The Three of Us

by Kim Lock

  ‘You did tell us that,’ Elsie said, carefully. ‘You went into the nursery. But the matron caught you and made you leave.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t tell you that I picked her up and held her. That I looked at her.’

  Elsie glanced at Thomas, and he felt a responsibility to do something in the weight of that glance. Problem was, he felt like he was sinking and there was bugger all he could do about it.

  Aida wouldn’t look at them. ‘She wasn’t in the nursery with the other babies. I . . .’ Her head drooped even further. ‘I lied to you about that. She was hidden away, in a different room. I didn’t know she was a girl at this stage, of course. After the birth they never told me. No matter how much I begged, they wouldn’t tell me anything.’ She paused, absently massaging her right hand, the memory of the old injury. ‘It was an office or something, where I found her.’

  In a voice faraway, Aida recounted it all. How she had followed the sound of the infant’s cries and found the baby not in the nursery, but tucked away in a small office. How she had seen the card stamped baby for adoption. This, Thomas had heard before. Only on rare occasions over the years had Aida spoken of her story and neither Thomas nor Elsie had ever wanted to press her any further than what she was willing to say. Why draw open her wounds? Now, Thomas listened as she described picking up the baby, and how it had stopped crying instantly in her arms. As she spoke Aida made miming movements with her hands.

  ‘I held her for a while, feeling the weight of her in my arms. It felt so right, you know?’ She looked to Elsie, who nodded sadly with understanding. ‘Then I put her down on a desk, I think . . .’ she frowned, recalling. ‘The face was so beautiful, so perfect. I wanted to know the sex, so I unwrapped the swaddle, legs first. Two fine legs, kicking away. And I looked in the nappy and saw she was a girl.’ Briefly she smiled, before her face drained of colour again. ‘Then I unwrapped the top half of her.’

  Thomas heard it before Aida said it.

  ‘One of her arms was shortened, it ended at the elbow. She had this tiny little hand, tucked back on itself. It was beautiful. Her other arm –’ she drew in a quavering breath. ‘It was missing altogether.’

  She looked up at them, chin quivering in anger. ‘My parents lied to me. They never intended to keep my baby – they only let me believe that to keep me quiet. But in the end they used her body as leverage. They said there was no way they could keep a baby . . .’ she put her hands over her face. ‘A baby like that.’

  As he watched Elsie put her arms around Aida, Thomas realised: there it was. The intersection, the point where everything lined up with too much precision to be random. Where coincidence seemed too ridiculously, impossibly coincidental.

  The office of Harvey Greene, BPsych

  Recently

  Not that he would ever admit to it, but when Thomas lowered himself painfully onto that brown couch for the fourth time, he was beginning to feel something almost like comfort. Those colourful throw pillows? Today, not so perplexing. That box of tissues? Today, well, they seemed rather handy.

  But he’d never get used to that damn security camera.

  ‘Thomas, I’ve got to be honest with you.’ Harvey took a cursory glance at his clipboard, hesitated, then discarded it. It clanked onto the table by his chair. ‘You’ve covered more in the last three sessions than some clients get through in a year.’

  ‘Two hundred bucks an hour,’ Thomas said. ‘I’m a dying man. Please don’t take offence, but I’d rather leave it behind for my wives and children.’

  Harvey gave him a kind smile. ‘Feeling okay today?’

  Apart from the dying thing, Thomas told him that he was feeling fine enough, thank you.

  ‘And you still haven’t told them?’

  Thomas shook his head.

  ‘Haven’t told them about the cancer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you want to.’

  A slight thickening in his throat. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  ‘It’s interesting you say “wives”.’ The shrink sat back in his chair and laced his hands together. ‘Technically, only Elsie is your wife.’

  ‘Splitting hairs. What would you call it?’

  ‘How about lover?’ he suggested. ‘Mistress? Friend? Partner?’

  Thomas wanted to know what the man was getting at.

  ‘You obviously consider your relationship with Aida the same as your relationship with Elsie. A wife. And everything that goes with that title.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘It wasn’t always like that, though. Not in the beginning.’

  ‘No,’ Thomas admitted. ‘It wasn’t.’

  Harvey rested his elbows on the arms of the chair, waiting. Watching him like that camera on the ceiling.

  ‘Back in the early days, I guess Aida and I shared our love of Elsie. That was what bound us together: we both loved the same person. What an extraordinary thing to have in common.’ As Thomas cast his mind back he felt the stirrings of old, old emotion. ‘I was attracted to Aida – she was beautiful. Still is,’ he hastened to add, as though she were in the room with them, ‘but no, I didn’t think of her as a wife until it became clear that . . . that’s who she was. That I was as committed to her as I was to Elsie.’

  ‘When was that point, do you think?’

  Thomas realised he didn’t have to think about it. ‘When she came back. After Millie was born, she went back to her parents for a while, then came back. When I bought the house from her father. We all knew it, then – that we just didn’t work without all three, and that we’d stick around. The three of us.’

  Harvey let that sit in the air for a while. He watched Thomas as the emotions of it rose and fell on his face, allowing him to experience it all.

  ‘Thomas, if you could walk out of here today and tell them what you want to say, what you’ve been keeping to yourself – how would that happen?’

  Thomas frowned; he didn’t entirely understand the question. ‘I’d walk in the door and say it.’

  ‘And how would they respond?’

  ‘They’d cry.’

  ‘Would they be angry?’

  ‘Probably. I’ve often made them cross.’

  ‘Because you kept it from them?’

  Thomas nodded.

  ‘And you’ve thought that by not telling them, you are protecting them?’

  Realising the full circle he’d traversed, Thomas looked down at his hands and called himself an old fool. They were right back where they began, only now at least the shrink knew the bones of it. But in spite of all his talking, Thomas still had no idea how to break open his heart to the women he loved. To break open their hearts.

  The shrink added, ‘Let me ask you this: we’re not talking only about the cancer, are we?’

  It punched him in the guts. Uncertain if he was going to throw up or cry, Thomas reached for the tissues.

  ‘What’s at stake if you were to tell the truth now? All of it?’

  Thomas stuffed the tissue into his eye sockets and the room went quiet.

  Harvey said, ‘You’re afraid that if you tell them about the cancer, you’ll also have to tell them everything else. And then they’ll think that if it weren’t for the cancer, perhaps you’d never have told them. At all.’

  Thomas saw a tangent and decided to take it. ‘The last time I saw my brother he took me to the pub. Or – what I thought was the pub. Over the years I’d seen him less and less – he stopped coming up to Gawler, I stopped going into the city. But a year or so ago, I made an effort to visit him. He still wasn’t sleeping much and he hasn’t been able to hold down a job in, oh . . .’ he trailed off. ‘A long time,’ he finished softly.

  Harvey said, ‘PTSD?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Thomas coughed, winc
ing as the movements sent pain through his hips. ‘We went for a drink but the place he picked wasn’t just a pub. It was a girly joint. You know, lasses who take their gear off.’

  ‘A strip club?’ the psych offered.

  ‘That’s the one. I’m sitting there with my schooner and this sheila in the nick and these tall shoes starts flinging her hair in my face, and I look over and David’s laughing. Actually, properly laughing, holding his belly and spilling his drink and everything. And I wanted to shoo this naked lass away but I wanted my brother to keep laughing. So I gave her fifty bucks and by the time we left I was covered in glitter. Looked like a bloomin’ unicorn shat all over me.’

  Harvey laughed.

  ‘I didn’t tell Elsie and Aida, though,’ Thomas said. ‘It was the first time I washed my own clothes. Fifty years selling washing machines and I only used one of them once.’ He picked at the seams of his pants and finished, ‘If I couldn’t tell them that story – the time I took away my brother’s suffering, just for an hour – how could I tell them about . . . about . . . this?’

  Thomas’s shoulders heaved. He dropped his head. After a while, he heard a shuffling sound and looked up. Harvey had come forward, out of his chair, and was sitting on the coffee table. The man’s rounded, pleasant face was two feet from Thomas’s.

  ‘You love her,’ he said. ‘You know what to do.’

  ‘I really don’t.’

  Harvey added, with great gentleness, ‘Everything is much more open now. There’s a possibility of finding out more information.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Start with the internet. I could help you.’

  ‘The Goggle again?’

  Harvey smiled. ‘Think about what Aida would want. What Elsie would want.’ He tilted his head. ‘Your wives.’

  Thomas looked up at the CCTV camera.

  ‘They will have each other,’ the psychologist said at length. ‘After you’re gone.’

  Thomas met his eyes. ‘That’s a good thing.’

  Wives.

  The man was right. Perhaps Thomas did know what to do.

  Part V

  What to do

  72

  Thomas, seventy-five and still driving despite the doctor’s threats, pulled into the carport and turned off the ignition. As the engine ticked and cooled, he sat clasping the steering wheel, as if he might change his mind and decide to drive away again. His guts felt like some bad-tempered behemoth had reached inside him with a giant noodle spoon, and given it all a big old stir. How did folk do this week after week, year after year? Yabbering away at a professional listener, hoping for a miracle in their heads. Wasn’t therapy supposed to make you feel better?

  He looked down at his hands. When did his hands become those of an old man? He’d only retired four years ago. Four years ago he was selling vacuum cleaners and dishwashers, but now he had an old man’s hands. Gripping the steering wheel, his hands felt as strong as they always had, yet look at them – the veins showing through, the skin dryish and spotted with age. As seemed to be the way with the inevitable passage of time, as Thomas grew older, the years seemed to pass more quickly.

  Everything he could possibly want was inside this house: this house for which he had excitedly signed a mortgage back in 1960. The year he became a home owner and a husband and a head of sales.

  And here he was now, over half a century later, and apparently his bowel was killing him from the inside: an arse-end revolt. But for fifty years he had loved two women who loved each other, and a fellow couldn’t ask for any more than that, could he?

  Except for that one thing. That burning knowledge he carried around with him in his chest, keeping it dark from the world. He sat there in the car and felt it grow huge inside him. Why? Now, he couldn’t think of a single forgivable reason for his years of spineless silence.

  Thomas thought of Elsie, who doted on her grandchildren and still led knitting classes – only now she put them on the internet, for the whole world to see. He thought of Aida, zipping around at lunch time delivering hot meals to those who needed them with local Meals on Wheels and who still, at seventy, took herself off walking in the bush. (Although now she carried a fancy mobile phone and didn’t take the steep or rocky trails, she admitted.)

  He thought of Millie, still working with farm animals, who dropped by almost every day to help Elsie and Aida around the house, and Millie’s three children – Jordan, now almost eighteen, Jasmine, fifteen and Elijah, thirteen.

  Thomas took the keys from the ignition and jingled them in his palm. The streetlights came on as the sun slipped behind a looming bank of storm clouds on the western horizon. Rain coming tonight.

  Then he thought of Arthur, a bank executive who divided his time between Sydney and London where he had a Pommie wife and two teenagers, Cara and Samuel – who all visited at least once a year.

  He was a father, a grandfather, and in a few years’ time he could even be a great-grandfather.

  It was with that thought, with the possibility of the downy-headed great-grandchildren he would never meet, that his shoulders gave way. Sobs burst up and he fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief. After a time he composed himself; he waited for the shudders to pass and called himself a sissy. Get a grip, he said to himself. You need to be strong for them.

  You need to be strong when you tell them.

  He got out of the car, and went inside his home.

  73

  Aida was kneeling in the garden. Runner beans clambered up bamboo stalks, bees droned in the sweetpeas by her elbows. A pleasant, organic scent rose from the turned earth.

  She was lifting zucchini seedlings from a tray when it occurred to her: this was how it was going to end. Cancer.

  The thought hit her with such ferocity that she dropped a seedling. The moist bundle of soil clamped within its roots came loose and scattered, exposing the delicate white tendrils. Tears sprung into her eyes. She covered the spoiled seedling with dirt. Gave it back to the earth. She lifted out another seedling and scooped a hole in the friable soil.

  Elsie was angry that Thomas had known about his illness for two months but kept it to himself. She was angry at his secrecy, at his shouldering the burden alone for so long. But Aida understood. Sometimes there are things that must be gathered in one’s own breast and held there – a pale, fragile germination – before exposing it to the shock of reality.

  Aida knew too well how it felt to evade giving out the truth. To dodge queries like, You’re visiting again? Or So you’ve lived alone next door all this time? Or Gosh, the children are extraordinarily close to you, aren’t they?

  Aida pressed the seedling into the earth. Across the yard, the screen door screeched on its hinges. ‘Aida?’

  ‘Out here,’ she called.

  Aida thought of her parents. Only a few years ago, her mother had passed away, quietly in her bed one night. Dorthea Glasson had been almost ninety. Over the phone, from Queensland, Aida’s cousin had told her there was no funeral, just a graveside gathering of close family. That gathering had happened, her cousin informed Aida, the day before that phone call.

  Secrecy had always been an inextricable part of their lives. It had made them who they were today.

  Aida tipped the last seedling from the tray as Elsie’s shadow fell across her. She was still clutching her handbag; she’d come straight from the car.

  ‘It’s still a little cool overnight – you don’t want to harden them off in the tray another week?’

  ‘I figured there’s no time like the present.’

  Elsie’s posture had become stooped. Even standing as straight as she could, her shoulders hunched on the top of her curved spine. Between the hem of her skirt and her slip-on shoes, her shins were papery-white. She stood with her elbows cupped in her hands, hair a white halo around her head, handbag dangling from her forearm.

  Aida asked,
‘What did the doctor say?’

  Elsie said, ‘Let’s sit down, love, and I’ll tell you.’

  Aida’s back protested as she stood. She set the sprinkler raining over the seedlings and a rainbow materialised in the spray. Water dripped from the pea leaves and darkened the soil.

  They sat at the little wrought-iron table underneath the gum tree.

  ‘How long?’ Aida asked, because it seemed the only question that mattered.

  ‘Doctor couldn’t tell us for certain,’ Elsie said. ‘But they want him to try a round of chemo, because it might slow the growth. Might. They’re guessing.’

  ‘But he won’t?’

  ‘He won’t.’

  A magpie-lark hopped across the grass, singing. A helicopter thudded somewhere far overhead. Aida pressed her palm into the gumnuts that littered the cool iron of the table top.

  Elsie went on. If the cancer had been picked up early enough, he might have had more treatment options. But because Thomas had ignored the symptoms for so long, it had metastasised into the rest of his body. Invaded his lymphatic system, poisoned his blood.

  ‘How did we not notice?’

  ‘Problems with the toilet . . . He’s hardly going to tell us about things like that.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Elsie said.

  ‘Whatever he wants us to do.’

  ‘He doesn’t want anything,’ she said crossly. ‘He’s opened his arms to it.’

  ‘He’s seventy-five years old,’ Aida pointed out, ‘Maybe he’s earned a little grace and peace.’

  ‘Is it peace, though? He’s not gracefully resigning or accepting – he’s sticking his head in the sand.’

  At least they could talk about it now without crying. It felt like all they had done for the past week was sob and weep. Aida’s head felt thick and clogged, her eyes felt swollen to the size of dinner bowls. But out here, in the garden, with the spring-sweet air and the grass and the hens squabbling over pill-bugs and the bees crowding the lavender along the fence, she felt somewhat cleansed. Like a salt scrub for her mind.