They lay in the tangle of their own sweat and sheets. Gil’s hand held her wrist, his leg wrapped across her torso. Alison watched him, his breath calming and coming back to a silent evenness. His eyes were closed. He often did that, she’d noticed. Like he was cataloging the moment that had just passed, wanted to remember it all just so. He opened them and saw her staring.
“Hi.” He smiled wide.
“Hi.” Moments were something Alison had never been good at. She was always thinking about how they would end while they were still happening. How she would preserve them and think of them later. What she would remember. She never remembered what it was to be in them. Just how they existed for her afterward.
“I love you.”
“What?”
“I know it’s early. I know it’s risky for me to say it, but I love you, Alison.”
She let out a long breath. “There are lots of different ways to love.” She ran her hand across his damp, hairy chest.
“I know it seems fast, but I mean it and I don’t want to pretend that I don’t. I’m serious about this. I’m serious about you.”
She felt the vise clench in her, her lungs and heart too big for their cage. She couldn’t give him what he wanted yet. She didn’t know how to tell him that. And she didn’t want to lose him. She spread her mouth into a smile. “Tell me something no one else knows about you.”
He looked at her. For a moment she saw something cloudy in his expression, and then it was gone. “I don’t like cheese.”
Alison laughed. “What do you mean, you don’t like cheese?”
“It’s my deepest, darkest secret. People really look at you differently when they know, you know.”
She wrapped herself around him more tightly somehow. “Really? How cruel of them.”
“I never thought I’d meet someone who understood.” He gently pushed her hair back from her forehead. They stared at each other.
“I don’t like mushrooms.”
Gil set his face in a look of mock shock. “Outrageous! How could I possibly love someone who doesn’t like mushrooms?” He manipulated his voice so it matched the old ads. “Meat for vegetarians!” As he spoke, he flexed his arms, their strength fully on display. Alison pushed him playfully and he responded by wrestling her into his arms, flipping her so that he was suddenly on top of her. She couldn’t have moved even if she’d wanted to.
She didn’t want to. They kissed. He tasted like salt and weed. He pressed into her, hard, urgent. They broke apart.
“I never wanted to be a chef. I thought I would join the army. My family, that’s what you do. But I . . . I have this weird heart thing. It’s manageable, it’s fine, but I’m not fit for military service.”
“I never thought I’d end up in Cairns either. I wanted to live in Paris.”
“Paris?”
“Yeah, god, it sounds so clichéd, but I was small-town. I guess I’m still small-town. I wanted to live in Paris and be an artist.” She said it in an extravagant way, poking fun at herself. Wanting him to know she wasn’t grandiose. Didn’t have tickets on herself, wasn’t going to fly too far. Alison had never understood why she’d wanted Paris so badly, but her whole life she’d never felt like she belonged in Lake Bend, and somehow Paris had seemed like the solution.
“You are an artist, though. Who needs Paris?”
“I do, maybe someday.”
“I could be convinced.” He ran his hands over her, gently caressing every curve of her body.
“I didn’t say you were invited!” She said it playfully, and she knew she didn’t mean it. She knew, in this moment, she couldn’t imagine any life without him. It was a heavy realization. She would do anything he asked. She would turn herself inside out to please him. She knew that. It was terrifying to feel this much. Heady. Dangerous.
“I don’t need an invitation.” He said it without any adornment, just plain, honest insistence. She kissed him again. If this was a perfect moment, she was determined to stretch it out as long as she could.
In Sal’s study the paints were spread out across newspapers hastily laid down as makeshift drops. Tubes half-expressed, pressed thin at the end, squeezed fast around the middle, rolled neatly to eke out the remainders, scattered across the space. The canvas was too big, or maybe it wasn’t big enough; Alison couldn’t decide.
She closed her eyes, tried to ground her visual memory in the moment she wanted to reconstruct. The air felt thick and cloying. It stuck in her throat and made it hard to breathe. The sky was black, but it was the middle of the day. Heat clawed at her from the inside out. She went over it again. The way the wind had felt, the depth of the darkness in the eye of it. She remembered it had felt so hot, she thought she couldn’t bear it anymore; so baked, she wondered how she wasn’t blistering.
And then it was gone.
Alison was frustrated. She couldn’t express what it felt like, the way the moment had suspended her, twisted her up and hung her high above everything that was going on around her. As though she weren’t really there at all. It passed over her like a shiver, and then, as quickly, it was gone again.
Alison lifted the brush and twitched at the corner of the canvas, thick white, spread fat and wide, kept dipping it in, spreading it in precise lines over the mess she’d already made. Ghosting the flames, then erasing them, one stripe at a time. She found it hard to breathe the air in this room without wheezing it out in spurts, as though there weren’t enough of it. Her hands were shaking as she worked. They were small, her hands, a little fat around the fingers, meaty palms, nothing elegant or fine to behold.
A fortune-teller in Cairns had told her the heart line was broken in all the wrong places, asked to see her other hand, tucked her tongue in the side of her mouth and proclaimed Alison was destined to love until the day she died; it just wasn’t clear whether she’d be loved in return. The woman had told her not to be concerned, because your life line’s not that robust either. Alison had given her fifty dollars to be told she’d die early and possibly very alone. It seemed important now, because she hadn’t died when maybe she should have. Had she cheated somehow?
The canvas’s white expanse stretched before her, glistening with possibility, potential to be useful, good. But there was no meaning here. Hands are just hands. Paint is just slicks of color laid down how you decide. Life is just one moment after another, piled together into something that you can’t properly understand or comprehend as you collect the breaths, the minutes, the conversations, the touches. Death won’t uncomplicate it. It will simply unravel everything you’ve built.
Simone didn’t plan to die; she didn’t think of it, didn’t ask for it. Alison thought about the bathroom floor, the tile, the exploded window. She closed her eyes and saw Simone’s hands, a Band-Aid on a finger, slim wrists, no jewelry. She wished she knew what her palms looked like. How long was her life line? What did she do with her hands in those final moments? Did she try to get out of the car? No, Alison remembered the seat belt was still clicked in place. It must have been fast, too fast to know what it was. Did time stretch out for Simone, as it had for Alison? Her clammy skin, her warm throat, her pink singlet, her purse, with the paper. With Alison’s address.
She dropped the paintbrush on the newsprint underfoot and drew her breath sharply, shallowly, erratically. That thing Billy had said, after he’d fucked her. About feeling like it was OK to die. Peace is not consolation; it’s resignation. Now it nagged at her, the reprieve. Picked at her like she was a scab not ready to flake off on its own yet. You pulled it off somehow. Got the skin back, a little less perfect than it was before. Every time you look at it now, you see the skin you can’t have anymore. The life you can’t have anymore.
She burned with it, and she knew that choice of word was dangerous, disrespectful even, but it felt true, the feeling that every moment she wasted here painting and then repainting her memories of the fire, she was wasting the time she’d been handed. Wasting what she’d been allowed to keep. But she didn’t know how to do anything differently. She didn’t know how to be worthy of the reprieve.
There was a knock at the door, and then a familiar voice carried in on the wind. “Ma? You there?”
Alison wiped her hands on the rag tucked into her shorts and hurried down the hall to let Sal’s youngest in.
Patrick Marsh looked a lot like his mother. Broad shoulders hunched permanently, freckled face, and sunny blond hair that flew in all directions, regardless of length or product applied. When Alison opened the door his hazel eyes squinted into the dark of the hallway, crinkling the skin about his temples, making him look older, more serious than he really was. Alison smiled at him, punched him softly on the shoulder, ushered him into the hall.
“Pat, Sal’ll be pleased to see you.”
“Yeah, got the day off to come up, wanted to see with my own two eyes that everything’s all right up here.”
“We’re OK, somehow managed to avoid the very worst of it. How’d you get up here? Roadblocks all over, fires still going in some parts.”
“Pulled a few strings, helps to know the right people.”
“I bet.”
They walked down the hall, toward the kitchen, and then through the back door to the deck. Sal was in the yard, fiddling with her roses. “Sal, got a visitor,” Alison called, her voice carrying on the wind.
“Sure smells like fire.” Patrick wrinkled his nose as he spoke, and Alison took a moment to take in the scent on the air, diminished, sure, but the unmistakable taint of wood smoke lingered. She’d gotten used to it.
“Yeah, you can see the damage down the ridge there.” Alison swept her arm up and out over the fields that stretched behind Sal’s. She saw her approaching slowly from the rose garden. The sun was in her eyes, and it wasn’t until she got closer that Sal could properly see the outline of her son set against the house. She grinned and began walking faster, waving happily, letting out a whoop as she got close. When she reached them, Sal wrangled her much-bigger boy into her arms.
“Patty! You didn’t tell me you were coming! Is Andrew here too?” She looked past him toward the house.
“Nah, Ma, he’s in court today, got that drugs trial; it’s closing arguments. He said to tell you he’s thinking of you and he’ll come with me next time.”
“He better. I suppose you left the dogs at home too?”
“The dogs? Geez, it’s not a social outing. I took the day off work. I was worried about you, all alone up here with these fires.”
“Ah, I’m all right, mostly missed town. Poor Alison had quite the fright, but she’s keeping me company for a bit, so I’m not alone.” Sal linked her arm through her son’s and led him back into the house. “Come on, then, I’ll make us a cuppa.”
“Bit hot for tea, Ma, don’t you think?”
“Nonsense. Never too hot for tea.”
Alison stayed a little longer in the wood-scented afternoon air. In the distance there was smoke on the horizon; far-off fires continued to smolder. The utter silence of the burned-out bush still shocked. In these quiet moments, there was nothing to pierce the silence but the few birds that had returned. No crack and tumble of bark stripped by lizards, or sticks crunched under kangaroo foot; no possums scurrying up and down in the night. The silence took some getting used to. Inside she imagined the clink of spoon against fine bone china, the hiss of the kettle, and then Sal’s muffled shout floated out on the breeze, imploring her to come in and have some tea.
But she continued to stare out at the blackened ground. Alison hadn’t seen Patrick since she’d crashed the Marsh family Christmas last year—Sal invited Alison both Christmases since she’d come back to town, but the first year she hadn’t taken the offer up. Just stayed at home, drinking her father’s favorite ’57 Nebbiolo and eating Lean Cuisine lasagna. If she was honest, mostly just drinking her father’s ’57 Nebbiolo. That first Christmas, with his old Rolling Stones records on the turntable and a glass, a bottle, two bottles, three, of his wine in her hand, Alison had let herself go, finally, completely, and cried, and cried, and cried, and cried. Torn up some of the family photographs, gone through her father’s desk and piled the papers in the grate, burning everything she could find, little wisps of his life catching the air and floating as embers onto the slate hearth. Smashed an empty bottle on the cold tile of the bathroom as she heaved up gluey béchamel and slimy beef product.
She had thought herself beyond it. Untouchable. Unshakably mad, unable to feel anything but white-hot righteous rage. She hadn’t expected to miss him so physically. The way his arms felt around her when he pulled her in for a hug. The sweat that greased the folds of his neck and collected at the small of his back, and wet his shirts through on hot summer days, mixed with his spicy cologne and created a musky atmosphere that announced his presence in every room of the house, even when he wasn’t there anymore.
The wine tasted woody and plummy and burned when she sucked it down too fast, didn’t let it breathe and expand like he told her to. Barolo needs to get complicated. Breathe, he would tell her, when he’d uncorked one and decanted it, Alison immediately reaching for a glass. Give it a minute. You’re always in a rush. She would roll her eyes, poke out her tongue, deliberately pour an overlarge glass and grin at him like she did when she was a child and she knew she was doing the wrong thing.
It was easy to mourn her mother. It wasn’t laden with resentment and words unspoken. It was just grief. Her face in a photograph made Alison well with tears, made her ache in her stomach and short of breath in her chest, but it didn’t make her skin crawl or her cheeks burn. Too many things she never got to say.
“Death’s a bastard,” Sal said to her at the funeral. “It traps us forever in the moment that it happened. You’re never going to be able to right what was wrong or say what you wanted to but didn’t.” She’d squeezed Alison’s hand and let her be, standing there in the portico of the church, as the hearses pulled away, her parents on their way to the incinerator.