Please Don't Leave Me Here by Tania Chandler Read Free Book Online

before they climb in with their mum and dad.
    Brigitte lies awake. The pillow feels hot, and hair tickles her face. She kicks Sam — go into the twins’ bed, give me some room — but he doesn’t move.
    Pain curls its fingers around her lower back, spreads into her pelvis and down her legs, cramps her toes. She twists, and tries to shift the pressure to different nerves. Breathing away the pain — good air in through her nose, bad air out through her mouth, filling the pain zones with pure, healing white light — doesn’t help.
    Guilt competes with physical pain. It worms its way under her skin, stirs the juices in her stomach, and wraps darkness around her throat, making it hard to swallow. Something casts a moving shadow on the wall; it looks like the curtains, but there’s no breeze to stir them. She starts at the guttural, unearthly noise — not quite grunting, not quite screeching — of koalas mating. Maybe she should just tell Sam, and get it over with.
    ***
    On the second day the weather warms up, and they walk to their favourite swimming spot at the back of the island. Brigitte stares at her feet and concentrates on the crunchy, rhythmic sound her sneakers make on the dirt road.
    Brigitte and Sam sit on a beach towel in the shade of the gnarled tea-tree, watching Finn and Phoebe roll in the sand and splash at the lake’s edge. A big black swan leaves its bevy and waddles out of the water towards the twins. They scream, giggle, bump into each other, and fall over. Brigitte laughs, and Sam shoos away the swan. The sky reflects blue on the water, and sunlit-silver wavelets shimmer in the distance. Brigitte fears the water, hates to swim, never goes in.
    â€˜Sleep better down here?’ Sam says.
    â€˜Yes,’ she lies, and looks at a passing boat. ‘A bit.’
    He scoops up a handful of sand and lets it sift through his fingers.
    Sam takes the twins fishing at dusk. Brigitte stays at the house; she tries to watch TV, or read a book, but she can’t concentrate, can’t sit still. She walks through the rooms. Her grandparents and great grandparents look down at her from old portrait photographs on the walls.
    â€˜What am I going to do, Papa?’ she asks the black-and-white shot of a young, handsome Papa fishing on the lake.
    He smiles at her from his old tin boat. He never caught the bastard in the blue Camry; he won’t catch you either. She runs her hands through her hair and looks away — straight into the big, gilt-framed mirror above the couch. She averts her eyes quickly. When they were kids, Ryan used to tell her that if they looked into that mirror they would see ghosts. She tells herself to stop being silly. There’s no such thing as ghosts. In the kitchen, the clock ticks loudly on the wall above the sink. She takes a bottle of white wine from the fridge and pours herself a glass.
    Footsteps pound across the porch, and the screen door slams. Fishing didn’t last long. Sam’s just behind the twins; he wipes his feet on the doormat. The house comes alive again.
    â€˜We catched a big crab, Mummy,’ Finn says.
    â€˜Yes, but it jumped off the line and back into the water, didn’t it, Finny?’ Sam picks up the twins’ abandoned fishing rods from the floor and stands them in the rack at the corner of the kitchen.
    â€˜Seaweed, too,’ Phoebe says.
    â€˜Yes, lots of seaweed.’
    â€˜And did Daddy catch a fish?’ Brigitte asks.
    â€˜No,’ the twins say in unison.
    â€˜It was a bit noisy. Fish like quiet.’ Sam gets a beer from the fridge and puts it in his I HEART THE R.I FERRY stubby holder. The twins giggle and run off to play with the toys in the sunroom.
    â€˜Would you like a little glass of wine?’ Sam takes the bottle from the fridge door. ‘God, Brig, you’ve drunk half the bottle!’
    â€˜I’m on holiday.’ She holds out her glass for a refill. ‘So