by Tabitha Bird
Sam mumbles, somewhere between asleep and awake, pulling me close. I don’t have the strength to push him away. Lion nestles herself behind my knees, head on my leg as if that will keep me here.
I wait until Sam is asleep again before I slip out of bed and write.
Boys, my sweet boys, Mummy loves you. I wasn’t enough and I’m sorry. Mummy will always love you.
Sam, you deserve better. You deserve a wife. They deserve a mother. Remarry. Love her fully. I won’t hold it against you. Look after my babies. I will ask God if I can watch over them. I will ask God if I can kiss you from heaven. Pass on my kiss to our babies each night.
Remember who I was.
Remember who we were.
You were the first man to make me smile.
I will always love you,
Willa
The clock reads 5.57 am as I look out at the dark giving way to a pale morning. Lion’s eyes follow me as I dress, ears erect.
My father’s truck will be a fitting end. The rattle-bang thing I threw rocks at as a child, but couldn’t keep from returning to our house. This time I will be the one to leave in it, run it off the bridge behind Boonah and into the rocks and water below.
Seb is not in his bed, so I look underneath. There he is, arms reaching for me as I pull him out.
‘Mumma, read book?’ he says as I place the truck keys on his bedside table.
He hands me a paper booklet he has stuffed up his shirt. I turn on his lamp.
‘Who made this?’ I say quietly.
‘Super Gumboots ta-da!’
‘Shh.’ Opening the book, I see there are even hand-drawn illustrations in there. My own hand-drawn pictures. Seb rocks on my lap to one last story, which is also the first one I’ve ever read to him.
‘Read it more, Mummy.’ So, in whispers, I do.
‘Again.’ And we do.
‘Please, more,’ he says.
‘I can’t.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I’ll explode.’ I don’t say that I cannot take it anymore.
He looks at me funny. ‘Noooo, no Mumma ’sploding. Read it more again.’ But I nestle him in bed, the book in his hands.
‘Where going, Mumma? Seb come?’ he says as I pick up the keys. Without answering, I stroke his hair with my other hand until I think sleep has cradled him.
Eli is still asleep in his bed and I almost can’t look at him. At the last minute, I do. He is cuddled up with Wozley. Big questions inside his beautiful mind.
I prop the letter beside Sam along with the clown he gave me long ago. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. Then I kiss his lips one last time. ‘I’ll be watching from heaven. I promise. I’ll always be watching.’
At the front door, Lion darts out into the front yard. I scramble after her, leaving the door ajar behind me, but she refuses to meet my desperate whispers. I unlock the truck and throw my keys on the front seat so I have two free hands. The longer I’m a woman running about her front lawn in the pale hours of the morning, the more time elongates and stretches around me, wanting to hold me here, and the more difficult leaving becomes. Finally, I catch her in the farthest corner of our front yard. Tiptoeing back up the front steps, I push Lion back into the house and close the front door silently.
As I walk away I see my Chihuahua scratching madly at the front window. To her I am Napoleon, a god, or at least an astronaut. Grammy is right. Dogs do talk. I look into those eyes. And then I cannot look at her another minute.
Chapter Fifty
2050
Willa Waters, aged 94
I jolt in my bed and wake to thunder and a crack across the sky. Whose bed am I in? Where am I? The room is dark and nothing looks familiar. I search about on the bedside table. I tap on a night light and knock my glasses off. There’s the crinkle, crinkle beneath me of plastic on the mattress. Oh! Is this the Plastic-Sheet Home?
The sky falls down upon the roof. Loud rain. And I remember.
I reversed down the driveway in my father’s truck.
No! Middle Willa – where is she? I manoeuvre to the edge of the bed and work my way forwards. I knock something over and it makes a bang on the hard floor.
There are footsteps and then someone is in the room standing beside me. ‘Are you okay? Did the storm wake you?’
I wave my hands at her in panic. ‘No, no, dear. But can you help me up?’
The woman is standing in her nightie. She moves a good deal easier than me; maybe she’s only in her fifties or sixties, sweet young thing. She slips out of the bedroom and returns a moment later with a wheelchair.
She helps me out of bed and into the chair. ‘Remember, you just use your finger on the dial pad like this,’ she says, demonstrating for me.
I scoot out of my room and down the hallway at such speed I’m sure my hair is flapping in the breeze. Or maybe not, because the woman next to me keeps up fine. But we are almost free. There is a door ahead of us, and we are going to make it out of this place.
When we reach the door I say, ‘Oh, please, help me. I have to get outside. I have to stop Middle Willa.’
The woman touches a few buttons on the wall and lights come on outside. She takes my hand. ‘I’m right here.’
‘You’re going to help me?’ I need Batman and Superman and James Bond and I don’t think she understands.
She pats my shoulder. ‘What can I do?’
‘There is a girl, a Super Gumboots. Something bad happened, but we don’t remember everything.’ My breath is coming too quickly.
‘It’s okay not to remember everything. Is that why you carry this notebook everywhere, Mum?’
‘No, I’m not her mum. She just – Willa hates the little girl and Seb dies in the storm! Please help?’
The woman pauses. ‘Are you talking about something that happened when you were little? Something to do with why you were out driving the night Seb died?’
‘Oh, yes, good girl!’
The woman’s eyes have gentle creases and when she speaks her words are round and smooth and just the right size to hold on to. ‘Maybe we could tell the little girl that it’s okay and that you do love her now?’ She opens my notebook. ‘Let’s write it in your special book.’
The storm is right here, right on top of us. ‘But is that what I need to do? Tell Willa about Super … little … Gumboots?’ Names puddle together in my head.
The woman opens the door and we look out at the violent sky. It can’t be far to the tree. Not far, not far.
Chapter Fifty-one
1965
Willa Waters, aged 9
I swish more water from the jam jar under the mango tree. The ocean wind bites my cheeks, and I hear waves smashing on rocks. I run back to the ocean-garden, away from Silver Willa’s world, and as I cross the rocky edge of it again there’s a flash of lightning. I can see the toy trucks in the backyard as the sky rips in two. Oh, thank you, Ocean. This is Middle Willa’s world. I have to tell her that Silver Willa is gone. The rain is falling so hard now that it’s like God is dumping buckets.
The door to Daddy’s truck is open and there are keys on the front seat. I keep running down the side of her house until I can see Middle Willa standing in the street, head towards the sky. No stars. I want to scream at her that there are no stars. Rain splats her face and she doesn’t seem to care. She reminds me of Daddy staring up, and now I’m not sure if I should run over. Are her hands sleeping monsters, too? I’ve left Lottie and Mummy, and now Silver Willa has gone. Will Middle Willa be mad at me? Will she think I made Silver Willa disappear and I didn’t call the police?
There’s a noise behind me that makes me turn. Someone crawls into the front of the truck with his blanket. Seb? But I don’t have time to check. Middle Willa is walking back this way and I hide in a nearby bush. She gets into the truck, closes the door and reverses along her driveway.
As the truck goes past I look up to the back window and Seb waves at me.
‘Wait! No, wait!’ I run down the hill so fa
st I fall and rocks dig into my knees. I run again, past the shops, past the shadows in the park and the dead-still roundabout. On and on. Rain is sticking my hair all over my face.
Where would Middle Willa go? Where is she?
I run, stop, run some more, my arms everywhere, screaming. Please, please Middle Willa, don’t keep driving. I’ll be good for ninety-three years.
A truck speeds past, splashing puddles of rain over me. Gasping, I stop. Water spills down me and off the ends of my fingers, but I just stand there, looking. Up ahead, the bridge leads out of Boonah.
The brakes screech.
‘Middle Willa?’ My throat hurts from screaming and I don’t think she can hear me, so I stumble out into the middle of the road. Arms waving.
The truck turns around, a huge thing coming at me like a dragon. I don’t move. Truck bigger. Lights brighter. I close my eyes. It’s going to hit me.
But the truck stops. I see the raindrops in the headlights and they remind me of stars.
Someone gets out of the car, a shape moving towards me.
‘Super Gumboots Willa? What are you doing out here on the road?’ She rushes towards me, bending down, knees in the gravel.
I fall into her arms, and we’re smooshed together in the rain.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I couldn’t do it. I tried to ring the police and then I ran to Silver Willa and she’s not there and … Where are you going? Seb’s in the car!’
The night is full of clouds roaring and the sky cracking in half. The stars are so far away.
‘No, honey, it’s okay. It’s only me.’
I pull myself from her arms. ‘No, I watched him climb in!’
She races back to the car, flings open the doors. All of them.
‘Seb come too, Mumma?’ he says.
Middle Willa pulls him out, kisses him all over his face. Both of them wet in the rain.
Then she holds me to her.
Chapter Fifty-two
1990
Willa Waters, aged 34
The back door is open and the wind has blown leaves and twigs inside. There are no lights on in the living room of Silver Willa’s house, but I can see a faint glow from the bedroom. I carry little Seb on my hip as we inch down the hallway, sloshing rain all over the painted floorboards. We enter the yellow room and see Silver Willa lying in what looks like a hospital bed. The back of it is raised so her head is slightly elevated, but it is lolling to one side. At the door of the room is a wheelchair with buttons and gadgets that I’ve never seen before and beside it a pair of red gumboots, the bravest boots she owns.
Another woman, perhaps in her early sixties, holds Silver Willa’s hand, shoulders heaving with sobs. I don’t recognise her face. Beside her are two men, one with freckles and the other with a wildness in his eyes. These men I know. My Seb, my Eli, my boys grown into men who must now be in their sixties.
I stare at Seb, his blond hair all white with age. But he is here. My Seb is alive, both the toddler on my hips and this man in front of me. This much I have changed already.
Super Gumboots Willa races in and throws her arms around Silver Willa. ‘Oh, please, please be okay.’
‘So she didn’t fall, and she wasn’t complaining about light-headedness or feeling sick?’ Eli leans over his mother.
‘She woke with the storm and then she was talking about the Willas again – you know how she talks about the little girl? Maybe I shouldn’t have opened the back door, but she just wanted to hear the rain and then, oh, I don’t know! She got more and more upset and then she couldn’t breathe … Oh, please, Mum. Can you hear us?’ The woman is a mess of big-hearted worry.
I notice grown-up Seb is talking to someone on a device strapped to his wrist. ‘She woke quite panicked and disorientated.’ He looks to the woman, who confirms what he’s saying. ‘Yes, she’s breathing but it’s very shallow.’ He pauses. ‘Pulse?’ Then he’s answering other things that blur together with the panic of his brother.
Grown Eli has his mother’s hand. ‘Mum, please? Open your eyes.’ Lightning cracks through the skies outside. My own body quakes. Here I stand watching myself die. Only moments ago death is exactly what I wanted, but now that I’m watching Silver Willa, a fragile bird in that nest of a bed, things inside me begin to shift.
‘Fight!’ Something lurches inside me. I want her. I want to be her.
‘Open your eyes! Please open them!’ Super Gumboots Willa shrieks.
The little girl I once was turns to me. ‘Do something!’
Grown-up Seb is still talking on the wristphone, with a holographic image before him. I see how much her sons love her, how they will not be okay if she dies tonight.
Silver Willa is motionless. Eyes sealed, skin loose on bone.
‘You have to wake her. Please!’ Super Gumboots Willa curls up beside her on the bed.
But I don’t know what to do. I look about the room for something, anything. On the side table there is a photo of Silver Willa, much younger, and three children. A vase of clover sits beside it.
There’s her notebook: Things I Am Sure of.
I grab it simply to have something of her to hold on to. Older Eli and Seb talk in low voices now, one arm each around the other woman as they watch over Silver Willa.
I sit on the wheelchair, suddenly weak. Little Seb opens the notebook and snuggles in close to me. ‘Read, Mumma?’
I see Silver Willa’s list and notice a last entry.
29. I want to tell Willa she was just a little girl and it’s okay. I love her.
I flip through the pages of the notebook and out falls the note from Solomon, which I must have kept all these years.
An invitation:
Have you met Super Gumboots Willa?
Where: You decide
When: In your own time
Now I know what I need to do. I cross the room and stand beside that little girl, ready to support her. Super Gumboots Willa squeezes the old lady’s hand, her own skinny arms trembling. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t tell the police about Daddy.’ She wipes her eyes in a movement that’s more like a swat, trying to keep everything at bay. But it all spills out. ‘See, I didn’t know what to say. I … I don’t remember everything in the art shed. I was telling stories in my head. Please, please don’t be mad at me. Wake up.’
This time I really listen. Super Gumboots Willa doesn’t remember either. But what happened was bad enough that she was telling stories to escape. And then there are all the other symptoms of trauma that I know she will grow up with. I realise I do know enough to trust my story. And I can work to heal those areas. Maybe there’s hope for a future, then.
Gently, I take Super Gumboots Willa over to the side of the room and kneel in front of her. Young Seb pats her arm.
‘It’s not your fault. Silver Willa wanted to tell you that you’re only little and it’s okay.’ I hear the words as I say them, and for the first time I understand. I couldn’t save anyone because I was a child. No child should take responsibility for saving their sisters or the adults in their lives.
Super Gumboots Willa turns to me. ‘It’s not okay. I think I told Daddy I would do bad things ’cause I wanted to save Lottie.’ She splutters, her face flooded with shame.
‘You think you gave your father permission?’ I grab that little girl and hold her close.
Super Gumboots Willa sobs in my arms. ‘I’m … I’m so sorry.’
‘Please, look at me.’
She tilts her head towards my face. Both of us are tear-stained. ‘There isn’t anything to forgive. You didn’t do anything wrong, okay? Daddies should never ask little girls to do those things. It’s not your job to save your family. Do you understand me?’
She searches my face. I know this will take years of healing, but at least she’s heard the truth. ‘And I know you’re little, but that’s a good thing. Childhood is a gift. And you know what? I love you.’
‘You do?’ Her eyes are wide open.
‘Yes, and from now on I’m
going to listen to you and protect you.’
Silver Willa moans. We stand over her, watching.
‘Is she breathing?’ Super Gumboots Willa pleads.
‘I’m not sure.’ I already know Seb didn’t die tonight, but I still have choices to make about my future. I will no longer believe that I am a liar.
‘Silver Willa,’ I whisper close to her ear, ‘I told her. She’s just little, and that’s okay. And I will keep telling her. I promise to listen to Super Gumboots Willa and believe her stories, letting her know that she is worthy of love. And that maybe I am, too. Pinkie promise.’
Silver Willa’s eyelids flutter open.
‘Mum! Oh, gosh, can you hear me? Are you okay?’ Her children gather around her. An ambulance woman walks through the front door and a little while later they take Silver Willa out on a stretcher.
Gently, and because I am beginning to realise how easily she bruises, I take Super Gumboots Willa by the hand, Seb on one hip.
‘Come on. I’m taking you both home.’
Eli is banging on the window, Lion scrabbling to get out of his arms. I put Super Gumboots Willa and Seb down on the back deck.
When I get to the door, Sam is there, his face drenched in terror.
‘Eli woke me up. Oh, Willa. Are you okay?’ He looks at the bundle in my arms. ‘And you have Seb! We couldn’t find him.’ Sam is shaking as he pulls us all into his arms, dropping the letter I left him.
We stand there. Dripping. Aching. Holding. The rain slowly passes, but the thunder lingers to let us know how close it was.
‘I’m sorry.’ It’s not enough, but it’s all I have left. The boys push themselves between us, the little girl too. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Chapter Fifty-three
1990
Willa Waters, aged 34
‘There’s something I need to do,’ I tell Sam. ‘One last place to drive my father’s truck, and then I have plans for its total destruction.’
