Chapters (37)
‘I knew there was something she wanted to say. I knew weeks ago.’ Ali suddenly grabbed Michael’s arm. ‘How pregnant is she?’
‘Six weeks, she thinks.’
‘Shit. Shit!’ Ali lay down now, and moaned into her hands. ‘That weekend with a crowd at Victor Harbor in September? She was weird when she came home from that, wasn’t she? Ran upstairs, laid low for the rest of the evening. Ah, God. Why didn’t I make her talk to me?’ She lay still for a while, seeing Stella in her mind, the girl’s expression this morning as she left the house, a kind of resigned sullenness, and herself, Ali, dealing with emails, organising her diary to fit in a flight to Sydney, barely looking up from the screen of her phone as her daughter left the house. She sat up. Michael waited, watching her.
‘OK, I’m putting all work on hold,’ she said. ‘This book, it’s taking up too much headspace, and the publisher’s always on at me to do this or that, and meanwhile there was Stella, getting pregnant, and I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend.’
‘Um … she doesn’t,’ Michael said.
‘What?’
‘It was a one-off,’ Michael said. ‘She wouldn’t tell me the boy’s name, said it didn’t matter.’
‘Oh, good God. I need to talk to her.’ Ali got to her feet. ‘Where was she when she rang?’
‘No,’ Michael said, patting the air between them as if this way he could quell her urgency. ‘I’ve told her we’ll see her later, at home, sort it all out then. There’s no point rushing headlong into it, Ali. I’m going back to the hospital now, you do whatever you’d planned to do today, and we’ll deal with it later.’
He smiled at her with a kind of studied empathy, and she saw he was using his bedside manner on her, calming her ragged nerves with professional kindness. She felt a sudden wild impulse to push him over, dirty his chinos, but instead she said, ‘No, I reckon I’ll go find her now,’ and before he could object again she set off at a clip, cutting a diagonal line towards home across the sun-baked parklands, and Michael could only stand and watch her go.