I hadn't heard from that reporter again. I hadn't heard a word from the police, I'd not seen a thing in the newspaper. Life seemed to be resuming and in that uninterrupted peace and quiet I waited, in a strange assurance, for the hammer to fall.
It was coming, I could feel it. Life was too quiet. I had taken to dropping the kids and school and then just driving the highway, windows down and music up, pushing the car as fast I could, right on the edge of losing control. I went back and forth, between Gympie and Araluen and Amamoor, and Kingaroy, and everywhere else within a few hours drive, often not returning to the house at all between dropping the kids off and picking them up. I just kept moving, like an animal pacing in a cage.
Samantha was still practically living in my house. It had been a full eight weeks since Gregory had departed life and we were all in a bizarre holding pattern, a life vibrating with anticipation of everything falling apart. I could tell something was wrong with Kelly, but I could not get a word out of her as to what it was. It was like she was living on another planet, completely disconnected from the rest of us.
I sent her to a counsellor, to see if I could get her to talk to someone - anyone - to get things off her chest. But she sat across from an extraordinarily patient woman called Sybil with steel-wool hair, grey and immovable, and completely refused to speak. She said not one word, for an hour, every Wednesday. She was in her sixth week now of seeing Sybil, and while she saw her, she didn't let one solitary word slip past her lips. Sybil squeezed my hand one afternoon and said 'Just keep sending her. Even if all she gets is the knowledge that she has the option to speak, it will be worth it. It might be months before she says anything, but eventually she will.'
So I kept taking her. Trevor and Angus seemed to carry on much as they had before. I took them to see professionals as well, and they seemed to just carry on about school and sports, Angus had an incredible amount to say about dinosaurs to a bewildered-looking man called Nigel, as he eventually up altogether on taking notes and just listened to Angus as though he was a teacher. Every now and then the boys would mention that they missed their father but they seem altogether well-adjusted. Sometimes parents die. They knew it from other kids at school. They were young enough to absorb reality without questioning it too much.
But they had lived in a different reality to Kelly. Fifteen and she was a sharp, observant girl on a different level than her brothers. I was growing more and more disquieted, trying to sort out in my head what she did and did now know about her father. I watched her nervously over my coffee in the morning, over my dinner at night. She moved through life now as though the rest of us weren't there. The change over two months was stark. She stopped letting my brush out her hair at night. She stopped sleeping with her door open. She scurried around secretly, appearing in rooms when I wasn't expecting her, and rarely in one when I thought she was meant to be. It was like acquiring a grown up roommate, and watching my daughter dissolve into thin air. I was entirely shut out of her life now. I could feel her suspicious gaze upon me, but I could not figure out the words to ask what I needed to ask without simply vomiting the truth all over her. And if she didn't know anything damaging, I couldn't risk being the one to tear that secret open, and hurl her into the void.
