Between a Wolf and a Dog

by Georgia Blain

  ACROSS TOWN, ESTER has her next client for the day.

  She had had no break after Sarah and Daniel. Sarah had sat and wept in the waiting room for ten minutes after the session had ended, and then Ester had told her she would have to leave, another client was due to arrive.

  ‘How am I meant to cope?’ Sarah had asked as Ester had shown her the door. ‘What am I meant to do?’

  ‘Do you have a friend you can call?’ Ester had suggested. ‘Someone you might go and sit with until you feel a little calmer?’

  Outside, the rain slanted down towards the house, and with the door open, they were getting wet. She asked Sarah if she’d brought an umbrella with her, a raincoat? Sarah didn’t respond.

  ‘I have to get home to the kids,’ she said. ‘I have to face the kids after that.’

  ‘Perhaps you could see if someone could come over?’

  But Sarah wasn’t listening. She was buried deep in the darkness of rejection. She looked blankly at Ester and shook her head, and then she walked out across the street and into the rain, letting it soak into her, darkening the purple of her top, bleeding into the crimson of her skirt, her hair dripping as she headed towards the main road, where she would wait for the bus, oblivious to anything that lay outside the circle of her misery.

  Ester looked across the street to see if Chris had arrived, relieved his car wasn’t there yet. She had a few moments to clear out her bin (there were a lot of tissues), to plump up the cushions on her sofa, and to jot down one or two key points she wanted to remember so that she could write up her notes in the few hours left at the end of the day.

  The room felt dank. It was the gloom and the perpetual rain of course, but — and she didn’t like to admit this to herself — it was also Sarah. It always felt this way after she left. Gardenias and sweat. She wished she could open the window wide and let the air in, but the rain was too heavy. She smiled as she stood in the corner and waved a wad of paper around — a useless attempt that was more for herself than for any practical purpose.

  It was strange, this blank slate you presented to each client. You existed only for them. Nothing else happened in this room, before or after. They came, they went, and then the next one arrived. None would know how much sorrow and shame and grief and fear this room had seen, from small ordinary madnesses to great howling despair. When the day was finished, she didn’t like to open the door. She locked it behind her, grateful for the warm evenings when she could leave the windows open to the night air, letting the outside world in to cleanse, so that, in the morning, the space felt a little better for having breathed. But on nights like this, she had to leave it closed up, hoping that somehow the misery would disperse, seeping under the cracks and out the front door.

  There — the room felt better.

  Across the road, Chris had pulled up. He was turning off his phone, and she watched as he walked across the street. He too was oblivious to the rain.

  His daughter had died 18 months ago.

  He had told her the story during their first session, sitting upright, chin lifted, voice level. Her name was Zoe, and she had been eight years old. Completely healthy, happy, ordinary — not a child that either he or his wife, Marina, worried about.

  At first, she had simply complained about a pain in her shoulder. It was just one of those things. Marina wanted to take her to the doctor. He thought she was being overly anxious. The GP, who was new and young, couldn’t see anything wrong with her. She’d probably just slept in a strange way. It would fix itself.

  Three days later, she went back to school, determined to run in the cross-country.

  She dropped dead 400 metres in.

  These were the hard stories. As he uttered the words, Ester had to steel herself.

  Zoe had a blood clot. It had gone to her brain.

  ‘It’s unusual for a young girl,’ he explained. ‘It’s not the kind of condition that a doctor would normally look for.’

  He was silent, staring out the window, breathing slowly before he continued.

  Marina had wanted to sue the doctors. He hadn’t. Marina had raged and ranted, and called lawyers, and screamed at him and everyone — how could he have told her she was over-anxious, how could he have made her doubt herself? How could the doctors have missed something so obvious? They should have given her an ultrasound. She had downloaded article after article about the condition, underlining the symptoms, showing him how simple it should have been to detect. Next, she took to parking outside the GP’s rooms for days on end, waiting for any doctor to come out, wanting to shake each of them, to tell them of her anguish, but never doing it. Sometimes she was there well into the evening. He knew when he called her, the sound of the traffic behind her as she lied and told him she was somewhere else.

  And then she had become silent.

  The house had been quiet. The pair of them barely talking, barely eating, slowly being swallowed by the emptiness that followed her rage.

  He should have tried to reach her. He knew that now. But he’d been lost in his own pain, unaware of her pulling away until it was too late.

  ‘I can’t stay here.’ Her voice was flat, stripped bare, as she told him she had applied for a job in London. She needed to go. She had arranged everything without his knowing, and he had done nothing to stop her.

  The next day she was gone, and Chris had looked at the emptiness of their house and known how perilously close he had come to losing all hold on his desire to live.

  His GP had prescribed antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication, both of which he took.

  ‘But I need to talk,’ he had told Ester during their first appointment. And he had put his head in his hands and wept. ‘I need to talk.’

  Ester knows that this is often the case with people in grief. She has seen this in her practice, and she reads about it in the literature debating the effectiveness of bereavement counselling. There are many articles about whether talking is of any assistance in the healing process. She doesn’t know, but her instinct with Chris was strong. He needed to speak.

  For the first few sessions, he wanted only to talk of Zoe, alternating between remembering her as she’d been and the despair he felt at her death. The stories he related were like snapshots, an album of a life he had loved beyond compare. He would open a certain page and tell Ester small stories. When she was about two, Zoe had loved dandelions, the ones you could blow into the breeze. She called them blowflowers. I hope so the blowflowers, she would say each time she went anywhere. She didn’t like girls called Maya. There had been cruel Mayas at daycare and at school. She was shy, but she pushed herself, entering the public speaking competition at her school. She got to the State finals, Chris told Ester. I have never seen anyone so nervous. She woke up in the morning convinced she couldn’t speak, and he and Marina had to get her to sing her favourite song, trying to show her that she hadn’t lost her voice.

  She shouldn’t have died.

  He should have been more alert.

  He should have known it was serious.

  She read voraciously. When she was little she had favourite books for months on end: Madeline, Where the Wild Things Are, and a fairy tale she loved about a young girl who wanted a man to marry her, but he ignored her. He and Marina had to read those tales, no others, over and over again.

  She had a trampoline and she bounced on it, morning and night, every day, making up stories in her head. If he went out to the garden, he could sometimes hear her, her whisper slightly louder as she came to a dramatic place in the tale. Chris thought it was the rhythm that she liked; it helped her to create the narrative.

  As he spoke of her, his eyes became brighter, he sat up straighter. It was as though he were bringing her back to life with his tales.

  He wished they’d had another. He was the one who’d put a halt to the idea when Zoe was young. Marina was keen, but he wasn’t. It was money,
he’d told Ester, staring up at the ceiling. He hadn’t wanted them to be managing on one income again. But if they’d had another child, they would need to go on. They would be forced to continue.

  She’d died at school.

  Away from them.

  No one had listened to her when she complained of pain.

  They had failed her.

  Sometimes he woke up, anxious that his own heart was stopping. He couldn’t breathe, he told Ester. It was as though he had forgotten how. He had to concentrate, to think about taking air in and letting it out, because if he didn’t, it wouldn’t work. And at other times, he would think that maybe he shouldn’t try; maybe he should just let himself die. Maybe that was what he deserved. But that too became a question of effort, of trying to stop, his body forcing him to inhale each time he came close to the edge.

  He is always polite and gentle, apologising when he talks for too long without pausing, rarely crying since that first session, reasonable when she suggests ways in which he might begin to allow himself to move through the pain of what has happened, appearing to listen to her when she speaks. His surface rarely ripples, only occasionally revealing a tremor across the smooth darkness, a moment in which there is a glimpse of the eternal lack of light below.

  She has talked to him about there being no ‘correct’ way to grieve, no ‘normal’ coping strategies. They have discussed letting go (an idea that he found abhorrent), and choosing to keep the relationship alive. They have talked about ritual, ways in which he can continue to honour Zoe’s life. And in the last session, they began to discuss ideas for how he could learn to be more gentle towards himself, more forgiving, allowing himself to provide some comfort to his grieving self. She had suggested that he write a letter to himself. As though he were a friend who had suffered a similar loss many years ago — words that he wished he’d heard at the time.

  He sits opposite her, on the couch, hands neatly folded in his lap, shoulders slightly hunched forward.

  When she asks him whether the exercise had helped, he becomes agitated. He tried, he says.

  Ester waits for him to continue.

  ‘But each time I sat down to write, it felt so false.’ He scratches at his wrist, pushing his sleeves up and then pulling them down again. ‘I’m not that person.’

  ‘Which person?’ she asks.

  ‘The comforter, years down the track. If I knew his words, I’d be all right.’

  ‘We can know the words we need to hear. We can know how we would like to lead our lives. And we can know what we would like to say to others, how we would like to be in this world, yet it doesn’t mean we are able to live that. But sometimes attempting to articulate those words can help bring them closer. Make them a little more real.’

  He takes a single sheet of paper out of his coat pocket, clutching it tightly.

  ‘You did write something?’ she asks. Her smile is gentle.

  He nods.

  He has his shoes off, a habit he has had from the first session, preferring not to wear them inside. He had asked her if she minded, and she told him it was fine. His toes inside his socks are scrunched tight, digging into the softness of the carpet beneath his feet.

  ‘I wrote to the man I was, before — ’ He cannot continue.

  She looks at him holding the letter, the paper damp from the sweat on his fingers. ‘What did you want to say to him?’

  ‘Not much,’ he tells her.

  She waits for him to speak again, but there is silence for a moment and then, to her slight surprise, he clears his throat, an awkward cough, and begins to read.

  Dear Chris.

  He isn’t looking at her. His eyes are fixed on the letter, his voice steadying as he continues.

  You were such an ignorant idiot. And then you lost everything. I can’t bear to look back on you.

  ‘That’s all?’ she asks.

  He nods.

  She is curious as to why he is angry with his former self.

  ‘Because he had everything. He was blessed with an ordinary life. And he didn’t even know.’

  Outside, a delivery van has pulled up, beeping as it reverses into the neighbour’s driveway; it is almost the only sound, that mechanical beep, and then the rain starts up again, pouring down on all the blessed, and Ester waits until she feels she has her composure, until she can open her mouth to speak, while opposite her, Chris folds the paper in his hands, carefully pressing down on the creases. He puts the letter back in his pocket, one white corner still showing.

  And then he looks up at her.

  She meets his gaze. ‘It’s how most of us live, paying so little attention to the good fortune we enjoy. Perhaps we have to stay ignorant of our blessings. Perhaps we can only carry our good fortune with us if we don’t know that we are doing it — otherwise we would be overwhelmed by anxiety at the possibility of its loss.’

  She waits for him to speak.

  ‘Will I ever come back?’

  She leans her head to the side slightly, unsure of what he’s asking.

  ‘To the world. To ordinary, everyday, shitty stuff that makes you forget just how lucky you are. All of that.’ He lifts his arms half-heartedly, as if to embrace life, and then he lets them fall again. ‘I don’t even know if I want to. I don’t want to be that stupid.’

  He turns to the window, hands once more clasped in his lap, unadorned apart from his wedding ring, which he still wears.

  Ester would like to reach for him, but she can’t, and so her own hands are also clasped, her wedding ring long discarded, and she listens, aware of the truth and beauty in his words, and that here in this room, she too is blessed — an awareness she doesn’t have enough, she realises, as the rain continues to fall, sweet against the soft grey of the sky.

  IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME since Lawrence has seen Hilary, even longer since he has been to this house.

  He brushes against damp new leaves unfurling on the giant magnolia, the last of the flowers dropping their petals to the ground, where they lie bruised and bedraggled. He tries to shut the iron gate, but one of the hinges is rusted, and he gives up, bending low beneath an overhanging branch, the drops shaking loose and running down the back of his neck, cold, as he hurries to the shelter of the front verandah.

  Hilary is there at the door moments after he knocks — the same, and not the same. She stands, shorter than he remembered, her face like April’s but stronger, her gaze more focused. And yet there is a frailty in her eyes that he hasn’t seen before, a slight twitch at the corner. But perhaps he just imagines this.

  They are awkward in their initial greeting. In the past, he would always have kissed her on the cheek, but now they each lean hesitantly towards the other, unsure of how to say hello. Then she takes charge. Taking his hand in her own, only for a moment, she tells him to come in, out of the wet.

  With the front door shut behind him, there is quiet. No birds, no hiss of distant traffic, just the faint tapping of the rain. The house seems empty, but then he has only ever experienced it at family gatherings, with Ester, the girls, sometimes April, and, in the more distant past, Maurie as well. There would be noise, disagreements, family frustrations, and joy as well. He had usually witnessed more than participated — this is how it is, he presumes, when you are not blood. Part of the family, but not. Definitely not now.

  Ester used to worry about Hilary being lonely after Maurie died, but she had always seemed so busy to him, so capable, so self-contained that he’d found it difficult to imagine her experiencing anything as aimless and frail as loneliness. Yet now, as he follows her past the living room — hushed, neat, too large for one person — and down the hall, he recognises the emptiness he experiences in his own place when the girls go back to Ester; everything packed up, cleaned up, waiting, waiting for people to make each room exist again. Because that is how it feels sometimes — as though both he and the house
in which he lives are not real when he is by himself. Who is to say they exist, other than himself? — and he smiles at the thought, the ludicrous existential spiral his mind is following because he is nervous about this meeting.

  The kitchen has floor-to-ceiling glass windows on two sides — one looking out at an ivy-covered wall, the other across a courtyard. He remembers this room well; April and Maurie making salads, terrines, casseroles, marinading meat, all to be brought to the outside table. Which is still there, the wood sagging, damp and rotten in places, its surface covered in leaves, the legs laced with spider webs, glittering with perfect raindrops. What was the French phrase for a web? The star of the spider? Something like that.

  There is a dining room as well, just behind them, but they rarely used it. He glances through there now, and it is like the rest of the house: empty, waiting, the large Victorian table pale with dust, one of Maurie’s earlier paintings hanging on the wall behind it. He and Ester had once had sex in that room — and he blushes at the memory.

  Opposite him, Hilary pours them both a glass of water. Her hand is trembling. He opens his mouth to speak, to say something foolish like how are you when she has already told him she is dying, but she cuts over him, fortunately, taking charge once more.

  ‘You look older,’ she tells him.

  He laughs. ‘It’s been a bad day.’ He speaks without thinking, aware of how puny his complaints are in comparison to hers as soon as he utters the words, and he grimaces. ‘Although not so bad — in comparison.’

  There is almost a smile on her face. She clasps her hands around her glass, and asks him if he would like a coffee, a tea, or perhaps even a stiff drink.

  ‘I’m tempted by the last one,’ he says. ‘But I have to pick up the girls and get them home.’

  ‘I’d have one myself, but I’d probably pass out with the pills I’ve been taking.’ She meets his gaze, and there is, in that instant, so much sadness in her eyes. ‘I need your help,’ she tells him. ‘And I figure if there is anyone in the world who owes a debt to me and my daughters, it’s you.’