The World Without Us

by Mireille Juchau

  He scans the market for some private space as his feelings swell. But he won’t cry – not for their child, a mere idea, suppressed; not for his mother; not for Evangeline and her memorial tree with its tiny shoes; not for this new baby belonging entirely and only to her. He’ll always be at the mercy, he realises, of some woman’s decision about family. He is powerless to summon it alone.

  Let’s get you some water, he tells Sylvie, sit you somewhere shady.

  But she’s still so intent on Evangeline.

  Thanks for the honey, she says weakly, dry-gulping a pill. Then leans over the market table.

  Don’t you think it’s strange, she asks, with Jim allergic to bees, I mean – moving next door to something so potentially fatal?

  2

  Tommy, sit.

  Evangeline gestures to a kitchen chair. She looks tired and dishevelled, the baby’s growing fast and she is carrying low. Something has happened to her chin that he guesses will unhappen when the kid is born.

  He looks at the framed paintings on the kitchen shelves, the flowers drooping in vases, the sunken candles on the mantel. When the Müller girls were younger, and he’d visited more often, when he’d been just like family as Evangeline said, they were always busy, mucking about with old shoeboxes, string and tape, and the results were plausible, noteworthy. The sisters’ word for these: creations, and how their mother displayed them, on small tables with lamps trained on, turned the most incomprehensible or minimal sculpture aureate. All that care – he’d wanted to be part of it – the wonder and the noticing. But after Pip’s death the Müllers had asked not to be disturbed.

  After The Hive he’d had nothing from his childhood; everything had burned. Even his beloved storm glass had shattered in the heat.

  Stefan round?

  He’s taken the hives to Rossdale, she says. It’s boiling bees up there, apparently.

  Not the canola? Isn’t he worried about the neonics?

  Tom stops himself droning on. The other day someone at the market called him a doomsayer, and last week Dr Paulson suggested that the preoccupations in his Survival Report could be adding to his depression. He’d had a copy at the ready and tapped page three with his Pfizer biro. Why does one need a simple wire snare loop? Why publish instructions on how to make a stone adze? Thomas, if the Apocalypse comes do you really think all our technological knowhow will just disappear?

  And then, after his trip to find Ian Tucker, Tom binned his script. He’s been cold turkey on the Venlafaxine for two weeks now. Restless legs, dizzy spells, night sweats, but worse, the sudden electric zaps in his brain. The terrible nightmares, full of scenes from The Hive. Jack Hodgins with a giant hand on Evangeline. Infants in the nursery, beneath a solid shelf of smoke. Some recurring fly-like figure in a motorbike helmet. I believe in nature, Tom told Dr Paulson. What else could a person cling to? And where else had he experienced such wonder as on a clifftop conducting a cloud spectre, marvelling at mackerel skies, or skimming the pebbled floor of Repentance River with the young Evangeline.

  They’d once been so fearless. Now he’s on the ginseng, the St John’s wort, the Omega 3s. Each morning he anoints himself with spikenard, two drops on the solar plexus. He’d thought life would get easier, that on exiting the commune, like emerging from a coma, he’d enter a world shining with possibility. Instead, it was desiccating around him.

  Subjects of Hope: that’s what he overhears the teens saying as they wait at the crossing. That’s what they want to study now.

  He gulps his tea, scalding his throat. Fresh bread on the Müllers’ kitchen bench. Actual wildflowers, in non-jar vases. His place, since he’d packed his mother’s things, is even more stricken-looking than when she’d been inside calling everything the wrong names, compulsively zapping the air with fake lavender, hyacinth. She’d grown terrified of stinks and germs, flushing the toilet till the water turned an unearthly blue. But she didn’t realise she was their primary source, refusing to get in the water coffin as she called the bath. Sometimes, mid-negotiation with this new child-mother, he had an urge to fall laughing to the floor, to weep and chuck heavy breakable things; sometimes her condition was a kind of contagion.

  He pictures her, stretchered after the final bad fall, badgering the paramedics and calling out. Peter would never have abandoned her! she said. Tom had ignored her. He’d gently stroked her clammy hand against her will through the long ride to the hospital.

  There were often serious, regressive dementia episodes after accident or illness, Dr Paulson said. But even if she levels out, it’s time for the 24/7 care.

  Gah. Evangeline puts a hand at her side and leans against the bench.

  He leaps up. Are you? Having it?

  No, it’s weeks off, just … Braxton Hicks.

  Do you remember my mother ever talking about someone called Peter? he asks.

  She straightens, blinking fast, starts slicing carrots, celery. Back to him, knife in her hand. Thwack, thwack, chop. Some pieces flying.

  I’ve pretty much forgotten the Peter I knew, she says.

  She opens the fridge which casts a polar glow across her bare feet.

  Was it you I saw at the teacher’s house? Tom asks. Very early, foggy morning, the other week?

  She turns slowly.

  He’s a neighbour, she says.

  Just rumours then?

  As she narrows her eyes Tom winces, ashamed. He is so hungry for everything she has – family, love, sex, children – all the riches of entanglement. Even the affair, if that’s what it is, gives her life greater meaning, substance. His is cauterised. He can’t leave his mother alone in the Home, move away, start over. Who’ll look out for her? His life in town as futureless as in the commune.

  Look, he says, I work on my reports, my website. I’m a lollipop man. Big fucking woop in my high-viz vest. Now I’ve got Sunday visits to the dementia ward. Apparently I have a father. Brain-damaged from a tumour. He wouldn’t even recognise you, my mother says when I asked her. Coming from her that’s funny – she’s the one who calls me Peter. I could use some family. No one else will tell me about him. Not even Nora.

  Finally, she sits beside him. Why ask Nora?

  I heard they had a thing – her and Peter. He dossed down with her for a while, or so José says.

  Evangeline goes pale.

  He shakes out a Marlboro, matches it.

  She stares. You smoke now? Look, I thought I knew your brother, she says, sweat on her temples. He was sweet, but wild. We had no future together. After the baby came I asked him to stop visiting The Hive. Then once I started seeing Stefan, he never forgave me.

  But … how come I never saw him! Tom says. My mother never even said!

  Evangeline shrugs. He didn’t announce himself when he came up there. He and his friend were skulkers.

  Then she stands, kneading her side, breathing hard, saying, Ow.

  They were using. Dope – meth – something, she says. On the day of the fire they turned up, really high. Peter said he’d come to take what was his.

  Tom draws hard on the cigarette, searches around, then ashes the tip in his palm. I don’t understand, he says. What was that?

  My baby, she says. Tess.

  They shoved me in their van. They wanted to spook me.

  Now she grows silent, very compact.

  He swallows, did they do something to you?

  I fought them off! she says brightly. Lost a tooth see, she taps the white incisor. No big deal.

  And that’s all she can say for now, she tells him. Because it takes a toll – all this remembering. She has to save her energy. Pretty soon, the new baby. In fact, even now, these contractions …

  He stands, lopes down the hall and in the toilet vomits twice. He leans on the basin and stares at the mirror. His breath constricted, his heart swamped with speeding blood. Thinks about leaving the front way, unseen. How long has he been in here, sweating madly, struggling for air? The tap runs and runs but he does not heed the wasted wate
r because the sound is soothing. This is how it is then, to actually feel. After months cotton-balled in Venlafaxine, he’s newly raw and unprotected.

  Tommy?

  She calls quietly, puts her head against the bathroom door. Distraught men in bathrooms, alone. Such things happened to them in those novels of Scandi noir – they ran taps to disguise precarious business; they climbed out windows or located razors; they were seen many hours later in different territories with new clothes and hair. When Tom was a kid, he’d risked his life carrying her baby from danger then running back into that fire. He’d done almost anything she’d asked. She owes him the truth. But shouldn’t Tess be told first, before it comes to her sideways, warped by embellished report? Who her father is, what exact variety of man?

  Be a minute! Tom calls.

  And squints at the red face in the mirror, pitted from teenage acne, his large, blue unseeing eyes. He really is just a fucking drone. That’s what Hodgins had called him once. Until he’d run from the nursery with Tess and set the fire alarm. After that, some called him a hero. And he had not disabused them. Maybe he’d saved Tess, but he’d abandoned those other babies. Still, he’d let the story of his manly feats run its course; he’d taken praise and a little glory.

  Now, it seems, he has a brother. Hold fast to that, he tells himself. But why would Peter want Evangeline’s baby?

  A sudden image. Evangeline, backlit by flames, and running.

  On the basin, three flower soaps. Waxy gardenias in a bowl. The little touches, axing his heart. He rubs his hands on the Müllers’ green towel, buries his face in it. The scent of young women with their whole lives ahead drowns out his stale yearning. He turns off the tap. Still dripping. Sticks his head under, then dismantles the whole contraption. An abraded washer probably.

  3

  Datsun, Subaru, Hyundai; Tess watches the colours fade now the highway lights are gone. Would Pip have become a girl like this, out in the dark on a sister’s dare? No, Tess thinks. Pip wasn’t dreamy, she’d have said this was stupid. Probably her dare had been a joke.

  The centre line of reflective lozenges casts a pitiful glow along the road. Should have brought a torch, Tess thinks, or at least taken her mother’s phone from where it’s stored on a high shelf, the harmful rays well away from their tender brains. Should have worn something warmer than T-shirt and shorts.

  Now the sun’s heat has passed from the tar, and the path, at first lined with shady trees and verges, has dissolved into a mean, shoulder-less highway. Now she must walk on the road to avoid the razor grass and bramble. Her narrow hips in tattered denim, her thin arms batting flies and moths, her eyes searching the scant moonlight.

  Where does she really belong? Is her whole self a lie? Where has she come from? Does she even want to know? Her mother had carried her away from that burning mountain when she’d been just a baby, June said, but it seemed impossible. As they rode the steep mountain trails on June’s horse, Tess became mired more deeply in silence. She’d had to hold tight to June’s hips to keep from tipping off that Appaloosa. That night at the cold supper, she’d examined her family, a bunch of strangers now you thought about it, with unmatched hair and eyes. She stared at her father the longest, chewing with his half-open mouth, the full glass beside his plate, the bottle also on the table. And felt a tiny fury. Her mother was idly studying her nails. Meg was kicking her shins beneath the chair. No one with a sec to tell her the actual truth.

  Tess’s father, catching her burning look, had said, What? Then tossed his knife and fork, muttering, this family, and left. Tess saw her sister’s eyes fill; she watched Meg gnaw her lower lip. Her mother’s face was very pinched, one hand on that belly. Another child for her touch, Tess thought, the baby already drawing her mother’s attention. Sometimes she had a fantasy of popping that stomach with a hurled fork, of her mother zipping through the air and slowly deflating.

  Their father came back in for the bottle, then strode outside again.

  Here we go, their mother said.

  Had they all known? Had Pip, taking the secret with her? If I was born on the commune, why lie about it? thought Tess, scanning Meg’s body for signs and clues. Tess knew she looked nothing like her father but Pip was the dead spit, their mother said, of their father’s mother, Gretchen, a distant German Oma they’d never got to meet.

  Tess’s silence is bound up with this, walking along the shadowy highway with her hand outstretched, and one thumb up, carrying nothing but a cross-body bag into which she’d shoved ten dollars twenty.

  Cars pass and she wills them not to slow, though when it’s over, the worry will be gone. Worse waiting to find out what type will pick her up and where they’ll want to take her.

  It’s one thing to risk being lost, quite another to be found. Mr Parker had said this gently. Then asked her to try first person in her journal. And she’d wondered, who’s that? before remembering how in Robinson Crusoe everything was seen through I.

  I found, under my mother’s pillow, some baby clothes that once belonged to my youngest sister. I found, in her drawer, the small envelopes of our baby hair and teeth. Everywhere mixed with my mother’s things were the things of all her daughters.

  The amplified sound of a dog barking in a house or garage. Tess’s feet pound, and her pulse, and she concentrates on these rhythms to distract herself from what she’s set out to do. Small points of brightness appear – distant houses, streetlights – reminding her of the deeper dark when only stars or tail-lights will mark her out on the unlit roads.

  Soon she hears an engine slow. It can’t be large from how it sounds, she thinks, it has a humming smoothness. Definitely not a truck. As it draws alongside she watches the passenger window go slowly down, electric.

  You right there, girly? Where you headed?

  A luminous plastic hand suctioned to the dashboard. Its up-yours finger pointing skyward. From the car radio, she hears a song about fire and rain and she is suddenly aware of what she’s doing and what she’s done.

  4

  Meg’s fed up waiting for the right things to happen. At night she grinds her teeth. She’s supposed to wear a plate. It makes her feel she’ll choke. It makes her feel muzzled as a dog. Each morning a pain crackles from jaw to temples. I hope it’s not hereditary, her father says, passing her frozen peas in a flannel, so Meg knows, she must be his. Or he wouldn’t say that, would he?

  She rides out now past the new development because she can’t think where else to go. Tess had not returned and her mother had come home, then at nine pm gone back out searching.

  If you know what’s going on with Tess, tell me now, she’d asked before leaving.

  Meg, sick of always saying what her sister would not, shrugged, sighed, raked fingernails through her tidy hair. But it was impossible to escape her mother’s stare so she said, experimentally,

  Nora phoned. Asking about the dead man. Says she no longer thinks it’s a person called Peter and that you’d like to know.

  Her mother stepped back. What’s that got to do with your sister going off?

  How’d I know?

  When Meg had finished blinking her mother was gone. Outside on the porch – her umbrella – even though the sky was very low and bloated, and way off you could already see the fine needles of rain.

  Just ask your mum if she’s seen Pete lately, Nora had said.

  Ask her yourself, Meg replied.

  OK, put her on, Nora said.

  She’s not here.

  We both knew him, said Nora. If he’s dead she’d know. If he’s alive that changes everything, especially for Tess.

  Here she goes, the smallest in her family, fiercely pedalling along the fresh bitumen of Borrodale Road, hunched over handlebars, squinting into the dark. The rain falls in a gauzy curtain, then swells, hammering the ground. Meg, quickly drenched, cycles out to where the blond, identical houses are replicating, past golf-course gardens, the monster cars behind SilentGlyde garage doors. Meg strikes the bell on her bike and se
es with glee lights flash on in three houses and curtains jerking and a figure at an open door, beaking into the street.

  Nora will tell her everything. But when Meg pulls up at her house it’s dark. Beside it, the vast lake pitted with rain. Nora’s Corolla gone from the drive. Probably in the pub, getting hammered. Getting smashed. Getting liquored up, pissed, 86ed. Getting gourded or shickered. Ich bin sinnlos betrunken, said her father one stumbling winter afternoon.

  Meg sits on the porch, then jimmies a window with a garden fork and climbs in, landing on a tower of boxes. As her eyes adjust she sees the room is packed to the ceiling with stuff. A smell of Nag Champa and mint. She feels along one wall, smacking her shins into piles and stacks until she finds the light-switch. Some kind of storage area? But every room in the house is crammed with furniture and objects, magazines, books. In the kitchen she makes an almond-butter sandwich, sniffing all the bottles on a shelf. Whisky, rum, gin, bourbon. Empties sentried along the bench. Not all chaos. Every pile is tidily stacked, there’s no grime or dust. But why keep so many things?

  Meg swigs the Grey Goose and then, in the lounge, pokes around Nora’s desk. Boring papers. Bulldog clips. Staples. More mini bottles in a drawer. She pockets two, unopened. But hold on – photos. Mum and Nora, arm in arm. People at The Hive with spades, smoking. One of Dad! On the back, someone’s written Stef, 1990. Who calls him that? And then, her mother standing with some other women, all pregnant. Meg peers at the background, the familiar rustic cabins, her mother’s clear, untroubled expression. Pregnant with who? Meg takes another swig, though it tastes like something witches have invented.

  Beside the desk, on the wall, a poem. She reads it twice.

  Lord, the air smells good today, straight from the mysteries within the inner courts of God.

  A grace like new clothes thrown across the garden, free medicine for everybody.

  The trees in their prayer, the birds in praise, the first blue violets kneeling.