Shawn's Law (12 page)

A doctor’s appointment for Mum that I changed from morning to the afternoon because it worked better with my schedule.

Taking Mum for a swim at the local pool, even if it meant sharing the pool with dozens of kids who were out of school by that time.

Visiting Lisa. Visiting Aunty Ellie. Visiting Dad at the cemetery.

Yes. I was the master of excuses. For a while, there was nothing from Harley. Then he started messaging and calling me. Some of his messages became panicked—he thought I’d died from another calamity or something. So I messaged back.
I’m fine. Just busy. Talk to you soon.

Perhaps I was being stupid. And perhaps I was being immature. But I’d never had to tell a guy to stop contacting me before. Every guy I’d ever dated had either broken up with me in some painful way—text message, phone call, or over a nice dinner—or just not bothered to call me back. The one exception was Rory—but calling your intended victim from behind bars is a little hard, even when the intended victim called himself your clueless boyfriend.

I’ve forgiven Rory. For not calling me, I mean. I haven’t ever forgiven him for the four other men he dined on like they were takeaway from the local fast food joint.

So I assumed that if I just didn’t talk to Harley for a bit, he would either get the message or forget about me.

He didn’t.

I began leaving my phone turned off so it wouldn’t ring all the time to remind me of the guy I nearly killed. Then I hid my phone from myself so I wouldn’t turn it back on just to read his messages—again. It turns out I’m not good at the “hide” part of hide-and-seek.

In the end, Lisa rang me.

“What are you doing avoiding Harley?”

“Huh? What? How did you know?” I was aghast. How had my sister suddenly gotten involved in my love life?

“He rang me, you dipstick. I gave him my number after you were bitten by that snake. He rang me to see if you were okay, because you weren’t answering your texts. Then he rang me to ask if I’d heard anything. Now he’s ringing me because he wants to talk about you. We’ve just spent an hour on the phone chatting. He had me telling him stories about your childhood.”

Oh, God Almighty. If there really is a God in heaven, and if he has any love for me at all, he will strike me dead at this very moment to save me the embarrassment of my sister and my boyfriend-who-doesn’t-know-he-is-an-ex chatting about my childhood.

FOR AN HOUR.

“Lisa, please tell me you didn’t say anything embarrassing?”

“Like what?” she said.

“Like the time I got stuck in the cubbyhouse window.” I held my breath in hope.

“Told him.”

“The tomato up my nose incident?”

“Told him.”

“The fingers I superglued together?”

“Told him.”

I was nearly crying. I wondered if I could swallow all the pills in my mother’s collection and what would they do to me. Would I die quickly and painlessly? Or would I blow up like a balloon and have my legs amputated instead?

“The time I played a sheep in the school play?”

Lisa laughed. “I told him that one ages ago.”

“The time I fell off the pony at the Royal Show?”

“Yep. Sorry. Told him.”

I think a sob broke from my mouth then. “Is there anything you
didn’t
tell him?” I asked anxiously.

I could see Lisa almost congratulating herself on the other end of the phone. “Yes. I didn’t tell him about the time you had an erection for two days straight and Dad had to take you to emergency about it.”

I wasn’t sure if I should thank God for small mercies, or not. It’s a bit like your entire front lawn dying, apart from one small thirty-centimeter patch. Are you thankful that it didn’t
all
die, or do you not notice the tiny bit of green among the brown?

And believe me, I know what the entire front lawn dying looks like. Before I quit work, my mother sprayed the whole lawn with nonselective weed killer, thinking she was helping me out by getting rid of the weeds. Did I mention the spray was nonselective? As in, it kills everything it touches? As in, it kills the grass as well as the weeds? That was an expensive exercise.

“Leese? Can you do something for me?” I asked with a wavering voice.

“Yeah, sure. What is it?”

“I want to be cremated in a plain pine coffin. I think it’s much better for the environment than all that ornate polished and varnished wood. And I don’t want you to split up my ashes. Keep me all together, please. I have visions of people splitting up their loved one’s ashes. How do you know what you’re getting? Maybe this person has the head and this person has their mother’s bum. Can you see it? Saying that you sprinkled your mother’s bum on your garden to remember her?”

Lisa was laughing by this time. I wasn’t.

“Shawn, don’t be a doofus. You’re not going to die anytime soon. Now I have about fifteen minutes before the kids wake up. I’ve just made myself a coffee and I’m sitting down in the lounge with the air-con on. So, tell me why you’re avoiding Harley.”

“I nearly killed him,” I wailed.

“Bullshit. He was bitten by an ant. How is that nearly killing him?”

“It was my fault he was bitten,” I huffed. I hated when she was the sensible sibling.

“True, but now you know not to go anywhere near them again. It’s not like you deliberately pushed him off a cliff or anything.”

“Leese, you know all about Shawn’s Law. You somehow managed to survive nineteen years living in the same house as me. I don’t know how you did it, but you did. Me being around Harley is putting him in danger. I don’t want to do that. What if he dies?”

There was a little pause before my sister slowly and carefully enunciated down the phone, “Shawn Ignatius O’Hara. Do you mean to tell me you’re avoiding the cutest guy to ever enter your life because of some
imagined
thought that you have about the universe being out to get you?”

I cringed at the Ignatius bit. Fancy saddling a poor child with a middle name like Ignatius just because it was your father’s middle name? I’d never forgiven my parents for the indignity. My family knew that to refer to it meant I would get my revenge on them—usually subtly and painfully.

But for Lisa to tell me that Shawn’s Law was simply my imagination…? Well, I couldn’t let that go.

“Lisa? Remind me again? How did you meet your husband?”

“Shawn, don’t bring this up—”

I didn’t let her finish her sentence. “If I remember rightly, it was after I injured him in a car accident. You came with me to the hospital when I went to apologize to him.”

“That accident wasn’t your fault, Shawn. It was the mechanic—”

“Yes. The mechanic who forgot to put brake fluid in the car after he bled the brakes. Could’ve happened to anyone, right? But no. It happened to me, and I nearly killed Brendan.”

“He doesn’t blame—”

“Who’s your daughter’s godfather?” I asked without pause. There was silence on the other end of the line. “Yes. I believe that I nearly killed the poor guy after my new car engine exploded? If I recall rightly, he was one of the firefighters called to put the flames out in the car park of the department store while I blithely shopped, unaware of the fuss? Didn’t I invite him to a family dinner to apologize when he got hurt, and he and Brendan hit it off and have been best mates since?”

“That doesn’t—”

“And what about the night you went into premature labor with the twins? I’d accidently cut the phone lines that afternoon when I was fixing your sprinkler system. That was purely an accident, but the fact that I somehow managed to take both of your mobile phones home with me as well?”

“That was because Izzy put them in your bag,” Lisa cried.

“Exactly,” I crowed. “Now what other person would that happen to apart from the person the whole universe is against?”

“The universe is
not
against you,” she argued.

“I nearly killed you and my nephews.”

“Utter rot. I was in labor, not dying.”

“What about the time that weather balloon fell out of the sky and nearly hit Izzy when I took her down the park?” I pointed out.

“So?”

“The baseball that nearly hit you at the game I took you to?”

“Your point?” my sister said, completely unconcerned.

“My point is that being around me is dangerous.”

“Fiddlesticks. I reckon being around you has saved my life. Didn’t you hear yourself? The weather balloon
nearly
hit Izzy. The baseball
nearly
hit me. Being around you is good luck. I think you’ve
saved
our lives. If you hadn’t had that car accident, then I’d never have met Brendan, and the kids wouldn’t exist.”

I stopped. I’d never thought of it that way.

“But Harley—” I started.

“Excuse me? The way Harley tells it, you
saved
his life. If he’d been by himself in the bush and bitten, he might not have been able to make it back. Didn’t you recognize the signs and drive him to the hospital?”

“But he wouldn’t’ve been bitten if it wasn’t for me.”

My sister sighed. Loudly and with frustration. “Shawn, Shawn, Shawn.” Another sigh punctuated the sentence. “Shawn, I want you to do something for me, okay? I promise it won’t be painful. Now, take a seat and close your eyes. I want you to visualize that you’re married. Can you do that? Can you see your husband in front of you?”

I huffed and closed my eyes. The visualizing my husband bit was easy. I just pictured Harley.

“Now,” Lisa said. “I want you to imagine your husband had the flu. Would you leave him if he had the flu? Would you dump him? Divorce him?”

“Of course not,” I exclaimed. I couldn’t see where she was going with this one.

“What if he had leukemia? Would you ditch him?”

“No!”

“What if he was HIV positive?”

Whoa. My baby sister was bringing out the big guns if she was talking about the subject that every gay man dreads.

“If I loved him enough to marry him, then of course I wouldn’t abandon him.”

“Even if there was a chance that he could infect you? Even though he might give you the disease?”

Double-whoa. My sister was sneaky.

“Even then,” I declared. “Just because your partner’s HIV positive, it doesn’t mean you’ll get it. There are steps to take to ensure you don’t pass it on. Things you can do to make sure you don’t get it. As long as you know your partner is HIV positive, you can minimize the risks.”

“But there’s a chance that he might
kill
you.”

I pursed my lips together and stared laser eyes in the direction I knew Lisa lived. “True. But if I loved him, then that’s an acceptable risk.”

“So, if there’s such a thing as Shawn’s Law, then we know about it, don’t we? We can take steps to deal with it, like carry first aid kits, learn how to administer first aid, take extra clothes when we go out, service the car twice as often, be aware of our surroundings for falling weather balloons, and not attend baseball games. So, in other words, we can minimize the risks. And even though there’s a chance you might kill the person you’re with, if they love you, then it’s an acceptable risk, isn’t it?”

Did I mention I hate my sister?

“Now,” she said, not waiting for my reply. “I can hear one son playing in his cot, which means the other one is certainly awake from the noise. So I’ll hang up now, but you’d better ring Harley, or else I promise I’ll come and nag you until you do.”

She left me with a dial tone and an unsettled stomach. But I didn’t pick up the phone and call Harley. Yeah, yeah. I can hear you shouting at me from here.

My sister knew me well. She started up her campaign. The text messages began to come through.

3:02 p.m.:
Have you rung him yet? Do it!

3:55 p.m.:
Go outside and say hello!!!!

4:46 p.m.:
Why didn’t you say hello? Ring him!

7:32 p.m.:
Put Mum to bed and ring him.

10:09 p.m.:
Shit head.

Yeah. I guess you could say my sister knew me.

The next day, in between messages from my sister that questioned my masculinity, I only thought of Harley about—oh, I don’t know—twenty thousand times.

Somehow Harley got the message that I wasn’t going to call him and began his own campaign. But his campaign was a series of reminders of our time together, all left in my letterbox as he walked his dogs every night.

A punnet of strawberries with a yellow note that said, “Call me for dessert.”

A miniature toy jeep with a bright green note that said, “Thank you.”

Another stuffed toy penguin, smaller than the one he’d won me the night at TimeZone with a pale purple note that said, “Can we do it again?”

A packet of antihistamines with a bright blue note that said, “Keep these with you for the next time we go bushwalking.”

A large, black feather—probably from a Carnaby’s cockatoo—with another bright green note that said, “This reminded me of you.”

On Saturday, he left his gift early and I didn’t realize. I’d been out the front, watering the garden in the morning, and my mother had been with me. An hour later I asked her what she was doing.

“I’m playing with my new balloon baby,” she told me.

“Your what?”

“My new balloon baby. See? I made myself a dolly from a balloon.”

I came over to where she was rocking an object wrapped in a couple of towels as blankets. My eyes flew open and my jaw hit the ground.

“Mother. Where the hell did you get that?”

Nestled in her arms was a pale pink condom filled with water with a knot in the end, and a face drawn on it using black pen. First, I wondered where she got it. Second, I sure hoped it wasn’t used.

“Don’t yell,” she admonished me. “You’ll wake the baby.”

“Stuff the baby. Where did you get it?”

My mother’s face dropped as if I were denying her a favorite treat. She looked to be on the verge of tears, but I needed to know where she found it, and was I going to have to feed her anti-HIV drugs for the next six months.

Her lip wobbled. “It was in the little pink packet. It smelled like strawberries.”