“She will?”
“Well, not necessarily because she senses danger. She just knows how I feel about muddy shoes in the house.”
Emmy took a sip of her tea and sat back in her chair.
“You’ve felt responsible for your sister for a long time, haven’t you?” Charlotte said, but her gaze was on Julia a hundred yards away.
For a second Emmy wasn’t sure how to respond. She sensed admiration in Charlotte’s tone, or maybe solidarity as she had obviously taken on responsibility for her own sister, Rose, albeit to a much greater extent. “I suppose I have. It’s not like I had a choice. Our mum’s not... She’s not like most mothers. She’s...” Emmy’s voice fell away. She didn’t know what word she was looking for.
“She’s ill?”
Emmy shook her head and a tiny laugh escaped her. “No. She’s not ill. She’s... She was only sixteen when she had me. She’s never been married and Julia and I don’t even have the same father. Her mother—my nana—was hard on her. They didn’t get on very well. I think maybe Mum’s getting pregnant—both times—was something my nana never forgave her for.”
“And yet it takes two people to create a baby,” Charlotte said gently, pouring more tea into her cup from the teapot sitting on a little table between them. She offered the pot to Emmy, who silently extended her cup.
Charlotte’s soft but candid tone surprised Emmy. Mum had spoken to her from time to time about men, mostly how Emmy should not trust the ones who liked to say nice things about how she looked. Mum never talked about sex with Emmy. Everything Emmy knew about how babies were made she had learned from classmates at school in hushed conversations peppered with twittering laughter.
“Did neither father provide for your mother?” Charlotte continued when Emmy said nothing.
“Uh, well. Neville—that’s Julia’s father—he liked being a father when it was convenient for him and when it didn’t get in the way of things he liked better. And he didn’t know how to handle money, if that’s what you mean. Whenever he had any, he spent it as soon as he got it. He was an actor. And was unemployed a lot of the time.”
“Was?”
Emmy looked to Julia running up and down the bank of the pond. “He died in a car accident in Dublin not too long ago.”
“Oh. I’m very sorry.”
Emmy brought her attention back to Charlotte. “Julia doesn’t know he’s dead. She thinks he’s still in India. Mum has always made up stories about where Neville was when he would disappear, so that’s where she thinks he is. It’s been a year since she’s seen him.”
Charlotte nodded thoughtfully. “I see. And Julia doesn’t ask about him?”
“Sometimes. She can go for weeks without mentioning him, and then she will see something that reminds her of him and she’ll ask when he’s coming back.”
“Strange that she calls him by his first name, isn’t it?”
Emmy shrugged. “It suited him. And Julia didn’t care. She liked him because he’d bring her trinkets and toys now and then, and he never did any of the things that little children wish their parents wouldn’t do, like make them mind or insist they eat their vegetables or demand they clean their room.”
“So you don’t think she should be told he has died?”
“It’s Mum who thinks she shouldn’t be told. She found out he was dead the same day the evacuationnotice came. Mum said it was too much for Julia to handle all at once. She made me promise I wouldn’t say anything. So I haven’t.”
Off in the distance, Rose knelt down and Julia followed suit. Rose was showing Julia something in the water.
“One of the turtles, probably,” Charlotte said, as if reading Emmy’s mind. “We’ve several that prefer our edge of the pond.”
Emmy watched as Julia put her hand in the water, squealed with delight, and drew it back out.
“And what about your father, then, if I may ask?” Charlotte said.
Emmy hesitated a moment before answering. “You can ask, but I haven’t much to say about him. I don’t know who he is. Mum said he was not someone I ever needed to think about.”
Charlotte furrowed her brow. “So she was not in love with him?”
Again, Emmy shrugged. “I guess not. I don’t know. She met him at a party, apparently. And she had been drinking.”
“At such a young age?”
“It happens.”
