think about how to respond.

“I treated Jake very poorly. I hurt him. I abused his trust and his love and he did nothing to deserve it.” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I think he’d be very angry if he knew I was here.”

“I don’t understand why you’d want to help us.”

“Because we can Mrs Reed—Trish—and because we want to.”

“Well, it’s very nice of you both, but really we’re fine. Between health cover and the insurance, and with Jake running the business we’re managing. It was hard at first, but Mick is making progress. He’s sleeping now, but I’m sure he’d have wanted to see you.”

Rielle knew she was being dismissed. The moment she admitted to hurting Jake, any chance of being allowed to help the Reed family burned away, turned to vapour like the water from the kettle. She could see it in the expression on Trish Reed’s face, and now Jake’s mum was closing ranks, softly but just as surely shutting the offending outsider out.

“Could I ask you for some advice before I go?”

“Me?” said Trish with surprise, coming around the counter to take the kettle off the gas. “I’m sure there isn’t any advice I could give you that your own mother couldn’t.”

“My mother is dead too. She died in an accident when I was fourteen.”

That made Trish flinch. She spooned tea leaves into the pot, added the water and took out two cups and saucers.

At the kitchen table with the teapot brewing between them, Rielle asked her question. “How do I make Jake understand how sorry I am for what I did?”

“Did you break his heart, Arielle?”

Rielle nodded and as Trish poured the tea, she tumbled the whole story out, starting with how they met in the gym and how she deceived Jake. Tracing through his kindness to her when she was troubled, his strength when she needed someone to stand up to her, and his ability to know the difference. She told Trish how he beat his fear of heights, and how he rescued her from her own terrors and then Rielle told Jake’s mother how much she loved her son and why she’d had to leave him so she wouldn’t continue to hurt him.

When the scones were done, Trish made a second pot of tea and woke Mick, helped him to a chair in the sunshine and they talked some more. When Rielle left the Reed house it was with a head butt from Monty, a hug from Trish and a squeeze of her hand from Mick. But for all their kindness she had no answer to her question, no less anguish in her heart. All she had left now was retreat.

Back at her hotel she called Bodge and packed her bags. There was no point staying. She should never have come in the first place. This was one fight she’d lost—deserved to lose. The heat of Jake’s anger, the rightness of it, wasn’t something she had a salve for. It burned and she deserved its brutal sting for how she’d thrown his love back at him and shut him out—how she’d soured his life and trashed his trusting heart.

She was whole now. Whole enough to make a life as Rie or Arielle on stage and off; as the Ice Queen or something new; or simply as Maggie and Ben’s daughter. Whole enough not to need a disguise and to be able to bear her own reflection, but still only half what she might’ve been if she’d understood what she had in Jake before she pushed him away. Something full and right and rich and real. A reason to be wholly alive.

Jake was set to go home and crash with a pizza when Mum rang. She needed low fat milk and a small carton of full cream, and he could spare the joke about one negating the other. She had a tuna steak and salad ready for him when he arrived, bearing groceries, and he was too tired to protest about not staying. And then he was glad he did, because Dad was still awake and keen to hear about the job.

They talked shop, with Dad asking questions slowly, and with difficulty forming words, until Jake was unable to stifle his yawns. He had an early start and he was still catching up on sleep from what’d turned into a two night drinking binge after seeing Rielle.

He tuned in to Dad saying something about a visit. Ah, a visitor, he’d had a visitor.

“We both did,” said Mum.

“Ah-huh,” he mouthed through a yawn, not even pretending interest.

“Reee,” said Dad, drawing out the syllable. Jake assumed he meant some boring Reed cousin or other.

“Arielle,” said Mum.

“I said Reee,” said Dad.

“What?”

“Arielle came to see us today.”

“What?” Jake said again, not taking it in. Rie, here at the house, talking to his parents? “What did she want?” he barked, awake now, suspicious and on guard.

“She came to offer us help, money actually, for anything we might need for your father.”

“For me,” said Dad. He rolled his eyes and put his weak right hand slowly up to his heart.

“Money! She came to lord it over us with her rock star money. Unbelievable!”

“No, it wasn’t like that at all. She was very sweet.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her we were fine but we appreciated the offer.”

“She had no right to come here.”

“She said you’d be angry.”

“Yeah, well she’s right.” Jake was on his feet. Mum gave him her ticked off look. What did she have to be ticked off about? That f*cking wolf woman had screwed with his life.

“What happened between you two? She said she hurt you.”

“F*ck, Mum. What were you doing, having a cosy fireside chat?”

“Jake!” Dad called him on the swearing, sounding like his old self.

He slid back into his chair. “Well, I’m sorry, but this is just—”

Mum put her hand over Dad’s as it lay on the table. “So that’s what’s wrong with him.”

“There is nothing wrong with me.”

“Bullshit,” said Dad.

“Mick!” Mum pulled her hand back, and Dad grinned, lopsided. He’d gone the power swear word and was happy about it.

“All right, so I got hurt. It happens. It’s no big deal. I’m certainly not going to talk about it. I don’t want anything to do with her.”

“She says the man that went with her, the other singer, he meant nothing to her. It was just so that you’d give her up.”

Jake scowled. “Yeah, well it worked, Mum. I gave her up months ago.” His parents exchanged a look he couldn’t read. “What now?”

“We’re not going to interfere but—”

“If you weren’t going to interfere, Mum, there wouldn’t be a ‘but’ in that sentence.”

“Let her finch,” said Dad, stumbling on the word ‘finish’, shaking his head in frustration.

“We just think if you’re still this angry—and don’t you say you’re not,” said Mum in a rush, holding her hand up to stop him cutting in. “Arielle must still mean something to you.”

“It doesn’t matter what she means to me, Mum. She’s not someone I can trust.”

“Sad,” said Dad.

“Are you sure it’s not worth trying again?”

“Mum!”

“Okay, I get it. I’ll stop now, but—”

“No ‘but’!” Jesus Christ!

“All right, if you’re sure?”

“Mum!”

“Okay.”

“Don’t f*ck up, Jay.”

“Dad!”

“Mick!”

Dad looked at Mum and laughed. Jake threw his hands up. He’d eaten too much, he felt sick; and indigestion, disgust, or fury burned in his chest.

“She wants you to know she’s sorry.”

“Yeah, she told me. It’s friggin’ easy to say isn’t it?” He stood. He had to get out of here. “Thanks for dinner, Mum. I reckon you should take your matchmaking shingle down now. I don’t need your help.”

“See you out,” said Dad, glancing briefly at Mum. He leaned on the table to pull himself upright and shuffled up the hall with Jake. At the front door, he tapped Jake’s heart with his strong left hand. “She here?”

Before the stroke Jake would have toughed that question out, fired back some slick retort. But now, looking at his father, knowing how close they’d come to losing him, and how hard he was working to recover, he couldn’t fudge it. He nodded. There was a hardness in his heart that pained from not having Rielle in his life.

Dad moved his hand to Jake’s face. “She here?”

Jake nodded again, closed his eyes. He saw one of a hundred images of Rielle that had free reign in his thoughts, heard the music of her laughter, felt the sensation of her touch. “It’s no good, Dad.”

Dad folded his last three fingers back and popped his thumb out, forming a pistol shape with his good hand. He fired it against Jake’s temple, mumbled “F*ckwit,” and pulled him in for a tender hug using both arms—one tight and strong, one loose and weak—before releasing Jake, swaying slightly from the sudden shift in balance.

Jake reached out to steady him. “You can’t just use swear words, Dad, you have to use whole sentences.”

“A new me.” Dad laughed. “And you?”

“I guess I have to use whole sentences too.”