Slava looked up, blushing. ‘Excuse me now? What is this marriage you speak of?’ She raised the hand that held the paper and pointed to her ring finger. ‘I don’t see a ring on there?’
Emilian tapped his nose. ‘Working on it.’
‘Stop it, you’re such a weirdo.’ Slava rolled her eyes and unfolded the paper: it was a news article, the headline read ANNOUNCEMENTS OF BIRTHS, MARRIAGES, AND DEATHS, and then a handful of black and white squares with images and words.
‘What is it?’
‘Something about births, marriages, deaths, in an Australian newspaper.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Nope.’
‘It’s a sign from God.’ She looked over at Emilian sat on the windowsill; he was looking through an old photo album. ‘We should put our marriage in the paper.’
Slava chuckled and walked towards the phone. ‘Honestly, some days I wonder about you...’
Her mother picked up on the second ring. ‘Slava?’
‘Hi Mama.’
‘Everything alright? How’s the apartment?’
‘Everything is fine, it’s still a mess,’ Slava glanced at Emilian ‘partly due to my lazy almost-fiancé in the corner over there...’ Emilian stretched his face into comedy shock and winked.
‘What??’
‘Never mind,’ Slava raised the paper and looked at it. ‘Listen, someone sent something to this address, for you.’
‘Oh? Who?’
‘Well, the envelope says it’s from the ‘Townsville Welfare Office.’
Silence.
‘Mama?’
‘Sorry, go on, yes... and what was it?’
‘Well, it’s a bit strange,’ Slava flipped it over in her hands, and back again, scanning it. ‘It’s just a newspaper clipping of births, marriages and deaths, dated...’ Slava squinted at the top of the page ‘... June fifteenth, nineteen-seventy-nine. So, from a few months ago.’ There was silence again, and Slava only heard her breathing. ‘Mama? Should I send it to you?’
‘No, no. That’s alright.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes, absolutely. Probably a case of mistaken identity or something. You can throw it away.
‘Alright.’
Slava was about to ask her something else, but her mother had already replaced the receiver.
‘Hey, everything alright?’ Emilian walked up to her, a pile of books in his hand.
‘Sure,’ Slava responded, looking through him. ‘Yeah.’ She placed the clipping in the envelope, and then in a file, and placed it on the shelf. She had always been good at listening to her instinct.
30
Melbourne,1980
Ed had gotten the phone call before, and felt obliged to listen, though he knew what she was going to say before she said it, and knew the inflections of her voice as they hinted at her state of mind. Siblings were strange that way, twins probably even more so; they read each other like books. He tucked the phone onto his shoulder and trapped it with his ear, waiting patiently for her to continue.
‘I don’t know, maybe I’m being too sensitive, but I’m so,’—her voice hesitated on the other side of the mobile, and Ed knew why. ‘—I guess nervous, maybe, about it all, I mean do you think any of this is a good idea? I mean, it’s Mum and Dad’s stuff, won’t it be really emotional? I don’t think I can handle it.’ The tempo of her voice was halting, fractured, holding up an invisible barrier to rational thought or reason in its staccato moments. ‘They’d only been sick for such a short time. This is just…’ her voice tapered off.
‘I know, Roz. I know. But we can’t start backtracking here. We agreed to sell the house, after all of this happened. And it won’t happen overnight, either. Let’s just take our time.’ Roslyn had called him this afternoon, as she had done once a week for the past six months after the funeral, to grieve, to talk, to tell him the details of her anxiety about it all and share the shock of what had happened. This was a big deal, of course, and it was only natural that the act of preserving the past would be denying the future. They’d both decided, soon after their parents’ death, to start dividing up history— a life that their parents had protected for them, and now she would rather that they stick their heads in the sand and ignore it all. He understood it, it was painful for both of them. But there was no question in his mind that this was what they needed right now.
His fingers ached from holding the phone and it had grown hot at his ear. ‘Roz. I’ve already told you; you’ve got to relax with all this. I mean, you’re the lawyer for goodness’ sake. Get your pragmatic brain on. It’ll be fine— ‘
‘Will it though? I mean seriously. I’m an estate lawyer for other people. Not for my family. What if’—‘
‘What if what? We find out our parents had really bad taste in furniture? We already knew that.’
Helen opened the door just then placing her keys on the table, a bag of shopping sagging in the crook of her elbow. Ed covered the receiver and mouthed Roz again, and she nodded and mouthed just let her get it out in response and walked off.
‘Listen,’ he continued, ‘just let me handle it and I’ll let you know. It may not come to much, to be honest, so who knows, it may be something interesting at the least.’
‘Helen’s there isn’t she.’
‘Yeah, why.’
‘You went quiet for a second. You think I’m being nuts. Your wife has much more time for me than you do these days.’
‘Well, that’s a given.’ He laughed and ran his fingers across the keyboard distractedly and stared at the wallpaper on his computer screen. It was a black and white photograph of the Kakadu National Park taken at a distance, with a little girl in the foreground, holding the hand of her parent, hair loose the side of her face visible as she looked up, wondering. He’d taken this when he’d been on an assignment for the Melbourne Parks Authority. He’d shot an entire series of landscape photos and had been about to leave when he saw two figures, in conversation: a parent and a child, wandering without purpose. And it struck him as if a remembered dream, and he immediately took a few shots, grateful that he’d captured the moment for himself.
‘Anyway. I’ll see you at the house in a few months, alright? The buyers are giving us time to go through and take what we need, and I have an assignment I need to finish up first. Do something to take your mind off it, because you’re going to crack in half. I mean, I understand how you feel, but one day, when this is all settled and the paperwork is sorted out, we can figure out the house. And let's make it a good day.’ Roz was never good at being patient, even as a child. She’d always been willful and insistent, and Ed was the pragmatist. Where she was emotional and reactive, he was patient and thorough. They had always been opposites, but very close and protective of each other; their parents had always commented that they were the best kind of puzzle pieces: all angles and curves that fit together well, though occasionally a bit forced in their partnership with each other.
She laughed easily now, and he pictured her immediately, the husky, familiar voice perfectly congruous with her greying blonde hair and dark eyes that had always been so wild and wary. ‘Okay, fine. I’ll talk to you soon, yeah?’
‘Yep. No worries.’
Ed hung up and placed the phone on the desk, quickly skimmed over the last of his edit, and then walked outside to sit alone on the porch. He’d built it himself almost immediately after he and Helen first bought the property in Trinity Park, because it was a wide and open and easily lent itself to soft light, in with its windows on every side. It sat at the end of a road perched on a hill with views down to the small crescent beach, and the lush green trails of Earl Hill Summit, well-worn by a stream of constant hikers determined in their exploration, towards the sides and back. But for its expanse, it was limited in space outside, and Ed had always craved, insisted on really, views of the sky and a bit of the sea.
The inside was representative of the plain outside: clean and modern, with pale wood floors and whitewashed and ol
d furniture, greens and blues and greys dominating the choice of paint colors and soft furnishings. At every turn, the walls around him displayed something new: contemporary aboriginal paintings done in black and red, with lines and circles and thousands of small dots scattered within and around; sunlit, undulating plains dehydrated in the blistering sun; black and white photographs taken by his parents, from his travels to Fiji as a child; the photos of Ed and Helen posing somewhere exotic, having accomplished an adventure; the family photographs that were left to him and his sister after their mother--and then soon after, their father--had died.
Ed loved stories, and his parents had encouraged his appreciation of cultures and wonder, which is probably why he had stayed where he had been raised, and sought his studies at a college in Melbourne to become a travel photographer (though in recent years he had started consulting, as the plane journeys and had become too much of a chore now that he was a much older man). He’d made a healthy career out of seeing worlds through a lens and meeting people that he’d never see again, though in the recesses of his memory he knew, and felt, that he had one more story to search for. But how, he thought, would he ever find it. And what would that mean for him and his wife and maybe his children one day, and would he regret seeking it? He had never been able to answer that.
The rains hovered in the distance and the air felt luxuriously heavy; at any moment, the storm would begin. He would have to close the shutters in the bedrooms, he thought; the last time he didn’t, the rain had coated the floor and ruined a thick stack of paper that he’d left on his desk. A year of documentation, paperwork and filings about his parents’ lives, any information that pertained to their work and their personal assets and information, correspondence with various banks and trusts and work colleagues—all of it had been soaked through and had taken a month to dry, and underneath was a pile of discarded papers that needed to be fed into the shredder.
He stood up to go back inside, when he saw the dust plume delicately in the distance and then heard the small car pull up at the bottom of the drive. He heard the door squeak open, then heard it shut again, and willed himself to wait for the car to retreat again, before he walked down to the mailbox.
The rain started upon his ascent back to the house, gently at first then harder, coating his greying hair just as he managed to get back inside, and he sat down to look through it all: two catalogues advertising outdoor gear, a magazine about photography, and a white envelope with typed black letters on the front, addressed to his parents, forwarded to him. The return address read: Queensland Government, Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability Services.
‘Ed?’ Helen called out from upstairs.
‘Yeah?’ He held the envelope in his hand, poised to open it.
‘Can you check the closet in the master bedroom? The hinges have come off again, sorry.’
He groaned. ‘Yep, coming.’
He placed the pieces of mail on the edge of the desk and walked off, not noticing as it all fell to the floor into the pile of shredding.
31
Glen Cove, 1980
On one of their trips to Glen Cove, Henry saw a FOR SALE sign beside a small building: a yellow, one-level complex with 10 rooms nest to a 100-foot long beach. It didn’t take long for both Henry and Julia to both realize that this was the investment that they had been looking for, something to keep their minds occupied and their money working. Within days, they’d put in an offer and became the new owners. It needed a lot of repair work, cosmetic mostly, the docks needed fixing and the units needed cleaning… but it was theirs.
In the very beginning, the couple decided that Henry would move upstate full time and Julia would continue with her job at Fisk. She’d had a stable job that treated her well, and she couldn’t just leave it overnight. She needed time. Every weekend, she and Slava would both take the bus from Penn Station and travel the hour and a half across the city, over the bridge and into Glen Cove, with Henry picking them up at the station. It was something she looked forward to every week: it was their project that they shared. It brought them forward towards a goal. It was stabilizing.
It was September 1976, and an Indian summer had gently settled on the water. Green and gold speckled the trees and hinted of autumn, but the air still felt deliciously warm. It was a battle of seasons; the push of colder weather and the pull of long days and nights were the sun didn’t set too early. The heat, however, guaranteed business, and that pleased Henry. He ran the building not as he used to in Brooklyn, but rather with calm intention: he saw the usefulness of each fragment of the property, he saw the value that it could bring. The days were long and there were so many things he had to take care of, but this was home.
A few months prior, Julia had decided to give up her job and move upstate full time. Slava helped her pack up the 71st street flat without much ceremony and Julia moved to the motel to live there full time. It was the last bus ride that she would take, the familiar streets that she’d walked so often, giving way to wide stretches of road and skies unburdened by looming skyscrapers. She knew she’d never return.
This particular Saturday felt quiet. Henry was laying down another coat of varnish on the docks to winterize them; the winters by the lake were occasionally sharp and insidious, despite the beauty it brought. The wood expanded and contracted like a beating heart, and cracks would form over time. It was best to protect it as much as possible. The rhythm was comforting back and forth, the brush forward and back, against the lapping of the water against the beach.
He heard footsteps and looked up; Julia was walking towards him with a cup of coffee.
‘Is that mine?’ he rubbed the sweat from his brow with his forearm.
‘No. Did you want one?’
‘Never mind.’ He put his brush down and reached for his cigarettes. ‘Well, hopefully, this will stay strong,’ he drew on his cigarette. ‘Not sure, but worth a try anyway.’ He exhaled.
‘Yes, looks good, although the color is a bit off. Maybe a lighter color next time? A bit too dark.’
‘Okay, give me the instruction manual next time, then, eh?’
‘Ach, sorry, should’ve just said it was fine.’
‘Yes.’
‘So, Slava called, she and Emilian are driving up later today after she gets a few last things out of 71st, maybe we can all have a nice dinner?’
‘Sure, fine, we’ll have a dinner. When she gets here, ask her to come out, she’ll need to help with a few things.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and started painting.
‘Alright. Did you want coffee?’
‘Yes. Cream and five sugars.’
That evening, the oval wooden table was set with simple china, embroidered napkins and crystal tumblers. A few candles helped magnify the two small table lamps in the corners of the room. Julia was in the kitchen, her apron tied loosely around her, sipping a small glass of wine, navigating the steam emanating from the roast pork she took out just minutes before.
‘Mama, do you need help?’ Slava walked in first, a fitted black turtleneck hugging her body, her blonde hair scraped back in one long braid that looped around itself at the top. Emilian followed behind her to say hello, and then retreated to the other room to stand with Henry.
Julia swept her arm in front of Slava to direct her, deftly instructing her, as her mother had done with her when she was young. The moment wasn’t lost on Slava, she watched her mother—the salty streaks in her dark hair more prominent than ever— as she seasoned and grabbed
handfuls of ingredients and mashed and chopped and stirred and kneaded.
‘How do you remember all this, without a book?’ She helpfully stirred, watching Julia season the vegetables. ‘My mother taught me,’ she replied, ‘and I'm teaching you. Although I probably haven’t taught you as much as I could.’
‘You’re doing it now, though. That’s what counts.’
Henry asked Slava about work, Emilian asked Henry about the new house, and Julia spoke little, though her pre
ference was to observe often and engage and watch the people she loved as they moved and smiled and connected. When she did speak, she asked Slava and Emilian if they’d get married one day or had considered children at least.
Slava rolled her eyes. ‘No, Mama. Not now. Too busy.’
Julia pushed a bit more. ‘Don’t you want to have children one day?’
Emilian interrupted, forcing levity into the subject. ‘Hey, I hope I get a say in this?’ Henry laughed but said nothing and watched as the women bristled.
‘Listen Mama, I’m not lonely for children, and I don’t, we don’t, feel the need. What’s the point?’
‘Of course, yes, that’s not what I meant, that you’re lonely or bored, you know that.’ She looked over at Emilian and smiled and felt a pang of her own past. ‘You’re just getting older now, so…’
‘Come on, I’m 35. Em is 37. That’s hardly that old.’
‘I’d already had you when I was 26.’
‘Children aren’t everything.’
‘Ah, but you’re wrong. They are. Work isn’t.’
‘Well,’ Slava leaned back from the table, her cheeks flushed from the interrogation and the wine and the gaze of her parents. ‘Maybe I don’t want to have children.’
‘Don’t, they’re trouble.’ Henry interjected, and Emilian laughed, and raised his glass to the comment.
Julia’s tone became insistent. ‘Oh please. Slava was fine. More than one was a--’ Henry looked at Julia and she caught his eye. She had forgotten herself. ‘-- would be troublesome, I imagine.’ He looked away again.
‘I’ll figure it out, Mama.’ Slava had heard the change in her mother’s voice and she understood then that her father knew. It made her incredibly sad. ‘Besides, my life is too full.’
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