Martin brought Ben over to stay and agreed to have dinner with them. Over schnitzels, vegetables and chocolate-chip ice cream, the three chatted for hours about the trip and their adventures. It was almost like earlier times. The holiday had done them wonders.
Martin barely mentioned his girlfriend and Ben thrived on the attention from both parents. Past bitterness seemed to have been forgotten. Both parents kissed their sleeping child goodnight.
The Saturday with Ben passed in a blur of hugs, laughter and games. Anya could have sworn he had grown in the days since she had seen him.
Sunday morning had him up much later than normal. Anya checked to make sure he was all right, and watched him sleep, so peacefully, so innocently. Disneyland and the trip home had exhausted him. Even so, he’d hung a display full of badges by his bed, collected and swapped in Anaheim.
Anya looked at the unmade bookcase at the back of the room. Ben hadn’t even asked about the boxes; all he wanted was his mum. She couldn’t help smile. Last night they’d snuggled on the lounge and watched Ratatouille. Days, and nights, with Ben were precious and too few.
She slipped downstairs and boiled the kettle while he slept. In retrospect, the divorce with Martin had been inevitable. Except Anya hadn’t counted on losing custody because she had become the working parent supporting them all while Martin stayed at home as the primary carer.
Anya placed two teaspoons of leaves and another “for the pot” as her grandmother had always done, and filled the teapot with boiling water before turning it three times, just like Nanna used to.
She sat and felt the sun on her skin through the kitchen window. This was her favorite time of day. No phone calls or meetings, and the world felt temporarily calm. And Ben safe upstairs, as if he lived there permanently.
Anya thought about how much of Ben’s schooling she had already missed, and it was only his first year. Other mothers did reading and canteen duty, but she had to work to pay child support on top of the mortgage and Elaine’s wage. Business had improved, but a lot of the government work went unpaid. Even so, it often led to paid jobs, which always helped.
A mug of tea later, Anya heard quick steps on the wooden stairs. “Good morning,” she said and met him in the doorway with a hug.
Ben, still sleepy-eyed, wrapped his arms around her without a word. When he didn’t move, she checked to see if he had fallen asleep standing up.
“How about some breakfast? I can do orange juice, scrambled eggs and toast.”
“Can we go out for waffles? I like waffles with maple syrup like we had in Disneyland.”
“How about we see what cereal’s left in the cupboard, after you ate two big bowls yesterday?”
Ben grinned with pride.
Anya was always conscious of wanting to make sure Ben enjoyed his visits, but tried hard to make sure he ate something nutritious for each meal.
He yawned and scratched his belly underneath his pajama top. For a moment Anya saw a mini version of her former husband. Ben opted for some muesli with banana and milk and sat himself in his usual spot at the small table, across from his mother.
Within moments of the first mouthful, he was back to his chattering self, regaling her with funny moments from Ratatouille, interspersed with more tales about the airport and plane food. Sometimes the stories he told took longer than the actual scenes, but that was one of the things she loved about him.
After he’d finished, he asked if they could color together. In a flash he was back with a pencil case and coloring book full of animals. He flicked open at a page of a mother tiger and her cubs, handed her the orange pencil and began with blue for himself for the sky.
“Mrs. Henry says I need to practice staying in the lines. She says I am good at writing letters but go too fast coloring. Did you do that when you were in kindergarten?”
“I don’t remember, it was a long time ago.”
He had managed to color over clouds but Anya chose to let him go.
“Hey, after this we can go to the park, then come back here for lunch. We have to go out with a work friend this afternoon to visit his sick dad.”
Ben glanced up through his curly mop of a fringe. “Are we going to the hospital?”
“No, sweetie, we’re visiting a place called a nursing home, where people go when they’re not well enough to look after themselves, but not sick enough to be in the hospital.”
He swapped the blue for a green pencil and began tracing the outline of the grass. “Why don’t their mums and dads look after them?”
“Because their parents are usually in heaven.”
“Do they have families?”
“Sometimes.”
“So why don’t they live with them instead of the nursing place? Mrs. Henry says families are supposed to look after each other. That’s why we have a family.”
Mrs. Henry, Ben’s kindergarten teacher, featured a lot in his conversations. Anya loved the way she made learning a game for him.
“Some families can look after their older members, but most can’t.” Like everything in life, the issue was complicated.
“Why not?” The grass merged with a cub, which was fast becoming green and black.
The questions never ran out with Ben. “Why” had to be his favorite word.
Anya thought about the number of reasons. Smaller families, longer working hours, distance from relatives, selfishness, family problems; the list was endless. She opted for a practical answer. “Well, if your nanna was in a wheelchair, she couldn’t live here because the bedrooms are upstairs. Where would she sleep?”
Ben considered this for a moment. “You could bring her to our house and you can come and live with us too.”
Anya would love nothing more than being with her son full-time, but Martin had a girlfriend. Besides, she couldn’t live with an adult who thought surfing was more important than paying bills. Even so, looking at Ben, she had to admit that, as a father, Martin was doing a great job.
“Hey, as far as I know, Nanna’s pretty happy seeing her patients and looking after her garden. Now, what about the park?”
Ben placed his bowl by the sink and trotted off to get dressed. While washing up, Anya wondered what sort of a father the Harbourn children had had. Chances were he hadn’t fathered all of the children, if Noelene’s “profession” continued throughout the relationship.
Had he been inherently bad, abusive or violent? Was he even literate? Was he strict, or morally void?
It can’t have been easy raising nine children, but large families could be perfectly functional, or at least appear that way. She headed for her office and clicked on her laptop to check her emails. There was nothing further from Dan Brody. They would still expect him this afternoon.
Ben reappeared in a new Buzz Lightyear shirt and shorts. The navy made his eyes an even deeper blue. “Mum, why don’t you have the same name as Dad and me? There’s a boy in my class whose parents didn’t get married and they have different names.”
“Your dad and I got married but when we got a divorce, you kept the name Hegarty, and I changed my name back to what it used to be.”
He maneuvered onto her lap and dangled his legs beside hers. The computer was an instant magnet for her son, but she wasn’t about to turn down the affection it encouraged.
“Why?”
That word again. “It’s far too complicated.” A five-year-old couldn’t understand her need for autonomy and independence and she was not about to explain why she had changed her surname from Reynolds to Crichton either. She tried to change the subject. “So are we going to the park?”
Ben stayed sitting and reached for a paperweight. “Why do people have to have different names?”
Anya kissed him on the cheek. “It’d be pretty funny if poor Mrs. Henry called the roll and said the exact same name for every child. Imagine if you all were called Ben.”
“The girls would look pretty silly being called a boy’s name.” He giggled at the idea, then opened the drawer and rummaged until he found a pencil. “But why do we have to have last names?”
Anya put the pencil back and closed the drawer, mindful of his fingers. “Names go back a very long time and tell you things about the family. Some names tell you where a family came from, like Crichton. It comes from a place in Scotland where my great-great-grandfather used to live. Other names can tell you what someone did for a job. Someone called Smith was related to a person who made things out of metal or could have even made things out of gold.”
“Is Josh Smith rich?”
“No,” she laughed. “But his great-grandfather could have been a jewelry maker.”
“What’s a Hegarty?”
“Well, Benjamin Hegarty, let’s find out.” Anya called up Google and searched. The site described it as meaning “unjust.” Knowing Martin sometimes that could fit. “It sort of means one-sided.”
“You mean like the goodies? That should be you because you help catch the baddies with Auntie Kate.”
“Something like that,” Anya said and lifted him off. “Time we cleaned your teeth and I got dressed. Can you find some shoes and socks in your bag?”
Ben was off. Before switching off the computer, she typed in Brody. “Muddy place” wasn’t what she had expected, but was pretty appropriate right now, given the discovery of his mother’s baby.
Curiosity led her to type one more name: Harbourn. She sat back when the result flicked on to the screen. The family moniker couldn’t be more telling.
“A polluted, dirty stream.” With a family labeled polluted, they either lived near contaminated water or were known for being generations as vile people. She suspected the criminality displayed by the current family members wasn’t due only to events in their childhood. At least some of it was probably in the genetic makeup. She had always thought that environment was more important than genes, but many of Ben’s mannerisms and his easygoing personality were more like her father, whom he didn’t see very often, so the traits could hardly be learned. Having a child had forced her to reconsider the influence of inherited traits.
She decided to perform a literature search on the latest research to help her better understand criminal families.
In the Harbourns’ case, she had a gnawing feeling that evil and violence were quite likely bloodborn.