A Story of Now (25 page)

“No, it’s a promise.” The nurse lays the sheet carefully back over Cam’s leg and grins at him. “Believe me, no one gets thrown from a car, then lies completely still for a couple of weeks in a hospital bed, and enjoys being made to move. You won’t be doing much, but you will suffer.”

“Well, I’d just like to thank you for single-handedly ruining my anticipation of the day ahead. I had one thing to look forward to. And now, nothing.” Cam shakes his head and puts on a woeful, betrayed air.

The nurse checks something off on Cam’s chart and heads for the door. “Happy to be of service.”

Claire gives Cam her best malevolent grin, but he ignores her. Instead, he picks up his remote control, turns up the volume a little, and flicks through the channels. She kind of understands why he’s complaining, though. Even with the good TV package, there’s still nothing to watch. Premium gives him a slew of dated movies, mediocre television on repeat, and sport, sport, and more sport.

“I can’t wait to get home to my Xbox,” he says, still flicking.

“Just please don’t make me watch golf again. I may stab myself in the eye. Or you.”

“You know, don’t you have anything better to do than hang out with me and complain about my choices in viewing pleasure?”

“Yes, Cam, in fact I do,” she grumbles as he settles on a basketball match. She automatically picks up her textbook. “But you know how it is, as the only representative currently in town, this Pearson must do her family duty and supervise your whole not-dying thing.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

His not dying is actually going incredibly well today. He’s upright for the first time, bolstered against some pillows. He looks relatively human, too. The grazes on his jaw and face have mostly healed, and his hair has been washed and brushed. From the neck up, she can’t really tell there’s anything wrong with him.

“Mum called this morning.” He stares at the screen. “Just checking in.”

Claire nods, not even looking up from her page.

“You know, she got all weird when I told her I can’t really remember her being here.”

That makes Claire look up. “You can’t remember?”

He shakes his head and flips over to a hockey match and then straight back to the basketball. “I mean, I know she was here, and I remember knowing that and remember the nurses talking about her. But I just can’t really remember her. Then, I don’t remember much, really.”

“What do you remember?” She’s curious now.

“Just little things, like the doctors talking about me. I remember feeling really weirdly heavy, like I weighed more than usual. I remember pain. I remember not being able to speak. And I remember you telling me about the accident. And I remember how pale you were.” He turns and glances at her quickly and then looks back at the screen.

“I’m always pale.”

He smiles, but it fades to a frown. “But I just don’t remember Mum.”

“She would not like that.”

“No, she would not.” Cam shakes his head and grabs a pen. He shoves it down the top of his cast, scratches at his upper arm, and frowns. “When I told her, she did that thing, you know, where she’s kind of angry but trying to pretend she’s not because she knows it’s not cool to get angry about it?”

Claire nods. She knows that one exactly. “Guilt,” is all she says.

“Yeah, I guess.” He continues to slowly work the pen in and out of his cast.

Claire watches him as he stares at the screen and scowls when a player misses an easy shot. She crosses her legs and taps her pen on her mouth. She knows her mother feels bad about leaving them here. She wouldn’t call so much if she didn’t. She wouldn’t harass the doctors all the time. She wouldn’t organise for their aunt to bring Cam his favourite foods so he doesn’t have to eat the shitty hospital food. Of course, she hates that Cam can’t remember her being here when, for a while, she was so intensely, irrepressibly here. She almost feels sorry for her. Almost.

“Thanks for hanging out,” Cam suddenly says. “I know you’ve got a lot going on, with exams and everything, and—”

“Cam?”

“What?”

“Shut up.”

She tells him to shut up because that’s the only way she knows to tell him that of course she’s here with him. Of course there’s nothing more important for her right now than sitting in this room.

CHAPTER 32

Mia pokes Claire in the side with her foot. “That’s
all
you are getting.”

Claire pushes away the foot “And this, Mia, is
all
I require.”

She undermines her aloof response with an involuntary giggle. She can’t help it; the photo is stupidly cute.

They lie end to end on the bed again, with Mia up against the pillows and Claire with her head at the other end. Her socked feet rest on the wall above the bed. Even though it’s getting dark and Mia has turned on the lamps, they’ve left the curtains open and the window raised. The balmy evening air washes in, bringing smells of grass and early dinners being cooked in neighbouring apartments. Every now and then, a passing headlight lays bright tracks along the wall, and as she studies, Claire can hear the sounds of footsteps and doors slamming as people come home from work.

They are on a break. Together they have plotted out the perfect study system, one hour of intense, silent study time, and then twenty minutes to relax and talk, make a snack, or take Blue outside. It works well.

It’s Claire’s third night at the apartment, and they have worked steadily together every night after Claire gets back from the hospital and Mia returns from the library. Tomorrow Claire’s parents will return from Canberra, and she will go home.

She knows she’s going to miss it here. It’s cosy and lively, with neighbours coming and going, and friends dropping around for tea. It’s a world away from Claire’s house.

And an added bonus is studying with Mia, who’s completely and utterly focused on her work, means that Claire’s probably as prepared for the exams as she would’ve been if Cam hadn’t been hurt. In fact, the harder they study, the calmer Claire feels about these coming exams. Now she’s back on track, she’s sure she can manage whatever will be thrown at her.

Mia, however, seems to be the opposite. The more she studies, the tenser she becomes. It’s not overt. She still acts like regular Mia, but Claire can see the fear winding tighter inside her in the ways her brow tightens when she talks about the tests, or in the way Claire catches her staring off into the distance between bouts of note taking, with a lip-chewing look of consternation on her face. And she knows, Mia is terrified of these exams. And she looks so damn miserable in those moments that during these breaks, Claire tries to distract her from thinking about them. She tells pointless stories or talks about nonsense topics, all to make Mia laugh. It seems to work, mostly.

And this is her latest means of distraction, spurred by genuine curiosity. She lays her head back against the pillow and holds the picture above her face.

It’s so unmistakeably Mia, even if she’s dressed in the girliest clothes Claire has ever seen her in. She wears a knee-length, floral, party dress with matching ribbons in her hair. Her hair is wrapped in a wreath of plaits around her head, and stray strands fall around her face and neck, exactly the same way they do now. She’s laughing in the photo, her mouth open and her arms akimbo as though she were completely in motion when the shot was snapped.

Claire holds the picture a little closer. “How old were you?”

“Maybe six or seven, I think.”

It was taken here in this flat. Claire recognises the living room. She almost doesn’t recognise Mia’s father, though, young and beardless. He is sporting a moustache, though. She must remember to pay him out about that one day.

“Who’s that with your dad?” She looks at the small, slender woman with long, honeyed-blonde hair standing next to him. It’s definitely not Tasya. Whoever she is, she’s laughing with her arm around Mia’s neck as if holding her in place. “And why is she strangling you?”

“Who’s strangling who?” asks Tasya.

Claire jumps. Tasya leans on the door frame. Claire immediately takes her feet from where they are on the wall. She doesn’t want to look too at home.

“Claire wanted to see a photo of me when I was little. I’m showing her that one of Lila and Dad.”

“Ah.” Tasya nods as though she knows the photograph well. She enters slowly and sits down on Mia’s desk chair with a sigh. She leans over to stroke Blue, who is stretched out on the floor as usual. “Then she was probably holding Mia still. You always had to do that for photos. Most of the pictures we have of her under the age of ten, she’s being held in a headlock by someone trying to keep her in the frame.”

Claire laughs. “A bit hyper, Mia?”

She grins. “I hated being in photos.”

“And you hated standing still even more,” Tasya adds. She reaches for the photo. “May I?”

Claire passes it to her and watches as Tasya stares at it, a shadow of a frown on her face.

“You were going to turn seven that year,” she tells Mia. “It was your dad’s thirty-seventh birthday.” She smiles at the photo. “I always forget how beautiful Lila was.”

“Who’s Lila?” Claire turns over on her side, resting her head on her hand.

“John’s sister.” Tasya takes one last long look at the picture and passes it back to Claire. “She died of cancer two years later.”

“Oh.” Claire stares at the woman in the photo. She can’t be older than thirty. And she is lovely.

“She was Mia’s only aunt.”

“I’m so sorry. That’s so sad.” She wonders how well Mia remembers her.

“This was hers.” Mia holds up the silver chain she always wears around her neck.

Claire nods. She wondered why Mia always wears the same necklace.

Tasya smiles and sits back in the chair. “I remember taking that photo. I was trying to get a picture of the three of them to send to Rosa, John’s mother. And Lila was trying, as usual, to get Mia to stay still. But of course, she wasn’t having any of it. I was taking too long to work the new camera, and all she wanted to do was go to the park because Lila had promised to take her.”

“Where are your shoes, Mee?” Claire asks as she notices that, despite the fancy party dress and hair, Mia’s feet are bare and grubby.

Mia laughs and looks over at her mother as if she knows what’s about to come.

Tasya chuckles. “That, Claire, is a question that has been asked often in this house. As a child, Mia had this uncanny ability to divest herself of shoes within minutes of putting them on, even when she was a baby. We’d get in the car to go shopping, and she’d be wearing them. By the time we’d get into the supermarket, they’d be gone. The child could barely crawl, but she could lose a pair of shoes in minutes. I remember once when she was five, some friends found her pair of little white shoes under the bridal table the day after a wedding in Shepparton. We had to leave the wedding with her in bare feet because we couldn’t find them anywhere. They had to post them back to us.”

Mia laughs. “I hated those shoes. They were ugly.”

“And then sometimes she’d simply come home without them.” Tasya shakes her head. “I don’t know how many times I had to call the school or other parents to figure out where you left them.”

“How do you not notice you have no shoes on?” Claire asks, baffled.

Mia raises her hands. “I don’t know. I don’t lose them anymore.”

Tasya laughs. “I wish I’d known the answer to that question when she was a child, though, Claire. I would be a richer woman for it. Some never appeared again. And some turned up in the oddest places. Like on the kitchen windowsill, once.” She shakes her head. “The
outside
kitchen windowsill. Of a second-story apartment.”

“Mr. Hatsis once found a pair in his yard that I’d dropped on the way home, remember?” Mia’s still a little pink but smiles as though she’s committed to her embarrassment now.

“Oh yes, that’s right. Do you remember that letter you wrote to them? About their yard?”

Mia nods. “Yes. My stroke of genius.”

“It really was.” Tasya turns to Claire. “When Mia was eight, we would never let her go around to her friend Kristen’s unless one of us walked her there. And of course, being an only child, she always wanted to go there and play.

“She lived on the street behind us,” Mia explains. “But it was kind of a long block to get around.”

“And there was a busy main road on the way,” Tasya adds. “So we didn’t like her going by herself.”

Claire nods. She pushes her book away and rolls onto her side, thoroughly entertained by this nostalgic indulgence. It’s way more entertaining than reflexive verbs.

Tasya continues, “Of course, we weren’t always able to walk there with her when she wanted to go, not straight away. Which drove her crazy.”

Mia laughs. “I would get so impatient. I remember you’d tell me that you’d take me in fifteen minutes, and I’d just sit there and watch the clock and wait for it to move. It felt like an eternity.”

Claire smiles. She remembers that feeling when she was a kid. A minute took a day, and an hour took a year, especially when she really, really wanted something to happen.

“And with John it actually would be an eternity,” Tasya says. “He’d tell her fifteen minutes and then get completely absorbed in what he was working on and forget.”

“Yeah, and he thought he could get away with it, that I couldn’t tell time on his study clock yet.” Mia shakes her head. “He forgot he taught me how the numbers worked when I was five.”

“So what was the letter about?” Claire asks.

“Well, after getting tired of constantly waiting for us to walk her around to Kristen’s house or begging us to let her walk alone, which we told her she couldn’t until she was ten, Mia masterminded her own solution.”

Claire turns to Mia, curious. “What did you do?”

“I finally figured out that if I went over the back way, I actually only had to go through one backyard to get to Kristen’s house—their next-door neighbours’, the Hatsises. So I wrote them a letter explaining who I was and asking for permission to cross through their yard. And then I got Kristen to put it in their mailbox for me. I even put a stamped self-addressed envelope in it.” She laughs, shaking her head. “I don’t even know how I knew to do that.”