One week later
‘So, I’m not pregnant,’ said Jessica. ‘Never was pregnant. It was all in my head.’
Ben looked up from the couch. He picked up the remote and turned off Top Gear.
‘Okay,’ he said.
She came and sat down next to him and put her hand on his knee and for a moment they sat in silence and didn’t say a word, but somehow they both knew what it meant.
If she’d been pregnant, they would have stayed together. There was enough love left to stay together for a baby.
But she wasn’t pregnant, and there wasn’t enough love left to try again, or for anything else, except an inevitable, amicable divorce.
Two weeks later
The house smelled of gingerbread and caramel and butter. Carmel had cooked all her daughters’ favourite foods for their homecoming.
She heard the sound of the car pulling into the driveway and went to the door.
The car doors flew open and out tumbled her four little girls. They knocked her to her knees with their embraces. She buried her nose in their hair, the crooks of their arms. They burrowed into her and instantly began to fight over her like she was a favourite stuffed toy.
Lizzie got elbowed in the eye by one of her sisters and wailed. Lulu screamed at Allie, ‘Let me have a turn hugging Mummy! You’re taking all of her!’ Sadie grabbed at Carmel’s hair and tugged, bringing tears of pain to her eyes.
‘Let your mother stand up!’ snapped Joel. He never did well on long-haul flights. ‘For Christ’s sake.’
Carmel managed to stagger to her feet.
Lulu said fiercely, ‘I am never ever leaving you again, Mummy.’
Joel snapped, ‘Lulu! Don’t be so ungrateful. You just had the holiday of a lifetime.’
‘No need to get cross with her,’ said Sonia. ‘We’re all tired.’
Watching her ex-husband’s new girlfriend criticise him reminded Carmel of the euphoria she’d experienced after drinking that drug-laced smoothie.
‘Go inside, girls,’ said Carmel. ‘There are treats.’
The girls ran.
‘You look great,’ said Sonia, who looked grey-faced and jet-lagged.
‘Thanks,’ said Carmel. ‘I’ve had a really nice break.’
‘Have you lost weight?’ asked Sonia.
‘I don’t know,’ said Carmel. She honestly didn’t know. It no longer seemed important.
‘Well, I don’t know what it is, but you just look transformed, you really do,’ said Sonia warmly. ‘Your skin looks great, your hair . . . everything.’
Carmel thought, Damn it, I’m going to become your friend, aren’t I?
She realised that Joel wouldn’t even notice any difference in her. You never changed your appearance for men, you changed it for other women, because they were the ones carefully tracking each other’s weight and skin tone along with their own; they were the ones trapped with you on the ridiculous appearance obsession merry-go-round that they couldn’t or wouldn’t get off. Even if she’d been a perfectly toned and manicured gym junkie, Joel would still have left her. His ‘lack of attraction’ had nothing to do with her. He didn’t leave her for something better, but for something new.
Joel said, ‘We got seated right near the toilets on the flight home. Bang, bang, bang, went the door all night. I never slept at all.’
‘Unacceptable,’ said Carmel.
‘I know,’ said Joel. ‘I tried to get us upgraded on points, but no luck.’
Carmel registered the upward lift of Sonia’s eyes. Yes, definitely friends.
‘So, I’ve been thinking it might be good if you could help with some of the chauffeuring around to after-school activities this year,’ said Carmel to Joel. ‘I wore myself out trying to do everything on my own last year and I want to keep up this new exercise routine I’ve got going.’
‘Of course,’ said Sonia. ‘We’re co-parents!’
‘My mouth feels disgusting,’ muttered Joel. ‘I think it’s the dehydration.’
‘Send me their schedules,’ said Sonia. ‘We’ll get it all worked out. Or, if you want, we could have a coffee together, talk it through?’ She looked nervous, as if she’d overstepped.
‘That sounds good,’ said Carmel.
‘I set my own hours, so I can be really flexible,’ said Sonia. The enthusiasm bubbled up in her voice. ‘I’d love to help out with their ballet, any time. I always dreamed of having a little girl and doing her hair for ballet and, well, as you know, I can’t have children of my own, so I’m never –’
‘You can’t have children?’ interrupted Carmel.
‘I’m sorry, I thought you knew that,’ said Sonia, with a sideways glance at Joel, who was busy running his finger around the inside of his mouth.
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Carmel. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, it’s fine, I’ve fully accepted it,’ said Sonia, with a second glance at Joel that told Carmel it was not fine for Sonia, but it was just great for Joel. ‘But that’s why I’d love to help with ballet. Unless you want to keep that for yourself, of course.’
‘You’re very welcome to take them to ballet,’ said Carmel, who was not a ballet mum and could never manage those sleek ballet buns to the satisfaction of her daughters or their teacher, Miss Amber.
‘Really?’ Sonia clasped her hands as if she’d been given the most precious gift, and the joyous gratitude in her eyes made Carmel want to cry with gratitude too. The girls weren’t going to have to be confused by the arrival of a half-sibling and Carmel was going to get out of all things ballet. Miss Amber would love Sonia. Sonia would volunteer to help out doing hair and make-up at the concerts. Carmel was permanently off the hook.
Later today Carmel would tell Lulu to never ever correct anyone who said how much she looked like her mummy when she was out with Sonia.
‘I’ll research the best calendar-sharing apps.’ Sonia took out her phone from her handbag and tapped herself a note.
Carmel experienced another burst of euphoria. She might have lost a husband, but she’d got herself a wife. An efficient, energetic young wife. What a bargain. What an upgrade.
She’d be there for poor Sonia when, in ten years or so, Joel decided he was due for his next upgrade.
‘Can we talk about ballet another time?’ said Joel. ‘Because right now, I really need to get home for a shower.’ He made a movement towards his car.
‘We need to say goodbye to the girls!’ said Sonia.
‘Of course,’ sighed Joel. It seemed like it had been a long holiday.
‘Was it paleo?’ Sonia whispered to Carmel, as they headed inside the house. ‘Five: two? Eighteen: six?’
‘Health resort,’ said Carmel. ‘Very trippy place. It changed my life.’
Three weeks later
‘You’re panting,’ said Jo to Frances.
‘I’ve been doing push-ups,’ said Frances, facedown on her living room floor, the phone to her ear. ‘Push-ups work every muscle in your body.’
‘You have not been doing push-ups,’ scoffed Jo. ‘Oh my God, I haven’t interrupted you in flagrante delicto?’
Only Frances’s former editor could both pronounce and spell ‘in flagrante delicto’.
‘I guess I should be flattered that you think I’m more likely to be having sex at eleven in the morning than doing push-ups.’ Frances sat up into a cross-legged position.
She’d lost three kilos at Tranquillum House and put them straight back on once she was home, but she was trying to incorporate a little more exercise, a little less chocolate, a little more mindful breathing and a little less wine into her lifestyle. She was feeling pretty good. The whites of her eyes were most definitely whiter, according to her friend Ellen, who had been shocked to hear about Frances’s experiences.
‘When I said their approach was unconventional, I meant the personalised meals!’ she cried. ‘I didn’t mean LSD!’ She thought about it, and then said wistfully, ‘I would have loved to try LSD.’
‘How’s retirement?’ Frances asked Jo.
‘I’m going back to work,’ said Jo. ‘Work is easier. Everyone thinks I have nothing to do all day. My siblings think I should take full responsibility for our elderly parents. My children think I should take care of their children. I love my grandchildren, but day care was invented for a reason.’
‘I knew you were too young to retire,’ said Frances as she tried to touch her nose to her knee. Stretching was so important.
‘I’m starting my own imprint,’ said Jo.
‘Are you?’ said Frances. She sat up straight. A tiny burst of hope. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Naturally I’ve read the new novel, and naturally I love it,’ said Jo. ‘Before I think about making an offer, I just wondered how you’d feel about incorporating a little bloodshed? Potentially even a murder. Just the one.’
‘Murder!’ said Frances. ‘I don’t know if I’ve got it in me.’
‘Oh, Frances,’ said Jo. ‘You’ve got plenty of murderous impulses lurking away in that romantic old heart of yours.’
‘Have I?’ said Frances. She narrowed her eyes. Maybe she did.
Four weeks later
Lars didn’t know he was going to say it until he said it.
Since he’d been back home the dirty-faced little dark-haired boy with Ray's hazel eyes kept materialising just as he drifted off to sleep, and suddenly, irritatingly, he’d be wide awake with the exact same thought in his head, like a brand-new revelation every time: the kid didn’t want to show him something terrible from his past. He wanted to show him something wonderful in his future.
What a load of nonsense, he kept telling himself. I’m not a different person. That was just drugs. I’ve taken drugs before. That was a hallucination, not a goddamn epiphany.
But now Ray stood at the pantry putting away groceries, all those protein shakes, and Lars heard the words coming out of his mouth: ‘I’ve been thinking about the baby idea.’
He saw Ray’s hand stop. A can of tinned tomatoes poised midair. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t move or turn around.
‘Maybe we could give it a shot,’ Lars said. ‘Maybe.’ He felt sick. If Ray turned around right now, if he threw his arms around him, if he looked at him with all that love and happiness and need in his eyes, Lars would vomit, he would definitely vomit.
But Ray knew him too well.
He didn’t turn around. He slowly put the can of tomatoes down. ‘Okay,’ he said, as if it were neither here nor there to him.
‘We’ll talk about it later,’ said Lars, with a firm knuckle rap on the granite benchtop, which kind of hurt.
‘Yep,’ said Ray.
A little while later, when Lars came back into the house to retrieve his sunglasses after saying he was going out to the shops, he heard the unmistakable sound of a six-foot man jumping up and down on the spot while shrieking into the phone to someone who was presumably his sister: ‘Oh my God, oh my God, you’re never going to believe what just happened!’
Lars stopped for a moment, his sunglasses in his hand, and smiled, before he headed back outside into the sunshine.
Five weeks later
There was a documentary about the history of Australian Rules football on TV. Frances watched the whole thing. It was actually fascinating.
She called Tony. ‘I just watched a whole hour of television about your sport!’
‘Frances?’ He sounded like he was puffing.
‘I’ve just been doing push-ups,’ he said.
‘I can do ten in a row now,’ said Frances. ‘How many can you do?’
‘A hundred,’ said Tony.
‘Show-off,’ said Frances.
Six weeks later
Napoleon sat in the waiting room of a psychiatrist he’d been referred to by his GP. It had taken him six weeks to get the first available appointment. That’s the mental health crisis problem right there, he thought.
Since returning from Tranquillum House, he’d been surviving: teaching, cooking, talking to his wife and daughter, running his support group. It was amazing to him that everyone treated him as if he were just the same. It reminded him of the blocked-ears feeling after a flight, except all his senses, not just his hearing, felt muted. His voice seemed to echo in his ears. The sky was leached of colour. He did nothing that he wasn’t obliged to do because the effort of existence exhausted him. He slept whenever he could. Getting up each morning was like moving his limbs through thick mud.
‘Everything okay?’ Heather sometimes said to him.
‘All good,’ said Napoleon.
Heather was different after their time at Tranquillum House. Not happier exactly, but calmer. She had joined a tai chi class in the park down the road. She was the only one under the age of seventy. Heather had never been the sort of woman to have girlfriends, but for some reason she fitted right in to this elderly circle.
‘They make me laugh,’ she said. ‘And they don’t demand anything from me.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Zoe. ‘They demand lots of you!’ It was true that Heather seemed to be spending a lot of time driving her elderly new friends to and fro from doctors’ appointments and picking up prescriptions for them.
Zoe had a new part-time job. She seemed busy and distracted with her university course. Napoleon kept a careful eye on her, but she was good, she was fine. One morning, a week or so after they’d got back from the retreat, he stopped by her bathroom door and overheard a beautiful sound he hadn’t heard in three years: his daughter singing off-key in the shower.
‘Mr Marconi?’ said a short blonde woman who reminded him a little of Frances Welty. ‘I’m Allison.’
She ushered him into her office and motioned to a chair on the opposite side of a coffee table with a book about English gardens and a box of aloe vera scented tissues.
Napoleon didn’t wait for the niceties. He had no time to lose.
He told her about Zach. He told her about the drugs he was given at Tranquillum House and how, ever since then, he’d been struggling with what he believed to be depression. He told her that his GP had offered him antidepressants, and he probably did need antidepressants, but he knew sometimes it was hard to get the dosage right, it wasn’t an exact science, he understood and appreciated this, he had done the research, he knew all the brand names, all the side effects, he’d put together his own spreadsheet if she was interested in taking a look, and he knew that sometimes, during that initial period, patients didn’t get better, they got worse, they suffered suicidal thoughts, and he knew this because he knew people who had lost family members in that way, and he also knew that he overreacted to drugs, he knew this about himself, and maybe his son had the same sensitivity, he didn’t know, and he was sure that those people at that health resort meant well, and maybe this depression had been going to happen anyway, but he felt that he was possibly the one person in that room who should never, ever have been given that smoothie.
And then, limp with exhaustion, he said, ‘Allison, I am terrified that I will . . .’
She didn’t ask him to finish the sentence.
She reached across the coffee table and put her hand on his arm. ‘We’re a team now, Napoleon. You and me, we’re a team, and we’re going to work out a strategy and we are going to beat this, okay?’
She looked at him with all the passion and intensity of his old football coach. ‘We’re going to beat it. We’re going to win.’
Two months later
Frances and Tony were taking a walk, nine hundred kilometres apart, in different states.
They’d got into the habit of keeping each other company as they went for walks around their respective neighbourhoods.
At first they’d walked with their mobile phones pressed to their ears, but then Tony’s daughter, Mimi, had said they should use headphones, and now their ears no longer ached when they finished and they could walk for even longer.
‘Are you on your steep bit yet?’ asked Tony.
‘I am,’ said Frances. ‘But listen to my breathing! I’m not puffing at all.’
‘You’re an elite athlete,’ said Tony. ‘Have you murdered anyone yet?’
‘Yep,’ said Frances. ‘Did it yesterday. Murdered my first character ever. He totally deserved it.’
‘Did you enjoy it? Hello, Bear.’
Bear was a chocolate labrador that Tony often passed on his walks. Tony didn’t know Bear’s owner’s name, but he always said hello to Bear.
Tony told her about his upcoming trip to Holland to see his son and grandchildren.
‘I’ve never been to Holland,’ said Frances.
‘Haven’t you?’ said Tony. ‘I’ve only been once. I’m hoping it’s not going to be as cold as last time I went.’
‘I’ve never been to Holland,’ said Frances again.
There was a long pause. Frances stopped on the side of the street and smiled at a lady wearing a straw hat, watering her garden.
Tony said, ‘Would you like to come to Holland with me, Frances?’
‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘Yes, I would.’
Their first kiss was in the Qantas lounge.
Three months later
Heather sat on the end of her bed and rubbed lotion into her dry legs, as Napoleon set the alarm on his phone for the next day.
He’d been seeing a psychiatrist, and he seemed to be doing well, but he didn’t talk much about what went on in those sessions.
She watched as he put the phone on the bedside table.
‘I think that you need to shout at me,’ she said.
‘What?’ He looked up at her, startled. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘After the retreat, we’ve never properly talked about it again – the asthma medication.’
‘I wrote all those letters. It’s on the record.’ Of course, Napoleon had done the right thing. He’d found the right contacts through Dr Chang. He’d documented it all. There was never any intent to sue but he needed to make sure that what happened was on the public record. He’d written to the authorities, to the pharmaceutical company: My son, Zachary Marconi, took his own life after being prescribed . . .
‘I know,’ said Heather. ‘But you never said anything about . . . what I did.’
‘You are not to blame for Zach’s suicide,’ said Napoleon.
‘I don’t want you to blame me,’ said Heather. ‘But I just feel like you’re allowed to be angry with me. You’re allowed to be angry with Zoe, too, but you’re not going to shout at Zoe –’
‘No, I do not want to shout at Zoe.’ He looked horrified at the thought.
‘But you can shout at me. If you like?’ She looked up at him, where he stood by the side of the bed, his brow furrowed in pain as if he’d just that instant stubbed his toe.
‘Absolutely not,’ he said, in his pompous schoolteacher voice. ‘That’s ridiculous. That achieves nothing. You lost your son.’
‘Maybe I need you to be angry with me.’
‘You do not,’ said Napoleon. ‘That’s . . . sick.’ He turned away from her. ‘Stop this.’
‘Please.’ She got up on her knees on to the bed so she could look him in the eyes. ‘Napoleon?’ she said.
She thought about the home she grew up in, where nobody ever yelled or laughed or cried or screamed or expressed a single feeling, except for a mild desire for a cup of tea.
‘Please?’
‘Stop this nonsense,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Stop it.’
‘Shout at me.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I will not. What next? Should I hit you too?’
‘You’d never hit me in a million years. But I’m your wife, Napoleon, you’re allowed to be angry with me.’
It was like she saw the anger shoot through him, from his feet to the top of his head. It flooded his face. It made his whole body tremble.
‘You should have checked on the fucking side effects, Heather! Is that what you want to hear?’ His voice rose on an ascending scale until he was shouting as loud as she’d ever heard him shout, louder even than when Zach, at nine years old, old enough to know better, nearly ran in front of a car to chase a ball, a ball he’d been told to leave behind, and Napoleon shouted ‘STOP!’ so loudly that every single person in that car park stopped.
Heather’s heart raced as Napoleon held his hands on either side of her shoulders and shook them violently, as if he were shaking her hard enough to make her teeth rattle, except he didn’t touch her.
‘Does that make you happy? Is that what you wanted to hear? Yes, I am angry because when I asked you about side effects for a medication you were giving my child you should have checked!’
‘I should have checked,’ she said quietly.
He grabbed his phone from the bedside table. ‘And I shouldn’t have pressed snooze on this fucking piece-of-shit phone!’
He threw it against the wall.
Heather saw tiny shards of glass fly.
For a long beat neither of them said anything. She watched his chest rise and fall. She watched the anger leave him.
He sank onto the bed, facing away from her, put his face into his hands and spoke in a hoarse, heartbroken voice with only pain and regret left, so softly it was barely above a whisper, ‘And our daughter should have told us there was something wrong with her brother.’
‘She should have told us,’ agreed Heather, and she laid her cheek against his back and waited for both their hearts to resume their normal pace.
He said something else but she didn’t catch it. ‘What?’
He said it again. ‘And that’s all we’ll ever know.’
‘Yes,’ said Heather.
‘And it will never, ever be enough,’ said Napoleon.
‘No,’ said Heather. ‘No, it won’t be.’
*
That night Heather slept deeply and dreamlessly for seven hours straight, something she hadn’t done since Zach died, and when she woke she found herself moving across the invisible, un-crossable expanse that had separated her and Napoleon for the last three years, as if it had never been there in the first place. She had made some bad decisions in her life, but saying yes to a freakishly tall, nerdy boy’s polite invitation to see a ‘well-reviewed film called Dances With Wolves’ was not one of them.
You’re not meant to think of your children when you make love. Sexuality between married parents is for behind closed doors. And yet, that morning, as Napoleon took her so tenderly into his arms, she thought of her family of four, of both her children, of the baby boy who would never become a man, and the baby girl who was a woman now, and the powerful currents of love that would always run between them: husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, father and daughter, mother and daughter, brother and sister. So much love that came about because she said yes to a movie invitation.
And then she thought of nothing at all, because that nerdy boy still had the moves.
One year later
Ben and his mother had imagined it so many times that he thought they would surely be prepared when it finally happened, but they weren’t.
Lucy died of an overdose during one of her good periods, which is often the way, just when everyone thought that maybe this time she was going to make it. Lucy had started an interior design course. She was driving her kids to school. She’d been to a parent–teacher night for her eldest son, which was unprecedented. She had her eyes on the future.
Ben’s mother found her. She said she looked strangely peaceful, like a little girl having a nap, or a thirty-year-old who gave up battling the monster that just refused to let her be.
Ben thought first about ringing Jessica. They were on very good terms, although he still squirmed with embarrassment when he thought about the post she’d put on Instagram ‘announcing’ their split, as if they were a celebrity couple who owed it to their public to let them know the true story before the media began hounding them. She wrote: We’ll always be best friends but we’ve decided the time has come to lovingly separate.
Right now, Jessica was in the middle of auditioning for the next season of The Bachelor. She said it wasn’t so much that she wanted to find love, and she doubted she would, but it would be great for her ‘profile’ and it would guarantee her so many thousand more Instagram followers. He couldn’t laugh too much because she was an ‘ambassador’ for multiple charities and her Instagram account was filled with photos of glamorous lunches and balls and breakfasts that she and a new group of society friends were so ‘honoured’ to have organised.
Ben was back working with Pete. The guys gave him a hard time in the beginning – ‘You short of a buck, mate?’ – but eventually they gave up and forgot he was rich. Ben still had the car, and a nice house, but he’d put a lot of his money into a foundation run by his mother to help support families of addicts.
Lars helped them split their assets without vitriol and without going to court. That was one thing they’d gained from their retreat at Tranquillum House: meeting a great family lawyer.
Ben didn’t ring Jessica to tell her about Lucy straight away. He couldn’t bear to hear the lack of surprise in her voice. Instead, he dialled Zoe’s number. They’d become online friends and occasional texters since the retreat but they’d never actually talked on the phone.
‘Hello, Ben,’ she said cheerfully. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m calling –’ He found he couldn’t speak. He tried to remember to exhale.
Her tone changed. ‘Is it your sister?’ she said. ‘Is it Lucy?’
She was there at the funeral. His eyes kept seeking her out.