‘She’s my sister,’ she said, her eyes filling with tears. ‘She was my sister. And I want to be allowed to talk about her sometimes.’
‘I know you do.’ The dog was clambering into her lap, whining. She hated anyone to cry.
‘I thought if my boat had her name I could say it whenever I wanted without everyone going all weird.’
I stared at my great-niece and wished there was something, anything, I could say that would alleviate what I now knew she had been hiding.
‘I want to talk about her without Mum looking like she’s going to collapse or something.’
‘It’s a lovely idea, a really smart one, Hannah, but I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen. Not for a long time yet.’
When we got home, I climbed slowly up to my room and pulled out the drawer where I kept the picture of Liza with her two little girls. The edges are a little uneven, where I’d cut that man out with a little too much resolve. Liza thought the only way to protect them all was to bury Letty, I knew. It was the only way she herself could continue to live, and the two of them could exist safely.
But it wasn’t as simple as that. They couldn’t bury Letty then, and they couldn’t bury her now.
And trying to pretend otherwise was no kind of living at all.
Every afternoon I visited Nino Gaines. I brushed his hair, brought him freshly laundered pyjamas and, when I felt brave enough, I even gave him a shave – not out of sentiment, you understand, but because there wasn’t anyone else to do it. Okay, so Frank might have been able to, or John John, or perhaps John John’s wife, but the young are busy. They have their own lives to lead. So I volunteered, and sat there for a few hours every day and read him the bits I thought he would enjoy from the newspaper and occasionally berated the nurses on his behalf.
I had to come. I reckoned he hated it in there by himself, his nostrils filled with the smell of disinfectant, his strong old body hooked up to bleeping monitors, and tubes that fed him God only knows what. Nino Gaines was built for the outdoors: he had strode up and down the lines of his vines like a colossus, occasionally removing his hat as he stooped to take a closer look at this or that grape, muttering about bloom or acidity. I tried not to see him as he was now: too large for the hospital bed, but somehow diminished. It was clear he was not asleep, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself that he was.
His family were happy for me to stay; they came and left food that mouldered beside his bed. They brought photographs, in case he opened his eyes, and music, in case he could hear. They whispered together, held his hand and talked in huddles with the doctors about prognoses and medication, reassured by the EEGs, which said that his brain was working fine. I could have told them that. I talked to him: about the vineyard, how Frank had said the first buds of this year’s growth were about to show through, and that some supermarket buyer had made a special trip to see him all the way from Perth because he’d heard how good his wines were and wanted to stock them. I told him about the planning inquiry, which had received an unprecedented number of public objections, including a whole folderful from the children of the Silver Bay Elementary School who had deemed their whales more important to them than a smart new school bus. I told him about Mike and the hours he spent alone in his room on the telephone, doing what he could to stop the development. I told Nino about my sneaking affection for the young man, despite what he had brought to bear on us, and about the watchfulness in Mike’s eyes that seemed to me a reflection of what he expected of himself as much as anyone else, and the way that when they alighted on my niece I felt I might have done the right thing in letting him stay.
And I told him about the disappearing whales and the poor, beleaguered dolphins, and about my niece, who seemed so rattled by Mike Dormer’s reappearance in her life that she didn’t know what to do with herself. She was busy and she was not busy. She went out by herself on Ishmael and came back in a worse mood than when she had left. She ignored Mike at every meal, then scolded her daughter if she did the same. She was furious with both of us for allowing him to stay at the hotel. She swore she had no feelings for him – and when I finally told her she couldn’t see what was in front of her face she had the temerity to use the words ‘pot and kettle’ at me.
But she was a fool and Nino Gaines was an older fool. He lay there uncharacteristically still, the tubes flowing in and out of him. He said nothing, did nothing, just let me pour my troubles into him as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Sometimes I left feeling hopeful. Sometimes his immobility made me mad. One day the nurse caught me shouting, ‘Wake up!’ at him with such ferocity that she threatened to get the doctor.
But when I was by myself in that little room, and I lowered my cheek on to the back of his old hand – the one without the cannula fed under the near-transparent skin – it was only Nino Gaines who could feel the wet of my tears.
It rained all afternoon, as I had guessed, and by nightfall it turned into a storm. It was what my father would have called an old-fashioned storm, while my mother would mutter that it was no different from any other storm. I understood what he meant, though – it was no-nonsense, biblical weather with thunderclaps that made your teeth rattle, and sparked lightning strikes out at sea, like a wet-season storm in Darwin. When I got back from the hospital I called up the coastguard, and he said we needn’t worry too much – we’re always wary of the waterspouts, tornadoes over water, that look like God’s finger pointing from the heavens, but behave like the hand of the devil – because the worst of it had already passed. I closed the shutters, built up the log fire and Liza, Hannah and I sat in front of the television, Hannah glued to some programme she liked, Liza and I locked in our own thoughts as the wind rattled around us and the lights flickered, just to remind us that we were still at God’s mercy. At around a quarter past six, I heard noise in the hall, and stepped out to find Yoshi, Lance and Greg shedding their oilskins, bringing with them the cold damp air, their skin shining with rain.
‘You all right if we stop with you for a bit, Kathleen? Thought we’d have a drink before we set off home.’ Lance apologised for the puddle his feet had left on the floor.
‘You’ve been out all this time in this weather? Are you mad?’
‘Someone didn’t check the weather reports,’ said Yoshi, glancing at Lance. ‘We thought we’d go out a bit further, head round the coast towards Kagoorie Island, in case there were any whales round there, and it came on awful sudden.’