Green Dream

by Robert Gollagher

  Sally felt the cold fluid begin to flow into her arm. She smiled, through her tears, stricken with grief and sadness and confusion at her own death and sorry that the only person in the world she truly loved, Ruth, would have to go through losing her. She looked away from the flow of the drip set and looked out at the clear blue sky, and the grass, and the trees, and all the colours of dawn.

  Death is not so bad, she thought.

  The Indian Ocean would have been just beyond the low rise of the landscape in the distance, to the west, but it was invisible to her.

  She watched a bird fly across the park.

  And then she fell asleep.

  Her head slumped forward. She was completely asleep. There was no thought. There was only sleep. She was anaesthetised, dangerously deeper than any patient on an operating table ever would be. And then, in a minute or so, her heart stopped. The flow of the deadly barbiturate to her brain also stopped, as her heart gave out, but so too did the flow of fresh blood, rich in oxygen and glucose sugar which her brain needed to survive. Without these things, in a few minutes, deep under the unconsciousness of anaesthesia, there is brain death. Sally Johanssen was dead.

  And there was nothing more to tell.

  Dear Diary,

  These will be the last words I ever write. I have sent my love to dear Ruth, posted the letter to her. She is the only one I wanted to say goodbye to. And now I will go to the park. And that is my life.

  Thank you, Diary, for listening. For listening to me.

  Sally.

  Reading this, Michael cried, stronger than he had ever cried since the accident. He cried for Sally. He cried for Ian and Diane, and he cried for his dear beloved Marie. Everything washed over him, waves of sadness and grief, most of all, grief, which poured out of him like a flood and would not stop. He couldn’t move. He could only cry.

  Michael closed the diary and thought for a long time.

  Chapter 18

  Michael waited until the evening meal the next day to raise the subject of the diary. He spent the day keeping to himself. In the late afternoon, while Ruth was making shepherd’s pie, he went across to the river and sat on a park bench, watching the whirling seagulls and the quiet herons. He chose a peaceful stretch of the river, not far from the house, but it was a Sunday and there were families about, enjoying the last hour or so of their riverside picnics before they would have to pack up and go home. Most of the people were further to the south, near the jetty at Deep Water Point and the boat ramp there, but there was a mother and her two young children a few yards away, at the next park bench. Michael watched the happy children play.

  When, at last, he was seated at the kitchen table eating dinner with Ruth, and after he had complimented her on the meal being good and thanked her for it, he said simply, “I read about your granddaughter’s death. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right, Mike.”

  Michael ate some of the pie, then spoke again. “I ... I know how she felt about life, Ruth. I feel a bit like that myself.”

  “I know.”

  “But she was so young. She was too young to die like that.”

  Ruth nodded, slowly. She decided it was time. “Michael, I’ve got something else to show you.” She stood up, went to the shelves by the kitchen window, and retrieved an envelope from the highest shelf. She returned to the table and gave it to Michael.

  Michael examined it. It was addressed to Ruth MacDonald. The postmark was from Perth, February, 1996. He recognised the handwriting – it was Sally’s. “What’s this?”

  Ruth ignored the question. “Open it, Michael. I want you to read it. Now, it’s late. I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Thanks for dinner.”

  “Goodnight, Mike.”

  Michael took a moment to think, before he looked inside the envelope and pulled out the letter that was folded inside. He read it in silence. There was no noise but the wind gently caressing the big eucalyptus tree closest to the kitchen window. Warm summer air came from the garden. It smelt of grass and flowers. The words of the letter rolled to an end.

  Sunday, 18 February, 1996

  Dearest Ruth,

  I’m so sorry to have to write this to you. You have always been the best grandmother to me. You are the only one who has truly cared for me, and I will always love you. You have always been so strong. I wish that I could have had your strength, Ruth. But I don’t. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.

  I can’t do this any more, Ruth. I can’t go on in this place. I’ve tried my best, truly I have, but nothing is enough. I’ve failed at my profession, and there is nothing else for me. It was my one dream, the one thing I wanted to come true. I thought that being a vet would make my life better, but instead, animals are dead because of me. If you could have seen the tears of their owners, if you could have felt their anger, I’m no good, Ruth. I’m no good at what I do.

  I have nightmares. I see Karl. At night, he still comes to beat me. Even now that he has been dead so many years, he still comes, in my mind, in my nightmares. You know how much I hate him, I hate my own father, but maybe he was right about me. I haven’t come to anything, after all these years. All my dreams have come to nothing.

  I wish I were stronger, Ruth, but I’m not. I wish I were a better person, and that there was a future for me. But I’m not, and there isn’t any future. I know you won’t understand that, but there’s nothing left for me now. And by the time you get this letter, I will be gone. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  Dearest Ruth, I love you so much. Please forgive me for doing this, and please know that I will always love you. You are the best person I have ever known. I will miss only you.

  Please stay well, and please have the strength that I didn’t have, for I could never bear to see any harm come to a good person like you, the kind of person I always wanted to be.

  Forgive me, Ruth. Forgive me.

  All my love,

  Sally.

  Michael let the letter drop from his hand.

  He sat quietly at the table for many minutes, then he went out the back door and into the dark garden. He didn’t sleep at all, that night. He sat on the wrought iron chair at the bottom of the garden, the same chair in which he sat to paint during the day, and he watched the stars slowly circle across the sky as the hours passed.

  Ruth heard a noise from the garden, before she fell asleep, and she looked out from her bedroom window and saw the vague figure of Michael slowly pacing around in the darkness. She was not surprised to see him there. She went back to her bed and slept.

  Michael thought about Ruth, about all that she had been through in her life. He thought about Sally, and the love that those two women, grandmother and granddaughter, must have had for each other. That kind of love was rare. It was an honest love, a love with integrity and without pretence, a healthy, genuine love. Michael had known that kind of love too, with his wife, before she died. It was the rarest thing in the world. And he had known it. He felt lower than an insect, to not have been able to save Marie, to not have been able to land that Cessna safely in the godforsaken storm which claimed her life and the lives of his friends. But something else, he realised too: that this old woman he was staying with, that he had hardly spoken to in the three months he had boarded at her home, that this dear old woman loved him like a son, although she hardly knew him. Why him? Why should Ruth choose to shower her kindness and compassion on the likes of Michael Andrews? Why did he deserve that kind of love? For Michael knew that it was Ruth, and only Ruth, that had saved him from taking his own life. She was the only one who could make him understand, and she had done it. He understood. It was an accident. It wasn’t his fault. It was an accident.

  Michael sat on that old wrought iron chair, in the dark garden, and cried for Marie. And for Sally. And for Ruth.

  And even for himself.

  When the night was nearly over, Michael went to the kitchen and got the keys to Ruth’s car. He slipped quietly out the back door agai
n and down the side path to the driveway, opened the door to the little Mazda and got in. He put the keys in the ignition, and turned them.

  Ruth was woken by the sudden sound of the engine starting. She got up and hurried to the front door, but by the time she had opened it and looked out, Michael had already driven away.

  It was Monday morning, but this early before the dawn there was no traffic about. Michael drove across Canning Bridge and turned onto the deserted freeway, heading north to the city centre. He drove downtown and then turned west, onto Kings Park Road. When he reached the big roundabout at the north-eastern corner of the park itself, he turned south and drove along the long avenue, beneath the towering, magnificent eucalypts, which looked out onto the city lights and the Swan River far below. The park was deserted and dark. The view was breathtaking.

  Michael continued along the road as it turned west, away from the view, and towards the interior of the park. A few moments later, he came upon the little car park by the spiral lookout tower. He switched off the engine and got out of the car, not bothering to close the door. He went straight over to the tower and climbed it.

  At the top, he looked around in the darkness and felt the warm wind on his face. He listened to the slight creaks and groans of the tower as it swayed a little. And he waited.

  Twenty minutes later, the black sky had turned deep blue, and then a lighter blue, and then, in the east, a swathe of orange burned silently across the sky. There was no one but Michael. He was completely alone, watching the grand spectacle of the sleeping city and the waking dawn, soon to intersect just the way they had done two years before, on the warm February morning that Sally had taken her life.

  And then he remembered, it was not quite the same. This was not where Sally Johanssen had been. She had been in the trees, hidden in the bushland to the south of the great fairway which stretched away from the tower to the west. So Michael came down from the tower and onto the grass. He walked down the incline a short distance, then turned into the trees and stood there, waiting for the dawn. The only clear view was to the north-west, away from the sun, across the fairway and to the trees and sky opposite. He imagined this must have been the direction Sally had looked, before she died. This was the last view she would have seen.

  And then the world lit up. The great ball of the sun edged above the lip of the earth and cast its long shadows to the west. The fairway seemed impossibly green, twinkling with highlights of orange from the sudden sunburst. The sky was cloudless, except for a few wisps of flat, harmless cirrus cloud, high above. The sky was a beautiful, clear blue, above Michael, away from the smog of the horizon, and he looked at it with the eyes of a pilot. There would be safe flying today, for those who took to the air. A magpie crowed noisily somewhere nearby. There was a tear in Michael’s eye, a single tear. It flowed down his right cheek. And he wiped it away.

  Michael came out of the trees and stood in the centre of the huge fairway, the grass crisp under his shoes. He looked up the incline to the spiral tower, and saw the sun, brilliant and beautiful, wash clean the city and the park in its early-morning warmth.

  For the first time in six months, Michael did not feel guilty to be alive. He was glad he was still here. He was glad, to have survived. He knew, at last, it was what Marie would have wanted.

  And for that knowledge, he thanked Sally, and he thanked Ruth, in a silent prayer. When he least expected it, when he thought there would never be any hope, Michael Andrews had found peace at last. The turmoil was gone from his mind. The storm, the terrible, terrible storm, was over.

  It was a calm and beautiful morning.

  Chapter 19

  Ruth was in the front garden, pruning the long hedge that ran along one side of the yard, when Michael returned from Kings Park. She looked up from her work as she heard the car pull into her driveway. It was ten o’clock and the day was already very hot. Rather than confront Michael, she turned back to the hedge as he got out of the car.

  Michael walked over, a little sheepishly, and stood behind her. He looked down at her back, but he could not see her face. It was hidden under her large sunhat.

  Ruth trimmed back some errant branches at the base of the hedge. She did not stand up. She seemed to be ignoring Michael.

  Michael was not sure what to say. The keys to Ruth’s car were still in his hand. Finally, he decided he would say nothing, but would simply return the keys to the kitchen where they belonged. Just as he took a step away from Ruth’s back, she spoke, without looking at him, without stopping her work.

  “You missed your breakfast. I cooked this morning.”

  “Oh. I ... um ... didn’t know you were cooking.”

  “Hmmm.” Ruth moved along the hedge a little further towards the front fence. She was still kneeling, scrutinising the hedge closely to see which parts needed to be trimmed back.

  Michael stood silently, watching her.

  “I heard the car start, this morning. Before dawn.”

  “Right.”

  “Woke me up, you know. I thought someone was stealing it.”

  “Maybe someone was.”

  Ruth stopped pruning and cranked her head around to look up at Michael from underneath the brim of her hat. “Maybe.”

  Michael looked away from her. “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right.” Ruth continued her work.

  “I ... I went to the park. Kings Park. To the spiral tower.”

  Ruth closed her branch-cutters with some effort. There was a loud crack, as a piece of hedge came away. “I thought you might.”

  “You did?”

  Ruth still did not look at him. “I’ve been there. You know, I couldn’t bring myself to go there for nearly a year, but when I knew that I was dying, I went. It gave me ... a sense of perspective.”

  Michael said nothing.

  “Do you know what I mean, Michael?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  Ruth paused for a moment. “That’s good, Mike.”

  “I’ll put the keys back, then.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And, Ruth?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks. I mean, for everything. Thanks.”

  Ruth stood up and brushed the dirt off her slacks. The secateurs dangled from her left hand. Then she looked directly at Michael, and nodded. “That’s okay, Mike.”

  Michael looked at his feet for a moment. Then he suddenly reached forward and put a hand on Ruth’s shoulder. He wanted to hug her, but he was too embarrassed. “No, I mean it. Thank you, Ruth. I ... think you’re the greatest. You know that?”

  “Well, if you’re going to compliment me like that, I might even cook lunch, even if you did let breakfast go cold.”

  Michael looked at her without a word.

  Ruth stared calmly back at him, and smiled. “But if you steal my car again, I’m going to have to kill you.”

  Michael laughed.

  Ruth knew, at last, that he understood.

  Every day after that, for the next two weeks, Michael would disappear in the morning and not return until it was dark. Every night, he ate dinner with Ruth, and he seemed to her a different man. He would laugh, he would tell jokes, he would make small talk. They would watch television together, after dinner. But he stubbornly refused to answer any of her questions about what he was up to during the day.

  The first day, Ruth knew, he had gone to retrieve his car from the security garage which had locked it up for him since the accident. He had left the house in a taxi and returned in his silver Commodore sedan, with its Aero Club bumper stickers and university parking permit decals stuck to the windscreen. But more than that, Ruth did not know.

  Michael did not tell her how difficult it was for him, driving that car again for the first time since the accident. There were still some of Marie’s things in the glove compartment: her address book, lip balm, a hair brush. As for Michael’s home, it had been locked up since the accident. He still couldn’t quite bear to go back there, with all its memories. It w
as enough just dealing with driving his own car again.

  When Michael went to see the psychiatrist, the day after he retrieved the car, he was no longer hostile to her.

  “You seem different, Michael,” she said.

  “I’m driving the car again. The car that Marie and I used to drive. You know, I found her hairbrush in the glove box. It still had her some of hair in it. It looked just the same. The same long, brown strands.”

  “That must have been difficult for you.”

  “Yeah. It was hard.” Michael’s voice broke a little.

  “Have you been to the house?”

  “No,” Michael whispered. “Not yet.”

  The young psychiatrist nodded her agreement. “Hmmm.”

  “Look, Kathy, I know I haven’t been the best patient for you. I, uh, just wanted to say sorry for that. There have been a lot of people trying to help me, since the accident, people at the hospital, nurses, doctors, counsellors, even you bloody shrinks.”

  The psychiatrist smiled.

  “And Ruth, of course. And I just ... wasn’t ready to let anyone help. That’s why I kept you all away. I must have been a bloody pain in the arse to you, these last three months. You must have looked in that appointment book and said, ‘Bloody hell, not that miserable bastard, Andrews, again.’ I’m sorry about that, Kathy.”

  “That’s what we’re here for, Mike. You don’t have to apologise. You’re the patient. I’m the doctor. That’s what I’m here for. But thanks, anyway, for the apology. It’s okay.”

  Michael allowed a little of his old, boyish charm to shine through. He smiled. “Thanks, doc. You’re a sport. I don’t know how you people do it, put up with the likes of me. But thanks, anyway.”