She continues as if Danika’s agreement was a given. “He was killed in a car accident eight months ago, on 12 August.”
“Stop right there.” Her heart thumps hard, an urgent pounding of danger, of terror…as it does when she wakes in the night, even now, Chris’s name on her lips, and her heart banging a terrible rhythm in her hollow chest.
Panic attacks, night terrors, her GP says, that will ease as her grief does and with the passing of time. She clutches the door frame and wills her heart to slow its frantic drumbeat. She swallows the lump of grief that an unexpected mention of Chris can bring and pushes down a terrible chill.
“Stop. I don’t know who you are, or what you want, but yes, my husband is dead. And no, you can’t heal me or save me in some woo-woo way that no doubt will cost a lot in ‘donations’. Leave now. Please.” Danika white-knuckles the door frame, summoning steel for her spine and a fierce, stony stare to her eyes. “And don’t come back.” She starts to close the door.
“Wait. Please.” Kim extends a hand but otherwise makes no move to stop the closing of the door. “I’m not here to ask for something or sell you anything. I don’t want your money. I have something to tell you, and it’s important. It’s about Chris. And your daughter. It affects her, too.”
“What’s your full name? Not just what you told me before.” Danika barks the words over the pounding of her heart. She doesn’t know why she asked—Kim could easily reel off a false one. Maybe it’s to see if she hesitates, if she sounds evasive. Or maybe it’s to take the information to the police if this woman is attempting to scam her.
Maybe she preys on grieving widows. After all, death notices are common, and Chris had a celebration of life ceremony, an obituary, and she spread his ashes at his favourite place in the Dandenong Ranges near where they live. Even now, he is blowing in the breeze or sinking into the forest floor in a grove of tall gum trees and ancient cycads, his cremains mixing with the particles and essence of the rainforest. Sometimes when it rains, Danika thinks she can sense him in the petrichor.
“Kimberly Varga. I don’t have a middle name. I live at unit 3,7 Elstree Road, St Kilda.” She fumbles in the folds of her baggy pants, pulls out a Victoria Driver Licence and thrusts it at Danika.
The details match, and the picture shows Kim. Danika notes her date of birth—she’s thirty-four, four years younger than her. Although, for the last eight months, she’s felt so much older. Grief, responsibility, and worry have pulled her down. She’s lost weight, which doesn’t look good on her; there are more lines in her face, and grey strands twining in her hair.
Danika hands back the licence, and her fingers brush Kim’s. She jerks her hand back, and Kim grabs the licence before it can fall.
Danika swallows, and studies Kim’s face. She looks honest, someone she might chat to at a mothers’ group, or exchange comments with at a library event or art gallery. But the worry that is even now battering its way out of her chest is growing, and somehow, although she doesn’t know how, she senses thatKim’s visit is no spur-of-the-moment event. “What do you want to tell me?”
Kim bites her lip for a moment, as if second-guessing her decision to be here. “I don’t know for sure, but I think this might be an enormous shock to you.”
Her eyes search Danika’s face, and for a moment, Danika sees regret, sorrow, empathy. Then they vanish, wiped clean by a steely determination. Kim sets her shoulders back and takes a deep breath. “Your husband, Chris Henshall, was also my de facto partner. He told me his name was Chris Henwood. We were together for nine years. Chris told me he worked at a mining company as a geologist and worked two weeks away in South Australia, two weeks at home. Eight months ago, he vanished. I filed a police report, and that’s when I found out there was no such person.”
Kim closes her eyes for a moment, as if summoning the strength to continue. “I hired a private investigator, and that’s when…that’s when I found out my Chris, Chris Henwood, was also your Chris, Chris Henshall.”
There are words, and they rattle through Danika’s mind like a train clattering over tracks. There are words, and maybe they form sentences, but those sentences are incomprehensible to her. They make no sense. They arewrong.
Chris was her husband. No one else’s. She’d haveknown. An affair? Well, maybe. She’d wondered that sometimes, in the middle of the night, when she was alone and Chris was in South Australia turning over core samples or whatever geologists do in the desert. But in daylight, she’d dismiss that. He loved her. He was the perfect husband and father. Attentive. Caring. Loving. Generous. Cami loved him. There was no way he’d have sought the same with another woman.
No way.
No fucking way.
But one look at Kim tells her that she, at least, believes this. It’s there in her hands, clasped in front of her, wringing each other. It’s there in the shake in her voice, in her tenseness, as if any moment her courage will give out and she’ll turn and flee. And it’s there in the dampness of her light-brown eyes and the way they alternate between Danika’s face, the open hallway behind her, and either side of the porch.
The mist in Danika’s mind sways aside enough to let her feel relief that Cami isn’t here to listen to this nonsense, this fraudulent claim for… For what, she doesn’t know, but she does know it’s wrong. It’s a lie, and if Kim believes it, then she’s mistaken. Because there is no way, no way between the heavens and the earth and all the clouds and air between that Chris would have done this to her. To her and Cami.
She retreats a step. “Go. Please leave. I’m not listening to any more of this bullshit. I don’t know what you want, but I want you to fuck off right now and not come back. You will not approach me or my daughter, because if you do, I’ll call the police.” Her heart is beating so hard that for a moment she wonders if it will burst. Surely no heart can contain all of this and keep functioning.
“Mummy! They’re not there.” Cami. At the back of the house. And any second, she’ll come racing down the hall to this…this melodrama in progress. And that must not happen.
“Don’t come back,” she says again. For a second, she meets Kim’s eyes, and the sorrow in them makes her breath hitch.
“Wait.” Kim’s voice is hoarse, as if all the words she still needs to say are bottled up in her throat, backed up like an overfull reservoir about to burst. “There’s more.” She lifts her chin and stares Danika full in the face. “Chris and I, we have a daughter. She’s eight—five months older than your Camille. Her name’s Bella. And I wanted…I wanted to see you, to say all this, as much for Bella and Camille as for me.”
Danika gasps and clutches the edge of the door, putting her body behind the wood as if she can shield herself from this. There’s a static buzz in her mind, but Kim’s words pierce it like a carving fork in roast meat: first her mind yields, then it parts to let the words in, and then, now, it drips its blood, its life force, turning everything she has known upside down and inside out and she can’t deal with this, not now.
Maybe not ever.
And Cami’s coming down the hall, still in her socks, and her daughter mustneverknow.
She steps back and closes the door and sets her back to it, as if Kim might break through with a battering ram. Although Kim doesn’t need that. Her words have done more damage.
Or they would, if they were true.
Cami stands in front of her, truculent in her soccer kit and socks. No boots. “Mum, I’ve been calling and calling. They’re not in the car. Who was that woman?”
