Good Girl Bad (13)

He just wants to find Tabby.

And he can’t quite make the link that problems in the past might be related to problems in the present.

The police have not been very helpful. As far as they’re concerned, Tabby is sixteen. Nate and Rebecca can hate it all they like, but legally, Tabby is over the age of consent. She can run off with Leroy if she wants to.

But what if she didn’t want to?

Even the dog, they just shrugged. Was he killed, or did he have a heart attack?

There’re no bodies, no evidence of foul play. Only Rebecca’s insistence that Leroy and Tabby weren’t really getting along, and they would never have gone off together voluntarily.

Nate wonders how much he can trust Rebecca’s judgment, though. She doesn’t have the greatest track record of emotional intelligence when it comes to family matters.

Does he, though?

“Walk me through it again,” he says now, to Rebecca. “Sunday night. Sunday afternoon, even. Try to remember everything.”

Any other day, Rebecca would have told him to go to hell. But today, their daughter and her husband are missing, and she can’t think of anything else to do so early on a Tuesday morning.

“Let’s get coffee,” Nate says, and she follows him obediently to the kitchen, and he marvels again at all the different Rebeccas she manages to keep inside her skin.





“We did have a fight.”

Nate looks up from his half-empty coffee, the movement sharp, but his expression careful.

Rebecca had given him the run-down: it had been a quiet day. They’d had friends over the night before, so they were a bit hungover. Genevieve had spent nearly all day in bed, reading. They were having a weird cold snap, not that unusual in Melbourne at this time. But they were all a bit lethargic.

Tabby had been studying. Her year ten final exams were only a week away. She’d been working hard, with little prompting from Rebecca.

Rebecca had been gardening, half-heartedly. Leroy had spent the morning reading the paper, and then had gone to the markets to get food for a roast.

She left out that she and Leroy had bickered a little—there were leftovers from the night before. She’s always extravagant when they have guests. There’s always leftovers. And Rebecca thought cooking more food was a waste of time and money. She wanted Leroy to help her in the garden. After he’d gone, she pulled weeds out with unusual ferocity, muttering to herself.

So she was in a bad mood. She can see that. But what follows her bad moods is always less clear to her. It’s uncomfortable, and blurry, and she shuts it down, often with the same phrase, and she never looks more closely at it, and she never tries to change it, and sitting opposite her, Nate doesn’t even need her to tell him anymore, he can imagine it exactly, can see it perfectly clearly in his mind’s eye, and he shrivels inside a little bit, because he knows this story, he knows it so well, and yet he did nothing, nothing, nothing, to make it better.

He takes a deep breath, though, and is just about to ask more questions, when Rebecca says, “It was nothing. She disrespected me. I shouted a bit, and she went to her room. She said some awful things. I would have left her. But Leroy went to see if she was all right. I went to bed. And when I woke up, they were gone.”





11





The girl sits on her bed quietly.

She can hear her parents arguing, trying to maintain hushed voices in their room. Occasionally one of them forgets, their voices rising to an exaggerated hiss with sharp edges and pointy inflections, which carry easily to her.

Their bedroom is not so far from hers.

She tries to do the right thing. She tries to help, to be useful. She offers to babysit her younger sister, and make dinner, even to brush her mother’s hair.

She’s always getting it wrong somehow, though.

This afternoon, her mother had just looked through her, as though she didn’t exist, and she wonders what it is she did wrong, this time. Did she not put her breakfast bowl in the sink? She knows she spilt the milk, but she is sure she cleaned it up and there was no mess left, none at all, she is sure of it.

She must have done something wrong, though, and if she could just work it out, if she could just try a bit harder, she knows that she could please her mother, and her parents would stop fighting, and they could be happy, and go to the park, like the families she sees out the car window when they drive to the supermarket.

They drive past, and they never stop.

At least, they used to. Now, they don’t even take her to the supermarket. Sometimes, she’ll leave her bedroom and find that they are gone. When she asks later, timidly, where they went, they’ll tell her the supermarket, and seem not to even notice that their children might be afraid, left at home alone.

She tries so hard. And it’s not easy to be the best at everything, at school, at home. But if she just tries harder, if she just does her very best, she knows she can make them happy, and her mother will smile at her, and hold her, and laugh with her in bed on Saturday mornings, and everything will be okay.

Now, she rises quietly from her bed. She starts to order the things in her room, folding clothes that she’d left on the floor, placing them neatly back in drawers. It doesn’t matter if they’re clean or dirty, so long as the floor is clean, everything put away in its place.

She wipes down her desk with a tissue, neatly lining up her pencils, and when everything is perfect, she slips into bed with her sister, who is huddling under the covers, blocking out the anger, the fight, the coldness in their home.