A Single Breath

by Lucy Clarke

  “Saul will.”

  Callie eyes her closely. “Why are you really going back?”

  “I’ve already told you,” Eva says tightly.

  Callie looks at Eva for a long moment, then she shakes her head. “You shouldn’t have gone to Tasmania in the first place. It was my fault for encouraging you. Going back won’t make this better.”

  “So what will?”

  “Time. Looking forward. I don’t know. I haven’t got the magic solution. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be in Tasmania on your own.” She pauses, her finger tracing the edge of her place mat. “Perhaps you should think about . . . speaking to someone about how you’re feeling.”

  Eva stares at her. “You mean a therapist?”

  “It might help,” Callie says softly.

  But Eva doesn’t want to talk about what’s happened; she wants to know why it happened. She needs answers—and a therapist isn’t going to have them.

  Eva is going to go to the person who just might.

  The idea of you finding out the truth terrified me. There were some days when I thought I couldn’t keep up the pretense any longer.

  Before I came to England, my life was a mess of mistakes scrawled across a white page. When I met you, I thought I could just turn that page over, start again. But I was wrong.

  I don’t expect sympathy from anyone: I put myself in this position, no one else. But I do want you to understand, Eva, that it was hard for me, too. The life we’d made together was incredible—more than I could have ever dreamed of—but even during our happiest times, I was always waiting for that moment when it would start to come undone. There were times when I actually wanted it to. I wanted to be caught out, confronted, held accountable—just so all the stress and lies would be over.

  One evening I went for a run after work—I did that sometimes to try and shake off the anxiety. But I couldn’t outpace it that night. It ran alongside me, reminding me of everything I’d done, everything I could lose.

  I came home and sobbed in our shower. I didn’t hear you come into the bathroom—but I heard you leave. You must have seen me in there crying, but you didn’t ask what was wrong. Maybe you thought I’d tell you when I was ready. Or, maybe there was a part of you that was scared to know.

  20

  Eva stands on the deck of the shack, breathing in the smell so familiar to her now: salt air, eucalyptus, a briny tinge of seaweed. The bay is calm, a gentle breeze quivering over its surface. Large clumps of kelp lie on the shoreline like sleeping seals, and she imagines there must have been some strong winds while she’s been away.

  She turns from the view and wanders inside, lightly trailing her fingertips across the kitchen counter. Everything is exactly as she left it. The only clues that time has passed are the wrinkled, waxy skins on the apples left in the fruit bowl and the layer of fur in the coffee mug that stands beside the sink.

  She moves into the bedroom, pausing in front of the mirror to look at her reflection. Another clue of time, she thinks as she examines the dark hollows beneath her eyes. Sleep has become something elusive, chased away by anxiety. The one question that stalks her through the night: Why did Jackson marry me?

  There must be plenty of facts to explain how: how he forged the paperwork, how he managed to juggle so many lies, how he got away with it. But all Eva is interested in is why?

  She hopes she’s doing the right thing by returning to Wattleboon. Perhaps Callie was right to warn her against it, because simply being here pulls Jackson even deeper into her thoughts.

  A wasp flies dozily into the room, causing her to glance up. She watches as it makes a large, haphazard circle of the room, then flies straight for the window, which it hits and falls to the ground, stunned. Swiftly, she grabs an empty water glass and crouches down, trapping the wasp. It buzzes against the ridged glass.

  Eva fetches a magazine and slides it under. As she does, her eye catches something on the wooden floorboard beside her. It’s a marking, one she’s not seen there before. Something has been scratched into its surface. She tilts her head and sees small, angular letters freshly carved into wood.

  Her breath catches in her throat as the letters form into a word: Jackson.

  She sits back sharply, pressing herself to the wall.

  The air contracts around her. Her ears fill with a rushing sound as blood races to her head.

  She blinks, staring at his name. It is right there in the wood. Slowly, she lowers a hand toward the floorboard and runs a finger over the grooves. She is not imagining it. They are real. She feels each letter in turn, as if she can read something more from them.

  Leaning down so that her face is only inches away, she examines the inscription. She notices now the dark film of dust and sand that has worked its way into the letters. They are not freshly carved at all. From the look of the grime filling each groove, the inscription must have been here for years.

  Eva sits up, shocked at herself. Grief or misplaced hope had prompted her first thought: Jackson is here. She shakes her head. The rational explanation was clear. Jackson had grown up in this bay, had probably been friends with the owners of this shack. Either bored or just young, maybe he had once carved his name into the wood.

  Eva knows Jackson is dead. She does. She was there on the beach. She spoke to the witnesses, the police officer, the coast guard. She felt the icy water, saw the waves churning up the sea. But still. She knows that Jackson had deceived her so deeply that the smallest seed of doubt has been planted, enough to make her trawl over every detail of that day, of every day, to see if there was anything that she’d missed.

  She squeezes her eyes shut, telling herself: Keep it together, Eva. Then she gets to her feet, grabs the glass with the wasp, and carries it out of the shack. As she passes the shelf in the living room, she pauses.

  It is empty. The framed picture of her and Jackson at the jazz festival is missing.

  She steps closer and stares at the shelf. She knows the photo was there when she left—she looked at it every day. There is absolutely no way she would have misplaced it. Her skin prickles cool as she glares at the empty space where it should be.

  Her concentration must slide away from her as she hears the thrum of the wasp as it escapes the glass. It flounders upward, toward Eva’s face, and she swipes a hand through the air, batting it away.

  Suddenly she feels a vibration of wings caught within her sleeve. She panics, yanking at her cardigan and shrugging it from her shoulders in a rush of movement.

  But she is too late. The bite of its sting pierces her forearm like a hot needle.

  SOMETIME LATER EVA WALKS over to Saul’s place, her arm still throbbing. She finds him bent down, repairing something beneath the deck of his house. On hearing her voice, he turns sharply, clunking his head.

  He comes out blinking, rubbing his hair. He’s wearing a thick navy sweater, the sleeves of which are starting to fray. His shorts are rolled up, as if he’s just waded in from the water, and the skin on his upper thighs is pale where it hasn’t seen the sun. “Eva? You’re back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “With Callie.”

  “I’ve been calling you. I wasn’t sure if you were coming back. You left your stuff, but . . . well, I wasn’t sure . . .” His sentence trails off. He shoves his hands in his pockets.

  “How did you know I’d left my things? Have you been in the shack?”

  “The shack?”

  “Did you move the photo?”

  His brow creases and he looks at her blankly. “What photo? Eva, what are you talking about?”

  “Of Jackson and me. It was on the shelf when I left. Did you move it?”

  “No, of course not!”

  She looks at him for a long moment, weighing up whether or not she believes him. Perhaps it is possible that she moved it herself. Her head was all over the place in the days before she left.

  “Listen, Eva,” he says, taking a step tow
ard her. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you Jackson was married. I should’ve.”

  “Were you hoping I’d never find out? That I’d just fly back to England and that would be it?”

  He holds her eye as he admits, “Maybe at first. Yes.”

  There’s a pause. “And later?”

  “And later,” he says, his gaze slipping toward her mouth and then returning to her eyes. “I wasn’t sure how I felt.”

  “I trusted you,” she says quietly.

  Saul moves forward so there are only inches between them. She feels the physical proximity of him and is aware of her heart beating faster. Suddenly she is remembering the day on the boat, the press of his lips against hers and the strength in his arms as he held her. She forces herself to breathe slowly. She cannot allow herself to feel this.

  “When you turned up on Wattleboon, I thought you’d be here for a few hours and that’d be it. Dad had begged me not to say anything, so I didn’t. But then,” he says, pausing, “you stayed.”

  When he speaks again, his voice is low, intense, as if he is willing her to understand. “I didn’t want to lie to you. That’s not who I am, Eva. But the idea of telling you—God, I kept goin’ over and over it. You’d just found out you were pregnant—I couldn’t tell you Jackson had another wife, not then. And afterward . . . after the miscarriage . . . it just felt cruel. I couldn’t do it. I’m sorry.”

  He removes his hands from his pockets, and for a moment, she thinks he’s going to reach out and hold her; instead, he places his palms together in front of him as if he’s about to pray. “I want to be honest with you now. I want to be honest with you always. There are things we need to talk about—”

  “I want to meet her,” she interrupts.

  He draws back a little, his hands falling to his sides.

  “I need to talk to Jeanette. That’s why I’ve come back.”

  He closes his eyes and swallows.

  “What?” she says, a twinge of anxiety beginning to stir. “What is it?”

  He opens his eyes and looks at her steadily, his mouth tightening over something he doesn’t want to say. “There’s a child, Eva. Jackson and Jeanette had a child.”

  SHE SITS AT THE table opposite Saul. There is a smooth white pebble on top of a pile of mail, and a book spread open about cloud formations. She runs her thumbs along the edge of the table, thinking.

  Jackson had a child. A son, Saul tells her, called Kyle. He is three years old. Eva works out that Kyle would have been nine or ten months old when Jackson left for England.

  She thinks of the baby she lost and how, even before it had been born, she had already begun to love it. She flattens her hands against the table, the wasp sting just a dull ache now. “How could he leave his own child?”

  Saul doesn’t answer.

  In delivery rooms she’d watched fathers fall in love with their children; she’d seen the way their eyes grew damp as they cradled them for the first time; she’d heard whispered, choked words of welcome and love—and she thinks, I did not know my husband.

  She tries to recall whether there were any signs that Jackson had been in touch with his son through Jeanette, but she can’t think of any; no private phone calls or e-mails, no photo slipped into his belongings. But the idea that he had no contact with Jeanette and therefore, Kyle, is worse than believing that he had.

  He’d always talked about wanting a family. Two girls, he’d said.

  Eva looks at Saul. “You said Jeanette lives in Tasmania still.”

  “Yeah, in Warrington, in the northeast.”

  “Did Jackson live there with her?”

  He nods. “I never visited them, but I know the area. It’s a remote town on the coast—mostly just farmland. Jackson had a job in a pub, Dad said.”

  She tries to picture Jackson living somewhere isolated and rural and it surprises her given his love for the city. But then, so much has surprised her. “Have you met her? Jeanette.”

  Saul draws his hands to the edge of the table and looks up at Eva. “She’s the one,” he says, his gaze darkening. “The woman Jackson and I fell out over.”

  It takes a moment for this to register. Jeanette was the woman Saul had been in love with, the same woman who had left him for Jackson.

  Now it begins to make sense why the brothers never made up. Not only did Jackson take Jeanette, but he married her, too. They had a child. How could Saul bear to watch all that?

  She thinks about this faceless woman who was the mother of Jackson’s child and a sharp flash of pure jealousy seizes her: Jeanette had a child with Jackson.

  Eva’s child died.

  She keeps her gaze on Saul and asks, “Will you tell me about her?”

  THE CHAIR CREAKS AS Saul leans back, wondering where to begin. “We’ve known each other since we were kids. Her family,” he says, pausing, “they owned the shack you’re staying in—before Joe bought it.”

  Eva balks. “Jeanette used to live there?”

  “In the summers, yes. I know that must be strange for you,” he says, understanding the irony that both of Jackson’s wives had spent time in the same shack. “But it was the only place I could think of for you to stay.”

  “Jackson’s name—it’s carved into a floorboard in the back bedroom.”

  “Is it?” he says, not sounding surprised. “Maybe Jackson did it as a kid. Or Jeanette could’ve—she had a crush on him growing up.” He reaches for his glass of water and takes a drink, then sets it back on the table. “Jeanette and I used to hang out a lot when we were younger. We were the same age.” He looks out briefly toward the bay. “Then, when we were thirteen, there was a bush fire.”

  “The fire that killed your mother?”

  He nods slowly. “After that, our family stopped comin’ out here—it was too hard on Dad. So I didn’t see Jeanette for years. We met again by chance almost a decade later at a mutual friend’s wedding. We spent the whole night talking, catching up, and I guess things grew from there. We were together for a few months and I thought it was serious . . .”

  “But then she met Jackson,” Eva says.

  He nods, remembering the night of his birthday. Jeanette had worn a white sundress and in the dusk she looked ethereal as she turned to face them. Saul noticed the way Jeanette’s gaze locked with Jackson’s and how she’d smiled at him, a finger touching her collarbone.

  “There was something between them from the start,” Saul tells Eva. “Just the way they looked at each other gave it away.”

  “What happened?”

  Saul draws a slow breath in. “Jackson persuaded Jeanette and me to go into town with him after the barbecue. He got us into this club he did some work for and sorted out a load of free drinks. I bumped into a couple of guys I knew and had a quick beer with them.”

  Saul shifts in his chair. “Afterward I went to find Jeanette. She was sitting with Jackson in the corner of the club. There was this look about them—maybe it was their body language, or the intensity of the conversation they seemed to be having, but I knew something was going on. Then, while I was standing right there, Jackson kissed her.”

  Saul remembers the fury he felt in that moment. He cared about Jeanette—thought he even loved her. “I was so angry that I knew if I went over we’d end up in a fight. So I left.” He had jogged home via the beach, where he stripped off and swam out to a marker buoy, burning off some of his rage in the water.

  “Jeanette called me the next day. She didn’t ask why I’d left the club, or what I’d seen. She just apologized because she was breaking up with me. She didn’t mention Jackson. Neither did I. That’s what made it so strange. Jackson never said sorry. I don’t know if he felt guilty—or if he just didn’t care. There was no argument, no fight.” They had simply stopped speaking and drifted out of each other’s life, like a tide that was always going to turn.

  “So Jackson kept on seeing her,” Eva says, “and you went to South America.”

  He nods. “Dad was the only one who saw th
em—and I didn’t want to hear anything about it. Didn’t even want to hear his name. There were a few bits I caught, of course; when they got engaged, when they had the baby. The next thing I heard, they’d separated and Jackson had gone abroad.”

  “To England,” Eva says with a smile so sad that he wants to reach across the table and hold her. “Your friend—Flyer—he said Jeanette was distraught over Jackson’s death. Do you think she still loved him? Even after he left?”

  “It’s difficult to know. But from some things my dad said, I’d guess yes.”

  Eva muses on this for a moment and then she says again, “I’d like to meet her, Saul. Would you take me?”

  21

  They fly along the highway in the lashing rain, the truck’s wheels kicking up sheets of water. Fishing rods jig and dance on the back shelf, reels clacking together. Eva gazes out through the rain-smeared window at the wide expanse of Great Lake, rain and wind churning its surface.

  The drive to Jeanette’s home in Warrington is over four hundred kilometers. She thinks that if a map of Tasmania looks like a heart, they are on the course of an arrow shooting diagonally through the center of it.

  Eva’s seen little of Tasmania beyond the watery edges of Wattleboon Island, but she doesn’t make an effort to notice the small townships dotting the lake or the shadows of mountains in the distance. She just wants to get there. Get this over with.

  She runs her forefinger over one of the truck’s air vents, wiping off a film of dust. Back and forth she trails, revealing the smooth plastic beneath. They’d set off yesterday evening and she and Saul had taken rooms at a motel to break up the journey, but she’d barely slept, the same nightmare about Jackson tearing into her dreams. She’d found herself gazing at the red digits on the clock on the nightstand as they tripped through till dawn.

  Saul glances at her. “You okay?”

  She blinks and withdraws her hand, wiping it against her jeans. She feels wired, on edge. She shouldn’t have had the espresso at the gas station, but she needed something to take the edge off her tiredness. “I’m fine,” she says. She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands and then stretches, her fingertips pressing against the roof of the truck. She twists around in her seat and faces him. “Am I doing the right thing?”