by Leah Swann
What would it be like, she wonders, if he got better? Is there a parallel universe where the same man is well? A para-well universe. She has imagined that other self of him encasing the fragments, bringing them back together so the glimmers she has seen are all absorbed into one man. She used to live in hope for it. But another being has come from her now, the sum of both their wishes, the child that would have knit them together, that the man should have risen from the dead for, though still he lies curled up or stretched out and wooden against the new wails.
Something in her falls when she comes to bed and finds the man coiled under the sheet, a mummified being all folded in on itself. She has come to dread this pose. It makes her a witness to the death of something.
—I am sorry, he says in the dark of the night, —to be like this.
—It doesn’t matter, she replies.
—Nobody wants a sick man.
She chases away the pronouncement, yet again and again those words of his return, a flock of persistent birds determined to roost in her mind. Again and again she will shoo them away. But he is right. Nobody wants a sick man, not even the man himself.
Where is her husband? He is absent to her. She is stuck in one of those cave tunnels, rock pressing in on all sides, cold seeping through skin, air depleting, no sign of life except in herself, hand reaching out and received by stone.
These are unhelpful thoughts, her mother would say.
The thoughts come in on a nightly tide. Rhiannon considers herself in the mirror and sees a stranger who is deeply weary. Fatigued. Defeated, perhaps. Subsumed into his state. Not of itself but as a kind of atmosphere that is breathed in. His way of being has pervaded her. She is turning into his reflection.
Standing under the shower, which is steamy because of the cold air in the house, she can see herself drifting alone, the tie between them a thinning wisp, him following somewhere out there on the breeze, unaware of whether she is there or not, it seems.
They lie with their backs to each other. His to hers because, he says, he aches too much if he lies the other way. Hers to his because, she says to herself, she has given up on his affection.
And between them lies the child, the precious child, waiting.
On a good day she can say to herself, we have to go slowly, we live one moment at a time. And sometimes, just sometimes, there seems to be a sliver of hope—a laugh, a touch, an approach—light through the slats, the shutters, the wooden louvres. These are the good days, the days of knowing that to live in peace is enough. She can pause in a moment as if it is a falling tear and watch the way he dwells with the is-ness of things—a turtle sunning itself on his bare thigh, a starfish sprawled across his palm, a frog pulsing breath against his neck. He is living, she thinks.
He said once, I want to show you something, and he led her to a tree that he would save from burning. She watched him stomp out the flames that wanted to find a way in, saw his fingers touch the singed bark with a knowing calm. They visited the tree for days after. It has survived this time, he said, maybe not next time.
She wonders how the tree is, back there in the north, in the tropics, braving the great clouds, the lightning storms.
They would return one day, to the house un-renovated and boarded up, the boxes and the endless debris of their lives on hold. Perhaps everything would rot before they got there. Perhaps that would not be a bad thing. They could stay here, in the cooler south and leave the oppressive heat and past behind. She is no longer sure she wants to return to the north, to set up a new house, and begin the slow grind in all that humid air, with the baby and the sick man.
—Do not lift a finger, the midwife had said to Rhiannon, —or I will put you in hospital. Your blood pressure is up. I mean it. Warning.
Sweat was pouring down her face, legs, arms, stomach. She was breathless with bending over boxes, lifting objects from here to there, wiping over sagging cupboard shelves and disintegrating chipboard drawers. Her fingers were full of splinters. But it was the heat that sapped her most. Oppressive, relentless, brought in on great, pluming white clouds that loomed over the trees and filled up the sky. If only she had a long enough needle, she would prick them and let out the rain.
The truck was late. The men annoyed. One of the blokes hadn’t turned up after a party the night before. How slowly they moved. Why had she agreed to pay by the hour?
—It’d cost you less if he carried stuff to the truck too, you know!
The oldest worker nodded his head in the direction of her husband. She curled her lips into a smile, took a shuddery breath.
—I’m sick, the sick man chimed in, ready to explain himself.
And the strong men laughed heartily at that, tossing back their heads as they nearly dropped the lamp and dragged the new mattress through mud.
—Ha, ha, wish we could say that! — Oh mate, I feel tired, too tired to work today!
Rhiannon backed through the front door and into the bathroom so she didn’t have to hear, while the sick man persisted with trying to explain this most enigmatic of conditions, this most maligned and mocked state of being. She put her hands over her ears and tried not to vomit into the basin she’d just cleaned.
Can’t work, can’t play, can’t read, can’t lift, can’t think more than one thought at a time. How do you explain that to people? They want something definite. Tangible. Visible. Anything else is suspicious. The well-meaning come with their questions and suggestions about illness and psychology and diet and emotional paralysis and exercise and mineral analysis of hairs from the head. They bring their solutions like offerings. They wish he would try this one doctor, this one remedy. It would make a difference.
All the words, the helping and the damning are drips from a tap that melt away skin to the bone. They go into her, the words, and stick. They add to the unwellness she is breathing in, the heaviness of the atmosphere.
While he is resting on the couch she will check her emails. There is one from her neighbour up north, who has walked past the tree he saved once. Another fire has come through. The tree has fallen. It is evidence the control-burn fires are too hot, her neighbour says of the so-called fire management solutions. Evidence. That is what people want. Regardless, the fallen tree will disappear. It will soon be hidden by new undergrowth. It will become a house for creatures that will take that trunk apart in tiny pieces and give it back to the earth.
I guess I will have to tell him,she thinks, though she would rather not. There is something in the tree too much like him, like them. Fallen, eroding away. But not without the burning protest. Broken louvres, a shattered glass cracked in the hand like an egg. A hairline impression in the wall. These are the little marks of deeper fissures under the skin. Her love is an angry man. The pottery vase shoved from bench to floor. Positive thinking cards strewn through spilled water and chips of ceramic. Flowers scattered and trembling. A man slumped to the floor, sobbing. A woman storming away.
She is over it, over it, over it. And she grits her teeth until the front one snaps. Our life is a shattered dream still breathing. Unnoticed by passers-by.
—You cannot say such things, warns her mother. —What of the new child?
And they look at the sleeping angel together, the little soul, flung from heaven into the cradle.
—Go for a walk, her mother says. Get some fresh air. Think of the good things, she adds.
Yes, the good things. Rhiannon gathers up little moments of gold. Keeps them in a bottle around her neck. Every now and then she holds the precious vial up to the light to see the little specks glisten. And yet something in her would walk to the edge of a cliff-face and throw the treasure overboard. Where would it land, this small vessel of love’s tiniest fragments? She watches it slip through her fingers, and somersault through air, until a waterfall gathers it in and takes her treasure down to the swirling white waters. Perhaps it will float down the river, oblivious. Perhaps it will be swallowed into the deep. Perhaps it will be dashed against a rock and the fragments wi
ll scatter, subsumed in fine spray, carried on the wind.
She walks home rigid, stalking the soul of something—herself, him, she can’t tell. She brings the door shut behind her with a slam. He will be cross about that. She doesn’t care.
Her fist bangs the door of the fridge. And makes crooked a little piece of paper where a poem is scrawled. She reads the words out loud to herself, remembering.
Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune — without the words, / And never stops at all, / And sweetest in the gale is heard; / And sore must be the storm / That could abash the little bird / That kept so many warm. / I’ve heard it in the chillest land, / And on the strangest sea; / Yet, never, in extremity, / It asked a crumb of me.
—What are you muttering?, comes the voice of the man stirring on the divan. He wakes like a man coming up from underwater. She can feel his paleness seeping through her skin.
—Nothing, she replies, snatching the poem free of a magnet.
Hope is the thing with feathers. She is not up for that kind of flight, or that kind of clinging on.
—You banged the door, he says.
She goes to the bathroom, shuts the door and turns on the taps to run water into the bath. To drown him out, to drown her out. Let the water run. And so she takes herself under, to where nothing is heard in the same way.
Beneath the quiet she closes her eyes to see her husband walking an endless sand dune, feet sinking awkwardly in the hills gone white under the moon. He walks in an odd way, as if he weren’t made for the land. And in his hands he holds a little bird that shivers, perhaps newly fallen from its nest. So fast and fragile is the creature’s heartbeat, she fears that it will seize and stop. Underneath soft feathers the frail legs and rigid claws stick out through gaps between her husband’s fingers. And the eye of the bird is bulging, as if to fall with fright from the little feathered skull. The man glides along slowly, sleepwalking, en route to somewhere. But he carries the little bird with care, like it is the most precious thing in the world.
When she wakes she is lying next to him on the bed, a blanket around her. He is resting on his back, air whistling through his nose softly, both hands gripping her arm across his chest like a man adrift on the sea clinging to the last beam of a raft.
I set you as a seal upon my heart. As a seal upon my arm.
When she wakes again he has left the door open and gone out into the dark before first light. Through the open door she sees the deep shadows of quiet trees waiting, the full moon a crisp oval lake of silver.
It is nearly 5am. The baby is wide-eyed in the blue dimness. Tiny icicles have knitted their frosty pathways across the windows. Rhiannon lifts the child and wanders into the warmer room, by the still-murmuring fire. He is heavier than yesterday. She watches him feeding at her, the clinging finger, the eye turned up to consider her face. She wishes she could go out the door that is slightly open, into the forest and the secret ways of it. She would take the baby with her, strap him tight against her heart and carry him along the path to the tree woman and her river.
Instead she waits, listening. There are shiftings and scratches beyond the door. She is alert, a little nervous. Listening for animals and other presences. Watching for the snake that came onto the verandah yesterday, raising its slender, swaying body against the glass of the window. An omen, a blessing, depending on which view of the snake you hold.
She is listening for him, her absent husband. Perhaps he will not return. Perhaps he will go out into the night forever. At last his footsteps approach. She can hear him walking down the path, his breath loud in the cold air. He is at the door before she expects him. Shivering, awake. She has never seen him like this. The baby pulls away to stare.
There is something about the man. Behind are the velveteen night and the silver white stars. Around him is the cold air of exhilaration. He seems strangely alive. His eyes are shining, his forehead glowing. A flint has struck in his pupil. He is bringing something to her, this messenger freshly returned from dark travels and ready to announce pre-dawn secrets. The smell of the forest comes in with him like a cape. For a moment she sees him, the man that was and is, together.
A breath of wind sighs in, the door murmurs. Flames on the log stir awake with the gust of air. He is standing there, her husband. There is a flutter, a soft whoosh past his body. She glimpses feather and wing, feels the soft scratch of a tiny claw across her cheek. Her body ducks low, a roof over the child. The bird flounders against wall and window, scrapes the floor, brushes the ceiling. And then is gone again, out into the indigo night. In the silence afterwards the woman wonders if the feathered creature was real. Her husband is still standing half-in, half-out of the doorway.
—It’s beautiful, he breathes, and turns to look behind him again, as if he might plunge back into the mystery that he has known.
Notes:
‘Hope is the thing with feathers’ by Emily Dickinson
‘I set you as a seal upon my heart. As a seal upon my arm’ from Song of Solomon
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