She ran her hands down his upper arms and helped him free himself totally of his shirt. Those muscles. So perfect. Just muscly enough. Muscles that could just lie back and relax under the sun or could save you from drowning in a river if the need arose.
All the pain of the past six years fell away and she was here, almost naked—and almost with no secrets—starting life all over again.
But suddenly Matteo froze, his arms wrapped around her. He turned his head to the side, his chest rising and falling.
‘What is it?’ Lara looked down at him in the candlelight as she returned from the stratosphere, the hard edges of reality gouging into her skin. ‘What is it?’
‘Shh. Do you hear that?’
Lara looked at the walls, as if she’d be able to see through them into the night. ‘No,’ she said, feeling a mixture of rejection and confusion.
Matteo gently but firmly lifted her body away from his and moved her to the bed so he could sit up properly, leaning forwards, his ear cocked towards the walls.
‘What is it?’ she asked again, worried now.
Matteo didn’t answer but sprang off the bed, at the same time gathering his discarded shirt and deftly slipping his arms into the sleeves. He managed to get a couple of buttons done up before he reached the door and flung it open. Lara searched for her dress, with no clue what was going on.
She found it, fumbling to pull it the right way over her head. Matteo already had his boots on. And now she could hear what Matteo must have heard.
Terrified bleating.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked, following him, struggling to get her sandals laced.
‘Lupi.’
‘Lupi? Do you mean wolves?’
But Matteo was already off the small porch and crunching over the ground towards the main casa. Lara followed him into the darkness. She’d had no idea Italy even had wolves. One thing she did know was that they were supremely intelligent and first-class hunters.
They must be after the goats.
It was terrible. Those poor animals.
She kept as close to Matteo as she could, not knowing if a wolf might sneak up behind her.
As they reached the casa, outdoor lights sprang on, and there were shouts and people moving.
‘Domenica!’ Matteo shouted, jogging the last few metres to the house. ‘E i lupi?’
Lara, a step behind, was puffing when she stopped in the blinding floodlight.
Domenica, a short, wiry woman with cherry-red hair, answered him in staccato Italian, ignoring Lara, who briefly wondered if she was simply used to seeing Matteo with strange women. Domenica threw open a wooden trunk, the metal catch rattling as the lid hit the stone wall behind it. She reached inside and pulled out a rifle.
Lara gasped.
Domenica handed the rifle to Matteo. Lara wrapped her arms around herself and stepped backwards, further into the dark.
She was awash with horror, simultaneously terrified for the goats’ safety, pushing away images of bloodshed and carnage, and also of this thing in Matteo’s hand. This weapon. A thing constructed to inflict injury and death, to give power to the person wielding it.
The only thing worse than seeing Matteo holding a long, dark weapon was that he appeared to know his way around it with ease, holding it deftly, moving parts around that made ghastly metal clanking noises, exactly the type she’d heard in movies or on television. She began to shake.
She could hear more shouting now, down at the goat shelters, and urgent bleating from hundreds of goats. She was scared for them, the sweet young goats that had climbed into her lap. She didn’t want them hurt. But still, she didn’t want the wolves shot down either. Guns…they were…
Leonard, home after three weeks on the streets, a gun in his hand. Lara thought it was a toy. Tried to smile and say thanks for the gift, even though it was an odd thing to bring a nine-year-old girl. She reached for it.
‘Lara! Stop!’
Her mother lurching from the bedroom, everything in slow motion, Leonard swinging to face her, his smile disappearing, his eyes going hard, Eliza’s body between Leonard and Lara, her hand on the gun.
Leonard’s other elbow jabbing at Eliza’s throat. Her mother falling, gasping. Lara screaming, backing away. Sunny running up the stairs from the yard, noise, noise everywhere. A struggle. Lara hiding behind the couch, her hands over her ears. Don’t hurt them, don’t hurt them.
Matteo and Domenica were oblivious to her distress. They were already jogging down the hill, their rifles at their sides. She knew they needed to protect the goats, yet she still felt terror in her body at the memory of a weapon smashing open a peaceful afternoon. She stood rooted to the ground, both clenched fists at her mouth. Paralysed.
A gunshot cracked open the air and bounced around her skull. She doubled over, her hands over her ears. Another shot. She screamed and held her hands to her ears even harder.
A cacophony of shouts from down the hill.
Lara pulled herself upright, tears sliding down her face, her feet moving towards the car then back towards the casa. She threaded her fingers together in front of her while she waited for the others’ return. And it seemed she waited an eternity in the dark, her senses on high alert, not knowing what would come next.
Finally, Matteo appeared, walking gingerly around the casa and into the light.
‘What happened?’ She went to him, casting her eyes down at his filthy pants. It looked as if he’d tripped and slid on his knees. She stopped a few metres from him. The rifle hung at his side, the veins in his arm engorged. He looked stricken at whatever he’d seen or done.
‘What happened?’ she asked again. And then, more gently, ‘Are you okay?’
‘F-f-fine,’ he said.
She took a breath; he’d stuttered, and she’d noticed. Her stifled sob was still audible. ‘Did you…find a wolf?’ she whispered.
He looked her straight in the eye. ‘Sì. Due lupi.’
Two wolves. Two shots.
‘Did you kill them?’
‘No.’
‘But you would have,’ she said.
‘If I h-h-had to.’ The gun was still in his hand. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she said, not long ago feeling nothing but passion and adoration, and now feeling nothing but horror.
‘Lara, they had already attacked three g-g-goats. We’ll have to put them out of their misery.’ His face twisted. He stepped towards her, metal still glinting at his side. She recoiled.
‘Get that away from me!’
Matteo halted, as if she was a frightened animal.
‘I have to go.’
There was another shot in the distance. Lara yelped and jumped, then spun on her heel.
‘Wait,’ he called, as she strode up the hill.
Another shot.
‘Lara, please wait.’
And another shot. A sob erupted from Lara’s chest. But by then, she was climbing into the Alfa Romeo and starting the engine, not allowing herself to look back.
28
Lara and Dave
Lara was twenty-six years old.
Dave suspected first.
He brought home a test kit and presented it to her late one night while she was in bed reading.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, confused and on edge. There was a hardness to his eyes she knew well and her fear spiked.
‘Are you pregnant?’
‘What?’
‘You’re late.’
She frowned. ‘Maybe a couple of days.’
He reached out and squeezed her left breast.
‘Ow! What are you doing?’ She shoved his hand away.
‘Tender,’ he said, as if delivering his foregone conclusion.
He made her take the test while he waited downstairs for her. He was pacing when she arrived. He held out his hand for the test strip to see it for himself.
She handed it to him like a guilty child, and pulled the sleeves of her j
umper down over her hands and tucked them under her armpits. She was pregnant and in shock and feeling a whirlpool of emotions, from hope and joy through to dread and shame. She stared at the floor, waiting for him to say something.
At last he stopped pacing and took a deep breath. ‘Lara, please come and sit,’ he said, and his voice was quiet and soothing. They went to the wooden dining table with the hard, uncomfortable chairs.
She sat as directed. He continued to stand. The overhead light was a little behind him, casting his face in shadow.
‘You have to have an abortion.’ His tone was flat, calm and authoritative, the same manner in which she imagined he might one day deliver bad news to a patient. No room for discussion. Yet the impact of his words on her was like running at force into a brick wall.
‘What?’
‘Lara, you’ve been on medication for a long time and it has a high chance of affecting the foetus.’
‘But it might be okay,’ she said, shoving her hands underneath her legs, her shoulders hunched. What he didn’t know was that she’d stopped taking her mood stabilisers months ago because she couldn’t cope with the drowsiness and nausea. She couldn’t see straight and had felt herself forgetting what the world looked like without them.
She’d developed a sneaky method of pretending to take them when he handed them to her each morning, tucking them up between her back teeth and cheek until he’d gone, when she would spit out the pills and wash them down the bathroom sink. Maybe one or two of the tiny contraception pills had been accidentally washed away too.
The mood stabilisers were the dangerous ones for pregnancy. She and Constance had talked about it during one of their sessions about possible futures. It was a long time ago now. Dave wasn’t a fan of Constance; he said she gave Lara false hope. But back then, Constance had made it clear that having bipolar didn’t mean she couldn’t one day be a good mother. When the time came, she said, they would have to look carefully at her medications. Lara knew a little bit about which ones were safer for pregnancy. She’d have to check with Constance, of course, but it might still be okay.
‘And you have an illness,’ the medical voice went on.
‘Yes, but…’
‘You aren’t capable of raising a baby.’
His words punched her. She looked up at him, the shadows moving across his face as he walked around the table and came to sit beside her. She didn’t even know if she wanted a baby. But shouldn’t they at least be talking about it?
‘Lara, I work and study eighty hours a week. I can’t be here to help you the way you would need. And then there’s the high probability that you would pass on this very serious, debilitating illness to the child.’
She was defective. Shouldn’t be bred from.
‘Can we slow this down a little?’ she asked, her hands under her legs going numb now, distracting her from the pain Dave’s words had just injected into her heart with surgical precision. ‘You’ve always said you wanted children—one day, I know, in the future when your career is settled. But maybe this is it? You’re doing well now, nearly finished your med degree…’
‘I don’t want this baby,’ he said, sounding disgusted.
The room spun. Her heartrate increased. ‘Because…?’
He looked at her pityingly and pulled the hand nearest him from under her thigh and held it, stroking it like a cat. ‘Because it’s yours.’ He sighed regretfully and discarded her hand.
Lara struggled for breath. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t want a baby of yours,’ he said again, slowly, as if explaining to a child.
Mocking her.
He was never going to marry her. He’d never intended to. He’d been playing her this whole time.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she mumbled.
‘You need to have an abortion,’ he said again, back to his soothing, trustworthy doctor’s voice. ‘It’s the best thing you can do for yourself. You’ll never handle the huge hormonal surges that make even the sanest woman struggle.’
Sunny. The sanest woman she knew would be Sunny.
‘You’d have to go off all your medications, medications that might have already deformed the baby’s heart, spine or brain.’
‘Stop saying that.’ She clutched at the edge of the table as the world began to sway.
‘And even then it might not survive. Then you’ll have the trauma of miscarriage and maybe surgery, and you and I both know you couldn’t handle that. And even if the foetus is okay and you somehow make it to term without falling into a pregnancy-induced psychosis and having to be hospitalised, you’d still have the postnatal depression and all of that before you got to be a real mother.’
A real mother.
Dave folded his hands neatly on the table, the overhead light now making his cheeks hollow out and the greying hairs over his ears take on a yellow glow.
Lara gave up trying to talk. He’d out-argue her at every turn.
Besides which, he was right. All discussion of medication aside, she wasn’t fit to be a mother. Dave was the person who knew her best, and if he was telling her she was delusional to even consider keeping this baby then she was sure he was right.
‘And then there is the child to consider,’ he went on.
Please stop. Her body had frozen rigid while her insides were slippery with movement.
‘If the child survived, and if by an absolute miracle it wasn’t harmed by the medications you’ve been on, it would have a mother who was completely dysfunctional and unhinged. Devastatingly for all concerned, it would probably grow up to be your carer.’
She vomited then, right into her lap, trying to catch it with her hands. She stared at the mess, her nose pinching and her throat burning.
Dave flinched and moved his chair away. ‘And then of course the great tragedy would be that it might be just like you.’
Tears slid down Lara’s face.
She’d never realised how truly fucked up she was.
She’d never truly let herself think about what a burden she could be in the future.
Dave got up and went to the kitchen, where he rummaged through cupboards and turned on the tap. He returned with a wet tea towel and handed it to her. She dabbed weakly at herself.
‘Thank you,’ she managed to squeak between the sobbing.
He sat beside her and rubbed her back. ‘Lara, honey, you see? You see what a mess you are? I hate seeing you this way. It hurts me so much that I can’t be a better partner for you. It hurts me that I can’t heal you.’ He dropped his head, his fists balled to his forehead. ‘I should be able to fix you.’
‘What?’ She was shocked into silence.
‘I’m a psychologist and almost a medical practitioner but still I can’t help you. You are so filled with pain,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to see you like this. It hurts too much.’ He beat his chest with his fist.
‘Stop,’ she said, catching his wrist.
‘I need you to have an abortion,’ he said, his words grinding out through his teeth. ‘I can’t stand the thought of watching what it will do to you. If you won’t do it to save yourself or the child then please, do it for me.’
‘Okay, okay,’ she whispered, just needing it all to stop. ‘I’ll do it for you.’
Dave made her an appointment to request the abortion pill for two days later. But when the time came, she was still curled up crying in bed, where she’d been ever since she found out about the pregnancy. Dave came to sit in the heavy chair near the bed, one he’d put there because he said he spent so much time at her bedside he may as well be comfortable, and placed his leather-bound book on the bedside table.
‘I can’t do it,’ Lara sobbed. ‘I know I can’t keep it, but I can’t do it either.’
He’d been listening to her for two days, and for two days his voice had drilled into her, reminding her why she couldn’t keep it, reminding her she couldn’t cope, that she was defective and no one would want her for a mother, and this episode she was
having, right now, was further proof of that.
‘I can’t go,’ she pleaded, reaching for his hand.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s an impossible situation, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ she said, relieved he finally understood.
He nodded slowly. ‘So because I love you so much and because I want so much for you to be out of this pain, I’ve come up with another solution.’
Lara gulped. ‘You have?’ She pulled herself up to sitting, leaning against the headboard.
‘My love for you is so great that I would sacrifice my own happiness for yours.’ He paused and shoved his hand into the pocket of his taupe pants, then brought out a medicine bottle.
‘What are these?’ She wiped her nose on her sleeve.
‘These are a ticket to freedom, to a place of no more pain for you or the baby.’
She reached for the pills. A whole bottle.
‘I want to help you. I can’t stand seeing you in this much pain.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She began to cry again, clutching the bottle to her chest.
‘It’s okay. It can all be over now for everyone. We will all be better off.’ He stood and went to the wardrobe and opened the doors. Up on the shelf above the rack was a large mound of cream coils. He pointed to it. ‘Rope. I thought I might take up sailing.’
Rope.
He was giving her options. Not to live, mind you. Just options on how she died. But she could see it, the welcoming abyss. Finally, she’d be free of this pain. She wouldn’t have to make the awful choice to terminate this baby. She and the baby could both just drift off together.
‘But won’t you miss me?’ she whispered.
‘Yes. But my love for you is greater than any concern for myself. Please, honey, let it all go. Escape this illness that is ruining your life. Let all this suffering end and finally find the peace you’ve been looking for.’
She did want it. She wanted peace, to be free of this pain and free of the torture of her mind and free of fear.
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