‘Doubts I’ve been having.’
She grips the edge of the bench. ‘What doubts?’
‘Probably the same doubts Bridget had, but I wouldn’t know because we don’t talk about her.’ I swallow. ‘I don’t know that I believe all the things they teach us.’
She purses her lips so tightly they lose all colour, then says, ‘You are being tested. Satan’s testing you. Now is the time to turn to Jehovah for strength, not away from him.’
I’m shaking my head the whole time she’s speaking. ‘I don’t even know if I believe in Satan.’
She reacts as though I reached out and slapped her. ‘Annie…’
‘I wish I didn’t have all these doubts,’ I whisper. ‘I really do. It would be so much easier not to question a thing.’
‘Then don’t. Have faith.’ She looks down at her hands. ‘Or perhaps you think I haven’t lost enough family members.’
I start to cry, but it’s mostly from relief at having finally said some of these things aloud. A tiny piece of my truth is now out there in the world.
‘Don’t go to that boy when you’re at your weakest,’ she says, looking back at me.
I give her a feeble smile. ‘I’m not at my weakest.’ In fact, she might be witnessing my first glimpses of strength.
This moment is breaking her. I can see it all over her face and in the way her knees are now pressing into the cupboard for balance.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say as I head for the back door.
Hunter
We messed up. I mean, we really messed up. This is what Annie’s been afraid of all along, and now it’s happened. She’s across that creek, her life in ruins, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. If I go over there now, it’ll 100 percent make things worse for her.
‘Dad?’ I call as I step into the house. I have no idea what I’m going to say to him, but I need to talk to someone.
He doesn’t answer.
‘Dad!’
I check the kitchen and find him slumped in a chair with a beer can still in hand. He can actually do the advice thing well when he’s sober, or even part-way to drunk, but he can’t even hear me right now. I’m completely alone in this.
As I’m pacing in the doorway, willing him to wake up and help me for once, the house starts to feel too small. I begin to overheat, so I tug my jumper off and draw a few long breaths, trying to slow my heart down.
Is this really my life now?
I stop and lean against the door frame, staring at my dad while my future plays out like a movie in my mind. Him drunk every day. Or worse, drinking himself to death. Annie living across the creek, always in sight but never within reach. She’ll have no choice but to shut me out now. Or she might choose to leave the religion. It’s a possibility. She might choose to walk away from that life and live another one. She might leave her mum, her community, her friends, her safety net. She might even choose to include me in that new life. But I can’t be the reason for her leaving. I’m not enough of a reason, and I shouldn’t factor at all.
I head to my bedroom, looking around at the unmade bed and peeling walls in need of paint. It’s not a homely room. It serves the purpose of sleep. It hasn’t felt homely since Mum was alive, when she used to hang pictures and buy duvet covers in prints of things I loved. Aeroplanes, motorbikes, drums, surfboards. Then after she passed, my interests changed, but my duvet cover didn’t.
Dad was too sad to notice. Then he was too drunk.
I took the pictures down when I outgrew them, and there was nothing to replace them with. Blu-Tack marks on the walls are the only evidence of a childhood. The current duvet cover is a striped print, purchased by my aunt who came to visit a few years after Mum died.
I’m doubting my ability to live this miserable existence, putting Dad to bed each day and single-handedly running the farm. I don’t want to do it, but what I want doesn’t matter. No one else is going to pick his drunk arse up off the floor. Though maybe waking up on the floor in his own spew in an empty house, with no one else to do the work, would be the ‘rock bottom’ everyone keeps banging on about. Perhaps I really am enabling him.
That thought plays repeatedly in my mind.
I’m pacing again. Where would I go if I left? What would I do? How heavy would the guilt be? And how long would I have to carry it?
Maybe I don’t need to have all the answers now. Maybe I just need to get out of everyone’s way and figure the rest out later.
One thing I know for sure is that Annie needs time and space to get her life in order. She can’t do that with me distracting her. If one day she works up the courage to leave, then we can see what’s between us—not now. Right now I need to bow out.