Danika is curious to meet Kim’s parents. Kim has said they know about Chris’s double life but still have to fully accept the extent of the deception. Danika is prepared for intense questioning.
“There they are.” Kim walks back down the breakwater to greet an older couple.
“A word of warning,” Suze says softly. “Amanda is likely to be pleasant on the surface, but underneath she’s all steel. She’ll be grilling you to make sure you’re not taking advantage of Kim.”
“But I’m not!” Danika’s eyes widen. “I’ve never?—”
Suze moves closer and puts a hand on Danika’s forearm. “I know. But I was concerned at first, too. Not now. But Amanda has only just learned this part of the story. Be on your guard, is all I’m saying. And Jorge is angry. Not at you, I think, but at Chris.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.” That’s all she has time to say, as Kim and her parents are upon them.
The kids return for introductions. Amanda is taller than Jorge, and they stand arm in arm, a united front. She smiles at Danika, who suppresses a shiver at the concentrated stare.
“I’m happy to meet you,” Amanda says. “And Camille.” Her gaze tracks Cami as she runs with Bella and Jorie to the end of the breakwater again. “She’s so like Bella. And so close in age.”
Jorge simply glowers and harrumphs. He won’t meet Danika’s eye. So, still angry then, and maybe with her.
Danika’s parents hurry down the breakwater to join the group, and there are more introductions.
Kim clears her throat. “Now that we’re all here, let’s get started.” She picks up the clay pot, cradling it carefully in her arms as if it does indeed contain Chris’s ashes.
Once they are all arranged on the rocks, with the calm sea lapping below them, Kim sets down the pot.
“Thank you all for coming. This isn’t a funeral, but rather a way to say goodbye for those of us who haven’t had the formal chance. Anyone who wants to is welcome to share a memory, or say something. Then, those who want to can scatter sand from this pot into the sea. It’s sand from Chris’s favourite place.”
Danika shifts her feet on the uneven rock.
“I’ll start.” Kim flashes a smile around the assembled group. She holds out her hand for Bella, who comes across and takes it. “Chris was my partner for nine years. He was kind, considerate, and although he had a work life that made things difficult for me and Bella, we managed. Every time he came home to us was a happy day, as then he’d be with us for two weeks. I’ll never forget how he called me Kookie, as he said I was as sharp and cute as a kookaburra.”
Danika gasps before she can suppress it.Kookie.The bastard. Chris’s pet name for her was Kookie—given to her before they were married, and with the same reasoning. And he called Kim the same thing—one less thing to trip up on. A low growl of anger churns in her throat.
“‘Our’ song, our family song, was the very poppy ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ by Philip Oakey and Giorgio Moroder.”Kim closes her eyes and quotes the chorus line. “Each time Chris went off for work for two weeks—and yes, we all now know the actual story—we would play that song, and dance around the house together. Chris said the song would help us remember him.”
The growl is now a silent roar. Kim and Bella’s song was her song. Kim’s words could equally apply to Danika and Cami. She closes her eyes and a reel plays in her head of Chris, Cami, and her dancing around their living room as “Together in Electric Dreams” blasts from the speakers. She looks across at Cami; she’s grinning fit to bust, holding hands with Bella. No doubt she’s ecstatic that she also shares this with her sister.
But Danika is cold, colder than the wind from the Antarctic. She wraps her arms around her middle, takes deep breaths. Why give his two partners the same pet name? Why pick the same song for both families? She has to get past this—now. This morning is for Bella, and she will not take a little girl’s happy memories of her father.
“We went camping, of course, and Johanna Beach was our favourite place. He’d swim in the ocean. Once a pod of dolphins joined him in the surf, leaping alongside him as he bodysurfed to shore. I’ve never seen him so awestruck. This clay pot doesn’t contain his actual ashes, of course. It contains sand from Johanna Beach that Bella brought back when we went camping there a few weeks ago.”
Kim talks for a couple minutes more, but Danika barely registers the words. Things as simple as Chris calling both her and Kim Kookie, and using the same song for both of his families has rammed home the calculated nature of what he did.
To an extent, she’d justified Chris’s double life as a man who’d loved two women and was unable to choose between them. A man unable to be open about it and give her and Kim the autonomy to choose a polygamous relationship—or not. But these things—the minutiae of an intimate relationship—well, they weren’t chosen with love, given to individuals. They were shared to make it easier for him.
It was about power. The superiority of the entitled male. Was he laughing at her and Kim all those years? Did he not give athought to what he was doing to them? She clenches her jaw so hard she feels the muscle pop. She barely hears whatever else Kim is saying, only snapping back into the moment when Kim steps back, and Bella is standing in the loose circle of people.
“I know my daddy loved me,” Bella says. “I loved how he’d hug me if I had a bad dream. He’d open the window, gather up the monsters, and throw them out. He’d tell me they were sliding down the lamppost outside and running away back to the city.”
Danika sways, lightheaded. How have she and Kim never discussed these small things? Not just similarities, but almost word for word. Chris wasn’t treating his two families as individuals, as people he loved in their own right, but as interchangeable pieces in his life. Same song. Same pet name, same way of dealing with the dream monsters.
Was he like that in bed, too? Were his moves the same for both of them?
Danika doesn’t want to go there.
She takes a deep breath, then another, and stares blindly out to sea.Fuck you, Chris. Fuck you for screwing my life over. Cami’s life. Kim’s and Bella’s too. Fuck you for treating us all as objects to be moved around at your whim. You must have laughed at how easily you could fool us all.
But now is not the time for this anger. She swallows hard and focuses on Bella. “I miss Daddy,” Bella is saying. “I miss his silly jokes, and how he’d bring me something back from South Australia every time he went. But I have my sister now, and Danika, and that’s good, so it’s not all bad.” She bends and pats the pot at Kim’s feet. “I love you, Daddy, and I know you loved me.”
Tears prick at the back of Danika’s eyes. Angry tears now mix with emotional ones at seeing Bella’s love for her dad. Cami too. Bella and Cami now stand together, holding hands again.
