Chapter 57

chapter fifty-seven

‘Troy thinks Dad is going to be arrested today,’ said Logan.

‘What does Troy know?’ said Indira Mallick, and she realised she’d automatically slipped into the role of supporting Logan in the ongoing competition between him and his younger brother, although only Troy openly wanted to win.

Indira and Logan sat at the glass-topped table where they used to eat dinner each night.

She’d told Logan that she was here in Sydney for a friend’s baby shower, and it was true, but she would never have flown all this way for an awful baby shower. She’d come for Logan. ‘You’re still in love with him,’ accused a friend as they cooed, ‘So cute!’ each time the guest of honour opened another gift and held it up above the proud pregnant curve of her stomach. Indira had informed her sternly that her ex-boyfriend’s mother was missing. She was here as a friend.

‘How is Amy coping?’ she asked Logan.

‘She’s okay. I think she’s actually in a session right now with her therapist, or counsellor, or whatever we’re meant to call him,’ said Logan.

‘That’s good,’ said Indira. ‘She should probably –’

She stopped herself. She was no longer a part of the Delaney family and therefore no longer entitled to an opinion about how Amy should manage her mental health.

Amy had once told Indira that she was pigeonholed because she was easily offended when she was a child and now everyone assumed she was still easily offended, which was offensive. Indira had sympathised because she too was pigeonholed by her family as the ‘clumsy one’, even though she was no longer especially clumsy.

She picked up one of the ‘missing person’ flyers on Logan’s table. It was too busy, with too many different typefaces. It broke her heart that she hadn’t been the one to design it. The photo showed Joy wearing a t-shirt that Indira had given her. It was screen-printed with three big gerberas. She and Joy had a shared fondness for the flower. They bought little gerbera-themed gifts for each other.

‘Do you want any help putting these flyers up?’ she asked Logan.

‘It’s okay,’ said Logan. ‘They’re everywhere. I feel like we’ve done everything possible to get the word out there. She’s just . . . vanished.’

Indira looked at Joy’s smiling face. Logan’s mother would never deliberately stay out of contact for this long. She was the sort of person who kept effortlessly in touch with everyone. Even after Indira broke up with Logan, Joy had continued to send the occasional non-intrusive text or email, filled with exclamation marks and emojis.

Logan didn’t seem at all like his mother, but in this they were alike: he was good at keeping in touch with people too. He was the friend who went around to people’s houses and helped build their back deck or fix their drainage problem. He was the friend people called when they’d locked themselves out of their house, or when an appliance exploded. She should never have called him passive. Passive people didn’t spend entire weekends helping their friends build back decks.

He was a good person.

She experienced the truth of this like a physical injury. A literal twist of the heart.

‘Are you okay?’ asked Logan.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Indira. ‘I’m worried about you.’

She put her hand on top of his. He looked terrible. He was always scruffy – scruffiness was part of his identity, it was how he differentiated himself from his brother (that was her theory, of which he did not approve) but this was a new level of scruffiness. His eyes were red, his skin blotchy, his jeans sagged around his waist like an old man’s trousers. He must have lost weight.

Seven months ago, she’d broken up with Logan because she’d felt trapped, pleasantly trapped, but trapped nonetheless, in a perfectly nice life, living in this perfectly adequate townhouse, going to the same perfectly adequate Mexican restaurant every Friday night. It wasn’t that she loved change. The thing she most disliked in Logan was the thing she most disliked in herself. She too loved the seductiveness of a daily routine.

Logan didn’t chase her to the airport like a scene in a movie. Naturally he didn’t.

But then: nothing happened. Her life didn’t magically become different. She was still Indira. Just alone and lonely. She missed him. She missed sex. She had assumed sex was like chocolate – if it wasn’t in the house she wouldn’t think about it.

It had begun to occur to her that she wasn’t trapped because of Logan; she’d been trapped in her own Indira self, like everyone was trapped in their own selves.

‘What about Troy and Brooke? How are they?’ She could feel the question everyone was surely asking unpleasant and sour in her mouth: Do you think your dad did it?

‘Troy and Brooke aren’t speaking,’ said Logan. ‘It’s like Troy thinks he’s proving his loyalty to Mum, and Brooke thinks she’s proving her loyalty to Dad.’

‘And you?’ said Indira. ‘What about you? Are you okay?’

‘I’ll be fine.’ He suddenly flipped his hand over and held on to hers. She watched his face. A muscle in his jaw shuddered. He squeezed her hand once, tightly, and then he returned it to her, carefully and gently across the table.

She held the released, rejected hand with her other hand as if to comfort it.

Logan tugged hard on his earlobe. ‘Are you happy?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to talk about me right now, not when you’re going through this terrible thing.’

‘Are you painting?’

‘Am I painting?’ She gave a half-laugh. ‘I’m all talk and no action when it comes to painting, you know that.’

‘That’s because you need a studio,’ said Logan urgently.

‘Sure, Logan,’ said Indira. ‘That’s what I need.’

‘You need somewhere like this,’ said Logan. ‘Just for example.’

He opened his laptop and clicked on a real estate website.

‘What’s this?’ Indira pulled the laptop towards her and her elbow knocked against the cup of tea she’d been drinking. Logan caught it before it spilled, with practised ease, as if he’d known that was going to happen.

‘It’s a three-bedroom house,’ said Logan. ‘It has a granny flat out the back. The light is beautiful.’

Indira stared without comprehension at the screen.

‘Sorry, Logan, I don’t quite get –’

‘I looked at it just before Mum went missing.’ Logan tapped his finger on the screen. ‘It’s further out from the city but it would be worth it for more space.’

Had his anxiety about his mother made him lose his mind?

‘I also bought you a ring,’ he said. ‘It’s in my sock drawer.’

She stared at him.

‘Obviously I’m not proposing. Not now. Not when my father is about to be arrested for murdering my mother. It’s just that you’re here, looking . . .’

He gestured up and down at her body as if it were obvious what he wanted to say. She looked down at herself, mystified. She was wearing a comfortable shift dress that he must have seen a hundred times before. Her nose was red around the nostrils from a cold last week.

‘Looking so bloody beautiful,’ he said, and his voice broke on the word ‘beautiful’. Indira was stunned. She had never seen him cry. Not even close.

When they first started dating, he used to call her beautiful all the time and she’d snap at him because it embarrassed her, it made her feel as if she needed to urgently call out to a derisive audience, Don’t laugh, I know it’s not true! So eventually he stopped saying it.

She’d successfully trained her beautiful boyfriend not to call her beautiful.

Logan rested his head in his hands. His voice was muffled. ‘Sorry. I don’t know why I said that. It just came out. I’m so tired.’

‘It’s okay.’ She put her hand on the back of his neck and leaned in close to his ear. ‘Everything is going to be okay.’

She didn’t know that, of course. All she knew was that right now she was going to make him eat, and then sleep, and then she was going to stay by his side for whatever horrendous or wondrous things lay ahead.