The Paris Wedding, page 25
Rachael saw tears in Tess’s eyes. Any retorts she might have thrown at her sister to mind her own business dissolved like rain clouds in a dry year. She knew how proud Tess was to be a farmer’s wife, and now that life was falling away from under her. Rachael could understand what that was like. For the first time, she saw Tess’s fear and hurt and uncertainty. That her intrusions were a way of controlling the things she could while being at the mercy of everything else.
Rachael counted her own blessings. Joel was right—this farm was doing okay. She might have wished to reclaim her lost years or go to university, but she’d made a grave mistake in Paris, and those dreams were the price. Her mother had made a good life for herself here on the farm. Maybe it was time to give in and make peace with that.
Rachael let the tension out of her body and conceded. “Maybe you’re right. I know it was a while ago, but what was that you mentioned about Joel’s cousin?”
Tess paused, clearly flummoxed. “I thought you’d forgotten about that.”
Rachael firmly closed the door to their mother’s room. “Maybe you could set us up after all.”
* * *
“His name’s Harrison. He’ll call you,” a delighted Tess told Rachael after she’d hung up the phone not ten minutes later.
Harrison did, before the hour was out. Rachael wasn’t sure if he was overly keen or just scared witless of Tess, but on the phone he had a deep voice and sounded amiable enough. She was slightly encouraged.
“I’m sorry, the plant’s about to start,” she had to say when he asked when they could meet. “It’s going to be flat out for a while from tomorrow.”
“How about dinner today, then?”
Rachael glanced at Tess, who was hovering in the doorway, and agreed. They arranged to meet up in Parkes for an early café dinner.
Harrison rolled up in a dusty truck wearing a good checked shirt with his hair still wet from the shower. “You must be Rachael,” he said, climbing down. He wasn’t bad-looking. Nice eyes, and he smelled of aftershave and soap. “Thanks for making it short notice. Might not have managed to meet up for weeks otherwise. I know how it can get around plant.”
“Must be a good sign,” Rachael said with a small kernel of hope.
They took a table, talking shop because that was safe. Rachael could hear herself speaking about the farm, about the advantages of dedicated tramlines or their weed-control regimen, but she wasn’t quite within her own body. She wished she wasn’t constantly reminded of how this wasn’t Paris and it wasn’t Antonio sitting across from her. Her heart dipped a little each time she thought of him.
“Jailhouse Rock” began pumping through the café speakers and Harrison—or rather Harry as he’d asked to be called—said, “Elvis is a big thing around here. I looked in on the festival back in January. Never seen anything like it.”
“It’s a Parkes thing,” Rachael said. “Up in Milton we’ve got Bernie Collins and his bakery.”
“That’s Blue Suede Choux, right? I remember it. Did you know they had an Elvis dinner out at the big Dish? It was good fun. Nice to be in a place with some personality.”
Rachael smiled around the ache in her chest. She loved home, but Paris had shown her how much bigger the world was. The conversation faltered for ten minutes.
“Tess says your farm’s been running no-till for a good while,” Harry finally said, trying to steer back to neutral ground.
They recovered slightly, talking about the relative virtues of plowing versus not, and then more about Harry’s cherry orchard, then a bit more about their families.
Then he said, “Tess mentioned you just had a trip to Paris.”
Rachael pushed her half-eaten pasta around her plate. “Yes.”
“Must have been quite something.”
“It was.”
He waited expectantly, but Rachael was incapable of describing any of the things she’d seen. It all reminded her of Antonio, or Yvette, or that little dressmaking studio near the Arc de Triomphe. Her reluctance put him at a distance and so the little kernel of hope never germinated. Conversation dwindled until she and Harry were both politely looking out the windows, or talking about the weather. Rachael knew it was her fault; she kept imagining herself in Tess’s life—on the farm with a husband and children—and couldn’t shake a need to run away.
They parted amiably, but without organizing to meet again.
* * *
“What happened?” Tess asked when Rachael walked in the door. “I thought you’d be out for hours yet.”
“It was okay,” Rachael said, but her disappointment was dark and deep. She went to her room and didn’t come out, despite Tess sending Joel to ask if she wanted tea.
Tomorrow’s work loomed. Rachael paced around like a prisoner, straightening her bedspread, reorganizing her drawers. Finally, needing some kind of catharsis, she dropped to the carpet and opened her dresser’s bottom drawer. She pulled out a photo of her and Matthew from their last school dance. Rachael looked absurdly young, her face soft and round and unlined. Her cheeks didn’t have that roundness now, and a curved line was etched from the outside edge of her nose down to her mouth.
She put the photo aside and dug underneath for more. She found Matthew, Bernie, and a group of friends all dressed as Elvis; and another of Matthew in just his shorts about to jump into the waterhole, head back and arms spread, brave and carefree.
She pulled out the pile of letters. Some were just notes they’d passed in school; others were from the first half of the year he went away, when Rachael had written every week and so had he . . . at first. After a while he’d argued that email was so much easier, even though the farm’s connection was often on the blink. She reread some of them, but couldn’t feel any fondness now. They just sounded immature and dreamy, thoughts from another life.
She added them to the photos, and the rest of the drawer followed: little velvet bags and boxes of jewelry he had given her, a smooth river stone she’d picked up the first time they’d gone to the waterhole, a dozen other obsessive reminders of their relationship.
What a joke. Matthew had never apologized for his actions, for misleading her. Had never even tried to make it right.
In the very bottom of the drawer was Matthew’s senior jersey, carefully folded and wrapped in acid-free tissue paper. He’d given it to her when he was accepted into medical school, the same night they’d made love out in the field. Rachael had fallen asleep holding it for months afterward. Now, she didn’t want to touch it. It smelled of the same cologne he’d been wearing in Paris.
She bundled all of the keepsakes into a bag, wanting to burn them. And yet she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Despite everything—leaving her, lying to her, leading her on, undoing all her chances of something new—she remembered him sitting in that rowboat and saying he still loved her. All the wrongs he’d done her should have burned him out of her like fire through stubble. Instead, the sadness of what could have been, and her own lack of insight, lingered.
Rachael put the bag back in the drawer. She would keep it to remind her in five years, in ten, in twenty, what a folly it was to think you could go back.
She stood and stretched. On the dresser was a framed photo of her and Sammy as teenagers, gray with mud after swimming in a low dam, both squinting their eyes and grinning at the camera. For the third time, she picked up her phone, and again the call switched straight to voice mail. Rachael hung up—she’d already left two messages—and sank onto her dresser chair. She was rigid with jet lag and despair, incapable of sleep. She might be able to bear losing everything but the farm, but not without the friend she’d had since school.
She tore out three pages from an old exercise book and uncapped a pen with fingers that trembled with fatigue. Dear Sammy, she began.
An hour later, the letter was done. Rachael pushed it into the pocket of her jeans. Tomorrow, she told herself, after the long day of planting, she would drive over to Sammy’s. If her friend wouldn’t talk to her, maybe she would read the letter instead.
* * *
Rachael woke at dawn. When she went outside, the sky was all gold and pale blue, the fields rolling away all around, the air crisp on her cheeks as the birds sang their chorus. Planting day had always inspired her—going out and running over every inch of the fields, coming back in the breaks to update her mother on their progress. In earlier years, Marion had watched with binoculars from the verandah, or even hobbled down to the shed with the aid of her walking stick, bringing a thermos of tea and a packet of cookies, which Rachael, hot and dry, would polish off without guilt. Last year, Marion had slept until after noon, and Rachael had paid a seasonal worker to take over in the middle of the day so she could get her mother up, showered, dressed, and seated in her chair. Still, she had determinedly worked until dark.
Now, despite the glorious day, Rachael could summon neither inspiration nor enthusiasm. She was running purely on habit. She checked the weather reports, and was backing the tractor to hitch the drill when Joel came down to the shed with two mugs of coffee.
“Keen,” he said. “You want me to kick off?”
Rachael climbed down from the cab. “No need. I’ll take it until ten, then could you take over for thirty? I’ll take it back after that.”
“You’ll need a longer break than half an hour.”
She paused. “Well, maybe an hour, and I can make a trip into Milton.”
She didn’t make it through to ten. Just before nine, when she turned the drill for a run back toward the house, she saw Sammy’s green hatch with the mismatched door panel coming down the driveway. She instantly killed the tractor engine and was down from the cab in a second, running across the field. The car pulled up on the drive, and Rachael skidded to a stop when Marty unexpectedly climbed out.
He squinted at her like someone who’d been flushed out of a dark place by torchlight, his cap pulled low, brow furrowed. But unlike the last time Rachael had seen him, he was also clean-shaven, his shirt tucked in, and clearly on a mission.
“Have you seen Sammy?” were his opening words. “She didn’t come back last night.”
How much had Sammy told him?
“Ah, no.”
“Shit. I thought she’d be here. I’ve checked everywhere else.”
“I haven’t seen her since the plane from Paris. I don’t know if she said anything, but we had a fight. She hasn’t been answering my calls.”
Marty took off his cap and rubbed at his hair. “Us too, yesterday. She wasn’t happy after she got back. Did something happen over there? She rang me almost every day and said she was having a great time. Made a change from the last year. She’s been upset about this business thing for a while, you know, ’cause money’s been tight and we had to wait, but I thought she was over it. I don’t understand.”
“Um . . .” Rachael couldn’t say anything about Peter; that wasn’t her place. “I’m not sure. She didn’t say anything?”
“Not a word. Took off after the spat. I guess she caught a lift with someone. I mean, it’s Milton. Where’s she gonna go?”
“Did you check at the motel?” Rachael asked. “And with Bernie?”
“Yeah. The motel says she’s supposed to be on later today, but Bernie says he hasn’t seen her since they drove back from Sydney. The cops reckon it’s too soon to worry, especially as it’s happened before.”
“What did— Wait, it’s happened before?”
Marty shrugged, then looked away, embarrassed. “Uh, yeah. Twice in the last few months. But she said she’d stayed at the motel.”
Rachael put a hand to her forehead. She stank of sweat and dirt, and dust and straw coated the inside of her nose. Her hands were numb from the vibration in the cab. She glanced at the drill, immobile in the field, at the acres and acres left to go. And yet all she could think was, Where the hell was Sammy? She obviously hadn’t said anything to Marty about Peter or the baby.
“I’ll look,” she said. “I’ll call you.”
Marty thanked her and turned for the car.
The letter was a lump in Rachael’s pocket. She dropped her pretense of calm and made for the big shed, where she ran straight into Joel.
“Whoa,” he said. “Don’t tell me the drill’s packed it in?”
“Sammy’s missing. I know there’s so much to do, but no one’s seen her and—”
“You want to split?” Joel said, holding up the keys for the truck. “Needs fuel anyway.”
“You’re the best,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.
Two minutes later, she was flying down the drive, alive for the first time since Paris. She couldn’t do anything about her own wrongs, but she could find Sammy.
* * *
Rachael’s first idea was to head to the motel in Parkes and wait for Sammy to come in for work.
“Called in sick,” complained the owner, who was manning the reception himself and seemed rather oversize for the job, his generous gut upsetting the printer tray every time he turned for his coffee cup. “Though can’t say I’m that convinced.”
“When did she call?”
“An hour ago. Which gives me such ample time to call in someone else.”
Rachael left him to his sarcasm. While she was relieved Sammy wasn’t lying in a ditch somewhere, she still wasn’t answering her phone. Her parents lived in Bathurst, but Rachael knew Sammy wouldn’t go there even if she was paid. But after fueling the pickup and visiting all her favorite places in Parkes, Rachael was running out of ideas. Maybe Sammy had bought a bus ticket after all.
She even drove out to the Dish, and found the visitor center deserted except for a small clutch of tourists.
“You want to buy a ticket?” called the counter staff as Rachael stuck her head inside the theater.
In desperation, she turned back for Milton and, after a slow drive past the shops, and taking a moment to bury her shame, pulled up in the residential streets behind. Bernie answered the door wearing a half-finished rhinestone Elvis suit, a set of bifocals balanced on the tip of his sweating nose. “Rachael!” he said with a grin that held no trace of reserve or disapproval.
Rachael let go of a huge tension she’d been carrying. Even after seeing her in the lobby with Matthew, Bernie was exactly the same.
“New costume?” she asked.
“Started it yonks ago,” Bernie said, rolling a fat crystal between his fingers. “But these things and the hot glue are sending me bats. Stuck three fingers together already. Come in. I’ll put the kettle on.”
“Thanks, but I won’t stay. I’m just looking for Sammy. Marty says he can’t find her.”
“I know, he asked me already. We thought she was out at your place.”
Rachael shook her head.
“I did wonder if you’d had a tiff when she said you were making your own way home,” he added.
“Do you have any idea where—”
“Your eyes are better than mine,” Bernie interrupted, proffering the rhinestone with glue-spattered fingers. “Is that blue or cobalt?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“And this? Yellow or amber? I got the packets all mixed up.”
This was all very odd. Bernie didn’t seem at all worried about Sammy. Almost like he knew he didn’t have to be.
Rachael reached into her pocket. “Bernie, can you please give this to Sammy if you see her?”
He took the letter with his gluey right hand, then, finding it stuck, transferred it to the clean left one. He frowned. “Rach, it’s not serious, is it? This argument between the two of you?”
Rachael’s lip wavered. “I hope not. But it’s really important I find her.”
Bernie offered the letter back. “When a man gives his word not to say anything, it’s important not to break it. But if you were to ask me if I’d given Sammy a lift to the creek drive and I didn’t say anything, well, I wouldn’t have said anything, would I?”
Rachael stared at him. “Are you saying . . .”
“I’m not saying nothing,” he said, tapping his nose.
Hope bloomed in Rachael’s chest. “If you see Beverley, tell her I’m sorry too.”
“What for?” he called after her, but Rachael was already gone.
She raced the truck back home. The creek drive was one turnoff up the highway from the farm gate and had once led to a pump station at the river. The road had been disused for years and was overgrown and undrivable, but it provided an easy walking track to the waterhole if you knew where you were going. But the walk took at least half an hour.
Rachael ran to the shed and leapt on a trail bike. Across the far field, she could see Joel running a straight line with the drill, swirling dust obscuring the tractor’s wheels like a magic trick.
She pulled up at the edge of the river trees, knowing that if Sammy was here she’d have heard the bike. Rachael climbed to the highest rock over the water and scanned the area. The breeze softly whistled between the rocks, and the creek burbled into the pool. It was such a long way from the Seine: this was a wild waterway, one never likely to be settled, at least not by many. But Rachael needed only one person.
Please, she thought, please be here. She couldn’t fail at this too. A real friend would have known that something was badly wrong in Sammy’s life, and Rachael hadn’t. She would have given up again every chance she’d squandered on the Paris trip to spare Sammy feeling that she needed to run.
“Sammy!” she called.
An echo came back, but no reply.
Rachael couldn’t see any signs of someone being here—no tent or scraps or wet marks by the pool.
She climbed down and circled through the trees. The tumbled boulders and trunks made lots of blind spots, but she found nothing in any of them. Once, she thought she heard a nearby crunch of leaf litter, but when she stopped to listen, nothing else came.
Just as she was climbing back, she spotted a patch of freshly turned earth the size of a scraps burial or a bush toilet. Definitely made with a camping trowel.
“I know you’re here,” she called.
No response. Sammy clearly didn’t want to talk.
Rachael took the letter from her pocket and weighed it down with a rock in an obvious place. Then she plucked another stone from between two boulders and cast it into the water with a wish. The resulting ripples sparkled in the sun, inviting, but she had to get back. Joel had already done longer in the cab than he should have.
