With little warning, clouds crowd out the sun, shadow racing across the cemetery so that it is suddenly as dark as evening. Fat raindrops fall, splashing warm, and within seconds the heavens open, the rain hammering down, sending Lotte limping for the protection of the trees. A sign from the gods, she thinks, if only she could believe in such things. She thinks of all the phone calls she made last week to Helen’s friends, and the stories they’d told. Of Lotte’s meeting with Simon, and who he must have been. And she knows that she did know her mother after all, as well as anyone could; better than many daughters might.
Lotte looks at the note in her hands and smiles. Per aspera ad astra.
•
He comes to see her in the hospital. Floppy-haired, a T-shirt she doesn’t recognise. He is holding flowers, and a pineapple.
I wasn’t sure if you would be hungry, he says.
Vin.
He puts the flowers on the table that rolls across her bed. They obscure the view between them; all she can see is his all-too-familiar forehead, one of his shoulders. She pushes the table aside, and he stands to help.
Sorry, let me.
She wonders what he sees when he looks at her. Eyes deeper than usual; a streak of grey in her hair above her left temple. She’s become quite fond of that.
How are you? How did it go?
Textbook, she says. Everything as it should. There were two small tumours, but they haven’t spread. They don’t think it will.
That’s good.
She has already explained it to him on the phone. The preventative surgery, the treatment to follow. He was kind, concerned. Admonishing her for not having called him sooner. And now he is here.
He drops back into the chair.
I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch.
No. She cuts him off, slicing her hand through the air. Please don’t, she says. I’m only glad you came. It’s nice to see you.
I was going to bring Janet, Vin says. But I wasn’t sure how well you were doing.
Next time, says Lotte. I’d like to see her.
She is surprised to realise she is not lying, that the possibility of seeing Vin’s sisters brings her a genuine lift.
She had a baby, didn’t she? A boy?
They called him Jack, says Vin. He looks just like her. For the first six months, Cherry was jealous, she would bark so much they wouldn’t put him down on the floor. But now they’re the best of friends, and Cherry even sleeps beneath the cot, keeping guard.
That’s sweet, says Lotte.
They talk through each of his family members, how well everyone is doing. Lotte can feel the dull ache of the surgery across her chest. Mostly, the medication keeps the pain at bay; only the occasional twinge breaks through to the surface. A tube runs from below each breast, and she drains away the fluids when she gets up to go to the bathroom. She has not yet had to contemplate how much she has changed, and she knows that’s all in the future. For now, her day is divided into processes initiated by the nurses — medication, meals, the bathroom, physiotherapy. Soon she will go home, to a flat she has rented close by, in Annandale. She hopes to be well enough to be back at work mid- year; she has already been making enquiries at the university.
I’m so sorry about what happened to Eve’s little girl, said Vin. It seems like only yesterday she was born; I remember Eve sent a photo.
Lotte realises she must still have all of Eve’s emails tucked away in her account, all those photos of Mina growing up over the years.
It was awful, Vin.
And she cries as she tells him. About the accident, about her broken friendship with Eve, about witnessing the impossible grief of her father.
I shouldn’t have even been there, says Lotte. I should have stayed away, not even come back to visit. Not until after all of this.
She gestures at her body, the hospital bed.
I should have waited until I was better. I didn’t realise how unstuck I was; I was awful, acting as if they owed me something.
I’m sure they understand, says Vin.
It hardly matters, says Lotte.
He holds her hand as she cries, and, for the first time since Mina’s accident, she lets the tears come, not worrying that she should hold them back, that there are others more deserving of grief. She had left Ballarat after the funeral and flown straight to Sydney. From the airport she’d gone straight to the appointment with the specialist. Two weeks to find a flat, create a new space for herself, and then she was booked in to hospital for the surgery. She had caught up with some friends, some old colleagues, but not told any of them why she was back. Embracing her loneliness like a punishment, not wanting any sympathy; she was too undeserving for that. She had called Vin only yesterday, and here he was.
Tell me about Jen, Lotte says when the tears stop, her eyes small and tight.
Are you sure? he asks.
She nods. It is best to know. So he tells her about his new wife, about how they met, about the way his mother wonders why he couldn’t have picked someone a bit more polished.
She’s a sustainability officer, he tells her. She works mainly with the parks department. Last weekend, we went for a walk through Namadgi and she collected eight kinds of gumnuts — she’s drying them out for the seeds, which she sells online.
She sounds nice, says Lotte.
Vin laughs.
She is, he says. You might even like her.
Later, Lotte will cry at this too; at having let go the one she loved. To what end, she would ask herself in coming months as her body determinedly put itself back together. But when Vin calls to tell her that they’re expecting their first child, Lotte’s heart swells with love for him, for everything he will have. She doesn’t want it, not for herself, she is sure of that now. Or, at the very least, she does not regret letting him go, even as she wants to hold him close.
12
EVE
AUGUST 2015
Sweltering. Her chest is slick with sweat, and she throws the blankets off, scissoring her legs free of their weight. Outside, the day has dimmed to evening, but the light above the cabin door has been switched on, throwing yellow back into the small room. A rolling landscape of lumpen shapes has materialised on one of the bunk beds. Another person? Then Eve realises it is her own belongings from the tent: her clothes, and the plastic shopping bags of canned food. Even her tent has been packed down and folded back into its bag, the sleeping mat and bag bundled up beside, her jacket hanging from the back of one of the chairs. Why couldn’t he leave well enough alone? She rolls over to face the wall, its imitation timber shiny in the dim light. A chirrup, an impatient buzzing. Her phone. On the bedside table, plugged in. It will be Tom calling.
Lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling. How? How does one go on? All of these kind gestures, people willing to show they care and understand. But they don’t, they cannot. She can see already the distress and pity that would appear on Len’s face if she told him what had happened, what it is exactly she’s running away from. Shock followed by the relief that always powers the desire to help. Thank God that didn’t happen to me; that’s what they all think. She has even seen it on the faces of the other parents in the grief support group: people who had lost their children through illness, or accidents caused by others. By careless people.
The first time she went, in a meeting room in a community centre, she mentioned only that her three-year-old daughter had died. She was almost four, she had told the group. She had gratefully received the sincere condolences from people who were confident they understood. But the second time, standing by the hot-water urn and nursing a polystyrene cup, biscuit clinging to her teeth and refusing to wash down her throat, she mentioned to another mother what had happened to Mina.
It was an accident, Eve said. In the driveway. I was driving.
And she saw the horror in the woman’s face, the ba
rrier shooting up between them. I am not like you, the woman’s body said, as she took a small step back, straightening her shoulders even as her words reassured Eve that she shouldn’t hold herself responsible. And for a small moment, Eve felt pleased to have been able to provide this woman with such a feeling of superiority, however fleeting. She did not go back to the meetings.
She can barely recall the days after the funeral. Tom tossed the flowers in the bin before they had a chance to wilt, and late summer rolled on, unperturbed by what had happened. Eve didn’t leave the house, sitting for hours in an armchair in the living room, looking at the crates of toys by the bookshelves, cataloguing their contents in her mind. In the evenings, Tom switched on the television, and they ate small bites of the food dropped off by friends and strangers. Odd, unfamiliar food: spaghetti bolognese that did not taste like their own; a Thai green curry that was accompanied by red capsicum and carrot that had been sliced into small spears and lined up in a ziplock bag, so they didn’t go soggy in the fridge.
After two weeks, they both went back to work; clinging to routine, leaving the house at the same time each morning, promising to see each other in the evening as though it was something to look forward to. Neither of them mentioned that they could have left the house later than they used to, as they no longer had to go past the childcare centre; both of them arrived early at their desks. All day, Eve would surf the internet, losing herself in endless banality. She avoided Facebook and its showy reminders of the unblighted lives of others. She hungrily added strangers to her Twitter list, so that every time she looked at her feed her mind was pulled in a dozen directions. Then she’d delete them all, unable to bear their relentless march forward, the trail of thoughts that became the past as soon as they appeared. Three seconds ago. Eighteen minutes ago.
One day, Eve went to an appointment with a client. A philanthropic couple had bought a three-storey monolith — the old Mechanics’ Institute library on the main street — and turned it into an artists’ collective. Photographers set up desks where fiction had been; graphic designers were in the alcove for biography. They wanted to know how to quieten the space while keeping it open. They’d torn up the carpets and pulled down the curtains, and then wondered why the previously cosy building had become draughty, with melancholy sounds of the aching plumbing echoing up the staircase, footsteps rat-a-tatting like hailstones on the floor.
After touring the building, Eve had stood on the upper landing, unable to hear a word the man was saying. His mouth moving, his hand gesturing.
She could hear the building, but not the man. Windows rattling in their cases; possums in the roof; the hum of loose wiring; the buzz of lights being set up for a shoot. She hurriedly gave them advice, waved away their offers of payment, and returned to her own office. Even there, the sound assaulted her. The sigh of the bar fridge as the motor kicked in; the stop-start traffic on the street below; the whoop and hurry of the pedestrian lights.
At home, she dug out her old minidisk recorder from the garage, shoeboxes full of the disks themselves. The words scribbled on them brought back few memories: Orange, Jindabyne, Majura Pines. But the moment she put on her headphones, she was transported. There was twenty-five minutes of the crackle and pop of red gum in a fireplace, the anticipation of the shifting and thud of the largest log as it burnt through, and suddenly, there it was, the coal sparking in response. Lotte had built that fire, Eve recalled — they were staying in a B&B in Orange, because some kids had smashed in every window down one side of the campervan. Lotte had forgotten to open the flue, and the room had filled with smoke, sending them springing to the windows, laughing, flapping their hands at the smoke detector that failed to squeal even when the smoke became so thick it made their eyes water.
There was a recording of cars rumbling over a plank-wood bridge: the rise and fall of the tarmacked planks — one, two, one, two — every time the same echo came as the back wheels chased the first. The bubble and slurp of a creek down by the coast, and she was immediately transported back to a long weekend spent camping with Tom, walking along the creek to the waterhole in the morning, then spending the afternoon at the beach, laughing as she threw up her arms, backing into the waves because she didn’t want to be thrusting her pregnant belly before her, to be using the baby as a shield between her and the elements.
Tom would come home to find Eve in the armchair, headphones on, eyes open but not seeing anything, and he would pause by her, a hand hovering by her shoulder, her head. She would always return his touch, one for one, but could no longer initiate it, so sure was she that she had lost the right to assert her own needs.
I think …
Tom stopped, folded the tea towel. They were wordlessly cleaning up after dinner, putting things back in their places only to pull them out again tomorrow.
What do you think about selling the house? he asked.
She felt another little bit of herself splinter, a crevice appearing where a hairline fracture had dictated it someday must. To be further from every single memory she had of Mina; to put her daughter so clearly in the past.
I think it’s a good idea, she said.
Because it was not up to her to take part in these decisions any more. Just as she instinctually knew she didn’t want to move, so she knew Tom needed it. The house held too many memories for him.
It would be a fresh start.
They bought a house on the fringe of town, in the foothills of the low volcano that disturbed the flat landscape. Their block was bestrewn with silver gums — beautiful, unworldly things, like lightning bolts speared into the ground, their white flesh peeking from ribboned bark. The house was only a few years old, a fortress of timber and steel that sidled into the landscape, large windows inviting the outdoors in. The master bedroom was up a flight of stairs, an eyrie amongst the whispering treetops, the blue-grey leaves politely carolling through night and day. She watched from the windows as Tom reconstructed his vegetable garden, ramming starpickets into the hard clay ground to hold the timber walls that would contain layers of soil, straw, and sand. She saw that he might be happy here.
Their bodies came together as easily as they always did. Afterwards, Eve settled herself in Tom’s embrace, her cheek pressed against his arm.
Eve, I’m not going to tell you to get past this. But you need to stop blaming yourself.
She didn’t say anything. He went on.
It was an accident. But I’m just as much to blame. I should have been watching Mina. I shouldn’t have left the door open.
It was a discussion they had had many times, Tom desperately keen for her to accept his responsibility, as though that lessened any of hers. There was a door that led from the backyard to the garage, and Tom had left it open as he gardened. It was this door that Mina must have run through, perhaps pulling it closed behind her and frightening herself in the near dark until Eve lifted the roller door. Mina running down the far side of the van towards the daylight, and Eve reversing without a second thought.
I was driving, she said.
Why couldn’t he understand that?
But that was one small moment in her life, said Tom.
He pulled his arm out from under her, sitting up in the bed.
Eve, I miss her. I miss our daughter, and I want to be able to talk about her, to remember her. But you won’t let me. Every time I mention Mina I can see it in you: you’re so angry at yourself and you just shut down. It’s not fair.
Of course it’s not fair!
She turned to face him, her thoughts clouding. How does he think such a concept even comes into it?
I killed our daughter. How do you expect me to react? Do you want me to just blather on about how wonderful she was, everything I miss about her?
Yes.
Tom’s voice was small.
You need to forgive yourself.
How can I? Every time I look at you, I think about ho
w I’ve ruined your life, what I’ve taken away from you.
Tom shook his head.
No. It happened, it was one tiny little moment, and it’s done. But it’s now that you’re taking her away from me. You won’t let me talk about her; you’re shutting me out of your life. That’s what I don’t know if I can live with.
She had been waiting for him to say this. To let her know that she was no longer welcome in his life. It was as it should be.
I want you back, Eve.
Lying down, he reached out for her hand.
The next day, she packed her bag and took a train to Melbourne. A day later, she was on a bus to the coast.
She showers in the small bathroom, scrubbing at her scalp, the residue of sand stubborn beneath her fingernails. When she finally gets out of the shower, the hot water has hazed the air — she cannot make out her reflection in the mirror. She is crouching in front of the heater, drying her hair, when a shadow falls across the floor and there is a knock at the door.
I’m going to get some fish and chips for dinner — do you want me to bring you back some?
Len does not step into the cabin.
Eve glances at the food on the bunk. She hasn’t eaten anything all day.
Yes, that would be great, she says.
He shuffles his feet, looking away across the park.
Look, Bridget’s on a double shift. I could take Jordie with me, but he needs to rest. He can’t run around as much as most kids. Would you mind watching him for a bit?
Her breath catches in her throat, fighting to get through.
Are you sure? I mean, I could, but …
That would be great. Just come by when you’re ready. He won’t be any trouble; I shouldn’t be more than forty minutes or so and he’s glued to the iPad, you know what kids are like.
I’ll just put some shoes on.
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