Staying

by Jessie Cole

  ‘Jess?’

  ‘It’s not a good story.’

  ‘You don’t want to tell it?’

  Sam lifted a handful of sand and spilled it slowly over my arm. A pyramid built in the crease of my elbow, and when there was no more sand left Sam flattened it and gently rubbed the particles away. His touch was light, and I felt something inside me release.

  Be brave, I told myself. Try again.

  ‘My sister committed suicide when I was twelve.’ The words came fast. ‘It seemed an unbearable lesson to learn. Her lesson to us.’ Short and sharp. ‘Irreparable. Irrecoverable. My father couldn’t salvage himself.’ I sucked in a breath. ‘He died six years later.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He killed himself too.’

  ‘How’d he do it?’

  ‘In the car. I mean, he tried to slit his wrists first, but it didn’t work.’

  ‘How old was your sister?’

  ‘Eighteen.’

  ‘How’d she do it?’

  ‘Gas too, from an oven. In Holland. She was travelling.’

  ‘Why’d she do it?’

  I looked across at the fisherman, his hands loose, relaxed between his knees. The unanswerable question.

  ‘Unspeakable sadness, I guess.’ I shrugged. ‘Why does anyone choose to die?’

  In my reckoning, experience wasn’t as simple as points on a map, leading in a clear direction, though we were narrative-hungry creatures, and tended to think it so. We all tried to make sense of the present by looking at the past, but I was beginning to see that every moment was fresh, and each of us—in any given minute—might take multiple different paths. There was always the life we lived and the life we could have lived, if only we’d chosen differently. I didn’t believe Zoe had to die that day. There were other roads she could have walked.

  ‘Sometimes I think if she’d just lived through that day, maybe she wouldn’t have done it. Maybe she just needed one more day.’

  He reached out, like he was going to wrap his arm around me, and I tensed, my heart beating against my chest, an ancient flight mechanism setting in. Sam dropped his hand, tilting his head to watch me.

  ‘I won’t touch you, Jess,’ he said softly. ‘I can see how stiff you go when you think I might touch you.’

  I’m a prickly thing, Sam.

  I don’t know how I got this way.

  I tasted tears in my mouth, but I gritted my teeth against them.

  ‘I wasn’t always like this,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t know how to be.’

  Sam shifted around, kneeling on the beach in his fisherman jeans. He scooped up a mound of fine sand, trailing it slowly from inside his hands, and I watched the graceful glide of white.

  ‘You’ve been hurt, Jess. Sometimes that makes us—’ He grappled with words.

  ‘Prickly?’

  ‘Yeah … I mean … it can.’

  ‘But I’ve never been hurt in that way. Never … physically. Half the hurts I carry around aren’t even mine.’

  Sand slid from hand to hand, a shuffling motion, smooth and rhythmic.

  ‘It doesn’t matter whose.’

  I held out my arm, and Sam scattered a delicate line down my bare forearm, elbow to fingertips and back again. I quivered a little and the sand dropped away. Reaching out, he repeated the uneven sliding line. This time I was utterly still, watching the fall of sand, balancing it, letting it build into small pyramids.

  ‘My mum used to sprinkle me like this when I was little.’ I felt myself sigh. ‘I’d lie down on my belly and she’d sprinkle me with sand,’ I added. ‘It feels tickly and nice. The sand’s cool in the afternoon.’

  Sam paused, watching me.

  ‘I could sprinkle you,’ he said, picking up a handful of sand.

  I hadn’t known this physicality would be so hard for me. As a child I’d been free with my body—affection had been easily given and received. Here on the beach, I could sense Sam’s kindness. In my dream world I had craved his touch. With my rational mind, I knew Sam was no threat, but my body was on red alert. Poised for flight, in panic mode. I wondered if it was a response to trauma, this heightened hypervigilance. I suspected Varda would know.

  ‘Close your eyes, then I’ll lie down,’ I said softly, hoping my body would oblige.

  Sam knelt in the sand, his eyes closed, arms hanging by his sides. I turned onto my belly.

  ‘You ready?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Opening his eyes, Sam smiled and I laughed in reply, a sighing giggle. My cheek rested against the fine white sand.

  ‘Do you need something for a pillow?’

  Sam began to take off his flannelette shirt, but I shook my head. ‘I’m okay. Just start.’

  Slowly, I inched my forearms out from beneath my sides. Like a turtle I had folded myself away and now I cautiously unfurled my limbs. Trying to still my racing heartbeat, I looked out past the fisherman and along the stretch of beach before my eyes. Sam moved around me on his knees, scooping up sand and trailing it slowly along my shoulder and down my arm. Delicate and soothing, the sand sprinkled in fine lines over each curving finger. I focused on the minute specks before my eyes, the waves beyond a distant blur.

  The fisherman traced the length of my calves poking from beneath my skirt. Softly the sand slid from his fingers, an unhurried arc of white, and Sam shuffled down and released a light trickle onto my feet. Settling between my toes, it tickled, and I couldn’t help but squirm. Sam scooped up another handful and buried my wiggling feet completely.

  ‘Too ticklish?’ His voice seemed to come from far away, and I sat up abruptly, sand sliding from me in a glittering fall. Exposed and tingling, I fought the urge to run.

  ‘No, it was good. Your turn.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Sam lay down slowly on the sand, closing his eyes. I could see his breath ease out in a long sigh, his body all softness. I watched him a moment before I cupped a handful of sand. His arms drifted out from his body, his hands curled like seashells against the white. Leaning over, I surveyed the arc of his fingers, trickling sand down his forefinger, curving around to his thumb. Then, taking small pinches, I sprinkled his knuckles, and filled the space between his fingers with soft rows of sand until tiny walls grew up enclosing them. He was motionless. The sand blew against his eyelids in speckled dots. He looked so vulnerable, lying there, and everything seemed so fleeting.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I’m just going to get something. Don’t move, I’ll come back.’

  I stood and walked down to the breaking waves. Rocks and shells lay washed up on the shoreline, broken but smooth, and I leaned down and scooped them into my singlet. I was indiscriminate in my choosing, picking up everything I could see.

  Walking back up towards him, I emptied my singlet onto the sand in a cacophony of sudden sound. Kneeling, I sorted quickly through the pebbles and shells. With quick, darting movements I arranged the rocks around Sam’s sandy fist. I placed the shells—pipi-shaped and smooth—in the sand around his head. Wisps of his hair wafted against my fingers and I glanced down at his eyes, but they were closed. He was unmoving, as though sleeping.

  I outlined his shape with my jumbled collection, pushing the shells lightly downwards with my thumb. With no shells left, I walked back to the shoreline to collect more, and returning, released them at Sam’s feet in a scattering slide. I placed them against his feet and calves, and when I’d arranged the shells and pebbles in a vague silhouette, I crawled across to kneel at his side, his sand-encrusted hand at my knees.

  ‘You can move now—I’m finished,’ I whispered.

  Sam’s speckled eyelids opened and he gazed up at me, for a moment unseeing.

  ‘Were you really asleep?’ I felt suddenly like laughing. ‘Move carefully.’

  Sam raised his head, looking over his shoulder at the shells and rocks.

  ‘You’ve made me in the sand.’

  ‘Y
ep.’

  Gingerly, he lifted his body up, trying not to disturb the silhouette of shells and rocks. He dusted the sand from his clothes and smiled sideways at me, his cheek white with a fine veil of particles that crumbled and fell away with his grin.

  ‘It’s beautiful, Jess.’

  ‘Mmm. Your imprint.’

  ‘Wonder how long it’ll last,’ he said.

  ‘It’s above the waterline—it won’t get washed away.’

  ‘Some dog might come past and dig it up.’

  ‘Or some wild kids like mine.’

  ‘A surfer might dump his gear here without even looking.’

  I turned towards him, my restless fingers hidden beneath the hem of my singlet.

  ‘Maybe the wind will just blow it all away.’

  Sam watched my face, and I stared across the sand to my car, wordless, the magnetic pull of home suddenly upon me.

  ‘Time to go?’ He stepped back, as though to let me pass.

  ‘Do you ever come here early for the sunrise?’ I asked.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Must be beautiful, hey? You can’t see the sky at my house.’

  ‘Why? You live in a cave?’

  Glancing back towards him, I laughed. ‘No. It’s beautiful, my place, but there are so many trees. You can’t see the sky, not like this, just pockets here and there. Small pockets of blue. No sunsets. No sunrises. I can see the moon, though, when it’s full, from my bedroom window.’

  ‘Does it keep you awake?’

  I looked up at the broad expanse of the sky. ‘I’m not a good sleeper. I get restless, moon or no moon. But I like to see it. I feel connected in some way. It’s silly—I mean, it’s just the moon, right?’

  ‘Jess?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’m sorry about your sister, and your dad.’ He spoke slowly, like there was no hurry. ‘I thought you must have had something real sad happen. Something about you—’

  I wondered if I was marked, if all my hurts were visible in some way, but I didn’t want to ask. The afternoon had moved towards night and I could see the shadow of the evening upon my skin. A glittering kind of darkness.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You’ll be here, won’t you, if I come back? Another day. You won’t just disappear?’

  ‘Blown away by the wind?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The dimming sky seemed all at once to close in, and I looked away from Sam’s face, downwards, smoothing my foot through the sand in a wide arc.

  ‘I’ve been here a while, Jess. I’ll be here a while yet.’

  ≈

  At my next session with Varda, I told her about the fisherman and my recalcitrant body. She was thoughtful for a long moment.

  ‘It’s a common experience for trauma survivors to have problems with intimacy,’ she said finally.

  I thought about an old primary school friend of my brother’s, about how I’d bumped into him recently and he’d stood there, awkwardly, asking, ‘Is it okay to hug you?’ I’d laughed, and he’d looked at me carefully. ‘Oh, it’s only that when I last saw you, you said you don’t do touch.’ Demonstrating, he’d held up his palms, as though warding me off.

  I’d been shocked. ‘When did I say that?’

  ‘Last time I saw you, just after your father died.’

  I’d had no memory of it. No memory at all.

  In the studio now with Varda, I stammered, ‘But I never had any trouble like that with Gabe.’

  I wondered about my withdrawal from Gabe. I’d always thought it began when I first got pregnant, but maybe it was earlier.

  ‘Trouble with sex? Or trouble with intimacy?’ Varda asked, watching my face.

  ‘Sex,’ I answered hesitantly. ‘It was probably the thing we did best.’ I wasn’t sure about intimacy. We’d been good at it once.

  She nodded. ‘Well, historically speaking, you’d always seen him as a safe place. Probably he didn’t set off any fight or flight impulses.’

  ‘And the fisherman does?’

  I could see Varda was thinking.

  ‘Well, excitement and fear have very similar bodily sensations,’ she said. ‘Racing heartbeat, heightened perception, tingling. Sometimes, when there’s been a big shock, your nervous system gets the two things scrambled, like wires crossed.’

  This was alarming.

  ‘But how do I overcome it?’

  ‘We can come up with some strategies.’ She smiled. ‘But, basically, you’ve just got to try to take things slow.’

  ≈

  In grief, denial has its own adaptive purpose. We stay there until we are ready or able to feel the pain. The commonly identified stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—are only a loose guide. Many of us step off the beaten track. What pushes us from one state to the other is mysterious, though we might like the process to follow a neat narrative line. Possibly there are unconscious mechanisms at work. We dream, and over time some of these messier feelings get disentangled in our sleep.

  I didn’t know why I had refused for so long to read the ripped-up letter my father had sent me in the months before he died. Perhaps in my anger I didn’t have any space for his suffering. When someone takes their own life it is hard to forget that they have chosen to leave you. That whatever love they had for you wasn’t enough to make them stay. They didn’t just move interstate, or across the world—they left you forever. And even if you know their pain was unbearable, deep down you will always wonder if it was because you weren’t worth sticking around for. You didn’t, in the end, make life worth living. Knowing what my father had wanted to tell me in those last months had always been more than I could bear, but with Varda in my life I knew I wouldn’t have to shoulder all the weight.

  Gathering the shovel, scissors, camera, sticky tape and glue, all possibilities covered, I descended the ridge to my special place out past the clothes line. Out of sight of my mother, I made my way down the red mud slope, through the barbed wire and across the creek. On the higher ground the curved stick sagged from its hole, marking the burial spot. Milla and Luca were with Gabe, and without them I had come to dig up the past, to uncover my metal box with its hidden letter, torn and maimed.

  The dirt was soft, and I leaned the shovel against a tree and scraped at the small mound with my fingers. The layer underneath was damp and the soil came away in easy handfuls. In the shortest time I saw the glint of metal. Smoothing away the clinging dirt, I pried open the box and stared for a moment at the creased envelope inside.

  The letter from him.

  This time, I was ready to read it.

  Settling on a dry, flat spot, I scraped aside the leaves, clearing the way, and tipped up the envelope, watching as the scraps of white paper fluttered to the ground. The messy ink-scrawl of my father’s handwriting glared at me from the hard dirt, but I wanted to piece the letter together first and try to absorb its meaning later. As I inspected the writing for connections and began the puzzle of his words, I hummed a tune, the sound of the song soothing. I worked, arranging the words, and then sticking them down when they fitted properly.

  The letter appeared slowly before my eyes, stuck straight against the dirt with a white drop of glue. One page complete. Two pages complete. I cleared away more leaves, needing space to finish the rest. Three pages, four. My neck ached as I crouched before the scraps of paper, but I was becoming expert now at seeing the way my father’s words fitted together. I looked away for a moment to get my bearings. The creek murmured beside me, reflective and shady. I watched the water swirl across the rocks. Close to finishing the last page, tears slipped from my eyes, smudging the seven-year-old ink.

  It was hard not to read the words as they appeared. I listened to the rushing of the water, focusing on the sounds around me, wrenching my mind away from thoughts of my father, until finally it was all done.

  Not yet. Not quite yet.

  I looked away from the finished puzzle, standing asid
e and walking across to the water. Tucking up my skirt, I stepped in, watching as the rapids raced around my ankles. I breathed—a deep pull of air—then exhaled, leaning forward to dip my fingertips beneath the gushing coolness. The water was fresh and soft against my fingers, and I picked up a stray leaf and sent it careering down the flowing current, watching it disappear beyond my sight.

  After a minute or so, I moved from the water towards the white map of my father’s words. Kneeling before the letters, I began at last to read.

  March 12

  Dear Jess

  LETTER WRITING

  —Personal, that is. I was sitting here thinking about this. It’s a pretty odd sort of thing.

  THOUGHTS

  1. Once there was a time when letter writing was the only form of communication.

  2. Who to?

  3. How often?

  4. How long?

  5. What’s in it?

  6. What is the connection between the written & spoken word?

  7. What do you censor?

  8. Is it actually a kind of love affair on paper?

  9. 100 other things.

  10. Some people write heaps, others none. Why?

  11. Maybe it gets boring?

  12. Maybe you repeat yourself because you forget what you said last time.

  13. What space to devote to perusing the last letter & maybe responding to things in that?

  14. Half of ‘Possession’ which I’ve got here is letter writing. (A.S. Byatt (female) set partly around 1860.)

  15. There were lots of other things going around in my head about this subject but they’ve disappeared temporarily.

  16. Have you got lousy writing, so you miss too many words—maybe even 10 missed words in a page is too many?

  17. ‘Possession’ is a pretty amazing book filled with lots of letters from 1860s, the letters intensify—it’s a 500 page book. Sometimes their letters—being so Victorian—drove me crazy—I preferred the current story—and they swapped poems too—lots—(not my scene). But it is also about two people researching these people now. I think I’ll read it again, starting tomorrow.