TL *Humaning the Best She Can*’s Reviews > Homecoming > Status Update

Heh, a couple more twists in the road

Polly had certainly made some wrong turns—strange how easy the signposts were to see in the rearview mirror—but she had learned long ago that it was pointless to give in to the black temptation of regret.

For the next few days, Percy struggled to keep his head above water. Meg was unreachable, neither of his sons was speaking to him, the Turner family lay dead in the morgue. The police were interviewing everyone in town—Percy had taken Kurt along to the station himself, getting in early before the eye of suspicion had a chance to land; the search for the Turner baby continued.

It started to rain again, and out there in dark, hidden places, dingoes sent their howls into the stormy night. Hearing them, Percy was overcome with a sudden deep and profound grief. Events of the day, but even more than that, at an elemental level. It could do that to you, this country. The sounds, the colors, the stories of make and break—

Grand and magnificent, yet even from a distance she could see that the house was in a state of disrepair. It was perched upon a stone plinth that rose about a meter off the ground. A clinging ficus with tiny leaves had grown to cover most of the stones and moss stained the rest, so that the house appeared to sit upon an ocean of greenery.

The driveway wound on through a profusion of changing foliage, lusher and denser than the bush through which she’d already come. Enormous hydrangeas with vibrant pink sponge-like blooms, rhododendrons and impatiens, tall spears of flowering oyster plants jostled together with Jurassic-looking philodendron leaves and tree ferns, a mixed bag all tied by a wild creeper with bell-shaped blue flowers.

It was unsettling being back at Darling House. Polly was beset with memories; the past appeared at every turn.

He didn’t add that he nonetheless knew them very well. That he would never forget the Turner family of Halcyon, their lives and terrible deaths beside the creek that Christmas Eve.

The house, when he reached it, was not the place he remembered. It had taken on the air of abandonment that all empty houses do after a time. The rooms no longer rang with the busy noise of a family going about their lives: the clatter of the piano, the squeal of children playing, a new baby’s cry. The doors were sealed, and a haze of wind-blown dirt rendered the windows dull.

He knew others in his field who had become inured to the sights and smells, who could chat as they worked about the film they planned to see on the weekend and the funny thing their kid had said before school that morning. But not Larry.