It was the car idling in the driveway that woke her, the headlights on the wall through the frame of the old fig. The engine did not cut; it just purred, as if in a trance. Her eldest had taken the Mazda to an eighteenth birthday party. There’d been a run of them lately, as if all his friends were suddenly realising they were adults and their exams were over.
Tracee’s friend Rhonda, from down the street, had said, ‘You just have to let them go at that age,’ the tip of her cigarette flaring as they sat together on Tracee’s back step.
And that’s why, now, Tracee doesn’t get out of bed and move towards the wardrobe for her dressing gown; why she doesn’t go downstairs; why she lies, staring at the wall, listening to the alarm clock tick out its steady rhythm as her heart knocks against her chest.
After the motor chokes, she hears the car door close and footsteps. She pushes off the covers and goes to the window, looking down to the driveway. Tracee sees his lanky body folded in half, looking at one of the headlights. A scrape, she thinks to herself. He’s gone and had himself a scrape – just what he needs right now, before he gets his exam results, before he leaves for university.
Then he disappears from view and she throws herself back on the bed, as the back door shudders in its frame and the stairs creak. Her bedroom door opens with a yawn. It’s been so many years since he came to her bed. Not since the separation, when all three of them used to sleep together in her bed, tossing like a boat every time one of them rolled over.
*
‘But how do you let go?’ Tracee had asked Rhonda, as she scraped the tip of her cigarette along the step.
‘Oh, letting go,’ Rhonda sighed. ‘Letting go is easy. Letting go is just like walking around and pretending you don’t see anything.’
Tracee’s eldest boy was the school captain, and now they expect him to get dux, or that’s what his teachers tell her. She knows she should be happy – any other mother would be happy – but Tracee worries that this early success will spoil him.
*
She stays facing the wall when she hears his breathy little sobs from the mattress behind her. And when she asks, ‘What’s wrong?’ she does not take his shoulders and demand it of him. She asks him flatly, as if she doesn’t care to know the answer.
‘The car,’ is all she catches through the straining in his throat.
The smell of alcohol on his breath drifts to her. He hasn’t even bothered to brush his teeth. It’s funny, that strange complicity between adults and their children; this I won’t ask, as long as, whatever you do, please don’t tell.
‘Go to sleep. We’ll worry about it in the morning.’
She says this, but all through the dark night her eyes are fixed on the grey wall beside her bed and she lies stiffly, conscious of the body of her son spread out on the mattress beside her.
*
In the morning, she’s up before the boys. The sun is ready to rise, pink, like a damp mouth about to swallow the sky. She drives the Mazda up the driveway, into the garage, and steps outside slowly, bracing herself for the damage. But when she surveys it, there is nothing except a small dimple in the bonnet, where it looks as though something hit and bounced.
Then she turns the key in the ignition and the engine sniggers and turns over. She flicks on the headlights and they illuminate the back wall of the garage suddenly, as if it’s a stage, revealing the lawnmower and the rake and shovels huddled together. She walks once more around the car and at the headlights stoops to see a brown smudge over the Perspex. She bends down and rubs her finger against it, but it doesn’t lift, so she scratches it off – first with her fingernail and then with a key – until it has all flaked away, and she sweeps it up with a dustpan and broom. When she’s finished, she stands in the garage for a moment, feeling the air thicken with carbon monoxide, the smell of it scratching at the back of her throat.
She leaves the boys to fix their own breakfast and drives into town. At the panel beaters, she says something about driving behind a semitrailer and a stone hitting the bonnet. The panel beater just nods, wiping his oil-stained fingers with a damp rag.
At ten, right on time, the ex comes to collect the boys, parking out on the street at the front of the house, as though acknowledging it is not his driveway anymore. The youngest clings to Tracee’s leg: he is shy around his father, and this – of everything about the separation – is what pains her most. Travis has them every second weekend and for a week in the school holidays, but the youngest doesn’t like moving between the two places. Travis leans against the car, the way he used to when they were teenagers, but the smile, the we-can-go-anywhere-smile, that is what is missing now. When Travis smiles at her, his smile is swallowed by his mouth, his lips one straight line in his face.
While they are waiting for the boys, they talk about their friend Charlotte, who is finally remarrying. They speak of it carefully, dancing around the details and stealing little glances at each other. It wasn’t so long ago that Tracee visited his new apartment for the first time. It isn’t new anymore; he’s had it for four years now. It’s a small, two-bedroom place, right near the beach. Neat as a pin, he used to say, as if quoting from a real-estate brochure. It has a small balcony and a galley kitchen. The boys like it, at least, because there is an Xbox to play.
‘Where’s the Mazda?’ Travis asks, looking towards the empty garage.
‘I took it to the panel beaters,’ she says, ignoring the pull of her eldest’s gaze. And then she repeats the story, word for word, the same as she told the panel beater.
‘Will you be right without a car?’ Travis asks, as if the very thought of it pains him. And all she can do is nod.
*
Sometimes, she thinks they could have mended things, Travis and her. But she was busy going to university and then, for a year or two, he had a new girlfriend – a woman with freckly skin and a heavy fringe. And now it’s too late. Now they’re like two old bones that can’t knit back together again.
When the boys have gone, she sits out on the back step, fondling the almost full packet of cigarettes that she hides in her underwear drawer, where she knows the boys will never look. The eldest begged her to quit. She would die of lung cancer, he said, if she didn’t give them up. They show them now, at school, pictures of tar squeezed from dead lungs like molasses and solidified fat clotting the aorta. In her day, there were no pictures: they just let you work it out for yourself. So she quit when the eldest was ten and she does not tell him about her occasional lapses.
Tracee strikes the match to the box; it flares and she holds it to the end of her cigarette. Beside the steps, hydrangeas bob up and down in the breeze like nodding heads. Every time Tracee looks at them now she has to remind herself to come back out to them later with the secateurs – they’ve grown thick and bushy. She draws in a lungful of velvety smoke, exhaling it evenly from her nostrils. She practised this as a teenager; the art of smoking a cigarette is all in the exhale, she used to tell her friends.
Around her mud wasps hover like jumbo jets, their dangling legs like wheels preparing for landing. It’s not until the third breath of smoke that she starts to feel giddy, and it reminds her of when she used to smoke at school, behind the tin shed at lunchtime. On the step beside Tracee, their black and tan kelpie rests her head on crossed paws. Her ears prick at the thud of the Saturday morning paper on the front lawn.
Tracee takes a drag of the cigarette. From the corner of her eye, she sees something move in the grass. She blinks hard: sometimes the rush of nicotine plays with her vision. She walks towards it and stoops down. It is moving in short pulls, but even up close, she still can’t make it out. Furry bands of orange and black and something attached to it, brown. Then it takes shape: it’s a wasp carrying a huntsman. The spider is bigger than the wasp. She watches it labour over the grass, pulling at the weight of the spider, a load too heavy for flight. It stops at intervals, as if gathering its strength. The wasp carries it all the way across the lawn to the grille underneath the back step, where it disappears, pulling the spider in behind it.
When she can feel the warmth of the cigarette too close to her fingers, she drops it in her glass of water. Then she rubs her fingers on the grass, a trick she learnt as a teenager, so that her teachers couldn’t smell cigarette smoke.
Tracee lets the dog through the back of the house and she skids on her nails across the wooden floorboards, down the hall to the front door. She scrambles down the front steps, diving for the wrapped newspaper like it’s a moving prey. Tracee takes it from the dog’s mouth and flattens it out on the kitchen table. On the front page there is a grainy image of the pedestrian crossing on the main street. A girl was hit by a car there last night and found unconscious by passers-by in the early hours of the morning. They rushed her to the hospital, the article said, and removed a small piece of her skull to minimise the inter-cranial pressure. There’s a photograph of the girl above the article; she’s in her school uniform and her unblemished face is smiling straight at the camera. Anyone with information is asked to contact the police.
Tracee recognises the girl from the supermarket deli, where she scoops chicken thighs into a plastic tub on Saturday mornings, her slack jaw working away at a piece of gum.
Tracee doesn’t read the rest of the newspaper. Instead, she goes to the bathroom and squares herself off in the vanity mirror. She does this sometimes, when she feels herself slipping, to get hold of herself. She pushes her fingers into her skin and lifts it upward, trying to remember what she looked like before gravity started to take effect.
*
Later on, in the afternoon, when she and Rhonda have come back from their walk to the beach, she fingers through her old leather-bound yearbook. She had all her friends sign it on their last day of school.
The pages are now fragile and tea-stained. There are poems and tributes and friends who promised to stay that way forever. There is that poem she copied out, the one she liked, about footprints. About how there are two sets of footprints in the sand, and how there are places where there is only one set of footprints, and about being carried during the hard times. At the end of the poem, in her uncertain teenage handwriting, ‘ANON’ is written in capital letters.
*
Her boys probably wouldn’t believe her if she told them she was popular at school. That she had friends, lots of friends. That she was the girl everyone looked up to. Not like now, since Travis and her separated and the boys have become the two planets she orbits in figure eights. She used to roll her school uniform up at her waist to make it short on her tanned teenage legs. She used to go to all the parties down on the beach on Saturday nights, where they lit bonfires from old driftwood. She used to walk behind the dunes with the boys who had wandering fingers and glance back over her shoulder to her friends, who watched her leave.
That’s what happened one night with Travis: the nervous boy in their year, the one that they were all surprised she left with that night, that she chose. Then it was an early marriage and a difficult labour at nineteen, and then people stopped looking at her in quite the same way.
At thirty, though, she finally put herself through university. She studied psychology and now she has her own practice. Sometimes she thinks she ended up this way, sorting out other people’s problems so that she’d never have to confront her own.
*
Now her eldest has a girlfriend, Amy, a girl from school. She comes over for dinner occasionally during the week. Tracee likes Amy; she’s quiet and polite and she crosses her cutlery over her plate when she’s finished eating.
Tracee bought her eldest a packet of condoms one day and when she handed them to him, the colour rushed violently to his cheeks. It had taken her a long time at the chemist to find a packet not coloured or studded or flavoured in some way.
‘Mum,’ he groaned.
‘I just want to make sure you’re practising safe sex,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. You’re almost an adult now.’
He took them and walked to his room, shutting the door quietly behind him. That was before Rhonda had told her about letting go.
*
On Sunday afternoon, Tracee is upstairs in her bedroom, looking out from her window, when she sees the boys walk back up the front steps. Travis drives away with three toots of the horn. He probably knows she’s up here, looking down. It’s five o’clock: he’s right on time.
She always seems to be looking out of her window at this time. There is something sad and inevitable about Sunday afternoons. She notices, out on the street, the old fig tree is starting to sprout leaves again. Soon, there will be little fig balls strewn all over their front yard.
The kelpie rushes to the boys, dancing around them in little circles, nipping their heels, guided by some innate sense for herding, back along the garden path and up the stairs to the front door.
*
That night, Tracee is reading to the youngest and they have almost finished Charlotte’s Web. They are at the part where Charlotte’s babies tell Wilbur they are leaving the farm, and the little one’s eyes well with tears as Tracee reads it to him. He is teary, her youngest, he cries at the smallest things. He was young when they separated – too young, really, to have understood why Daddy had to go and live in another house and why Mummy just needed some time on her own. It was almost as if all the sadness she held on to about the separation seeped out through him.
She takes him in her arms and says, ‘They have to make their own life.’
‘But can’t they just stay with Wilbur?’ he says, between bursts of tears.
‘No, they’re going to use their webs to fly to a new home.’
Only the fact that three of them will remain at the farm stems the flow of tears. She stays with him, with the lights out, until his body starts to twitch and surrender to sleep. He always sleeps this way, with his head tucked under his arm, like a small bird.
Downstairs, Tracee stands in front of the fridge, looking for the milk. Then she sees the empty bottle poking out from the top of the bin. It is always a surprise to her, how much milk the two boys go through between them.
‘Mum,’ says her eldest from behind, in that croaking pitch his voice so often takes. She turns around and sees him in the cool light of the fridge. Lately, his nose and mouth look too big for the rest of his face, as if he hasn’t quite grown into his features.
‘About the car …’ His voice is straining.
She closes the fridge door and the light goes out. Suddenly, they are in darkness together. She takes his hand and feels it tremble.
‘Shhh,’ she says. ‘Shhh.’
And he leans in towards her and his two manly shoulders are shaking against her. Then she leaves him in the kitchen and walks upstairs to her bedroom.
*
A week later, she drives into town, past the pedestrian crossing in the main street. There are flowers taped up to the stop sign; the girl is still in hospital, quietly lying in an induced coma. They look so ineffectual, the colours are purple and pink, and they are all bruised and browning with age.
The wheels screech as Tracee turns the steering wheel hard, U-turns on the main street and drives home. In the backyard, she tramples over the flowerbed to the waratah and cuts through the woody stem with a sharp kitchen knife. She pulls off a forked branch with two waratahs brimming crimson at each end. Then she drives back down to the crossing and ties them up to the stop sign with an old piece of twine. They hang there like two throbbing hearts.
*
In the new year, early one morning, the three of them drive down to the post office, before the mail is sorted. Her eldest collects the crisp A4 envelope with his name showing through the cellophane frame. His fingers shake as he rips the envelope open.
He leaves three weeks later to study in Sydney. His father drives him up there – he borrows Tracee’s Mazda for the trip, which is better for long distances. It has a smooth, flat bonnet now; you can’t even see where the dent was. The little one is in the back seat; he’s taken his pillow along for the drive.
After they leave, Tracee will be out on the back step again with the same packet of cigarettes, dragging the swirling, cancerous smoke into her lungs and holding it there, as if she is smoking out a wasp’s nest.
Beside her, on the lawn, she’ll see how her single set of footprints has flattened the wet grass. And then she’ll think, as she starts to feel giddy, that mostly it doesn’t feel like she’s carrying; it feels like she’s dragging, and not turning around to see what’s left behind along the way.
Having Cried Wolf