August Falling

by Les Zig

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry? It wasn’t you. It was …’ Now, her voice does choke. Her sunglasses have dropped an inch down the bridge of her nose and she pushes them back up. ‘I hope my frankness doesn’t bother you. It was what it was.’

  I clench my right fist.

  ‘You deal with it. You move on. What choice do you have?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I clasp the palm of my left hand to my face, cover it in embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry about that sorry—I’m not good in these situations. I don’t know what to say. It’s shit and wrong … I wish it hadn’t happened to you.’

  Julie shrugs her left shoulder. ‘We all have our stuff.’ She pulls her sunglasses down that inch and looks at me over them. ‘Right?’

  ‘Yeah. I guess.’

  The roads are so twisting that it’s not long before I lose all sense of direction, and my imagination conjures sinister connotations around remote towns in horror fiction, but all I get from the verdant gardens that surround these beautiful homes is serenity.

  The retirement home—the gold embossing on the sign out the front christens it Sanctuary Hill—almost seems a decorative centrepiece. Long and stately, the architecture is colonial with Edwardian terraces and rectangle windows. It must’ve been a hotel or something back who knows when.

  Julie pulls into the parking lot and leads me into the reception—a cold stone foyer with tarnished wooden floors and echoing hallways. The overwhelming impression is of an implacable antiquity indifferent to the ubiquitous staff in their navy shirts and black slacks, and the infirm they attend, many of them in wheelchairs. There’s death here, stained into the walls. I fold my arms across my chest and hug them to me.

  ‘Hi,’ Julie says to the middle-aged man sitting at reception. He has a flat nose and oval face that seems too long for his body, like it’s been fed through a pasta roller. His name tag identifies him as Karl.

  ‘Hello,’ Karl says. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘We’re here to see Zoe Hall.’

  Karl types at his computer to bring up the name.

  ‘I know the way,’ Julie says.

  ‘I’ll need to get your details—’

  ‘That’s all right, Karl.’ A thin, elderly woman with prominent cheekbones and pointed shoulders arrives at reception. She moves with great delicacy, as if she’s brittle and might break apart given any velocity. Even the Sanctuary Hill uniform seems heavy on her. Her name tag identifies her as Faye. ‘Hello, Julie. It’s good to see you.’

  ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘Hanging in there,’ Faye says. ‘She’s a fighter.’

  ‘We’re okay to go straight in …?’ Julie points vaguely.

  ‘Sure.’

  Julie throws Karl a pointed look, then tugs my wrist and we walk down one of the thin hallways. ‘I hate that term—fighter.’ She shakes her head. ‘As if the act of not dying is so majestic.’

  ‘It’s meant to be a compliment.’

  ‘I know, but it’s also trite.’

  The room Julie takes us to is small and functional. A TV hangs in one corner, under it a dresser flooded with DVDs. There’s a door in the opposing corner, by a window that overlooks the garden. Although sun streams in through floral curtains, and there are pictures on the walls and flowers on an end table that are bright and lively, it’s like being in a fridge.

  Zoe is a small woman who barely protrudes from under the covers of her bed. There’s no resemblance to the woman in the picture in Julie’s flat; her now pasty skin hangs on a hunched skeleton, like a jacket sagging from a clothes hanger that can’t support its weight. Her eyes are slits, and only the right one greets us as we come into the room.

  ‘Hey, Aunt Zoe!’ Julie kisses her. The right corner of Zoe’s mouth curls. ‘I brought a visitor. This is my friend August. I’ve told him lots about you.’

  ‘Hi.’ I take a step forward and half lift my right hand, preparing for a handshake that’s an impossibility. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’ I stop myself from cringing at the stupidity of the greeting.

  ‘How about we get you out of here?’ Julie says. ‘August, there’s a chair in the wardrobe there.’

  The wardrobe door sticks and it doesn’t click in my head until I’ve wrestled the door open that Julie’s referring to a wheelchair. It’s folded up under a tattered pink robe that hangs in the wardrobe. I step back. A whole life comes down to this—a tattered pink robe and an empty wardrobe. Then what? At least Zoe has Julie. That’s something. Gen will have Oscar. I don’t even own a robe.

  I wheel out the chair, worry I won’t be able to assemble it, but it extends into its full width. Julie swings it around by the bedside, and before I can even think to offer, she has effortlessly lifted Zoe from the bed. Zoe’s legs dangle like a marionette’s, and her left arm falls limply by her side. Julie eases her into the chair, lifts her left arm into her lap, and her feet into the chair’s stirrups. I retreat into the corner, unsure where to look—or if this is even something I should not be looking at—and what to say. Julie grabs the blanket from the bed, folds it, and tucks it around Zoe.

  ‘Want to take a little walk?’ Julie says.

  I open my mouth to answer, but realise Julie’s not talking to me. She’s talking to Zoe. Of course she’s talking to Zoe.

  I fall back behind Julie as she pushes Zoe from the room and we head down the hallway. Julie exchanges perfunctory greetings with some of the staff, and brief courtesies with some of the other residents or with their visitors. I walk behind her, nod, or smile, but mostly avert my gaze from any meaningful contact that might prompt an exchange.

  We arrive at a set of French doors and I stumble forward to swing them open. Julie pushes Zoe through; I follow and close the doors behind us.

  The rear gardens are comprised of rows of coloured flowers spiralling around a fountain—tulips maybe, not that I know anything about flowers. Paths wind towards curled stone benches set under trees (I’m almost sure these are willows) that sway ponderously.

  Julie picks a vacant bench, positions Zoe towards the sun, then sits down. Zoe’s head tilts back—at first, I’m sure it’s a lack of support, or that the atrophied muscles in her neck can’t hold up her head, but she’s lifting her face to the sky. Her right eye closes and the right side of her mouth curls again, but the left half of her face is stoic.

  ‘Sit down.’ Julie pats the bench alongside her.

  I sit, still unsure what to say. Other people escort residents through the gardens. One kid runs around, arms outstretched like an aeroplane. A block of a woman who must be his mother wheels a man (possibly her father) towards the fountain and tells the kid to behave. The kid ignores her and runs around the fountain. The old man, a single drop of saliva gleaming from the right corner of his open mouth, nods incessantly—whether it’s a tic, or appreciation for the kid, who knows?

  Julie leans into me, and I lift my hand to the middle of her back. ‘I wish I didn’t have to study or work and I could take care of my aunt on a day-by-day basis, the way she took care of me when I first showed up on her doorstep, as a dumb, inconsolable fifteen-year-old.’ She kicks at the lawn with her heel until she makes a divot, and her voice drops to a whisper. ‘When I got her in here, I was sure she’d get better, that it was just a matter of time. But I’m starting to accept that’s not going to happen. I could take her out, put her somewhere cheaper, but we’ve come this far and she deserves the best. Doesn’t really matter where she is, I guess. They’re all places where you deposit loved ones who’ve become too cumbersome to take care of. Then, one day, you get that call, telling you they’re gone. And that’s it. It’s not fair. She’s only seventy.’

  The sun shines on Zoe’s face until her skin is porcelain. Her left eye is clamped shut, but the right is open wide, sparkling like mercury. She’s dead—I’m sure of it. But no, her chest rises; it’s shallow, almost imperceptible to the extent I have to watch it happen again to make sure I didn’t imagine it. She’s sleeping.
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br />   ‘I dread that day,’ Julie says, ‘and I know it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. I’ve worked on a eulogy—can you believe that? Worked on it for years. There’ll be nobody there to hear it, but she deserves it.’

  She bows her head, and her top teeth bite into her lower lip. Her chin quivers. I stretch out my arm, curl it around her, and she rests her head on my shoulder. Her body is rigid, and I know she’s just holding on. She’s probably been carrying this a while. I never went through it; my parents were there one day, then they weren’t. But if that hadn’t been the case? At some point, you stop seeing your loved ones as omnipresent, and realise the days they have remaining are growing limited.

  Zoe snorts and wakes, and there’s a lucidity in her good right eye, a brightness that lasts an instant before it dulls—maybe as her mind reconciles the confinement of her own body, of what her life is. What’s going on inside her head? Her intelligence wouldn’t be paralysed. She’d know what she’s lost, what her life’s become, the reliance on her niece—a reliance that becomes more apparent through the day. Julie talks to Zoe, a one-sided conversation where Julie recounts her classes, her disorganised but lecherous professor, Don Talbot, and how she’s looking forward to interning at the city hospital. Zoe makes tiny movements throughout—a nod so small here and there it’s impossible to tell whether it’s an acknowledgement or a nervous twitch.

  Around lunchtime, Julie wheels Zoe to the kitchen and spoonfeeds her a thick pumpkin soup. As she does that, she tells me about a vending machine that serves sandwiches, and gives me directions to find it. I get lost and have to ask one of the staff where it is, then get lost again and stumble on the vending machine—two of them, one a drinks machine—in a foyer lined with couches that’s probably some sort of waiting room.

  The sandwiches are forlorn in their little triangular black cases, wrapped in plastic. The only thing that doesn’t have tomato in it is the tuna sandwich, so I grab that, a ham, cheese, and tomato sandwich, and a couple of juices, then backtrack to the kitchen, wrong turns and all. Zoe’s asleep again, and Julie sits at the table, eyes unblinking and misty.

  ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Tuna was the only thing without tomato.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Sucks.’

  We eat wordlessly, then take Zoe to the lounge where Julie commandeers the couch and flicks through the television channels. Other residents come and go, some with their families; exchanges with them are short and meaningless. Zoe stays awake through most of the talk shows, although that might not be out of interest but the daily routine of her body clock. As the late-afternoon soaps begin, she’s asleep again.

  ‘I should’ve brought your book,’ Julie says.

  ‘My book?’

  ‘To read.’ Julie pats my thigh. ‘This wasn’t a very good idea—to invite you, I mean. You must be bored. And I’m not very good company.’

  ‘It’s okay. Not like I was solving world hunger or anything.’

  Just as it’s getting dark, we return to Zoe’s room. I’m about to offer to help with Zoe, but Julie hoists her easily from her chair. I pull back the covers, and Julie lays Zoe on the bed. Dinner comes shortly after—this time pea soup—and Julie spoonfeeds Zoe again, although now Zoe’s sloppier, and struggles to swallow. The soup splutters on her lips and dribbles down her chin. Julie patiently wipes it away, then tries again. Zoe’s right eye blinks and flits towards me, perhaps embarrassed. I look away as my phone rings—Gen. I decline the call, and message her that I’m with Julie and will talk to her later.

  Not long after dinner, Zoe’s asleep again. Julie pulls the covers up to her chin, tucks them in under the foot of the mattress, and kisses Zoe on the forehead. Then she stands motionless. I take a step towards her, want to reach out and comfort her. Julie’s shoulders straighten. There are no tears and her face is impassive.

  ‘This would be a good time to go,’ she says.

  Julie’s quiet as we drive away, and I don’t know what to say. I try to rehearse possible conversation starters in my head, but can’t get past the word, So …? No nervousness fills me, so there’s no rambling. No babbling. Nothing witty to disguise how uncomfortable I am in the situation. Nothing but awkwardness.

  Julie puts the radio on to the oldies; a song’s midway through—INXS’s ‘Don’t change’. I search for a meaning there, for some bit of serendipity, the way people find signs in everyday occurrences, no matter how innocuous, but there’s nothing.

  As we leave Hidden Vale behind, the road becomes dark—streetlights are few and the car’s headlights aren’t particularly penetrating. The hills and plains that stretched endlessly around us are now sheets of blackness, and the stars are so bright they have a milky aura.

  Julie veers the car down a dirt road that leads to one of the new estates under construction and slams the brakes. The seatbelt jolts across my ribs and snaps the breath from me. Julie yanks the handbrake so hard that it screeches in protest. She kills the engine, gets out of the car, takes several steps away from the car, then springs back and kicks the tyre.

  I wrestle with the damn seatbelt again before I manage to get it unlatched, and go to open the passenger door. Jammed. Of course. So I scamper across the front seats, and stumble from the driver’s door. Julie paces back and forth, although she hardly takes more than a few steps before she turns. As I approach her, she stops and holds out her hands, although I’m not sure whether it’s to tell me to stay where I am, or she’s trying to assert some control over herself.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I do this every time, even though I always tell myself I’m not going to do it, and I thought for sure since you were here I wouldn’t do it. Geez, I’m pathetic.’

  I take her hands—or at least hold them by the fingers—but she doesn’t relax, and the gesture’s awkward, but now I’m caught either trying to make this hold work, or letting go, which seems even more awkward.

  Julie looks up at me. ‘I am pathetic, aren’t I?’

  ‘Grading you on the curve, where I signify one extreme, you’re like a Nobel Prize winner—although, I don’t know, they might be pathetic, but if they’re winning Nobel Prizes you’d think they’d have to have something going for them, wouldn’t they?’

  Julie’s arms relax, and her hands close around mine. ‘It’s not fair, that this is the way it ends up.’ She runs the back of her wrist across her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry you have to feel this way. A lot of things aren’t fair. I wish I could say something wiser than that but that’s what it comes down to: a lot of things aren’t fair.’

  I lift my arms and hold them out wide, an invitation for a hug. Julie melts into me, warm, smelling again of whatever that soap is she uses, but now it’s mixed with something else—something medicinal, that’s probably rubbed off from her aunt.

  She rises up on her tiptoes, her misty eyes closing, and her lips purse. I kiss her, and my embrace tightens, but she pulls back. I’m sure she can feel the thumping in my chest. Those big eyes of hers are so soft, so vulnerable, full of something I haven’t associated with her in the short time I’ve known her: pain—of course, with a mother dead from cancer, molested by her stepfather, brought up by an aunt who needs special care, all while Julie’s trying to make her own way in the world. She could’ve been me, could’ve locked herself away from everything, even locked herself within her own head until she became lost in the mania of her own doubts and worries.

  But here she is.

  Yanking the buckle of my jeans open, and pulling my zipper down.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ I say.

  ‘I leave here every weekend and I feel empty and alone and I need something to feel alive.’

  Her hands shoot down my hips, into my jeans and underwear, pushing them down to my knees. I look up and down the road—there’s nothing but the road disappearing into the night. The wind whistles and crickets chirp, things that would’ve been going on all this time, but which I’m only aware of now because I’m worried ab
out being caught. Somewhere so distant I might even be imagining it, a dog yaps.

  ‘What if somebody comes?’ I ask.

  Julie reaches under her dress, pulls her underwear down to her ankles, and steps out of them. She grabs me by my shirt, pulls me close and backs up against the car. Her right leg hooks around my hip; her arms lock around my neck. She kisses me and my hands rest on her waist, the way they might if I were taking her for a waltz and afraid about being improper.

  ‘Get out of your head,’ she whispers.

  ‘These things don’t really happen.’

  ‘This a dream then?’

  She kicks off from the ground, so she’s sitting up against the edge of the car, supporting herself by gripping so tight around my neck she’s pinching. My hands move to her knees, run up her thighs and her weight settles into my palms until my biceps and shoulders strain. It’s confusing with her dress becoming bundled around her waist, and my shirt tails hanging over our crotches, but the new worry that emerges is whether I can guide myself into her. Julie’s tongue twirls in my mouth and I lose myself in kissing this beautiful woman who’s deigned to be with me. I enter her, so easily that despite being engulfed, despite that she is wet and tight around me, and even though she gasps into my mouth, I’m sure I must’ve done something wrong.

  Finding a rhythm shouldn’t be easy either, not standing like this, struggling to hold her pinned up against the car, but my thrusts are deep and steady. Julie’s cheek rubs against mine, and her breath pounds my ear.

  Yesterday’s failure is non-existent, Lisa is a woman whose face I don’t remember, and the night swallows us and isolates us until there is nobody else, nothing else, nothing but this moment, nothing but Julie, nothing but the next thrust—

  I pull out from Julie, pivot, and ejaculate, the first spurt hitting the front panel of her car, further spurts spiralling into the dirt like failed missiles whirling away towards self-destruction.