The Game You Played (40 page)

I imagined Pria smiling to herself right now.

She’d lied again. She
had
been to the other side of the island. And she’d done this.

Did she guess we were coming and she wanted to play one last trick?

When I turned around, they were between me and the ocean.

Two children.

A girl with a small child on her hip, both of them bedraggled in wet underwear.

It was Jessie. And a boy with bleached-white hair and six months of growth I hadn’t witnessed.

Tommy.

Tommy, alive and staring at me curiously.

A sobbing cry tore from deep inside me.

“Phoebe?” Jessie ran halfway to me, then she stopped still, nervous and uncertain as she held Tommy out to me.

I rushed to them, encircling both of them in my arms. Tommy’s little face pressed against mine. I cried openly. I didn’t want to scare him, but I couldn’t stop myself. They were here, and I didn’t understand why, but they were here. I kissed him, kissed Jessie, kissed Tommy again.

Tommy held out his arms to me. He was shivering. As was Jessie. Stripping my overcoat off, I pulled it around Jessie’s shoulders. I shrugged off the jacket I wore underneath that, bundling Tommy in it and taking him from Jessie.

“How did you get here?” whispered Jessie, wrapping the oversize coat tightly around her.

“I finally found out what I should have known all along.” I kissed her forehead, rubbing her arm. “Let’s get you two out of the wind.”

We headed into the cave, the weight of Tommy’s body in my arms seeming strange as much as it was a remembered thing. He was bigger, his features slightly changed and matured. He’d lost the baby look, his legs losing their dimply knees. He was wearing a saturated disposable nappy. I removed it from him.

“I couldn’t get the fire started.” Jessie pointed at the crates. “There’s matches and firestarters in there, but they’re crumbly. I’m sorry. I had to take our clothes off. We got wet.”

“Don’t you be sorry.” My voice shook. “Don’t you
ever
be sorry.”

“I had to go to the toilet, and I took Tommy with me. I couldn’t leave him.” She looked behind her fearfully. “Mum is—”

“I know,” I told her. “Don’t worry. The police are on the island. They’re with your mum now.”

I heard her panting quietly in relief then, and it broke my heart.

The fire was never going to start. Everything was too damp. It was a wonder she’d even got a spark out of the pile she’d made.

Tommy twisted his head to stare up at me, a hint of doubt in his brown eyes. Pria had had him for the last six months. I needed to give him time to know me again. And this time, I’d be different.

“Where’s Luke,” I asked Jessie in a gentle tone. “What happened?”

She drew her knees up to her chest, her eyes grown distant. “He took Tommy and me onto the yacht. To call for help on the radio. And . . . to get away from my mother. She tried to stop us, but Luke pushed her, and she fell. What we didn’t know is that she’d already wrecked everything when we first got to the island. She never wanted us to leave. She’d even ripped the lifejackets on the dinghy. But Mr Basko said it was just a short trip to the yacht, and so he took us. When we got onto the yacht, we found out the rest of what Mum did.”

I hugged her, brushing wet hair back from her face.

“She smashed the radio,” Jessie told me. “And untied and cut the sails. The storm got a lot worse. Mr Basko said we had to go back to shore. It wasn’t safe. There was an extra set of lifejackets in the yacht and he put them on us. He was about to put Tommy and me back on the dinghy. I was holding Tommy while he got it ready. Then the sail swung around and hit us. We all fell into the water.”

“
No
. . .
” I breathed. The visual was too much to bear. Pria hadn’t been lying about seeing them all fall out of the yacht.

Jessie chewed her lip, her expression tense and afraid. “It was freezing. Mr Basko must have got knocked out by the sail, because he just floated away. I didn’t see him again. The waves were
scary
. I pushed Tommy to the dinghy. I couldn’t get him in. So I held him up as far as I could and shouted at him to crawl in. He did it. Then I climbed in. The yacht was filling with water, and I was worried that if it went down, it’d pull us down too. I found a knife on the dinghy, and I cut the rope. I tried to paddle the boat in, but I wasn’t strong enough to lift the paddles. The ocean took us to the other side of the island. The waves dumped the dinghy onto the rocks. I jumped out with Tommy. The boat took off again. I got our life jackets off and brought Tommy up here. I wanted to take him back to the house, but I couldn’t.
I couldn’t.
Because Mum—” Her eyes shone wetly. “So I looked for somewhere to hide.”

“You were brave, Jessie,” I told her. “So very brave. What you did—”

I could barely comprehend it. I was holding Tommy in my arms, flesh-and-blood Tommy, not a
dream Tommy
. I’d almost lost him for a second time, only I hadn’t known it. While we’d been sailing to the island, Jessie and Tommy had been fighting for their lives.

What had happened to Luke? If he was unconscious and out in an ocean in a wild storm, he couldn’t survive it. I prayed he’d woken, that the police rescue boat would find him quickly. For Tommy. I didn’t know yet if it was for me, too. My feelings towards Luke were numb, broken. And I hated him for bringing the children here.

I looked over my shoulder at the crunch of footsteps on the rocks and palm fronds.

Bernice wiped her wet eyes. I’d never seen her cry. But then, I’d shut her out of my life all these years. I hadn’t seen it because I hadn’t been there to see it.

Distant shouts carried on the wind.

The police were almost here.

Thursday

PRIA STOOD ON THE BEACH, her clothing still damp, the wind whipping her hair every which way.

Two officers stood by her, waiting for the police boat that was coming to collect her. She didn’t move an inch, as if she’d become a fixture of the island itself. I guessed the island had formed part of her over the past few months, when she’d been dreaming up her plan to take Tommy and Luke away from me, and then all the months after that when she was setting her traps. In her mind the island represented a new life, her end game.

I pulled the blanket that the police had given me around myself, heading across a sandy beach that had been scuffed by many feet. Tommy’s tiny feet had touched this sand, too.

Everyone else was already on the boat that would take us back to the mainland. Luke was on there, too. They’d found him far, far out, his face blue. In his life jacket—
thank God for the life jacket
—fully conscious but exhausted by the intense cold and his failed attempts to swim back and find Tommy and Jessie in the water. He hadn’t known they’d made it out. The rescuers had dried and wrapped him in a thermal blanket after they first found him. He’d been suffering cold exposure, but he’d recovered well. Luke had always been what my mother called an iceberg—in winter heading down for swims in the outdoor Olympic pool near Luna Park.

I had one last thing to say to Pria.

Pria bent her head slightly as I approached, her lips whitening as she pressed them hard into a thin line.

I stopped dead in front of her. “Did you want to kill me?” I said, keeping my voice steady. “When you cut the stairs, were you trying to kill me?”

The police officers glanced at each other, then lifted their chins and turned back to the ocean.

Pria didn’t answer, not that I’d expected her to. I’d just needed to say it. We’d been friends since we were nine years old. My mind was still fighting against this new perception of her, all the things she’d kept hidden from me.

I hunched my shoulders against the icy wind. Pria didn’t even seem to be feeling the cold, despite being soaked to the skin.

“I just remembered something,” I told her. “That day at number 29 was the last time we ever played
The Moose
. It was your idea. You shuffled the names and handed them out. I was you and you were me. You made sure of that. You were me from that day on, weren’t you? You never stopped playing the game.”

“I wasn’t playing a game.”

“You took my son away from me, Pria. You kept him and left me in torment.”

“I rescued him. And I rescued Luke. Luke should always have been with me. I loved him better than you.”

“They didn’t need rescuing.” My voice lost its conviction.

In all truth, I couldn’t say for sure what would have happened to Tommy had Pria not stolen him away. My rage back then had terrified even
me
. Despite the terrible things Pria did, I couldn’t say for sure that she hadn’t actually saved Tommy. And was she right about Luke? Her love wasn’t a healthy kind of love, but in some twisted way, maybe she did love him more than I was capable of.

“I know why you’re wet,” I said. “You went in the water after they fell from the yacht, didn’t you?”

She nodded vacantly. “The waves were too high. I got driven back. And then I couldn’t see any of them. I didn’t mean for any of them to die. They were supposed to come back on the dinghy.”

Pain grew hard inside me. “They almost did die out there. I can’t forgive any of the things you did. I never will.”

I turned away from her then.

As I entered the yacht, I looked for Luke first, because I knew he had Tommy. He was sitting on a bench seat, a woollen blanket around his shoulders, facing away from the island and away from Pria, his head down, his arms around Tommy in that protective way that men held their children—the gentleness of their large bodies accentuating their masculinity.

Jessie stood with Bernice at the railing, looking out at Pria’s
Ab ovo
. Walking up to Jessie from behind, I slipped my arms around her, wanting to protect her from the sight of her mother being left behind on the island, trying to urge her away. But when I caught the expression on her small, cold-pinched face, I saw something that I could only describe as
release
. The usual quick, nervous look was gone from Jessie’s eyes. What I’d always thought was Jessie was not really Jessie.

I didn’t know what she’d been through being Pria’s daughter. And I didn’t know why I hadn’t noticed that things weren’t right. In retrospect, there’d been signs. But I’d missed them all. I’d lived on the same street for almost the past three years, too caught up in my own life to see what was happening around me. Silently, I made a promise to Jessie that I’d be there for her now.

Jessie had been shy when the police had praised her for saving not only her own life, but Tommy’s also. The boat and the relative warmth of the cave had prevented them from becoming hypothermic. I owed her everything.

Bernice, holding the boat’s rails, glanced at me. The storm had died, the intensity of it showing on her face. Her skin was not the type to deal with extreme weather well. Her cheeks were dry and scaly, her lips almost blistered. We all had a touch of exposure, but Bernice had fared the worst. A few minutes ago, Detective Yarris told her it would be best for her to get out of the elements, but Bernice had refused. As I watched her now, she raised her face to the sky, letting the breeze stream past her. It seemed she’d become a vacuum, scooping up everything: the salty air, the restless ocean, Pria-on-the-island. She shot me a brief smile, and I smiled back, nodding. I was sure of one thing. The daughter that had left Mrs Wick’s house last night was not the same daughter that would be returning today.

Trent Gilroy approached me somewhat sheepishly. In the rush to organise the flight here, he’d forgotten to call Nan. He put his phone on speaker and dialled. Nan answered, her voice strained thin with apprehension. She and Mrs Wick were together at Nan’s house. Bernice crept across to listen.

I could imagine Nan and Mrs Wick huddled together in Nan’s tiny living room, watching the news for updates. Apparently, so far, the media knew nothing except of my escape from Greensthorne and that the police had found Bernice and me breaking into Pria’s house and had brought us into the station. He gave them a brief overview of what had happened with Bernice and me over the past few hours. And he told Nan we had Tommy.

Their cries and screams of disbelief and joy had fresh tears stinging my eyes.

When the conversation ended and he’d put his phone away again, Trent locked eyes with me, exhaling uneasily, as though he had a lot to say but couldn’t find a beginning point.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I’ve got Tommy back.”

I understood he’d done what he had to do, with the information he had to go on. I didn’t hold anything against him.

But right now, my focus wasn’t on providing a salve for his conscience.

“I think Bernice might have something to tell you,” I said carefully, meeting Bernice’s eyes.

At first, her expression froze. But then she drew in an audible breath and gave a nod.

“There’ll be lots to go over in the coming days,” said Trent. “We’ll do it all at the station, where we can get official statements.”

“This isn’t about Tommy,” I told him. “It’s about something that happened a long time ago. The after-effects of which gave me the wrong impression of Bernice. Because I didn’t know what happened.”

With a deep frown, Trent turned to Bernice.

I could see that it was taking all of Bernice’s strength as she began. “It’s about Luke’s father. And house number 29 . . . .”

Excusing myself, I headed over to the other side of the boat, to where Luke was sitting. I wanted to give her the space to tell her story without me there listening. I’d been one of the people who’d added to her pain all these years.

I’d asked Jessie to come with me, but she wanted to stay where she was, watching the island. I could see the conflict on her face as she kept her eyes fixed on her mother. Perhaps, mixed with her love for her mother was a desperate desire to be certain that she was really getting away from her.

Luke was reluctant to give Tommy up when I reached for him. Partly, I guessed, because he’d fallen into the trap laid by the person who abducted Tommy, and now he wanted to be Tommy’s human shield.

But I insisted, taking Tommy’s tiny blanket-wrapped body into my arms.

“Boat,” Tommy told me excitedly, pointing.

It was the first thing I’d heard him say.

“Yes,” I cried, trying to steady my voice and failing badly. “This is a
big
boat.”

“Phoebe . . .” Luke’s eyes swept over Tommy and me. “I didn’t know. I deserve how you feel about me. But I didn’t know.”

“Jessie told the police everything. Yes, you didn’t know. But you didn’t have to come
here
.”

“I’ll never forgive myself for that mistake.”

Tommy held my face between his hands, taking my eyes away from Luke. This had been a typical Tommy gesture when he’d wanted someone’s attention. It surprised me that he still did this. Somehow, I’d expected that all the things that used to be
Tommy
would be different now.

I kissed his warm cheek, inhaling the scent of his skin. I could feel the connection between Tommy and me—physical, visceral. He was the being that had once been inside me, part of my body, a heart beating under mine.

The wind careening into the boat made me uneasy. As though it could sweep Tommy from my arms and take him. There was far, far too much sea and sky. The clouds scudded too fast across the horizons.

“I’m taking Tommy inside,” I told Luke.

He sighed, nodding, then bent low over his knees, his head in his hands. I could guess that the storm hadn’t yet eroded in his mind.

I headed into the covered area of the boat. Seating myself on the bench seat, I held Tommy close against me, one hand stroking his newly flaxen head. From here, I had a filtered view of the island.

I vowed never to let Tommy out of my sight again—Jessie either, if I was allowed to keep her. Maybe I’d move to a country town where there weren’t too many people.

And I’d watch Tommy out in the garden with his beloved caterpillars and snails. He’d spent a long time in Pria’s trap, unable to see the insects and dig in the dirt and run his trucks over stones.

Nan would come to my new house, too. Getting her there would be like breaking in a wild horse, but once she’d settled into country life, she’d surely love it. Not that she’d ever admit it.

Luke wouldn’t fit there. Not Luke with his big dreams and his big life. And I didn’t even know whether Luke fit with
me
anymore. Did Luke and I make sense together?

Flynn wouldn’t fit there in my country house either. Flynn was a traveller in life. He couldn’t be held to one place too long. Back when we were a couple, it was understood that we were going to be free spirits. Adventurers. No children.

Six months ago, both of us had wilfully forgotten that. I remembered now what I’d told him that day over the phone, at the moment Tommy had gone missing. I’d told him
yes
. I’d planned to pack up Tommy and myself and go live with Flynn in London. It was a way out of the consuming depression and bleakness that had coloured my days.

But I couldn’t figure now why I’d agreed to such a thing. (I guessed that I was still holding the phone when I was searching for Tommy down at the harbour, and I’d dropped it in the water without noticing. Flynn, once he’d heard in the news what had happened with Tommy, must have known I wasn’t coming. He never did make contact again.)

I’d played such a terrible game, from Tommy’s first kick in my belly, making myself believe I could be who I wasn’t. Pretending and pretending and pretending until there was nothing left of me. And then pretending again with Flynn that we could pick up where we’d left off.

If I didn’t know who Phoebe Basko was, I knew even less about Phoebe Vance.

None of that mattered now, though. Tommy was back, and he was going to expand into every empty space in my life.

The distance between the boat and the island grew too great to be able to see more than a faint image of Pria, until she disappeared completely from view.