Chapter 18 #2
Dad does not say anything, but he nods a few times in recognition. When I have finished his apple juice, I give him a lopsided hug, and make my way back to the waiting room, to Fran, following signs I did not notice on the way in.
We sit in plastic chairs until the doctor, a kind-faced young woman, comes out and tells us it is okay to take Dad home.
She has not received, or perhaps not accepted, Dad’s note about his episode not being panic-related.
I wonder how many panic-attack-disguised-as-heart-attack patients carry shame about their ill health being related more to mental than physical reasons.
And I wonder why it makes such a difference.
‘Try to keep his stress levels down if you can. I know it’s a tricky time of year,’ the doctor says.
Dad laughs at this, and when I take his arm to lead him out to the car park, Fran leading the way to the car, I find myself laughing as well.
The summer after I graduated high school remains my most visited memory.
I do not have to imagine it as anything else, because it is perfect in its true form, a reprieve from the events of the day that soothes me on the drive home.
It was bonus time; I was no longer on the clock and thus no pressure existed to make me feel bad about doing whatever I pleased.
My ATAR score had not yet come in, so even if I wanted to think about university I couldn’t, and I really did not want to think about university.
When they graduated, Luke and Olivia ranked well and had their pick of courses; Luke left for Sydney before I realised he had even been contemplating it, and when it was Olivia’s time she was just as quick to move to Brisbane with a group of her friends.
They had made plans; they had dreamt of what came next.
And Grandpa David had left enough funds for these dreams to be put into action.
But I could barely forecast as far ahead as dinnertime, and even then, it was always with the understanding that the weather could change.
Now I can start to see how burnt out I must have been, and how disconnected I had become from myself.
If I had known I was on the right track with rest, if I had allowed myself more of it, rather than stressing about having already taken too much, perhaps things would have gone a different way.
Fran’s seizure had been caused by epilepsy, and he started medication that made him feel sleepy and weird.
He could not drink, so I did not either.
My mind welcomed the break. It also meant we did not venture far, though he seemed to worry that he was preventing me from some imagined life of adventure and excitement, as if that would have been otherwise on the cards.
He questioned me about my non-existent other plans all the time.
‘Why would I want to go anywhere? Doing nothing with you is my favourite pastime,’ I told him, as we restarted New Girl for the eighteenth time.
‘You always say that,’ he replied, getting comfortable on the floor of his bedroom.
He stacked two cushions on his lap for me – the firm one and then the soft one, just how I liked it.
‘Because it’s true.’
We saved our favourite holiday episode to watch on Christmas Eve.
My house was a no-go zone, natural disaster area: pre-Christmas Cyclone Elsie, steer clear.
Fran had made his room cosy with cushions and blankets to nest in.
I laid my head on his lap and sang along to the theme song.
It was as close to comfortable as I can remember feeling – in my comfort clothes, in my comfort place, on my comfort day, with my comfort person, and our comfort show.
This was the feeling I was always chasing, I should have told him, because comfort was not boring to me.
It did not mean giving anything up. It was a state of being I spent more time dreaming of than I ever had the opportunity to experience.
Maybe I did not have the words or perspective to understand it then, but I felt it all the same.
I wish I had been able to communicate that to Fran.
His hand started on my shoulder and by the time the episode was reaching its end, it had travelled down to the dip of my waist. The warmth that gathered under his palm spread to every other corner of my form.
That could not have been a one-sided experience, could it?
A chemical reaction surely required more than one reactant.
It might have meant nothing, humidity and skin, but I allowed the feeling to merge with every other piece of us, our history and the last few quiet months we had spent like this, until it meant everything in the world.
I wanted to approach things differently this time, to let him know it was a him thing, an us thing, not just something I wanted to tick off an imagined to-do list.
‘Remember how we used to make out when we were younger,’ I asked, subtle as an axe.
‘Yeah,’ he replied, unsure.
I could not see his face, which made it hard to judge his reaction.
I did not have the skill to direct the conversation the way I was desperate for it to go with any kind of sophistication.
Without alcohol, or nosy not-quite friends, I was lost, regardless of how many teen movies we had watched.
I knew not to jump to the end point, not to mention sex at all, but that only restricted my options, rather than laying out any alternative routes.
‘That was really nice,’ I said, because it was the only thing that felt true without putting expectation on him.
Fran took his hand off my waist and adjusted his seating until I got the hint that he wanted some distance between us. I sat up and tried to gauge how badly I had messed up this time. From the look on his face, quite badly indeed.
‘Sorry,’ I said, quick and sharp.
‘It’s fine.’
His eyes flitted every way but mine, as though he was looking for an emergency exit. I had ruined things. Again.
‘Sorry. Sorry. Let’s forget I said anything, Christmas always makes me feel weird,’ I offered, giving him the opportunity to hit eject.
‘No, Rah. Let’s talk about it. Because when you say things like that, I don’t know how I’m supposed to react. And before I’ve even had the chance, you take them back. So I can’t tell if you’re joking, or being real.’
‘What?’ I was shocked, his interpretation of my feelings way off base, even though I knew he was only repeating things as they had happened, more or less.
‘Sometimes I think you are more in love with me than a person has ever been with anyone, and other times it’s like you pity me, you think I’m pathetic.’
His voice shook as he said it, while I scrambled for the right words to put him straight.
‘You are not pathetic, my God. I am more in love with you than any person has ever been with anyone. Of course I am,’ I said, my own voice on shaky ground.
‘You say things like that, about other people being boring, annoying, or too loud, and how you only want to be with me. But you don’t actually want that – you’re too embarrassed to date me publicly, or to tell your friends about us, or to let things just .
. . unfold. So how am I supposed to know what to do?
’ He sounded frustrated then, which I understood because I was a frustrating person.
‘I’m not embarrassed,’ I said, trying to catch up.
He put his hands through his hair, and then linked them behind his neck for support, his pain so clear.
‘I am always being real, as a starting point,’ I replied.
‘The jokes are only ever cover when I get the impression you want me to be joking. Logically, I don’t want to ruin the one friendship I have looking for an answer I don’t think I’ll get.
And then sometimes I don’t care about the risk at all because it would be worth it if things could work between us again like that. ’
I watched my words circle around behind his thinking face, holding hope that they would settle in the places I meant for them to land. His face was beautiful.
‘But what about . . .’
And instead of finishing his sentence, he kissed me.
He kissed me. It was not a kiss like any our younger selves had shared, it was far more urgent and intense.
He was everything in the whole wide world.
If I could have swallowed him whole in that moment, I would have.
Leaning back against the base of the bed, I imagined pulling him through a portal into a new dimension, somewhere new just for us.
Quickly I stopped imagining, stopped thinking at all.
There was no way to get as close to him as I wanted to be in that moment, but we did our best. Clothes – a terrible invention.
Talking – a waste of everyone’s time. We bumped heads and clashed teeth and laughed nervously and hurried until we needed to take our time.
I had done this before, in my room and on the back seats of cars and on benches in parks with people I only knew by first name, and that one time at that awful lookout table with awful Ben.
But at the same time, I had never done this.
Touching my lips to his skin, feeling his hands on mine, it felt divine, in the spiritual kind of way, like I might believe in that kind of thing after all.
This was what we had been made for, the both of us, coming together like this.
Everything else was white noise. He was gentle, and slow, until our bodies found their own pace, quickening in sync.
When we ran out of energy, we lay in sweaty silence for a moment before shame got me up and dressed.
Or, not shame, but self-awareness. I remembered that I had a body, because for a moment there I had forgotten.
Fran did not seem startled in this way at all.
He had never looked so at home in his own body as he did that night.
I reached across the floor and kissed his belly button as I grabbed my shirt.
‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ I said, and he laughed.
‘Well, then. It’s only fair,’ he replied, leaning across to kiss mine.
I caught his face in my hands. ‘I love you,’ I said.
‘What?’ he replied.
‘Oh, umm, I –’
‘You love me? Eww. That’s so sick. Disgusting, honestly.’
It took me a few moments to catch the joke, and I threw a cushion at his head for that split second of worry.
‘I love you too,’ he said. ‘Obviously.’
He loved me. We loved each other. If we talked about anything of importance after that, I do not remember, but when we said goodnight, the anticipation of what lay ahead for us felt like its own kind of Christmas.
When I woke in the morning, what would be waiting?
Maybe some things I had asked for, maybe some surprises, but it was all part of a new tradition moving forward, of which I was the beneficiary.
I was off my guard when I arrived home, keen to shovel some food into my stomach and hurl myself under the sheets of my bed, already desperate to relive the memory of us together like that.
The urgency of needing to be asleep for Santa never left, not for me.
And on that night, I also felt I needed to suspend consciousness as a way of cementing whatever Fran and I had established together.
To see him in my dreams was the quickest way for us to be together again.
Mum surprised me, sitting at the dining table in the dark.
Perhaps I screamed, or perhaps only on the inside.
‘You scared me,’ I told her, thinking she might laugh. ‘I thought you’d be asleep. I was just watching movies with Fran.’
Elsie scoffed and took a gulp from her deep glass.
‘Everything okay?’ Usually I would not ask, aware of the ways a question so open could turn, but I felt peaceful, enough to want to share that feeling with someone else.
‘You don’t even know how easy you have it,’ Elsie replied, a slur to her voice.
‘What?’
She turned to me and her eyes were dark, unfocused, wild.
‘You don’t have a care in the world and are you even grateful? Do you even know what I’ve lived through to provide this life for you?’
‘I didn’t ask to be –’
She was in my face before I had the chance to process, her fingers around my jaw and pressing into my skin. She was every monster I had ever feared was hiding in the dark. And then just as quickly, she released my face and retreated.
‘I don’t even want to look at you. Get out of my sight.’
I did not need to be told twice. I grabbed my glass of water, my rice crackers and apple, and I bolted to the stairs. Out the window as I made my way down, I saw the light on in the tool shed. And I heard my father’s voice in my head: ‘It’s a tricky time of year.’