He has not changed in all these years, so porous, too conceding. And she is running out of time. The baby’s loss has shown her the gaps in her life with terrible clarity. She should have seen them sooner.
Every day she decays a little more: the tips of her DNA shorten incrementally, cells apoptose, fibres tighten, oocytes mature, drop out, are lost.
Maybe (yes) she still loves him.
But she can’t walk on eggshells anymore.
part two
chapter 7
Most mornings, the anxiety is there in her chest when she wakes and it does not go—but not today. Today, the wind blows through the open window as she drives, through her hair like in the movies, the old ones, the good ones, and her chest flutters like a small (live) bird.
Three hours north, the town of Rainbow Beach. It smells like the coast ought to, she thinks: salt and fish and the dry tang of eucalypts, and something a bit like tilled earth, though the ground here is sand, and famously infertile. She eases the truck slowly through the main street, sleepy shopfronts like shut eyes, though there is a cluster of trucks and bustle at the hardware and bait-and-tackle shops, at the bakery and the little cafe. Dogs pace in silver tray backs, ready to run; men pour bags of ice into giant eskies. Off to Fraser Island, keep the beers cold. A dreadlocked woman leans against a van, eyes closed to the sun, takeaway coffee in one hand.
Elise picks up the keys at the rental office and finds her dingy cottage a block off the water’s edge. She doesn’t unpack the truck straight away but wanders the rooms. Home for now. Simple kitchen, dusty burgundy couch, two bedrooms with seashell artwork, peach and teal. The laminate floor creaks under her leather boots. She can hear the ocean through the fibro walls, the crack under the kitchen window, and it reminds her of childhood, though not her own. This, a place you might feel safe, even in storms, even being so shabby. A grandmotherly place.
Elise never had a grandmother—never met one, at least. After the accident, it was Aunt Rosie who came to organise the funeral and passport and throw out everything that wouldn’t fit into two small suitcases. Unwheeled suitcases, the old-fashioned, carrying kind. According to Aunt Rosie, the whole ordeal was quite difficult and expensive—as if there were options, cheaper and simpler, for these things.
‘You’ll have a better chance, now,’ she’d said, though at what Elise never asked. They boarded an aeroplane, another, another, and Elise left a world of sprawling figs and kookaburra daybreaks for the dismal cold of small-town Iowa, which seemed, no matter the season, to smell like cow.
Elise hadn’t known Aunt Rosie before this; she had moved overseas with her army husband before Elise was born. ‘Rose was always the stronger,’ her mother had once told her, and Elise had imagined her aunt as a circus strongman, with a curling moustache and bulging muscles and dumbbells balanced on her fingertips.
Rose Ostrowski was, in the flesh, a formidable woman. Her pale legs were streaked with purple veins, thick like stumps that she might, Elise imagined, somehow detach and beat a person to death with. The underchunks of her arms cascaded down the sides of her sleeveless summer dresses.
But Aunt Rosie would turn it all around, say that Elise’s mother never saw herself properly, never saw herself for who she was, and then she married that man and never had the chance.
No, somehow Rosie had seemed to feel good in her big body in a way that Elise had never seen in her own mother and rarely felt in herself. Elise didn’t love her own anatomy, her too-long neck or too-wide hips, couldn’t see another woman without comparing forms. Women standing, sitting, moving: she had watched them all, pitted them against herself in a kind of competition, where there could be only one winner.
Elise leaves everything in boxes in the dining room and drives the sandy track to her field site, through the low wallum heath, thick with banksia flowers, leaves like minnows in the wind. The track is firm and tanned by recent rain, and she scans the woodland for dead trees, fallen trees, great exposed root masses where small creatures might den or hunt or run. Tall white-skinned trunks thrust up, tops so high and shivery she can barely see them against the sun. She puts the window down and the air moves through her, clears her out, and she becomes transparent to herself, lets her mind drift with the trees as they pass.
Though the species are different, the landscape reminds her of Iowa, of oak and maple and horse chestnut and horizon-cresting fields of corn and soy. A raccoon at the creek line that stared at her, sharp-eyed. A mouse in the garage that ran in circles, bug in its brain, until Uncle Bob put it out of its misery.
Things weren’t all bad there: in the backyard, the maples had splattered green and light across the lawn, and it was like being underwater. But every morning and afternoon as she rode the bus to school or from it, in a seat of her own, she’d sent her mind beyond her world to navigate the woods along the roadside on a white, freckled horse. Pause in a copse of trees, leap a stack of cut logs, slip behind a tree as she outmanoeuvred, outstepped, unseen pursuers. They were always men. Or (once) wolves. Either way, they could smell her and just being silent, still, wasn’t enough. She had to keep moving.
As Elise drives, the canopy thickens, darkens, and brush box and strangler figs strain up close together like fingers from the ground. They lean over, entwine. They dapple the light. She pulls off the road just beyond a small picnic area, where large mossy tables are scattered through the leaf litter, a few vehicles notched into pull-offs at the side.
Elise has permits, two years old but still valid. Permits to catch antechinuses from the wild, bring them into the lab. I can do this, she’d say, were she pressed. I’m allowed to, look here. She wouldn’t have to say what she planned to do then. What her student would do.
She imagines a woman, a tall woman, beautiful and earnest, striding out from a car, from the forest, asking too many questions. ‘But they belong here, in the wild,’ this woman would say. ‘Can’t you do the research here?’ And Elise would shake her head. It’s just not possible, she’d explain. We need to control the breeding, their environment, eliminate extraneous factors. We need to be precise. ‘Oh,’ the woman would say. ‘Is it important, what you’re doing? The research?’ Oh yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
Besides, Elise might tell her, they’ll die soon anyway. After the fucking and birthing and lactating, most of the females die. They give everything, you see. The energy in their fat stores, the protein in their muscles, they use it all up. They starve for their babies, give everything away. Wouldn’t you?
Wouldn’t your body?
But no one questions her as she hauls the boxes of traps out of the back of the truck and sets to work laying them out in long transects. It is not easy work. The vines are thick and the logs are slippery with moss. How nice it would be, she thinks, if she were a small creature, could use the vines as tracks and race along them, oblivious to the thorns. Simply set her feet around them.
Each trap, a steel box with a triggered plate door. She baits them with a teaspoon of beef mince, oats and peanut butter, and sets them where she thinks the animals will be, though she is really just guessing. Vine ends and buttress roots. And then the sun dips, and the forest, which seems to have been waiting, begins to come alive. Rustling, scuffling noises in the leaf litter, the eerie child-cry of catbirds, pigeon wullapaloo, flickers of movement at the corner of her sight. A yellow-wattled brush turkey follows her, curious. She stands and listens.
The rainforest is beautiful in the way that the inside of the body is beautiful, and frightening, and unknowable. She thinks of the sparrow, now a skin, nothing more, not even a memory of flying. William, empty. These are the things she can’t answer, can’t fathom—this space between physics and philosophy and poetry, between all the cells in her body. What holds her together, when she is nothing but atoms?
By the time she’s back in the truck, windows steaming up, it’s black and moonless, and her stomach twists with hunger, not-hunger. She examines the map, marked with blue ink, and though she
should head back the way she came, she’s impatient. There’s a shortcut, a track that runs straight through the rainforest, that will get her home sooner. She forgot to bring food, and her clothes smell of mince.
A sweet, coppery scent. She’s hungry for meat.
Elise doesn’t like the too-dark drive. The forest hunches over the track with long claws and tall black hats, and she imagines things in the periphery of her headlights. Quick, wispy things. Her headlights sweep up and down as she manoeuvres the truck over rocks and roots, catching the eyeshine of spiders and other unknown creatures.
She doesn’t like how this is going, but it’s too late to turn back. It would be hours now if she turned around. Her hands and hamstrings ache with the controlling, she needs food and to be out of this dark. But the hill ahead is perilously steep and deep, soft sand, and the truck, even in its lowest gear, slows slows slows up the rise, wheels spinning until forward momentum stops, and the truck sinks back and will not go.
Elise reverses down and tries again, accelerates hard, and doesn’t make it.
Reverses further, a running start,
and no.
It occurs to her that the problem is traction, so she leaves the truck running, headlights on for light, and drags whatever branches she can find across the track, ten of them, ladder-like, up the hill. This time, yes, the tyres grip, the engine strains, the top of the hill grows close, closer. Elise leans forward, as though her own weight might make the difference.
‘Comeoncomeoncomeon!’ she shouts, and the truck angles over the crest of the hill and she screams in triumph—
and then a bang, clear as a bullet. The truck lurches and does not move.
For a moment, everything is still.
Images crowd into Elise’s mind. A hole in the heart of a small, dead bird. Pallid man behind a tree, moonfaced in the shadows, a movie she saw once and can’t quite remember.
William, William, William.
The truck tugs against unseen hands, will not budge in any direction. Quickly, Elise leans over the passenger seat and locks the door. Sits in the cab, engine running. Warm air blasts across her neck.
There is no man. No gun.
There is only her, alone, on a sandy track, crowning the hill.
Still, she shivers. Has no reception, no one to call.
She shuts up her mind and steps out of the truck but leaves it running, door open, for brightness. For just in case. She examines the tyres, the bumper, the undercarriage with her iPhone light and finds it. A stick as long and firm and straight as a broomstick protrudes from the ground and disappears into the truck’s body, hooking it like a fish.
Elise leans under the truck but cannot pull it free, push it, kick or hammer it loose. She’s not strong enough, maybe, or her proportions are wrong, and when she’s sweaty and pink with frustration, she returns to the cab.
She could walk through the sand to the road, but doesn’t know how far she has to go, and it’s so dark, and with no phone reception, barely any charge …
She wishes for Dan beside her. The flutterspins of William.
Elise slides back into the driver’s seat and turns off the engine, leans her head against the cool leather of the steering wheel, considers closing her eyes there, petrifying. Maybe they will find her one day, her leather like her boots’ leather, seat leather, cow’s hide, tight over plasticmetallic bones. But she’s not like the vehicle. Her own body will disappear entirely, and anything she leaves behind will have to be words or ideas, snippets of knowledge.
She goes out into the dark one last time, quickly, to squat in the sand, then gets back in the truck and locks all the doors, crawls over the centre console into the back seat, and covers herself with a rough towel she finds there.
Curled up on the dusty leather, she knows the night will go faster if she sleeps through it. There are too many things in her head she cannot push away, the emptiness in her torso a vast wide chill, that place where William warmed her. Elise wants so much to be held, Dan’s arms around her so tight she might hardly breathe, so tight she might lose the feel of her skin apart from his and let herself become one body with him again, like they used to be. Before. Before her body became this. Rush of oxytocin, bond of partnership, exchange of carbon and fluids and electrons, the warmth of another person’s skin and blood and loss of heat from his every cell taken up in her every cell. She wants to be held.
She would call him, if she could. (Maybe.)
But when she tries to sleep, she thinks not of Dan but of Iowa, and of John, and of all the little birds.
*
His wife had left him. He never said it straight out, at first, but she’d heard. Those kinds of things got around, gossip about the good-looking ones like John Faulkes, Professor of Ornithology. Elise was a sophomore the winter she met him.
I need a volunteer, he’d said in class, to help me catch birds, early mornings, all winter break. Come see me in office hours if you’re interested. He didn’t have to say much. The little birds in BIOL 203, Behavioural Ecology, flocked around him, begged him to let them come, help with his fieldwork. His loneliness.
Elise didn’t want to go home that year, hang around Aunt Rosie’s house. There were things to do—academic things—that would push her ahead, set her apart from the others. Besides, she missed the summer Christmases, hot and thick with blooms, and the little gifts her mother would tuck into the nooks of the mango tree, where the branches left the trunk and took their own direction. She missed her mother.
‘Come home, sweetheart,’ Aunt Rosie had said. ‘The boys are coming, too. And you can meet Frankie’s baby.’
Elise was relieved when John Faulkes chose her.
She liked the pre-dawn quiet, and would go out early to wait for him, too early, stamping her feet against the needling cold. The world asleep, new snow over the empty sidewalks and empty cars and empty streets, sinister in the yellow glow of the streetlights. An afterlife.
His were the only lights in motion, the only rumbling engine, warm cab, hot coffee. She’d swing up inside and, after a few days, they developed a routine of it—Elise bracing her silver travel mug between her knees and pouring coffee from his heavy green thermos into it. Sipping carefully. He could see her, she felt, even with his eyes on the road. Radio on, her blood pulsing through the thin skin of her neck, like a double bass.
The birds. The winter birds. The snow. The car park for the conservation area was along a short dirt track, a thin line between leafless trees. Fine black nets in drawstring bags and long, slender net poles. Slide, clamp, unfurl.
The nets, when erected, encircled a wooden feeding platform, and Elise would slide off her gloves to clear it of snow, scatter seed bait across it. Her palms stinging with cold.
Wait, wait.
Beside each other, among the trees.
And, in just minutes, the birds would come. Like warm-blooded butterflies, a dozen or more species touched down on the platform, jostled for place, cracked seeds with sharp beaks and the casings fell like insects onto the snow. Flickers, juncos, blue jays, palm-sized brown birds, tiny black-and-white ones, red-beaked cardinals, so many kinds she could never remember. Their motors hummed with hunger.
They flew in easily, over the nets and down to the platform. But the threads were so fine they were nearly invisible, and with full bellies—and just a little fear—the birds forgot. They flew straight and sure back towards the trees, and their feathers snagged in the cotton. The harder they flapped their wings, the tighter the bind. Eventually they gave up and dangled, motionless, like feathered beads on some great necklace.
He taught her how to extract them from the nets—calmly, with control.
‘Hold the bird tight, but don’t squeeze. Put the head between your fingers so it doesn’t bite.
‘Loop the net over the wing—feather by feather—see? One by one. Don’t hurry.
‘Carefully fold the wing against the body, hold it there.
‘Unwind, untwist.’
And Elise unwrapped him in her mind, unzipped his coat, twisting and pushing each shirt button through each hole, so much like releasing a bird from a net; slipped his arms one by one from their sleeves, carefully, with the certainty you need when you’re working with a wild animal; unloosed his belt, sliding it out and away; peeled open his pants. And falling to the ground, she pressed her nakedness on his nakedness on the snow, skin on skin burning white.
They disentangled the small birds first, as they were most in danger of freezing in the nets. Tiny hearts pumping heat out of tiny bodies, seven hundred beats a minute. They tucked the birds into small canvas bags then into a warm box in the truck. Once the nets were empty, Elise rolled them up, and they sat together in the front seat to examine and record the day’s catch. Many of the birds wore tiny metal bracelets on their legs, numbered from previous years. John knew these birds well, and he marked new ones with similar rings. He made notes about things Elise understood, and things she didn’t.
He let her hold the birds and asked her questions, sometimes leaning so close that Elise could smell him. Coffee and wood smoke. His eyes were green and flecked with brown.
‘Have a look at the fat below the skin. See here? This one’s got plenty, I think she’ll make it.
‘Ah. You can tell she’s a young one by the colour. See the grey on the wing? It goes black as they age.
‘Tell me—male or female?’
The birds were almost always female, and they were Elise’s to set free. She threw them upwards with two hands, like doves at a wedding.
chapter 8
Elise hasn’t been gone for long, a few days at most, but he can hardly remember how they used to be. Like a dream he once had, those days on the road, windows down, blaring the stereo, cruising north or east from LA or San Francisco, her hand on his leg. The bison, the elk. The golden-haired grizzlies. Her back against a redwood, tall as the sky. His mouth on her mouth, her neck, her shoulder. Shells on the beach, crushed by the waves.
The Breeding Season Page 6