Before This Is Over

by Amanda Hickie

  “He’s not home.”

  They looked around, like the thieves and trespassers they were, for something hard or long and strong. All they saw was a square of grass like theirs, a featureless brick garage with only a single door and no rainwater tank, and a raised wooden deck attached to the house. Hannah sized up the garden chair, the one Stuart had been sitting in when she last saw him. The metal was too flimsy to do any damage.

  Under the covered kettle barbecue on the deck, Hannah found only a gas bottle, a possible backup, although not as big as their own, and a long set of tongs. She pulled out the gas bottle. “We could use this to break the glass.”

  Sean blanched. “That would make a mess.”

  She wedged the tongs between the leaves of the folding door. The tip bent, bruising the wood of the frame without moving it. They were the two most incompetent housebreakers of all time. They didn’t even come equipped.

  Sean was over the fence as Hannah watched the back of their own house, this time for any sign of the kids. In a second, Sean was back from their garage with a large screwdriver and a hammer. He hammered the screwdriver in between the door and the frame where the tongue of the lock was just visible. Everything about the scene told her they should stop. “How is this not stealing?”

  “It’s borrowing. We’re looking after Ella.”

  “Mask and gloves.” She handed them to him.

  The metal screwdriver parted the wood easily. Although they were breaking the peace for several hundred meters, they disturbed no one but themselves. Sean threw his weight against the handle of the screwdriver, and the wood cracked loudly and gave. The lock stayed in place, surrounded by splinters as Sean pushed the door open.

  “We’ll nail that shut before we go.” He wasn’t convincing himself. “We can nail it from the inside and go out the front door if we can find some keys.”

  The door let into a large open-plan dining area with the kitchen wrapped around the far wall. There was a faint, musty, rotting smell. Hannah opened the curtains on the window that faced their kitchen, to the sight of the back of Zac’s head. She yanked them closed again.

  A door banged and she jumped, ready with an excuse, but it was the latchless back door swinging in the breeze. On the other side of the room, Sean was opening and closing cupboard doors, revealing only plates and glassware. Hannah noticed the neat rows of wineglasses in one. Six red, six white, six cocktail glasses. This was like going through Natalie and Stuart’s underwear drawers.

  There could be nothing in the fridge that hadn’t spoiled by now, but she had a perverse need to be sure. She took a deep breath before she opened the door, expecting to be hit by the source of the rotting smell. The fridge was clean, well organized, and almost empty. Tubs of leftovers, some jars and a couple of well-wrapped blocks of cheese, all carefully arranged. When she finally gasped for breath, she could detect nothing more than the slight scent that already pervaded the room. It was probably imagination, but the air wafted by the fridge door felt a little cooler. She pulled out the vegetable crisper, anticipating a stinky sludge. Inside were two pristine onions and a wilted but intact head of celery—a bounty of fresh vegetables that she could parcel out over a few days.

  Sean closed the cupboard with a sharp tap of his finger. “No space for food.” He was bewildered. “Where do they keep the food?” Hannah looked around. A narrow door in the corner of the kitchen caught her eye.

  “They have a walk-in pantry.” She folded open the door to find a person-sized space filled with shelves of old, shallow boards painted white, floor to ceiling. “Why don’t we have one of these?”

  There was only room for one in the pantry, so Sean left her to ransack it while he filled one of the green bags from the fridge.

  “Only take things that haven’t been opened or don’t go off. In jars, not plastic containers,” she called out to him. “You don’t know how long they’ve been there.” In their fridge, takeaway containers of leftovers often hid in the back and only reemerged weeks or months later. She lived with an anxiety that one day when Zac was browsing for snacks he would indiscriminately hoover up a tub full of contamination. Something, it had turned out, she should have taken a bit more care with herself.

  “What about cheese and eggs?” His head was in the fridge, his voice muffled.

  “Cheese, we can cut the green bits off. Eggs, we can do the float thing or just break them and make sure they don’t smell.”

  In the light falling through the pantry door, she could barely see the well-spaced, orderly shapes on the shelves. She felt for a light switch, flicked it out of habit. Nothing changed. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out regular-sized tins on one shelf—a lucky dip of tomatoes and fruit salad. Who knew secondhand groceries could be so exciting? The first one she picked up, she checked the use by date. A month over. That was a risk they would have to take. A sealed, sterilized tin of peaches didn’t go from being good on the first to dangerous by the thirtieth. She dumped the rest in the bag without checking, as well as the neat stack of child-sized packets of dried apricots beside them. On the next shelf down, there were jars. Pasta sauce on the left, and in three different flavors! Packets of dried pasta lay parallel. She threw them all into the bag, noticing the exotic names—rosemary and garlic penne, squid ink linguine. On the right were half a dozen jars of jams, all farmers’ market flavors with ingredients like ruby grapefruit and Campari. The kids were not going to touch fig and ginger, but she put them all in the green bag. Although they didn’t have bread, if push came to shove they could eat jam with a spoon.

  She had to bend to look into the next shelf. She smiled to herself, wondering whether it was Natalie or Stuart who decided that the odd-shaped jars and tins that wouldn’t stack neatly should be below eye line. A flat tin of octopus, a jar of dukkah, an oval can of pâté. They were calories. They went into the bag.

  She got down on her knees to see into the dark at the back of the bottom shelf. And there it was, a vacuum-sealed kilo packet of coffee beans. She hollered out, “Gold!” And behind it, a couple of small packets of flour and one of rice.

  She waved her hand around the back of the bottom shelf, in case something was hiding. As if a tin could hide itself, as if Natalie or Stuart had considered as they stacked their shelves how best to protect their pantry from theft. But a stolen item required an owner, a loss, and a sense of the conventions of civilized society. Surrounded by someone else’s groceries, she could find none of those things. She creaked herself upright to contemplate the top shelf. What, she wondered, could be so misshapen as to be exiled out of sight and reach? She gingerly used the shelves as steps. Holding on by the ends of her toes and the tips of her fingers, she raised her head above the top shelf, almost hitting the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. She could just see a tin can and a twelve-pack of toilet paper. She let go with one hand to bat the toilet paper closer to the edge of the shelf, grabbing hold again quickly to stop herself from falling. She batted and grabbed three times before she tipped it off the edge. Posh toilet paper, not scratchy brown recycled stuff.

  She did the same with the tin, leaving it teetering, then climbed carefully down, jumped and swiped at it, catching it as it fell. She held it in her hand as she came back into the kitchen. “They don’t have a cat.”

  “They did, before Ella was born, before Oscar was born, remember?” The can was slightly rusty. She placed it down gently outside the back door, trying not to attract Mr. Moon with the Pavlovian sounds of tinned food, and went back inside for a Bunnykins bowl she had seen in the drying rack.

  “We’re going to need some stuff from home to fix the door.” Hannah spoke to the back of Sean’s head as he stared into the empty house. All she wanted now was to stop feeling like a bad guy. “We came for food. They’ll understand food. Now we have to go.”

  Sean took a couple of paces towards the hall before he called out over his shoulder. “Clothes for Ella. And some toys. They want us to look after her.” He was already through th
e door.

  She scrambled after him. “Clothes, toys, nothing else. Pajamas—she really needs her own pajamas.”

  She ran straight into Sean, who had doubled back. “Don’t come in, don’t come any further. You don’t need to see.” As he spoke, she realized the subtle smell, the smell she had looked for in the fridge, was still there. She’d become acclimatized to it in the kitchen. Here it was stronger.

  She couldn’t help herself—she had to look in. Sean caught her with his arm, pushing her backwards. “Out, wait outside.”

  “Why are you going back? If he’s in there, you don’t need to check.”

  “He might not be the only one. And there are still Ella’s clothes.”

  She opened her mouth to object, offer, remonstrate.

  “I’ve seen him. One of us has to be able to tuck in Ella tonight without Stuart in our eyes.” Sean gave her a gentle push. “Out.” In the fight to spare each other, he’d decided to win.

  Crap, bugger, shit. Hannah was breathing hard into her mask, the reused air hot and fetid. She knew. She knew. She bloody knew, they all knew the risks. Even Stuart, even Sean. Especially Stuart and he had chosen to send Ella to them. She kicked the cat food so hard a searing pain shot through her foot. The can bounced on the deck with a dull thud and hit the barbecue with a metallic clang and clatter, answered with a rumble from the garage roof as she caught a flash of Mr. Moon’s tail streaking across. Shit again—she didn’t need a hungry disease vector of a cat as well. A cat who in the absence of easy meals had undoubtedly returned to his instincts. There were enough rats around these days to keep him fed. Much easier to catch than a bat. But if he found a dead bat, or ate a rat who had eaten…She made herself hold still in the exaggerated silence that flooded in behind the noise. Two seconds. The silence shrank to its normal size. Everything she’d done to make them safe, everything jeopardized just by walking into that house. Because of Stuart. He was dead, had been dead for a while, and she had known all along.

  She retrieved the tin of cat food from under the barbecue, emptied the contents into the Bunnykins bowl. One more meal from a tin was one less chance of Mr. Moon dining on bat.

  Sean emerged from the dark of the back door. She looked for some sign he’d heard the racket, but he was shut down, preoccupied. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know the right way to witness something like that, but it deserves to be witnessed. Maybe it was easier when people wore hats. I could have just taken off my hat as a sign of respect. Maybe it was easier to know what to feel when the right rituals existed. He deserves to be respected.” He looked beyond her, and then his eyes snapped onto her face, as if just now realizing where he was. “Let’s go.”

  Hannah went back over the fence first. It was an ungainly exit. She used the crossbars for footholds. Balanced like a seesaw on top, she had to wonder if Stuart had been gone for long enough. Or what she could do if he hadn’t. If there was a “long enough” for a body. If the kids could manage, shut in, alone. She twirled herself half a circle and slowly eased to the ground, falling ungracefully for the last few centimeters. Sean handed two shopping bags over the fence to her.

  “What are you doing?” Ella’s voice behind her made her jump. “Did my daddy give you them?”

  “Go inside.” Hannah couldn’t help but sound cross as she took a step back, pressed herself as close to the fence as she could. “We got a change of clothes for you, sweetie, that’s all. Why aren’t you playing with Oscar?”

  “Ella!” Zac jogged out of the house. “Ella, come back inside.” His face was thunderous. “I told you to stay inside.”

  “And we told you to look after them.”

  Zac’s face didn’t change. She was going to have to give him a few words on blaming your failings on someone else, but the look on his face wasn’t directed at Ella, it was directed at himself. He already knew. Nothing she said could make him feel his error more than he was making himself feel it now.

  Sean dropped down beside Hannah, his voice unmuffled, his mask off. “Go back inside with Zac, Ella. We’ll be in soon.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “No one’s home right now. You have to stay with us for a while.”

  “I want Daddy.”

  Hannah saw Sean flinch. She had to say something, something that wasn’t Daddy’s dead. “Hey, why don’t you go back inside again and see if your mum’s phone is answering now.”

  “I want Daddy, I want Daddy, I want Daddy.” It went from a demand to a wail, screeched over and over again. She threw herself on her back, chubby legs and arms flailing, her face red and scrunched. The sounds of the words were lost in the incoherent anguish pouring out of her.

  Zac stood, stunned by the demonstration in front of him of how such a small failure on his part could lead to so great a consequence. Hannah could see his mind turning over, casting around for a way to make it better, for the words to put it back to where it was three minutes ago. “Ella!” He spoke with heightened jollity. “Why don’t you come back in with me? We can’t finish the game without you. Oscar’s waiting. He really wants to play.” Ella couldn’t hear a word he said. He shifted from foot to foot, put out a hand towards her, and got caught by an arm flung out. He wedged his hands under his armpits and looked unhappy.

  In one movement Sean pulled off his gloves, flung them over the fence, picked up her small body, and pinned it against his, wrapping his arms around her tight. Her limbs could only bat against his trunk. She squirmed and cried, but more from his embrace than her anger and fear. He marched inside, her noise subsiding, and Hannah hoped that meant she was calming, but all she could think was Too late for a decision. He should have used disinfectant before he touched her.

  Only Zac and Hannah were left in the garden. He looked so forlorn, she would have done anything to make him feel less useless, part of the grown-ups. “Could you stay out here for a minute? I could use a hand.”

  “Sure.”

  She found some planks of wood rejected from the pantry reinforcing for being too short, the cordless drill, and some screws in the garage, and clambered back over the fence—harder this time because this side had no cross members and Sean wasn’t there to give her a boost—then got Zac to pass the tools over. He was eyeing her gloves and mask warily. She saw his gaze go to Stuart’s open back door, gently swaying.

  “Ella’s dad wasn’t there?”

  She didn’t have an answer ready but hesitation was as good as telling him. “No one home.” He was only an adult some of the time. She promised herself she would tell him the truth in a different setting, when it wasn’t so immediate. Through the kitchen window, she could see Sean sitting with his arms still wrapped around a now floppy Ella. “Hey, could you look after Oscar for me? Dad has enough to deal with.”

  “Sure, no problem.” He headed inside, if not happy at least useful.

  She searched the kitchen more thoroughly this time, knowing that if the keys weren’t here, they were most likely with Stuart. The thought of having to search a body unnerved her. She found them hidden among coins and old pens in a decorative bowl on the kitchen table.

  The drill in the wood of the back door made a racket, reverberating off the kitchen tiles. It battered her ears and made her deaf when the noise stopped. Loud enough to wake the dead. She pushed the thought away. Every few seconds, she turned to check that she was still alone. The drill became increasingly sluggish and the last two screws only went halfway in, and then only by pausing the drill for a few seconds between bursts to squeeze out the last of the charge. She tested the door with her shoulder—it didn’t move.

  To get to the front she had to pass through the living room and by whatever it was that Sean didn’t want her to see. A few steps beyond the sofa, she stopped, too aware of what was behind her. She turned slowly to say goodbye. The curtains were closed, but through the darkness, she could still make out Stuart’s face. Pale, impassive. He was holding a throw around him, lying on the couch, head at one end. Where
his cheek touched the armrest, he looked bruised, as if he had dropped his head hard, but it could have been shadows.

  “You had a tough choice to make,” she said to the mop of hair.

  Under the top of the blanket, she could see a dark wine filigree of rash spreading across his chest. It was, she knew, the mark of the end. The imprint that said you were not going to be one of the lucky ones.

  She told herself she was facing death up close, but the only thing in front of her was her neighbor, as if she had walked in on him taking a nap. She expected to feel horror, grief, revulsion. But all she could think was that he had put her boys at risk. He could have killed Sean.

  She put the back of her gloved hand against his cheek. It was an uncomfortably personal a gesture for a man she barely knew. She still expected to find warmth, a hint of life. Although Stuart’s cheek wasn’t cold, its eerie room temperature made her snatch her hand away.

  “But you didn’t have the right to choose for us.”

  She considered pulling up the blanket, to hide the brand of the disease and because that’s what you did, but from what she had learned watching cop shows, she assumed his hands would be stiff, and she wasn’t prepared to risk contamination by prying the blanket out. So she left him.

  She locked the front door behind her and checked up and down the road before leaving the porch. Sticking as close to the walls as she could, she trampled some of Stuart’s garden before the fence forced her onto the footpath. There was no one to care about the garden now. The plants would regrow, with or without people to look after them. She broke into a jog up their steps and banged on their door with her elbow.

  Sean let her in. “I was going to do it.”

  “You were busy.”

  He glared at her. “It could wait—you didn’t have to do it.”