Good Girl Bad (17)

Now, she sits up straight, looks Leroy in the eye. “Get out of my room, Leroy,” she says. And as he stands to leave, dithering, one hand on the door, she adds, “And tell my mother to go to hell.”





15





Tuesday

In the car, Rebecca is howling.

Awkwardly leaning over the center console, Nate tries to comfort her, and she turns her face into his shoulder, her tears wetting his tee shirt in moments.

Gingerly, he strokes her hair.

“I need to identify the body. There’s no ID. But his car was there and the description matches. They want a formal statement.” Rebecca is hiccupping softly between words, her face still buried in Nate’s shoulder. She seems fragile, and childlike, a state that he can only remember seeing Rebecca in once before. When she told him about her sister.

After that one time, she had banned them discussing the topic ever again.

Now, Nate is torn between tenderness, a little tiny green shoot of something still alive regarding his feelings for Rebecca, and fear. For his daughter.

For them all.

Was Leroy abusing her? Did she finally snap, and retaliate?

Or was it something worse?

“Let’s go to the station. Or, where? Where do they want you?”

“Forensic Medicine. Then the station. I’ll direct you.” Already Rebecca is pulling herself together, straightening her shoulders, getting back in charge.

“We need to get Gen.” Nate suddenly remembers his youngest daughter, alone in the house. His heart starts hammering in his chest, and he shoves the car back into drive, screeching off the curb without waiting for Rebecca to agree with him.

Gen. Jesus.

He tries to think about how Gen will take this news. On top of Charlie. She’ll be terrified.

Did she love Leroy? Will she be devastated? Nate tries to remember how Gen related to her stepfather. He was too busy worrying about Leroy leering at Tabby to pay much attention. And he was certainly still caught up in his own complicated feelings about Rebecca moving on to be able to offer any objective guidance on how to navigate a blended family.

In amongst his fears as he belts back toward Rebecca’s house that familiar emotion starts to surface again, though.

Guilt.

Because if he is very honest about it, if he doesn’t hide anything from himself, the thing that bubbles to the surface is the knowledge, crystal clear, that he knew that his girls were not all right, and he did absolutely nothing to help them.





Nate is surprised by how calm Rebecca is after identifying Leroy’s body.

Nate himself had waited in reception, Gen slumped on him, alternately sobbing and staring blankly at the wall. She has said not a single word.

On the way from Forensic Medicine to the police station they are all quiet. Rebecca stares out the window, her face blank, her posture defeated. Nate thinks she’s in shock, and she shouldn’t be making a statement to police in this state, but ever-efficient, she wants to take action. She wants to find answers. She’s always been better at doing than feeling.

Nate’s mind wanders back to that conversation about Moira. It was the only time he’d ever seen Rebecca out of control with pain. He’s certainly seen her out of control with anger, but that day she had sobbed and sobbed, her mouth hanging open, her eyes wild. But just as quickly she’d dried her tears.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she’d said. And then, emphatically: “Ever again.”

Nate thinks perhaps he fell in love with her more that day. It was like he’d been allowed in, to something private and painful; he was trusted. And it’s hard not to move toward someone in pain, it was human nature, wasn’t it? When you share painful things, you grow closer.

In his more cynical moments, since separating, he’d wondered if it was all contrived. Theatre, for what purpose? To pull him in closer? To create the illusion of intimacy? Because he certainly never felt that close or that trusted in their marriage, ever again. He’d tried. Tried to talk about it, to understand it, to see if Rebecca really truly didn’t want to talk about it, or if it was something festering that burying only made worse, not better. But Rebecca had only gotten angry. It seemed that she really, truly, did not want to talk about it ever again.

He’d tried, hadn’t he?

He drags his thoughts back to Leroy. He was found in the Yarra River. His car was near the Tandy Bridge. Nate’s first thought was that it was an embarrassing place to die. It was a humble little bridge, there was nothing impressive about it. Did he jump? Was he pushed?

It wasn’t even that high. Why didn’t he swim?

“They’ll have more answers after the autopsy,” Rebecca had told him, her voice soft. “And after forensics go through his car.”

But of course, Tabby has been in Leroy’s car. He drives her places. She was learning to drive with Leroy. Nate still remembers the stab of jealousy he’d felt when she’d told him.

How will forensics work out if she was in his car on Sunday night? If she struggled? If he held her against her will? Nate thinks he is going to be sick.

What if Leroy didn’t take Tabby?

What if it was someone else?

In which case, where is she now?

He pulls in to the police station and takes deep breaths.

Then he flings open his door and vomits on the asphalt.