The World Without Us

by Mireille Juchau

  And there, high in a tree festooned with strangler fig, is Juniper Peterson, watching Tess intently, her bum planted on a tapering branch. Tess looks back at that horse and flowers, then up to the placid sky as June launches herself to the dirt.

  That’s my mama’s grave you’re looking at, June says, righting herself.

  Tess stares at her own feet. June lives with her uncle, Bo Peterson. It’s rumoured he has tunnelled under his property, that he’s a survivalist with a well-stocked bunker, that he deals meth and gambles. That young men come and go from his place. At All Hours. Others say he’s decent – hadn’t he taken his niece in when she had nowhere else to go? June was the only orphan Tess and Meg had ever met and this lent her a special radiance. They’d see her cantering round the town, or leading Tucker’s mother, Heidi, to the GP and the charity shop. They’d once sat through June’s Magick Act at the school fete. She’d sawn the library teacher clear in two, then tweaked a pretend skirt for a curtsy.

  Tess picks a hangnail till blood jewels out. It’s getting cold, the sweat from her climb makes her shiver. The sun low, the shadows furtive.

  You and I were only little, says June. No way we can remember what it was like living here.

  Tess smirks. Fail! She’s never even lived at the commune! She tips her chin up, narrows her eyes.

  June gestures to the smaller graves. Those two bubs, she says, they died at birth. She makes the sign of the cross, eyes shut. Then burps.

  Some women had free-birthed on the mountain until Hodgins forbade it. People did some foolish things trying to live by nature, Tess’s mother said. They forgot that nature can be cruel. The world is wild, she’d said, and life is unpredictable in its goodness and danger. Tess had heard this before – maybe those words had come from her own schoolbooks.

  I like it here, says June, surveying. So quiet. No one ever comes, not even to visit the graves.

  Tess scans the billowing trees, the empty rock circle where the pond once was, the ordered shapes of cabins and hall. Through the majestic mottled trunks, past the settlement, there’s a wedge of coastal sky, the lit, staggered lines of ocean. The land Jack Hodgins chose.

  Tess, turning back, sees June’s mismatched eyes, one flecked green, one hazel.

  My uncle knows who set the fire here, June says.

  It was lightning, Tess thinks. Everyone knew that. She puts her hands on her hips, but a worry ticks beneath her ribs.

  He says the individual’s still in town, says June. Knows all about that car wreck too – the one on your land. And who was in it.

  Big deal, Tess thinks. She feels queasy. Maybe hungry, or tired because she’d stayed up reading Tucker’s thing about Apocalyptic Signs and then finishing the class handout on Thoreau and Bruce Chatwin. Her hands are sweating. June’s horse whickers, insects whirr above the squally mountain breeze.

  Lucky Tucker rescued you, said June with narrowed eyes. Some other babies nearly burned in that fire. He left them all in the Nursery Cell! What made you so special?

  Tess shakes her head. She hadn’t been there to save or leave! She hadn’t even existed!

  June whips out a pack of cards, fans them.

  Pick any card, she says.

  Tess tugs one out.

  Queen of Hearts? June asks, tapping a foot.

  But Tess is remembering something overheard. Time to stop pretending, her father said to her mother one afternoon, that she belongs entirely to us. She’d thought they were talking, back then, about Pip.

  Well? June yanks the card from where Tess has it pressed against her chest.

  Scheherazade! I was right. With magic, she says, the audience knows you’re tricking. They wouldn’t just let a person cut another in half. That’s called suspension of disbelief.

  June straightens, shaking a leg. Tess thinks of a golden dog she’d once known, its air of solid, dumb assurance, and is seized by a violent hatred for June, believing any rumours.

  You OK? June pats Tess’s shoulder, bending to look into her face.

  Tess, folded over, gripping her knees, brushes June’s palm off sharply. No one must touch her, it’s all she can do to keep from puking. She remembers her mother saying, my milk had nearly dried up after the fire, then you started to refuse the bottle and how she’d stood up suddenly then and left the room.

  After the fire? What had she meant?

  Now the sky is smoky purple through the canopy.

  Come on, says June. I’ll show you something.

  She trots across a clearing towards a crumbling wall, cards falling from her pockets. Queen, Jack, Spades. Queen, Queen. Queen.

  Trick pack, Tess thinks. And feels a dim misery because she cannot tell any more which people in her life are pretending.

  Tess follows, muscles stiff from the climb. That sound getting steadily louder, the livid air pocked with busy insects. Closer, inside the dim cavern of that ruined hall, the noise is unmistakable.

  As her eyes adjust Tess sees what’s hanging from the ceiling and jutting like lichen in thick, creamy layers. They protrude from the walls and fan from the corners. They garland the roof beams. Great waxy chandeliers lit with yellow bees. A massive natural hive.

  June has thrown her arms wide as if showing a buyer a remarkable home.

  Nearly a gazillion! she shouts. Maybe more!

  But are these wild bees or have they swarmed from someone’s apiary? You can’t say if they’ve come from man or nature. You can’t determine without capturing a queen to see if she’s been marked. You think of your father’s stolen bees and the new queens that cost him two thousand dollars. You think of how he’d said the honey would only trickle in this year. He’d driven off to check the two hundred hives set out for contract pollination, but came home from the almonds three days later. Half the hives had been stolen, even though those boxes were fire-branded with his code.

  Tess knows what she’s looking at, but can hardly guess its worth. Some things get their value from being owned.

  12

  Dear Jim

  Every teacher knows that teaching is never just the conveying of information, but rather a way of joining, at a distance, the families of all the children they teach.

  Why haven’t you called? At least let me know you’re OK.

  Sylvie x

  13

  Today Evangeline says, I can’t lie on my back any more. The vena cava.

  They sleep for a while, then wake. The rain has come and gone, the day ebbing fast. Through the cabin door they watch cockatoos unpicking worms from grass like thread from fabric.

  Jim stands, pours a long draught of cider.

  You’ll never leave them, he says.

  What would you think of me if I did? she asks.

  Tell me. Then I can decide to stay or go.

  He drains his glass, his tongue perfumed with pear. He’s learned with her to drink lightly, and rarely. When he takes out beer, or the vodka, she practically backs across the room.

  You’d really leave? she says, eyes widening. This house, or the town?

  Would you care?

  His need for her makes him feel debased. The plain lack of small talk, their hurtling directly into ardour, turns all their conversations lurid or grave. To say it’s hot might mean: take off your clothes; to mention darkness conjures those they’ve lost. By choosing her he hasn’t escaped his grief, just walked headlong into hers. Does he love her? He can’t name the feeling. It’s stealthed on him like panic. She lies in his cabin asking for nothing. After her body, she has nothing else to give.

  I can’t watch you from a distance play happy families, he says, inverting his cup on the table.

  Don’t watch then!

  She stretches her legs, circles an ankle, moves further left so their bodies are more distant.

  Hold on, she says, you think I pretend?

  You love us both?

  And he instantly sees his mistake: neither of them had said the word yet. Now he has.

  Through the smeary window
, distant swallows swoop and careen in their intuited formation. In his yard, bees fuss over lavender and climbing rose, siphoning nectar. When you open a hive it’s clear how promiscuous they’ve been, all the multicoloured pollen from the many flowers. Bees. He wishes they’d just fuck off.

  Evangeline examines her nails with distaste.

  He moves towards her. Eva, he says.

  There’s a long, blank moment.

  No one calls me Eva, she says. Is that what you’ve been saying all along?

  She turns side on. Her breasts, which he’d first seen eight months back by the Repentance River, now heavy with milk. She opens the book of poetry.

  If only I’d studied, she sighs.

  Your daughter’s bright, he says. Her writing’s …

  … Writing? Evangeline sits. Then she stands, and stares at the corner table where his schoolwork is piled.

  What does she write about?

  His dread deepens. Somewhere in there, Tess’s journal. If they were at school he could bring it out. Show the daughter’s work to the mother. But here, in his house, the mother fresh from his bed, wasn’t that a violation?

  Why don’t you ask her? he says.

  Evangeline has crossed the room. She lays one hand on the stack of exercise books.

  In here? she asks. Show me.

  He walks over, takes her arm, saying, Don’t. It just makes everything more complicated.

  She pulls her head back, breathing slowly, her eyes glassy and unfocused.

  Let go of me, she says.

  He loosens his grip, but keeps his hand on her forearm. Puts the other one on her breast.

  Ah. That old trick, she says. But what’s to hide? Or does she write about me? And she lets out a choked laugh.

  No, he says. I’d say it’s about grief.

  And he feels her muscles liquefy beneath his hand.

  When Stefan met me, she says, I was already pregnant.

  Jim swallows.

  And now they want to tell Tess, she says. About her real father. They’d planned to years back, but because of what happened to Pip … And after the funeral, they hadn’t the strength. The risk of losing another girl. But lately they’ve tried to figure out how to say it, and when.

  Jesus, he says. But why tell me?

  She’d been supposed to adopt Tess out, Evangeline says. She’d been so young. She hadn’t wanted anything more to do with Tess’s father. A badly chosen fling. So, Jack Hodgins and her mother decided she should give the baby up. There was a woman from the valley, Lana Beaufort, desperate for a child. But as the time approached Evangeline knew she could not do it.

  Jim paces, the cabin suddenly stifling, very low-ceilinged and dingy. His own disloyalty strikes him painfully. How can he encourage what’s blocked in Tess now he’s co-opted into this family secret?

  I can’t do this any more, he says.

  She stiffens. Then he sees it, a marvellous aquatic undulation beneath her belly. He puts his hand there, feels the nub of a fist or foot connect. Go on, let yourself think it: something of yours might belong to her.

  Is it mine? he asks.

  His thousand imaginings of being a father. It will encompass him, it could be so simple. But he knows from how his Sydney friends withdrew and bunkered down, from their whispers when he’d phone at the Worst Possible Time, from the background howls and the declined invitations – that he’s only in thrall with the idea of kids, and how far can an idea carry you into the routine and grind, the sickness and healing, the sublimation and sacrifice, the burden of making sure your child survives their own childhood?

  She knows, so much better than he, what this new life might cost her.

  She bends, retrieves her dress. Just a woman, her hair bedraggled from their time in bed, her face flushed. Swollen-ankled, mouth-breathing with a greying front tooth. No sign of the particular aura she’d had when he’d found her by that river. His compulsion to rescue, he realises, just deflects his own inner peril.

  He catches sight of himself in the window, what’s so special? She might have chosen anyone. He has no idea what he can mean to her.

  Don’t look at me like that, she says.

  What?

  It makes me feel anonymous.

  You’re like no one I’ve ever met, he says. But, this baby, he points, is part of your family. So I’ll be …

  Like the undead, he thinks, roaming, restless, unable to connect with some fundamental part of himself.

  You can’t just go on pretending with me – or Stefan, he says.

  Until I met you, that was my life! she tells him. She pretends for her family. That she wants to keep living in a house where everything reminds her of what she’s lost, in a town she never willingly chose or belonged. She pretends till it feels just a bit real. She has tried to remember the person she was, but even that young woman, she realised, had been entirely invented.

  Are you so scared to think of another kind of future?

  Yes, she mutters. I’m terrified.

  He remembers the Xanax packet hammered to the mountain tree. Her name typed on.

  He bends towards her, gently moving her hair from her face. She tugs her dress over her stomach. Then tries and fails, with trembling hands, to fasten her sandals. He kneels, takes her foot, secures the buckle.

  When you chose me, she says, you knew what you were getting into. I can live day by day. But I can’t afford to sink.

  She pulls her foot from his grip then says, Stefan knows, OK!

  He absorbs this.

  Now she’s beside the door. One hand in her hair as if to reassemble herself after dissembling. It sinks deeper: Stefan knows.

  Have you really never travelled? he says, handing her the other sandal. Jesus, have you been in this town your whole fucking life?

  I chose you, she says with a dull laugh. For once in my whole fucking life I’ve been entirely selfish.

  14

  Dented filing cabinets. Scuffed vinyl floor. A Japanese fortune cat, swinging its pendulum arm. Evangeline in the grey police station crossing and uncrossing her legs. She felt her baby undulating, hopped up on shared adrenalin. At the last appointment the midwife had been approving. You’re all baby, she’d said, as Evangeline stood in her faded underwear.

  Some pregnancies had liberated her. There were weeks when she’d receded as the baby pushed closer to the world, her mind becalmed and hazy.

  But now, in the station, she swallowed a bitter, greasy taste, knitted her puffy fingers. Thursday morning, 10.12 am.

  On the desk beside her, a computer with astronomical screen saver. Stars. Moon. Some ringed planet twisting in orbit. Onscreen at home she’d browsed the images from the astronauts. She’d read their posts on the world’s lonely splendour. Oh the puny travails of humans viewed from afar! Oh the cities, lit up at night like new constellations! She scrolled the photos and thought of that outmoded diminutive earthlings, which seemed to refer to an earlier, more elemental species. From space they were mapping disquieting changes: ocean vortices, widening gyres, dislocated tracts of polar ice. Still, the cosmic perspective was soothing. After, she’d click towards the physicists. There exists no proof of the past but memory, no evidence of future but our belief in it. She’d read and reread this, gently ruined. When she shared it with Stefan, he said, That’s a convenient theory, if you’re after absolution.

  He hadn’t recognised it as a simple hunger for new knowledge.

  No time now for the cosmos. It was the hour of uniformed men with their stricter currencies of what and who and precisely when. There they sat in vanilla air. One sallow and gaunt, the other handsome, acne-scarred. A pinky ring, the tail of a tattoo below shirt cuffs. She absorbed their holsters, their Tasers, the sheen on their uniform pockets. The taller man’s gun seemed more worn than the other’s, more used. Had she ever, in her whole life, touched an actual weapon? She had a sudden unholstering urge and a hazy sense of where she could take aim. She felt an old, reckless seam that she’d never tamed to her ad
vantage. No one had ever taught her the difference between an instinct and an urge.

  They asked about her time at the commune.

  I can’t remember much from then, she said, taking quick, shallow breaths, like a person surfacing.

  Her arms were frozen to her sides. Her feet seemed not to belong to her legs. She remembered in the hospital after the fire, her mother had read aloud from her file, pausing at the word, dissociated. They were transferring Evangeline that day, to another unit. But Stefan had materialised in a cone of arctic light, then signed for her release.

  You once lodged a complaint, said the handsome one, waving a file. About some men in a van. Peter George Tucker and Gus Van Loon. Sergeant Becker handled it for you. Why did you withdraw it?

  Wasn’t this supposed to be about the accident on their farm? Weeks back she’d gone out to inspect that lonely patch of scrub. By the barricade-tape she’d found a cross from old fence boards, and bunches of sunburned flowers. Stefan’s work? When he confirmed this later, the shame. She walked around the property then, picking burdock and hypericum, cat’s claw and kudzu, thinking of a man she’d once known, keen-witted and sensual but at his core, very harmed. She made the weeds into a rough bouquet and laid it by the cross.

  The broader policeman was waiting, flexing delicate, tapered fingers. Odd, wasn’t it, that the same type of van ended up on their land years later?

  Evangeline looked up, her eyes unfocused, and asked, You think one of them is the dead man?

  Was it before or during the commune blaze, the broader man asked, that she’d injured her head?

  I had amnesia, she said. The whole thing’s still a blur.

  She fingered the scar at her temple. Painting was how she knew fact from feeling. Outlines defined the touchable things. Objects, adjacent, produced the emotion.

  Then she pointed at the taller officer asking, What kind is it?

  He followed the line of her gaze to his crotch.

  Your gun, she said, side-eyed.

  It’s a Glock.

  And she laughed, then fenced her mouth with fingers and grew deeply intrigued by a sticky patch on the floor. What she remembered most starkly was that time in hospital, after the fire. The pain from her burns as if she’d been struck by a thousand immortal bees. A keening that persisted, hour upon hour, and gave every proximate thing a peculiar, pulsing glow.