by G. Benson
What would fade without their influence? What would stay?
Anna kissed Ella’s cheek and pulled the blanket up. The light that washed over the bed dimmed as Anna pulled the door over. She listened in at Toby’s door and heard soft sleeping sounds.
Finally exhausted, Anna fell in to bed next to Lane, sighing contentedly as warmth enveloped her.
“Ella and Kym are going to be ganging up on us from now on.”
Anna attempted a laugh at her comment, but choked on emotion.
“Hey,” Lane whispered. “What’s up?”
Burying her face in Lane’s neck, Anna kissed the skin there, then kissed her lips with more fervour than she’d realised she had building.
An hour later, they fell asleep, wrapped in each other. Anna had to poke Lane awake enough to pull clothes on, reminding her that Ella sometimes liked to crawl into her bed.
It was a habit she’d have to get Ella out of, or she’d at least have to teach her to knock first and wait. However, with the fragile state she was in, Anna wasn’t going to give Ella any hint that she couldn’t come to her whenever she wanted.
If Anna had anything to do with it, Ella would never feel like that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Crying rang out and Anna’s eyes snapped open.
The loud groan that came from behind her made Anna chuckle.
“What is that?” Lane’s voice was choked with sleep.
Anna pulled Lane’s arm tighter around her middle as Lane curled more snugly against her back. “That, was Toby.”
“Na!”
Lane groaned again, and the arm slid away as Lane rolled onto her back.
The sheets rustled, and Lane pulled a pillow over her face. Her muffled voice floated out. “Why is it Toby?”
“Cause he’s a baby?”
“He’s almost two!”
“He’s eighteen months.”
Lane made a grumbling noise, then pulled the pillow up and looked at Anna. “What time is it?”
Anna grimaced. “Five.” Any earlier and she might have had hope of getting him back to sleep for another hour or so, but this late, he could be up for good.
“Ugh.” Lane pulled the pillow back over her face.
“Welcome to your first sleepover when the kids are here.” Anna sat up, resting her hand on Lane’s stomach. “I’ll be right back.”
Lane just grunted from under the pillow.
Amused, Anna padded down the hallway to get Toby before he woke up Ella. Often, he’d sleep much later than this. On the odd occasion, however, he woke up bright and early, ready to go. And while Anna didn’t hate mornings as much as Lane clearly did, she found it was always easier to cope with one cuddly toddler rather than a cuddly toddler and his six-year-old sister. It was five a.m., after all.
Stifling a yawn—she’d only gotten four hours sleep—she pushed Toby’s door open to find him sitting up, looking even sleepier than she felt. The grin he aimed up at her melted her. Maybe he would go back to sleep.
He pushed himself up to stand, unsteady on the softness of the mattress, and she scooped him up before he could fall over.
“Na,” he said happily.
She pulled him against her, his little legs wrapping around her and his head resting heavily on her chest.
“Morning, little man.”
Chubby fingers grasped her shirt, as they always did, and he yawned against her neck.
“It’s very early, you know.”
He burrowed into her.
Anna turned to carry him through to her room when he sat up straight in her arms, hair sticking out every which way. “Blank!”
“Of course.” Anna turned back to his cot. “Can’t forget your blanket.” The second she held it out to him, Toby grabbed it and settled against her, clutching it to his chest. His head thunked back down against her chest and he cuddled in.
Another yawn and Anna could practically feel him falling back to sleep in her arms. She carried him through to the bedroom, rubbing his back. A lump was all that Anna could see of Lane in the bed. The pillow was still over her head.
Whispering in Toby’s ear, Anna pointed, “Who’s that?”
Curiosity coloured Toby’s features as he sat up straighter in Anna’s arms. He looked at the lump, then back to Anna, then back to the lump. Toby pointed at it, then looked to Anna to make sure she’d seen it.
“I know! Who is it?”
When he craned forward, she stepped towards the bed to plop him down. Blanket in hand, he crawled across the mattress and sat down heavily, then smacked his hand down on the pillow. Nothing happened, and he looked at Anna, concerned.
“Try again, Tobes.”
So he did. And he jumped when the pillow moved, then looked delighted as Lane emerged from under it, hair a cloud around her head.
Lane, even half-asleep and hating everything at five a.m., smiled at the delighted toddler. “Hey, Tobes.”
As Toby fell down in a full body cuddle, Lane manoeuvred him under the covers with her.
Comfortable, Toby snuggled in, then suddenly sat up, grabbed his blanket and lay back down, cuddled right into Lane’s chest. Toby turned his little head to look at Anna, who was trying not to explode with the cuteness of the scene.
“Na.”
She took the hint and slipped back under the covers. Anna threw one arm over Toby, resting her hand on Lane’s hip, effectively encasing Toby in a sandwich. He burrowed in and yawned.
Lane caught Anna’s eye over the top of his head. “Is he always this cute in the morning?”
“About nine times out of ten. Every now and again, he’s a nightmare.”
“Never! Look at him!”
Right then, cuddled between the two of them, he looked like an angel.
Anna pressed her face into the back of Toby’s head, breathing in his baby smell. “Mm. He’s good at looking innocent. You slept through the one a.m. thing this morning.” She caught sight of Lane’s guilty look. “Or you pretended to sleep?”
Lane had the decency to look sheepish.
Unable to feign being indignant, Anna yawned, and Lane caught it, yawning too. Toby joined in, and Lane chuckled, slipping her arm over him so her hand mirrored Anna’s, fingers stroking the skin at Anna’s hip.
They all drifted back to sleep.
“Wake up!”
The bed lurched and Anna opened one blurry eye. Lane groaned and rolled onto her back, pulling the pillow over her head, while Toby sat up, clapping at the sight in front of him.
Ella stood on the end of the bed, with Kym kneeling next to her. Their hair was wild around their heads, and both looked ecstatic.
Kym was the one chanting: “Wake up, guys!”
“Hi, Aunty Na! Kym told me to yell and wake you up, but I said I wasn’t meant to, so she said she’d do it.”
“Way to drop me in it.”
Sensing an opportunity as Kym mock-glared Ella, Anna sat up, grabbed a pillow, and threw it, hitting her right in the face.
The glare Kym had been directing at Ella turned onto Anna. “Well, that was just rude.”
With a loud, “Morning!” Ella half sprawled in Anna’s lap. Anna smoothed her crazy bed-head off her forehead. “Morning, Ella Bella.”
“El! Lan!”
“Morning, Toby.”
Desperate to share his news with his sister, Toby smacked his hand down on the pillow over Lane’s head. “Lan!”
“Hi, Nurse Lane.”
Finally emerging from her hiding spot, Lane gave a wiggle of her fingers. “Morning, Ella.”
“I slept in!”
Anna looked at the clock. “It’s barely after seven, Ella.”
“That’s totally a sleep-in.”
“Well, I appreciate you waking Kym up first.”
Kym,
who had flopped down on her back at the end of the bed, turned her head. “Happy to be of assistance. Why’s the tot in your bed?”
Toby was crawling his way over to Kym. Soft hands patted her stomach, and then he lay his head on it, fat fingers gripping her shirt.
“He woke up early.”
Unable to hold back a smirk, Kym looked at Lane. “How early?”
Lane answered through gritted teeth. “Five.”
“Nice work, Tobes.”
Toby giggled.
The week passed and became the next week too quickly for Anna to keep up. In some ways, it was like their routine was never broken. In the mornings, Anna dropped Ella at her mother’s and Toby to day care. After work, she picked Ella up and they had dinner. During the day, she visited Toby in day care, had coffee with Kym, and paged Lane to her office at inappropriate times.
However, some things made it glaringly obvious that they’d had six days of hell—and other things were subtle, barely noticeable unless you knew to look for them.
At night, Toby’s cries when he woke were the hysterical ones of the first few days. By the end of the first week, it turned to just a desperate cry of Anna’s name and tears, but was a long way from the twice-a-week, half-asleep cry of before. The blanket still went everywhere, and he clung more than ever when she dropped him off at day care. He spoke a little less, words he’d picked up no longer yelled out in delight.
The real mystery was Ella. At times, she was the Ella that had started to re-emerge right before she’d been taken into foster care. Other times, she was quiet, contemplative. She clung for longer when Anna tucked her in at night. When Ella heard tyres over the gravel in the driveway, her whole body tensed and she stared at the door as if she expected to be dragged through it.
Four times in ten days, Anna had gotten up to comfort her after a nightmare, and, in the end, had taken Ella to her bed. One night, Ella had been almost inconsolable. Her choked cry of “I want Mummy” had made Anna’s chest ache and her own tears fall. She had rubbed Ella’s back, wanting to give her whatever would comfort her, and unable to give the only thing that would truly make everything okay.
Lane was a ray of sunshine for all of them. She had stayed over twice more, and she and Kym had joined them for dinner even more times than they stayed. The kids loved waking up to Lane in the house, and, thus far, Anna and Lane had remembered to put clothes on before falling asleep each time.
There were days Anna felt like she was exactly where she wanted to be, Lane moving around the kitchen and Ella telling them about the baby bird they’d saved at recess. Toby would sit on Anna’s lap, leaning into her and sucking at a sippy cup they were trialling.
And then there were days Anna felt like pulling her hair out and screaming.
Ella would be sullen and refuse to pick up her toys. Toby would be clingy and whiny, hanging off Anna until she couldn’t remember what it felt like to be alone for more than thirty seconds. Work would get hectic, and she’d be running around, trying to finish in time to get Toby from day care and stop by the grocery store and get Ella from her mother’s and, God, what was she going to do for dinner tonight and there were six loads of laundry she had to get done and, if Ella whined she wanted another bowl of ice cream one more time, Anna was going to lose it.
Moments would rear up out of the blue so solid and painful in which Anna wanted to talk to her brother, to ask Sally questions, to giggle with her over wine, to punch Jake in the arm when he said something annoying—to have her brother, her best friend.
But without everything that had happened, Anna wouldn’t have the life she had now. And that would mean no Toby and Ella. And no Lane.
Toby would look at her sometimes, head cocked and forehead all scrunched up, and she would swear Jake was looking at her with his “you’re insane, little sister” look, and it made her chest ache until she couldn’t breathe. Giggling, Ella would tell her a story from school like a conspirator, leaning forward so her hair fell around her face, and she was the mirror image of Sally doing the same.
Without the distraction of the trial, missing her brother and Sally seemed to drop on Anna like a tonne of bricks; she couldn’t explain why.
One day, hands clasped around a coffee, Kym looked at her from across the cafeteria table, eyes intent. She leant across the cool metal tabletop and rested a hand on Anna’s forearm.
“Don’t beat yourself up.”
“What?” Anna was genuinely puzzled.
“You miss them. And you’re allowed to—grief is funny like that. It’s more like a wave than something you, I don’t know, progress through in steps. It recedes, then hits you again, sometimes weaker and sometimes stronger.”
Nodding slowly, Anna gave an awkward shrug. “I thought it was getting better.”
The smile Kym offered was soft and deep with understanding. “It was. And it will again. It takes a long time.”
“What do you do when it’s like this?”
Kym sat back in her chair and grinned. “Either sob in the shower or come hang out with you guys.”
After having a psychiatrist tell her it was normal, Anna felt marginally better, though she still missed them constantly.
She knew Lane had noticed, but found herself waving the concern away and saying she was fine. The third time she did it, Lane looked at her and said, “No you’re not. No running.”
Staring at her, Anna finally gave in and shook her head. “I’m not. But I’m not ready to talk about it.”
Lane pulled her into a hug. “And that’s fine. Just no disappearing.”
Surrounded by the softness of Lane, Anna buried her face in her neck. “I’m not going anywhere.”
There were the days she’d stand in the kitchen, when Toby would be pulling on her leg and Ella would be calling something out from the living room, when she wouldn’t have gotten to have more than five minutes with Lane in days, and Anna would close her eyes and take a deep breath and count backwards from ten.
But these days, when it felt like she didn’t know what she was doing, she genuinely didn’t question why she was doing it or if she wanted to be doing it. Not anymore. Anger at her brother for putting her in this position didn’t bubble up, and Anna didn’t wish him back purely so she could scream at him. But now that the anger was gone, she was left aching with the sadness that Jake wasn’t there.
When she finished counting back from ten, she would open her eyes and lean down to pick Toby up. He would pat her face with his open palm and say, “Na,” with layers of affection in his voice.
Ella would wander through from the living room and say, “I just wanted to tell you that the teacher asked who we wanted to talk to every day, and everyone said a friend from school, but I said Mummy and Daddy, because I remembered you told me it was okay to talk about them.”
And Anna would be able to keep doing it; because those two kids made all the rest completely worth it.
On the bad days, a glance at her phone would show a text from Lane that would make her smile. Then she’d order pizza and they’d pull out a blanket and have a picnic on the kitchen floor, the kids chewing messily and getting pizza all over their colouring-in things.
Anna would leave the laundry to the next day.
And that was okay.
“Ella asked me at dinner if you’re my girlfriend.”
Disengaging her lips from Lane’s neck, Anna looked up. “When?”
She was sprawled over Lane, trying to find the energy to get up and get clothing on before the aforementioned Ella could burst through the door.
One arm under her head and the other tracing lazy patterns over Anna’s back, Lane shrugged. “When you were doing the dishes.”
“What did you say?”
“Um…I didn’t want to lie. But I didn’t know if it was my place to say anything. I don’t know how much detail you wanted to go into
, or how much detail Ja… I didn’t know.”
Anna smiled softly. “You can say his name, Lane.”
Hand gliding up Anna’s back and over her shoulder to push the hair behind her ears, Lane took her time to answer. “I didn’t want to upset you. You’ve seemed extra…sad about it this last week or so. Which is totally fine. I just didn’t want to make you talk about it.”
Normally, Anna would change the subject and not talk about it—and that’s exactly what she wanted to do again. But Lane was looking at her with utter concern, and she was wrapped in warm skin, lying between Lane’s legs, and Anna didn’t want Lane to think she couldn’t bring up this topic.
At times, it seemed Lane was still walking on eggshells since they had gotten back together. It had only been a few days, but it had impacted them. Anna didn’t want Lane to have to be careful.
“I have been.”
Lane looked at her, waiting for her to go on.
“I…I’m not angry anymore.”
Brow furrowed, Lane looked at her.
Leaning her cheek in her hand, Anna moved so she could still look at Lane, whose hand was softly stroking the skin between her shoulder blades. “I was so angry, at Jake for putting me in this position. God, even for…for dying; I just wanted to yell at him.” Anna didn’t know if it made much sense, but she kept talking. “And now, it’s kind of hard to explain. I’m not angry at him anymore. I wouldn’t want the kids to be with anyone else and I have you and I actually really like my life. And then I feel guilty, because I like my life and it’s a life where my brother and Sally are dead, and that is not okay.” It came out in a rush, some of it things Anna hadn’t even really realised she had been thinking.
Dark eyes soft, Lane just watched her, expression empathetic.
Eyes burning, Anna looked Lane in the eye, feeling tortured. “Those kids don’t have their parents and I don’t have my brother or my best friend and we are all starting to move on, and that’s not fair, Lane.” Her voice broke over the words. “It’s not fair.”
