THE MIRAGE INN

There were messages on the answering machine. Daniel had not picked up their baby from day care. It was Wednesday night and Audrey had come home expecting her husband to be feeding Keenan dinner. No-one had called the teachers to tell them there was a problem and Mrs Hastings hadn’t been able to reach anyone on the two emergency numbers. Keenan was playing happily with Mrs Hastings when Audrey got to care, as if nothing in the world could be wrong.

Daniel was gone and Audrey assumed the worst. Hospitals and police were of little help. Days passed with no sign of him. All she could do was continue to dial numbers. Audrey would have preferred reports of accident or injury, even heart attack or crash, over the news she eventually received. That the man she’d been sharing her life with for over a decade was lying on a bed, in a motel called The Mirage Inn, watching porn.

Her husband had left his mobile on the windowsill in a room he’d paid for with cash. The next guest had picked up the phone three days later and turned it on. Discovered 161 missed calls. Waited only a few minutes before Daniel’s mobile rang. It had been sitting by a window overlooking a dismal little pool covered by leaves, foil wrappers and plastic bottles bobbing on the water.

Audrey dumped Keenan with Daniel’s mother. Didn’t say where she was going. Didn’t answer any questions at all. She even swore at the bewildered old woman. Got back into her car and was away before Dan’s mother could take it in. Grandma’s was the only place Audrey could leave her son for a few days. Keenan had been wailing for hours. He’d stopped crying as soon as he was released from his mother’s frantic embraces.

She went out to The Mirage Inn, so far north of Adelaide there was only desert beyond the compound. Audrey was taken to the room where Daniel had stayed. The owner was trying to be helpful as he walked her around the room but could only tell her about the takeaway food, Scotch and porn. She paid him for the room, asked him to leave, and continued to look around. In a drawer of the bedside table was a picture of Steve May—taken years ago at Audrey’s office Christmas party, when she was working on Gouger Street. A photograph she’d forgotten about once she had hidden it away.

On the back of the photo, in biro welts that had pushed through the image and could be read in reverse across Steve’s body, were a few sentences. Daniel had written about the days passing and seeing Steve’s face surfacing like a man taking years to come up for air. A stranger, pushing his way through the vivid blue eyes of Keenan.

Audrey put the photo back in the bedside drawer. She went outside to the small pool, lay on a deckchair made of varicoloured strips of plastic and closed her eyes. She felt nothing. Wanted to hang onto that numbness. Waited for the tears. They came in the tiny motel room, a little after two in the morning. She fell asleep and woke up before daybreak, crying again. Not the kind of tears she wanted. They came from the surface, from self-pity. She was drowning below—barely able to make a noise.

She couldn’t move for the next few days. Didn’t know where to go or what to do now. Sleep came in brief instalments and she couldn’t rouse herself from a daze when she was awake. She bought a pack of Peter Stuyvesants from the Shell down the road. She hadn’t smoked in years. With every inhalation she tasted poison. She got through the pack anyway. Audrey sat by the motel’s pool, sweating. Smoking a cigarette every few hours. The owner of The Mirage Inn cleaned the pool after the second day.

She picked up the phone to call her son but could not dial the number. Dan’s mother would answer and Audrey wasn’t ready for that conversation. The many comments over the years. Grandma saying how much Keenan resembled Audrey, never seeing Daniel in her grandson. The comments delivered softly, lovingly—brutal every time they were uttered. Each one, another crack in the glass, splitting and growing into a whole tree of branches and roots like she’d seen occasionally in windscreens, eventually spreading through everything Audrey saw. Maybe Dan’s mother would say, ‘Well, I knew those lovely blue eyes didn’t belong to us. No eyes of that kind on our side of the family.’ A final crack in Audrey’s glass—in the tree of fractures that had grown within the framework of her bones. Audrey put the phone down and didn’t make the call.

Keenan would be happy at Grandma’s for a few more days. He adored the old lady. A woman who loved Keenan so much she bought him clothes and toys practically every week, devoting a room to him in her house: decals on the walls of lions and monkeys and giraffes and rhinos; leopard-skin pyjamas for a new bed with zebra sheets.

All because she had believed he was a genetic reflection of herself, even if it wasn’t something she could see with her own eyes. Audrey had spent days on the telephone looking for Daniel. Now she couldn’t pick up the receiver in her motel room to dial one number.

Was she supposed to call Dan’s mother and tell her that Keenan belonged to Audrey and no-one else in the world? If she was honest with herself, her hesitation wasn’t because she felt pity for the old woman. Audrey knew Keenan would barely understand. Also, that he would have a lifetime to remember the day his mother broke his heart. Audrey wanted to pick up the phone and ask Dan’s mother, all of that love for Keenan, was it really nothing more than genetic vanity? Was there anything left over for the boy himself?

Daniel’s mobile sat there on the windowsill overlooking the pool. It had rung a few times, friends or people at work wanting to know what had happened to him. She hadn’t been able to answer why he had disappeared, even if it felt obvious to Audrey. What else could it be other than a catastrophic mistake she had made? A permanent error that wasn’t erased because it was random and stupid and brief. Every time Audrey had said she didn’t know why or where or how, she knew the only possible answer became clearer to everyone asking. She had charged the phone when she found it, but she left his mobile where it was and let the battery die.

Audrey had assumed it was an accident, yet the phone had led her to The Mirage Inn, and this room. The photograph was for Audrey, placed in the bedside table as Daniel walked out of The Mirage Inn. Going where? Going anywhere. In fairytales, breadcrumbs were left behind when people went missing. Daniel had come to the desert and left behind these last bits and pieces of his life.

Audrey didn’t want to leave the image behind and she couldn’t take it with her. Before she left the motel she cut the image of Steve May into small pieces with a pair of scissors. She’d checked the room’s drawers again as well as the wardrobe and the compartment behind the sliding bathroom mirrors for anything else Daniel might have left behind.

Below the bed she found the dusty wrapper of a condom and wondered if this was something he’d used. On a rod in the wardrobe hung a silver suit that held the odour of an old man, and there was a child’s toothbrush on top of the medicine cabinet.

The only other thing she had found was a postcard from Venice of the Rialto Bridge—a few gondolas ferrying clusters of people. A blank card with nothing to indicate who it was from, who it was intended for, or how it had ended up all the way out at The Mirage Inn.

On the drive back to Adelaide she made a few decisions, none of which she believed she could live with. She would have to go by Daniel’s family home in Glenelg and reclaim her son. Audrey kept driving and arrived at her house in the early afternoon. Didn’t bother with the messages on the answering machine. Swallowed two sleeping pills and got into bed. She woke up when it was dark, took another two pills, and went back to sleep.

She had one long dream as she slept—of searching the motel room endlessly, occasionally discovering objects she couldn’t understand. A bottle cap was a coin or it was a button or maybe a war medal. The Venice postcard had a message on the back that said From Us in the square for the message and To Us across the lines for the address. Daniel had written it, or Keenan had learned to write and these were his first words, or Audrey had filled out the postcard, perhaps even in real life.

She was roused from sleep. She heard her son playing with the metal bell that Daniel had screwed onto the plastic handle of Keenan’s buggy. After every ring of the bell, Keenan happily cried out ting-a-ling! ting-a-ling! Audrey swung her legs out of bed. With her eyes glued shut, she stumbled to the lounge room and stubbed a toe on the way—had to stop with gritted teeth as pulses of agony passed through her in waves. She hobbled another few steps.

Her husband was sitting on the carpet with the child. Daniel said hi when he saw Audrey. She said hi back as she worked her eyes open with her palms. He must have stopped by Glenelg and found Keenan at Grandma’s house. Audrey asked Daniel if he wanted coffee. He said yes as he placed Keenan on the buggy. From their kitchen she could hear him mimicking his boy, saying ting-a-ling! ting-a-ling!