‘She’s lovely,’ she said, but Tom didn’t reply, just reached up and stroked her hair.
She wakes with the dawn, light flooding into her room. When she and Tom bought the house it was impossible to sleep past sunrise, especially in summer, daybreak bringing kookaburras and cuckoos and swooping flocks of cockatoos, their crazed laughter and screeching clamour echoing through the trees like a memory of the primordial forest. The diversity and profligacy of the birdlife was a big part of what Tom loved about being here, his pleasure in it a source of amusement for the two of them. It was the thereness of them he said he loved, their presence and life and total absorption in the moment.
Most of the birds are gone now. She is not sure when they began to disappear: elsewhere there have been huge die-offs, great waves of birds falling from the skies, yet here the process has been more gradual, species slowly disappearing, those that remain less numerous with each passing year.
Although she expected to be the first one up, Ellie is already in the kitchen, a pot of coffee and her screen on the table in front of her. Ellie looks up as she enters and for a second the two of them hesitate, uncomfortable after their edginess last night. Then Ellie gestures towards the coffee.
‘I hope you don’t mind: it’s so long since I had any.’
Maddie nods. Since the crop failures three years ago, coffee has become increasingly expensive and difficult to get.
‘Of course not.’
‘Would you like some?’ Ellie asks.
‘That would be nice,’ she says.
Taking down a mug she pours herself half a cup, and sits opposite Ellie.
‘You’re up early.’
Ellie shrugs. ‘Most mornings I go to the studio for an hour or two before Summer wakes up. I find it helpful having that space, before the day begins.’
‘What are you reading?’
‘Li Po.’ Ellie flips her screen over and slides it across the table to Maddie. ‘He’s a poet, eighth-century Chinese. I’ve been reading a lot of him.’
Not for the first time Maddie is reminded of the gulf between the two of them, of her sense that her stepdaughter has always thought her life as an artist makes her somehow superior. But she can also see that Ellie is trying, so she musters a smile.
‘Was there something you wanted to do today?’ she asks.
‘Summer will want to go to the beach.’
‘Of course. And you?’
‘I’m happy to just tag along.’
When Ellie leaves to have a shower Maddie picks up the screen. The poem is called ‘The River Merchant’s Wife’. Ellie has annotated it here and there, highlighting one passage in particular:
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
Maddie feels a twist of grief. And then, irrationally, a flash of anger at the possibility Ellie may have been thinking of her.
When she learned she was pregnant she let a fortnight pass before she told Tom. Later she pretended she hadn’t known immediately, and that once she had she was worried that telling people would make it real, and therefore make her vulnerable, but that wasn’t all of it. She also kept it secret because some part of her felt the pregnancy was hers alone, and that every person who knew took a piece of it from her.
She could have gone longer, of course: although it was strange to feel her body changing, the heat in her blood, Tom did not suspect anything until she told him.
As the weeks passed and her body began to thicken she worked hard to conceal it from everyone but him. Tom thought it was concern about growing fat, about losing control, but it had more to do with a lack of desire to discuss her condition with others, to face questions and field looks. She had seen the way pregnancy turned women’s bodies into public things, the way strangers assumed the right to touch their bellies or speak to them as familiars, and she recoiled from it, so much so that even in the later months, when the fact was inescapable, she avoided social events, affecting a brightness that was not hers, but armour.
It was a strange time. Later Tom took to saying they grew closer during her pregnancy, but she knew it wasn’t that simple. She let Tom see what he needed to see, but still she kept much of what she felt to herself, unwilling to share her savage joy at the thought of the life growing within her.
She did not have a birth plan. Although it amused Tom that somebody as controlling as she was should be so accepting about this one thing, the idea of trying to predict the unpredictable seemed ridiculous to her. And so even as she listened to her friends describing the arrangements they had made, the lists of helpers and midwives and prohibited drugs, or extolling the virtues of natural birth, home birth, midwifery, she found herself wondering whether it might be possible to have the child alone, with nobody but some anonymous doctor in attendance.
In the end it didn’t matter because Declan arrived four weeks early, the first contraction occurring at three on a Monday morning. She tried to tell herself it was a firm kick or a roll that had woken her, taking herself to the bathroom in the dark to drink a glass of water. But when the second struck as she was shuffling back to bed she grunted, and Tom started awake.
‘It’s coming,’ she said, and he was already there close to her. This was the last time they would be here like this, she thought as she looked at him looking at her.
‘I’ll call the hospital,’ he said, but she shook her head.
‘No,’ she said, suddenly afraid of what would come next, ‘not yet. Let’s wait for a little longer.’
It is nearly eight by the time Summer appears, but by half past they are on the beach. After last night’s wind the air is calm, the water blue and glassy, waves slowly crumbling in steady breaths onto the sand. Maddie does not swim often but today she allows herself to be convinced for Summer’s sake. Once, she had had no qualms about being seen in a bikini; although she had never obsessed over her body in the way many of her friends did, that was partly because she never really needed to, having been slim and fit since she was a child. Yet as she undresses next to Summer she is aware of how she has aged, the subtle loosening of the flesh, the thickening of her waist.
After a few minutes in the shallows Summer strikes out away from the shore, moving with confident, relaxed strokes. Ellie follows her, keeping pace easily, her body toned by the kilometres she swims each week. Watching them, Maddie is aware that she no longer knows how to find her way into that ease with her body, the steady motion of swimming or running or breathing. Or love.
Just before noon they head into town. Until a few years ago there was a fish and chip shop here, selling the catch from the boats that operated from the wharf on the inlet; these days the catch is too small, the prices too high, so they buy burgers from the takeaway and settle down at the plastic tables by the car park.
As they eat, Maddie probes Summer about school and friends, careful not to look surprised or frustrated by Summer’s studied evasions. Next to her, Ellie looks on without speaking, her face troubled, and not for the first time since they arrived Maddie wonders whether there are things Ellie is not telling her about Summer. Yet when Summer excuses herself to go to the toilet it is Ellie who speaks, turning to Maddie to ask her whether she means to stay on at the beach house.
‘Why do you ask?’ she says.
‘I’m worried about you. Alone down here.’
‘I could say the same about you. Up there.’
‘That’s different,’ Ellie says.
‘How is it different?’
‘Please,’ she says, ‘you know what I mean.’
Maddie regards her stepdaughter with a steady gaze. Then looks away.
The first year with Declan was revelatory. She loved him with a passion that once would have frightened her. Despite being premature, he slept and fed easily, and even when he didn’t she felt buoyed by her feelings for him. She spent whole days marvelling at the fact of him, the movement of his limbs, his delighted, wa
tchful fascination with the world around him. Tom loved him as well, and her the more for having him, the knowledge of their mutual adoration expanding their happiness in a way she never could have predicted.
Absorbed in Declan they let their friends slide, instead spending more and more time down here alone. That was the year the real disasters began – mega-blizzards in North America, tornados in China, the first widespread methane ruptures in Siberia – and it seemed natural to try to shut them out, to concentrate on the fact that here and now they were safe, and had each other.
When Declan turned one they asked a handful of friends to their house in Bondi for a party. Ellie and Adam came, although they were only half together by then. Declan had been walking for more than a month, and Maddie, watching the way Summer held his hand and led him around the garden, thought this was all she would ever need.
After lunch they agree to spread Tom’s ashes the following morning, the decision coming surprisingly easily. Perhaps because of this the rest of the day passes without friction, and that evening Summer is talkative, playfully mocking her mother, her school; making jokes at her father’s expense.
Yet despite her humour Maddie cannot help but feel there is an edge to Summer’s manner, a sharpness to her judgements that is unsettling. There has always been a ferocity in Summer, a ferocity Maddie knows Ellie fears might turn inward, and listening to her vault from subject to subject she wonders if Ellie is right to be afraid, or whether this is just Summer trying to negotiate the treacherous gap between childhood and adolescence: certainly there are times when Maddie, catching Summer glancing at her mother mid-sentence, seeking her approval, sees with painful clarity the undefended nature of Summer’s heart, its shifting vulnerability.
After dessert Summer excuses herself and disappears to her room again. For a time the two older women sit listening to the sound of her voice as she chats with friends.
‘Is she okay?’ Maddie asks at last.
Ellie takes a sip of wine. ‘I really don’t know. She’s happy enough at school, I think.’
‘But?’
‘They seem so closed off, these kids, like they’ve grown up too fast. It frightens me.’
‘Because she might hurt herself?’
‘Because I don’t know what kind of future there is for her,’ she said. ‘For any of them.’
Later Maddie would wonder whether, if she had noticed the signs earlier, things might have been different, but at first it didn’t occur to her it was anything other than a throat infection. He was lethargic and pale, his temperature spiking now and then. Because he’d just begun childcare he’d had a parade of illnesses already that winter, so she ignored it, letting him stay home with her for a day or two, then sending him back. She had just returned to work herself and was struggling with it: she could not take days off all the time.
A week later, Marina, the administrator of his childcare centre, took her aside when she arrived to pick him up. She remembers being worried that it was something serious, her relief when Marina asked whether she’d thought about taking Declan to the doctor.
‘Is his throat hurting again?’ she asked, and Marina hesitated. Not for long, but long enough.
‘It’s probably nothing, but there’s a lump. I think you should get a doctor to look at it.’
Lying next to him that night, stroking his hair as he fell asleep, she could not imagine how she had missed it, how his body could have become distorted in this way without her noticing. While the lump was not large – little bigger than a marble – its outline was clearly discernible beneath the skin where his neck met his clavicle. When she touched its surface it felt hard, and he pulled away, though not, she imagined, because it hurt exactly, but because it felt wrong somehow.
He took a long time to fall asleep, and it was almost nine by the time she uncurled him from her and rejoined Tom. He looked stricken, his jaw tight. They had not discussed the lump and what it might mean in front of Declan, their conversation limited to a code of omissions and assumptions.
‘I’ve made an appointment for tomorrow,’ Tom said, then hesitated, as if there were more.
‘And?’
‘I called Nick,’ he said eventually, his voice flat.
Nick, an anaesthetist, was Tom’s oldest friend. They had shared an apartment while at university.
‘What did he say?’
‘That it could just be some kind of fatty deposit, or a blocked pore, but we should definitely get it checked out.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
‘Not really. I think he was being careful not to frighten me.’
When she didn’t reply Tom put his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.
‘Don’t.’
He looked perplexed. ‘Why not?
‘Just don’t,’ she said.
In that first week they bounced from doctor to doctor, diagnosis to diagnosis. The surgeon was practical, optimistic, the oncologist more vague, telling them the road ahead was likely to be difficult. The review panel was even less conclusive. Every time Maddie and Tom took their place in a consulting room they asked the same questions: could their son be cured? How difficult would the treatment be? What was the chance he might die? And every time, Maddie found herself parsing their words, searching for a certainty no one seemed able to offer her.
In the end surgery was scheduled for the Friday, with chemo to begin a fortnight later. They had their first fight the day after the dates were settled. Tom had been at work, Maddie at the hospital with Declan, watching as he was ushered from ward to ward, his body probed and jabbed and scanned. At three and a half he couldn’t comprehend what all this was about, and every time he looked to her for reassurance she wondered if he could see how frightened she was. She couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear that Tom wasn’t there, that it was she who had to betray their son like this.
The morning of the operation they woke him early. He was hungry, and confused by his parents’ refusal to let him eat he became angry. Maddie tried to comfort him, only to lose her temper herself when he wouldn’t calm down, shouting at him that she didn’t care if he was hungry, she’d had enough, and then bursting into tears when Declan, frightened by her behaviour, began to cry.
These are the things she remembers:
Declan’s body in the hospital bed, his limbs so thin it hurt her to look at them.
The view from the window by his bed, the rows in the garden, the intimacy of their disorder.
The smell of the ward, the way it clung to her.
The way time seemed to stretch out across those months, until every second seemed to fill an hour, a day. A week.
She is not sure when she began to withdraw. It was not that she didn’t love him, because she did, more than anything; she would have given her own life, right there, right then, would have done anything if it meant he could live even one more day. Yet somehow it seemed easier, more truthful to accept that he was dying, and that nothing she could do, no gesture, no flamboyant display of grieving, would change that.
Tom didn’t understand. She saw it in his eyes every day, in the way he hovered over Declan as if the boy were about to break, in the way he gathered the moments. Sometimes she could almost see him thinking, This is the last time we will be here with him, the last time he will go to the zoo, the last time he will run just like this, and she hated him for it, hated him for the way his weakness infected all of them. One night Tom accused her of being cold, so afraid of losing control she could not let herself feel. Only once, and in anger, but it was enough.
There were people to help them, of course, foundations and volunteers and successions of visitors. And in many ways they were lucky: there were families they came to know while they were on the ward who did not have the luxury of money, haunted-looking fathers who appeared late in the evening or early in the morning, mothers who came from jobs as cleaners or in factories, their faces grey with exhaustion.
Later she read figures about the toll childhood ca
ncer took on careers, but at the time she only saw Tom taking leave and allowing his partners to cover for him.
Some of those families they knew by name, others by sight, fellow travellers in the twilight world of the cancer ward. There was a Somali couple whose daughter had leukaemia, a single mother from Penrith whose handsome thirteen-year-old son’s osteosarcoma had returned, a gay couple whose daughter had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. She would watch Tom talking to them, his broad-shouldered frame handsome in his rumpled suit, one of their hands grasped in his, and know he was assuaging his own pain by seeking to understand theirs, his need to connect suddenly ridiculous to her.
In time they realised it was easier not to know too much about the others, so as not to have to register their sudden absence from the ward, their ghostly return with flowers or a gift for the staff. Better, they learned, to remain ignorant.
And all the while she could feel the way life sought to regain its equilibrium. The way ordinary life kept fighting its way in, so that grief was never constant but a series of shocks, each one as new, as raw, as the first. How soon would it take for life to reassert itself afterwards? she caught herself wondering. How long before this unimaginable absence became normal?
Still, it was the final weeks that were the worst. His body so tiny, so frail in the bed, his breathing so weak and shallow that each day it seemed impossible he could go on. She could not bear the thought of no longer having him, yet sometimes, seeing what it cost him to stay, she found herself wishing for the end, even as she knew it meant she would not know how to continue living herself. And then, when it seemed he could last no longer, he went. It happened almost suddenly. He was sleeping, he woke up, he convulsed. His body arched and went rigid and then was utterly still.
The house is quiet next morning, and at first she assumes she must be the first one up. But as she steps into the kitchen she sees Summer sitting on the edge of the deck, back straight, headphones on, lost in whatever it is she is listening to. At the sound of the door she turns, removes her headphones.
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