Daughter of Australia

Perhaps the world had always been black, inside and out.

Perhaps she had died with the child who had only begun to warm within her, the child who had never known a breath of air or her kisses or his father; perhaps she had died as a child, in that desert, and life had been a slow dream waiting for the final nail held in this moment.

It was morning, but there was no light. Leonora could see through the window, the sun high above the trees—an odd, bright ball that did not belong in a world of darkness. Meredith, hunched and quiet, lifted the cold, untouched tea from the tray and replaced it with a new steaming cup, wiped a wayward splash with a napkin. But a dead body does not see things quickly and Leonora watched the woman and the activity absently.

“Is it true?” Leonora heard her own raspy, dead voice—the question lifeless as a corpse.

Meredith did not turn around. Her head dropped and nodded weightily.

The monstrous black swirled. The hollowness spread to every dead limb. “Where’s Tom?” asked the dead, dry lips.

The woman turned slowly now, her forehead wrinkled. “Don’t you know?”

Leonora moved her chin up, the muscles in her neck weak with sedative. “Know what?”

Meredith’s chin dented under the bulk of her frown. “Tom’s dead, too.”

Leonora’s eyelids blinked—over and over and over again. Meredith left. And still Leonora blinked with blind sight. From far away, through the mass of closing eyes, she heard her heart beat. She waited for it to stop—waited for the deadness to reach the pulsing muscle and silence it.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

Wait. Wait. Wait.

The strange ball of glaring sun moved along the fingers of the trees and slid to the back of the house. Rectangular shadows expanded along the floor in front of the French doors. Meredith returned and brought new tea. A bowl of soup steamed and then chilled on the tray.

A long, lean shadow passed the sofa, turned and passed it again, back and forth, over and over between her blinking. Finally, the pacing stopped. “I didn’t do this, Leonora.” Alex stared at her with a drained face, his words hollow and distant, only grazing a dying sense of hearing. “Say something, goddammit!” he shouted.

Death was cold and black. Numb. The air moved slowly in and out of her lungs—two dead shells—each respiration strange and dull and foreign. And still she waited for the air to stop. And still she listened at the stubborn pulse ticking in her chest. The pain in her pelvis was detached—just there, sitting on a distant shelf with the obstinate heart and intrepid lungs.

“I can’t take it.” Alex pulled at his hair, cried out, “Look at me!”

Her dead eyes scrolled upward, set and hung on his. Alex stumbled backwards and clawed at his hair, began to pace back and forth again with long strides, unable to escape the dead, heavy eyes that followed him. Alex stopped at the window, forced an inhale. He clasped his hands behind his back. “I need you to know that I didn’t do this.” His voice calmed. “Part of me wishes I had. Part of me wishes I had been the one pulling the trigger.” He turned to her. “But I had no part in it. I swear it.”

The sound of truth—pure, unfiltered truth—stabbed at the numbness. That strange organ began to beat faster and saliva wet her dry mouth. No! The word screamed in her mind, awakening it from its quiet. The life, the air, the pulse, was moving in the wrong direction, moving away from death. She pulled at the numbness, at the frayed ties. She could taste the pain that was hiding in the corners, waiting for her, and tinged her nerves with terror.

Alex walked toward her, his face blank of ego or anger, his jaw and eyes raw and honest. He knelt and took her dead hands in his. “I didn’t do this. And I can’t live with that hatred in your eyes.” His voice crumbled. “The men attacked the sheriff, Leonora. Killed him in cold blood when they tried to escape. The deputy had no other choice but to shoot them.” He squeezed her hands. “Your precious James did this. Not me.”

The name crushed her pelvis in a hard, tight fist and she cried out. The pain was breaking. Alex grabbed her elbows and his lips quivered. “It doesn’t have to be this way. Don’t you see? We can start over, Leonora. Now that you know the truth about him, we can start over. No one knows what happened except for us. No one knows.”

The words swirled in her stomach, made her sick with grief. She covered her mouth with her hand, wanted to retch. Alex took her hand away and held her face. “I blame myself for this. I should have never brought you to Australia. It changed you.”

His words spun around her temples, twisting her mind like a toy top.

“You didn’t know what you were doing. I left you alone too often. I see that now. You’ve always been like a child. You needed guidance and I wasn’t here to give it to you.”

Alex jiggled her arms as if she had fallen asleep. She looked at his face blindly, searched the distorted features for something that made sense and didn’t make her ill.

“I forgive you, Leonora,” he said happily. “I forgive you. Don’t you see? It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know what you were doing.” His eyes lit. “We’ll move away. Go back to America. Move to California. I’ll watch you better now, darling. I promise.”

She watched as he formed each word with his lips, watched as the mouth moved with sound. She watched as his white teeth showed with some words and were hidden with others. His tongue was pink in his mouth. The hairs of his mustache traced each curve of his lips.

“You understand now. Don’t you?” he prodded.

“Yes.” Her voice was dead.

His mouth curved with pleasure. “You see I won’t ever let you go again?”

“Yes.” The sound of her voice echoed in her ears from a long tunnel.

He squeezed her tighter. “We’ll start a new life.”

She swallowed and croaked on the words “a new life.”

Alex hugged her rigid body. He showered kisses on her forehead and cheeks and stiff lips. “It’s all going to be better now. You’ll see.” He propped up a pillow behind her head.

The pain waited until he left. The cuts frayed and beaded blood. She clutched her stomach. The grief rolled over her now, clawed and tore with each wave, one on top of the other. Her mouth ovaled to a howl and her body shuddered under rupturing despair. James was gone. Dead. The thought wracked her tendons and wailed in the creases of her brain until there were no thoughts or feelings beyond the entity of pain.

Weeks or months passed. Leonora fell dully into the folds of grief as a pebble falls into the murky dark of a bottomless lake. She did not try to fight the pain any longer, for it was part of her now, part of her skin and blood and organs.

Alex watched her always. She could not move from one room to the next without him asking where she was going. He was hiring a new manager to run the Coolgardie mine. He was making plans to divide and sell Wanjarri Downs. And Leonora knew, even in her grief, she would not leave Australia, even if it meant she had to be buried under its soil.

“Where are you going?” called Alex from his office.

“To take a walk,” she answered hoarsely.

“Good.” Alex tucked his nose back into his papers. “Fresh air will do you good.”

The sun mauled her sight; the dry heat engulfed and stuck to the skin. Her limbs felt the pull of the managers’ quarters, but she pulled back, forced her head toward the west. But it didn’t matter; James was everywhere and the missing pressed into her temples and her gut and her shoulders. Dust climbed up her ankles. Bull dust, they called it, she remembered weakly. Leonora kicked it idly. She was blind to direction, put one foot in front of the other. Step. Step. Step.

The sun burned the back of her bent neck. Her breathing was shallow. Step. Step. Step. The dust lessened; the ground grew more compact and cracked, reddened. Step. Step. Step. Sweat inched down her nose, soaked the collar of her dress. Her chest thickened with awakened grief. Her footsteps quickened. Step. Step. Step. Sobs broke with the energy. She ran. Her lungs fired with fast, searing air. Tears fell and dried before they reached her neck and still she ran. Step, step, step. She stopped. Shade covered her head. A wail left her lips. She grabbed at her hair and curled into the grief. Her knees gave up. She fell at the base of the lone tree, scraped her cheek against the warm bark and twisted her legs around the roots. Sinking. Sinking. Sinking.

Her body chilled. She had been here before. The same tree, a different tree—it was all the same. The memory left her cold. Old terror wrapped fingers around her shoulders. Leonora looked up through wet tears and she was a child again. Her eyes searched the barren land for a figure. Her body shook. It was the same. The panic, the swirling sick, the gaping loss. The same.

Her hands convulsed as she brought them from her lap to the air. She stared at the shaking, thin fingers, stared at the wavering palms. A jolt. And then something shifted. It was not the same. Her hands were not those of a child. Her fingers spread and stilled. I’m still here. The thought entered like a rush of fresh, pure oxygen. I’m still here. Her rib cage expanded; the hot bush air filtered into her lungs and flooded the rims. I’m still here. And it all came quickly now. The catalog of images fanned under the shade of the moving tree limbs. Left to die in the desert. Thrown from the sea. Raised to wilt under soot-filled skies. Scorned in marriage. A torn love. A baby’s loss. But I’m still here. And at that moment, in the still of the silent bush, Leonora was not her grief or her pain or her loss. She simply was.

The answers came. As loud as if they had been words, the answers thumped in her chest and screamed in her mind and breathed in her lungs and cushioned her heart. The answers came now. And they were so easy. For so long they had been out of reach, and here they were sitting before her as clear as if they had been written in the red ground.

She could leave now. She would tell the Aborigines. She had land to offer. They would not take it; this she knew. To present them a deed for land was like having them sign a contract for air. But she would tell them. They could choose to stay or to leave. But she would not stay. No more. The rest of the land she would give to Tom’s mother. She remembered the woman’s prophecy—Tom, a fleeting wind.

Leonora rose to her feet and grew again. Grief had not left, but she was not the grief; she was the one who carried it. She would sell her jewelry. She would take what money was rightfully hers and she would leave. Even penniless, she would leave.

Leonora walked, clutched her grief like a handbag but did not fall into it. The Aboriginal camp glared in the distance, the metal roofs pearly and white under the sun’s unstoppable rays. She swallowed. For she saw the sun now, saw the blue that surrounded. The gray was leaving.

A group of Aborigine women washed clothes in a rusty tub between the shacks. They watched Leonora approach and this time they did not turn away. Their dark pupils were calm and the whites of their eyes held her. For they saw the lines of her loss, the grief-drooped lids, and they knew this look. Perhaps knew this look better than anyone else on the planet.

Children bounced on the outskirts, played fetch with a thin, rib-lined puppy. The men were gone out in the paddocks or in the fields or with the horses. The women turned back to their wash and Leonora did not know how to begin, her mouth and thoughts failing. A tall, thin black woman reached to a slung wire and hung a wet dress upon the line. She turned, revealing a pregnant belly. Leonora stared at the swollen stomach, watched as the woman tenderly touched the curves of it. Absently, Leonora’s hand came up and rested upon her own flat abdomen.

The pregnant woman neared, tall and black as night. Her head blocked out the sun. She picked up Leonora’s hands, her palms hard and rough, and placed them on her bulging stomach. Tears fell again but not of grief. Under Leonora’s fingers throbbed life—rich and hot and full. There was no jealousy. This was a gift, the woman’s gift to her, and she let the wonder of the budding life flow into her veins and replenish what had been lost.

Leonora whispered, “Thank you.”

The woman nodded and mouthed one word . . . only one: Life.

Leonora took the word, let the vibration of its sound shudder through her body. Life.

Late in the evening, four days later, the front door hammered. Leonora bolted upright in bed. The pounding grew louder and more urgent. Alex moaned, then silenced with attention. He shot out of bed and grabbed his revolver from his pants. “Stay here!” he ordered.

Leonora dismissed the warning and followed. The whole house rattled under the knocking. Alex peered out the window. “What the hell!” In a rage, he flung open the door and screamed at the wide-eyed Aborigine, “What’s the meaning of—”

The man ignored Alex and stretched his neck at Leonora. “The baby!” he screamed. “Baby not comin’!”

Alex turned to Leonora. “I told you to stay upstairs.”

“What’s going on?” Leonora pushed past Alex to the man at the door. “What baby?”

Alex growled and shoved the dark man in the chest. “Get out of here!”

“The baby!” the man cried, his focus still tied to Leonora. “Alkira pushin’, but baby won’t come!”

Leonora looked at her hands, remembered the pregnant Aboriginal woman, could still feel the pulse of the baby underneath her fingertips. “Stay there!” she ordered. “I’m coming.”

She ran for the stairs to change when Alex grabbed her. “You’re not going out there.”

Leonora ripped her arm away. “The woman needs help, Alex.”

“I don’t give a shit!”

Leonora spit with hatred, “Do you really want the blood of another child on your hands?”

Alex glanced at her pelvis, stepped back with the memory. “Go!” He waved his hands in the air as if it were rotten. “What the fuck do I care.”

Leonora brought her medical bag and fumbled with her dress buttons as she chased after the black man, nearly invisible in the dark night. The moon was new, the sky a thick blanket of onyx. There was no break of color from ground to sky, only a line of stars pointed to the edge of land. The air was cool. The curlews were loud, their wails suffocating the ears and night. The Aborigine moved agilely on silent feet. Her breath came choppy and strained; her feet fumbled and slipped over stones and dry, sharp grass as she tried to keep up.

They neared the camp and she stopped. The shacks were still and without sound. Wide, empty shadows clung between the corrugated iron shanties. The air was heavy with absence; the very particles of the night did not fit. Something was off. There were no fires, no lamps lit in the windows. Her flesh shivered. Her feet inched backwards.

The man stopped and turned around, waved her forward. Leonora forced her body against the dread. It was too quiet. The cool air did not carry any scent, and with the lack the air cooled further beyond temperature. She was breathing quickly; her hands clutched the medical bag to her chest. She swallowed through her tight throat and walked slower but ever forward into the rows of sleeping iron boxes.

The man entered the largest shack, a long, rectangular tin can with sawed holes for windows, the edges warped and rusted. Leonora entered the dark room. The pounded-dirt floor sloped unevenly. She couldn’t see past the man beside her. “Where is she?” Her voice cracked.

“In ’ere.” The man put a firm hand on the small of Leonora’s back. Her already-tense nerves jumped at the touch and he let go, waved her ahead to another door.

The shadows of the corners shifted. There was breathing beyond her own. The man threw open the door. She stepped back, the urge to get away sudden and fierce. Someone moved behind her back and with a hard thrust pushed her to the black room. Leonora stumbled blindly and turned around. The door slammed. Leonora spread her palms over the closed door, tried to find the edge, tried to find the handle. “What are you doing?” she screamed.

The door locked. The hairs along her forehead and behind her neck and along her arms and legs stood straight. She found the handle, a twisted wire wrapped around more metal. She rattled the knob, tried to move it back and forth. She shook her whole arm trying to force it open. The terror moved down her back and filled the darkness. She pounded the door with her fist. “Let me out of here!” she screamed. “Somebody, help! Let me out!”

“Leo.”

She froze. Her fist hung in the air. Her heart raced until it nearly broke through her ribs. Her pulse thundered in her ears and eclipsed every other natural one. Then, beyond the throb of blood, bedsprings creaked.

“It’s all right, Leo,” the air whispered.

Her body trembled. Her lips stretched across her teeth. Her fist faltered and opened; her fingers twitched with spasms. A deep, long wail left her throat.

“Please don’t cry.”

It was a ghost. His ghost. His voice. Leonora tried to hold on to the sound. Knew it would fade, knew it was fading. She shook her head and cried out, “Don’t do this to me!”

The sound would disappear again. She would lose him all over again. Her forehead fell to the door and pressed against it. She shook her head into her sobs. “Please don’t do this to me!”

“Turn around, Leo.”

“No!” she wailed. If she turned around, the voice would go away; the ghost would disappear.

“Please.” The voice was rising, thick with pleading. “Just turn around, Leo.”

Her body twisted in the dark with defeat. Her feet flopped over each other as they stumbled to the back of the room. She shouldn’t have moved. The voice would be gone now. The hole would rip open again, bleed and grow, and this time it would never leave, never scar—just sit open and raw for eternity. But her feet still moved. Her knees bent without bones. Then something touched her arm. Her breath caught. Fingertips etched down her arm and found her hand, squeezed it tight.

Her legs gave out with the touch. Leonora crumpled to the floor. She felt the cold metal bed frame against her cheek. The hand pulled her up. Lips brushed her forehead, kissed her eyelids. A mouth opened and sighed against her jaw.

Leonora shook her head and cried and the lips kissed the tears. Her hands reached up to skin. To skin. Her nails bit into the long, smooth back. Her head rolled into the warmth—the warmth of his neck. Her fingers danced over his face. His face. Her fingertips quaked against the lines of the set jaw, the hot skin, the long, sloped nose, the drawn eyebrows, the creased forehead, the silken threads of his hair. It couldn’t be and was all at the same time. A cry left her throat.

“Shhhh,” James hushed her, and wrapped an arm around her waist, pulled her to his chest. “I know,” he whispered into her neck, the pain in his tone matching hers. “I’m here, Leo. I’m here.” His fingers curled in her hair, held her head against him. “I told you I’d never leave you.”

She tried to speak, but there were no words. She tried to kiss the lips that brushed against her cheekbones, but her lips were still frozen with the freshness of the grief and the new sheer, jolting disbelief. Her mouth opened and gasped, “I . . . I thought you—” The cry broke again before she could say the word.

“I know.” One kiss did not stop before another began, his lips inching along her face. “It’s all going to be all right now.”

The weeks, the months, of dying without him filtered in and laid their knives deep across her stomach. “Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”

His kiss slowed and stopped; his lips hovered above hers. “I almost wasn’t.” James pressed his forehead against hers. “I didn’t want you to know until I was sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“That I was going to make it.”

She gripped his shoulders. A small, constrained sound left his throat and his body winced sharply. Leonora pulled back. “You’re hurt!” she gasped.

“I’m all right.” He was quiet for a moment. “The worst is over.”

In the dark, she touched him gingerly down his arms, his chest, around the bandages that covered so much of him. She reached for his face and fell into his chest, tucked her head under his chin. “How?” she whispered through her tears.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Someone found me. Brought me here.”

She found his lips, the warmth of his mouth. James gripped the back of her neck and held her to him. “I never stopped thinking of you, Leo,” he hushed between the drawn kiss. “Never.” With his bandaged arm, he touched her stomach lightly with his fingers.

The baby. The memory attacked and twisted. He didn’t know. She pulled away with horror and shame.

“What is it, Leo?” James reached for her retreating hand, pulled it back tightly.

“The baby . . .” she choked. New, hot tears spread down her face, dropped onto his wrist.

“I know.” James slid his hip along the thin mattress to near her, the effort bringing constrained winces of pain. James kissed her neck and swallowed his own tears. “I know about the baby, Leo.” His voice was nearly silent. “Tom told me.”

A heavy quiet dropped and settled with the utterance of the name. Tom.

Leonora was glad she could not see James’s face and the anguish and bitterness that would sculpt his features. But she was more relieved that he could not see her face and the shame and mortification that froze it. The silence between them grew as the name still echoed. Tom’s death was her fault.

Her hands stretched upon her face and she cried deeply into the creases of her palms. “I’m so sorry, James,” she choked haltingly.

“No, Leo.” James pulled himself up, grunted against his wounds and kissed her hands, her fingernails. His strong arm wrapped around her back, the biceps firm and unwavering against her bent spine. “This had nothing to do with you . . . with us. Nothing.” James touched her hair, tucked it behind her ear, kissed each strand that fell between his fingers. “Trust me, Leo.”

Leonora fell into his arms and sobbed, but his body was calm and loose. “It’s over, Leo. The pain. The loss. It ends now.” He kissed her forehead and she felt his lips smile softly against her skin. “Now we start a new life. Together.” He kissed her. “Like we were always meant to.”