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Ashley got the fright of her life for the third time that day as she opened the laundry to be confronted by her daughter’s Labrador-sized stuffed-and-wired unicorn—again. She sighed, pressed her hand to her chest, and waited for the adrenalin to subside.
Bloody hell. Maybe she just needed to wash it now and be done with it. She’d put it in here earlier this morning when her daughter Ellie had peed on it accidentally—‘accidentally’ was a common word in their house, these days—and if she was going to be super honest, she’d been avoiding cleaning it because it seemed all too hard. A lot of things seemed too hard right now. All she really wanted was a couple of days to herself—maybe a week if she was being greedy—just to rest, recoup, regather. To stop feeling stretched thin, like there were fifty-three too many things on her to-do list every day. To stop ending every night feeling like a failure.
But then, the kids had had vegetables for dinner—curry, no less—and they’d gotten through most of their school work for the day and no one had shouted or cried during witching hour.
Ashley had even managed to convince Ellie to go to sleep without the giant unicorn guarding her bed, a ten-out-of-ten success she’d never been able to pull off yet in the three years Ellie had owned the toy.
Adrenalin calmed, Ashley took a deep breath of laundry-power-scented air and ran a hand through her slightly itchy, slightly oily, dark hair. Man, a long shower would be nice, too. Uninterrupted, for preference, though with Carter up and down for an hour and a half every night these days, who knew how plausible that actually was.
She’d lock herself in the bathroom with her favourite blackberry bubble bar if she didn’t know that he’d just sit outside the door and moan and whine until she got out and settled him again.
Ashley closed her eyes and let herself sag against the doorframe of the laundry, just for a moment. It wasn’t defeat, it was regrouping. Just for a second.
And in five more days, Tom would be home. For good, with any luck, this time.
Five more days.
Ashley wound dirty clothes down into the washing machine, loaded it with powder and lavender fabric softener, listened to the music of the beeps as she adjusted the settings, and set the machine whirring.
She left the laundry with a sigh, snagged a glass of fresh-pressed orange juice from the fridge, and collapsed onto the couch in front of the TV.
Medical drama, white-guy movie, news, news, slapstick... Urgh. Netflix it was.
It was a little ritual she went through every night, and she wasn’t even quite sure why, because there was never anything on free-to-air that she was interested in, and Netflix was right there, but she persisted with it nevertheless. She’d found, in the last twelve months of Tom being gone one week out of every fortnight, that it was the little, thoughtless rituals that kept you sane when everything else felt like it was falling apart.
Ashley picked out the latest period drama, set it playing, and picked up the embroidery she was working on.
Well, ‘working on’ was generous; she, like most of the rest of the world right now, was attempting to learn a few ‘old school’ skills while they were all stuck inside for months on end, and her first attempt at embroidering a row of flowers down the side of Ellie’s little jeans looked more like a child’s scribble—which was fitting, since Ellie’s canvas of choice was herself whenever possible.
But this latest attempt, a little pair of flowering cacti in a pair of terracotta pots, was actually looking okay. Recognisable, anyway, and the colours made her happy.
Hopefully Ellie would like it.
Upstairs, footsteps creaked floorboards, muffled by worn carpet.
Ashley sighed. “What is it, Carter?”
Silence.
She set in a couple more stitches, working now on the pale pink stars that served for flowers on the cacti.
Creak. Creeeeak.
Ashley sighed again, but ignored the footsteps, focusing on the period drama where two lovers were melting each other with their gazes from across a room. She snorted. Who could have predicted that real life would have taken such a steep turn back toward eighteen-hundreds courtship.
Briefly, she imagined having to date in a situation like this, when you couldn’t even visit someone’s house, couldn’t really go out in public, couldn’t eat out or go to the movies or do anything typically date-ish.
Man. Dating was hard enough.
She blinked, shook her head, and refocused on her stitching. After ten years of marriage, that stage was long behind her. Thank God.
Creeeeak.
“Mummy...”
Her jaw twitched. “Yes, Carter?”
“I can’t get to sleep.”
“I know, sweetie. That’s normal right now, remember?”
A protracted pause. She never quite knew if it was because he was processing what she’d said, or just that he was finally getting sleepy; he didn’t tend to do it in the day time.
“Yeah.”
The period drama’s end-credit music trilled, overcut with a montage of scenes, shots of the main couple staring at each other across rooms, across gardens, staring longingly out of carriage windows at each other.
Ashley might not know what dating from a distance felt like, but she sure knew what marriage-at-a-distance did. She closed her eyes for a second, caught by momentary longing for her husband’s arms around her. She tried to make herself believe that she could smell his aftershave, a little sharp, like mint, but soft like lotus and sandalwood too.
“Can I have a shower?”
That was Carter again.
Patience, Ashley reminded herself, is a virtue. “Yes, sweetheart. I’ll come get you in a bit.”
Upstairs, the sound of the hot water pipes screeched a little before settling into their steady, thrumming rhythm.
Chocolate would make everything better.
Ashley tucked her needle into the soft denim of Ellie’s jeans and set it all aside on the couch. In the kitchen, hidden behind the bright red toaster, was the kids’ stash of Easter eggs. If she took a small one from each bucket, they couldn’t complain about her being unfair...
She took a gold one from Carter’s stash and a pink one from Ellie’s, the foil slightly crinkled and gleaming brightly under the kitchen downlights. The foil went into the collection in the otherwise-empty fruit bowl—she’d heard somewhere recently that it could only be recycled in fist-sized balls, so they were clumping it all together as they collectively ate their way through the Easter harvest—and Ashley slumped back on the couch, tossing her feet up over the arm and twisting sideways, one arm lolloping over the side, fingers dragging on the cold tiles of the living room floor.
Which, by the by, was filthy, and she’d probably contaminated herself now with chocolate crumbs or toast crumbs or spilled milk or heck, even pee, who knew. The tiles were long overdue for a mop. Probably, she should do that before Tom got home. He’d appreciate it, she knew... But he also wouldn’t judge her if she didn’t do it.
The kids ate vegetables, she reminded herself. We walked around the pond twice. They only had two hours of iPad time today, a serious improvement on yesterday’s seven hours apiece.
The shower shushed away overhead.
With another sigh—it seemed to be the only way she got any air, some evenings—Ashley hit pause on the TV, licked the last of the chocolate egg from the inside of her cheek, and headed upstairs to fish Carter out of the shower.
The bathroom was steamy and warm, a pleasant contrast to the cool evening downstairs. The smell of soap filled the air... and puddles covered the floor.
And the toilet.
And the carpet outside the bathroom, where child-sized wet footprints told the story of Carter going in to his sister’s room to check on her before returning to his shower.
Ashley slumped, but grabbed a white towel from the linen press, wiped up the worst of the water, and rapped her knuckles on the shower’s glass door.
Carter’s broad, tanned face appeared through a hole he’d rubbed in the steam.
“Time to hop out,” Ashley said, holding up the towel.
Carter’s face disappeared, and the water shut off in the shower.
The door creaked open, and Ashley swaddled him in a towel big enough to wrap right around him twice. Seven years old, and he weighed barely any more than his four-year-old sister. Kid was all skin and bones—and muscle, she reminded herself as she towelled him down. He’d been doing gymnastics since he was five, the local club had scouted him at school, and he’d had a six-pack about that long to go with it.
She shook her head, lips pressed to hide a smile. “Love you, kiddo,” she said as she finished drying him down and folded the towel neatly in half length-wise.
Carter disappeared off to his bedroom to dress, and Ashley a moment to savour the warm, damp, soapy air, straightening the bath mat, hanging the towel, moving a stray bar of soap that had dried to the counter back to the soap holder over the bath.
“Mum.” Carter reappeared in the doorway again, buttoning the shirt of his blue Transformers pyjamas. “Can I leave my light on?”
Valiantly, Ashley resisted the temptation to rub at her forehead. “Sure, kiddo.” She couldn’t keep the resignation out of her voice, though. “Why not.”
She’d fought that one in the beginning, not wanting him to grow reliant on it. But she’d been terrified of the dark as a kid—she still remembered the time that the natural movement in her vision in the dark had seemed like a green, ugly witch’s face taunting her from her bookshelves—and the alternative was either a prolonged fight, or her sitting up at the desk on the landing until he fell asleep.
Some nights, that wasn’t a terrible proposition either; although the whole difficulty-with-bedtime thing drove her nuts, on another level she couldn’t forget feeling exactly the same way when he’d been a toddler learning to settle himself at night as well, and how many hours she’d wasted lying on his floor teaching him to sleep—wasted because of her attitude, her frustration.
Those years had passed, and these would too, probably when the world finally went out of lockdown, whenever that might be.
In the meantime, it seemed prudent all round to avoid as many fights as possible.
She could train him out of using a light to fall asleep some other time, when the world wasn’t falling apart around them.
“Mummy...”
Patience patience patience patience patience. “Yes, Carter?”
“I feel like there’s something in my room.”
Ashley couldn’t help herself: she sighed again. “Hold on.” She flicked off the heat lamp and the light bulb in the bathroom, went to close the door but changed her mind—keep it open, let it dry out—and crossed the tiny space that wasn’t quite small enough to be a hallway but wasn’t really big enough to be anything more than a landing for the stairs and went into Carter’s room. “What’s up?”
“I feel like there’s something under my bed,” he said, curled up in a ball, dwarfed in the queen-sized bed he’d inherited when Ashley and Tom had upgraded to a king. Carter peered up at her with big, brown eyes, pitiful and underscored by heavy dark circles.
“Kiddo,” Ashley said, running her hand over his head, “you’d really feel a lot better if you could just go to sleep.”
And she would feel better with her husband home, and time off from single-parenting, and enough energy to do everything she felt like she needed to do in a day to keep the household running.
Might as well point out how much better they’d all feel if Ellie’s toy unicorn came to life and granted them all some wishes.
Momentarily distracted by the hypothetical question of whether or not unicorns could grant wishes, or whether that was something exclusive to genies or jinn, Ashley got down on her knees and peered under the bed.
Dust bunnies, more dust bunnies—a couple big enough to be dust hares—a slew of unpaired socks, a small stack of comic books, and a few pieces of Lego.
“There’s nothing under there, Carter.”
He nodded solemnly, but his expression didn’t change.
Ashley thought longingly of her embroidery on the couch downstairs, her period drama, her hour and a half of alone time before she’d crash exhausted into bed.
The world wouldn’t be like this forever.
And she wouldn’t have the kids forever either.
With one last sigh, Ashley flicked off the light.
“What are you doing?” Carter squeaked in alarm.
“Move over,” Ashley said. “I’ll lie down with you for a bit.”
A pause, that protracted silence again, though this time he was also moving over as he thought, making room for her amid the small horde of pillows and stuffed animals he hadn’t particularly cared for until he’d acquired a baby sister who loved anything animal more than almost everything else in the world.
“Will you stay until I fall asleep?”
Dim light filtered in from the stairwell, and as she lay down, Ashley noted that Carter’s blinds hadn’t been drawn all the way down; a sliver of night sky showed, a few stars glimmering way out there beyond. Cold air diffused into the room from the crack, and for a moment she reached to close the blind...
But stars, like children, were something she never quite had the time to appreciate enough.
So she tucked Carter down in his blankets, pulled the uppermost one over her as well, draped her arm around the top of Carter’s pillow so it rested against his fuzzy, warm head, and watched as the stars whirled slowly past beyond the silhouette of Carter’s perfect, child-like face.