‘Yes,’ Constable Lumina said, ‘it’s hard for everyone. Your daughter too. Please, Mrs Nielson, get dressed, and we’ll take you to the hospital.’
As she was dressing, Mandy thought about what she hadn’t said to Jo and Ashleigh. You’ve been drinking, don’t drive, take a taxi. She should’ve stopped Jo driving. She should’ve tried. She was a coward, avoiding conflict, instead of being a proper mother; a proper mother would’ve stopped them.
When she emerged dressed, Constable Lumina led her out of the house, ready to take her by the arm. Mandy shifted away again. She avoided looking up at the street, at the neighbourhood, at the tanks and the bridge.
In the back seat of the police car, as they drove down Hyde Street, Mandy thought about Ashleigh’s parents, and Jane, and the police knocking on their door, and the fact that they were grieving for their daughter, their sister, who was gone … forever.
The officers drove to the hospital. Mandy wanted to tell them how beautiful Ashleigh had looked in her blue top, how she was all smiles and laughter. About Jo and Ashleigh with their arms around each other, posing for photographs, and of her jealousy — jealous of their youth, of their lives. And now Ashleigh was dead, and it was all Jo’s fault. And if it was Jo’s fault, then it was Mandy’s fault too. She’d let it happen.
‘She was so alive, a few hours ago,’ she said, in an attempt to convince the two police officers, and herself, that it was a mistake. It was impossible, she wanted to yell at them, shake them. This wasn’t how death happened. She’d watched both her parents die — months of decline, of hospitals, of waiting, of suffering and pain, until they stopped praying for life, for recovery, until all hope abandoned them, until they were praying for death.
The police officers didn’t respond.
Bad mother. She was a bad mother. Good mothers knew what to do. They knew how to behave. A good mother wouldn’t have let her drunk daughter take the car. A good mother would’ve stopped them, and Ashleigh, beautiful Ashleigh, would be alive. Mandy’s anger flared. In the past, whenever Jo had done something wrong, she’d defended, excused, compensated. But there was no excuse for driving drunk. No defence. No compensating for Ashleigh’s death. Mandy didn’t want to see Jo. That moment in the back seat of the police car, she experienced a sensation of falling, of falling out of love with her daughter. Like falling in love with Jo, it would, in her memory, seem instantaneous. When Jo was born, Mandy bonded with her immediately. Jo was an easy baby. The nurses said she was lucky. It was only years later, when other women friends had their babies, and she witnessed first-baby blues and anxieties, postnatal depression, and colicky infants that refused to sleep, that she realised how lucky she’d been. Her love for Jo was unconditional — it rose out of her in waves, and even during the recent difficult teenage years, even as Jo rejected her, even as she no longer knew what her daughter thought about, dreamed about, even as she asked questions and Jo was rude and distant, she hadn’t doubted her love. It was the one love that would endure anything, survive anything. She had promised Jo that. When David left, Mandy said, ‘Your father and I can’t live together, we don’t love each other anymore, but we’ll always love you.’ She promised the three- and four- and five-year-old Jo over and over again.
Her love for Jo had been her driving force. On days when the world seemed impossible to negotiate, it kept her going. In its absence, she was left feeling hollow, weighed down by weariness. Leaning against the window in the back of the police car, she had no idea how they’d live through this, past it. Did people manage to live? To move on? Did Jo deserve to? Did either of them?
‘Will she go to prison?’ Mandy asked the police officers.
Constable Lumina turned to face Mandy. ‘She’ll be charged, and when she’s released from the hospital she’ll have to make a statement. And go to court. It’ll be up to the courts.’
‘But it’s likely?’
‘Yes, it’s likely.’
Chapter 9
Antonello woke in a sweat, his hands gripping the bed post. In his dream the bridge, cut loose from the piers, was a swinging pendulum. He was balancing on a tightrope between the two halves. But the span on the west side cracked, the concrete crumbled, he was falling … He reached out for the tissues on the bedside table and wiped his face. Took a deep breath to calm himself and checked the clock. It was 4.00 am.
‘Occupational hazard,’ Bob said the first time Antonello told him about his falling dreams, not long after they’d started to work on the bridge. ‘Whenever you do height work, the falling comes back. Sandy says that some nights the whole bed shakes, and that isn’t because I’m such a stud.’ He winked at Antonello.
Many times standing on the half-finished bridge, Antonello had imagined diving off: the flight, the lift, the floating, the soaring, and the final descent into the water. Like all the men, he’d felt the bridge sway, especially on windy days, when the end span shook. The movement, a tremor, travelled along the bridge and through his body in tiny rolling waves; he’d imagine his own falling.
After the collapse, the occasional falling dream turned into a reoccurring nightmare, and each time it catapulted him into the past and left him adrift, as if the present were an alien world he’d landed in by mistake.
To anchor himself, he shifted his body closer to Paolina, until he felt her breath on his face. She’d thrown the covers off her shoulders; both arms were raised above her head. He resisted the urge to reach out, to run his hand over the soft folds of her skin.
‘It’s not a remission,’ the doctor warned them. ‘We can’t call it that, not yet, but for now the tumor has stopped growing.’
Life without Paolina was unimaginable. It was a cliché and a lie, he knew that. It was what people said when their loved ones were dying. Then, of course, most people went on living. But there were all kinds of living, and some were closer to death than life.
Antonello was certain that without Paolina, he’d shrivel and shrink, until he was like those pickled men in a jar they sold at the craft markets Paolina loved going to on Sunday mornings. The men were made from recycled pantyhose, the surprisingly young craftswoman had told him, standing behind rows and rows of men in jars. She wore a green lace dress and a small box hat with feathers.
‘Everything’s recycled,’ Antonello remembered saying to Paolina. ‘Why don’t they say old?’
Paolina hung her pantyhose in the bathroom to dry. They were so delicate that if his hand accidentally brushed across them, the threads snagged easily on his fingernails, on the rough patches of his skin.
The young craftswoman, with her button nose and sweet smile, reminded him of his mother’s Madonna. Emilia had kept the statuette, strung with rosary beads, on her bedroom dresser. Every night, she’d knelt in front of it before bed. His sister, Carmela, the only remaining church-goer in his family, had inherited the statuette. His mother would’ve described the young woman as angelic. It was disconcerting to think of her sitting at a work table, cutting up old stockings, shaping and stuffing them until they turned into old men, and then shoving them into a jar, the lid screwed on nice and tight.
Paolina’s cancer felt like a betrayal. Of course, he knew he was being silly and selfish and ridiculous. Childish, even. But Paolina was going to leave him, and without her his days would be long and empty; life would have no meaning.
He wasn’t good at friendship. When Paolina’s friends visited, he was polite — he could even be friendly — but he didn’t have any friends of his own. His brother Joe dropped in some afternoons, and they paced the garden or strolled down to the creek so that Joe’s German shepherd, now old and crippled with arthritis, could take a slow walk. Once a year, they made wine. Sometimes Antonello went rummaging in wrecker’s yards or trash-and-treasure markets, excursions instigated by his brother Vince, to buy materials for his many projects — a new shed for one of his children or a cubby house for a grandchild or something for h
is latest attempt at renovating a section of the house.
Recently, Antonello had overheard his daughter, Nicki, say to Paolina, ‘Don’t you dare die first and leave us with Dad.’ Alex and Nicki — Alexandro and Domenica, but their Italian names printed on their birth certificates were rarely used, mostly forgotten — considered him difficult. Soon he’d be a burden.
‘Mama is the most loving woman I know. I’m sure you love us, but you’re not good at showing it. You’re moody and hard to be around. What I learnt from you, Dad, is that love isn’t enough,’ Alex had said once, on the rare occasion when father and son talked, though the conversation had arisen after Antonello criticised Alex for spoiling the girls.
Alex and Nicki rarely talked to Antonello directly. They talked to their mother and she refashioned their requests, their announcements, for him. He overheard their comments and criticisms, not because they said things when they knew he’d overhear them, not because he purposely eavesdropped on them — he would’ve preferred not to hear — but because they didn’t notice him. He was a spectre lurking in the background, invisible and hardly relevant.
Nicki said Paolina should’ve divorced him. Had she ever considered it? Paolina loved him, he was certain of that, even though their marriage was more difficult than she’d anticipated — but no one ever imagines a difficult marriage.
Over the last decade, a number of Paolina’s friends had been widowed or divorced, and they had started new and different lives without their husbands. Did Paolina hope for a life in which she could plan her own destiny, perhaps discover another self? He wanted to die first.
When the depression hit, as it did on a regular basis, it left him depleted. It manifested first as rage — with it, a desire to scream, to tear things apart, to punch walls, to throw furniture. A dark mantle that swamped everything. But he was a volcano that never erupted. He didn’t vent his anger as his father had done. That was his only source of pride, as if by not expressing it he was protecting his family from it. The pity was it took so much energy to dam it up, to contain it, that he had nothing left for his children, and so he withdrew, was often absent, silent and alone, sometimes disappearing for hours, for whole days, walking miles across the city until his heart returned to its regular beat, until he stopped shaking, until he could unclench his fists. But even if he was in the house during those episodes, he wasn’t present. ‘Dad’s gone zombie again,’ Nicki would complain to Paolina.
Several times he’d considered leaving Paolina and the children, for their own good, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Leaving was impossible. Where would he have gone? What would that have done to his family? Anyway, without Paolina he didn’t exist at all. He’d contemplated suicide, but the thought of Paolina’s grief and the legacy he’d leave behind — a coward husband and father — stopped him.
Knowing his children resented him was painful, but he’d learnt to live with it. Compared to all the other aches and pains, it hardly registered. Paolina smoothed things. Made excuses for him. She told their children over and over that he loved them. She tried to convince him to do things differently, but she didn’t betray him.
‘She defends you all the time, even when you’re being an arsehole.’ Nicki didn’t understand her mother’s loyalty.
He stretched his body long in the bed and watched Paolina. He loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone else.
‘The phone, Nello,’ Paolina said, shaking him awake. ‘It’s the phone.’
Antonello looked at the clock. It was 6.00 am. He hauled himself out of bed and raced to the kitchen, where the phone hung on a wall bracket above the bench. The ringing was insistent and demanding. Then it stopped and the house fell silent, but before he could turn back, the ringing began again.
Later, he’d speculate about his reluctance to answer. Was it a premonition? Not that he believed in premonitions; they were Paolina’s domain. But there was a secret hope he harboured that not answering the phone might prevent whatever bad thing had happened from happening. As if bad things could be thwarted by his refusal to pay them attention. As if he didn’t know better. As if he didn’t know that tragedy could and would strike whether you were around to pick up the phone or not, that it would catch up with you and stop you in your tracks no matter how hard or how fast you ran, no matter how happy you were or how sad. No matter whether you’d had your share of tragedy or not.
‘Hello.’
‘Dad.’
‘Alex, what’s wrong?’ Antonello heard the quake in his son’s voice, the intake of breath.
‘Everything is wrong, Dad, everything.’ Alex paused and Antonello knew the panic was real. It wouldn’t pass.
‘There’s been an accident. It’s Ashleigh.’ Alex’s voice was cracking, broken.
‘How bad? Is she okay?’
‘No. She’s dead, Dad. My Ashleigh, my baby girl, she’s gone.’ Alex broke into thick, heavy sobs.
Antonello heard himself gasp, but after that he wasn’t sure what else they said, what he said, what Alex said, before they hung up. His body was limp. His arms dropped to his side. His legs buckled. Shaky, he leaned against the wall.
‘Nello?’ Paolina reached for his arm. He gazed at her. She was so old and frail that he thought for a second it wasn’t Paolina at all but the ghost of his mother-in-law, Giuseppina, who had been reduced to half her size, wrinkled skin loosely draped over brittle bones, when she died in her nineties.
‘Sit down.’ He couldn’t tell Paolina. He couldn’t say the words out loud.
‘No, tell me,’ Paolina demanded.
‘It’s Ashleigh,’ he said. ‘A car accident.’
‘Which hospital?’
‘No, è morta.’ Antonello shook his head, wrapped his arms around her, and pulled her close.
‘No, no, please no,’ Paolina wailed. She was trembling, a tiny tree in the wind. He stood, solid, and she leaned into him. They held each other. Since Paolina’s diagnosis, they’d become used to finding themselves without words. Closing his eyes, Antonello stroked her short grey hair, and remembered her hair long and thick, and the way she loved weaving it into a plait, the tail reaching the base of her spine. And the way he’d taken pleasure in unravelling it, running his fingers through it until the strands separated. And how when Ashleigh was little, she measured the length of her hair against her grandmother’s. The way they loved to brush each other’s hair. Ashleigh. The tears flowed — silent tears he couldn’t wipe away, because that would mean releasing his grip on Paolina.
‘Ashleigh. Ashleigh,’ he repeated her name to himself. Little Ashleigh, princess, wild thing, pestie pest: all his pet names for his first-born granddaughter, his son’s daughter. Calling her up in his mind, as if he might be able to call her back to life. Ashleigh. The last time he saw her was only a few days ago — arriving with a copy of Beverly Hills Chihuahua and teasing Paolina that with her short hair, she looked like Jamie Lee Curtis. He remembered the way Ashleigh and Jane slid into bed on either side of their grandmother so they could watch the movie together on a laptop.
Ashleigh. Ashleigh. Loved so much.
Paolina was sobbing.
‘We have to get dressed and go over to Alex’s,’ he said.
Paolina nodded, but didn’t move.
‘They need us. We need to help them through this.’
‘I don’t know if I can get through this, if there is a way through this,’ Paolina whispered. ‘Mia bellissima nipotina.’
Antonello hooked his arm around her waist and guided her slowly to the bedroom, and there they both began to dress. He kept an eye on Paolina, as he’d fallen into the habit of doing, standing back, but not too far, waiting in case she stumbled, in case she was dizzy. Usually it annoyed her to see him hovering, but now neither of them spoke.
When they arrived at the house, Alex was alone in the kitchen. Paolina drew her son into her embrace and Antonello watch
ed him spiral back in time to become her little boy again. He saw the unspoken hope between them that Paolina could make everything whole again. He wished he could hold his son. The desire was there: to pull Alex close, to give him a safe place to weep. But they so rarely touched. They shook hands at Christmas and on birthdays. While each kissed other men in the traditional one-kiss-on-each-cheek greeting that was almost impossible to avoid, especially at extended family gatherings, they didn’t kiss each other. Antonello moved closer to mother and son and placed his hand on Alex’s back, holding it there until Alex moved away from his mother’s embrace.
Antonello and Paolina sat at the kitchen table as their son told them the details of the accident, pieced together from the police and the ambos. Over and over, he repeated the details of the night, of the last time he saw Ashleigh. He was frantic, a wild man in the grip of a fever, stomping up and down the length of the room.
‘She came home from the library late afternoon with a stack of books. “For my Legal Studies essay,” she said. I said, “You look as if you’ve brought home the whole library.” And she said, “The old fart says no online references, can you imagine, as if we live in the Stone Ages.” We both laughed even though I agreed with the old fart, even though I thought I shouldn’t have laughed …’ Alex swallowed and repeated, ‘We both laughed,’ as if the possibility of having laughed were the most shocking element of the story he was telling.
‘And she gave me a kiss on the cheek.’ This last statement was made in a squeaky small voice, a child’s voice, and Antonello was transported back to an afternoon when Alex was seven or eight. The little boy racing into the house exhausted and sweaty, his nose bleeding, his school shirt torn and dirty. Alex’s indignation coming out in the ceaseless prattle.
‘Five minutes later,’ Alex continued, ‘she was out the door in her jeans, half her wardrobe thrown over her arm. Going over to Jo’s, she said. That’s the last time I saw her. That girl’s name was the last thing I heard her say.’ He paused, sat down, and immediately stood up again. ‘Later we had dinner. Rae took Jane to the movies, and I read my book, and I thought how great it was to have the house to myself — how could I have thought that? I don’t want this fucking house to myself.’ Alex gripped the back of a chair with both hands, his knuckles turning white.
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