‘Ow. That’s where it hurts,’ Sam said, sinking into the seat, pushing Jake away with his good arm.
‘We need a sling,’ Jake said, heading back towards the rear of his car. ‘Look around for a stick. Something straight.’
Ella scouted the ground near the car, then thought about the amount of building going on at the Honeychurch house. There was bound to be some timber offcuts in the skip bin, so she took Jake’s torch and ran over there.
I should have told Sam about Marshall years ago.
What type of mother kept a truth like that from her child?
A crap one. A useless one.
Ella splayed the torch light over a skip filled with heavy-duty plastic wrap, lunch wrappers, old brick, old tin, remnant insulation bats, iced coffee cartons, soft drink cans and, thank heavens, timber offcuts.
She snatched one off the pile, tugging it out from larger planks.
Jake waited with bandages and scissors, and Ella gave him the piece of timber. He wrapped the splint against Sam’s forearm, then lifted and tied the sling around Sam’s neck.
‘I think it’s a hospital visit for you, young man,’ Jake said, leaning further into the vehicle to clip Sam’s seatbelt before he looked at Ella. ‘You want to ride in the back with him?’
‘I don’t want her,’ Sam burst out before Ella could speak.
His words left Ella’s insides stripped out, as if he’d laid them bare on the grass beside the car. They shredded her heart and stuffed it under the lunch wrappers and the bricks in the skip bin, with the other rubbish nobody wanted.
She didn’t argue with him.
Jake didn’t argue either.
‘Let me call Ollie’s mum and dad and let them know we’ve found him and to pass it on. Just in case anyone else is looking.’
He made the call, then he and Ella strapped in, and Jake drove.
It was a forty-minute drive between Chalk Hill and Mount Barker, and Ella didn’t say a word. She stared out the front windscreen as Jake drove, watching the headlight beams hold back the trees, wondering about all the things she could have done differently. Done better.
She could have bought a plane ticket in those years after Sam was born and taken him to Sydney to find Marshall. Made her own personal picket line outside his training centre, and woe to any pushy swim coach who blocked her way.
‘Tell us what happened, mate?’ Jake asked Sam, and Ella felt like she was hearing the story from under ten feet of water.
Sam had run from the bowling club, but he hadn’t gone down the road. He’d cut across a bush lot that linked through to the walking path along the creek, and got to the bridge that way.
All that way in the dark with a steep slide to the water just metres away … he could have slipped and drowned.
Ella put her hand in her mouth and bit her knuckles. She had to fill her mouth with something because she wanted to throw back her head and howl all the guilt and hurt from her body.
Excuses. She’d spent all of Sam’s life making excuses to make her own world easier. She told herself it was for Sam, waiting till he was older and he’d better understand. Waiting till he could cope with the rejection if Marshall never wanted to know his boy.
She was doing it for Erik. Showing support for the man who loved Sam as if he was his own.
‘Then I thought about what you said, Jake. About how when you were a kid when you were angry you’d strip a willow branch from the tree, and bash the bark off the other trees … that’s why I went looking for the willows near the river,’ Sam said.
‘I nearly got the biggest one too. I had to balance on the bridge and lean right out to get the big one, and I was pulling it back to twist it off, then it slipped and I fell.’
Ella shuddered in her seat.
The terrible truth was for ten years she’d lied to her son because it was easier than telling him the truth. Lying risked nothing. The truth risked losing Sam completely.
Jake snuck his hand across the gap between them and squeezed her thigh.
She couldn’t look at him.
CHAPTER
31
Jake helped her get Sam inside. Ella opened his bedroom door and Jake laid her boy out on his bed, dead to the world.
Ella pulled off his dirty boots. They stripped off his jeans and then cut the shirt from him rather than try to take it off over the sling.
Ella tugged pyjama bottoms up Sam’s legs and made him as comfortable as she could on the pillow, smoothing blond hair from his forehead and kissing his skin. She breathed his Sam smell once more, and cried when the scent was more antiseptic and hospital than her Sam.
It was one o’clock in the morning when she left him. This Ella knew because Jake stood in her kitchen, under the clock.
‘Do you want a cup of tea or anything?’ she asked him.
‘What?’ His hands bounced off his hips. He reminded her of his brother, that day at the dam, nervous energy, constant motion.
‘You can’t want coffee at this hour. I don’t have anything stronger.’
‘Ella, I don’t want anything to drink. I want you to tell me what the hell is going on. The whole story this time. Don’t leave anything out.’ He paced between the kitchen counter and the door to the backyard, and when she didn’t answer, he stopped and met her gaze. ‘Maybe it’s you who needs the tea.’
Maybe.
Ella made a cup and blew on the brew as she took it to a chair at the kitchen table and sat.
Jake was already there. ‘You were telling me about Sam. You said Erik isn’t his father? Sam must have heard that and that’s why he ran away.’
Ella shook her head stubbornly. ‘He knew Erik wasn’t his dad.’
‘You’ve got to talk to
