Before This Is Over

by Amanda Hickie

  “Zac, it’s not up to you to deal with this stuff.” Sean spoke man-to-man. “Try to understand—it’s hard for us too. Don’t stay mad with your mum too long. She did her best.” He gave her a glance again, as if looking for confirmation.

  Zac kept his eyes on his feet but his reply hid teenage contempt. “’Kay.”

  Hannah spoke hesitantly. “This is bad stuff. It’s all right for all of us not to know what to do.”

  “’Kay.”

  “Now we have to work out some way of getting food and water to Gwen.” Hannah sighed.

  “We can put it in a takeaway container and leave it for her. Take it around sometime this afternoon. She can’t lie in wait for us all the time.”

  Hannah dug in the cupboard for a container and decanted the salad into it. From the pantry, she got a small plastic water bottle.

  “So, how do we deliver this?” Hannah stared out at the fence again. “To her back door I guess.”

  Sean walked out to the backyard and stepped on the horizontals of the fence, craning around to get a good look through Gwen’s small back window. An old lean-to laundry blocked most of the view. “I can’t see any movement. I can’t see anything. Maybe I should take it to the front door.”

  “I don’t think that’s safe. She’ll expect it. We always take the food to the front door. And the blinds are drawn all day. You can’t see in.” She stared at the blank back of the house. “Maybe we should try to talk to her when she’s calmed down, take it around then.”

  “You’re not going to her place. That really defeats the lock-in.” Sean contemplated the yard, the fence, and the door.

  Zac looked from one to the other. “We can’t let her go hungry.”

  Sean put one hand on the fence. “Well, here I go.” He pushed up with his arms and tried to swing his legs over. The fence wobbled back and forth. Once he got one leg up on top, the fence settled into a more graceful sway. Hannah could see the palings digging into his gut as he shifted his weight. He gave a large heave and slid both his legs and most of his heft to the other side. The fence gave a lurch. He dropped over, leaping up just a little too enthusiastically, then stumbled again.

  “Are you all right?”

  “My knees are fine. They are absolutely fine because I’m not old.”

  “Quick.” Hannah held out the salad and water to him.

  He hobbled at a jog, his frame lumbering from side to side. At the back door, he bent to put the food down, creaked back up, and knocked. Back to the fence was a sprint and a scrabble up the smooth side. Hannah pulled at his torso but only managed to grab his shirt, half pulling it over his head. She laced her arms under his armpits and gave a tug. It got him to the top of the fence and he half tumbled down the other side.

  Gwen’s back door opened. Zac ran one way to the house, Hannah and Sean the other to the office. They slammed the door, huddling in its shadow. Hannah was shaking silently, tears running down her face.

  Sean put his arm around her, drew her in to his shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  Her breathing came in deep gasps, not quite like sobs. She was having trouble drawing air, she was laughing so hard. “You”—she gasped again—“are so”—another almost sob—“uncoordinated.”

  They stayed behind the door, arms wrapped around each other until they were quite sure Gwen had gone inside. Hannah could feel the vibration of her voice against his chest. “I screwed that up. And I don’t know how to fix it.” Her face became somber.

  He kissed her damp cheek. “What could you have done?”

  “Something different.”

  “What something?”

  “Not push an old lady over. I screwed up.” She rubbed her wet face on his shirt.

  The moonlight turned the lemon tree and the garage into ghosts. The boys were in bed. There was no sound from the TV in the living room. No car noises from the street. No banging of pots or voices from the neighboring houses. The intermittent improvisation of a wind chime and tin roofs creaking in the breeze stood in for the silent occupants of the neighboring houses.

  She pulled the heater closer to the table. The kitchen lights were off. Only the bars of the radiator glowed against her legs and warmed the room with a faint orange light. In the strange quiet of the night, Hannah could hear every soft footfall on grass as Sean emerged from the dark of the office, across the garden, and into the gloom holding a bottle of wine in one hand and a piece of paper in the other.

  He held up the bottle as if it were a hard-won trophy. “We might as well drink the least valuable liquid we have and save the water.”

  They drank slowly in comfortable silence, savoring the astringent, full flavor. Hannah lost herself in the deep red of the wine in the low light.

  “I could do this every night.”

  “You could do this ten more nights. Or, given we have nothing to do tomorrow and no one to answer to, five more nights.”

  Hannah rested her feet on his knees. “Just as well we can’t wash the kids in wine. What a beautifully useless drink this is.”

  “Speaking of which.” Sean smoothed out the sheet of paper on the table. “Somewhere on here it says how much water we use.” He held it sideways to the radiator and squinted.

  All Hannah could see by the glow was that it was one of their bills. “You could turn the light on.”

  “And ruin the ambience? Not a chance.” He ran his finger over the columns. “I think it says a hundred and sixty-three, or sixty-eight, I can’t tell. Does that seem right for a day?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Let me see, average daily usage. That’s the one. So that’s how much we use in a day.”

  “For four of us, but there are five of us. Or six.”

  “Right, so, that’s about…I don’t know.” Sean looked befuddled.

  “You’ve only had a glass.”

  “Ah, my love—the wine, the moonlight, and you are all intoxicating.”

  She pushed his leg with her foot. “You think that will get you somewhere.”

  “I think I will impress you with my towering intellect. I believe, if my calculations are correct, that means we use about forty liters of water per person per day. But we just won’t wash the kids. Or their clothes. If we all stay dirty we’ll all stink the same.”

  “We still need water to cook. So, thirty liters each?”

  “No, much less. No water for the garden or the dishwasher. We can reuse cooking water.” Sean looked over the bill again. “But we have to factor in the toilet.”

  “Any idea how many liters the bucket holds? I used the whole thing but maybe we can get away with less.”

  “We’d be screwed if we still had the old toilet. I think the new one is supposed to use six liters at a time and the bucket holds around ten. I told Zac just to use a half—it worked for me.”

  “He must have loved that.” Hannah considered how lucky she’d been to get out of that particular parenting moment.

  “He loved it even more when Oscar danced around him chanting ‘If it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down.’” He grinned at her. “So, I think if you look sideways and squint, we could get away with fifteen per person.”

  “More like twenty-five.”

  “Twenty, and that’s my final offer.” Sean raised a bidding finger.

  “We plan for twenty-five and work our hardest to make it twenty.”

  “Sold, to the tipsy lady in the woolly socks.” Sean stared, defocused, into the garden with a contented smile. “I feel peckish. What do we have in the way of goodies?”

  “I will allow you to get a tin of smoked oysters from the pantry. The kids don’t like them anyway.” Hannah lifted her feet to let him get out and held them suspended until he came back with a plate loaded with crackers and the oysters.

  She slipped a cracker into her mouth and licked the oil off her fingers. “I never thought a natural disaster would be like this. I didn’t think there would be parts I’d want to remember.” />
  Sean refilled their glasses and considered the contents with a subdued and bitter smile that they didn’t seem to warrant. “That assumes we make it to a time when we can look back and remember.”

  “Right.” The path that idea led down was unnerving. She diverted her thoughts to the things she could control. “Which depends, in part, on the water. How much do we have in the tank?”

  “More than if we’d bought the tank you wanted.”

  “It’s three-quarters full.”

  “So it would have been three-quarters of a thousand liters. Now it’s three quarters of two thousand.”

  “You were right, I was wrong.” She smiled. “Which makes how much?”

  “A week and a half, if it doesn’t rain, but it’s going to rain.” He considered the glass, twirling it by the stem. “The water wouldn’t do us any good without the pantry. That’s all you.”

  “Ah, but I didn’t think to buy a case of wine.”

  “One of us has to be about the fun.”

  “Do you think Zac’s ever going to forgive me for this afternoon?”

  Sean frowned.

  “I’m not even sure he should.” It was a confession, and she hoped for absolution.

  “We’ll survive this because of you.” Sean squeezed her hand. “After all that we’ve been through, together, we’re practically indestructible. Zac will just have to learn that you can’t solve the unsolvable, but you can endure it. He’ll forgive his mother for not being superhuman.”

  “I’d die for Oscar or Zac, if I had to, but I wouldn’t die for Gwen. I hope I would for Daniel, but I don’t know. Does that make me a bad person?”

  Sean shrugged. “What about me?” He flashed her a smile. “Would you die for me?”

  “I assumed you’d die for me, boyo. That’s the way I saw this relationship.” She slipped her feet back onto his lap.

  He smiled. She sipped her wine. They listened to the silence.

  Sean shifted in his chair. “There’s a funeral tomorrow for one of the guys from work.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Not well. I know what he looked like.”

  “You can’t go.”

  “Is that how we measure our compassion, by how well we know someone?”

  Hannah considered the moonlight. “What if some of us have smaller souls? What if I was just born with less?”

  “I imagine your soul is full-figured.”

  “Maybe no matter how hard I try, even if I expend all my energy, the most I’ll ever be is a not completely crappy human being.”

  “Or maybe we never had to make decisions like this before. Maybe all over the city these kind of decisions are being made.”

  “By people who are better, more compassionate.”

  Sean rested his hand on the foot that lay in his lap, staring at it as if it held an answer. “How do you measure compassion? Is it an unthinking reflex, even if that achieves nothing? Or is it careful and considered and planned? You can only do what you can do.”

  “What happens when we run low on water? How do we decide who gets what?”

  Her leg was warm where Sean’s hand rested on it. The branches of the lemon tree swayed, dappling the light falling on the kitchen table. She stretched out her toes and he pushed back against them.

  He looked at her with gentle concern. “The water will go back on. It’s a city—you need water. Lots of people don’t have a tank—they’ll have to bring the water back. Or we could leave the water to the kids and drink wine. But we do it together.”

  She looked at the clock on the car dash. It was ten past twelve, later than she thought. She could see Sean drumming on the shelf of the ATM, waiting for it to spit out the cash. He had been calm as long as he was doing something, but now he couldn’t speed up the money counting, and his head darted left and right.

  She looked at her phone. Still ten past twelve. The boys were home alone. Every second spent here was another second they were not protected.

  This was the second machine they’d hit tonight. They had waited until they were sure the kids were asleep, like Christmas Eve, then had driven up to the local shops and done a circuit around the block to make sure no one was there. The shops had looked strange, but only in the way they would on any Tuesday night around midnight. Vacant, shut up, waiting for people. Bright shores on a dark street.

  Sean had taken out the daily limit. And how pleased he had been with himself as he had pointed out it was a daily limit, that midnight was the end of one day and the start of the next. Which is why they had sat in the car for another half hour, waiting for the day to end.

  “Are you sure this will work?”

  “No, but we’re here now. Where else do you have to be?”

  “Home.”

  “At home, we’d be asleep. How much protection would you be providing then?”

  “We were only going to be ten minutes. They’re alone, and we got what we came for.”

  “If the banking system goes down, we’ll need cash for food, petrol…”

  “Fine, five minutes more.”

  That afternoon they had spooked themselves with the thought that they had almost no cash in their wallets and that the ATMs might not always be refilled. And then they spooked themselves with the thought of carrying large amounts of money through almost empty streets. Sean had spent half an hour going through the boys’ things looking for a baseball bat.

  “Why would they have a baseball bat? They’ve never played baseball.”

  “It doesn’t have to be baseball. Anything threatening and hard that you can wield like a bat.”

  “They play soccer. The soccer ball is in the garden.”

  “Someone gave one of them a cricket set, didn’t they? I remember plastic stumps in the garden. Zac made me play with him. I’m sure.”

  Zac and Daniel had watched, still and silent, as Sean had pulled everything out of Zac’s cupboards. They had followed him to the garage as he emptied every box. They had looked on, Zac embarrassed and Daniel bewildered, as Sean had arisen triumphantly with the tiny plastic bat.

  Now that they were actually here, she worked hard to reassure herself that these were her local shops the same as always, but the dark midnight shadows in empty shop windows made it hard. She was parked diagonally, to see down both roads, watching all directions, jumpy, ready to yell. The idling engine was a magnet for anyone looking for trouble, but if she turned it off, she would lose seconds starting it. They weren’t teenagers—they were parents of a teenager. If they met trouble, a quick getaway was their best bet.

  Sean stood at the ATM, in a well-lit recess in the glass front wall of the bank, hand out, looking down to the money dispenser. She watched the shadows, hoping that any danger was here and not at home. He was clear as day to anyone in the street. The bat was in his left hand, dangling at his side. It barely made it to his knees. She wanted him to hurry up. Leaving the boys alone was a mistake.

  As they drew up, the house gave nothing away, dark and silent in solidarity with every other house in the street. A light drizzle shimmered in the cones of the streetlamps.

  “Hey.” Sean rubbed her knee. “We’re safe. Even thieves stay home when it’s wet.”

  “Your run-of-the-mill career thief, maybe, but desperate people don’t care about a few drops of rain.”

  “What are the chances that someone would pick our house, in the one hour in the middle of the one night we’re not there?”

  Worry was a talisman—it kept the evil at bay, but it didn’t make leaving the boys behind anything but a bad decision. As she put the key in the front door, she thought about how pointless the lock was, how flimsy the house’s defenses were. They were defenses of convention, politeness. A general agreement to go in through the front door, not smash the window next to it.

  Her first impulse was to place a hand on Oscar. By the light that seeped around his curtains, she could see his forehead forced into a little pucker that seemed out of place. Concern, Hannah
thought, for a future he wasn’t aware of yet. But he had thrown his arms wide, as if they lay where they fell, and his body oriented itself without heeding the direction of the bed. He breathed heavily, a child’s version of a snore, like a baby clone of Sean. She let herself watch him.

  She couldn’t do more than take a step into Zac’s room. The door opened only a fraction, wedged hard against Daniel’s mattress, which took up most of the floor. Even in sleep they defended their right to privacy. Two lumps in two beds, two sets of breathing sounds, and two mops poking out from the sheets. They were safe.

  Her nerves jangled but she ached with tiredness. As Sean stuffed the wad of fifties into one of his weekend work boots, it bothered her that it looked like nothing more than a roll of paper. Hannah wrinkled her nose at him. “Couldn’t you pick a nicer shoe?” As if that would make a difference. Any thief worth his salt already knew all the places amateurs like them hid their money. They were trying to second-guess themselves.

  “We can go again tomorrow night.”

  “Getting home and finding the kids still safe is a reprieve, not license to keep doing it.”

  “I’ll go by myself.”

  “The petrol gauge dropped below empty. You’d have to walk.” She could picture the long walk, him standing alone at the ATM, everything that didn’t happen tonight happening. She turned away from the thought, like a sharp wound.

  “Let’s see how things are tomorrow.”

  She slid into bed, hunkered down under the duvet, and turned towards the luminous numbers of the clock. Half past one, much chillier now than it had been when the kids went to bed.

  Oscar would be up in five hours. Five possible hours of sleep. But her muscles were full of stored energy. She had an itch to get up, expend the tension, but she was pinned in place by her need not to wake everyone. Tomorrow she should run up and down the hall like Oscar did.

  A quarter past two. Four hours until Oscar woke. The streetlight through the curtains made patches on the ceiling, like a map. She traced paths between the islands of light.