Elsie couldn’t think what to make for tea. Her mind was blank as through the kitchen window, she watched a juvenile magpie and its parent hustle across the grass. The younger bird, with its mottled grey feathers where its parent’s were snowy white, eee-eeked impatiently, beak open, trotting along behind the older bird. The parent bird would dig a morsel from the earth and the adolescent would gobble straight from its parent’s beak, its greedy cries stuttering off as it swallowed. How busy the birds looked, Elsie thought. How fruitful and productive. And how free.
Tears slid down her cheeks. Tears of self-pity, of anger and resentment. But who was she angry with? No one, she realised. She was simply angry with the way things were. The indulgence of the gloomy thought only enraged her further. With her sleeve, she scrubbed at her cheeks, sniffing defiantly. This misery, this grief over nothing – how she longed to put it in a box, to not let it rule her.
The magpies opened their wings and lifted from the yard, disappearing into the afternoon sky. Through watery vision she watched them vanish: one moment they were there, the next they were gone. Their liberty made her feel panicked.
Wait a minute. Elsie pushed her face closer to the glass. Was that . . . ?
Aida’s laundry window was open. Only a crack, but it was definitely opened. Had it been open all this time, and she had never noticed?
Slipping down the hall, Elsie went out into the yard and pretended to check the washing on the line. Fingering the sleeve of one of Thomas’s shirts, movement caught the corner of her eye. She heard the sound of a door slammed shut. Feigning interest in her drying sheets, she unpegged one and let it drop into the basket. As the fabric fluttered down, Elsie saw an older woman hurrying out Aida’s front door.
Elsie crept up the side of the house. A car was parked at an angle by the front steps. As Elsie watched, the woman paused at the car and stared back at Aida’s house. She dashed at her face as though angrily swatting away tears, got into the car and drove away.
And in the window Elsie saw the face of a woman, looking at her.
Aida was back.