Chapter 8 — My Brother Is Dead

(Laura)

I don’t answer him. The tap is still running in the bathroom, and I can hear Chris humming the theme song from the cartoon he isn’t supposed to watch on school nights, and the sound is so ordinary I want to scream.

“Wait there,” I tell Matteo, and shut the wooden door in his face.

I lock it. Then I stand in my own hallway with my palm flat against the door and count to five, like I tell the residents to when they get up too fast and the room starts to spin.

Chris has toothpaste on his chin now instead of crumbs. I wipe it off with my thumb, steer him into his blue bedroom and tuck him under the doona with the book he’s picked, the one about a shark who’s scared of water, which he has picked every night this week.

“Who was that man?” he asks.

“Nobody you need to worry about. He’s got some grown-up stuff to talk about, and then he’s going.”

“He talks like Antonio.”

It takes everything I’ve got to keep smiling. “A bit, yeah.”

“Is he Antonio’s friend?”

“No, mate. Read your shark book. I’ll come and say goodnight soon, and if you’re asleep I’ll kiss you anyway and you won’t even know.”

“I’ll know,” he says with total confidence, and opens the book.

I pull his door to, leaving it open a crack because he hates the dark. I take my phone from the kitchen bench and slip it into the pocket of my work pants with my thumb resting on the screen, and I grab the house keys too. Then I unlock the front door and the security screen, step out onto the verandah and pull both doors shut behind me. Whatever this man has come to say, my son isn’t going to hear it down a hallway.

Matteo has moved to the top of the verandah steps while I was gone, putting a good two metres between himself and the door. I notice. I don’t give him any credit for it. I also notice, against my will, how the porch light catches the line of his cheekbone and the shine of his dark hair, and how the shadows make his eyes darker than they already are.

“He’s seven,” I say. “And he’s mine. That’s all you need to know about him.”

He inclines his head a fraction, accepting it, or pretending to. A lock of dark hair falls across his forehead when he does it, and my fingers twitch at my side with an urge to push it off his face that I will be taking to my grave.

“Now tell me why you’re here. And what you think you know.”

He doesn’t answer straight away. Down at the end of the street the surf is loud tonight with a change coming, and a moth is battering itself against the porch light above his head. He doesn’t seem to notice the moth. He’s looking at me with the same measured attention he gave Chris, as if he’s working out how much of what he’s brought I can carry.

“My brother is dead,” he says.

I had thought, standing in the hallway, I was ready for whatever he might say. I’m not ready for that.

“Piero.” The name is strange in my mouth. I haven’t said it out loud in eight years.

“He died almost five years ago.”

Five years. Chris was two. He was learning to say more and no and Mum, and climbing into the bath fully dressed, and I was so tired I used to fall asleep sitting up on the edge of his cot. All that time, I flinched at every tall, dark-haired man in a shopping centre crowd. I checked the locks twice before bed. I kept a speech in my head for years, the one I’d say if I ever stood in front of him again, and I polished it in the shower until every word was sharp. And for five of those years, there was nobody left to say it to.

Relief comes first. It’s so big and so heavy I put a hand on the verandah post to steady myself. He can’t walk into my life. He can’t turn up at Chris’s school. He can’t ever, in any version of the world, find us.

The anger arrives right behind it. He got to die without hearing a single word of that speech. He got nearly three more years of his life after what he did, and then he got to stop, and I’ll never get to make him look at me. Whatever answer I wanted from him, I’m not going to get it now. Nobody is going to make him say it.

I don’t cry. I’m not sad, and I refuse to let this man think I am.

“How?” I ask.