The Perfect Girl

TESSA

When I get back to Maria and Chris’s house I park on the street again and then I let myself back in, and the first thing I hear is a scream. It’s long, and high-pitched, and it makes me hurtle down the stairs into the kitchen.

Zoe is screaming. She has her hands over her ears and her mouth open wide and she’s screaming as if something’s unbearable.

Maria stands at the island and says, ‘Stop it, Zoe, stop it! Stop it! Will you stop it!’ but it’s not until I have Zoe wrapped tightly in my arms that she does stop and I feel her body go limp against mine. Lucas hovers beside us, anxious. Chris looks on aghast.

Something’s gone wrong; that’s obvious. I think Chris has confronted Maria. She looks awful: smudged eye make-up, a dirty shirt, red eyes, and there are eggs smashed on the counter.

‘Come with me, honey,’ I say to Zoe, and I usher her towards the door, and upstairs into the sitting room, which is decorated as if the family regularly entertain minor royalty, which, for all I know, they do. I sit her down and, although it’s too hot for hugs, I keep my arms around her for all the long minutes that it takes for her body to stop shaking.

Zoe’s a convicted killer. There are no two ways around that. Tom Barlow would probably qualify that further by saying that she is a murderer. But she’s still my niece. She’s the baby I visited within hours of her birth all those years ago, a scrumpled-up scrap of a thing, at that moment full of all the potential in the world. She’s the toddler I took to the beach and made a sandcastle with, she’s the girl I took to the zoo and helped to be brave when she wanted to feed the lorikeets but was afraid of the feel of them when they landed on her hand. She was the nine-year-old I cheered on when she made it to her first regional piano final in blinding style, making me swell with pride even though I’d bitten my fingernails to the quick.

She was the child I loved and thought about and took an interest in.

And so, in spite of what she’s responsible for, I love her still. Zoe made a stupid mistake one night of her life, which has had the most terrible consequences. But I will always love her. Somebody has to.

I know Maria loves her too, but Maria is closer, obviously, and the fallout from Zoe’s actions has fractured Maria’s life before and might now fracture it again and that, however much you love somebody, is complicated. They are tied together too tightly for their love to be easy. But I think Zoe has a good heart. I believe her story about what happened all those years ago, on the night of the accident, and I want her to know that somebody loves her after the accident just the same way they did before it. I think she deserves that.

And so, as my body gets hotter, and damper, from the close contact with hers, I wipe her tears gently as they fall, and I just hold her, and I whisper to her that I’ll always be there for her, no matter what, and that I love her to bits, and when she’s calmed down enough I encourage her to lie down and I slip back downstairs to see what’s happening.