I raised my palms toward him. ‘No, I told you, I’m fine.’
Kevin threw down the letter and reached for his pack of cigarettes. ‘It can’t hurt.’ The cigarette moved up and down between his lips as he spoke and lit up at the same time. He blew out a stream of smoke and leant back on the bench.
I knew from his look that he was digging his heels in on this one. I lowered my hands onto the chair. The familiar grassfire crept over me, but I didn’t want him to see me lose control. It was important to appear particularly sane at that moment, otherwise he would have more reason to send me to the counsellor and I could not stand the thought of some jerk interviewing me and getting me to relive the whole thing. They could never make any difference to the way I felt.
‘Please, don’t,’ I said, mustering a controlled voice. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘The appointment is for Wednesday.’
‘That’s three days away! You can cancel it. I don’t need to go. They can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.’
‘It’s too late. You’re going.’
‘You can’t tell me what to do.’
‘You’re going, Sunny, and that’s that.’
‘Mum would never have made me do this.’
He exhaled smoke. ‘Your mum is the reason you need to go.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You know what it means, Sunny.’
I pushed the chair under the table. ‘If you want to kill yourself with those things that’s absolutely fine with me, but you shouldn’t smoke in the house.’ I stormed off to my room.
It was almost as if I’d made it happen to Kevin.
In my fury about the appointment with the counsellor I had wished for lots of things to happen: sickness, terminal illness, death. I know that’s cruel and of course I didn’t mean it. Well, not all of it. But you know what it’s like when you’re mad at someone, so mad you want them scrubbed off the face of the planet, immediately? Then an hour later you’ve forgotten about it? It’s just as well humans don’t have magical powers or the earth would be a smouldering ruin of revenge.
I’d imagined him being dragged away by the police, because of Dylan, and because of what the creepy blond cowboy had said. And because it felt like I was the only person in the world who knew Dylan was dead. And I’d thought about Kevin being locked up in a cell. So when the police actually drove in, I was a little stunned.
I was out near the flame tree working on an email to my father. I had decided that an email would be better than another phone call. It would give him time to process the fact that I was still around. I had even assimilated his family into the fantasy I had developed. It could work. I would arrive at Dave’s house and he would come out of the front door and see me standing there; his wife and two girls would come out behind him (artistic licence since I only knew of the existence of one little girl). He would recognise me instantly, smile, and open his arms wide. He would hug me tightly – a real man’s hug that squeezed the breath out of me. I longed to feel those arms locked around me and feel the warmth and sturdiness of someone in charge, someone who would make everything alright.
He would say, ‘Finally, finally you’ve come back to me.’ He would cry because he had missed my life and I would cry because I had missed his. And we would both weep together because you can’t ever get that back. And his children would gather around me and smile and want to be my friend because I was now their uber-cool big sister. We would do stupid sister things together, like braid hair and paint our nails wacky colours. And my life would begin again.
I was working on the sixth draft when Mervie started barking and streaked around the back of the house yapping hysterically, the way he did when he didn’t recognise a vehicle. I got up and walked around to the back porch and saw a police four-wheel drive parked near the sheds.
Kevin came out and greeted two male officers. A feeling of dread pooled in my stomach as I watched them talking in low murmurs. Kevin lifted an arm toward the house and they all looked over at me. I crossed my arms in front of my body. It must’ve been bad news because Kevin kept running his hands over his head. Maybe they had found Dylan.
But then I wondered, Why would they be telling Kevin that?
They strolled around Kevin’s ute as though inspecting it in a car yard, then came over to the house. The porch steps creaked under Kevin’s weight as he came inside, closely followed by the officers. He didn’t make eye contact with me, but the officers nodded as they passed by. I followed them into the kitchen and watched intently as Kevin led them to the gun cabinet fixed to the wall in the laundry. The guns had belonged to Grandma. Mum was going to get rid of them, but Kevin had told her that all farmers have guns for shooting pigs that came onto the property, and she had reluctantly allowed him to keep them.
Kevin opened the metal door and showed the police two rifles.
‘Have these been used recently?’ said one of the officers.
‘Er, yeah. This one has. I shot at a pig when we went out. Missed though.’
‘Shooting not your thing, then,’ said the other officer, writing slowly and deliberately in his notebook. They actually did that, like in the shows.
‘No. It’s not my thing.’ Kevin sounded annoyed.
The other policemen took both guns from the rack.
‘I’ll need those back,’ said Kevin.
‘All in good time, Mr Horsham,’ he said.
‘Sunny, I’ve got to take these blokes up to where we camped the other night,’
