‘I know who you are.’
‘No, you don’t,’ she said and rose and brushed past him, heading for the door. ‘You see what you want to see, and that’s not me.’
‘So who are you?’
‘Heaven knows,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’m heading off into the unknown to find out.’
Nick watched her go.
He watched until Louise’s car was out of sight.
Then he walked inside and slammed the door so hard it fell off its hinges.
Great. Something to do.
Something to do to stop him following her and dragging her back any way he knew how.
Misty was staring down at the receding vision of Sydney and all she could think of was what she’d left behind. What she’d given up.
‘But I’m not giving it up,’ she muttered. ‘I’m leaving for a year. It’ll be there waiting for me when I get back.’
‘Nick won’t be there,’ she reminded herself. ‘That’s up to Nick.’
Oh, but what a risk. She sniffed before she could help herself and the man in the next seat handed over a wad of tissues.
‘My wife does this every time we fly,’ he said. ‘So I come prepared. She’s not with me this time but she sobbed at the airport. Leaving family then, are you, love?’
‘Sort of.’ It was all she could manage.
‘He’ll be there when you get back,’ the man said comfortably. ‘If he has any sense.’
‘That’s just the problem,’ she told him. ‘He has too much sense.’
‘So what will we do without her?’
What, indeed? Move? The idea had appeal-to shift out of this house where he’d thought he had his life sorted. Only he had two dogs, and Bailey loved his new school, and to move out now…
They’d move before she came home, he decided. If she came home. She’d probably meet someone white-water rafting. Or kill herself in the process.
‘Why do you keep looking angry?’
‘I’m not angry.’
‘So what will we do?’
It was Sunday afternoon. They’d had a whole forty-eight hours without her. It was raining.
Even the dogs were miserable.
Nick stared round the kitchen, looking for inspiration. ‘Maybe we can cook,’ he said. ‘I’ve never tried a chocolate cake. You want to try?’
‘It’d be better if Misty was here,’ Bailey said, stubborn.
‘Yes, but Misty’s not here.’ He headed for the recipe shelf and tugged out a few likely books. ‘One of these…’
But then he was caught. There was a pile of scrapbooks wedged behind the recipes. One came out along with Mrs Beeton’s Family Cookery.
It was a scrapbook, pasted with pictures. All sorts of pictures.
On the front in childish writing…
‘Misty Lawrence. My Dreams, Book One.’
It didn’t quite come up to expectations. Flying over Paris at dawn…
For a start, it was loud. It hadn’t looked loud in the pictures. The brochures had made it look still and dreamlike, floating weightlessly above the Seine, maybe sipping a glass of champagne, eating the odd luscious strawberry.
She was cold. Champagne didn’t cut it. If she wanted anything it was hot cocoa-where was Nick and his rocker now?-but she was too busy gripping the sides of the basket to even think about drinking or eating. The roar of the gas was making her ears ring. It was so windy… It had been a little windy before they’d started but had promised to settle, but a front had unexpectedly turned. So now they were being hit by gusts which, as well as making the ride bumpy and not calm at all, were also blowing them way off course.
Mind, she couldn’t see their course. All she could see was a sea of cloud. The guy in charge was looking worried, barking instructions into his radio, most of which seemed to be about the impossibility of finding a bus to get his passengers back from who knew where they were going to land.
There were three couples in the basket and Misty. The couples were holding each other, giggling, keeping each other warm.
She was clinging to the basket, telling herself, ‘Number One on my list, okay, not great, but now I’ll get to wander down the Left Bank and take a barge down the Seine and buy Lily of the Valley on the first of May.’
Alone. She glanced across at the giggling couples who were holding each other rather than the basket.
Get a grip, she told herself. This was her list. She’d waited almost thirty years for it.
A month of Paris. Then the Dordogne. The great chateaux of Burgundy.
And then cruising the Greek Islands. It’d be fantastic-if she could just hold on for another hour and she didn’t freeze to death or burst her eardrums. And maybe the clouds would part for a little so she could see Paris.
She must have started these lists when she was Bailey’s age. They had all the scrapbooks out now, spread across Misty’s kitchen table. Every night they seemed to be drifting back to Misty’s side of the house to read her scrapbooks.
But, in truth, it wasn’t just to read her scrapbooks. It felt better here-on Misty’s side.
The dogs seemed more settled in Misty’s kitchen. They slept by the stove, snuggled against each other, but every time there was a noise their heads came up and they looked towards the door with hope.
No Misty, and their heads sagged again.
How can they have fallen in love with her in so little time? Nick thought, but it was a stupid question. He knew the answer.
He had. And he was still falling…
They were reading the scrapbooks instead of bedtime stories. There was so much…
She’d been an ordered child, neat and methodical. The first couple of scrapbooks were exotic photographs cut from old women’s magazines, and the occasional postcard. Some of the postcards had lost their glue and were loose. They were tattered at the edges as if they’d been read over and over. As he and Bailey flipped the pages it was impossible not to read their simple messages:
In Morocco. Oh, guys, you should be here. I feel so sorry for you, stuck in Banksia Bay.
Grace.
He thought of an eight-year-old receiving this from her mother, and he thought of going out and cancelling Grace’s cheque. He couldn’t. It would have been long cashed. Grace was gone.
Misty was gone.
‘I wish she was here,’ Bailey said, over and over. He leafed through to the third scrapbook. ‘This place is number one on her list.’ Her list…
They’d found it now, carefully typed, annotated, researched. What she’d done was take her piles of scrapbooks and divided them into twelve to make her list.
He went from scrapbooks to list, then back to scrapbooks. Pictures, pictures, pictures. And then, later, articles, research pieces, names of travel companies.
A child’s hand turning into a woman’s hand.
These were dreams, a lone child living with ailing grandparents, using her scrapbooks to escape to a world where her mother lived. Her mother didn’t want her, but to know a little of her world… To dream of a world outside Banksia Bay…
I feel so sorry for you, stuck in Banksia Bay…
She’d been raised with that message ringing in her head.
Bailey found the scrapbooks entrancing but, as Nick worked his way slowly through them, he found them more than entrancing.
He began to see what he’d done.
He’d asked her to give up her dreams.
‘Twelve months,’ she’d said. ‘I just want twelve months.’ He hadn’t given them to her. He’d reacted with anger.
‘You’re just like Isabelle.’
It had been said in an instinctive reaction when he hadn’t got his way. Yes, it was born of his need to protect Bailey, but it had been unfair and untrue. He thought of Misty’s face when he’d said it and he felt appalling.