Saving Francesca (13 page)

At the end we take a bow, and for the rest of the day whenever someone from drama class walks past me in the corridor, it’s hard not to grin.

And being that happy makes me feel guilty. Because I shouldn’t be. Not while my mum is feeling the way she is. How I can dare to be happy is beyond me, and I hate my guts for it.

I hate myself so much that it makes my head spin.

At times, the house becomes a thoroughfare of my mum and dad’s world, and as people pass through I hope that one of them has the secret to Mia’s recovery. Some of them we see almost every day. People like Freya, the “bastard magnet,” who cheerfully breezes through the house, chatting to Mia as if nothing’s wrong. I like it when Freya comes over. It reminds me of old times, when she and Mia would almost be speaking over each other to get a word in. Sometimes Freya takes her for a drive to get her out of the house and I find myself waiting for a miracle, like them walking through the front door, laughing hysterically over some story Freya has told. But it’s only Freya’s voice I hear each time and she and I will exchange looks and sometimes there are tears in her eyes because I know that she needs Mia to come back as well.

This is my theory. Mia’s not going to go out into her world, so I decide that I need to bring her world to her. She has so many people in her life and I don’t know where to start: school, university, work, family friends, colleagues, past teachers, past students. I begin with the people she works with, the ones my dad doesn’t relate to.

Sometimes she used to fight with him about them because, as independent as she is, when she went out she wanted my dad and her to be together.

“Go out with them on your own. I’ll look after the kids,” he’d argue.

“That’s a cop-out,” she’d say. “I go out with your friends.”

“Because my friends are our friends.”

“Mine could be ours if you gave them a chance.”

“I have given them a chance. I don’t watch enough public television and foreign films for them, and all they talk to me about is soccer and the Cosa Nostra.” He’d adopt an appalling polished Australian accent, and even Mia would fight hard not to laugh at that. He’d grab her mouth with his hand, making a smile out of it.

“Can we have a maturity moment?” she’d say. “Every time I go to one of these things, I feel like a widow, Rob.”

“That’s probably because I feel dead when I’m around them.”

They’re weird, in a way. Sometimes I used to hear them at night and they’d be killing themselves laughing after having a heated argument over dinner. Most of all, she’d be sounding him out. He knows her department by heart. He knows who’s lazy, and the strengths and weaknesses of every student in her tutorials. Sometimes we’d be out in Norton Street and bump into one of her students and he’d say, “Oh yeah, Katrina Griffiths, who wrote the paper on McDonald’s imperialism.” Or else at night they’d talk about what he was working on—the Pirelli house or the Jameson carport. They’d debate about whether he should hire someone else, and they’d talk about going overseas.

“I can’t leave my mother,” she’d say. “They won’t give me time off work. Frankie just started Year Eleven.”

“There’ll always be an excuse not to relax, Mia.”

“It’ll cost us at least ten thousand in airfares alone.”

“We’ll leave the kids with my mother.”

Thanks
,
Dad
.

“No way. I couldn’t do that.”

Mia hated being separated from us.

“Luca would be fine but Frankie would never cope,” she’d add.

Thanks
,
Mum
.

My dad liked doing things with her on their own, whereas Mia always had an entourage. Luca, me, Angelina when she was growing up, my nonna now that Nonno’s dead, my aunt, Mia’s friend from the university who couldn’t cope with a breakup. Mia was the mother hen, taking in the problems and issues of all around her.

I’d hear her and her friends talk about men. Freya, the “bastard magnet,” would talk about her relationship with her current bastard. “I tell him my problems and he thinks he has to solve them,” Freya would say, “when all I want to do is verbalize how I’m feeling.”

“Robert doesn’t try to solve things,” Mia would tell them. “He just tells me, ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’ ” She’d say it almost critically, and I couldn’t understand why. It’d make me angry. As if she’d have to find something negative just to fit in with the whining.

Telling Mia’s world about what’s happening isn’t easy. They either don’t get it or don’t want to. Maybe I’m just not selling it well.

“Mia’s depressed,” I say.

“Tell me about it. I can’t get through this work and the department expects miracles.” (The any-problem-you-have-mine’s-bigger work colleague.)

“Mia’s depressed,” I tell the next one.

“Nothing to worry about. She’ll snap out of it. You know Mia. Thrives on drama. Tell her to ring me.” (The practical university friend who thinks you should be able to juggle everything and not complain.)

“Mia’s depressed.”

“Well, I can’t say I blame her, Francesca. She does everything around there.” (Another of Mia’s work colleagues. Hates my father.)

“Mia’s depressed.”

“That’s what happens when you take on too much.” (Mia’s school friend. Gloating voice—a “you sucker” to women who take on heaps and try to have it all. Crucify them! Crucify them!)

Some promise me the moon, others nothing. But by the time I get off the phone, I feel a hundred years old.

chapter 16

I GET STUCK
with Thomas Mackee one afternoon at the bus stop. Luca’s at choir practice, and the girls have got various commitments. We stand alongside each other in silence for a while. Then our bus comes along and the psychotic bus driver chooses not to stop for us and we exchange glances. Suddenly we can’t pretend the other is not there.

“Why did you ask me to dance in drama?” I ask him.

He rolls his eyes. He does it exaggeratedly and I regret the question.

“Before your feelings get out of hand,” he tells me, “I have to warn you that you’re not my type.”

This time I roll my eyes.

“It was like you were asking me to,” he says. “Anyway, I felt like a bloody idiot out there on my own and I thought, who do I want to drag down with me?”

“So why drag me down?”

“Why did you say yes?” he asks.

“You made me laugh and I haven’t laughed for, like, ages.”

“Because you’re a grinner,” he confirms.

“Am I?”

“Yep. Not often, but once in a while you have this goofy grin,” he tells me. “Most chicks have great smiles, even Finke has a killer of a smile when she forces herself, but you have a goofy grin. See, you’re doing the goofy grin now.”

I try hard not to, but the more I try the goofier it feels.

“It’s not the way to go if you’re trying to attract a guy,” he advises me, but he’s not taking himself seriously and he makes me laugh.

For a moment I can’t help thinking how decent he is—that there’s some hope for him beyond the obnoxious image he displays. Maybe deep down he is a sensitive guy, who sees us as real people with real issues. I want to say something nice. Some kind of thanks. I stand there, rehearsing it in my mind.

“Oh my God,” he says, “did you see that girl’s tits?”

Maybe not today.

One of Mia’s colleagues comes and visits, and they’re in her room for hours. Sue is the head of Mia’s department at the university and kind of scares the hell out of us all. Like with my dad, Mia has this way of making people want to hog her, and I always feel that in the eyes of her colleagues, Luca and I are like the enemy who take up too much of her time.

Afterward, I make Sue tea and she talks to me as if I’m an adult and I want to tell her that I’m not.

“Why hasn’t she seen a doctor yet?” she asks almost reprimandingly.

“She has. At the very beginning.”

“Has she gone back?”

“My dad says they’ll only put her on antidepressants.”

“Your father doesn’t wake up in the morning and see the world through gray-colored glasses. Antidepressants aren’t the only answer, but they’ll get her on her feet, and from there, she has to take over.”

“She doesn’t even take Tylenol,” I begin.

“And I saw the plate of food you had in there for her,” she continues, as if I haven’t spoken. “You don’t give a starving person a feast. It’ll kill her. Begin simply.”

I know she’s trying to be kind, but Sue is practical. She treats everyone like an adult, except for my father, who she treats like a child.

“Has she lost her job?” I ask.

“No. But her job is the last thing on her mind.”

“Is it because of Luca and me . . .”

“You and your brother have to stop thinking she’s there to be everything to you.”

We’re her children,
I want to say.
That’s what children do, isn’t it?

But I can’t imagine Sue’s children being like that. She taught them independence, and now they’re living in London and Toronto. Mia couldn’t even cope with me living in the next suburb with my grandmother.

The next day, when I get home from school, I tap on the door and let myself in. I bring in chamomile tea and toast, and for a moment or two I potter around her. One day I’d like to understand this thing, this ugly sickness that’s been sleeping inside of her like a cancer. I wonder if it’s sleeping inside of me. I wonder if it was in her when she was sixteen, or if it appeared much later. Looking at it from a distance makes me hate her for being weak. Up close, I’ve never loved her so much in my life.

I lie alongside her on the bed, where papers brought by Sue, the day before, are scattered all over the place.

“Have you done your homework?” she asks, because I think it’s the easiest question for her.

“Most of it. Have you done yours?”

She gives a little sound, like a laugh.

“I’ll do it for you,” I say. “You used to let me mark your multiple choice stuff.”

“That was when I taught Year Eight. It’s different.”

She hardly has the energy to speak, but I think she wants the company. The contact with the outside world, without having to involve herself in it.

We lie there for a moment in silence.

“Was Sebastian’s a mistake?” she asks me quietly.

I don’t know how to answer that. I thought I knew the answer, but now it’s not so easy to say. So I tell her about the Sebastian girls, and by the time I’ve spoken for an hour I realize that I can’t work them out. Why does Siobhan Sullivan hang out with us, when she’s accepted by so many other groups? Any day now she’s going to point out how uncool we are and move on. And Tara Finke? The guys in the social justice group hang around her like flies, and as gracious as she is with them, as passionate as they allow her to be without laughing at her like we do sometimes, she’s always back with us, arguing, bitching, yelling. It’s weird, but I think we’re kind of a legitimate group.

I know that Mia thinks that as well, because she nods. In the past, I’d lie on her bed and
her
voice would soothe me. Now it seems like the other way around.

And then I tell her about Will Trombal and about dancing in drama and Shaheen from biology and Eva from economics and Ryan from English and Will Trombal. I tell her about the pathetic Brolin and the lovely Brother Louis and the harassed but kind Ms. Quinn and Will Trombal.

And when I finish speaking, I kiss her cheek and I take away the tray.

And it’s empty.

That’s how we begin.

chapter 17

ON THE WAY
to the bus stop from school, we walk past this young homeless guy sitting outside a major department store with a cardboard sign saying,
I’m Hungry. Please Feed Me
. Brian Turner from legal studies yells out, “Get a job,” and Siobhan laughs and Tara goes on about it all the way to the bus stop.

By the time we sit in the back row of the bus, she and Siobhan have had an argument about it, and the four of us sit in silence. Thomas Mackee is with us as well, because there’s nowhere else for him to sit.

The girl in front of us, who hasn’t shut up the whole time, stands up and waves to her friends as she gets off the bus.