Winter Beginnings

by Elise K. Ackers

  He conjured her face in his mind. It was unsmiling, which dissatisfied him.

  He thought back to the few occasions he’d seen her laugh, and his mind folded itself around those moments like fabric, carefully enclosing them like museum pieces for later study.

  She was sad. Wrung out and closed off.

  Because she’d given him this sweet moment, he wanted to give her something similar. Maybe that meant taking something away, because from the outside looking in, she appeared burdened. He thought about her workload and guessed at the pressures she faced away from work, and tried to imagine how he could help.

  Money was a sore subject, she’d become the worst kind of animated when he’d stuck his nose in there. If time was the issue, he could reduce her work hours and still pay her the same, but that would mean she’d have to wait around before or after school, or start putting Ben on a school bus.

  As Nina and Rowan struggled to their feet and Nina hurried over to switch off the oven, Dean wondered if he was overlooking the obvious. Maybe it wasn’t a thing so much as a state of mind.

  Dean could empathise. When his life had turned on its head he’d failed to resurface for a while. Hell, it had taken him years to laugh as he’d just done. Who was to say she hadn’t suffered something which still affected her today? Maybe she was depressed.

  The prospect didn’t scare him, and it didn’t make him think any less of her. It did, however, give him something new to think about.

  He needed to do some research, and perhaps hone his observation skills. He looked at her a lot during the day, but maybe he wasn’t seeing her.

  By the time all the doors and windows were closed and the heater was on, Dean had a plan.

  Chapter 12

  Ben felt like two people in one body when it approached the time for his mum to leave for work. He watched her move about the kitchen as she prepared his favourite sandwich for dinner—an assortment of cold cuts, scrambled egg and smashed avocado—and both longed to have the house to himself, and to wrap himself around her legs and stop her going.

  It was Saturday evening. They’d spent the day together and it had been mostly fun. The grocery shopping part had been boring, but he’d had a haircut after and his fringe was finally too short to fall in his eyes. The last bit of their time together had been the best; they’d bought inflatable bubble balls big enough to climb inside and they’d battled in the backyard until they’d collapsed from exhaustion.

  His mum had won. She’d sent him flying onto his butt too many times to count. She was awesome.

  And guilty again.

  She always got this look on her face before she went to the restaurant, and Ben always wondered what he’d done to put it there. Except on the days when he whined and sulked—he knew what he’d done on those days, obviously. But today he was being good.

  ‘There’s a big party tonight,’ she said, tearing a measure of Cling Wrap free from the roll and wrapping his sandwich in it. ‘I’ll be home as soon as I can, but it depends on when the last guests leave.’

  He said, ‘Okay,’ and nothing else. He even tried to say it tonelessly. He was scared to say too much in case she realised something was up.

  She usually knew when he was plotting something, but he’d been really clever this time.

  She paused. ‘Something going on?’

  Crap.

  ‘No.’

  She set the sandwich down and flattened her palms on the counter. ‘What are you going to do tonight?’

  What could he say that she would believe?

  ‘I’m on level seven of my game.’ Which was true. He hoped that by saying that she assumed he meant to play it.

  She nodded and pushed away from the counter. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But bed by ten. If you finish seven or eight or whatever at nine fifty-seven, don’t start another level.’

  ‘K.’

  The sandwich went in the fridge, and their time together ran out.

  He followed her to the door, hugged her tight around the middle, then locked everything loudly so she could hear it from the other side. Then he was alone.

  Ben mooched around the living room for at least ten minutes—just in case she came back—then he darted upstairs and changed his clothes. He dragged on a pair of old jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, a short-sleeve shirt, and a jumper, and found his Iron Man beanie under his English homework and an empty packet of biscuits.

  He checked that the driveway was still empty before he went out the back door.

  In the garden shed, stuffed behind deflated pool lounges and a collapsed shade tent, was the two-person tent Ben was looking for. He dragged the bag outside and dropped it on the lawn beneath the big gum tree he’d engraved his initials onto two summers ago. The tent pegs clattered. Almost everything he needed was inside that bag, including the plastic mallet that his mum had used to scare away a fox once.

  He set about laying the tent base down, and before long he was pretending he had company. He imagined Dean giving instructions, and then Ben would follow them. He pretended he was racing Ro. Whoever got their tent up last had to dig the bog hole. Nina would be supervising in one of her weird outfits. Ben didn’t know what Mr O’Hara and Mr Foster would be doing, he didn’t know them very well, but he supposed Mr O’Hara would be putting drinks in the esky or getting dinner ready, and Mr Foster would be doing something clever with bits of wood he’d found on the ground. Building a really cool fire, maybe.

  His mum was there too. Talking to Dean. They were friends in this daydream—she liked Dean as much as he did and nothing was grown-up complicated. It was just fun. And loud. It was the noise Ben liked the best.

  He felt like he was part of the chaos until the tent was done. After that, he just felt alone. He thought about turning on the television and leaving the back door open. It would be easy to pretend the news program was the grown-ups inside talking. But in the end, he just tried to remember stuff he’d overheard at the garage. Once he’d retrieved his sandwich from the fridge, his pillow from his bed, and his sleeping bag from the shed, he climbed inside the tent and zipped the door shut.

  The sun would stay up for another half hour or so, then everything would get dark and it would be easier to pretend he was somewhere else. Wherever Ro, Neenz and their dad were now. They were probably having the time of their lives.

  He bit into his sandwich and shivered.

  Chapter 13

  ‘This was not your best idea,’ Cal said grimly.

  Dean glanced at his friend but had no reply. This was far from Dean’s best idea—no question—but he didn’t want to sound defeated in front of the kids. Not when their moods were teetering on the edge of hysteria. Not when this trip was shaping up to be the worst kind of unforgettable.

  Rowan stared at his father through the neck of a spare T-shirt that he’d fashioned into a balaclava. The arms of the T-shirt hung limp from his temples and gave him the appearance of a sad rabbit. His arms were around his knees and he was shivering violently. Beside him, Nina was wearing her sleeping bag. Rowan had tightened the draw-cord around her flushed cheeks, which made her look like a caterpillar getting its last glimpse of the world before withdrawing into its cocoon. Her lips were pressed together in a miserable pout.

  Outside the tent, in the blustering wind and the dark, Ethan was humming.

  ‘I hate him,’ Cal grumbled.

  Dean raised an eyebrow.

  ‘This is what he was like last time,’ Cal said, casting a withering look at the tent wall. ‘When you’re this miserable and uncomfortable, someone else’s cheerfulness gets right into your bones and you feel like you’re going to—’ He made a sharp, dramatic gesture with his trembling hands. Rowan and Nina looked at each other.

  ‘Someone else’s cheerfulness is a good thing,’ Dean told them, but privately he agreed with Cal. Ethan had to be putting this on, no-one could be so upbeat in the face of this temperature.

  They were twenty kilometres beyond the last thing Dean had recognised on the
road past Lithgow. This wasn’t an official campsite, they’d run out of the store-bought logs for the fire, and everything laying around was too wet to burn. They’d ploughed through the food because they’d been bored, and now there was only the waiting. Waiting to warm up. Waiting to sleep. Waiting for it all to be over.

  Dean had half a mind to call the whole thing a bust and bundle everyone back in the car.

  ‘Know any games?’ Dean asked Cal.

  Cal shook his head and glanced at the kids. ‘Not for present company. You bring any cards?’

  That would have been a good idea.

  ‘Okay!’ said a happy voice outside. ‘Who’s ready to be warm?’

  There was a sharp whine as Ethan dragged the tent door zip open. He stepped inside, closed the flap behind him, then dropped like a stone onto the unsuspecting Cal. Cal yelped, then the pair of them began to tousle for the biggest amount of real estate in the too-small space. The kids giggled as they watched, and Dean only just managed to avoid a rogue elbow to the eye.

  Ethan settled himself on half of Dean’s sleeping mat, then began rummaging in his pockets.

  ‘Hands!’ he commanded.

  Rowan was the first to act, and therefore the first to have a small packet of something placed in his upturned palms.

  ‘It’s warm!’ he cried delightedly, lifting it to his face to inspect it.

  ‘Air activated,’ Ethan said, leaning towards Nina, tugging the drawstring away from her face and sliding a packet inside her cocoon. ‘Don’t ask me how they do it.’ He tossed one to Cal and Dean each, and there were grateful murmurs all round.

  Within a minute, everyone had a second warmer pack to stuff down their shirt, and things got better within moments. Everything no longer seemed so dire. Cal was even smiling at Ethan.

  ‘Let’s play a game,’ Ethan said. He made the kids giggle when he put one of his hand warmers on top of his head then pulled his beanie over it. ‘It’s called Animal, Vegetable or Mineral, okay? I’m going to think of something, and it’s going to be one of those. You have to guess what it is, and I can only say yes or no.’

  Dean’s smile dropped a fraction. He’d played this game before. Decades ago, on a bush walk with Ethan and their father. Their dad had tried to keep them distracted as the kilometres had moved behind them and time had stretched before them. They’d gotten lost but Ray Foster had never panicked. He’d told the brothers they were explorers, the likes of which Australia had never seen before. He’d given them his share of water, and told them stories about when he and their mother had been dating. His laugh had rolled down the gully and up the other side, then rolled back to them, like a skateboarder on a half-pipe, back and forth.

  It was the first nice memory of his father that Dean had allowed himself since he’d learned the awful truth about his parents’ deaths. When he’d realised the role Ray had played—the weakness that had cost Dean’s mother her life too—Dean’s heart had shunned any nostalgic thoughts towards his father.

  His mother, though … Dean wished he’d had more time with the late Kelly Foster. She’d been affectionate and expressive, generous with her time and quick to laugh. She’d been everything two young boys had needed, before she—just like Bree—had been taken too soon.

  Ray’s fault.

  Dean closed his eyes and brought the man’s face to mind. He hadn’t tried to conjure Ray for years now, and the picture wasn’t clear—like an old Polaroid photo, faded and warped by time.

  Animal, Vegetable or Mineral, he thought. Ray hadn’t been a bad father. He’d just made a few catastrophic choices at the end. It hadn’t been his intention to rob his boys of both their parents. He’d only meant to take himself out of the equation, for a hundred reasons Dean would never know nor understand.

  Dean had known a grief Ray had never known. Ray had died with his wife. Dean had buried his. And life had been unthinkably tragic in the wake of Bree’s death, but Dean had never given up, nor would he. He had his kids to think about, and they were his world.

  Nina with her wide eyes and smart mouth. Rowan with his spirit and loyalty.

  Dean and Ethan had been loved by their father, but at the sunset of Ray’s life he’d chosen not to think about his family. To Dean, that was like a carcass in the water supply.

  He felt torn. For the first time in a long time, Dean wanted to speak freely about his father. His kids deserved to know about their grandfather because there was good before there had been the bad, but it was hard to forgive when Ray had left behind such a visual reminder of his fatal choice. Every day in the garage, Dean had to look at the wall Ray had looked at as he’d died. There it was, a macabre reminder of where—exactly where—everything had changed direction in Dean and Ethan’s young lives.

  It was something to think about. Maybe something could even be done about it. Dean was, after all, embracing change on all sides lately.

  Chapter 14

  By the following week, things were better than ever for Dean. It felt like he’d resolved his issue with time—whether it had stretched or he was no longer so stretched, he couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t feel like everything was happening at once anymore. He’d been more hands-on in the garage, free to work for hours on end on one car or project without worrying about phone calls, walk-ins or paperwork. Hiring Alice had made a big difference in every aspect of his life; he wasn’t working long hours to keep up with demand, which meant he was getting more time with his kids. He wasn’t pushing his staff or asking too much of himself. Life had improved.

  He should have hired her years ago.

  He’d also had the time to come up with another adventure, seeing as his kids had insisted they weren’t camping again until summer. Bushwalking. He was going to map out some possible tracks, estimate how far little legs could go … He thought Nina walking at a daydream pace, and Rowan complaining about something or other—probably the pace—and shook his head. Maybe he would just sit his kids down and ask them what they were interested in nowadays. Then they could all do that together.

  Because it was nearing three o’clock, he cleaned his hands in the small sink outside the reception area and readied himself for some conversation. He’d developed a habit of spending time with Alice before the kids turned up, and liked finishing his work days this way. Alice also seemed to enjoy it, and had started moving a chair up to the desk for him, which he liked more than he would ever admit to her.

  Today there were nerves in his stomach, and his throat was tight. He didn’t have an easy conversation in mind this time—he had a bunch of confronting questions that Alice wasn’t going to like.

  She was hiding something from him, and he’d had long enough to think about it now to no longer be willing to indulge it. She was perpetually tired, didn’t talk much about what she did after hours, and evaded his invitations to spend time together outside of work. The kids were all getting on now and were walking to the garage after school together. They wouldn’t have minded seeing more of each other, yet Alice never accepted his invitations to dinner.

  He saw her looking at him sometimes. He didn’t flatter himself that she harboured an above-average level of interest in him, but it did make him wonder whether she was deciding if she could confide in him.

  Today he would convince her she could.

  But Alice wasn’t in the reception area when he stepped inside, nor was she out the front with a customer. He was about to pull a chair over to her desk to wait for her when he was brought up short by a strange sliding sound. It hissed, like a long whisper, paused, then hissed again. He strode past the antique gas pump his customers admired and stepped through the open door to the storeroom.

  Lit by a single insubstantial light, the small room was too dark for him to see details, but halfway down the narrow aisle, standing between stacked drums of oils and a high shelving system packed with boxed parts, was a person.

  ‘Alice?’

  The penlight swung in his direction, then lowered to illuminate Alice’s brown
leather boots. ‘Hi,’ she said. She held a long cardboard box in one hand.

  ‘Everything okay?’ he asked. He dragged another box from a nearby shelf and used it to prop open the door.

  ‘Yeah, the bulb just blew. I’m looking for brake shoes.’ She clutched a Post-It note in the hand with the penlight, where he guessed she’d written down the specifications.

  ‘I’ll fix the light. You need any help?’

  She lifted the box a fraction as she stepped forward. ‘I’ve got them.’ It wasn’t until she was close to him that she added, ‘Thanks.’ The word fell softly into the quiet, poorly lit room.

  Before she could ease past, out into the light and away from what had somehow become a moment, he reached for her and trailed his fingers across the soft flesh of her arm. She hesitated, and his fingers curled around the circle of her wrist.

  He was going to ask her now, when they were away from scrutinising eyes and bright light and time. It was only the two of them. She was going to forget there was anything else for a moment—for just long enough for him to say his piece.

  He’d told himself he’d wait for her to open up, but maybe it was as simple as asking the right question. Maybe she’d been waiting for him to broach the subject.

  ‘Alice, just … wait a second.’

  When she lifted her eyes to meet his gaze they were weighed down with fatigue. Dark circles were a mask on her otherwise beautiful face, and there was a small line of red on the right side of her bottom lip. She’d developed the habit of biting there, something he was sure she hadn’t done before working at the garage. Alice had become a kind of study for him, dependably unravelling a little more each day. Sometimes her clothes weren’t ironed, or her hair was scraped into a messy knot high on her head. Other times she spent her lunch hour dozing on the old couch in the kitchen. She hadn’t worn make-up for a while but even when she did, the foundation did little to disguise her increasing exhaustion.