‘No,’ Kevin yelled, following me out. ‘No!’ He pointed a trembling, dripping arm in my direction.
‘No, what?’ I shouted. ‘Did you do it? Did you kill Dylan? Why don’t you defend yourself? Why don’t you tell them? Why don’t you stand up and say something, for God’s sake?’
‘I did tell them. I tried …’ Kevin lowered his arm. ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t care what they think – any of them.’ He took a few steps toward me. ‘I don’t care if they believe me.’ He groaned. ‘But I need you to believe me. I need you, Sunny.’
‘You don’t need me. You don’t even care about me.’
He lifted his eyes to the sky for a second. ‘But I do need you,’ he said. His eyes met mine. ‘You’re Lily’s daughter. You’re my daughter. You’re all I’ve got.’
He stared at me then with a look of such sadness that something happened inside me. Something broke; the wall that I had built around myself cracked and splintered, fell away. I knew he didn’t do it. I’d known all along that Kevin had not harmed Dylan. I had turned myself against him, my only true ally. I’d wanted to blame him for it all.
I stared at him, and the rain washed away the last of my flimsy defences. All the complex reasons and beliefs evaporated. Suddenly, it was like I was seeing Kevin for the first time since Mum had died. I realised he loved me, more than my own father ever had.
He took a step toward me, his palm turned up, catching raindrops. ‘Sunny, your mum’s accident … it’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault!’ Water poured down his face, but I could see his eyes were filled with tears. ‘It’s nobody’s goddam fault. It’s just bad, rotten, shitty luck, and it’s taken her away. From both of us.’
His words flew across the space between us and melted through me.
Nobody’s fault.
I shook my head, not wanting to believe him. Surely it was my fault. I must have said something to Mum about learning to drive in that stupid ute. I must have …
‘I miss her too,’ he said. He stood in the rain, his hair plastered to his head, water coursing down the creases in his face. I knew then what people meant when they said ‘a broken man’. Kevin was a broken human and I had helped to snap the last sinew.
I’d been such a fool. I was a worthless, stupid, cruel person. I couldn’t stand there a moment longer.
I turned and ran.
‘Sunny, wait!’ Kevin’s voice trailed away, drowned out by the rain.
Time disappeared as I ran through the dripping forest toward the gorge. The words circled in my head and fell in time with my running feet.
Nobody’s fault.
And with each step I believed it a little more.
Nobody’s fault.
Could it really be possible?
As I climbed down the narrow track to the waterhole, I could hear the roar of the swollen creek. The amount of water tumbling over the rocks had doubled since the day before.
Before I knew it, I had climbed over the boulders in the gorge and was near the edge of the swirling waterhole. Below me, in the depths, people had gone down and had never come back up. The water hurried to crowd in between the rocks and escape the pool to the rapids below.
The words of the warning sign came back to me: Beware of flash flooding. If the water swelled up into a mighty wave and washed me down the creek, I didn’t care. I didn’t know how to fix things with Kevin; I didn’t know if I could. I had been so self-centred, so cruel. It was as clear then as if I were watching a film about it. Kevin was grieving too, and I had been so intent on blaming him for everything I hadn’t even seen his pain.
Nobody’s fault.
His words had liberated me. It was nobody’s fault. Suddenly, that notion of blame seemed absurd and the guilt that had been pressing on me lifted. Maybe the holes in the cheese did line up, but no-one put them there, no-one made it happen. Not even me. It just happened.
I stood above the waterhole and screamed her name into the drowning air, screamed until my throat hurt. Finally my voice gave out and became tiny amid the thunder of the creek. ‘Where are you?’ I sobbed. ‘Please, Mum. Please.’ I wiped tears and rain from my eyes and lost myself in the vortex of water rolling and churning around the rocks. That’s when I saw it, something red under the surface.
I gasped and moved across the slippery rock, stepping across to another boulder to get a closer look. I slipped and fell, collapsing down onto my hands and knees. The red thing was a metre away and I was close enough to see the chequered pattern of a boy’s shirt, the one in all the images of him, as familiar to me as one of my own shirts. It wafted and danced in the current.
Dylan had returned. The waterhole was bringing him up.
A cry escaped my lips. Part despair, part wondrous relief. My eyes were drawn upward to the rock on the other side of the rushing water.
I knew what I’d see before the image formed in my mind. My mum. She stood there, on the bank, hands clasped in front of her, sad eyes burning across at me through the rain.
Mum.
Here he is. Here is the boy.
Then I understood.
I stared, not wanting to lose the image, but no sooner had I seen her than she was gone. Below where she had stood, the red shirt twisted in the turbulent water. I didn’t bother looking up again because I knew Mum had done her job now; she had led me there to Dylan.
Poor, dead Dylan.
Despite the powerful flow, the shirt wasn’t moving downstream; the water wasn’t taking Dylan
