Last Bridge Before Home

by Lily Malone

  She turned to the support worker who’d joined them that morning. ‘I’m so sorry, Terry.’

  ‘It’s fine. There’s no rush,’ Terry said.

  They should have been at the winery five minutes ago.

  Terry had travelled from Bunbury to visit Whale Rock Wines this morning and assess the workplace to make sure it was suitable for Jaz.

  Brix had suggested the job, and they’d had Lynne Farrell’s input to connect all the dots between the support agencies, Disability Services and Centrelink. It was paid work—making up boxes for packaging wine orders. Jaz would work one morning each week to start with and if she went well, they could see about her doing more.

  It was an incredible opportunity, but one that required the wearing of closed-in shoes. Jaydah sighed again.

  ‘How about if we take the shoes with us and walk down to the winery and see what you think when you get there, Jasmine,’ Terry said.

  Jaz brightened. ‘Can we take some cake for Brix?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ Jaydah said.

  ‘Can we take some cake for me?’

  ‘I guess we can,’ Jaydah said.

  * * *

  ‘So watch me do this, Jasmine,’ said the cellar door manager, Essie, a small-boned woman with a happy face and long, thin fingers that reminded Jaydah of a dragonfly in the way they sped about her tasks.

  Essie folded out the flaps of the box and turned it over before demonstrating how to run clear tape along the bottom of the box where the flaps joined. Then she flipped it up and placed the box, bottom down, on the floor with the cardboard flaps opening up.

  She picked up another of the flat-packed boxes, all stamped with the Whale Rock logo, and made another box and set it inside the open flaps of the first, then another.

  ‘Now you have a turn. See if you can make a tower like mine.’

  It took a few repetitions, and she had trouble with the tape gun, but after a while Jaz put together her first unassisted box. With her tongue poking from the corner of her mouth as she concentrated, she made another box, and a third.

  ‘My tower will be higher than yours,’ she said to Essie. ‘This is easy work. I like this work.’

  ‘Do you know what I think?’ Terry murmured quietly to Jaydah.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think she might have thought all work involved shovelling rocks … Maybe she thought she’d have to do that here. From what you’ve told me, I don’t blame her if she didn’t want to shovel rocks.’

  Brix looked into the warehouse and came across to them, putting his hand in the small of Jaydah’s back and rubbing her spine with his thumb. ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘She’s doing great.’

  ‘Way to go, Jaz,’ he called to her. ‘You’re doing a great job.’

  Jaz looked up at Brix and beamed at him, then returned her attention to the next box, pulling out the flaps and turning it over to run the tape across the bottom gap.

  ‘Did you see that, JT?’ Brix said beside her. ‘She didn’t cover her mouth!’

  ‘I know,’ Jaydah said, standing there, ever so slightly stunned.

  Brix nudged her ribs with his elbow. ‘Gee you’re a big softie, JT. You’re crying!’

  ‘I know,’ Jaydah said again, and she turned her face into Brix’s shirt and used it to wipe her eyes.

  She left the winery soon after because Terry wanted to make sure Jaz could work without Jaydah, Brix or her mum with her and not get anxious.

  * * *

  Getting work for Jasmine turned out to be easier than finding something for herself.

  The local paper didn’t have many vacancy ads, and those that were advertised tended to be seasonal work for waitresses, or for casuals for the coming vintage. Nothing took her interest.

  ‘I don’t see why you’re worried. Take a holiday, JT,’ Brix said when she complained about not paying her way.

  ‘I’m not used to sitting around doing nothing.’

  ‘Are you getting bored?’

  ‘Not really,’ she had to admit.

  ‘Then relax. We’re fine for money.’

  ‘Brix, I just added three extra mouths to your house and Jaz eats enough for two. That’s four extra bodies using power and gas and eating your food.’

  ‘I’d pay your mum to cook, she’s amazing, and this house has never been so clean. I should be paying her.’

  It was a fair point. Her mum found it impossible to sit still in his house.

  ‘Just go with it, JT. You’ve worked all your life. You’ve earned a holiday, so take it. Let me look after you for a while.’

  So she did. She made a point of keeping her mum’s driving lessons going, applying for a Learner’s permit and eventually taking her mum out on the quieter roads to get her log book hours up. Jaz would sit in the back of the Subaru, flicking through her racehorse scrapbooks, and they’d drive to the beach at Busselton where the water was warm and calm and the very worst thing that could happen was that Jaz might complain about the sting of salt water in a paper cut.

  ‘It’s not fair that paper can cut,’ she’d say, staring at the faint nicks on the pads of her fingers. ‘How can paper cut? And how can cardboard boxes cut? It’s not scissors.’

  They walked out on the Busselton jetty and took Jaz to the underwater observatory there, then rode back on the train, which Jaz loved, although the motion of the small train made Jaydah feel queasy. When the train got back to shore, she and her mum would sit up near the playground in the shade nursing a coffee while Jaz would make sand castles that somehow always managed to look like the snowmen they’d made together in the quarry on the farm.

  On one of these trips, while they watched Jaz on the beach, her mum put her cup down and cleared her throat. ‘He is a good man you have married, my Jaydah,’ she said.

  ‘I know he’s a good man, Mum.’

  Her mum flapped her hand. ‘I am not saying it right. I mean more than this.’

  Jaydah waited, watching Jaz poke a piece of seaweed into her castle like a flag and stand back and look at her effort, and then the exploits of other kids on the beach, as if she was sand castle judge and jury.

  ‘I mean: your marriage is not like my marriage. Brix is a good man and you—’ she hesitated. ‘You are happier with him. I see it every day. You are glowing now. It is like his love is inside you.’

  ‘I am happy, Mum. I feel like a new person. I feel like I wasn’t whole before without him, and now I am. I have you and Jaz. I have Brix. It is everything I ever wanted.’

  I just hope Brix is as happy as I am. I hope I haven’t complicated his life too much. He had such a simple life before.

  As January ebbed away and the grapes ripened, the vines grew heavier and Brix prepared for vintage. The Tully women thrived in sunshine and safety, and by February Jaydah could almost dream that maybe, just maybe, it might always be this way.

  CHAPTER

  24

  The letter from Manila arrived in the second week of February, covered with colourful stamps when Jaydah collected it from Brix’s box at the local post office.

  She wouldn’t let her mum read it until she’d driven them safely home, but the moment they were all inside Jaydah handed it over.

  Her mum slit the envelope with the nail of her thumb. She took a gulp of air as she read, then another, and soon the gulps meshed together and her tears slid to the page, blurring the handwritten ink.

  ‘What is it?’ Jaydah asked. ‘What does it say?’

  Her mum had been holding the page in both hands, but she let one drop. The paper fanned towards Jaydah.

  ‘It says they never got my letters,’ her mum said.

  ‘What? None of them?’

  ‘Never. Not since the one I sent when you were born. They say they wrote and wrote to me and I never answered.’

  ‘But you said you never got a letter,’ Jaydah insisted.

  ‘I never did.’

  ‘Dad kept them,’ Jaydah stated. Another brick got cemented
in place in the wall of hate she bore in her heart. ‘He hid them from you, Mum.’

  ‘They say they never got the money also.’ Her mum picked up the hanging edge of the page. ‘Not for years and years and I thought we sent something every month. Your father—’

  ‘Don’t talk about him. I hope he rots in hell. No. That would be too good for him!’

  ‘I hope he rots too,’ her mum said.

  When Brix got in from the vineyard that night, Jaydah told him about the letters and the money. He listened to her rant while he pulled off boots and socks all sticky with grape juice, and he let out a sigh of relief as he wiggled his bare toes.

  ‘If it’s money that’s worrying you, I can help with that. We’ll make it work,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t spend money on my Philippine relatives.’

  ‘If Rosalie had been living in Manila she would be helping support her parents in their old age, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘She would. Yes.’

  ‘Then we’ll find a way. You’ve been to see the bank, haven’t you, and Centrelink? The money that always got squirrelled away by Keith, that’s coming to Rosalie now. Yes?’

  ‘Yes. Lynne helped me sort all that through too.’

  ‘Then we’ll find a way. It will make your mum feel better if she can see some of her own money going to her parents. She can control it herself.’

  Jaydah opened her mouth to argue, and closed it.

  He was right. Again.

  * * *

  ‘This is the sixth packet of sardines you’ve bought, my Jaydah. We already have the sardines in the pantry and you haven’t eaten any of them. Why did you buy more sardines?’

  ‘I like sardines,’ Jaydah said.

  ‘You’ve never eaten sardines in your life!’ Her mum studied the packet as she unpacked the tins. ‘In tomato sauce.’ She clucked her tongue. ‘Terrible. Terrible.’

  ‘I walked past them in the aisle and I wanted sardines,’ Jaydah defended.

  ‘But twelve packets? You bought six last week and another six today, and you haven’t eaten any.’

  ‘I forgot I bought them last week.’

  Her mum clucked again. ‘You are forgetting your head, my Jaydah.’

  Jasmine carried a bag of shopping into the house, heaved it up on the kitchen bench and then flopped across onto her tummy on the carpet. She turned the television remote on and flicked through channels but quickly got bored and picked up Snap instead.

  Jaydah unpacked soap and toothpaste and toiletries, and took them to the bathroom. When she opened the cupboard to pack the bits away, there was room for everything except the packet of tampons, which made her pause in front of the space on the shelf.

  Two full packets stared back at her.

  Come to think of it, when had she last used any tampons? She picked up a box and shook it. It hadn’t been opened.

  She cast her mind back. Last time she’d had her period she’d been at work at the Bowling Club. It was the day after she’d been with Brix in Albany, when she’d gone to the Magistrate’s Court.

  A warm flush spread from her toes and she touched her belly, watching the movement in the bathroom mirror, watching the smile spread on her face.

  * * *

  ‘So we have news,’ Jaydah announced as she held tight to Brix’s hand and squeezed his fingers, and he felt so proud it was ridiculous.

  Rosalie had been wiping out the oven but she stopped and removed her pair of pink rubber gloves, crossing them over the kitchen tap.

  Jaz dealt out two piles of cards and didn’t look up.

  ‘Who are you playing with, Jaz?’ Brix asked.

  ‘My left hand is playing against my right hand,’ Jaz said. Her tongue sat at the corner of her mouth as she began playing cards into a growing stack in the middle.

  ‘What is this news?’ Rosalie said.

  ‘We’re having a baby!’ JT told her.

  Rosalie put her hand to her mouth to cover the squeak, walked from the bench to the table, pulled out the nearest chair and sat.

  ‘I want a baby too,’ Jaz said, putting all the cards flat on the floorboards. ‘I would call her Tara.’

  Brix said, ‘I thought you’d name your horse Tara?’

  ‘I would have a horse and a baby named Tara,’ Jaz said, and she picked up the cards and started her game again. ‘I think left hand will win.’

  Jaydah squeezed his fingers.

  ‘When are you due?’ Rosalie said.

  ‘September eighteen.’

  ‘A Christmas baby.’

  ‘Christmas?’ Brix said, confused. ‘I think your maths is a bit out, Rosalie.’

  ‘Not when he is born. I mean he is conceived on Christmas night. You count nine months from December 25 and you get how many? September 25. There is a reason there is so many babies born in September!’ Rosalie winked, and of everything she might have done, that wink told him how much she’d changed in those months since they busted her out from the farm.

  Jaz said again, louder this time. ‘I want to have a baby too.’

  Brix thought about what he might say, and stopped before he said something stupid.

  Physically, Jaz must be exactly the same as any other woman, but how did a baby happen for a woman like Jaz?

  ‘You can have a baby if you want to, Jazzy,’ Jaydah said, and Brix baulked again. She could? ‘You need to find a man who loves you to have a baby though, like Brix loves me.’

  ‘In Home and Away they have babies all the time.’

  ‘That’s on television. I mean in real life. If you find a man who loves you and you love him and if you want to have a baby and he does too, then I think that’s great. But you have to be sure the man loves you, and that he’s a nice man, and that means he should be someone who has met Mum and met me and met Brix too. Okay? He needs to be someone we all get to meet too, so we all know for sure that he loves you enough.’

  ‘And babies are hard work, my Jasmine. They are not like a game. They wake up in the middle of the night and need to be fed. They poop in a nappy and the baby’s mummy has to clean it all up,’ Rosalie put in, and Jaz made a face at the thought of poop in a nappy.

  ‘Yuck.’

  ‘It’s true, Jaz,’ JT said. ‘You have to cook the baby dinner when it gets older, and get it lunch and breakfast and give him a bath and get him dry. And it will be a very long time before he is old enough to play Snap with you. The baby will want to chew all the cards, and tear them, not play Snap with them.’

  Jaz clutched the cards in her hand tight into her chest. ‘Tara mustn’t tear them or chew them!’

  ‘You could buy new cards.’

  ‘These are my favourite with all my horses’ faces!’

  ‘Then you have to remember to put them away where the baby can’t reach. And same for your farm animals when you play with them or the baby can put the tiny animal in his mouth and he might choke.’

  Jaz’s eyes darted to the ice-cream containers pushed under the bookshelf. ‘He would eat my farm animals?’

  ‘He might swallow one because they’re so small.’

  Jaz considered it, head tilted to the side. ‘When will your baby be here, Jaydah?’

  ‘It’s a while yet, Jazzy.’

  ‘So I don’t have to put everything away yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Good,’ Jaz said, satisfied for now, and she returned her attention to playing Snap.

  * * *

  ‘Could Jaz really have a baby?’ Brix asked JT when they were alone.

  ‘Of course she could.’

  ‘How likely is it, do you think, that she’d meet someone? And what sort of person would it be? A boy like her?’

  ‘You mean a boy with a cognitive disability like her?’ Jaydah’s river-deep eyes grabbed him and wouldn’t let go.

  ‘I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just curious.’

  ‘She’s never been able to socialise with anyone her own age and definitely not with any other kids with disabilities and
double-definitely not with any boys. Dad would never come at that.’ She sat up straighter on the couch and put her legs across his lap. ‘Jaz has a hormonal implant that Dad talked her doctor in Sydney into inserting. It has a five-year effective span and she hasn’t had a period since her first one when she was thirteen. There’s a doctor in Albany who Dad sent Jaz to, and he’s put a new one in each time it’s expired.’

  ‘Is it okay when she sees the doctor for a new one or is it a drama each time?’

  She shrugged. ‘When she had her period for the first time, the blood really frightened her and my dad couldn’t deal with the thought of going through that every month for the next thirty or forty years. If I’d have been more mature then, I could have helped her more, but I didn’t know how and Dad wouldn’t have listened to me anyway. There’s no reason why she can’t manage her periods—she’s more capable than my dad ever knew—so next time the implant expires I’m going to talk with Jaz about whether she gets another one or not. I’m going to talk with her about her body and all the natural things it does, like periods and having babies, and I’m going to help her manage all that.’

  ‘Do you worry about some arsehole taking advantage of her?’

  ‘Of course I do. But I want to empower her to make her own choices. She’s got every right to have a baby if she wants to, just like me. If she found a man who loved her and if she wanted to, I’d support her being a parent. So would Mum. But she also needs to understand what it means to care for that baby.’

  Wow. ‘It’s a lot to get my head around.’

  ‘Then it’s lucky you’ve got a big head, isn’t it, Brixy?’

  ‘You know what happens to you when you call me Brixy.’ He reached for her, chest tight with love and longing.

  ‘I know. Believe me I know. It’s terrible.’

  ‘Truly terrible. I don’t know how you manage.’ He kissed her and she kissed him back, a flush in her cheeks, breath short, and a laugh curving her beautiful lips.’

  CHAPTER

  25