by Sue Saliba
mia had felt the blood rising from her chest, up along her throat and burning into her face. she had looked desperately around. no one seemed to have noticed her mother outside in the courtyard beyond. everyone was absorbed in their french texts, busy following the conversation in their books as they listened to it through headphones.
please let no one see her, mia had prayed, and had felt her whole body tighten. please.
her mother had moved closer, swaying slightly as she approached the window, cupping her hands and pushing her face with its smudged lipstick close to peer inside. no, mia had said, and dropped her pen, scurrying under the table in a feigned search for it. no, she had repeated, and willed that the scene outside the window was blank and serene and that her mother was not there and never had been.
at last, when mia had climbed back into her seat and turned to face the window, she saw only the classrooms in the distance and a smudge against the glass, so faint it could have been her imagination.
now, beside ethan in his car, she turned into em’s driveway. it wasn’t really a driveway, more a dirt track that must have once, not so long ago, been forest. the car moved downhill, narrowly missing the sand pit with its tiny american flag stuck inside and came at last to a stop at the back of em’s house.
mia wasn’t sure then whether she should lean across and kiss ethan in a kind of proprietorial way or casually wave a simple goodbye. perhaps she should invite him inside.
she was looking down and biting her bottom lip when he leant across to her and said, ‘please call me, whenever you like,’ and placed a slip of paper in her hand.
she closed her fingers around it and opened the car door. she clutched the paper tightly as she walked towards em’s house and heard ethan turn the car around behind her and start to climb the driveway. please call me … whenever you like.
she should have been completely transported, and she was. except something else, some other force was pulling at her.
as she began to climb the steps, mia thought she heard em inside the house, near the back door, no, surely not, it couldn’t be. em would be busy doing something for the family: sorting out the laundry or washing the breakfast dishes, putting their son christian’s toys away, or chatting with terrence about the bills to be paid or how hard he was working at his job at the university. she’d be listening to his plans for his next hunting trip, perhaps reminding him to unload the gun before he came home. everyone in the house would be occupied.
in fact, it was most likely no one had even noticed mia’s absence, after all, she did sleep in a lot and in the five weeks she had been in fairbanks she had already spent long periods alone in the little room at the bottom of the stairs.
slowly, mia went into the house. no, there was no one behind the door. slowly she crept along the wooden floorboards of the hallway, slowly, slowly, halfway along, opposite the kitchen, was the stairway to her little room, if she just walked carefully, she’d be sure to make it there unnoticed.
on she went until at last she was at the beginning of the stairway. she was putting one foot on the first step when she sensed a presence behind her. should she turn or should she simply flee down the stairs? mia turned. there, standing at the stove and stirring something in a saucepan, was em.
mia froze. so her sister knew she’d spent the night away. no, it couldn’t be. no, em had her back to her, she didn’t know anything. did she? mia studied the angle of her sister’s arm, the tension of her neck, did her sister know?
in the past, mia would have been sure of what em knew. eight years ago or even five years ago she would have been certain, back then, she was sure about everything regarding her sister. back then, she and em had been inseparable, sharing everything, including their bedroom with its lino floor and louvre slat windows and its crack down the far wall that kept growing year by year.
together they had worked one cold weekend to seal up that crack using flour paste and clag and at last paper glue, but with each attempt the liquid had simply disappeared and the gap had remained, it was em finally who covered it over with a picture of the racehorse mia had drawn for her when he had come first in the melbourne cup. the portrait had been a gift for em’s fourteenth birthday. goannas and dugongs, crocodiles and butterflies fascinated mia but she drew em horses because she knew em loved them – elegant, serene, running powerful and free. mia knew that whenever she drew a horse for em she was drawing an aspect of her sister, some part of her sister that no one else could see, that no one else could even imagine.
slowly, carefully now, she crept down em’s alaskan stairs. she reached the little room and it was as she’d left it the afternoon before – the bed haphazardly made, her few clothes spilling out from her suitcase, the vase on the shelf that em filled every few days with fresh forget-me-nots from the edge of the forest.
mia pulled back the covers of the bed and she climbed inside, she should have taken off her shoes, her top, her skirt from the night before, but she didn’t. she left everything exactly as it had been, and she simply lay inside the nest of the bed and waited.
it wouldn’t be long, she knew that. but she didn’t expect it to happen as it did. first with the phone ringing, and then with em’s unhurried steps across the lounge-room floor above her. em usually didn’t answer the phone. she’d leave it ringing and ringing until the message terrence had recorded came on for the caller to hear: you’ve reached the hancock residence. we’re too busy to get to the phone right now, but please state your name and number clearly and we’ll get back to you when we can.
it was a message mia had heard often when she’d called from australia, tired, unslept, having counted the hours that separated her from em – seventeen if it was winter, eighteen in summer.
why wouldn’t em answer? she had wondered.
now mia heard em pick up the phone.
‘hello.’
mia stiffened in her bed. everything in the house was still.
‘hello.’
em repeated herself without a hint of emotion, without a moment of recognition. it was as if she had rehearsed it a hundred times.
‘it’s a wrong number,’ mia heard em say to terrence from the room above before the phone clicked silent. and perhaps terrence believed em. yes, surely he did. after all, that was part of it, wasn’t it? part of the reason em had married terrence – because she got to keep some part of herself private, untouched, even unknown. ‘i’ll put the washing in,’ em said.
and mia heard her sister’s feet walking down the stairs towards the laundry door, except they didn’t stop there. they continued along the passageway towards mia so that when she heard her bedroom door open, mia closed her eyes and pretended to be sleeping.
it was useless, of course.
em sat on the bed and said, ‘it was her,’ as if they’d been lying beside each other all night.
‘how did you know?’
‘because she asked for you.’
often their mother said nothing when she called.
‘she asked for me?’
‘yes.’
mia felt the fear she’d wished ethan could take away from her forever return, except it wasn’t only fear. it was shame and guilt and anger as well. and beneath all that, something far worse.
she pulled back the quilt and sheet. and for a moment, em turned to her as if she were about to lie down in the bed beside her. mia moved so the warmth she’d made in the sheets could be shared by em. she shifted her face on the pillow to make room for her sister’s head. but a sound carried down from the floor above.
‘mommy.’
it was christian.
em stood and went straight to the door. she opened it and left the room before mia had a chance to pull the bedclothes back over herself, but not before she got to feel the force of that something beneath all the other feelings – bold and unremarkable, it was nothing other than a deep, deep sadness.
she knew it was about her mother – or that it somehow radiated from that point. mia ran
her hand beneath the pillow and touched the piece of paper ethan had given her. she pressed her fingers against its surface. she knew she couldn’t call him, not now, it was too early. but she did notice something – how the mere anticipation of calling him took her away from that place of awful sadness.
he was possibility, he was hope.
she went to the window then, small inside the chunk of wall, and she opened it and climbed outside. em and her family remained indoors and her mother was left there, too. she followed the track along which em had sent her looking for blueberries on that afternoon five weeks ago when it was still summer. it was just the same, beneath the newly fallen leaves, she pushed them aside as she went and she found her way back to the place where she’d met ethan. fish that swim through forest? she’d asked him.
yes, why not?
there’d been a burst of something – a little gap in her world of toil and relentless trying when he’d said that. it was as if she were given permission to float free for a moment, to dream. she might even be happy.
why not? she’d said.
and then they’d walked along, and he’d pointed out leaves and plants that she would otherwise never have seen. it wasn’t that they were physically hidden from her view but it was that he somehow brought them alive, or brought her alive, yes, that was more likely.
she could suddenly see distinction and shapes in what had been before a hazy blur.
‘it’s amazing what’s there when you look,’ she’d said.
mia’s recollection was as powerful an antidote as ethan’s note beneath her fingers, or the memories of their night together the evening before. she stood in the forest surrounded by trees and branches and sky and she was unbound. she was back at ethan’s house, hearing the stories of his african childhood. she was being guided through his nearly complete home. and then she was thinking back to those weeks between meeting ethan in the forest and spending the night with him.
she remembered how she had thought of him, just a little at first, and then more and more each day. and she had asked herself who this man might be. she’d searched in the local paper and on the internet for any sign of him in those first weeks after they met, playfully to begin with, and then more and more seriously. but it was as if every attempt to locate ethan only confirmed his fairytale existence.
it should have drained her, looking and finding nothing, but instead it excited her and led her on. it was as if by being unknown, ethan appealed to mia even more because he was so unlike those boys she knew at school in melbourne. those boys were solid and anchored in reality and judged mia by rules she was sure she failed. she was not fun or beautiful or confident like the girls around her. she was serious and fearful and shy. she’d never had a boyfriend in melbourne, but perhaps here in alaska, things could be different.
she heard the breaking of twigs suddenly behind her, then. and as she turned, shifting from memory to the present, mia saw that she was being watched. through the branches and leaves and ferns, she could see a deer with her child was watching her.
‘where have you been?’ em asked when mia came in through the back door. em was scraping christian’s shoes clean on a square of newspaper in the hall. ‘i’ve been into the forest,’ mia said.
and mia was surprised by what followed.
‘it might be better if you didn’t go there.’
‘but why? it’s so magical and beautiful and i’ve been down to the part where the fish swim.’
‘mia …’ em looked up at her. ‘it might not be like that forever.’
mia sensed something was about to be said, something important and somehow difficult.
but it didn’t end up being said, not then, because a voice carried down from the lounge room: loud, clear, and unable to be ignored.
‘there’s no river in the forest,’ terrence called.
mia wanted to reply that she hadn’t said a river, but she stayed silent and touched the left sleeve of her cardigan, running her fingers over its ribbed cuff. she felt a tiny stem of black hemlock embedded in the pattern of its wool: fragile, rare, surviving only in piscine worlds, it was known as the plant of belief.
well, it could have been black hemlock. who but terrence would have known? terrence was a doctor of chemistry at the university of alaska, which had its campus in the middle of fairbanks, and he seemed to be an expert on many things. mia had first been struck by his sense of authority when she’d been watching television with him and em soon after she’d arrived.
‘it’s scientific nonsense,’ he’d said. they were watching a current affairs program on the subject of depression. ‘sure, everyone has their bad days, but you just pull yourself out of it. you get on with it. this depression thing is just for people to get sympathy and for drug companies to make money.’
‘perhaps it helps people to give something a name,’ mia had said.
he hadn’t quite known what she’d meant, but she didn’t elaborate; she didn’t want to seem contrary or difficult, after all, he was em’s husband and he’d agreed to have her stay and had tried to make her welcome when she’d arrived, greeting her at the door when em had brought her from the airport and carrying her bags to the little room. he’d even lent her his bedside clock. in the first few weeks, there’d been times when they’d sat together in the evenings, after em had gone to bed early, he read his baseball magazine or his scientific journals and she flicked through the pages of some half-read novel.
‘what’s the most number of home runs anyone hit last week?’ she’d inquire, she wasn’t really interested in the answer, but she’d ask and she’d listen to his reply. ‘well, let’s see …’ and he’d go through the tables on the back cover and give his judgment on each player and team and explain how they could have performed better.
baseball, mental health, mia’s future education – terrence had an opinion on them all. mia listened politely and was sometimes taken aback, but it was when he offered his assessment of em one afternoon that she was entirely shocked.
‘she’s really not very strong,’ he said as a passing comment, and mia was dismayed. this wasn’t how she knew her sister, this wasn’t how she remembered her at all. and yet, strangely, the longer mia stayed in their house, the more she witnessed em adopt a kind of deference when she was around terrence.
‘i’m sorry,’ em said one night when she served supermarket canned soup with dinner and terrence scowled at it. christian had been sick all afternoon and she’d had no time to wash and chop vegetables to make the broth that took two hours to simmer on the stove, em said nothing when terrence left the bowl untouched, just as she said nothing when he contradicted her knowledge of infants’ nutrition, although she was the qualified paediatric nurse.
‘no, a child shouldn’t be given extra vitamin c before the age of two,’ he said, as he read over her shoulder on the couch one night. she’d been preparing an information sheet for one of her patients at the hospital where she worked part-time, as a student nurse she’d been marked as the most likely person to soon be running the department. but since the birth of christian she worked only three mornings a week, rushing into the hospital when she could arrange child care and hurriedly doing the rest of her work at home while christian slept, or late into the night when everyone else had gone to bed.
em never challenged terrence’s comments, never defended herself against them or their inferences – although if she’d chosen to, she could easily have defeated him. instead she stayed silent, calm, it wasn’t that she was fearful of him and it wasn’t that she was in awe. she may have once been in love with him – yes, mia could remember the letters em had written excitedly when she had first met terrence at the university – but there was something else mia sensed, something else that terrence offered.
mia stood beside her sister in the hallway, it occurred to mia that em was as obedient to christian as she had in the past been devoted to mia. once, when the sisters were younger, it had seemed nothing would take them apart. now, and mia could no
t avoid the awful truth, she and em had hardly spent an afternoon alone since she had arrived in alaska. they had hardly had a conversation alone, without christian interrupting, without christian claiming the attention, yes, em’s son was the focus of em’s world, he was the focus of her life.
mia removed her fingers from the plant material caught in her sleeve and she looked at it. black hemlock? what had she been thinking? suddenly it was nothing more than dull clover, the ugly grey weed grown throughout all of north america. there was nothing special about it.
it was true, there was nothing special to be seen at all. she made her way again to the tiny room at the bottom of the stairs. it would be cold with the september wind sweeping in through the open window; she knew that. she could brace herself, pull her arms against the skeleton of her body and shut out the chill, but she was tired of closing out all that she didn’t want, all that she thought caused pain and discomfort. there was so much effort in shutting out, in focusing, in forcing belief, for a moment, she let herself be defeated, wished herself not exactly into annihilation but into a temporary absence, into being nowhere and no one just for a little while.
when she got to the room, she was surprised to find that it wasn’t cold at all. it was warm, as warm and cosy as the space she had made for em in the bed beside her that morning, and as familiar, the window had been closed, locked, a trace of brown mud from christian’s shoe was against the sill, now dried to powder. mia sat on the bed. she slid her hand beneath the pillow and she felt the note that ethan had given her.
call me whenever you like, he had said and handed her the note, the note itself had not changed, it still suggested hope, but there was a shadow about it now, a kind of question that reared up and asked, do you really believe such a thing?