A Single Breath

by Lucy Clarke

  She smoothes both letters out on her lap, an uneasy sensation stirring in her stomach as she wonders why neither was sent. She checks through the drawer again but doesn’t find any more. Logic tells her it must have been a simple oversight, yet she can’t help wondering if there was another reason why Jackson hadn’t sent them.

  A WEEK LATER, EVA is sitting in a bar with Callie, a bottle of white wine in an ice bucket between them. Callie pours generously and slides a glass across the wooden table to Eva. “Drink.”

  Eva obeys, taking a large gulp. She had called Callie in tears after her first shift back at the hospital.

  “What happened?”

  “I . . . I just couldn’t handle it. I left. Ran out.”

  “It was your first day.”

  “I thought I was ready. I delivered the baby and everything was fine—I was focused. I barely thought about Jackson. But, afterward . . .” She shakes her head.

  Eva had lifted the baby from the birthing pool and handed it carefully to its mother, a Polish woman called Anka, who looked spent. The new father had gazed at his son in wonderment, placing the backs of his fingers gently to the boy’s cheek. Then his eyes lifted to meet his wife’s. There was a moment when the room went still. He had said something in a choked voice, the words floating to his wife, whose lower lip trembled as she smiled.

  Eva hadn’t needed to speak Polish to understand what he was saying. He was telling his wife that she was incredible, that he was so proud of her, that he loved her deeply. It was this look, the intensely intimate moment between husband and wife that followed the strain and exhaustion of labor, that had always made Eva love what she did.

  But today, she had felt paralyzed by it. She had stared at the couple—who were only a year or two older than her and Jackson—as she realized with silent horror that she would never know what it would be to hold Jackson’s baby in her arms, or to have him look at her in that way, to be loved like this man loved the mother of his child.

  Because her husband was dead.

  The thought had slammed into her, and suddenly she was backing away and asking the support worker to call another midwife. Then she was sprinting down the corridor, bursting into the nurses’ toilets, and leaning over the sink just in time for bile and tears to be caught in the ceramic basin.

  “I couldn’t stand it,” she tells Callie. “I literally could not stand seeing the husband and wife together. In love. I envied them so much I couldn’t breathe.”

  “That’s how I feel at weddings.”

  Eva manages a laugh.

  “I was starting to forget what your laugh sounded like.”

  Eva tilts her head to one side. “You’re dressed up. You were out, weren’t you?”

  “Only with David,” Callie replies, waving her fingers through the air.

  “I’m so sorry! He was taking you for dinner. You were going to talk about the Melbourne contract. You told me yesterday. My head’s all over the place.”

  “You did me a favor. He’d booked a table at Vernadors,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I ate there before Christmas and was in bed for two days. Never touch their mussels.”

  “I remember.”

  “Course—Jackson was there too that night! I bumped into him having a business dinner. God, hardly the way to hook a new client. Give them food poisoning.”

  “He was fine.”

  “Well, yes, but he did grow up eating stuff he’d scraped off rocks.” Callie takes a drink, then tops up both their glasses. “So, tell me exactly where you’re at.”

  “It was a rough day, that’s all.”

  “Cut the crap. This is me. I want to know everything, all the gory, grisly details of how catastrophically bad your life is right now. Spill.”

  Eva takes a deep breath. “I . . . I just . . . I don’t even know where to start.” She lifts her hands to her head, squeezing her hair at the roots. “I can’t bear it. I literally can’t bear it. I miss him so much. I think of him constantly. I mean constantly. I have full-blown conversations with him in my head. Some days it hurts so much, I don’t think I can do it. I feel like I’m just dragging myself forward, when all I want is to close my eyes and sleep. I want to wake up sometime in the future when it is easier, less painful than this.”

  Eva swallows and continues. “And Mum . . . she’s calling me continually to ask if I’m okay, telling me I can move back home.” She shakes her head sharply. “And I’m not okay. Of course I’m not! But moving in with her isn’t what I want. I’ll suffocate there. I can’t go back.” She bites down on her bottom lip and then says, “I thought we’d have our whole lives together. And now . . . he’s dead. I’ll never get to see him again, or hold him, or hear his laugh . . . or do any of the things we’d planned. And it feels so . . . unfair. Why Jackson? Why did it have to be him? We were married for less than a year. We had everything ahead of us—and he died!” She slams her palm down on the table, making their wineglasses tremble. “I’m furious with him for being so fucking stupid, for being out there on those rocks in the middle of winter, fishing! And I’m furious with Mum for asking us to come and stay that weekend. But mostly . . . mostly I’m furious with myself—because if I’d gotten out of bed a few minutes earlier, or not bothered making a thermos—then I’d have been there in time. I’d have told him to get off the rocks. And then . . . he’d still be here.”

  Tears roll down Eva’s cheeks and Callie reaches across the table and squeezes both her hands.

  “I hate this, Cal. I hate feeling like this. I’m so lonely without him. The apartment . . . it’s awful. It’s so quiet. It’s like the life has been sucked out. I’m living in a vacuum.” Eva slides one of her hands free from Callie’s and wipes her face. “At night it’s just me in there and our bedroom . . . it feels so empty . . . so silent. I sleep with the fucking radio on and a hot-water bottle wrapped in Jackson’s clothes! It’s pathetic!”

  Eva reaches for her wine and takes a long gulp, draining half of it. “I wanted—needed—to go back to work, to keep myself busy, help me stay sane. But today, God, it was awful. That poor couple.” She shakes her head again. “I’m not sure I’m ready to be back.”

  The lights in the bar are dimmed and the music is turned up as the bartender sets the ambience for the evening ahead. “You’re an incredible midwife,” Callie says, leaning in closer to be heard. “You could open a florist’s with all the bouquets new mothers send. But maybe it is too soon. Give yourself some time.”

  “What would I do with it? I feel so . . . separated from him. I know that sounds ridiculous—because of course I feel separated: he’s dead! It’s just, there’s no one I can share this with. I’m so grateful to have you to talk to, but what I mean is, there’s no one here that knew him, really knew Jackson like I did. His friends are great and adored him, and Mum liked Jackson, but she’s grieving for me, not him. I feel like I need to be around people that really loved him, like I did.”

  “You mean his family?”

  She nods. “His dad still hasn’t called back. I keep trying him—but he never picks up.”

  “Maybe it’s too hard for him right now.”

  Eva finishes her wine. “I’ve been thinking,” she says, running a finger over the stem of her glass, “what if I went out there?”

  “Tasmania?”

  She nods. “I want to meet Dirk. Meet Jackson’s old friends. See where he grew up. We were planning to go together in the autumn. And it’s not far from Melbourne . . .”

  “So you could come and visit me!” Callie finishes, a smile spreading over her face.

  Callie was due to start a six-month contract there in February but kept on saying that she would cancel it if Eva wanted her to stay in London.

  “I could even meet you in Tasmania,” Callie says, “and then we could fly on to Melbourne together. The company’s paying for my apartment. It’s a two-bed place, so you would have your own room.”

  “What about David?”

  “He doesn’t do long hau
l. Tells me it plays havoc with his sleep patterns. That’s what happens when you screw a forty-five-year-old.”

  Eva tries for a smile, but feels the sadness that lingers around her mouth and in the dark hollows beneath her eyes.

  “Seriously, Eva, why not take a sabbatical? Give yourself some time.”

  She nods. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “Have you spoken to your mum about this?”

  Eva shakes her head. “She won’t like it.” Her mother’s life had been punctured by sadness; she’d lost her second daughter at birth and then, twelve years later, lost her husband to a stroke. All her love—and all her fears—were poured into Eva.

  “You’ve got to do what feels right for you, not what your mum wants.” Callie pauses. “What would Jackson have said?”

  Without hesitating Eva says, “Go. He’d have told me to go.”

  We talked about taking a trip out to Tasmania. You wanted to meet my family, go for drinks with my friends you’d heard stories about, see the shack on Wattleboon where I’d spent my summers.

  People often think of Tassie as Australia’s poorer brother because the climate is cooler, the cities are smaller and less sophisticated, its brutal history as Van Diemen’s Land is never forgotten. Yet I’ve always loved it for exactly those reasons: it’s wild and rugged, with a shadowy past, and enough raw wilderness to lose yourself in.

  I’d love to have hiked with you in the eerie beauty of Cradle Mountain, where moss drips from the trees, or shown you the wombats that amble on the tracks around Wineglass Bay. We could have been tourists together and taken a boat out along the east coast to see the whales cruising by, or eaten soggy fries and gravy from Buggy’s Takeout in Hobart.

  You used to ask me so many questions about Tasmania, as if by trying to understand the place you could piece me together. But there was a lot I didn’t tell you about my life there; whole chunks of time that I left out, people’s names I never mentioned, things I wanted to forget.

  I’d’ve liked to have shown you every edge of Tasmania because I know you’d have fallen in love with that little island in the sea. But the truth is, Eva, I never planned on taking you there. How could I?

  4

  There is a bus ride to Gatwick, a long wait in the overcrowded fug of the departures lounge, a plane seat with a dusty headrest, a bleary-eyed refueling stop in Dubai, a further twelve hours in the same cramped seat, a frantic run to the domestic terminal in Melbourne, and then a smaller plane heading finally for Tasmania.

  As they descend through broken white clouds, Eva peers through the scratched window of the plane. The Southern Ocean meets the winding Tasmanian coastline that unfurls in a mass of inlets, bays, and wind-ridged channels. She sees farmland, forest, tree-lined hills, and only a scattering of houses. What strikes her is the space. Almost a quarter of Tasmania is classified as a national park, an isolated island wilderness, dropped off the coast of mainland Australia.

  She feels the symmetry of her journey, which is unfolding in reverse of the flight Jackson made to the UK two years earlier. That’s how they’d met: on the plane, with Eva boarding in Dubai after spending a week there with Callie, who was working on a shoot.

  She had a pounding hangover made worse by the depressing thought of returning to Dorset, where she was still living at her mother’s while she tried to save for a place of her own. She barely registered the man in the seat next to hers as she sank down and took out her book. It was only when he introduced himself that she’d turned and looked at him properly. He had pale blue eyes that were clear and cool against his tanned face, and he smiled as he shook her hand, showing a row of strong white teeth.

  “I should warn you,” he’d said, the drawn-out vowels of his accent warm in her ear. “I’ve a low boredom threshold—and I got on this plane in Australia. If you want to request a seat change, now’s your chance.”

  She’d felt herself smile then, and when she glanced down, she saw he was still shaking her hand.

  Like any traveler, he didn’t want to talk about where he was from, but where he was going. He asked question after question about England and so she’d told him about the hectic pace of the capital and how it sprawls out for miles and miles. She told him that Big Ben isn’t actually the name of the clock tower, but the bell within it, and that parts of the Tower of London are over nine hundred years old. She told him what she loved about England: the culture, the history, the mixture of cities and agriculture. And what she hated: the pigeons, the weather, the political correctness gone mad.

  In return he told her that he was a marine biologist and she was captivated by his stories about working off a dive boat on the Great Barrier Reef, where he led tourists in coral restoration projects, or the three months he spent teaching teenagers to dive at an outdoor experience camp on the east coast of Tasmania.

  After the drink cart passed, he poured her a glass of red wine from a miniature bottle, then leaned back in his seat and said, “So tell me, Eva, what is it you love about being a midwife?”

  She liked the question and the way he listened closely as she answered. “Everyone assumes it’s the babies—that all midwives love newborns. But for me it’s working with the women. I get to share one of the most intimate and important experiences of their lives. It’s a privilege.”

  Jackson had studied her for a long moment and then his gaze trailed to her mouth.

  She had felt heat rise in her cheeks. “What about you? Why marine biology?”

  He’d not answered right away, just sat there, thinking. Then he smiled as he told her, “It was a book that made me want to study it.”

  Eva had tilted her head, intrigued.

  “Most Saturday afternoons me and my brother would go to a secondhand store looking for good finds. Sometimes we’d pick up old reels or bike wheels. This one Saturday, I bought an old khaki backpack for a dollar. When I got it home, I found there was a book stuffed inside. It was called The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist. It might sound stupid now, but at the time—I was thirteen—it felt like that book was meant to find me, as if it had stowed itself away. I wrote my name in it and read it cover to cover. I swear I looked at the sea differently after that.” He paused. “It seemed like a mystery waiting to be explored.”

  It was then, that moment sitting beside him in the narrow space of their plane seats, that Eva felt something sway and tip inside of her.

  When they got off the plane in London, they were still talking. They went through passport control in different lines, but met again after customs. Eva was staying the night in Callie’s empty apartment, so they shared a taxi through London and he stared out of the rain-smeared window, not hiding his wonderment at the grandeur of the city. Before she got out, he asked for her phone number.

  He called her the following morning and they spent the next three days in bed together, only leaving to buy croissants and fresh milk. When she finally returned home to Dorset, it was to pack up her things and move to the city with a man she barely knew.

  Falling in love took her by surprise with both its strength and its suddenness, so unlike the steady relationships she’d ambled through previously. It was as if she’d slipped into a parallel world, one where only she and Jackson existed. In those first few months they mapped each other’s bodies, created a dialogue punctuated with their own private jokes, filled a past they hadn’t shared with the sheer and vivid pleasure of the present.

  Now Eva feels the bump and jar of the plane as the wheels touch tarmac, wind roaring against the wing flaps.

  “Welcome to Tasmania,” the captain says, and Eva feels her heart clench.

  IT IS ONLY MIDMORNING when Eva arrives at her hotel, so she dumps her luggage, peels off her winter clothes, and steps into a cotton dress. Her legs look pale and dry as she slips on a pair of leather sandals, then leaves to get her bearings in Jackson’s city.

  Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, is set on the banks of the Derwent River, with the forebodin
g presence of Mount Wellington towering behind it. She heads out along the marina, the warmth in the air easing the tension in her muscles. Expensive yachts and tourist boats are moored beside battered fishing vessels, and shadows of fish circle in small shoals, breaking the surface to pick at sodden crusts of bread.

  It’s a Saturday, but there’s still none of the rush or frenetic pace of a city. Everyone seems to be milling around in cafés, men wearing sneakers or hiking boots, and women casual in flip-flops and shorts. After London, Hobart feels like a village—small, informal, laid-back.

  She drifts on toward Salamanca, where a market fills the street. The air swirls with scents of fruit and sugared doughnuts—the faint whiff of the marina hovering in the background. She barely registers the stalls selling olives, vintage handbags, beaded jewelry, antique books, or the shoppers with colorful bags swinging from their hands. All she feels is the empty space at her shoulder where Jackson should be.

  She imagines the warmth of his hand around hers as if they were walking together. She’d have persuaded him to pause at the antique jewelry stall so she could sift through old brooches and beautiful pocket watches, and he’d have wanted to buy her the prettiest one with money neither of them had. As they walked together he would’ve whispered a private joke about the man with the handlebar mustache selling cider, and then tugged her forward to introduce her to a friend he’d caught sight of, proudly saying, “This is my wife.”

  When Eva looks down, she finds the fingers of her left hand are unfurled at her side as if reaching for him. She quickly stuffs her hand in her pocket and hurries from beneath the canopies and out into the open air.

  She lets her legs carry her forward, moving through the modest city shopping center onto tree-lined residential streets, and eventually into a well-maintained park where groups of young people loll on the grass talking and listening to music, cigarette smoke drifting into the air. Two women in tie-dyed skirts stand beside a table stacked with books, where a hand-painted sign reads: FREE BOOKS .