Hindsight Read online

  “Yes, I…it’s just that…what if he wakes up and no one is here? He might get scared.” Tears are about to fall for the umpteenth time today. I must stay strong for Will and for Chris.

  She places her hand on my forearm. “I’ll stay here with him. He won’t be alone.”

  “You will? You’ll look after my boy for me?” My voice cracks and my chin wobbles.

  “Like he’s my own,” she whispers.

  “But I can’t leave him, he might need me.” My voice is gone and all that’s left is a whisper.

  “He’s in the best hands, Jules. Sister Catherine will take care of him,” Chris says, his voice a hoarse whisper.

  I bend down to kiss Will, feeling the warmth of his skin on my lips, and hoping that he is just as warm next time I see him.

  Lily comes home with us and pushes me off towards a hot shower. Afterwards, she makes a warm milk with a blob of honey and a swig of brandy in it, orders me to bed, tucks me in and puts a book in my hands.

  My eyes are hot and raw from crying and my face has puffed up like an over-inflated lilo. Lily sits on the side of my bed. “Now, drink, read and sleep Jules, OK?” she says.

  “The mirror in the bathroom was fogged up, I must look awful.”

  “Nonsense, you look as gorgeous as ever. You’ve just managed to puff out a few wrinkles, that’s all. Now swallow this and off to sleep for you.” She hands me a sleeping tablet. “I’ve got Ethan’s uniform for tomorrow and clothes for Cal. They’re both asleep at Aunty Maeve’s, and I’ll take Ethan to school in the morning, and pick him up in the afternoon. Aunty Maeve will keep Cal, alright?”

  “OK, thanks.”

  “If you need anything, anything at all, just come and get me. I don’t care what time it is, you come and get me. OK?”

  “Yes. Thanks Lily, for everything.”

  “He’s going to be just fine, you know. Will is going to wake up tomorrow and eat four tray loads of hospital food, and that’s just for breakfast,” she says.

  “Yes, you’re right. He’s going to be fine. The power of positive thought.”

  She kisses me on the forehead and leaves as Chris comes in. They murmur to each other in the hall before she goes.

  Chris sits on the bed and holds my hand. “Uncle Din’s car is out the front and I have the keys, in case…in case we need it. The hospital will ring Gran if they need to overnight, otherwise we’ll just head in when we wake up…”

  The sleeping tablet works its magic and my eyes shut for longer and longer blinks until they don’t open again.

  We are awakened by a frantic knocking on the front door. I fall out of bed bleary-eyed and stagger forward, leaving me dizzy and wobbly. Is this the moment, like Aunt Jen in the school office? Is this the moment before we receive the worst news of all? Is this the last moment of our lives as we know it?

  “Chris! Juliette! Open up. It’s Will, he’s awake!” Gran calls out as she belts on the door.

  Chris swings the door open so fast it almost cracks the glass inlay.

  “Will’s awake? Is that what you said?” I ask, unable to believe my ears. Is this a dream?

  “Yes, darling girl, he’s awake and asking for breakfast!” She clasps her hands in prayer position.

  Chris and I cling together in relief; tears of happiness stream out of my overused eyes. His body, like concrete, slowly relaxes the longer he holds onto me.

  “Oh, thank God, thank God, thank God,” he says. The grayness has disappeared and some amount of life has been injected back into him, although he looks like a bear that forgot to hibernate in winter.

  I hug Gran, as Chris wipes the tears away from his eyes. Gran holds my face in her hands and kisses my forehead. She holds me like…like a mother holds her child. It’s clear to me, in this moment, just how much she loves me and my boys.

  “Come on you two, get ready. Let’s get you in there,” Gran says with a crackly voice. “Chris, where are the keys to Din’s car? You look like the walking dead, there’s no way you’re driving, my boy.”

  A week after Will’s hospitalisation he’s home and able to function reasonably well, except for a badly broken arm, a sore nose and the occasional headache. He’s resting up and doing some schoolwork sent home by Father O’Brien, so that he doesn’t fall behind in class.

  The good news is that there seems to be no delayed intracranial bleeding or cerebral edemas, so now we can leave that awful episode behind us.

  The bad news is that the football season is over for Will. The doctors have said that his arm should heal, but there will be no footy until next year, and perhaps not even then. Will is devastated, as he knows that with the footy season goes his chance of a sports scholarship. No scout will want a broken player.

  Being here has kept me so busy and challenged that rarely do I have the time, or energy, to think about my other life. It would be different if my family were left behind, or if this life was awful, say, back in the 1780’s or something. Imagine being a convict, a life of backbreaking hard labour (and that’s just doing the washing), no heating or air-conditioning, having to kill your dinner and haul it in from the paddock, as well as no birth control. Those women just kept popping out babies from the minute their ovaries spat out the first egg until their birth canals collapsed in much the same way as the nasal passages of a cocaine addict. Then, just to top it all off, they died before they were 35. Looking at it that way, my luck has been extraordinary.

  A few days later, a quick morning tea with Gran takes a surprise turn when she pulls out a yellowy envelope that smells of mothballs. She turns it over and over in her hand, as though she doesn’t know what to do with it.

  “Juliette, my dear girl, I think the time has come for you to read this letter. But before I hand it to you, there’s something we must discuss,” she says.

  “Is that the letter that informs me that I am actually an English princess and the throne is waiting for me?” I laugh.

  “Why would you want to leave this kingdom, when you’re already a queen here?” Gran smiles, but only with her lips; her teeth aren’t on show and her eyes don’t move.

  “What’s wrong, Gran?”

  She takes a deep breath.

  “It’s about your mother,” she says. Shit! I had forgotten all about her. Will has taken up so much of my thoughts that my mother didn’t even get a look-in. “You said that you’re ready to visit her,” she continues, “but before you do, I need to tell you something, and then you can read this letter.”

  She sits down opposite me, the letter in front of her. There are three patches of rust on the envelope. It must have been resting against one of Gran’s silver brooches all this time.

  “OK.” Curiosity and concern are sitting inside me like oil and vinegar.

  “There’s something you need to know, something I should have told you years ago. I’m so very sorry that I didn’t, but it seemed the best decision at the time. Us old folk seem to live by the rule of forgetting loss and not speaking of it again. Being stoic and all that rot.” She waves her hand, dismissing her own comment. “As you know, Eleanor was a delicate person. Even as a child, she lacked the emotional resilience of her brothers and sisters. She would cry endlessly, or take to her bed in a fit of melancholy for days. As hard as we tried, your Grandpa John and I couldn’t make head or tail of her behaviour. So, eventually we accepted that no amount of coaxing or encouraging was going to change anything; this is who she was. She continued on this way until she met and fell in love with your father, when she blossomed into a loving wife.”

  “That’s not how I remember her.”

  “No, her dependence on William was so great that she became jealous of the bond the two of you shared. She came to see you as competition, which was silly,” she tuts. “After your father’s accident she became a shell of a person, empty. She wouldn’t eat or sleep, her behaviour became more manic and her moods swung like the pendulum in the grandfather clock in the hallway. She also took to drink, and it did her no favou
rs. If she was unstable while sober, she was volcanic when drunk.”

  Now that’s the mother I remember; a knock-down, argumentative, self-destructive drunk who reveled in misery and extended it to others as often as she could.

  “By that time I had taken you girls in permanently, there was no way I could leave you alone with her. One day I found her in the bath.” Gran pauses to catch her breath, the usual light behind her eyes fading. “She had slashed her wrists in a suicide attempt.”

  That sounds about right. She couldn’t wait to relieve herself of the burden of this life.

  “I’m so sorry Jules. I should have told you this long ago, but at the time you girls were so young, and you had both been through too much already. Children are not supposed to bear the burden of their parent’s failings.”

  It would have been so much better had she succeeded the first time. Mum’s final attempt was successful, but there had been others, near misses remedied in the A&E department of the local hospital. Each time she would come home with the telltale blue-black lips, stained from yet another dose of charcoal. It happened so regularly that we were able to convince the neighbours that she was a goth.

  “She was admitted to hospital for a while, but was released because it was thought that she would recover fully once she had finished grieving. The problem was that she never finished grieving, and she took most of her anger out on you.”

  “She blamed me for Dad’s death, because he tried to get home for my birthday.”

  “Yes, in her mind — in her twisted, disturbed mind — she blamed you. But it wasn’t your fault. Your father’s accident didn’t have anything to do with you. It was just an accident, a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The weight of this conversation causes me to slump down in my chair.

  “It was my fault, Gran, I asked him to come home. He wasn’t due back until the next day, but I asked him to come home early.” Tears spill over my cheeks like tropical rain.

  “Oh, darling girl, it wasn’t your fault.” She grabs both my hands and holds them tight. “When a person’s time on this Earth is up, it’s up, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Not since the day Mum threatened to send me to the unwanted children’s home have I felt this hurt inside. It’s the kind of hurt that sets your lungs on fire and scorches your throat, as though there is a lump of burning coal lodged deep inside.

  She squeezes my hands until they flop about like play-doh. “If it hadn’t have been a truck accident, it would have been something else. It was your Dad’s time to go, even though it’s the last thing he would have wanted. Sometimes we just don’t get a say. It’s all written in the stars, my love.”

  I’m sniveling, sniffling and snotting all over my hands. Gran hands me a hanky.

  “What do you mean, it’s written in the stars? Aren’t you a devout Catholic?”

  She laughs. “No, the church lost my faith when they started mixing politics with religion and then endorsing the wars that took my brothers and sons. We can make choices with our free will, but each of us has a journey to undertake, a role to play, and we have no say in when that journey finishes. We can use the stars to navigate, but our destiny is already written.”

  Pondering her theory, I look out the window to the garden. It’s a grey Melbourne day, the clouds emerging from the sky as they drip and drizzle constantly. Is my presence here related to her theory?

  “What happens if you don’t follow what the stars have planned, if you deviate off track?”

  “There’s no such thing as a coincidence, my love. Everything happens for a reason. The powers that be will find a way to put you back on the right path. One way or another.”

  Is this what my journey here is all about? Wishing I could ask Gran her thoughts, but too scared to confide in her fully, I let it go.

  “Anyway, Eleanor wrote this letter explaining why she had taken her life. Of course, she didn’t bargain on being found and hospitalised. It may help you to understand her a bit better.”

  “Has Dash read it?”

  “No, like I said, it seemed the best decision at the time to just bury it and get on with life.”

  She places the envelope in front of me and pours another cup of tea. From close-up it’s clear to see that the stains are not rust, but tiny droplets of blood that have darkened over time.

  “You take it home and read it when you feel the time is right, my love. There’s no hurry.”

  Chapter 22

  Melbourne’s weather has definitely changed into winter. Even though it’s been going for a month already, the cold hasn’t been too bad so far. But now, as the days get shorter and the temperature gauge takes a dive, I really miss my central heating. The gas heater in the lounge room does a great job, but a lot of my time is spent in the kitchen, and apart from the oven, there’s no heating in there.

  Mum’s letter sits tucked away in the dresser, out of sight, out of mind. As long as it lives in that dark drawer, it doesn’t live in my mind. Whether that is a good or bad thing, I’m not sure. But the time is not right, yet. Like Gran said, there’s no hurry.

  Lily and I are working in my kitchen while Cal plays in his room.

  “Jules, when was the last time you had a period?” Lily asks.

  A period? It’s so easy not to think about the curse.

  “Ummm, it was…back in, sometime, last… not too long ago. Why do you ask?”

  Jesus, when was it?

  “We used to get it at almost the same time, and you haven’t mentioned it lately, that’s all. Anyway, we need to go faster if we want to get these veggies blanched, packaged and frozen before dinner.”

  We prepare our fresh veggies from the garden and freeze them together. It’s a boring job and the time goes much faster when we chat our way through it. My mind is now in a spin trying to remember my last period. Have I had a period here? It’s the first of June, so it’s been two months exactly since my arrival, and those elephant-sized pads are still sitting in the corner of the bathroom cabinet, exactly where they were in early April. Oh shiiiiiiit!

  “I’ve finished the broccoli, what’s next?” I say, trying to change the subject.

  Oh my God! Is it possible? No! No way. No freaking way! What on Earth would that mean in regards to going home once Will has his scholarship? Would being pregnant here mean that there is no going back? Is going back still a possibility? Has Anya already claimed her win? There are no answers.

  “You’re trying to remember when your last period was, aren’t you?” Lily asks.

  “Yes. Shit, Lily, I can’t remember! I can’t remember!”

  Chris and I have had loads of sex; like newlyweds, we can’t keep our hands off each other. It’s true what they say about the lack of quality programs on television, you know. It’s sex-inducing. Not that that’s a bad thing, it’s a fantastic way to pass the time, except when it leads to pregnancy.

  “Calm down, it’s OK. Let’s just think for a moment,” Lily says.

  “When were you due last?” I ask, hoping that her response will be “yesterday”.

  “I had it two weeks ago.” She looks at me.

  Like a cartoon character, I gulp loudly. My mind starts racing. It’s impossible to stay on one train of thought for more than a couple of seconds. This must be how goldfish live.

  “I have been a bit tired lately.”

  “Hmmm”

  “And a bit emotional.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “And a bit hungry.”

  “Hmmm”

  “And a bit vomitty.”

  “Hmmm. And your boobs are huge, look at them! You’ve got Marilyn Monroe cleavage.”

  No longer do I have to look down at my boobs; lately they’ve been looking up at me.

  “My clothes are a bit tight, but it’s probably all that winter food.” All that good, yummy, home-cooked food that has been shoveled into my mouth with great gusto.

  “I just can’t remember getting my period sinc
e….oh Jesus, maybe March or February? Lily, shit! I need a pregnancy test. We have to go to the chemist.” My external nervous breakdown now meets my internal breakdown and the result is a quivering, mumbling, fumbling, gibbering mess of a woman. “Lily, what if there is a baby growing in there?” We both look at my tummy, protruding out of my corduroy pants because my top button no longer does up.

  “Calm down, lovey, it’s going to be alright. Chemists don’t do pregnancy tests, so we’ll go to the doctors, OK?” She is trying to be soothing and calming, but I am in such a tizz that nothing short of an elephant-sized tranquiliser gun will soothe or calm me now.

  I’m pregnant. Shit. The doctor confirmed it. Four months along and due in mid-November. Shit. I am at a complete and utter loss for words or thought. Shit.

  Chris was shocked but very excited at the prospect of another baby, as were all the family and everyone in the street. The pregnancy still hasn’t settled with me — it’s hard to believe. But, much like travelling here, there’s nothing I can do about it, so the best move is just to go with the flow as much as possible and try to freak out in private.

  Everyone made casseroles so that I could put my feet up a bit, which was very nice. After much begging, Anne decided to teach me how to make her famous lamb casserole and it turned out pretty well, I’m proud to say. My family no longer say their prayers at dinnertime; they don’t have to anymore.

  I’ve been here for over three months now, and I still don’t see any sign of returning. I fluctuate between despair and pure happiness. Despair at what is happening in my own life, if anything is happening at all. I miss work outside the house. I’ve always worked. It’s part of me — a big part of me — and when I had managed it properly, a healthy part of me. I miss the adrenaline rush, the chaos, the feeling of achievement at the end of each day. Some people need to work and others can fulfil themselves in other ways. So far, it appears that I fall into the former category.

  But then, happiness at my strong, perfect marriage to a man who has captured my heart all over again. Happiness at spending time with my beautiful children and getting to know them, at sharing my life with them every day (although it would be nice to have a chance to miss them a little). Happiness with my best friend and extended family, who love me just the way I am.