The Ripple Effect Part 27

"That was lucky for him." She was making a tremendous effort to remain detached and positive when it was obvious, at least to him, she was heartbroken. But then, he knew how she felt about the man. She'd confided in him that first time they'd discussed her new friend-before she knew the truth. She'd been happy and excited, maybe falling in love. He'd been deeply disturbed and apprehensive. Sharp, jagged edges of rocks loomed ahead.

It was staggering the effect their lie by omission had had down through the years. A tidal wave, a tsunami, gathering momentum and power the further it travelled through time until it crashed with devastating force upon the innocent and unsuspecting victims. Fortunately, Joelle had proven compa.s.sionate and strong. She'd weathered the onslaught. But they could hardly claim the credit for that.

"I'm so sorry, Joelle," William blurted, surprising her so that her hand stopped, poised over the box of chocolates. She withdrew her arm slowly. Her tongue ran across her lower lip. Her clear blue eyes met his, filled with nothing but forgiveness and love. An unbearable weight rose from his chest.

"It's okay now, Dad. I think I understand why you didn't tell me. But..." She dragged her gaze from William to Natalie and then Melanie. "Does anyone else have any secrets we should know?" A smile teased the corners of her mouth and her eyebrows lifted as she swivelled her eyes from one to the other. "I don't."

"I don't," said William returning the smile. "All my dirty secrets are out and flapping in the breeze."

Melanie said abruptly, "I've decided I'm going to call Luke." To Natalie's blank face she added, "He's the father of my baby."

Natalie clapped her hands together. "Thank goodness, Melanie. He should know about his child. You must bring him to meet us."

"I'll see how he takes the news first," said Melanie dryly.

"He'll be pleased," said Joelle firmly. "You said yourself he wanted to settle down together."

"I hope so." But Mel's mouth trembled as she grinned with her usual bravado William's heart melted. His tough, hard-talking, free-wheeling daughter had not only softened but was actively reaching out for a.s.sistance. And she'd found a job she enjoyed-thanks to Joelle. Now she was making an eminently mature decision.

William sat back, sipping his coffee, listening to his girls cheerfully discussing babies and pregnancy. At least he'd got this right. He could claim credit not only for the reuniting of Melanie with Natalie but also for the forthcoming reunion of Mel and Luke.

Then Joelle, out of the general babble of babies and birthing methods, asked, "Mum, why were you so opposed to telling me I was adopted?"

William's eyes flashed to Natalie's face. He opened his mouth to reply for her but thought better of it. This was her truth to tell, he couldn't answer for her any longer and he wanted to know the real reason, too. There was one; suddenly he was positive of it.

Natalie stared at her hands loosely clasped on the table before her. The knuckles grew white and her shoulders tensed under her soft blue jumper.

When she began to speak, it was softly, as if she were talking to herself. The first words emerged tentative and unsure, dragged from the murky depths of a memory long hidden.

"My father was a violent man," she said. "He hit my mother and he hit me sometimes."

The girls gasped in unison but neither said a word. William waited in shocked silence. Natalie had never told him much about her childhood. He'd never met those French parents who died in the car crash while their daughter was in Sydney.

"No-one would have believed it of him because he had a senior position in the town council and was well respected and liked. When I was eighteen, I had a boyfriend I loved very much. We planned to marry but my father didn't like him-his name was Raoul." Her eyes were soft with remembering, her face transported by first love. Her thumb rubbed ceaselessly over the wedding ring on her finger.

"My father said he wasn't good enough for his daughter because he wasn't well educated. He was a mechanic and he had a job but that wasn't enough." Her mouth twisted in anguish. "Anyway-I became pregnant. We wanted to elope and get married but Raoul was...killed...on his motorcycle. A car...hit him."

She stopped and a tear threaded its way down her cheek. She wiped it away quickly and sniffed, laughing self-consciously. She glanced at the girls quickly and then away. "So many years ago. Silly to cry now."

"No, it's not," whispered Joelle. "What happened?" She clutched Natalie's hands in her own. William edged his chair closer leaning in towards his wife, his love.

"My father discovered I was pregnant and he hit me. I fell and lost my baby. When I recovered, I left Lyons to stay with a friend in England. I didn't think I could have children after that."

"But you did," said Melanie.

"Darling, why didn't you tell me any of this?" asked William. Here was the source of the ripples. Her father-casting the original stone, setting the whole thing in motion with his violence and his desire to control.

Natalie reached a hand towards him and he held it tightly. "Because I was ashamed," she whispered. Her eyes clung to his. "And when I was beginning to love you I didn't want you to think I was...a tramp."

"I'd never think anything of the sort."

"It was in the past," she said. "Forgotten. My old life."

But it wasn't forgotten. The ripples travelled silently through calm waters until they struck an obstacle.

Natalie turned to Joelle. "When I held you in my arms it was as though I held the baby I had lost. You were mine. No-one else was going to claim you, I knew that. You became my baby. And your father's." She smiled at William with the smile he had loved from the first moment he saw her. "Babiey's are so precious. They are treasures. This is why, Melanie, I was angry with you for falling pregnant with no care for your child and its future. As if you didn't care."

"I care now, Mum," Mel said in a more subdued tone than William had heard from her for many years.

"I can see that, my darling," Natalie replied.

Joelle sat with the love of her family a palpable force around her. How could she have turned her back on this? Why had she not considered the reasons behind the decision her parents had made? Nothing comes from nothing. There's a reason for everything. Shay had tried to make her see how selfish and unreasonable she was being. Stan had succeeded. Or maybe it was simply that enough time had elapsed. As it had for her mother.

The secrets were out in the open and their family was the stronger for it.

Except, of course, for the one secret she could never reveal.

Chapter 13.

Shay returned to the surgery on Tuesday with leaden feet. Kavita greeted him with her usual cheer, the patients presented the usual array of infections, rashes, aches, b.u.mps and lumps. His colleagues, when asked, didn't produce any arguments against his proposed swap with Cathy O'Brian.

"We'd need to see her credentials, of course," said Steve, and Jane commented on the desirability of another female doctor on staff.

So, there was no problem with his leaving. Except his own reluctance to put hundreds more kilometres between himself and Joelle. The week plodded on. He procrastinated about contacting Cathy and telling her to send her resume to Steve. Next week would be soon enough. Cathy would be in touch if she was anxious to get things moving.

Joelle haunted him. In his dreams she wore the expression of dismay and confusion he had deliberately planted there by his carefully calculated indifference on the return journey. The tremulous way she'd asked if somehow she'd done something wrong, replayed itself over and over in his head. The brave smile when they'd said goodbye and she'd thanked him politely for taking her to visit his family insinuated itself into his memory. She was with him every moment of every day. So many times he'd come within a breath of s.n.a.t.c.hing up the telephone to blurt out his love, but always he prevented himself.

Torture.

He lay awake at night telling himself he'd done the right thing, indeed the only possible thing, telling himself he should phone or email Cathy in the morning. He would.

But in the morning, he didn't.

Almost a fortnight later, Cathy emailed him. When he read the sender name Shay's heart sank like a stone. Crunch time.

Greetings Doctor Shay, How are things back in the Big Smoke?

I have good news and bad news regarding our discussion about changing places-depending which way you look at it. The good news is, I'm engaged to be married. The bad news is ( for you) I don't want to leave my job here after all. My fiance is a teacher at Tamworth High and we want to buy a block of land in the area and build on it.

I'm sorry to do this to you when I know how keen you are to return to Birrigai but I'm sure something else will come up. You could set up pretty much anywhere you liked, I think.

Best wishes Cathy O'Brian Shay stared at the screen, reading and rereading her message. Good news and bad news. Which was it for him?

He pounded out a congratulatory reply with a *don't worry about it' sentence tacked on and sent it off.

Without the lifelong obsession of finding his sister, Shay's life seemed almost devoid of meaning. In limbo. He went to work at the surgery and did his s.h.i.+fts at the hospital. He functioned adequately but all with a curious sensation of observing himself from a distance, detached. He thought perhaps it might be a type of grief. Separation from sensation.

Be careful what you wish for in case you get it.

In the paper one empty Sat.u.r.day morning he read an article about the displaced feeling many soldiers endured upon returning from war. They spent the whole of the war wis.h.i.+ng they could go home, yet when they were home the fighting raged on in their minds. Some poor, ravaged souls were never freed of the horrors.

His current situation was in no way comparable to that of a returned warrior but the elusiveness of the desired goal was what resonated. The disappointment of finally achieving the longed-for state, then discovering it fell short or was indescribably different to that which the inventive mind had conjured up in its absence.

Was it better to be living the h.e.l.l and escaping to the dream of home as heaven or living in safety at home constantly immersed in dreams of h.e.l.l?

His dream of a loving little sister, forged in childhood and kept pristine was nothing like the reality of the beautiful woman he now loved with all his heart and could never have.

It occurred to him at one point that the search for other relatives had either stalled or reached a dead end. His mother's comment about the male and female Grayson lineage appeared to be correct by the lack of response to Mel's mail out. His own advertis.e.m.e.nts in major metropolitan newspapers had so far failed to elicit a reply, but when several of these contacted him to enquire about continuing his run, he agreed to another month. If anyone at all replied, it would give him a good excuse to ring Joelle.

Did a brother need one to call his sister? Normally, no.

He spent most of that same Sat.u.r.day afternoon trying to come up with a reasonable reason to phone her after nearly three weeks of silence. He failed but the house benefited from the thorough cleaning he gave it while thinking.

That evening Shay went to a party at a friend's house in Bondi, a monster affair to cover a housewarming and two birthdays that fell within a week or two of the date. Copious quant.i.ties of wine and beer were consumed by all. Shay slept on a divan in the study which was a better fate than that of several other drunken guests who ended up on the living room floor on an array of cus.h.i.+ons.

He arrived home at eleven the next morning and went straight to bed-stale smelling, rumpled, sick to the stomach, dry throated and head pounding with the mother and father of all hangovers. The theory of drowning one's sorrows in alcohol proved incorrect. Joelle stayed with him constantly, drunk or sober, waking or sleeping and probably dead or alive.

At five, he emerged from his bedroom, stumbled downstairs to the shower, and considerably brighter and cleaner twenty minutes later, contemplated food.

A tin of chicken and vegetable soup plus slabs of toast under his belt and Shay was a newish, if slightly seedy, man. He washed and dried his dishes and went to flop on to the couch for the TV news and sports results. A quiet evening in tonight. No more parties like that one for him. For at least a few months. Good thing none of his patients had seen him in action. Or Kavita.

An hour later he got up to make coffee. The answering machine light was flas.h.i.+ng. He hadn't even noticed this morning when he staggered in-too many other coloured lights flas.h.i.+ng in his eyes.

Two messages. Joelle? Always the immediate thought. Stupid. She wouldn't call. He'd frightened her off. Unless something was wrong or they had some news.

He pressed *Play'.

"Shay, it's Mum. I'm just calling to say h.e.l.lo. Nothing's wrong. Bye, love."

Shay smiled. She hated his answering machine and always sounded nervous and stiff when she left a message.

"Ring my mobile," he told her but she argued that the calls were too expensive. "I will if it's an emergency," she conceded. This obviously wasn't an emergency.

The second message clicked on. A man's voice. Slow-speaking with the familiar, laid-back manner of the outback.

"Uh. G'day. I'm ringing about the ad in the paper? About Emily Grayson? My wife used to know her. I'll call back later." Then came a scuffling noise and Shay thought with horror the man was about to hang up. He flung out a hand, about to yell uselessly, *No, don't' when the voice continued, "Umm. The name's Nolan. Andrew Nolan." Another brief silence. "I'll leave my mobile number. It's 0402 40..." BEEP. Andrew was axed.

Shay cursed loud and long.

When had Andrew Nolan phoned? The date and time on his machine had long since given up reciting the correct details. This message was announced as 7a45 am Friday. Yesterday evening perhaps, or this morning? He should call again today some time. What if he didn't? What if he called tomorrow and missed Shay again because he was at work? He'd give up, probably. He wouldn't realise the importance.

A new message! That's what he'd do-record a new message giving his mobile number. Shay wrestled with the b.u.t.tons and instructions for fifteen minutes but successfully recorded another outgoing message. He then retired to the couch with the coffee he'd intended to make earlier. He placed the cordless phone on the coffee table within easy grabbing distance.

Andrew Nolan's wife knew Emily Grayson. That would make the couple about William and Natalie Paice's age-maybe younger. In their late forties. Perhaps they went to school together. Why was Andrew ringing instead of his wife?

He should tell Joelle. Shay swung his legs off the couch and was halfway standing before he reconsidered. No. Wait until he had something concrete to tell her. No point her getting excited until he had more information. If the Emily Grayson turned out to be the wrong one she'd be upset and disappointed. He relaxed against the cus.h.i.+ons.

Seven-thirty. That would qualify as later if Andrew had rung yesterday evening. It would qualify as later if he'd rung this morning. Shay stared hard at the phone, willing it to ring.

At eight-fifteen he used his mobile to call his mother.

"Someone saw my ad and phoned to say they knew Emily Grayson."

"Who?" she asked with a rising squeak of surprise.

"Andrew Nolan. Heard of him?"

"No. Hang on I'll ask Stan."

A moment later his father's gruff voice said, "What did this chap have to say?"

"Nothing. My answering machine cut him off before he could leave a contact number."

"Will he call back?"

"He said he would. He said his wife knew Emily Grayson."

"Mmm."

"What?"

"I'm thinking. Nolan. Vaguely familiar but it's a fairly common name and I did deal with a lot of people on the force."

"It's unlikely you'd know him, surely? He might have been phoning from Brisbane for all I know. Anywhere."

"True. You'll just have to sit tight and wait for him to call back."

"I know."

"How's Joelle?"

"I haven't seen her for a while," Shay said.

"She took my advice and talked to her parents. Got it all straight and things are fine now, she said."

"Oh, I didn't know." Joelle hadn't bothered to tell him such a momentous piece of news. His plan had worked spectacularly well. "How do you know?"

"She called to thank us for the visit. She and her sister went round to see the parents the night she got back from her trip out here."

"That's good."