‘I like cosy busy places,’ she says softly. ‘I don’t want to hear myself all over again.’
‘I don’t know how to tell her.’
‘You told me,’ says Hannah Wallace. ‘Do it like that.’
But you’re different, he wants to say. More fluid, less absorptive than she is. I don’t want to hurt her.
‘It’s going to hurt no matter what you do,’ she says. ‘She needs to be part of it.’
He knows this. It aches in his bones.
‘Is he really my father?’ Dan asks. It seems crucial that he know—more crucial, now. But he doesn’t trust the man. ‘I can’t imagine him dying.’
She takes it how he means it. ‘It will be a production, that’s for sure. He’s already arranged to have his skin hung. The rest of him put in one of those urns at Mona.’
‘Skin?’
‘Like a tarp or something. I haven’t seen the sketch.’
Dan shudders.
‘Look,’ she goes on, ‘I don’t know if he is or isn’t. But he believes he is, and isn’t that what matters?’
Behind Dan, a baby starts to wail. But when he turns, there is no one there, only a bulb-eyed camera and a small white speaker.
Maybe, he thinks, it’s art.
Maybe he’s missed the point.
‘But why?’ he asks. ‘Why would he keep it a secret all this time and now he wants to tell the world? Tell me? What does that mean?’
Hannah laughs gently. ‘What does any of it mean?’
Dan watches the river through the wall-wide window. The bridge like a sailboat. A ferry slides downstream beneath it, always in the direction opposite to where he needs to be.
‘Go home,’ says Hannah Wallace. ‘Go home and talk to her.’
chapter 26
The table seems solid, metal-framed and oak-topped, but when the man sits down at the other end of it and opens his laptop, a mirror to Elise’s own, the whole thing wobbles. Elise reaches for her coffee, but it sloshes over the side, saturates the flimsy napkin underneath. The man adjusts his position. The man reaches for sugar. Everything the man does shifts the table, which is not what it seems at all; would, Elise thinks, blow over in a cyclone, flip foot over top through the car park like a turned-out umbrella. Yet to leave would be rude.
She reads about pregnancy after stillbirth, the chance she will fail again.
(The odds are higher, now, than they were before.)
She reads about babies as numbers, cold and lifeless statistics.
(2.6 million stillbirths worldwide, every year.)
She reads a paper about the ageing of sperm, and thinks about the student, Lars, and about Dan.
She tries not to stress.
She has several tabs open at once.
Elise does not want to do this at home, where Dan has been creeping around, seems to emerge from odd places with notebooks or tools or dusty boxes, seems to wander along a track between wherever he’s been and wherever she is and his office. And the little dog, still unnamed, trails behind him.
But the cafe distracts her with too many people. She wishes she could pull off what they do: a pantsuit, a flow-bottomed blue one. A whale tattoo on her arm. Skin-tight white leggings. Long silver hair. A grant. A promotion.
Elise always thought she could be anything, have everything, if she wanted. But the data say she will not. The evidence shows she will struggle to balance her career and her babies, boy in her heart and girl on her hip, both hands tied. A family collides with a woman’s career. There is so much to hope for. Too much, maybe.
It’s like the house in Iowa, she thinks, Aunt Rosie’s house—set in a curve in the road, a curve barely distinguishable from the roadside, little more than a slow angling between cornfields and apple orchards, where houses peered like tossed-out Coke cans through the grass and trees and hedges.
A curve that Elise never missed, in all those years, all those stupid, reckless years. Home too late, too drunk, too pregnant.
But so many others did.
A car that launched off the road and rolled down the gully. Two or three head-on wrecks. A drunk driver, late one Sunday, who ploughed through the fence and into the maple tree at the front of the house, almost hit Uncle Bob on the ride-on mower. A semitrailer that came too fast and couldn’t slow down, and Elise on the top stair of the school bus, descending.
What is it about that place, she wonders, that people lost control? What did they see on the road or beside it, or feel or hear to distract them?
‘Eloise,’ she hears, from behind her.
She spins.
‘Elise,’ says Vair. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’
The man at the end of the table looks up when she pulls out a chair, and frowns, but Vair doesn’t seem to notice.
‘We have to talk,’ she says. ‘Are you upset with me?’
Elise closes her laptop screen.
‘Yes,’ she says calmly. ‘No.’ She sees herself as from a distance, a strong, not unattractive woman. Keeping her shit together. ‘This has been a really rough year for me, and the last thing I need is people stabbing me in the back.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Percy. Peter. This PhD guy you’re dumping on me.’
‘You really think I’d do that?’
‘Some people are happy to walk over everyone to succeed.’
Vair laughs. ‘That’s me,’ she says. ‘I go for the Achilles, actually. Like those slasher guys who hide under cars.’
‘That’s not funny.’
‘No, it’s not. Don’t be an idiot. I’m not trying to undercut you; I’m trying to help. Anyway, fuck Peter. Do you really want to teach six lectures a week next term? Really? Or do you want to have a fricken amazing student collect some data for you?’
‘I just don’t like people making decisions for me.’ Elise rubs a coffee mark off the ceramic mug with her thumb.
‘Now I know you don’t like people telling you what to do,’ says Vair. ‘But seriously, Elise: go home. Spend some time with Dan doing whatever you want to, just not work. Work will still be here, I promise, I will pile it up very neatly on your desk for you. Let yourself remember what it was like before. Because he made you happy, right?’
Elise nods.
‘Really happy, right?’
Elise’s throat tightens. ‘Stop.’
‘You get what I mean, then. You have to do what makes you happy. Go home.’
‘He’s pushing me away.’
‘Do you need me to drive you?’
‘He found a dog.’
‘Right.’ Vair laughs. ‘Is it cute? You’re in trouble.’
If this were a movie, she thinks, there would be horses, manes streaming with the pace of the run, and she would cling to the tall grey one, grasp its hair in her fists and its chest between her thighs and get to him just in time.
If this were a movie, she would already have told him. Everything.
And, because it’s not a movie, she gets home and he is not there.
But the puppy is waiting, and it bounces at the door when she opens it, and chases her down the hall. Its nails slide on the hardwood floors, and click, and it scrambles, loses its footing. Elise picks it up. Her, she reminds herself, not it. The puppy presses her sharp teeth against the side of Elise’s hand.
She carries the dog through the house and into Dan’s office, sets her on the unmade spare bed. The puppy rolls on her back in the sheets, and Elise considers lying down next to her, but no. The desk is cluttered with papers and notes, and she’s curious about what he’s been doing. The book was done, and now, maybe, there’s more?
To the side of his desk, beside the bookshelf, a box. A plain cardboard box, like for moving, and for a moment her heart catches at the thought he might leave. But when she opens it, what she sees instead are envelopes. Stacks and stacks and stacks of envelopes, sealed tight, and full of things she cannot see.
Elise pulls out the top one, sits with it on the edge of the bed,
lets the puppy push against and crawl over her. There’s a way to steam the seal, she thinks, but she can’t be bothered to look up how, and besides, it doesn’t really matter. She’s going to ask him about it all anyway. She tears it open.
Inside, a sheet of paper, folded in thirds, handwritten.
The rabbit stew in Portugal, it says, in that little restaurant with the blue walls, white cloth on the tables. When I moved aside my potato and a bucktoothed rabbit skull floated to the surface from underneath.
And it comes back to her, sweeps into her mind from years behind and oceans away. The candles and olives and wine.
She opens another:
I love that you eat the fish’s eyes.
Another:
In bed next to you, writing our vows on bits of paper the night before our wedding. And you said yes.
Elise laughs. They’d been so caught up in organising, he’d forgotten to ask.
She hears him at the door, but does not look when he comes in. The puppy stands on the bed and barks, wanting Dan but afraid of the height, too high to jump.
‘I love you,’ she says to him. ‘I’ve really always loved you.’ She wipes her face dry with her free hand. ‘These are so beautiful, so perfect, I remember it all.’
‘I have cancer,’ he says.
chapter 27
Her face freezes, as though in a fairytale, and she has turned to stone. As though he might kiss her and break her free. As though he hasn’t done this to her, ruined everything. His kiss would mean nothing, except
maybe
goodbye.
‘What?’ she replies.
The dog bounces on the bed, desperate for him, still afraid to jump. Dan pulls it into his arms, sits on the floor in front of Elise, would kneel if his knees allowed it, would say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But the dog squirms over him, licks him, dribbles urine on his thigh, is a barrier between them, and he sets her to the side. Pushes her away with his hand.
Elise slides off the bed onto the floor next to him, facing him, back against the bed.
‘What kind?’ she asks. ‘How bad is it?’
Dan remembers a chair he saw once, in a showroom in the Valley, a rocking chair with two seats that faced each other. It was made of wicker. An impractical outdoor seat, something they’d never buy, but they’d sat in it, low to the ground, and rocked. Elise tipped back, then Dan, each pushing the other up and down, all the while eyes locked and laughing.
He can almost feel the motion, see her tip backwards, and it turns his stomach.
‘Melanoma.’
‘What? Where? When did this happen?’
Dan feels it as it comes up, a choke in his throat, an emptiness behind his nose eyes cheekbones, as though the inside of him has sucked his words away. He can only keen, tearless and miserable, the sound itself like dying.
She comes to him, then, wraps her arms around him, and he leans into the darkness of her sweater and sobs.
The dog sets her paws against him, eyes wide and brown, trembling.
‘Is it bad?’ she asks him. ‘Dan, look at me, is it bad?’
Maybe, he thinks, if he doesn’t say, it won’t be true.
But she pushes him back to look into his face.
‘Please,’ she says. ‘Please tell me.’
He nods.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. The words won’t come out. There are no words left.
‘I love you,’ he says. ‘I’m so sorry.’
I’m dying, he thinks, but cannot say it.
Her face has gone pale, the colour of marshmallows, marshmallow monsters. Her eyes dig into him, as though he has secrets she might dislodge from his hollowed-out centre.
‘It’s everywhere,’ he says. And suddenly, it is.
‘What do you mean, everywhere?’
He feels it all across his skin, and inside him.
‘It spread,’ he says. ‘It started down here—’ he points to his inner thigh, nonspecific ‘—and moved through my lymph nodes—’ points to his groin ‘—and now it’s everywhere.’ The truth is, he’s not sure anymore where his liver is, or his lungs, or his bowel. His cerebral hemispheres. He is like a frog in a high school biology class, pulled apart with too many sets of forceps.
‘What,’ she says, but seems to stop mid-thought. ‘How long?’
Dan takes a deep breath, exhales slowly. ‘Four months,’ he says.
‘You’ve had this going on for four months? And you didn’t tell me?’
‘No,’ he says, and almost laughs, almost never stops laughing. ‘No, four months is all I’ve got left.’
She looks at him and does not speak.
‘It’s too far gone,’ he says. ‘They can’t even operate, it’s so wound up with blood vessels.’ Like a placenta, he thinks. Half me, half not-me.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she says.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Well there has to be something, immune treatment or radiation. Something we can do. There are so many new things.’
‘Not this time.’
‘Why are you always so fucking pessimistic?’ Her voice is loud and sharp, and she moves her arm as though she might hit him. The dog whines. ‘Stop with the drama, Dan, stop it now. There is always a way, and we will find it. We have to.’ Her eyes are lion eyes, fierce and predatory, despite the tears.
Dan shakes his head. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to leave you like this, everything all messed up between us.’ He can feel his face contort, feel it all coming to the surface. ‘I love you and I’ve always loved you, and I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’
She grabs him by the shoulders, looks straight into him. ‘You can’t die,’ she says. ‘You won’t. I need you.’
The dog begins to howl, and its high, young wail seems to fill the room, his bones, the space between them.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she says. ‘We’re pregnant.’
chapter 28
She can’t take the smell, the chemical smell, the dry coughs, the shuffling papers, the waiting room full of low white cell counts and metastatic cancer cells, terrible things she might pick up or ingest or inhale from a sickly orange chair. The place is upside down, sick seeking health, and every bandage, scab, bit of tubing, makes her skin crawl. She shouldn’t be here. Dan shouldn’t be here. This is a place for old people, dying people, not them, not now.
A nurse collects them, leads them through the treatment room, blue recliners at intervals along the wall, IV stand beside each, and a little table, and a chair. A few of the recliners have people in them, liquid in lines from bag to blood, clear or red or cerulean fluids, nurses in purple aprons, bright smiles on the morning talk shows, the whole atmosphere like Willy Wonka, unreal.
Elise can’t look at them, and yet she does.
A wan, blonde woman in a hot-pink jumpsuit, too much red lipstick, too bright. She leans back into her chair, stuck as if by velcro, eyes closed. Weighed down with blue eyeshadow, heavy mascara. Clownish, discarded.
Discarded by what? Or whom? Elise thinks, and shivers.
Dan takes her hand in his.
The oncologist is a tall man, taller than Dan. His handshake is corporate, and Elise knows she shouldn’t think that way, shouldn’t question the man for what he’s said or not said, for his careless approach to Dan’s treatment, but she can’t help it. She doesn’t like him, not at all. The man’s face is complacent, his voice too soft. She settles into the chair beside the large desktop screen, speckled with images of someone’s insides. Dan’s, maybe. Lit up like gunshot.
‘Let me run you through everything,’ the oncologist says, and he taps each glowing spot on the screen with his pen, names them with words she knows from her work, the bodies of birds and quolls and antechinuses,
(not Dan, not Dan’s body)
words and bodies that she knows by sight and smell and touch and taste, almost too well, almost like her own body.
‘Surgery isn’t an option,’ the oncologist says, ‘beca
use the primary tumour has adhered to the femoral artery and has derived significant vasculature from it.’
‘It would be too dangerous,’ she says.
The oncologist nods. ‘So you’d like to know what other treatments are available?’ He turns the screen away and evens up his chair, looks across the desk at her. ‘As you know, and can see for yourself, Dan’s prognosis is not good. There are drugs we can use to slow the progression—’
‘Yes,’ says Elise. ‘We want those.’
‘—and I am happy to get him into a trial, but I really don’t recommend it in this case. Dan’s disease is quite advanced, and anything we do at this stage will only increase his longevity incrementally.’
Elise glances at Dan. He has not moved, does not even seem to blink. ‘How long?’ she asks.
Somewhere between the buildings, beyond the blinds, a crow awks and acks and rattles, and its voice echoes off the stone and steel. They are different here, she thinks, these crows. They speak a different language.
‘Weeks, months at most. And he would end up spending most of it in here.’ The oncologist waves his hand, and Elise’s stomach lurches. ‘He’d feel sick for a lot of it, most of it, and there are risks involved. We can do treatments, yes, but I don’t think we should.’ He sighs. ‘What many people do in this situation is make the most of what they have left. Spend time with loved ones. I gave Dan the details of some excellent palliative care specialists and support groups who can make this time easier for both of you.’
‘No,’ says Elise.
A painting of bottlebrushes on the office wall, the same lurid colour as the woman’s lipstick.
‘I’m sorry,’ says the oncologist. ‘I really am. Please think about it, talk everything over.’
Dan reaches over and sets his hand on her knee, where it seems to melt in.
Elise is tired, more than she’s ever been before, and the day is like a weight she lugs in her feet and her face and her heart. On the walk from the clinic, they weave between buildings and car parks, a bald frangipani tree, and before they get to the car, she needs to rest. She drops onto a bench. It has a plaque, with a name. In Memoriam.
The Breeding Season Page 19
