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She thought they had been cut off when there was a long, blank pause, then she almost dropped the telephone when her mother’s voice came in thin little bursts. ‘Oh, dear…I wish…see you…. It’s complicated, Em…little point in your…so we thought…legal…adopted…not really…’
There was more but it was such a word soup that Emily wasn’t sure she could make any sense of it, not when her whole brain was screaming in denial. ‘What’s that, Mum? I can’t hear you. Am I adopted or aren’t I?’ she panicked as the white noise thickened, almost completely swamping her mother’s next sentences.
‘You’re breaking up, Mum. Just tell me yes or no. That’s all you need to say. Just Yes or No!’
‘Sorry…ring you…soon…promise…truck…we can get clear air…yes…YES!’
Emily didn’t know how long she sat in the darkened room, staring at the dead phone.
Yes?
She was adopted? A burning liquid rose in her throat and she swallowed it back.
No. She couldn’t be. Surely not. Why wouldn’t they ever have told her? As a child…or when she turned eighteen…or any other time in the past twenty-six years? Because she was the daughter of a teenage drug addict? There was no great stigma in that these days. That couldn’t have been what her mother had been saying. They had probably been talking totally at cross purposes.
Her eyes felt hot and dry. If anything she was worse off, even more uncertain than before she had made the call. The bad reception had flattened all emotional tone but her mother’s words had expressed regret rather than shock that she should ask the question. And what was so complicated? Her alcohol-slowed brain scurried round and round in ever-diminishing circles.
She looked at her watch, astonished to see that half an hour had passed. It was too late to call again. The window of satellite opportunity in such a remote area was extremely small, and who knew when she could successfully draw all the threads together to arrange another call? She would just have to hope that her mother would be able to get access to another phone and ring back soon.
She heard the faint hum of an engine and jumped to her feet. Was that Ethan back? Oh, she couldn’t bear it if he found her waiting here in the dark. He might think she was waiting for him. He might take her in his arms and it would all come bursting out, all her festering doubts and untidy emotions.
God, she might even be drunk and vulnerable enough to blurt out the fact that she was falling in love with him…and then, just to complete the farce, she could hit him with the fact that she could well be his uncle’s granddaughter!
She crept along to her room and undressed in the dark, afraid the light under the door would give her away as she heard Ethan enter the house.
She slept, but she woke up several times with nightmares. Not the smoky new nightmares but the old ones, from her childhood, the nightmares of running, running after a truck that was leaving, choking in a trail of dust as she tried to run faster and faster to catch her mother and father reaching out from the tailgate. But the faster she ran, the further the truck moved away until it was only a tiny dot in the distance and she was left behind alone.
Finally, just before dawn, she got up and went along to the studio. There at least was a world of order and certainty, where everything could be put back to rights with a good clean and the right kind of glue.
If only people’s shattered emotions could be as easily glued back together, she thought as she double-checked the pieces of the dismantled blue and white vase that had been soaked in detergent, rinsed and dried, the iron-stained areas treated with a reducing agent and a soiled crack swabbed with hydrogen peroxide.
Now came the fiddly task of filling the cleaned rivet-holes and Emily forced herself to concentrate on nothing else as she mixed up the epoxy resin, which she tinted to the background colour of the vase, having taken the care to do a number of tests before she had finally settled on the correct shade.
By the time she had done several hours’ work she felt much more like herself—whoever that was! she thought with gallows humour—and sufficiently hungry to realise she might be able to eat breakfast after all. She had already decided not to tell Peter about her phone call—she could offer to pay for it later. There seemed no point in getting his hopes up until she could tell him something more concrete. In the cold light of day the call seemed nightmarishly unreal and she found it difficult to remember the sequence of the disjointed conversation.
Since the dining room
was empty she concluded that Peter had already breakfasted and the earlier rumble that had impinged on her concentration had been Dylan and Ethan leaving for work. Moving on to the kitchen she discovered Mrs Cooper muttering darkly with her head in the oven and quickly helped herself to cereal and juice and took it out onto the verandah to eat in the sunshine.
Towards lunchtime when she looked in on Peter in his office she was able to give him a cheerful smile and, remembering the message the previous day about the house, asked apologetically if he would mind if Jeff ran her down later to start to organise the site clean-up and make lists of everything she would need to have ready when her money came through.
‘Oh, no need for you to bother with that any more,’ said Peter, linking his arm with hers and walking her outside. ‘It’ll be much more convenient for both of us if you can just drive yourself.’
‘But, Peter, I—’ She came to a dead stop as she stared at the jaunty little yellow car parked in front of the portico, a shiny three-door hatchback with a dealer’s sticker on the rear window. ‘What’s this?’
But she feared she knew. Peter nudged her over to open the driver’s door releasing the unmistakable ‘brand new’ aroma of plastic and chemicals, and indicated the set of keys in the ignition.
‘It’s gassed up and all ready to go,’ he said. ‘I know you hate asking for every little thing. Now you don’t have to bother Jeff or I when you want to go anywhere. You can just hop in and tootle off whenever you like.’
This wasn’t a ‘little’ thing. Her blue eyes scolded him. ‘Peter, we’ve been through all this—you can’t just give me a car—’
‘I’m not giving it to you,’ he said, looking wounded. ‘I’ve bought a second car, a little runabout for myself, that’s all, and I’m lending it to you while you’re here.’
‘A runabout!’ she exclaimed. ‘Where are you thinking of running about to?’ Heavens, she was beginning to sound like Ethan!
His white tufted eyebrows lifted in dignified reproach. ‘I do have a licence, you know, Emily, I just find it convenient to let Jeff do most of the driving. But this’ll be handy for me when Jeff’s not around.’
She eyed him sceptically. ‘If I say no will you take it back to the dealer?’
