No matter what they give you to bring sleep, it never lasts. You dread this time. You refuse to open your eyes, refuse to let your body stretch or move or, in any way, act awake. After the first few times you don’t need to look at the red burn of the numbers on the bedside clock to know. Three-thirty, give or take. The deathly hour, the hour of regret and sorrow and revenge, the hour of buried rage resurfacing. The hour when you relive finding Toby, over and over, and wonder if those images will ever burn themselves out.
You haven’t even made it to the pre-dawn hours this time. It’s a little after two and you’ve been awake for God knows.
Someone is buying this house. Already some guy is painting the front wall, covering up any trace of what happened. Soon you’ll walk out for the last time, hand over the keys, take the money and go. Home, Finn keeps saying, like this has been a poorly conceived holiday to a dangerous destination where war suddenly broke out, and now you’re being airlifted to safety by the embassy.
You slide out of bed, stand, pull on a dressing gown, cross to the window. The moon is setting against the faint chatter of fruit bats as they feed on the lemon-scented gum blossoms out on the street. The rest of the human world sleeps, while the absence of Toby slowly dismembers you.
You have dreamed all this. You’ll wake and he’ll thunder down the hallway and scramble into bed beside you, his hand will pat your cheek and he’ll babble in your ear. It’s impossible he doesn’t exist.
You have been a scientist all your adult life, but one thing you now know: there is no consolation in science. It offers nothing to help you understand or live with this. Your body does not know science. Your body believes that if you search long enough you’ll find Toby out there somewhere.
As if pulled by some force, you stride to the door, open it, pad down the hallway past Jarrah’s door, enter Toby’s room. His absence – now total – is a vortex that wants to suck you in. You stuff your fist in your mouth and it’s only the thought of Jarrah two rooms away that forces you to control the harsh sound that wants to come. Until yesterday you could come in here and still smell Toby. It was unendurable, and you came rarely, but now you want it back.
You have to keep moving. The lounge room is cold and dark, the kitchen the same. Your body is animal in its need for comfort, a caged creature pacing its pain into the ground. You want Finn, suddenly and physically. You need his body against yours, his arms around you, his bristled chin on your cheek, the way he has never said anything to blame you. The urge is so strong, so beyond your control, that you follow it, through the lounge, out the door, along the verandah.
And then understand, viscerally: you have to pass the pool to reach him.
You lift the new, efficient latch, push the gate open, step into the pool area, feeling the rough sandstone under your bare feet. You let the gate close behind you. You plan to skirt the pool as widely as you can on your way to Finn, you plan to avert your gaze, but you can’t help yourself. As you tiptoe by, you glance down into the water and it all comes back.
You’d thought perhaps you were starting to make progress these past few days, but the memory smites you. You stagger and chlorine burns up through your nostrils and into your brain.
Before you can flee, something flickers down there in the water. The moon’s reflection glistens and the water moves slightly, as if some small thing has disturbed its calm surface, setting tiny ripples in motion.
You are suddenly very still.
There is nothing alive about a swimming pool. It’s a closed loop of finely balanced chemistry calculated to obliterate organic life. When operating normally, the pool’s system ensures anything organic is burned into oblivion before it can multiply.
Yet, looking down into the dark water, you’d swear you could almost hear its voice, an impossible siren song hidden in the ripples, drawing you in. You lower yourself to hands and knees, put your face close to the water’s dark surface and stare into its merciless depths.
Toby went into those depths. He followed the siren call to the water, down with the mermaids and the white whales and the giant squid and the seals and the selkies and all the nameless things of the sea. And it seems to you that water is always trying to lure its children back, whispering through human dreams, as if your lungs recall breathing water, your old gills strain under the surface of your skin, the webs between your fingers and toes twitch and try to grow, your limbs dream of weightlessness. You are made of water and you can never leave it.
If he’s anywhere, surely he’s here?
You know it’s not true; it can’t be. Your brain is mining memories of childhood fairy tales, pushing you to madness. Yet you lower yourself until your belly is pressed against the sandstone edging and your face is just centimetres above the water, and you stare as if you could pierce the surface with your gaze, as if you could look into it and see Toby’s face in those shadows of light and dark.
Because you are hanging over the surface your tears fall straight into the water and it happens again, the ripples, the movement of light and dark, and it seems you can see into the depths and almost hear his voice.
Toby?
You lower your hand, feeling the moment it breaks the surface tension of the water and the cold moves up your fingers.
You’re touching him. For a second you’re sure of it, and you reach in until the water laps around your wrist and you can feel him in there, as if he’s looking up at you.
‘Bridget?’
Finn’s low voice, real and shocking, snaps you out of the moment, wrenching you back into the world where your son has gone and the pool is a body of lifeless, disinfected water.
‘Are you all right?’
You scramble to your feet, shaking, and back off. ‘Get away from me.’
You turn and run away, fumbling with the gate and letting it clang behind you. You take the steps at a run, crash inside the house and flee to your bed, forgetting that Jarrah’s sleeping, forgetting everything except that for one moment you reached out your hand and touched Toby.