Deeper than the Sea

by Nelika McDonald

  chapter forty-five

  Theo stood just outside the carpark of the hospital with a white hospital blanket wrapped around her shoulders. In her hands were the things that Beth had left on the sand. Nobody had asked her for them, which was just as well. Theo wouldn’t give them up. She could smell the sea on her still-damp skin and, underneath that, the sly stain of petrol and smoke. Fire, water, wind and earth. She’d met with every element, tonight. Hospital staff and others passed her, but nobody paid her much heed. Theo stood, and waited.

  On the beach she had held Beth’s limp form in the vice of her arms so firmly that it took two paramedics to pry her off. They had let her ride in the back on the way to the hospital and Theo had watched, her heart pulled tight and her brain empty, as they tried to resuscitate Beth and drain the sea water from her lungs.

  David rode in the front and kept turning to see them, his face grey. The paramedics had said things to each other that Theo didn’t understand as they hurtled along the Esplanade, through the town centre and out to the hospital, lights flashing and sirens wailing. When they arrived, the police were waiting. She saw Detective Verten at their centre, of course. The paramedics ran Beth through the doors of the Emergency department on a stretcher and Theo went to follow them, but Verten had stopped her.

  ‘I can’t let you go with her.’ His voice was quiet, with none of its usual swagger. The officers at his sides looked down at their feet and then out, past her.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ David said. ‘Theo was the one who pulled Beth out of the water, she saved her, and now you’re saying she has to keep away?’

  ‘I know. I know what she did.’ Verten looked at Theo as he spoke, not at David. ‘And I certainly hope Beth’s life has been saved. I’m going to speak with the doctor and then I’ll be back to take a statement from both of you.’

  Theo had the impulse to cross herself, a remnant of her churchgoing childhood. All this talk of ‘saving’. If only she was a believer now, then she would know what to do. Pray.

  ‘Listen, don’t make this harder on yourself than it has to be,’ Verten said to Theo. ‘If you come inside, we’ll have to arrest you. Keep your distance, and I’ll keep you informed, okay?’

  Around them, ambulance and hospital staff bustled back and forth. Theo craned her neck each time the doors opened, trying to see down the hallway. Verten steered them away from the emergency zone and out to the path. Theo heard him speaking with David but she didn’t register the words. Verten went away and came back with a blanket for her. David left to find her some dry clothes and a warm drink. Verten left. And then Theo was alone.

  When she had dragged Beth in from the ocean and laid her on the sand, her daughter had seaweed wrapped around her head like a crown and snagged in the brush of her pubic hair. A strand snaked into the corner of her mouth. She was so thin that her hipbones stuck out like sails and the sharp wedge of her collarbones made Theo suck at the air like a newborn. It took a long time to find that whisper of a pulse in her daughter’s cool, slippery neck.

  From where she stood now, on the walkway next to the carpark, Theo could see the main doors to the hospital, people entering and exiting in a steady stream. In front of that was a garden. Someone in scrubs stood there smoking a cigarette and a security guard sat on the grass with a newspaper and what looked like a sandwich. It was one in the morning. Behind the hospital, the brewery still belched wheat-smelling plumes of smoke up into the night sky. A delivery truck trundled past on its way to the service entrance, and the guard in the garden waved at the driver. Everything continued to roll on, one hour pressing into the next until it gave.

  She would not stop either, Theo thought. She would not retreat, and she would not be going home to wait. She’d done enough of that. Everything and everyone had carried on without her while Theo had buried her head in the sand, and look where they ended up. No, this time she would stay right here, for as long as it took, until she could see Beth again. She just needed Beth to hold on until her mother got there.

  Later, years after she and Beth got on that train out of Melbourne, Theo had gone into a supermarket and thought she’d seen Alice. Beth had been six or seven, a tiny, noisy, pale fairy. They were on holidays, in a town that Theo didn’t recall the name of, Cladder or Clodough or something like that. They were supposed to be skiing, Theo had some notion that you were supposed to take children skiing, but neither of them liked it, so they stayed inside and drank hot chocolate and played Scrabble. Beth was precociously good at Scrabble. They went to the supermarket to get snacks and colouring pencils. The sliding doors opened with a whoosh, and a few heads swung towards them, but nobody spoke. Theo and Beth wiped the sludgy snow from their boots on the doormat. The supermarket smelt like creaming soda and roast chicken.

  ‘Where do ants go when it snows?’ Beth asked as they wandered down the aisles. She was wearing a green parka. The green reminded Theo of something, but she couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. She felt a familiar panic at the question, she didn’t know. Was she supposed to know the answer? Wasn’t that what parents did, what they were? The keepers of knowledge. The ones who made it all make sense. Theo didn’t know how to make it all make sense.

  ‘They parachute up into the sky and go somewhere warm,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Parachute,’ Beth said, dubious.

  ‘Yes, you know. With those little cocktail umbrellas, or an upside-down lettuce leaf. Up they go! To Hawaii, or Tahiti, wherever it’s warm.’ Theo towed Beth down an aisle, trying to rush her past the chips and lollies. They had eaten a lot of chips and lollies already at the motor inn they were staying at.

  ‘It’s probably still warm at our house,’ Beth said. ‘Because we live at the beach.’

  ‘True.’ Theo reached out for an apple, and another, dropping them in her basket. Beth drifted away, to the rotating stands of beads and trinkets at the end of the aisle.

  Theo tallied items in her head and pushed her fingers into the pockets of her parka, just in case. Lint and crumbs only. She had saved for this holiday for a long time. How could she have known how Beth felt about the snow? How could Beth have known? She had never seen it before. But she wouldn’t set foot on the ski slope, didn’t even like looking out the window at it. When she first stepped out and heard the snow crunch under her feet she cried, ‘It’s breaking, Mummy.’

  Theo told her over and over that it wasn’t, but Beth didn’t seem to trust it. The benign drifts around letterboxes, over shrubs, spoke to her of something hiding. What was this strange white stuff anyway? Powdered glass? No wonder it felt like it was cracking under her weight.

  Beth found the colouring books and began paging through them, murmuring to herself. Theo went into the next aisle, where a woman was reaching for something on a high shelf, a tin of tomato soup. She glanced at it and turned to put it in her basket. It was Alice, the braided hair, the delicate elfin ears and chin, the surprising height of her, the set of her shoulders. Theo stopped, her breath stuck. She ducked her head and shuffled back out of the aisle, her hand over her face like she was rubbing her tired eyes. She ran soundlessly back to Beth and picked her up, leaving their basket on the floor.

  ‘Mummy, what are you doing? That hurts my arm, put me down!’

  ‘Shh, shh, sweetheart, not so loud, I’ll tell you in a minute.’ Theo pressed her hand over Beth’s mouth, and Beth watched her, eyes wide. Alice mustn’t hear them. Theo half walked, half ran back towards the entrance, carrying Beth on her hip. Her heart skittered in her chest. She looked up and saw the security cameras aimed at the automatic doors and cash registers. She would have to find another way.

  ‘Wrong way,’ she said to Beth, trying to smile, her hand still over her mouth. Beth’s teeth pressed into her palm and bit down. Tears sprung to Theo’s eyes, but she kept moving. She would find another way out, she had to. This supermarket wasn’t so big. She calculated which aisle Alice would be in by now, moving behind displays, trying to move quickly but not attract attenti
on. A trickle of sweat ran down from her neck under the collar of her coat and down her back. Over the loudspeaker someone asked for assistance in Fresh Produce. Theo’s heart hiccupped. Her mouth was dry and she felt queasy, but she didn’t let herself think about it. She rounded a corner and ploughed directly into a man coming out of the next aisle.

  ‘I’m sorry, my fault, so clumsy,’ Theo whispered, and saw the man’s eyes go to Beth, who was crying silently, even though Theo had taken her hand off her mouth.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ the man asked Beth. ‘Is she hurt?’ He looked at Theo.

  ‘No, no.’ Theo looked behind him, and then behind them, and started to move away, smiling and shaking her head. Beth raised her leg and kicked her in the stomach. Theo doubled over, still holding Beth, and Alice came around the corner. Theo couldn’t move, she was winded. It was too late. Panting, Theo watched Alice’s shoes, watched them stop only metres away. She looked up, looked her full in the face, and her lungs burned but she drew her breath in again anyway, and then let it out. She let go of Beth, let her slide to the ground.

  It wasn’t Alice.

  The woman looked concerned. ‘Is everything okay?’ she asked. She glanced at the man Theo had run into, who shrugged.

  Theo didn’t answer, just kept staring at her. It was a close resemblance, she could see that now, but definitely not Alice. She tried to breathe normally and let herself sag against the tins of tomatoes in the shelf behind her. It wasn’t Alice. Theo smiled at her. The woman smiled back, confused, and kept walking. The man shook his head and walked away too. Beth stood and watched, her face scrunched up, the fluoro supermarket lights humming above her. She sent Beth to get some colouring pencils. She said she could choose whatever snacks she liked. She said she could have a colouring book as well, two colouring books. Any of them. All of them.

  After a few minutes, Theo got herself together in that supermarket in Cladder or whatever the name of that frozen town was, paid for their shopping, and left. Later that night, lying in bed with Beth, her chin tucked into Theo’s collarbone, little nose on her neck, Theo wondered why she had been worried about Alice recognising Beth’s voice. Alice had never even heard Beth speak. She couldn’t have picked her voice from the voice of any other little girl across this whole country, she didn’t know the way it sounded when she was tired, upset, excited or out of breath from running and skipping and being a little girl. Theo did, though. Theo knew every note in Beth’s range, every stretch of her register. Theo was the one who had taught her to speak and then watched, amazed, as Beth took up language and ran with it, producing fully formed sentences not long after she turned two, diction as precise and plummy as an English aristocrat.

  Theo knew that she could gently lift Beth out of her bed that night and tuck her into the single bed beneath the window, but at some point Beth would return to Theo like a ship to shore. Heading home. Theo would wake and find them together, and she would feel lucky.

  Like every day with this child was a gift that she didn’t deserve.

  chapter forty-six

  Beth remembered herself as a small girl, in a yellow dress with embroidery on the front. She loved that dress. She was wearing gumboots, and sitting on the front step, in the sun, waiting for Theo. They were going to a birthday party, for Toby-down-the-road. The step was warm from the sun and felt nice under her bottom.

  ‘Beth!’ Theo called her from inside the house. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Rea-dy, Mum-my,’ Beth called back in a singsong. She had been ready since forever ago. Toby-down-the-road had said there would be fairy floss, angel cakes and Cheezels for every single kid that came to his party. Beth had already decided what order she would eat them in: cake, Cheezels, fairy floss. If there were little cocktail sausages like Madeline had at her party, then she would have to decide how that fit with her plans, Beth thought. She liked how Cheezels could be rings as well. Beth and Susie could pretend they were getting married. Beth wasn’t entirely sure what ‘married’ was, but she knew it involved a party, just like a birthday. Perhaps it was what happened when you found someone with the same birthday as you.

  She heard Theo coming down the hallway. Beth had been looking out into the bright sunshine, her eyes were a bit funny when she turned around. For a few moments she couldn’t see properly and fuzzy blotches of black swam before her eyes.

  ‘Mummy,’ she cried out. ‘I can’t see!’

  ‘What?’ Theo dropped her bag and crouched beside Beth. With her head buried in Theo’s chest, Beth’s vision began to clear. She turned her face up to Theo’s and burst into tears.

  ‘I thought I’d never see you again,’ she sobbed, and Theo held her tightly.

  ‘Sweetie, it was just the glare from the sun. That happens to everyone.’

  When she turned her face back to the light, her vision was clear, and she was calm again. From that day onwards, whenever she thought of Theo, Beth thought of her then, coming down the hallway. She remembered the feeling of relief before she could even see her, of being in her mother’s arms.

  In her white bed in the white hospital room, Beth opened her eyes and looked for Theo. When she couldn’t see her, Beth closed them again.

  chapter forty-seven

  David had taken a taxi home. He brought his car back, parking it next to the path where Theo was waiting. He drove an old white ute with rust peppered along the panels and a coat hanger shoved into the antenna socket. He steered with his hands at ten and two, slow and cautious.

  ‘Anything?’ he asked through the window when he pulled up.

  Theo shook her head, and David reached across to open the passenger door.

  ‘Step into my office.’

  Theo stretched her lips into something approximating a smile and David gave her arm a quick squeeze as she climbed in. To his credit, when Theo had said she was planning on remaining at the hospital until she was permitted to see Beth, David hadn’t told her she was being silly, or dramatic, or grandiose, or any of the things she’d feared. He’d volunteered to go and get his car. There seemed to be no question of him leaving Theo to it. Verten was less supportive when he came to get their statements.

  ‘Being a public nuisance, that’s your tactic?’ he said. ‘Like those greenie protesters who chain themselves to trees.’ He scoffed and shook his head.

  ‘Does anyone cut down those trees when the people are chained to them?’ Theo asked.

  Verten didn’t answer.

  ‘Whatever works,’ Theo said.

  Verten shrugged, and returned to the hospital. She noticed that he left one of his officers stationed outside the doors, though. David went to ask a nurse for some painkillers for Theo, and brought them back in a little paper cup. She sucked them down like lollies. David reclined his chair and went to sleep. Theo watched the world of the hospital over the dashboard and played with Beth’s donkey necklace, rubbing his hooves across her fingers.

  True to his word, every hour, on the hour, Verten came up to the car and rapped on the window. At three am, he even brought a hot chocolate out for her.

  ‘This doesn’t mean I approve of what you’re doing,’ he said, handing it through the window.

  ‘Drinking every drop doesn’t mean I care what you think,’ Theo answered.

  ‘No change,’ Verten said. ‘She’s still on life support. Mary’s still in there with her.’

  Theo stared straight ahead. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  Verten nodded and went back down the path.

  Before another hour had passed, he returned with another officer, and Mary, pale and drawn, sweet Mary. Theo threw the car door open and pushed through into her friend’s arms. She buried her face in Mary’s hair and both of them cried; helpless and exhausted crying, pushed to the brink and over crying, the sort that kept coming and coming, long after it seemed the water in a person should have dried up. Mary wore something loose and soft and green and Theo pressed her nose into it, gathered a handful of it in her fist at the small of Mary’s back and he
ld onto it. She let all the strange sounds come out of her, the bovine lowing and the howl of something feral, a wildcat snared in a scissor of metal teeth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mary said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t keep her safe.’

  ‘No,’ Theo said, taking Mary’s face between her hands. ‘Nobody could have.’

  She copied Mary’s breathing, their foreheads together, until they were both quiet again. She could feel people moving around, David and Verten muttering behind them.

  ‘She’s in the best hands now,’ Mary said. ‘These doctors cured my mother-in-law even when I specifically asked them not to.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember, I’m a terrible friend –’

  ‘Theo, Theo, I was just joking. It’s okay.’

  Theo took a step back and looked Mary full in the face. ‘Mary, what if Beth –’

  ‘No.’ Mary shook her head. She didn’t drop her eyes.

  ‘No, don’t think like that,’ David said, from behind her. She felt his arm come around her and she leant into it. What if she let herself trust these two people, her friends? It would be so good to trust them. They both said there was no need to fear the worst, and maybe they were right. Hadn’t they been right about so many things? Why not this?

  ‘Who’s with Beth now?’ Theo asked.

  ‘Theo.’ Mary took her hand. ‘Alice is. Alice is with her. She wants to speak to you.’

  ‘Alice is here?’ Theo shivered, it was immediate, visceral, a rejection from her whole being. No.

  ‘Theo,’ that was David then, in her ear, ‘Theo, she could make this stop. She’s the one person who could. Talk to her, tell her why she needs to let it go.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Theo.’ The voice came from behind Mary. Theo couldn’t see who spoke, at first. But she felt like she knew anyway, before the tall woman with the blonde hair and that pointed chin came to stand in front of her, uninvited, again.