‘Did you resent having your childhood hijacked?’
‘Not at all. I loved tennis. We all loved tennis.’
‘You still play?’ Christina looked at the framed print of a tennis player on the wall.
Brooke’s nostrils flared. ‘Not competitively. I play with my dad every now and then. For fun.’
‘So growing up, did your parents put a lot of pressure on you to win?’
‘We put pressure on ourselves,’ said Brooke. ‘We all wanted to win.’ She followed Christina’s eyes to the picture of the tennis player, who was stretching for a backhand as if a life depended on it. ‘It’s hard to want something so badly and give it your all and then not get it. There’s this idea that all you need to do is believe in yourself, but the truth is, we all can’t be Martina.’
‘Martina?’ Christina checked her notes. Was that the older sister?
‘Navratilova,’ said Ethan. He pointed at the poster.
‘Oh, of course,’ said Christina. The only tennis player she knew was the angry one from the eighties. McEnroe. She had an uncle who used to put on an American accent to imitate his tantrums: ‘You cannot be serious.’
Ethan said to Brooke, ‘When you said “things haven’t been great recently”， is that because there was some fallout following that Father’s Day lunch?’
Astute question. Christina watched Brooke’s body language as she answered. Her shoulders went up and she stretched her neck in a turtle-like manner to make them drop.
‘There was no fallout,’ she said definitively. ‘There were just a few things said out loud that day that had never been said out loud before, that’s all. Then Mum was sick in hospital, and we all focused on that.’
Was that the truth? Or was that when things began to fray?
‘Okay then, so why do you think things “haven’t been so great” lately?’ asked Christina.
Brooke went very still. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, and she didn’t blink.
There was the lie. Right there. Christina could point at it like a doctor points out a fracture on an X-ray.
She did so know.
Christina waited.
‘Are you sure?’ she said gently. ‘Are you sure you don’t know?’
Two spots of colour rose on Brooke’s cheeks. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘So back to your parents’ house guest,’ said Christina. ‘She was alone with your father? While your mother was in hospital?’
‘Yes,’ said Brooke. ‘It was only two nights.’
‘Right,’ said Christina. That was long enough. She waited. Brooke didn’t flinch.
‘Then your mother came home from hospital and Savannah stayed on.’
‘Yes,’ said Brooke. ‘We were grateful because she was doing all the cooking.’
‘I believe it’s around this time that your brother Logan discovered something unwelcome about Savannah.’
This time Brooke definitely did flinch. Had she not expected this information to be passed on? If not, why not?
Brooke recovered fast, although she had to work too hard to maintain eye contact.
‘Did Logan tell you that?’
‘He did,’ said Christina. Logan had mentioned it in a sudden rush, just before he had to hurry off to teach a class. ‘Can you tell me more?’
‘Well,’ said Brooke, and she spoke gingerly, as if she were tiptoeing her way through broken glass. ‘Logan was just sitting at home one day when he discovered something about Savannah that made us all feel a bit . . .’ She broke eye contact to try to find the right word.
Ethan wobbled on his balance ball.
‘Nervous,’ finished Brooke.
chapter twenty-six
Last October
It was the middle of the day, the middle of the week, the middle of his life. Logan had taught an early-morning class and now he was back home, on his green leather couch, in his half-empty townhouse, on a clear, sunlit day filled with birdsong, lawnmowers and leaf blowers, and the sound of his next-door neighbour learning the cello. She’d left a pre-emptive note: Thank you for your patience while I learn the cello!
Logan channel-surfed, drank warm beer and ate cold leftover pizza for his lunch, and tried to stop his eyes continually leaving the television and returning to all the blank spaces in the apartment left by Indira.
There was a blank space in front of him where Indira should have been standing right now, hands on her hips: Do you realise the sun is shining out there?
She thought it was illegal to watch television when the sun was shining. It was because she and her family had emigrated from the UK when she was twelve and she still appreciated Australian sunshine in a way that Logan, who grew up with the sun in his eyes, never could. He saw sunlight as a peril, an obstacle to overcome on the court, like the wind. She saw it as a daily miracle.