Dan sits beside her, leans back into the bench and looks up towards the sky, and she follows his gaze. A 747 has just taken off from the airport, and it lumbers upwards, disappears into the low, thin cloud line.
‘I’m not giving up,’ she says. ‘There’s got to be something. I’ll read the studies myself.’
‘I want to meet the baby,’ says Dan, and he sets his hand on her belly, as though at this stage he might feel anything through her shirt and skin, perineal membranes, uterus wall.
She does not answer.
‘But I won’t be a burden to you. Think about it. If I did the treatment, and we spent the rest of my life in this fucking place—’ he nods towards the hospital behind them ‘—I still might not meet her. And even if I did, I’d be sick, Elise, really sick, and dying, and I need you to be with her, then, not me.’
‘What if,’ she begins, and trails off.
‘She’s going to make it. She’s strong, our girl, like her mom.’
Elise pushes away an image of her own sad, beautiful mother.
‘I need you,’ she says. ‘I’ve always needed you. I’ve been so stupid.’ She swivels on the bench to face him. ‘What if I did this to you? What if the stress of everything, and me leaving, did this to you?’
He smiles at her. ‘That’s not how it works. You know that.’
A magpie, bright and dichromatic, hops up the footpath towards them, pauses, rotates its head as though waiting to see what she will say.
Elise shrugs. ‘I know. Maybe. But there has to be something. Something experimental, or—’ the idea brightens her ‘—we could try the stuff your mother did. Just try it.’
Dan’s face hardens.
‘Isn’t that what people do, when there’s nothing else?’ she adds. ‘When they have to do something?’ She feels she has said the wrong thing, feels him pull away from her—plane from earth, man from plane—and she imagines a moment when she will not see his face beside her, when she will have to struggle to grasp it in her mind, when she will forget him.
She will not scream.
‘I am not going there, Elise, we are not ever going there. I’m done. This is it. Over. Look at your studies if you want, but let me tell you what I want. I want to live, I want to see my baby born and her first day of school and I want to hear her say, “I love you, Daddy,” and draw me pictures to hang in my office. I want Christmases and Halloweens and birthdays forever. I want to love you, grow old with you. I want to grow old, period. But I don’t get that. It’s fucked up, completely fucked, but I don’t get to choose my life, when it ends. That’s done.’ He clears his throat. ‘But I get to choose now, and I want you, Elise. Please.’
He is flushed with sadness or anger, and she wants to hold him, wants to say yes, all right, but she can’t.
‘I can’t believe you’d just give up,’ she says. ‘Fucking get over yourself. If I say you’re drinking green shit, you are.’
Dan makes a sound like laughing, and the magpie bursts into flight.
‘No,’ he says, and stands. ‘You get over yourself. I’m not an experiment, I’m not some wild fucking animal for you to dissect. I’m done with this. You need to deal with it.’
He tosses the car keys onto the bench beside her. His mouth and eyes are hard as he turns and walks away.
‘This?’ she echoes. ‘What do you mean?’ Her voice is shrill in her own ears.
But he does not stop, does not look back. Does not seem to hear her.
chapter 29
The day is cool, set low with clouds, and Dan loosens as he walks, so much aimless walking lately, think-walks, avoid-walks, walks to disperse the stiff grip of anger or disbelief or gloom. The last walks he’ll take, now. He may as well do them.
He avoids the main roads in case she is looking for him.
The streets are residential, and he looks at the houses, shrubs, trees as he passes. The sidewalk is crowded with uncut hedges and overgrown grass and strange bright flowers that look like herons. The fences push out towards him and he misses the wide spaces of Orange, California, the yawning front porches with porch swings or rockers, its oak trees and fresh-mown lawns and fireflies.
But, no. The fireflies were somewhere else.
He can’t quite remember it, the place like a feeling.
And what does it matter now? He won’t be going back anymore, not even his body will, likely. Who is there to go back to? Elise will stay here, raise the baby here, her home and William’s, now his by default.
Dan pauses at the pool along Hale Street, leans across the chain-link fence to watch the chubby babies bobble in their mothers’ arms, smack the water with lively paws, gurgle with joy at the rhyming songs. The scene is like a shipwreck, everybody nodding up and down, up and down with the waves as though they themselves have made them, a beautiful world created by the mothers to hide the truth, the looming iceberg, tipped-up ship, freezing water,
death, death, death.
It occurs to Dan that he has work to do, not the book or his own story in it, but calls and plans to make, things to make this easier for her, as easy as it can be. Calls and plans he doesn’t want to make, but will.
First, Hannah.
‘Hey,’ she says, voice soft.
‘Dying is shit,’ he says.
She laughs, low and musical, and again he feels a glimmer, something like hope. He lets it flutter away before he goes on.
‘Look,’ he says.
She says nothing. He hears his own walking-breath in his ear.
‘I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again,’ he says. His throat tightens.
‘I wish things were different,’ she says.
‘Okay,’ he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
‘Dan?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You have to tell him,’ she says. ‘He’ll want to know. And help. Let him help you, and her.’
‘I know.’
How final it feels, to say goodbye, to hang up and never hear a voice again.
*
Dan does not call the man straight away, isn’t even sure where his uncle–father is, if he’ll answer his phone at all. Instead, he walks towards the primary school at Rosalie, the cluster of shops that seem so familiar. So like somewhere he knows, but he hasn’t been here, the pink-and-green gelato shop or the tucked-away cinema or the little grocer on the corner. The butcher, like every other, but different. A door he will never go through, a frontage he will never see again.
He steps into the green of a nursery, hidden behind storefronts, moist and warm and quiet. The man at the front counter nods hello but keeps at his work, and Dan wanders, exploring the corners of the small, rainforested world. At the back, he finds a bench behind waist-high ficus, a bench made of recycled plastic. He sits. Absorbs the soft sounds of water trickling and classical music and voices next door. The clink of cups at an outdoor cafe.
And there he calls his father.
‘I’m glad you called,’ says Berlin. ‘We need to plan out the last chapter. I’ve been thinking since we talked, I have notes.’
Dan stretches his legs out in front of him, toes the thick leaf of a money plant with his shoe.
‘I can’t do it,’ says Dan, who has, to his own surprise, found solace in bluntness. ‘I’ve got cancer.’
‘Cancer? What kind?’
‘Melanoma. Terminal.’
‘How long?’
Dan muffles a cough. ‘Four months, maybe five.’
‘Well,’ says Berlin. ‘That ought to be enough time, I’d think, for someone like you.’
‘I didn’t call to talk about the book. I just wanted you to know.’
‘It has to be in there. You have to write it.’
A woman enters the nursery; Dan can see her from his corner, can see a scarf wound around her head, no hair, no eyebrows, more hope than he has, apparently.
Cancer fucking everywhere.
Her head swivels his way, and she stares at him like a velociraptor might
, like she knows, can smell it in him. Dan looks down, away, anywhere but where she is.
‘She took everything,’ Berlin says. ‘Like it was hers.’
‘You mean me.’
‘I was never the same after that. You have to put that in there. It changed everything.’
There are so many things Dan wishes he could say. About the baby, Elise, his life, a father, a father he never knew,
a father his child will never know,
a father who, when he finally meets him, is only a rich, narcissistic disappointment.
Dan would not be, have been, that kind of father.
His daughter has to know it.
‘Goodbye, Berlin,’ he says. And turns his phone off.
He’s on his way home now, towards her, towards them, and he feels the draw in his blood, like a storm. But he pauses as he walks towards the front of the shop, at a table engulfed by garden plants, tomatoes and eggplants and small bright lettuces, perky-leaved and iridescent. They glow in the half-light, and Dan wishes, suddenly, that he knew more about them, how they budded out and up and into so many things, leaves and flowers and seed heads, with such unfathomable capacity.
Like his child, inside her.
The whole world ahead.
Beneath the table, an empty basket.
He selects the punnets, and sets them into the basket: perpetual spinach and wild rocket and green-purple sorrel and three types of tomatoes; basil and mint and parsley; sage, rosemary, and he thinks of the song, but there is no thyme—
no time
—but there are carrots that promise to grow into fat orange balls, and beetroots with pale stripes; and a seed pack of radishes, the fastest-growing species he can find.
At home, there’s a shovel under the house, a bit of dry dirt out back.
Dan drops the basket on the counter and goes back for a bag of blood and bone.
Whose?
He wants to laugh, to share the joke. But the moment is his to imagine, how small his own body could be, will be, when it’s all burned into ashes.
The box is heavy, he can hardly see over it, and it’s only when Dan steps back onto the footpath that he remembers. He sits on the short concrete wall and sets the box beside him and the leaves reach up and out like hands, fingers straining towards the sky. He kicks his feet against the wall.
The bald woman comes out of the shop and stands beside him. She has a single pot of pink pompom blooms in her hand.
‘I saw you, before,’ she says. ‘Walking.’
Dan smiles, shrugs. ‘Good day for it.’
‘Do you need a lift somewhere, with all your plants?’
And Dan, who has, for as long as he’s known himself, never accepted such an offer, finds himself smiling, really smiling this time, and saying, ‘Yes, that would be amazing. Thank you.’
chapter 30
Elise watches him arrive in a strange pink car with a strange blankish woman and a box full of plants. She hears him say thank you, and I hope everything goes well, and when the car drives away she walks out the front door and down the steps and follows him along the side of the house into the back garden.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and he turns towards her, seems to see her there for the first time. He drops the bag of fertiliser and sets down the box and dusts off his hands.
‘I can’t do this without you,’ he says.
‘I know.’
He brings her a folding chair from under the house so that she can sit with him while he digs away the grass, demarcates the plot with leftover bricks from the patio, sets the seedlings into the soil.
When he’s done, the dirt is smeared across his cheeks and shirt and caught in his eyelashes, and it’s as though, she thinks, he’s already begun to decay.
But he is alive, here and now, he walks towards her and pulls her to standing and into his arms.
‘Can we call her Olivia?’ he asks.
Elise’s breath slips away, down down into her belly. ‘I love it,’ she says. And she does.
‘How did we get it so wrong?’ he asks, and presses his mouth into her shoulder, so that his words are muffled and spoken through her shirt and skin and at a distance, but she hears them.
‘We were stupid,’ he says. ‘I want it back, I want to do it over again; I’ll take the hurt and all of it and do it better next time.’
And there is nothing she can say to make it better. There is nothing to make it better. There is never enough time, she sees this now, and what they’ve had has been wasted, she has wasted it, and now he will be gone and she will never hear his voice again or smell his skin again or feel his arms around her or taste his tears off his cheek and she will never remember him the way he ought to be remembered.
He will fade, she is afraid he will go entirely, not just from the world but from her mind too, she needs to hold on to him because he is
(was)
everything she can never convey to their daughter, Olivia, except that there is never enough time to do what you need to, love who you need to, figure your shit out.
‘I packed our things,’ she says. ‘We can go wherever you want. You and me. The dog. Sofia and Lara will help with the garden. Let’s drive, let’s go everywhere, and see everything all the way up the coast—the house I grew up in and the school and the town and the beach and the cassowaries. I want to see all those things with you. For the next four months.’
It sounds so final when she hears herself say it.
‘I want her to know me,’ he says. ‘There has to be a way.’
He is so sensitive, this man, this beautiful man, and so strong.
* * *
Over time, she will take their daughter, Livvi, to so many places, the places that were part of his life and theirs, and she will read the stories he wrote her again and again, and play the videos she recorded on the drive, and Livvi will know the sound of his voice, its timbre and tone, and she will know the shape of his face.
The way he saw things and felt them.
Their child will know that part of herself, like a dream she can’t quite remember, like those few, best dreams that colour the world.
But there are other things that Elise will save as her own. Moments, in the quiet of the lab, with Livvi asleep in the car seat beside her or tottering around the halls with Vair or watching cartoons at Sofe and Lara’s house or at kindy or school or at swimming lessons or art camp or at the movies with a sweet, blond boy named Harry or in college, at a writing program too far away,
moments when Elise will take a tiny vial from the freezer, warm it and pour its contents onto a slide. Fasten the slide into the base of the microscope.
With a dark field behind, the tiny creatures, at 40x magnification, glow like stars. They flicker as stars do, the brightest stars, seen in perfect darkness from a tent or a mountain or up north or out west. She cannot see their tiny tails pulsing, flagellating, but she imagines them.
Proteins seeking proteins.
Even at 100x, on bright field, they are like poppy seeds, mites crawling across the pale golden glass of the slide, like freckles on their daughter’s nose.
At 400x, she sees them clearly. They swim past each other on the slide, bump heads and tangle tails, comedic and simple, like the old British shows that come on late at night. Each one a fragment, a half-Dan, a re-combination.
Look at them all, she thinks. So pointless, so beautiful.
All together, they swarm across the slide, desirous, angling for an egg they will never find. In minutes, they will die, dry up from the edges inwards, but that’s not why she’s here.
Elise watches intently, focuses on their living, if that is what they do, and remembers how it feels to be absorbed into another.
acknowledgements
Robbie and Nelle—you were there in the waiting rooms with me, the treatment rooms with me, and when the scans were clear (and I was still afraid), you gave me the courage to be more than I was, more than I imagined I could be. This novel is that place.
Our survival. Thank you to our cancer support team—Shiro and Anne and Sally and Chris and Nicole, Choices, my Mater Mothers group. Lisa and Jenny, we said goodbye too soon.
Thank you to all my family, especially Mom, Dad, Kari, Aunt Sis, and Uncle Martin and Grandma N (we miss you), who carved out this Iowa heart I carry in me.
Thank you to all my dearest writerly companions! Renee Treml, Mary Mullen, Erin Langner, Charlotte Callander, Hana Broughton, Tanya Friedman, Christie Tate, and my fellow AWP mentees and Corporeal writers—you reminded me to keep writing, and made my words so much better. Thank you, Ryan McIlvain—your class (in both senses!) made all the difference.
Thank you, Krissy Kneen, Alice Sebold, and Lidia Yuknavitch for showing me how to write through my body and into the world; thank you to the Australian Society of Authors, the Australian Science Communicators, and the AWP Writer to Writer Mentorship Program (Diane Zinna, we love you!), whose awards made it possible to work with these phenomenal women. Thank you to Varuna, who gave me a fellowship to write, a room of my own, and all that rain.
Thank you to the Australian Research Council, who supported my research (and so, in a way, Elise’s), and to our Anindilyakwa friends on Groote, especially Jennifer, Jocelyn, Phillip, and Elma. Thank you to everyone who put in the hours (and hours and hours) on quolls and antechinuses—but especially Bec, Jaime, Skye, and Ami. To all my dear, dear friends who I haven’t named—thank you!
Finally, thank you to Gaby Naher, Jane Palfreyman, Ali Lavau, Tom Bailey-Smith, Lisa White, Louise Cornege, Pam Dunne, and all the Allen & Unwin team for the great love and care you have shown this book!
The Breeding Season Page 20
