Something You Follow Through On

"People mistake silence for ignorance. I have spent a lifetime being grateful for that particular mistake."

Thelma had been fidgeting with her cardigan buttons for the better part of twenty minutes, and I had been watching her do it without comment for the better part of fifteen.

The tea had gone cold. I had told her it would go cold if she didn't drink it, and she had nodded in the way she nodded when she was listening to me and not listening to me simultaneously — a skill she had refined over seventy-six years to something approaching an art form. I had told her many things over those seventy-six years. She had nodded at a considerable number of them and done precisely as she intended regardless.

I looked at the cold tea. I looked at Thelma's hands worrying at the second button from the top. I decided, as I had decided on a number of occasions across our long friendship, that some things were not worth the expenditure.

The afternoon light came through the yellowed curtains in that particular way it had at this hour — softening everything, lending the room a sepia quality that suited neither of us especially well, though it was considerably kinder to Thelma than to me. She had always photographed better. I had always been the one who looked more interesting in person, which I considered the superior arrangement.

Outside, the corridor gave off its usual sounds. Footsteps. The distant clatter of a trolley. The low, efficient murmur of voices somewhere down the hall, gentle and unhurried. I had grown accustomed to the rhythms of this building the way one grew accustomed to any landscape — not by memorising it consciously, but by noticing when something within it changed.

I was waiting for a change now.

Thelma looked up from her buttons. "Do you think he'll come?"

"He'll come," I said.

"You were very firm in the message."

"I was clear in the message," I said. "There is a distinction."

Thelma's mouth moved in the way it did when she was deciding whether to say something. I had been reading that particular movement since 1942. I waited.

"Jane," she said. "About the key—"

"We're not doing that now."

"I only wanted to—"

"Thelma." I said her name in the register I reserved for full stops. She recognised it. She had always recognised it, even when she chose to ignore it, and today — to her credit, or perhaps simply because she lacked the energy for the alternative — she let the sentence go unfinished.

The silence that followed was not an uncomfortable one. We had been sitting in silences together for the better part of eight decades. This particular silence had a texture to it — the specific weight of two women who disagreed about something significant and had each said what needed to be said and were now simply coexisting with the disagreement in the manner of people who understood that friendship was not the absence of conflict but the decision to remain after it.

I understood why she had done it. That was the inconvenient truth I kept arriving at every time I turned the matter over, which I had been doing at intervals since the moment she told me. Thelma had never been careless with important things — not once in all the years I had known her. She had managed the Jeffries household, the Jeffries secrets, the Jeffries inheritance and its accumulated damage, with a steadiness that would have broken most people before the first decade was out. The fact that she had handed the key to Luke was not carelessness. It was a decision, made by a woman who was ninety-one years old and had been carrying her share of our particular history since she was young enough to walk for hours in Tasmanian rainforest without her knees registering any opinion about it.

I did not have to agree with it to understand it.

I still wanted the key back.

The knock, when it came, was exactly as I expected — once, sharp, businesslike. I had always been able to read character in a knock. This one said: I have things to do and places to be and I am here because I have no choice, but I intend to make this as efficient as possible. I was intimately familiar with this particular approach to a conversation. I had deployed it myself on more occasions than I could count.

I opened the door.

He was looking at me with that expression he sometimes wore on arrival — the composed surface with the current running underneath it, the face of a man who had learned to keep things internal and believed he was better at it than he was. He had his mother's jaw. I noticed it every time and had trained myself not to linger on it.

My hand was already extended.

"Where's Thelma's key?"

He held my gaze without flinching. I gave him credit for that, as I always did. "It's in a safe place," he said.

Something tightened in me, briefly, and I released it. I had anticipated this. I had, in fact, prepared for this. "You didn't bring it with you?"

"No." He met my eyes with the directness I had come to recognise as one of his more reliable qualities, whatever else might be said. "I want some answers first."

I looked at him for a moment. Seventy-six years of keeping certain things in certain rooms had taught me a great deal about what happened when those rooms were opened before the appropriate time, and what happened when they were kept shut past the point of usefulness. Luke had been someone who needed to believe he was negotiating from a position of equivalence, even when the arithmetic suggested otherwise. I had found this quality simultaneously recognisable and, on certain afternoons, exhausting.

"I don't think we have time for answers," I said.

"Then make time." He held the doorframe with one hand, not aggressively, simply anchoring himself. "Thelma gave me that key for a reason. I deserve to know what it's for."

We regarded each other across the threshold. The air between us had that particular charge it sometimes carried — two people who knew the same things through entirely different experiences, neither of them prepared to acknowledge the full inventory of what they held.

"Let the boy in," said Thelma from her chair, her voice carrying the rustling quality it had acquired in recent months, dry and distant as autumn leaves.

I felt my jaw tighten. I stepped aside.

He came in and I closed the door behind him with the quiet finality I intended. The room settled around the three of us — the photographs, the worn furniture, the faded rug, the cold tea, the particular smell of lavender and old paper that I had stopped noticing and now, with Luke in the room, noticed again as though through his eyes.

I watched him look at Thelma.

She was having one of her softer afternoons. I could see him conducting his own rapid assessment — the way the cardigan hung on her shoulders, the thinning hair, the drift in her eyes that came and went like cloud shadow. I knew what he saw because I had been watching it for months with the particular attentiveness of someone who had sufficient medical training to understand precisely what it meant and sufficient personal history to find that understanding almost unbearable on certain afternoons.

He sat in the wooden chair I indicated — back to the door, which I noted he registered with a brief, involuntary adjustment in his posture. Old habits. He had been navigating situations that required awareness of exits for some weeks now. I had been navigating them considerably longer.

"Hello, Thelma," he said, and his voice was gentler than the knock had been. I noted this as well.

Thelma's eyes settled on his face with a focus that came and went these days like a signal through static. She smiled — that faint, knowing smile that I had seen cross her face at intervals across seventy-six years, the smile that meant she was aware of more than she was currently choosing to organise into consecutive sentences. "Have you seen my key?" she asked softly.

"You gave it to me, remember," he said, carefully, attempting to bridge back.

Thelma nodded, or seemed to nod, her gaze drifting somewhere slightly past him. "William will be most pleased," she said.

I watched Luke's face receive this.

"Who's William?" he asked.

Thelma continued in the direction she was going, unhurried, her voice dropping as though sharing something that the walls had no business hearing. "I can hear him, you know. Sometimes at night. Through the walls."

I kept my expression level. I had heard Thelma say this before, in this room, and the first time she had said it I had sat with it for a long time afterward in the particular way I sat with things that I could not immediately classify. Thelma had always been the most perceptive of us — the one who walked furthest into unfamiliar terrain, who pressed into the places that my caution and Bob's pragmatism would not have reached alone. I was not prepared to dismiss what she heard through walls, even now. Especially now.

"Do you know what she's talking about?" Luke asked, turning to me.

I looked at him steadily and said nothing.

He tried a different angle, as I knew he would. "Is it dementia?" he asked, lowering his voice slightly, with a glance toward Thelma that I found simultaneously considerate and presumptuous.

I held my expression exactly where it was.

Thelma's hands met the table with a force that startled him visibly — the teacup rattling in its saucer, the cold tea shifting — and I felt, despite everything, a warm pulse of satisfaction at the sight of her. There she was. Still entirely there. "You know darn well that I don't have dementia," she said, and the fire in her eyes in that moment was the fire of the girl who had climbed higher than the rest of us, who had walked into places the rest of us hesitated at the threshold of.

I could have told him that. I had chosen not to, for the same reason I had chosen not to answer the previous question. There was value in letting people find their own footing in a room. It told you considerably more about them than answering their questions did.

"Then what's going on?" he asked. His composure had a crack in it now, fine as a hairline fracture but present. "And who the heck is William?"

Thelma's expression changed — the fire settling into something older, more deliberate, the smile of someone who had been holding a particular hand for decades and had decided the moment to begin laying down cards had arrived. "William Jeffries is my father-in-law," she said.

I watched Luke slot this into place. I had always thought him quick — the kind of quick that worked laterally rather than sequentially, making connections across information the way water found its way through rock, not by force but by persistence and the identification of existing channels. He had, in this respect, a quality I recognised and found easier to respect than to say so aloud.

"The two of you were close?" he asked, leaning forward slightly, reading Thelma's face.

"No, they weren't particularly," I said, before Thelma could open that particular door wider than I was prepared to allow this afternoon.

Luke rubbed his forehead. I observed the gesture with the neutral interest of someone cataloguing a specimen. The headache was genuine, I thought — not performed, not a tactical display of frustration. He was genuinely finding this difficult, which was precisely the correct response to this room on this afternoon, and I saw no reason to make it easier for him.

"You two are making this a little confusing," he said, and there was something almost rueful in it, a quality I noted with the detached interest of someone who was also, privately, not entirely unsympathetic. "Why don't we just start with the key? Why is it so important? What is it for?"

Thelma touched her neck. That soft, instinctive gesture — fingers grazing skin that time had thinned and mapped — and her eyes went to a distance that had nothing to do with this room. "You never met James, my husband, did you?" she asked.

"He's too young for that nonsense, Thelma," I said, because we did not have unlimited afternoon light, and Thelma's approach to storytelling had always moved in concentric circles that expanded outward from the central point before they arrived at it, and I had learned across seven decades exactly which circles were load-bearing and which ones we could afford to skip. "Just tell him about the key."

Thelma's fingers continued their slow movement at her throat. "Oh," she said, with that small chuckle that arrived sometimes from very far away. "That's right, you have it."

"The key?" Luke pressed.

I looked at him. "Yes," I said.

I watched Thelma gather herself for the telling of it — the way she always gathered herself, quietly and without announcement, the way a woman gathers herself who has carried something for a very long time and has finally decided that the weight of carrying it exceeds the weight of setting it down. Her voice, when it came, was younger. I had heard this happen before, in other rooms, in other decades — the voice a person used when they were retrieving something from deep storage sounded different from the voice they used for the present tense. It held a different quality of attention.

She told him about the trapdoor. She told him about the study, the rule about the study, the pregnancy and the hope she had carried into that room on the day she broke the rule. She told him about the carpet moved to the side, about James's carelessness — or what she had always thought was carelessness, though I had my own views on that, views I had kept to myself for fifty years because some things were Thelma's story to tell and not mine to annotate.

I reached across the table and placed my hands over hers as she spoke. I did not say anything. There was nothing to say that the gesture did not already contain, and I had long since passed the age at which I felt the need to translate what could be expressed more directly.

I felt Luke watching me do this. I did not return his gaze. This moment was Thelma's, and whatever Luke made of it — whatever he read in it, whatever he filed under the accumulating evidence of who I was and what I carried — would have to wait.

"The discovery almost cost me my life," Thelma said, her voice dropping to the register of something that had never fully stopped being frightening.

"Our lives," I said quietly. I had not intended to speak, and yet there it was — the correction arriving before I could consider whether to let it pass. Some things could not be told without their full dimensions, and that particular sentence was not Thelma's to carry alone.

She looked at me. The look was brief and ancient and contained, as so many of our looks contained, an entire conversation compressed into a fraction of a second.

"Our lives," she said.

I felt Luke's attention sharpen. "You were there too?" he asked, turning to me.

"It's a little more complicated than that," I said, and I heard my own voice deliver it with the steadiness I had been maintaining since long before Luke was born. "Far too complicated than the time we have left now."

I held his gaze for precisely long enough to make clear that the door I had just closed was closed, and then I returned my attention to Thelma.

She continued. The revenge. The stolen key. The copies made and the original returned before James knew it had ever left his possession. I had heard this told before — to Bob, decades ago, in a version that contained considerably more detail than the one Thelma was offering now — and I watched it land on Luke with the particular attentiveness of someone who had spent years studying the exact moment information entered a person and began to rearrange the furniture of their understanding.

I noticed his eyes go to my neck.

I had known they would. I had known it with the same quiet certainty that I knew most things about this afternoon — because I had thought it through carefully, in the manner I thought through things that required precision. I kept my hand still. I let him look.

"Clearly, you have one of those keys," he said, nodding toward the chain.

I held his gaze. Then, slowly, I drew the chain from beneath my collar and let the key rest in my palm. I said nothing. He looked at it with the expression of someone confirming a hypothesis they had already arrived at and finding the confirmation exactly as significant as anticipated. I returned it to its place beneath my collar with the same deliberate unhaste with which I had produced it.

"So, who has the third key?" he asked.

Thelma and I looked at each other, and then we both looked at him.

"Bob," we said.

His expression arranged itself into something between disbelief and recalibration. "Bob?" he repeated. "Bob Gangley? The old guy down the corridor that annoys you so much?"

"He's not that bad, really," I said, and I heard the note of something in my own voice that I had not entirely planned for — something that sat in the neighbourhood of fondness, which I acknowledged privately as accurate and presented publicly as the most neutral observation I could manage.

Thelma chuckled, and the sound of it — low and warm and entirely her — was worth considerably more than the cold tea and the fidgeted buttons and the entire taxing architecture of this afternoon. "He's just old, like us," she said. "None of the simple things in life seem so simple anymore when you're our age."

Luke was leaning forward now, the composure fully cracked, the current entirely visible. Questions were assembling behind his eyes in the way questions assembled in people who had just received enough information to understand how much they were still missing. I recognised the condition. I had induced it deliberately, and I watched it with the satisfied attention of a gardener observing the first evidence of germination.

"What happened to the original key? How would making copies satisfy revenge? And revenge for what? What did you find behind that trapdoor?"

The questions arrived in a rush, and I let them finish landing before I moved.

I rose from my chair.

The movement was deliberate and unhurried, the movement of a woman who had decided that this particular door had been open long enough for this particular afternoon. I felt the familiar complaint of my hips, noted it, and declined to let it alter the quality of what I was doing. "I think that's enough for today," I said.

"But—"

"Come back next week." I looked at him directly, and I used the look I had been using on people since approximately 1948 when I had understood that the most effective form of authority was the kind that did not raise its voice. "Bring the key, and we'll tell you more."

The silence that followed had a shape to it. I could see him weighing it — the promise of what we held against the leverage he had retained by arriving without the key, the calculation running at speed behind that composed face. He looked to Thelma, seeking the crack in the wall, the soft entry point. Thelma, to her very great credit, had drifted back to the middle distance with the timing of someone who had occasionally, across seventy-six years, been extraordinarily useful.

"Next week," Thelma confirmed quietly, from whatever shoreline she was currently standing on.

Luke stood. Slowly. With the particular quality of someone recognising a position they cannot negotiate their way out of today. "Okay," he said.

"Promise that you'll bring that key with you," I said. I kept my eyes on his face and I held them there with the full weight of everything I knew and everything I was not saying and everything that sat between us in that room that neither of us would name today, or perhaps ever, in the manner that some things between people are acknowledged in full without ever requiring words.

I watched him absorb the look. I watched something in him settle under it — that particular settling of a person who has been seen more completely than they anticipated and is still, despite themselves, standing.

"Yeah, I promise," he said.

I held his gaze for one moment longer — long enough to let him know that I was weighing the promise and had formed my own view of its reliability and would be proceeding accordingly regardless. Then I nodded once.

He left. The door closed behind him with a quietness that told me he was more rattled than he wanted to appear, because people who were fully composed did not close doors that carefully.

I stood where I was for a moment after the sound of his footsteps had receded down the corridor. Then I turned back to the room — the photographs, the worn furniture, the faded rug, the cold tea — and to Thelma, who was sitting with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the window where the afternoon light was doing what afternoon light did, slowly and without apology.

I sat down.

Thelma's eyes came back to me. We looked at each other across the small table in the manner of two women who had been looking at each other across tables for the better part of eight decades — in houses and hospital rooms and nursing homes and the odd outdoor location when the situation had called for it, through every configuration of joy and grief and anger and relief that a friendship long enough to constitute most of a life could possibly accumulate.

"He has his mother's jaw," Thelma said quietly.

I reached for my tea. It was cold, as I had known it would be, as I had told her it would be. I held the cup without drinking from it.

Heather had died in February last year. Eighteen months ago, give or take. I had received the news through channels that I would not have been able to explain to anyone who didn't already understand the architecture of the arrangement — a letter forwarded through Patricia's estate solicitor, brief and factual, the kind of letter that delivered its information cleanly and left the feeling of it entirely to the recipient. She had been fifty-four years old. She had published a small book of poems. She had lived quietly in Glenelg and died there, in the manner of someone who had spent a lifetime learning to require as little as possible from a world that had taken too much from her very early on.

I had sat with the letter for a long time. I had not wept, because I had made my choices in 1962 and weeping over them fifty-five years later would have been a self-indulgence I did not feel I had earned. But I had sat with it. I had given it the full weight of a long, still morning, and I had thought about a girl I had held for three days and given away and spent the remainder of my life watching from a distance that was precisely as far as it needed to be and no further.

"She had more of Ferdinand in her face," I said. "Around the eyes."

Thelma nodded slowly. This was not new information — Thelma had always known more than she let on, which was one of the reasons I had valued her company across seven decades. She knew when to ask and when to simply receive.

"He carries himself differently than her," Thelma said, after a moment. "She was always — inward. He goes outward. Even when he's being careful."

This was accurate. I had noticed this as well, in his early visits, before the weeks had accumulated sufficient familiarity to allow me to read him with any precision. There was something essentially outward-facing in Luke — a propulsion, a forward momentum that had taken him through a missionary's life and a Tasmanian relocation and now apparently an entirely different world altogether — that Heather, by every account and by the evidence of her own quiet, distilled poetry, had never possessed.

Whether this was nature or simply the difference between a life that had been damaged at seven and a life that had been damaged by a different order of things entirely, I was not qualified to say. I had my views. I kept them in the place where I kept views that I had arrived at too late to be of use to anyone.

"Patricia did well by him," I said. It was the most I was prepared to offer on the subject of Laurence and Patricia Atwell, and it was, I believed, accurate. Whatever else could be said about the arrangement — and there was considerable else, and I had said most of it to myself at intervals across fifty-six years — the boy sitting in my wooden chair this afternoon had not grown up the way Heather had grown up. He had grown up Mormon and earnest and full of dreams in a remote mining town, and whatever damage he had accumulated since, it was not the damage of a pink-wallpapered bedroom and a silence imposed before he was old enough to understand what silence cost.

That was something. I had always considered it something.

Thelma was quiet for a moment, her fingers still, her eyes on the window. Then: "Do you think he'll bring the key?"

I set down my tea. "He'll bring it," I said. "He's too curious not to."

Thelma smiled — that particular smile, the one from the rainforest, the one that had survived sixty years of James Jeffries and all the weight the Jeffries name deposited on the people who carried it. "You always did know how to leave a door open at exactly the right height," she said.

I considered this. "I learned from watching the wrong people leave them too wide," I said.

I reached for my tea one more time. It was entirely cold now, and entirely undrinkable, and I drank it anyway — because it was there, and because I had told Thelma it would go cold, and because some things you followed through on simply as a matter of principle.