Staying

by Jessie Cole

  ‘He’s depressed,’ my mother said after she found me watching him in the study.

  ‘But Mum, will he ever get better?’

  She looked off into the distance, out into the garden. ‘Everything takes time, Jess. I don’t know how long it might take.’

  ‘We just have to wait?’

  ‘Mmm.’ My mother nodded, and then wandered outside. She picked up a fallen palm frond and dragged it to the edge of the bank as I trailed behind her. ‘We’re all just sad, Jess.’ She threw the palm frond over the edge and then searched out another, looking at the ground, not at me. ‘We miss her. I don’t know what we can do.’

  My father’s guilt quietened him. He couldn’t go on with the garden, his sculpting of the world. The forest that had once held us all so firmly offered him no comfort. He felt no joy in its green embrace. He sat, instead, and read the newspaper, but he did not get past the front page. Grief time was like deep time, geologic—change was imperceptible. On his work days he got up early and left, the ticking minutes an awful weary grind, his patients blurring into one large mass of desolation and despair. But the torture of those interminable seconds was nothing compared with being at home and alone with his thoughts. My father could not sleep, food turned to ash on his tongue, and he drank wine like water. His only relief was the haze of drunkenness. We all stepped around him, giving him space in his sorrow, but the gnarled, woody vine of his guilt tightened around his beleaguered heart.

  ≈

  In secret, I too began to search out the mysteries of my sister’s sudden end. Squashed into the overfull filing cabinet, in cream manila folders, I found all Zoe’s letters home. In unsurveyed moments—out of range of my parents—I crept into the study to investigate their contents. Expecting to find clear indications of deep sorrow, or covert references to drugs and disorder, I was instead confronted by my dead sister’s ambiguities, her elusive turn of phrase. Though I read them all, and read them all again, I could not properly understand them.

  What did I really know of my sister? So much of how I had seen her was my own childish fantasy of what it was like to be a teenager. As a kid, I’d rarely been able to break through my projection of who Zoe was to see any of her woundedness. The vision I had of her—that punk acrobat, so full of verve—had overshadowed my whole childhood, but it had also stopped me from truly knowing her. After she died, my memories of her felt corrupt, based so heavily on a misconception. The sister I had experienced would not have taken her own life. So who was this vulnerable, desolate girl?

  Lying awake, night after night, I tried to imagine Zoe’s travelling life, but the names of all the foreign countries got mixed up in my mind and I couldn’t sort them out. I closed my eyes and strove to summon my dead sister’s face—her slant-eyed smile, her burnished glow—but every day the image blurred further, threatening to dissolve. I fought this forgetting, training my mind to work round and round fragments of memory until slowly they embedded inside me. The things I remembered about Zoe may have been tainted by my childish perspective, but—apart from her letters home—they were all I had. In the hours before sleep I counted these memories like a silent mantra. Working through this invisible rosary beneath the cover of night, I diligently kept track.

  Perhaps this was my own type of magical thinking. Perhaps I believed that if I kept Zoe alive in my memory, she wouldn’t really be dead. Before she died, she’d been away for a year, immersed in what could only be—for me—a kind of fantasy-scape: the wider world. Perhaps she still existed somewhere in that imaginary place?

  ≈

  You think if someone you love takes their own life, in the end you will find out why. It is a dark mystery that needs solving. But unless they explicitly explain it, the truth is you may never know. We all long for meaning—that elusive cause and effect, a story that makes sense—but resolution of even the most basic questions often relies on guesswork. Hazy, unsure; supposition.

  While Zoe was travelling, it was as though she had existed in three parallel spaces. Her exterior real-body-life, where she was interacting with the world at large; the effervescent ‘self’ of her letters home; and some deeper, unarticulated place where she had wanted to die. It was a terrifying thought. What did my sister not say that we should have intuited? What else about our loved ones were we not intuiting? In hindsight, every interaction was much more significant, strewn with missed clues and undetected signs. And afterwards, everything—every interaction—seemed uncertain, filled with risk.

  ≈

  After my sister died, my parents stopped hosting the wild parties of my childhood. They bought a VCR and hired endless movies, filling the sudden void in their lives with other people’s stories. We rarely went out, but sometimes one of them would rally, and we’d head off to a house party somewhere in Burringbar. Whole nights of drunken laughter, guffaws and high-pitched feminine shrieks. As a small child, I hadn’t noticed the unhappy faces of the watching women whose husbands so tightly held the writhing bodies of their dancing partners. I’d slept in curled oblivion long before any of the drunken arguments began. It was only after Zoe died, when I was dangling over the abyss of adulthood, that I noticed the horror of all the excess. I saw men fall off verandahs, come up with bleeding foreheads, wipe the blood from their eyes and still down another beer. I saw mothers rage at fathers, incessant and frightening, their eyes hard and wounded, their words slurred. Jake and I moved aside when stray couples wanted to use a room for a quick fumbled fuck.

  ‘It’s been a while, kids. You know what it’s like.’

  All these things came irrevocably sliding into view, and the parties felt suddenly filled with a hollow kind of cheer. The hopeful sound of my childhood gave way to a cacophony of dark and drunken despair.

  Zoe was dead, and the grown-ups no longer seemed grown up.

  Grief has its own time line. While other people’s lives moved forward, ours were stuck at this one harrowing point. A lot of things can happen in a year, but a grieving-year can feel like no time at all. As a family, we couldn’t move on. Zoe’s death still felt like yesterday. The pain didn’t lessen. My father didn’t start to smile. Gradually my parents fell away from the community they’d helped build. Maybe there wasn’t room for their sorrow, or a place outside the party to talk of what they’d lost. Or maybe there weren’t the necessary words. After a time, people we’d once been close to slipped out of sight. It was hard to know if we’d become hermits or if the town itself had begun to look away. But where once my life had been filled with other adults, after my sister’s death they mostly seemed to disappear.

  ≈

  My father had always been a social drinker, but after Zoe died his drinking changed. He began to drink alone. Halfway through his first bottle of wine my father’s face started to transform. His skin reddened and his eyebrows protruded. His eyes behind round glasses became milkier and his cheeks more jowly. His voice turned harsh and soon it would begin. My father talked and talked, an angry monologue of grief, until one after the other Jake and I got up from the table and quietly left. It was as though our father had become infected by rage, and he couldn’t shake it. My brother and I found refuge in television or hanging out in our now separate rooms, but our mother stayed and listened. She did not argue, she did not inflame, but sat unbending and calm beneath our father’s lashing words.

  Jake and I went to bed to avoid his incessant ranting, but my room was closest, and I could hear my father as I lay listening in the dark. The menace in his voice carried through the air. I could hear him threaten my mother, and I listened in terror for a silence so ominous and deep that I could not mistake its meaning. I waited and waited for the sound of my mother’s footsteps on the walkway bricks, so I would know she had escaped to bed, and then I waited—my whole body alive with dread—to see if my father’s heavy footsteps would follow. I was panic-stricken about what I would not hear once my father had her alone in their bedroom, and the ringing of this waiting silence filled my mind until I could thin
k of nothing but the plan.

  In the plan I would know the moment when I needed to act. The sound of the silence would tell me, or perhaps a noise, a frightening, meaningful noise, and I would creep from my room. Sliding across the back garden in the dark, I’d slip in through my brother’s half-opened door and wake him. Jake would be disorientated with sleep and fear and he’d stumble out the door behind me. I would drag him through the jungle palms, and then, when I thought we were far enough from the grief-rage of our father, I’d urge him into a run and we’d race out towards the ridge and slide down the muddy slope to the secret place of our childhood in the cold, hard darkness.

  Our clothes would tear against the barbed wire and we’d graze our backs trying to slide beneath its jagged edge, but once we made it to our secret place we would not stop running. We would race along the creek, our feet slamming against the sharp edges of the rocks. Blinded by the night, Jake and I would run and run until we were free of my father, then we’d huddle together, wretched and shivering under the dark trees, knowing that in our panic we had left our mother behind. We had left her to defend herself against our thrashing, drowning father.

  In my escape plan I could not rescue us all.

  But most nights my father didn’t follow my mother to bed. He stayed up late instead, drinking more wine and playing old records so loudly I couldn’t sleep. He listened to the first few bars of Judy Garland singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, just the first line, over and over, as though in his drunken sorrow he was trying to capture the one epic moment when the music swells and she begins to sing. Zoe was gone, vanished from our lives, but to my father this one phrase of notes was like holding in his palm the smallest particle of her. Every night he listened to this first line, as though grasping in his hand the skirts of the girl who had left him, as though in these soaring seconds he could keep her in the room. And when the line was over, she had escaped his hold, and his grief returned in a colossal swamping wave.

  And then he played it again.

  And again.

  My father was stuck in a circular grief and it played upon his mind like the repeating record scratched against my heart.

  I listened with a fury so immense I felt it rock and surge inside me, and sometimes when my anger overrode my fear I stormed out of my bedroom to confront him. ‘Dad, we can’t sleep. Do you not understand that we have to go to school tomorrow?’

  My father stood unsteadily in the doorway, unable to hear me over the amplified orchestral strings.

  I shouted then, my whole body shaking. ‘Turn. It. Down.’

  He shuffled to the record-player and turned the volume down a tiny notch, and I shook my head, holding my body stiff in defiance.

  ‘It’s still too loud,’ I hissed.

  His anger roused, my father exploded. ‘It’s my fucking house! I can do what I want in my fucking house. You’ve all gone off to bed and I’m just listening to some songs, my favourite songs, you know? Me! I can’t do anything in this fucking house without you all fucking complaining.’

  He stood over me, radiating a pulsing, drunken violence. I could not let go of my closed fists. I took a sharp breath, my body still trembling.

  ‘Dad, I have a test tomorrow and I need to sleep.’ My words came out in a dull monotone. I couldn’t bear the necessity of speaking them. ‘The music is driving me insane.’

  Why didn’t he know we needed to sleep? This man who had once been so tender. I wanted to wail but I could only stand before him and speak my muted words. We were deadlocked, and neither of us could win. I turned from him then, blood pounding at my temples like the flapping of wings. I went back to bed and lay awake the night through, listening to the relentless welling of my father’s one sad song. I could not cry, though I longed more than anything to feel the hot, slipping release of tears.

  In the mornings, my father pottered about as though the night of rage and Judy Garland had never happened. He made a point of telling me daily, ‘I love you, Jess. Never forget. I love you.’ Once Zoe was gone my father repeated that sentence to me like a chant, and I squirmed and shuddered at his desperate tone. Horribly, blatantly, these words were juxtaposed against his nightly rants and violent, grief-filled rages.

  I looked to the gone-ness of Zoe, at the great lack, my sister’s shadow, and whispered, ‘Here it is. Is this what you wanted? This dark love? All the focus on you?’

  In disarray my father swam upstream, enraged and exposed, manic and sorrowful. Drowning. His words insistent and choked with tears. ‘I love you. I love you. I love you. I’m sorry.’

  As he floundered, I hovered nervously at the edges of rooms. I couldn’t bear the endless spilling words and the constant swill of wine. I kept moving, and when I finally went to bed I felt the movement frantic inside me. In my bed I lay motionless but I could not slow down my speeding, pounding heart.

  ≈

  In the year after Zoe’s death, the father we had known slowly disappeared, the weight of his grief leaving him misshapen and unfamiliar, until we faced a stranger who was both irrational and unkind. Jake and I—now half-grown—slid in and out of our father’s company with averted eyes and frozen faces, tightly wound and trembling.

  In the midst of our father’s grief-rage the notes of Jake’s guitar sounded, unplugged and plinking. He lay on the couch, snuggled deep beneath a doona, endlessly watching quiet television and clutching his guitar. He made himself small and our father’s enraged gaze skipped over him, unseeing. Sometimes I lay with him on the couch—slipping in close beside him, trying to breach the silent space that now lay between us.

  I’m sorry, I wanted to whisper. I’m sorry I can’t save you from this.

  I couldn’t bear to translate all my brother’s potent sadness, to speak it out loud, though I felt it mirrored starkly within myself, and a quietness grew about us both, enveloping us until there was no place left for words. Our only communion became a kind of being together, a sitting in the same room. Jake and I exchanged darting glances, but I stopped confirming what was being said. In the wake of my sudden muteness there were only the twanging, lonely chords of his guitar. I didn’t tell Jake of my escape plan, nor confess that I lay awake fearing I wouldn’t be able to rescue him. I couldn’t tell my brother that of everything in my world he was most treasured, most worth protecting, and as the sound of our father’s grief-songs filled the house, my silence stretched unchecked between us.

  ≈

  The usual adolescent trials and tribulations that would once have been important to me were difficult to relate to in the context of my sister’s death. I found it hard to care what Liz said about Kelly behind her back, or what Justine was wearing, or if Emma didn’t get invited to that party of Jack’s. All the friends I’d had in primary school, those sibling-like pals, seemed to have drifted away. I tried to keep up with the concerns of my peers, but the enormity of what was happening at home was overwhelming. Even the morphing of my body, which had been so alarming, dimmed in significance. After Zoe died, I didn’t know how to be out in the world. Was my every word supposed to reflect—in some subtle way—the pain of what had gone on? Was I allowed to smile? I felt intensely surveyed. Was I grieving right? My classmates were friendly, but I felt like an outcast.

  The sister of the girl who killed herself—you know the one?

  To escape my dead sister’s shadow, in my second year of high school I moved from the cement labyrinth of my overpopulated first school to a smaller school on the hill outside of town. At this new institution I wasn’t defined by the suicide of my sister; the students and teachers knew nothing of her story. Starting afresh among reforming delinquents and the devoutly religious, I attempted to reinvent myself as unhindered by my family’s engulfing grief.

  When Gabriel, the new boy, arrived—black-haired and shining—he walked a clear path towards me and told me his name: ‘Gabriel. Everyone calls me Saba.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Gabriela Sabatini.’ A slight roll of the eyes.
‘That tennis player.’

  I knew of her vaguely.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But you can call me Gabe.’

  In hardly any time at all, Gabe and I slid into a relationship. Looking back, it’s hard to fathom just what it was that made us so definite about each other right from the start. For my part, I think I sensed in Gabe a solidity, a steadfastness. I trusted him not to disappear or to suddenly transform. And he was all lightness, bright smiles and big hugs. Endlessly buoyant, always laughing. When I think of myself at this age, and what I might have offered Gabe with all my sadness and confusion, it’s tricky to ascertain. But he chose me, and stuck stubbornly to that choice. We were just kids, fourteen and fifteen, but that didn’t seem to matter.

  Driving to school, my mother asked me if I was thinking about having sex.

  ‘We’re already way past that,’ I replied, cheeks hot.

  I’d grown up surrounded by casually conducted sex, so it was no surprise I wafted into it so easily. Between Gabe and me, there’d been no discussion, only a sudden jump from kissing to more. We were two hippie-kids who’d never been told it was wrong. My parents researched the best contraceptive pill, and upgraded my single bed to a double. No one batted an eyelid. My mother walked in on us once, Gabe’s head tucked neatly between my thighs, my breaths shuddery and fast. Her face, usually so still, lit up with surprise. No doubt we were all startled, but before my mother closed my bedroom door I saw a look of elation cross her face. At least, I imagined her thinking, at least they were trying that out.

  Gabe and I moved schools again together—another large, rambling affair with more options and less surveillance. When we’d first gotten together I’d believed he’d be just ‘a boyfriend’ in a string of boyfriends. Wasn’t I a teenager? Isn’t this what we did? But our relationship continued, and I realised with surprise that I would not kiss lots of boys. I didn’t even know any other boys, though I passed them daily in the corridors and classrooms. Gabe and I existed on an island, just us two. Unshifting and solid in the tumultuous sea of teenage heartbreak, in time we became young creatures of habit, quiet in our certainty and our everyday routines.