Season of Shadow and Light

  Praise for Simmering Season

  ‘A tangled web of family loyalties, guilt, secrets and would-be careers … A great read.’ Newcastle Herald

  ‘Simmering Season showcases McLeod’s ability to portray life in all its facets. In its laid-back Aussie way, this novel reaches out and grips your heart.’ Rowena Holloway Reviews

  ‘With Simmering Season, McLeod has cemented herself as an Australian contemporary fiction writer to watch. Like its predecessor, House for all Seasons, this book is full of heart.’ Write Note Reviews

  Praise for House for all Seasons

  ‘Jenn J McLeod’s debut novel is an enthralling read that will leave you feeling compelled to ponder your own childhood memories … A captivating story.’ The Australian Women’s Weekly

  ‘A painful exploration of estrangement, loss, truth, redemption and the power of wishes.’ The West Australian

  ‘This debut novel from Australian Jenn J McLeod impressively weaves a tale of secrets, scandal, surprise and reunification.’ The Sun-Herald

  ‘A warm, engaging read, and such a great cast of characters.’ Dianne Blacklock, author of The Best Man

  To Jeannette, for completing my story and always shining a little light in my life.

  And to Strawberry-Lou—my little shadow, now a shining star burning bright in doggy heaven.

  Never fear shadows.

  They simply mean there’s a light shining somewhere nearby.

  Ruth Renkel

  Prologue

  Same dream, same time, same sweaty body reduced to a shivering mess. Paige peeled her knees from her chest, unfurling her body from its foetal position, cramped fingers slowly relinquishing the fisted balls of bed sheet to fumble in the dark for the mobile phone with its illuminated display. Not that she needed to check a clock to know the time, not after all these years.

  Her first thought this morning was to poke Robert from his silent slumber. Once upon a time, her husband would have felt her stir and woken, rolled over, held her, whispered his love for her and massaged that knotted muscle at the base of her neck. Then, without the need for words, her dutiful knight would have clambered out of bed and made a point of examining every nook and cranny of the house so that Paige could confidently close her eyes again. Over time, however, the armour had tarnished, the fairy tale had faded, the knight had tired, his investigations become less forensic, until so cursory Paige no longer bothered waking him at all. Not because he wouldn’t check, put his wife’s mind at ease, let her fall back to sleep; their relationship had not deteriorated to that level. Not waking Robert was more about Paige wanting to avoid his predictable jibes over breakfast the next morning about what he labelled her overactive imagination.

  Paige slipped out of bed and with the phone lighting her way tiptoed to Matilda’s room. Not until she could peer through the gap in the doorway to see the Disney nightlight casting its dancing shadows across the small, sleeping form would Paige think to breathe, convinced—again—that no one had slipped from those shadows and stolen her daughter away in the night. As usual there was no one in the house, no one smashing windows, no one ripping her baby from her arms. It was as the doctors and therapists suggested. First her body had betrayed her; now her mind was playing tricks.

  Paige fell back against the wall, sliding to the floor outside Matilda’s room. Clasping bent knees with one arm, the thumb of her other hand punched out a phone number. And only then did she glance at the time—always 2 am—before whispering . . .

  ‘Alice? Same dream.’

  1

  Paige

  ‘Where are we?’ Matilda asked from her booster in the back seat. ‘Are we lost, Mummy?’

  Paige glanced at her daughter in the rear-view mirror, and with the lie like a sour lolly she couldn’t hold in, said, ‘Of course we’re not lost. The trip is taking a little longer than I expected.’

  Why with every iPhone app at her fingertips had Paige not thought to check the driving conditions before leaving the house? On the road since dawn, the trio had hit one delay after another. An earlier overturned semi-trailer on the motorway north of Gosford, its payload of packaged peanuts strewn across all northbound lanes, had them well behind schedule and suffering the midsummer temperatures, with only occasional blasts of air-con to save fuel. Not even Paige’s impromptu stand-up routine, telling the family’s favourite peanut jokes, had lifted her travel companions’ spirits at the time.

  Perhaps she could have checked the weather, too. According to the radio’s weatherman just now, the week would bring ‘perfect blue and cloudless skies to northeast New South Wales’.

  Perfect for lying on a beach somewhere and sipping cocktails maybe?

  If Paige had listened to Alice—the woman refusing to look anywhere but out the car’s side passenger window, sighing with exasperation for the tenth time in as many minutes—they might well be looking forward to spending the rest of January in the cool comfort of a beach resort. Instead, at the height of summer, Paige was headed for a hot, dusty country town to constant cries from the backseat of: ‘Are we there yet, Mummy?’

  Maybe they could have taken the inland highway, Paige added to her musings and the mental list of what ifs forming as mid-afternoon passed and dark, grey clouds thickened overhead, hanging what seemed mere metres from the roof of Paige’s Audi station wagon. In fact, she could have sworn one cloud had trailed them all the way from the highway turnoff two hours ago.

  Now rain.

  Perfect! Not the weather, but the perfect time to stop, to clean the windscreen, to refuel—the car, the crabby companion, the kid—and hopefully make their destination before sundown. Maybe she should have thought about doing all those things at the last roadhouse, as such establishments had been sparse since. They’d driven past a couple of side roads with signs showing the little petrol bowser icon, although the last arrow had been bent perpendicular so that it pointed to the sky. The Audi fuel gauge was showing a quarter full and the fancy trip calculator told her she was good for another 150 kilometres. Paige wasn’t convinced though, and with such mountainous terrain so far from typical highway driving conditions, they’d been going through fuel fast.

  The steep road had narrowed ten minutes ago, her daughter blissfully quiet for a change, engrossed in the Disney DVD of the moment; one of three Santa presents left in her stocking. Paige tried tuning out the occasional I-told-you-so stare from the adjacent passenger seat; a look she undoubtedly deserved as her doggedness was what had got them all to this point.

  Lost!

  Of course, she could shift the blame for their current predicament to Robert. The state of her marriage did seem to be trending—had been for some time. Only the word trending implied the subject was being discussed. She and Robert didn’t talk so much of late about anything other than his work that kept him out late, or his sport that kept him away all weekend. As a result, Paige hadn’t even mentioned the man at the shopping mall six weeks ago, the unmistakable desperation in the stranger’s embrace pressed into Paige’s memory, as well as the heart-rending, rueful expression once he’d realised his mistake.

  ‘I’d call you by your name, but I don’t know what it is,’ the man had said, handing Paige a business card. ‘Please, take this. Maybe I can buy you a coffee one day to apologise and explain.’

  With a trace of guilt, as if someone was handing her a note in class with the answers to the test, Paige had offered a cursory glance before banishing the card to the abyss of her shoulder bag.

  ‘You’ve apologised enough,’ she said, her voice tinged with equal parts sympathy and suspicion. ‘Let’s not make this any weirder than it is already, okay?’

  His big, broad smile seemed genuinely curious. ‘I’m no
t sure I know what you mean.’

  ‘Business cards? Coffee? Trying to be friends?’ she explained. ‘We’re not. We’re strangers. Strangers who happened to . . . Never mind.’

  The incident, blown out of proportion by an overly officious security guard with latent local hero aspirations, had already taken up thirty precious minutes. Mati would be waiting outside the school and Paige couldn’t be late. Only yesterday she’d endured one of Alice’s ‘What’s the world coming to?’ sermons, then an Alice lecture about stranger danger and after-school safety.

  ‘Wait!’ The stranger in the mall had called to her as she left the Centre Management offices. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’

  Paige cast a curt glance over one shoulder as she limped away. ‘That you thought I was your long lost love? In a word, no.’

  Chance meetings? Long lost loves? They only happened in movies and books. Real life for Paige was anything but thrilling, despite the facade of a busy social calendar and a privileged life in Sydney with her high-flyer husband and Matilda, their six-year-old daughter. But the incident that December day—a latte at Coffee Club, a busy shopping mall, and an intensely remorseful man overwhelmed by the tragedy of unrequited love—had brought Paige’s own discontent into the light.

  Perhaps not telling Robert about that incident straightaway had added to the mystery and excitement of having an exotic stranger embrace her enthusiastically, even if it was in the middle of a shopping mall. Had the encounter taken place anywhere else, without Paige hitting the deck when her dodgy leg gave way, and without the over-zealous security guard witnessing the incident, she was sure they’d have sorted the matter of mistaken identity quickly and without fuss. But the heart-attack-waiting-to-happen guard with the halitosis and sweat-stained shirt, whose highly visible presence was probably meant to reassure shoppers following a recent south Sydney shopping mall shooting, said he had—quote—‘witnessed the suspicious behaviour’, reporting it as such to Centre Management.

  A few days later, after the school drop-off and yet to tell her husband, Paige had the urge to tell Jane Lowy, mother of six-year-old Samuel whose name was popping up in her daughter’s distinctive scribble on various schoolbooks.

  Paige caught up with her as she waited on the side of the road with the safety supervisor. ‘Time for a coffee this morning?’ she asked as Jane paused briefly in the middle of the road to bend the flexible arm of the pram’s sunshade, much to the disapproval of the school crossing attendant. Although barely summer, with the school bell yet to ring for the start of class, the December sun bore down with sinister intensity.

  ‘Always time for coffee.’

  ‘Sure is steamy after last night’s rain,’ Paige said, happy to discuss the weather until the pair was settled at an inside table directly under one of two overhead ceiling fans.

  Jane coochee-cooed the baby, removed the pink dummy, and shoved a bottle between its rosebud lips before exhaling loudly, as if dropping her small son off at school and pacifying a happy baby was an exhausting chore. For a fleeting moment the thought gave Paige an ache in her heart where there should have been joy—if only . . .

  After ordering their drinks, Paige launched into her story. ‘The weirdest thing happened at the mall . . .’

  Wide-eyed for the entire account, Jane eventually giggled. ‘Oh, he sounds very mysterious. Why don’t exciting things happen to me? Gosh, I’d be going back there every day. A kind of Brief Encounter, only without the train.’

  More like Scenes from a Mall, only not so Woody Allen, Paige was tempted to say, but comparing her home life to a Hollywood rom-com about infidelity would be letting out too much information about the state of her marriage; Jane wasn’t that good a friend. Instead, she asked to burp the baby and Jane—somewhat reluctantly in Paige’s estimation—handed over the small, tightly wrapped bundle. Again, she and Jane weren’t exactly friends.

  Genuine friendship had evaded Paige, and any professional relationships she’d once enjoyed at work fizzled out when she’d relocated the family, the distance leaving most friends unable, or perhaps unwilling, to overcome the seemingly insurmountable divide between the trendy inner city and the outer-Sydney suburbs. Home for the Turners in the city’s northern gateway of Berowra could hardly be more outer-Sydney. Paige had been the one to insist they find a nice, leafy area. Somewhere safe. Somewhere that would allow Mati space and independence, while allowing an over-protective Paige to let go a little. As tempted as she was, and despite the recurring nightmares, Paige refused to become one of those mothers who clung so tight that something as simple as an acquaintance burping a baby was viewed with caution.

  Sometimes she tried to tell Robert how the bad dreams made her feel—like someone was tearing her baby from her arms and as hard as she might try to hold on she’d lose her grip and the baby would disappear into the darkness.

  ‘More like losing your grip on reality,’ Robert would tell her. ‘They’re dreams, Paige. The doctors said they’ll go away. I appreciate it must be hard. Losing a baby like we did is hard on me too, you know, but life goes on, hon. You have to try harder. Time to let go.’

  The problem was, Paige didn’t want to let go. As terrifying as the nightmares were, for a brief moment each time, they let her experience the joy of holding the baby she’d lost.

  Now she was stuck in a kind of limbo, no longer good enough for the job she’d loved—Food Editor with Going Gourmet Magazine—and no good at the dutiful wife and stay-at-home-mum thing. There was her poorly paid, part-time distraction with a national food company, although she couldn’t call blogging about processed food a real job. At least the weekly deadline stopped her going mad, even though working from home was much the same as being invisible. The once outgoing and unstoppable city executive was living in her husband’s shadow and blaming him for her lot in life.

  If Paige was honest with herself about her so-called brief encounter at the mall, she would admit that the notion of a sensitive stranger accosting her had added a thrill she’d missed since her illness. The man who spoke with broken English, his shiny white teeth set against dark skin, had been so sweet, so beguiling, so mysterious, Paige had hardly noticed the pain in her ankle until much later. The sad thing was, her husband hadn’t noticed her exaggerated limp that night at all. Keeping news of the dalliance from Robert had meant enjoying the mischievous feeling for a few days longer, before the monotony and predictability of life for Paige Turner took over again.

  The irony! Why had she not kept the surname Foster when marrying Robert? Life for her these days was so not a page-turner.

  ‘Oh my gosh, Paige, look what my little monster has done.’ Jane ripped three moist towelettes from the bag hanging on the back of the pram before lunging across the café table, sending a rush of panic through Paige.

  ‘What? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Can you not smell that?’ Jane asked, shoving the towelettes at her before retrieving the baby and settling her back in the pram. ‘Sorry. I don’t know what I’m doing differently with this one but . . . Phew! Samuel’s puke never smelled this bad. I guess it’s this crazy heat. Now there’s something else we can blame on global warming and the government. Smelly puke!’ Jane laughed and resumed her coochee-cooing.

  Paige used several serviettes to scrape the regurgitated baby goop from the collar of her shirt and with a subtle breath in through her nose hoped for a miracle. Nothing. She couldn’t smell a thing: not the freshly ground coffee beans as the barista’s grinder muted the café’s conversation, not the next table’s French toast stacked high with grilled banana and bacon, lashings of maple syrup spilling sensually onto the plate, not the exhaust from the car idling at the kerb, the driver oblivious to the exaggerated coughs and splutters of sidewalk diners. Sometimes, if she tried really hard, Paige’s brain could conjure up the memory of Matilda’s baby smells, but even that was becoming a test for her imagination.

  ‘You seem distracted,’ Alice said from the passenger seat, jerking Paige back
to the task at hand—delivering three weary road-trippers safely to the quaint-sounding boatshed she’d found on the internet. ‘You sure I can’t drive for a bit? I’m afraid I’m not very good with these map gadgets.’ The annoying navigation voice on the GPS had long since given up trying to tell Alice where to go.

  ‘I don’t need a break. You relax. It can’t be too much further.’ Paige tried sounding optimistic, but she was distracted by a thought. That crazy day in the mall last December, amid the pre-Christmas shopping madness, should have been the end of weird for Paige. Instead, weird had grabbed hold, bringing the entire Turner household down with a mysterious bug.

  The That’s weird bug.

  ‘That’s weird,’ Matilda had said a couple of days after the Mall Man incident and mid-way through a mouthful of toast and Vegemite, her favourite breakfast.

  ‘What’s weird, Mati?’ Paige had asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Paige remembered shaking her head at the single word that had become the answer to every enquiry:

  What did you do at school today?

  Nothing.

  What have you got for homework?

  Nothing.

  What do you want for dinner?

  Nothing.

  ‘So, what do you want to do today?’ Paige asked that morning, ever hopeful.

  ‘Nana Alice is helping me make coconut ice.’

  ‘For the end-of-year fete at school? I thought I was helping you.’

  ‘Nana Alice said you needed to rest and I was to leave you alone.’

  ‘She did, did she?’ Paige smiled at how adult her daughter sounded whenever she repeated one of Nana Alice’s commandments, which depending on the nature of the diktat annoyed Paige a lot or a little. Still, such niggles seemed insignificant, outweighed by the positives of having Alice so readily at hand, especially these last couple of years; the joy of suburban cul-de-sac living, with only the purpose-built gate in the back fence separating Alice’s house from theirs—although according to Robert, some days not separate enough. ‘Well, you’d best save me some of that coconut ice. I’ll pop over in a few hours for a taste test.’