The United States of Us

by Kate Sundara

  Ruth carefully picks up the T-shirt.

  ‘Could you just throw it away, please?’ says Mia, but Ruth has another thought in mind:

  ‘It’s funny,’ she says abruptly. ‘You go on about how actions speak louder than words… Isn’t this big enough an action for ya?’ Ruth looks at the T-shirt then back at Mia with hurt in her eyes.

  ‘Wil would have done the same for anyone.’

  ‘You think?’ fires Ruth, looking angry.

  ‘Of course! He didn’t – he just –’ Mia is perplexed. Ruth had seemed smitten with Corey.

  ‘You’re right. He probably would’ve done that for anyone, but he did it for you, didn’t he? He did it for you!’ blasts Ruth. She throws the T-shirt at Mia, who double blinks in disbelief and cannot summon the words. Ruth has no more words for her either.

  * * *

  Since Ruth isn’t talking to her, Mia accepts the offer of dinner at Chokecherry Shack. She’d considered constructing her figurative suit of armour tonight – the mental, emotional and physical shielding it’d take to go to Zak’s to reclaim her passport – but she’s still too shocked and unsettled by Ruth’s reaction. Postponing her mission, it hangs over her like a cloud of doom.

  Mia stands with Rosa on her balcony, super-saturated colours unfolding in the evening sky.

  ‘You girls are close, huh? I’ve seen you talking and laughing at the shelter,’ remarks Rosa.

  ‘Ruthie and I are solid. Or we were. I don’t want that to change. She’s giving me the silent treatment because she thinks Wil and I like each other.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I know that the last thing I want is bad feeling between Ruth and I. We live together, she’s been a brilliant friend. That’s harder to find than I ever thought.’ Mia thinks of April.

  ‘You’re fortunate to have found one another,’ says Rosa. ‘Sounds like a friendship of substance.’

  ‘It is. At least Ruthie’s real about her feelings, even if that doesn’t make it easy. To think that the authenticity of our friendship emerged from my masquerade with Zak. I guess he did us a favour, unintentionally. If he hadn’t screwed up so early on, Ruth and I may not have grown close. You and I mightn’t have gotten to know each other at all.’

  Rosa looks out at the sunset casting a cherry-red glow across the peaks. ‘It’ll all be okay in the end. If it’s not okay then it’s not the end.’

  ‘Here’s hoping. Ruth means a lot to me. She’s a big part of why I stayed in the valley even after what happened with Zak. I’ve made some good friends out here. Including you, of course.’

  Rosa smiles, squinting into the setting sun. ‘Maybe there’s another reason you’re meant to be here. A purpose other than the one you thought. I don’t think it’s by mistake you wound up in this valley,’ says Rosa. ‘I think you’re right where you’re supposed to be.’ Her deep earthy voice is soothing.

  ‘You think it’s fate? That this is all meant to be?’

  ‘Mountains look beautiful tonight,’ remarks Rosa, seemingly changing the subject. ‘The legend goes, once there was just one big mountain. Chickenhawk got mad and broke it up with his wings and scattered it, making a whole bunch of mountains. He was mad at being rejected by Owl’s widow.’

  ‘Love makes us do crazy things,’ says Mia.

  ‘Doesn’t it just,’ agrees Rosa.

  ‘Love is just socially acceptable insanity.’

  Rosa laughs, they both take their first sips of tea.

  ‘So the legend says those formations are a random consequence of unplanned events? Tell me another story.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve told enough stories. Your turn.’

  ‘Me? I don’t have a story.’

  ‘Sure you do. I can see it all around you,’ says Rosa.

  ‘What can you see?’ Who can she see…?

  ‘I carry my stories, I think you carry one too. I don’t walk alone and neither do you.’

  Mia looks at Rosa enquiringly, the flaming sun glinting in her eyes.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ says Rosa. ‘I figure it might help you to talk about it.

  Mia considers Rosa silently for a time. Rosa, who believes in the sharing of all things – tea and trust and nourishment of body and spirit, who filled whole afternoons with her tales. Maybe it’s time Mia did share her own story. But could she ever speak those words to anyone? Could she dare utter my name?

  ‘Maybe life’s just a bunch of mishaps,’ says Mia, ‘I used to think it was all mapped-out, all part of a greater plan. But sometimes it feels like there is no logic or reason, that life is like water. They used to think the molecular structure of water moved in a linear fashion, but it doesn’t, it’s more akin to Chaos Theory, meaning everything’s random. Wil taught me that. I can’t imagine why I thought he was a geek!

  Rosa laughs again.

  ‘Not that he thinks everything’s random. Wil’s a believer, thinks things happen for a reason.’

  Rosa looks pensively at the sun sinking behind the mountain, the late light catching her hair.

  ‘I’ve always been a dreamer,’ admits Mia. ‘But when you look at what’s around us: all the broken people at the shelter, all the suffering and disease and injustice in the world, why do we think we’re entitled to a Happy Ever After? Life isn’t fair. I’m not owed anything. I was crazy to come here looking for a fairytale, just like Lucy said.’

  ‘Lucy?’ enquires Rosa looking down at the herbal mix she stuffs in her pipe.

  A long silence. Mia clears her throat, half wanting to talk about something else, but she’s already eked open the door into her secret world and she has to push on through now or else she never will. ‘Lucy’s a friend of mine. She had a twin brother. He was my… He drowned. I let him drown.’

  They turn to each other, shimmering in the blood-orange glow, and the words flow out of Mia like a force of nature: ‘We all grew up in the same village. My older sister, Heidi, would babysit the three of us together. Me, Lucy, Robin. He was the cutest little thing, my sister adored him. She looked after the twins a lot, their parents weren’t getting on. There were these woods by the beach, close to where we lived. Heidi would take us there, looking for pixies in the foxgloves. We loved it. Robin had a heart defect from birth.

  It was never much of an issue, mostly theory.

  ‘When the twins turned eight, their parents separated. Their mother moved away, she took Robin and Lucy with her.

  ‘Ten years later. I was eighteen. It was the summer I finished school, the holidays filled with friends and festivals and camping trips. We were gearing up for picking season on our cider farm. I was out in the orchard, fixing up an apple-cart, when this person appeared amid the trees. He was absolutely gorgeous, gleaming green eyes, told me he came to ask about work before starting university. Like me. We were the same age. Then I cottoned-on who he was: Robin. The same boy I’d played with all those years before. The twins were back in the village visiting their dad. I’d sort of stayed friends with Lucy during the intervening years, but hadn’t seen Robin since we were kids. He accepted some casual labour on our farm. I developed such a crush on him, every day finding a reason to be around him.

  ‘Robin was this shining light. The life and soul. Everyone loved him. He was the strong but sensitive type, all set to go and study English Lit. He read to me, got me interested in poetry, made me want to write. He had a way with words but he was never just words, he was a doer too. He was always willing to go help others, much to my adolescent annoyance. I wanted him to myself.’ Mia smiles vaguely. ‘He was beyond me in maturity, beyond his years. He took charge. I liked that. I felt safe. My first kiss was with him in the orchard, hidden by the apple trees. I was a late bloomer. Still am.

  ‘Then there was this one day. The last day of the holidays. Robin, Lucy and I weren’t working, we headed to the nearby beach. The sea was too rough to swim in so we went into the woods – where Heidi used to take us looking for pixies in the foxgloves. Earlier in the summer we’d
found our old tree-house, the one the twins’ dad built us years ago, our old nest. We’d lay inside it, imitating the sounds of different birds.

  ‘Robin and I wanted to be alone in the tree-house. He and Lucy started arguing. They usually got along. He was fed up with his sister being our shadow, wanted us to have more time alone. I wanted it too. Lucy got upset. She stropped off through the woods. Robin said not to worry, she’d get over it. He climbed up the ladder fixed to the trunk, I climbed up after him. The top rungs had snapped away leaving a big gap. Robin scaled his way inside then reached down and grabbed my hands to pull me up. I was laughing and dangling and shrieking but he was assuring me, ‘I’ve got you, I won’t let go, I promise.’ I trusted him and he didn’t let go.

  ‘It was cosy inside, quiet, sheltered, September sunlight pouring through the trees, the little window looking out over all the forget-me-nots. We messed around for a bit as we always did, making bird-sounds, but we were alone now and that called for something new.

  ‘Robin took his shirt off. We hadn’t. I’d never… I was scared, in a good way. His skin was warm and smooth. Beautiful. I’d barely touched him when… suddenly – all this shouting – Lucy rushing back, her voice louder, nearer. We threw back the curtain, saw her running through the woods in a panic, yelling we had to come quickly, that someone was drowning. Robin helped me back out, we slid down the ladder and ran to shore.

  ‘We saw the kid, way out in the water, body-board further out, no-one else on the beach. The sea was wild and raging, Robin dived into the surf. Lucy couldn’t swim, she got out her phone. I raced in after Robin. I’d been swimming that sea for years. I was a strong swimmer – they called me Mermaid. I’d won prizes in galas at school.

  ‘When I’m in I realise what’s happened – the kid’s been dragged out by a rip-tide. I’m pulled out by it too. The only way out of a rip is to break out of it sideways and swim parallel to shore, but the force is so strong and waves are crashing over me and water’s shooting up my nose and down my throat and wrenching me further and further out and I’m powerless against it. I’m pulled nearer the kid, then I see him – Robin, struggling. I remember his heart – his defect – but I’m caught between the two and can’t be with both. Robin’s too far away and there’s the kid – I can’t not help him – suddenly clung around me, panicked, pushing me under. I look but I can’t see Robin, can’t see him anywhere, he’s gone, he’s gone. He’s just gone.’ Mia stops. ‘…And the hole in his heart became mine.’

  Rosa’s eyes start to well with emotion, no stranger to loss, but Mia doesn’t want emotion, she digs her nails into the dry wooden bannister to make herself as hard as wood.

  It’s been a long while since I’ve heard Mia speak my name and, for once, I want to let myself feel, to let familiarity flow through and around me like the best, most welcome hug. If only I could hug her, if I could put my arms around her now, tell her it’s okay, that it wasn’t her fault.

  ‘Lucy never talks about it; that day turned her to ice. Someone told me grief is like water: it takes different forms. Mine was to get away. I went travelling and never returned, I’m like the river, I keep running away. Friends back home joke that Mia stands for Missing In Action.’

  Rosa stands motionless, smoke billowing from her pipe resting on the bannister.

  ‘So yeah, you’re right: I don’t walk alone. He’s with me every day. Not as a spook or spectre. More than a memory. A complex. People talk about keeping dearly departeds alive in their hearts. I guess there isn’t quite a word for that yet. You said you carry the essence, the trace of your stories. That’s kind of how I carry him with me.’

  A long pause.

  ‘I’d write letters to my grandfather after he passed on,’ says Rosa.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Even if they were only to myself, it helped in the healing process.’

  Neither of them speak for a few moments, but Mia still needs to unburden.

  ‘Maybe I was meant to be there at the beach that day. If they called me mermaid then I was meant to rescue Robin. Mermaids rescue drowning men. I didn’t. The guilt’s so suffocating that sometimes I feel like I’m the one who’s drowning.’

  Finally out in the open, left to breathe, Mia and me – her core-wound – exposed beneath a sanguine sky.

  ‘Have you not shared this before?’ asks Rosa softly.

  ‘I had some counselling. I have a great supportive family. But I just wanted to keep moving on and no-one could make me stay. Living in my village got too hard. Everyone knew me as the girl who rescued that kid. Rescued some kid I didn’t know and let Robin drown. So I travelled and I kept on travelling, distancing myself from family and friends, from anyone who could remind me of what’d happened. I thought layers of new places and faces would bury the past, but the pain’s always there, beneath it all, still raw. I numbed myself to survive it. That was the easiest part. I’d felt so much so deeply that everything after just skimmed the surface. Nothing moved me to tears. I couldn’t connect with anyone on a meaningful level. I kept myself to myself, had no direction, I was empty.

  ‘And then I met Zak… He was different. He made me come alive again. He swept me up, told me to come and live with him in a land far away. It was the promise of a new life for me, a fresh start, a chance to settle somewhere with no negative associations. I saw the prospect of a positive relationship, that I might even make peace with the sea. I saw in his eyes a peaceful ocean. He said he was my reflection. I projected all my hopes onto him. I saw in him something forgiving, divine. I saw in him so many things… so silly.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be the first to fall for an illusion,’ says Rosa.

  ‘I know. In the olden days, love-starved, seasick sailors used to see mermaids in the water, but they weren’t really women, they were dugongs, malformed dolphins. Our minds fool us into seeing something if we want it badly enough. We see what we want to see.’

  ‘And you saw what you wanted to see.’

  ‘Yeah. I’d lost my way, but when Zak appeared, it was like he was waving a map for me.’

  ‘Not waving but drowning,’ utters Rosa, barely audibly.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Reminded me of a line from a poem.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I think I’ve heard it… That’s just it. Zak is drowning too, inside himself. And I can’t help him either. It’s like now, the only difference in losing him is that I’m grieving the loss of someone who never existed in the first place.’

  JULY, 2006

  She’s stood in her figurative suit of armour, here in Zak’s bedroom in the bluish half-light. A fairytale, with roles reversed, she’s fought against fear to be here in his tower, back in the place she thought she’d never return. She’s here for one reason only: to collect her ticket out of his life.

  The key-code the same, she let herself in, hugely relieved to find him asleep.

  Aside from relief, she guards against feeling, shielding herself from the disappointment that Wonderland turned out to be Neverland.

  Never mind the scattered papers and strewn dirty clothes, she tells herself, nor the blaring TV dumped on the end of the bed. Never mind the trippy paintings hanging crooked on shady walls, nor the bruise-coloured curtains rippling in the icy breeze. Never mind the scribbled poems, manic etchings, nor photos of Freya, eyes burning through the dark like she’s never going to leave. Whether they’re ‘a thing’ now, none of it matters, for morning sun never shone down upon he and Mia; they’d never laid here together, fluttering from dream to dream. No, those dreams are only ghosts. Now even for ghosts this place is too cold.

  She opens the dresser-drawer that Zak had cleared out for her, feels beneath the paper-liner for the passport and ticket she stashed there.

  She moves over to where he lies. He must be in a deep sleep because that TV is raucous, yet he doesn’t stir. She salvages the remote, zaps off the noise and stands watching him. She never asks herself why he brought the TV through here, knowing how he hates TV. She does
n’t care about the goose-bumps on his midriff where his T-shirt has ridden-up, nor feels concerned about how cold he might be. Concern would be crazy considering everything that’s happened – or not happened – between them. It’s liberating not to care, the same way he never cared about her. You could call all this denial, she calls it dealing.

  The cool wind rises, riding through the open window, a gust of leaves scrambling against the wooden frame. The hairs on her arms prickle, making her as cold on the outside as she is within. She’s doing everything not to think, not to feel. Even as the sun sets and birds settle in the trees and she closes the window. Even as she checks he’s still breathing. Even as she bends to pull the blanket over Zak’s body. She doesn’t want to acknowledge what she’s doing. She doesn’t want to notice that that blankets smell familiar, of something she recognises.

  Leaning forward on her knees, Mia puts her nose to the tattered blanket and finds her perfume all over it, the scent suddenly everywhere. She picks up one of his T-shirts – her scent – a crumpled sweater and another – her scent again. The perfume she left here – that one thing she couldn’t find – her bottle then three-quarters full, now beside his bed and empty. She finds something else: a notebook with a photo poking out. Carefully pulling out the picture, she finds herself again, crossing a street, unaware of the camera. She leafs through the book, one eye on it, the other on him. Pictures, paintings, poems – all pages perfumed – and it’s all about Mia, his unwitting muse. She looks to Zak and she doesn’t understand and she puts the book down, it scares her.

  Unable to suspend thinking anymore, she goes back to something she half noticed in the drawer. Packets of medication. Three different kinds. Zak’s name on the side. Each one unopened. Unable to pronounce the drugs, let alone remember them, Mia jots their names on the back of her hand; she’ll look up their meaning in the morning.