tried to focus on work, but as he pulled the first script from the spike, he nearly tore it in half. Luckily the important parts were still readable: Andrea Albee, fluoxetine, maintenance dose.
He took a small plastic cup and wandered among the towering pill shelves out back, then returned to his desk with Andrea Albee’s Prozac and powered up the fat computer on his desk. It buzzed and struggled. A few minutes later a black screen appeared with a green directory. He found fluoxetine on the database and hit the PRINT SIDE EFFECTS button for the side of the bottle.
The printer shook and screamed as the list emerged. Hives, restlessness, chills, fever, drowsiness, irregular heartbeat, convulsions, dry skin, dry mouth. Just how sad was this Andrea Albee anyway? Was turning her brain numb – and that’s exactly what she was doing: contrary to popular opinion, Prozac didn’t make you feel happy or right – truly worth the side effects?
Deborah poked her head into his station. ‘Phone call for you, boss. Wanna take it in here?’
‘Thanks, Deborah.’
Her eyes grew even wider than usual. ‘You didn’t call me Debbie!’
Jack flashed the same smile he’d given Graham Kasey, and Deborah connected the call to the phone on his desk.
‘Jack Went speaking.’
‘Hi, Jack.’ He recognised the voice right away. ‘Free for lunch?’
At two pm, Jack pulled in to the parking lot at the east end of Lake Merri and stood waiting against his red Buick Reatta convertible – a car Emma lovingly referred to as his mid-life-crisis-mobile. The lot was hidden from the highway by a quarter-mile of shaggy bushland. It was almost always empty, even at this time of year when the spring weather started to bring people back to the water.
Travis Eckles arrived ten minutes later in his industrial cleaning work van. He got out of the van in a pair of baggy white coveralls and checked his windblown hair in the windscreen reflection. He had a nasty-looking black eye.
‘Heck, what happened to you?’ Jack asked.
Travis gave the bruise an exploratory poke and winced. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’
Jack took Travis’s head between his hands and examined the injury. It puffed out his face, made him look thuggish like his older brother. ‘How’s the pain? Need some Advil?’
Travis shrugged. ‘No. It’s alright.’
‘Did Ava do this to you?’
Travis ignored him, which was as good as answering in the affirmative.
Ava Eckles was Travis’s mother, a wild drunk who liked to talk with her fists from time to time. If the rumours could be believed she had also slept her way through half the men in Manson.
Travis’s father was a crewman in the air force and was inside a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter when it crashed during a training exercise off the southeast coast of North Carolina in 1983. Everyone on board was killed.
Travis had an elder brother too – Patrick – but he was currently serving time in Greenwood Corrections on an aggravated assault charge. Then there were his cousins, a collection of college dropouts, drug dealers and delinquents.
Some family, Jack thought. But Travis was alright. At twenty-two he was still young enough to get out of Manson, and while being a janitor wasn’t anyone’s dream job, it was solid work for a solid paycheck. He was crude and abrasive sometimes, but he was kind and funny too. Not many people saw that side of him.
Travis slid the side door of the work van open. CLINICAL CLEANING printed on the side in big red letters turned into CL ING. He stood aside. ‘After you.’
Jack looked over the lake. The evergreens on the Coleman side shifted as a stiff breeze swept through them, but the water was still and empty. They were alone. He climbed into the back of the van and Travis followed, pulling the door shut behind them. It was warm inside. Travis rolled his coveralls down to the waist and Jack unbuttoned his pants.
My sister’s townhouse was in a labyrinth of identical-looking homes in Caroline Springs. I’d been there at least a dozen times already but I wasn’t sure I had the right place until Amy rushed out to meet me.
‘What is it?’ she called. ‘What’s wrong? What’s going on?’
‘What are you talking about? Nothing’s wrong. Who said anything was wrong?’
She bent over at the waist and braced herself on her knees, heaving with melodramatic relief. ‘When I saw you out front I just … I didn’t know you were coming and … I’m sorry. I guess I have a habit of assuming the worst.’
‘Yikes. Can’t a girl just visit her sister?’
‘Not when that girl is you, Kim. You’re not exactly the pop-in type.’
I made a big show of rolling my eyes because I didn’t want her to know she was right – which, of course, she was. I’m generally solitary by nature. I feel much more comfortable alone, staying in and reading a book or wandering the aisles of the supermarket for an hour trying to find the perfect brand of linguine.
Amy was five years younger than me, with a warm, round face and full body. ‘Bumps in all the right places’, our mother used to say. It was as if my sister’s genes had defined themselves in opposition to my own. Nobody in school ever stopped her to say, ‘Excuse me but I think your boobs are on backwards.’
Technically Amy and I were only half-sisters. Her father (my stepdad) met my mother when I was two, and they had Amy when I was five. But blood and DNA aside, there was no half about it. Amy was my sister, for better or worse.
Dean had been around long enough to earn the position of official, bona fide Dad. Of course, never knowing my real father meant there was no basis for comparison.
‘Aunty Kim!’ Lisa, my three-year-old niece, had hurried out through the open front door and onto the lawn, two fingers wedged into her mouth. The grass was wet and her socks were immediately soaked through, but that didn’t slow her down. She crossed the lawn as fast as she could. I grabbed her under the armpits, hoisted her into the air and turned her upside down. She screamed in delight, giggling until snot came out of her nose.
I set Lisa down on the front step and let her run into the house, her wet socks leaving tiny footprints on the hardwood floors. As usual, the house was a mess. Dishes were piled six plates high in the sink, Lisa’s toys were strewn up and down the hallway, and the living-room sofa was covered with coloured crayon, its creases foaming with forgotten chalk and food crumbs.
The television, a brand new fifty-two-inch, was blaring at full volume. Lisa was lured to it like a zombie. She stopped less than a foot from the screen, mouth agape, as if the cartoon characters on the screen were whispering all the secrets of the universe.
