You and Finn go to bed in silence. You hate how far away Jarrah has gone, and your inability to reach him. You hate being so helpless. You hate the thought of leaving.
Perhaps, in the pool, you might find an answer. Or at least a reprieve. Ignoring Finn, who’s lying wakeful and silent an arm’s length away, you rise and tiptoe downstairs and out to the pool, drop your robe, lower your feet into the water. The afternoon’s wind howls through the evening. If anything it’s picked up, blowing away the clouds, leaving a haze across the stars. It roars across the pool, rippling the surface, turning your skin to goose bumps.
You lower yourself, gasping at the slow creep of water up your thighs. You take a breath and drop into it, and the feeling floods you. You and Toby, submerged, entwined, one.
Away from this, during work hours, you doubt the experience and you doubt your sanity. But in here there’s no doubt at all. It’s true and you’re floating in it. In here, you can almost love Finn. Or at least remember loving him.
Images, memories, dreams wash around you. You remember first meeting Finn, dragged to some gallery opening by your artistic friends and watching him across the room, burly even then, back when he was young and lighter and had more hair. There was always something of the village blacksmith about him. Those craggy hands you wanted to be cupped in. The slow smile. The broad chest to measure yourself against. When you started to sleep together, your mind-whirring insomnia vanished. He brought you to your body, and to rest, and you slept like a dog, deep and twitching.
You remember, as though Toby is somehow putting thoughts into your head, sex with Finn one night down in Tassie. Jarrah was safely asleep. You shut the lounge-room door, turned off the light, lay down with him on the rug by the fire and fucked in the flicker of flame and heat, the skin facing away from the fire chilled by the cool air. You were both hot for it that night; you fucked like teenagers. He cupped his hand around your mouth so you didn’t wake Jarrah and you cried out into his palm as he pierced you, as he moulded you, as you fitted around him, as you came shuddering and hard.
You feel a flicker of Toby laughter and understand. You made him that night. You’d never believed those women who knew they’d conceived while having sex. It wasn’t physically possible – it took longer than that for sperm to join egg. But now you know Toby’s conception.
You roll onto your back and float in the inky water. The house creaks in the wind and leaves flutter into the pool. Water laps at your hairline, reaching into your ears when you tilt your head back, muffling the wind. Underwater sounds bloom.
Don’t think.
If your scientist’s brain gets a grip, you’ll reason Toby out of existence. It’s dangerous to analyse. Safer to breathe, to close your eyes, to feel him. You submerge, feeling the water close over your head, letting in the underwater world again. The wash and whoosh of it against your eardrums, the sound of oceans and tides, the pull of the moon.
You open your eyes and look up. Above you, the trees toss wildly against the sky. The sound of the wind has followed you underwater and you can’t rid yourself of it. It blows louder and louder and louder.