How to Be Second Best

by Jessica Dettmann

  * * *

  When the starter gun goes for the two-kilometre Fun Run, I’m still in a taxi, on the expressway. I’m wearing jeans, but it doesn’t matter now, because I’ve missed the race I vaguely helped organise, the race I was going to run with Tim. The race I’ve been failing to train for.

  The taxi pulls up near the gates of the oval, and I leap out, flinging a fifty-dollar note at the driver and not waiting for a receipt, even though I need it for my expenses. I can see a crowd gathering at the finish line.

  I have to admit, the whole set-up looks super professional. There’s an inflatable arch over the ribbon, balloons everywhere, and everyone I pass seems to be wearing the same hat: a bright yellow cap provided by Geoff Lang Real Estate bearing the slogan ‘Shorewood? Sure Would!’

  I can smell a sausage sizzle, and bacon and eggs, and one of the Lord of the Juice’s hideous chartreuse trucks is parked beside a Mr Whippy. I know who’ll be getting more customers. There’s a jumping castle doing brisk business, and two St John Ambulance workers standing beside their vehicle, looking bored.

  The crowd is starting to get louder, which must mean they can see the runners approaching. Picking up the pace as much as I can while carrying my bags, I jog to the arch.

  I’m stuck behind several rows of spectators, but I jump and peer around shoulders until I spot Helen. Resplendent in cobalt blue activewear from head to toe, she is in prime position, right beside the finish line at the front of the crowd. I force my way through, the insincerity of my apologies matched only by the sharpness of my elbows.

  A tall blonde woman cries out when I give her a slightly hard shove with my laptop bag, and she scowls at me as I barge past. When I reach Helen, I see Freya and Lola are standing in front of her, bouncing up and down with excitement as they watch the runners coming up the home straight.

  I crouch down and pull them into a hug. They hug me back for about two seconds, before pulling away and returning their attention to the runners. ‘Go Tim! Come on Daddy!’ they shriek, even though they can’t see them yet. ‘Run faster!’

  Helen looks at me. ‘You made it,’ she says, in a tone that suggests this is too little, too late.

  ‘Any sign of them?’ I say.

  ‘Not yet, but they’re probably not going to be in the first bunch of finishers. Troy’s actually feeling pretty ill.’

  ‘Did he have work late?’ I ask, and don’t even try to disguise my sarcasm.

  Helen stares straight ahead and says nothing. She runs her hands through Lola’s hair and Lola bats her away.

  The race is won by a mother I often see out running. She has close-cropped hair, a body like a greyhound, and her face is set in an expression of grim determination. Her kids are nowhere to be seen. They obviously couldn’t keep up with her and the concept of this being a Fun Run has been discarded somewhere along the route, along with so many Lululemon hoodies.

  Adam and Bon jog up to the finish, in a very respectable time, and my stomach clenches involuntarily when I catch Adam’s eye. He gives me a sheepish wave. I wish he would go back to Amsterdam. I feel like I’ve worked through what happened, but I’d still rather not see him every day. Ideally I’d just ignore him, but unless Tim and Bon have a huge falling out, I don’t think that’s going to be an option. I lose sight of them as they melt into the crowd.

  For fifteen minutes Helen and I stand side by side, watching the runners finish. There’s still no sign of Tim and Troy. Two dads accompanying a pair of stubborn four-year-olds straggle over the finish line to a huge round of applause, and finally Tim and Troy round the corner into the home straight. They are dead last. Tim is jogging virtually on the spot, and Troy is walking so slowly that Freya and Lola, at their most distracted, could leave him for dead.

  By the time they reach the arch, most of the crowd has dispersed in search of sausage sandwiches and ice cream.

  ‘Hooray!’ I yell. ‘Come on, Tim! You can do it!’

  He looks furious. ‘I know I can do it. Dad’s been so slow. We’ve come last. Last, Mum.’

  Troy now appears to be limping. He’s not looking very well.

  ‘Darling, are you all right?’ Helen rushes to his side.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m all good. Just rolled my ankle right after the race started, so I was a bit of a dead weight for poor old Tim.’

  ‘Why didn’t you stop?’ Helen fusses. ‘Tim could have run with someone else.’

  ‘I couldn’t let my boy down, could I?’ Troy’s leaning on Helen’s shoulder now.

  ‘Which ankle is it?’ I ask.

  He hesitates. Classic sign of a lie. ‘Ah, the right.’ He shifts his weight onto his left foot. Something’s not right here.

  ‘Look, I might just pop over to the first aid tent and get some ice for it,’ he says, but before he gets a chance, Bon dashes over to us, followed by Adam and the woman I barged past before, who, now that I get a good look at her, can only be Bon’s mother, such is their flaxen-haired similarity.

  ‘Tim! My mum’s here! Now she can be friends with your mum and she’s brought all my Lego with her!’

  Adam has the grace to look mortified. His wife looks at me without smiling and holds out her hand. ‘Hello, again. I’m Ilse. I’ve heard so much about you and Tim.’

  I’ll bet what you’ve heard doesn’t even scratch the surface of what there actually is to hear, I think, but I shake her hand. I’m about to apologise for bashing into her when Helen leaps in.

  ‘Oh!’ she says. ‘You’re Adam’s wife?’ Her voice is dripping with glee.

  Shit shit shit. Don’t say anything, Helen, I silently pray.

  ‘I’m Helen, Tim’s stepmother. This is his father, Troy. We must have you both over for dinner. We’d love to get to know Tim’s little friends’ parents more. Emma always seems to get to know them so well and we only have Tim every second weekend so we feel a little bit left out.’

  This is going to get very ugly. I’m about to make my excuses, and leave them all to hear what Helen seems to be about one sentence away from telling them, when I hear a familiar voice calling my name.

  ‘Emma! Emma!’

  It’s Philip. I don’t know how it’s Philip, but I turn to see him striding towards me. I’m so confused, but at the same time, strangely delighted.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, and wraps me in a huge hug. When he releases me, he kisses me firmly on both cheeks, and takes my hands.

  ‘Philip!’ I say, aware that all eyes are on us. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Can I just borrow you for a moment, Emma?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say, and we move away from the others.

  Philip takes a deep breath and begins. ‘I arrived in Sydney yesterday, and I realised that I felt very sorry to have left you. It was such fun getting to know you, and I don’t think I told you that. I wanted to ask you if I could see you again. And I didn’t think you’d say “No, I won’t see you again,” but you never know with people, they might not want to see you again, so I thought I wouldn’t risk not seeing you again by asking you that in an email or on the phone. And I remembered you were coming to this run thing — I remembered the name of your suburb, and I hope you don’t find that creepy — so I thought I’d find you here. I came to ask you in person, that way if you said no then at least I would have seen you again anyway, if you know what I mean.’

  I’m overwhelmed. Everyone is staring. Of course I want to see him again. He’s wonderful. I can’t begin to see how he would fit into my little life, but right now I don’t care. He’s still holding my hands.

  I glance over at the others. Adam is looking at me like a kid who has just passed the parcel when the music stops.

  Ilse is looking pleasantly baffled.

  ‘Emma, is this yet another of your beaux?’ says Helen, who seems to think she’s in a Regency novel all of a sudden. She can’t keep the delight from her voice. ‘I’m impressed. I don’t know how you find the time.’ She comes over, holding her hand out to Philip. ‘I’m Helen,�
�� she says. ‘You must be someone’s husband.’

  Before I can say anything, Tim pulls on my sleeve and I look down at him. There’s an expression on his face I have never seen before. It’s pure terror. I follow his gaze and what I see chills me.

  Troy is a very strange colour. A sort of purplish grey, and over the next seconds, which take forever, I see every drop of that colour drain from his face. It’s so dramatic that instinctively I glance down at his feet, expecting to see blood pooling around his shoes, for surely no one can go that colour unless they are bleeding out.

  Slowly his knees buckle and he falls to the ground, eyes closed.

  For a moment, no one moves. All faces are downturned, all eyes on Troy, who looks like a grey sack adorned with Nike swooshes.

  Then all hell breaks loose.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Helen and I are sitting on plastic chairs in a hospital waiting room. It doesn’t smell like disinfectant, which I don’t find confidence-inspiring. It smells like coffee. Troy is, to the best of our knowledge, at this moment, not dead.

  He was though, earlier, at the Fun Run. For several minutes, actually, although heart attack minutes are like dog years — there are a lot more of them squished into a regular minute.

  It felt like hours that he lay on the grass, a crowd of horrified onlookers gawking as first the St John Ambulance officers, and then, remarkably quickly, real paramedics compressed his chest, squeezed air into his mouth, injected things into his veins, and finally, terrifyingly, shocked his body with a portable defibrillator.

  All the time Helen stood ashen, her hands over her mouth.

  Adam and Ilse turned Bon away from the scene, but they stayed where they were.

  I knelt on the ground with Freya, Tim and Lola crushed to my body. I kept their faces away from seeing their dad, which meant I watched every moment of his resuscitation. Philip knelt beside me, gripping my shoulder.

  The scene was eerily quiet. Suze, officious as ever, held the crowds back. Apart from the sounds of the children quietly weeping, all I could hear were the voices of the first responders. They were so calm. There was no bustle or drama, just methodical processes to be followed and outcomes to monitor.

  I won’t lie, I thought Troy was dead. I gave up hope around the time they started chest compressions. Just after a St John’s volunteer called Karen said, ‘I can’t find a pulse.’ From that point on, my mind was working on the future.

  While I watched what I assumed were vain attempts to revive my ex-husband, I was planning how I would now have to co-parent with Helen.

  By the time they cracked out the defibrillator, which looked like an early 1980s educational computer game with its tough plastic casing and yellow handle, I was convinced there was no chance for Troy.

  But after they shocked his heart, and obeyed the machine that told everyone to wait while it detected output, he had a pulse again. They loaded him onto a stretcher, put him in the back of the waiting ambulance with Helen by his side, and with sirens wailing, he was gone.

  Everything started to move again then, and the babble of voices became so loud and chaotic that I didn’t know where to look. My ears were ringing.

  It was Philip who took charge. He did it unceremoniously, but quietly and capably he ascertained that I had no car there. He retrieved Helen’s bag from where it had fallen from her shoulder onto the grass, which was now littered with detritus from the ambos: swabs, plastic packaging, paper towels, and one of Troy’s sneakers that somehow came off his foot while they were trying to bring him back to life.

  Philip shepherded the three children and me off the oval and pressed the unlock button on Helen’s keys until her car revealed itself by flashing its lights. Together we buckled the kids into their seats.

  On the way to the hospital, Lola and Freya cried, confused and frightened, while Tim sat, his tear-streaked face stony, and stared out of the window.

  When we reached the doors of casualty, I leapt out, then came to a screaming halt when I realised I shouldn’t take the kids inside. Whatever lay beyond those doors was not for their eyes. They’d seen too much already. My best option at this point was to send them off in the car with a man I barely knew.

  I turned back. ‘Philip, please will you take them to my dad’s house? It’s ten minutes from here. He’s going away today but I hope he won’t have left yet.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What’s the address?’

  I couldn’t tell him. The address of the house I grew up in, the house where my own mother died, had vanished into the ether.

  I stood on the footpath, gaping.

  ‘It’s the shock, Emma,’ Philip told me. ‘I’ll bet Tim knows his grandpa’s address, don’t you, Tim?’

  ‘We call him Grandad, not Grandpa,’ Tim said, ‘and his address is 15 Barker Place, um. . .’

  ‘Philip,’ said Philip, and I realised my children didn’t have a clue who this stranger was.

  ‘Hi, Philip, I’m Tim. This is my sister Freya, and my other sister, Lola.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you all. Shall we let your mum go check on your dad now, and go see your grandad?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Tim, and I’d never felt more proud.

  * * *

  On entering the hospital, I was immediately struck with déjà vu. It was only two weeks since Freya was here. Once again, the casualty waiting area was completely packed.

  I approached the triage window and said my husband had been brought in by ambulance. They buzzed me through the big swinging doors and, in the absence of any other instructions, I followed the signs until I reached another desk with a nurse sitting at a computer.

  I told her the same thing: my husband had come in by ambulance.

  She looked at me with a furrowed brow. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Troy Lawson,’ I told her.

  Her eyes widened and she looked stricken. ‘Oh, um . . .’ she started, then trailed off.

  He’s dead, I thought. That has to mean he’s dead. This poor woman is unqualified and probably not even authorised to tell me Troy died in the ambulance, but that’s what’s happened.

  My knees went wobbly and the world started to fade. Head between knees, Emma, I thought. Mum always said if you’re going to faint, get your head down between your knees. I crouched down and hung my head. They must see a lot of that, because the nurse dashed around the desk and helped me to a chair.

  ‘Is he . . . Did he . . .’ I couldn’t say the word.

  ‘Oh!’ she said in a tone of dawning realisation. ‘No, no, he’s not dead, it’s just well, this might be awkward or difficult, so I just want to prepare you.’

  I wondered what on earth this woman was on about.

  ‘It’s just, when he was brought in he was in the company of a woman. And that woman told us — oh this is awful, I’m so sorry — but she said she’s his wife.’

  Relief coursed through me. ‘Thank Christ,’ I said.

  The nurse looked confused. This wasn’t the reaction she had been expecting.

  I cleared things up for her. ‘That woman is his wife. His new wife, I mean. I’m not married to him any more, but he’s my kids’ dad and I just wasn’t sure they’d let me back here otherwise so I said he is my husband.’

  Helen stuck her head out of a cubicle. ‘Emma, you’re here,’ she said, sounding pleased to see me for the first time ever. ‘He’s in surgery. I don’t even know what that means. They say he had a heart attack, well, he’s still having a heart attack. I don’t know. How long do heart attacks go for? Where are the kids?’

  ‘It’s all right, Philip’s taking them to Dad’s. When did he go into surgery? Did they say what they’re doing? Who is the doctor?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know any of that. I don’t know who to ask.’ She looked confused and her eyes were filled with tears.

  I put my arm around her shoulder. ‘We’ll figure it out, Helen.’

  * * *

  That was two hours ago, and sin
ce then Helen and I have been waiting for news.

  Philip found my dad’s house, and fortunately Dad was still in it. There has been no mention of Penny. I hope we haven’t mucked anything up for Dad.

  All three children are now, according to the text message updates I’ve received, eating everything they can find.

  Lola and Tim are snuggled up on the sofa watching The Railway Children — Dad’s selection of DVDs is limited. This tells me they are really quite traumatised. Normally they wouldn’t watch that kind of 1970s Victoriana for more than five minutes before begging Dad to sign up to a streaming service so they can have some decent content.

  Freya and Dad, for reasons known only to them, are building a spice rack. Dad has excellent woodworking skills — as long as you want him to build a spice rack.

  Some people, when they’re upset, smoke cigarettes or drink Scotch. Dad saws wood and sands it and nails bits of it together so people have somewhere to put their cardamom. I’ve lost count of the number of spice racks he’s made in my lifetime.

  Helen’s been on her phone nonstop, calling and texting, pretty much since they moved us from the cubicle in emergency up to this waiting room on the surgical floor. I was doing the same, until I ran out of battery. Helen, now that I’ve returned her bag to her, has access to a charger, for she is the sort of person who carries one with her as a matter of habit.

  I’ve been reduced to reading a pile of old issues of New Idea that have been either thoughtfully provided by the hospital or thoughtlessly left behind by other waiting families.

  Every time we hear footsteps approaching, we both tense up and stare at the door, simultaneously wishing for that person to stop and tell us what’s going on, and for them to walk on, keeping our future from us for as long as possible.

  Helen sighs loudly, puts her phone back in her bag and folds her arms. She glances over at me. ‘Do you want to charge your phone?’

  ‘Only if you’re done charging yours,’ I say. ‘There’s not really anyone I need to contact. I reckon you’ve got Troy’s family and friends covered.’ As I say it, I realise how stupid I sound. Of course she has his family and friends covered. She’s his wife.