The cheque Henry wrote and laid out on the marble plant stand is for fifteen thousand dollars. Will she sit for a while and talk with him instead of staring at it with her mother’s eyes?

“You can’t just take it and leave,” he tells her. “We have plans tomorrow.”

“Are you hungry, I am?” Henry asks. Sit down for Christ. He puts their bowls of curried soup on top of the Living pages.

She can barely sip the soup from the spoon although her eyes are all that it sees. “Remember New Mexico?” She does. They got stuck behind a cow truck for hours and she sang the poop song—poop poop poop poop—and she woke up with the sun, on the side of the road, thirsty. That was Black Mountain and she had to pee and Henry was asleep. She smiles while Henry changes his tank.

“You remember that boy you played with all week while I was in meetings?”

They watch television after dinner. She goes into the bathroom and comes out again with her mother’s eyes. Her hazel eyes find tone in her green tank top and Henry notices she no longer wears just T-shirts to bed. Her thin wrists are still very thin. She stares at the cheque while coming out of the bathroom, and Henry remembers her mother doing the same. They were once like their daughter is now: a little something all the time. “Give me one of those pills. Do I take it with gin?”

They sip from the same bottle.  She says, “You were sooo Baptist.”

Henry coughs and laughs and splinters. “I know, I know,” he says. “I can’t believe you…” She says she doesn’t remember it all. Henry wonders if she can remember the turtle she found. He says, “Do you remember the time you called me a cocksucker?”

When she was twelve? She doesn’t answer but, god, all that blood and mucus piled in the laundry room and her mother screaming, “How many times…don’t wear white,” while the poodle nested and shit all over that floor and Henry’s office shirts. Henry threw a plant into their old television. Black soil and potassium pellets and the terracotta warrior his lover had made spread against the wall, but did not stick. Henry screamed at her and his wife, “You see how angry you make me.”

That house, the mansion, the lie: to his lover, “chateau le désespoir,” everything marble and crystalline and perfumed and powdered. Henry broke all the doors and woke up bathroom-floored with peeling fists. He pulled her off the front stoop when she was stoned and laughing and waving and past curfew. Henry screamed, “Look what you’ve done to us.” Look at me; look at me suffering because of you. Another broken door, hers. “How many men have you let fuck you?” and he fisted her ripped blouse overhead. One tiny breast squished out from her pell-melled black bra he grabbed as she fled up the staircase. He shattered everything he’d ever bought her. Porcelain dolls: gypsies, indians. Victorian. “Bisque,” she says. They were very valuable: music boxes, mahogany horses.

They fell asleep on the couch. Henry woke up coughing, the tubing from the tank wrapped around her toes. He traced circles around the white clod of her ankle, the cold bulb of her baby’s foot, small teenage bumps, and hairy ankles. He kissed her on the forehead and draped a blanket over her.

The next morning Henry brushed his teeth and she’d been in his pills. He made a frittata for them to share, onions he cut so small she couldn’t pick them out. Onions are good for you. “So what kind of pills do you have?” he asked.

He watches her criss-crossing the rooms of his home. Her eyes defy restraint and can’t keep from the cheque. She picks it up and holds it in her hand. “Just take it when you leave,” he says.  “So you don’t lose it.” He asks if she has a separate account, if she’ll take his name again, or her mother’s? Henry remembers John’s black tails whipping in the air and his corsage askew, pushing Henry through the red cathedral doors and down the steps even as the march began. “She doesn’t want you here,” John said. Henry tells her, “He was too goodie-goodie.”

Henry asks her to drive his car, but she is already too high. They go through the clover field and out of town. Henry said, “You’re never thankful when it’s July, you know.” The short, dying breath pumped through Henry’s chest chasing its own lull. She had asked about his lovers and friends. He still kept their good times in frames throughout the house. Here in a hot tub, golden beach, here in hot embrace. They’re all, just a few, dead now. One is in Utah and they laughed about the word: U-tah.  She stays awake and never asks how much farther. He enjoys the appliance hum of the road and his escaping breath.

High now, father and daughter meander along the bramble fence. Their own steps and shadows make them giggle. Henry carries his tank on his back and stops at the beginning of the fence. He says, “You used to love horses. Can you still name them?” Morgan, Palomino, the brown sable, Hanoverian—the rarest: Henry names horses that aren’t there. He studied them before she came. They wave to the lesbian cowgirls. After a while, she looks tired and cranky. She lashes out at him. Henry stops at a bar where they order Reubens and Boulevard beers.

His ex-wife was old-fashioned in her memberships and hosting. She let him name his daughter. It’s the kind of story she likes to tell waitresses. He named her after a small town he’d stayed in for a weekend. He named her Olathe because, you see, Olathe means beautiful. He once told his daughter never to go there. The town burned to its easements the afternoon she was born.

They made it home and the next morning Henry hasn’t the energy to make breakfast. She’s already awake, her little bag packed by the door and the cheque tucked somewhere safe. They sit in the kitchen where the coffee percolates. Henry doesn’t believe she will start anew or that life can be reset at all. He says something about the cheque and she asks if he remembers the messages he left. “Sure,” he says. He doesn’t remember all of them, only that she stopped answering her phone. She’s leaving without breakfast.

He asks about the cheque and she rolls down her window. She says if this is going to work, “We’ll need to forget such things.”

He puts a piece of paper with the directions back into his pocket. He walked here from his hotel, and he doesn’t know the city well. The rain let up before he started, and the last of it was drying in halos off the sidewalk.

The front lobby is cramped, bundles of flyers lie on the floor, and water stains are on the white ceiling tiles. He picks up a flyer for a supermarket that he has in his own town and looks for his sister in the registry. Her name is done in pencil, 524, although he already knew that. He runs his finger over the name and a bit of the pencil rubs off on his finger. She buzzes him in without asking who’s there.

Jason and Julia hadn’t talked for a few years before their mother’s stroke – he can’t quite remember why. Julia is four years younger than Jason, so they didn’t have much of a relationship growing up. And he always hated being introduced with her, Jason and Julia, as if his parents had planned the alliteration as something to show off whenever they had the chance. Jason and Julia. He hated having the same initials.

The button for the elevator is plastic and cool. After pushing it, he moves his fingers over it, feeling out the cold and following two cracks that run parallel across it. The doors open with a shudder.

Inside, a fluorescent light flickers and he thinks about the eulogy he had written for their father. Jason remembers that it had made Julia cry, made his mother cry, even made himself cry. But he had felt bad about it at the time: he thought of it as just words, empty thoughts, only there to bring out tears. He hardly remembers what he felt that day, but it wasn’t grief. He and his father were never really close, although closer than he was with his mother. At the time, he felt he should have done more. That was four years ago, and he’s hardly spoken to anyone since.

Julia called for the first time five months earlier. She told him that their mother had had a stroke, and that she was in the hospital. She asked him when he would be there. He hadn’t known what to say, but it was a few weeks before Christmas and he knew that there was no way he could get out of work. She paused on the line, obviously not expecting this answer, then asked what he was going to do. He said he would send some money. That was how it started. Even then he hadn’t been happy about it, but there was no getting around it. At the end of January she called again and asked if he could send another five-hundred. So, at the start of every month, he sent Julia the money. There had been five months of it – twenty-five hundred dollars now.

He hasn’t bought anything since. He had been doing alright before, but this was buckling him. His shoes, his good work shoes, have a deep crease along the bend of his foot and he’s stopped eating out. He only has two suits he can still wear, and he’s started to hear people talking around the office. He’s come to stop the payments, or at least cut them back.

In the sway of the elevator he takes the same piece of paper from his back pocket, and looks at the address again. Still 524, in his own writing. He’s in his casual clothes; jeans and an old pair of runners. He’s only gotten off the flight a few hours earlier.

He goes over again how to break the news, how to say it. He had thought of some kind of government retirement home – he knows that there has to be something, somewhere to put them. “Nothing fancy,” he’ll say. There must be something. And from what Julia had told him over their calls, their mother wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Jason hopes his sister might see this as a good thing, that she might even be relieved. He thinks they can look into it together. “Nothing fancy,” he’ll say.

The elevator stops at the fifth floor, and when he steps out, he sees a man walking in the hallway and notices that the wallpaper is starting to peel. The carpet of the hallway has threadbare grooves walked into it, and he follows them to 524.

It takes a minute after he knocks until he can hear a rustle behind the door. When it opens, he’s met with a damp smell, something like what he imagines a diaper must smell like. Then there’s his sister. Her brown hair is tied into a ponytail, and he thinks she’s started to get wrinkles under her eyes.

“You’re here,” she says, her green eyes streaked red.

“Hey,” he says slowly, “how have you been?”

Julia walks into the apartment without answering, leaving the door open behind her. Jason stands outside for a moment before entering the living room with light green walls. The carpet is a washed-out red, and from between the nearly drawn curtains of a picture window across from the door, he can see that the sun has already set.

After he steps inside he hears a noise from outside and he shuts the door. Julia comes into the living room, pushing her mother in a wheelchair. As they turn the corner, his mother sees Jason. Her face lights up, and she makes sounds that don’t form words. Jason looks at her, at her face, and feels nauseous. He can see that the face is certainly still hers, he knows that, but details have all been smudged. Her eyes surprise him the most. The fury, the quickness, the intelligence, is all gone. They strike him as dull and exposed.

Jason keeps looking at her in the wheelchair, at the red scarf around her neck, and the heather grey sweat suit she’s wearing. She’s gained weight. His mother moves her hands slowly up and down and gurgles out more indistinguishable syllables. He takes a step back before he realizes what he’s doing.

“Hey… how are you, mom,” he says, but immediately feels that he could have said anything to her.

“She’s happy to see you,” says Julia flatly, “I haven’t seen her this excited.” She wheels her mother to a space beside the couch, and makes a spot between the blankets and pillows and sits down in it. “Well, this is it.”

He looks from his sister to his mother, then around the room for a place to sit. In the corner is a chair he remembers growing up with: steel with a checked plastic cover that’s started to crack since he last saw it. He moves it to the other side of the room and sits down, facing Julia.

“I didn’t think she’d look—” He cuts himself off. “I meant to come sooner.” He looks around the room, “but it’s been so busy since Christmas. Even getting the time to get down here, I had to beg.”

“Yeah.” Julia’s eyebrows jump as she moves her head up and shrugs her shoulders—a gesture he thinks he can remember from when she was a kid. “Well, this is everything,” she says as she motions her hands around the room. “You really couldn’t get here any sooner? You have no idea. No fucking idea.”

He thinks that she hadn’t had a job then, or now, and hadn’t even been going to school. That if anything, this would have given her some structure, but he says, “I was busy, really. I talked it over with my boss. This was the soonest I could get here.”

“Five months. That was the best you could do?”

He fidgets in his chair, but says “Yes.” She shakes her head quietly and makes the same gesture.

His mother breaks the silence with a low moaning sound, but only Jason, wide-eyed, turns to look at her. “Is she hungry?”

“She was fed an hour ago,” says Julia without looking at her mother. She shifts on the couch and stairs at Jason. “What are you here for? Do you want something?”

He almost says it, but he holds back, thinking he should wait for better timing. “I wanted to see her,” he looks at his mother, then at Julia. “I wanted to see you.” He pauses. “It’s been a long time.”

“I know that,” says Julia.

He leans back in his chair and feels a vibration from his pocket. He apologizes, “I’ll turn it off.” She raises her left eyebrow, and he remembers when his mother used to make the same gesture. He thinks they both got that from her.

“Where’s the nurse?” he says taking in the room and remembering how she had talked him into the nurse a few months earlier.

“She left. She’s only here four days a week. And only during the days. I can’t afford anything more than that.”

I, he thinks, outrageous. He purses his lips but doesn’t say anything.

“You’ve left me with everything,” says Julia, “I want you to know that. I’m the only one that’s doing anything and I can’t keep this up forever. You’re going to have to take a turn.”

His own eyebrows raise, and he can feel a rage coming up. “Take a turn. I can’t. You know I can’t. I’ll lose my job. Where will the money come from?” He stops and steadies his breath. “I actually want to talk to you about that.”

“About what, the money?” She shakes her head, and almost laughs. “What’s there to say? She’s still getting dad’s pension, a bit from the government, but it’s hardly anything.” She raises her voice. “It only covers rent, a bit of food. There’s still the nurse, the medication. We’re just getting by.” She stops as her mother scrunches up her face, and begins to cry in sync with Julia’s raising voice. He stares at his mother, and Julia keeps shaking her head.

“Can you get her a glass of water,” says Julia. He gets out his chair and walks out of the living room, followed by the wails of his mother. Deep, unrestrained crying that’s like nothing he’s ever heard.

In the kitchen he opens cupboards looking for the glasses. In one he finds packages of spaghetti, dried soup, cans of pasta sauce, peanut butter, white bread, and some ramen noodles. Another is filled with medication. He picks up a few of the bottles, feels the ridges of the tops, and wonders what they must have cost. Out of the next cupboard he takes a plastic glass and fills it from the tap without checking the temperature with his finger. When he comes back into the living room Julia is looking through a book that Jason can’t make out the title of, and his mother has calmed down. When Juila sees Jason, she takes the glass from him and puts it on a Plexiglas plate that she swings out from her mother’s chair. She sits back down on the couch.

“Can she do that herself?” He looks at the glass of water on the tray. “Can she feed herself?”

“Sometimes,” she says, “but she can drink water.” He’s not convinced, but doesn’t push it. “Look,” she says, “you want to help out, be part of the family? How about you watch her for a little bit. Let me get some air. I need to get a few things.”

Jason’s mouth opens, but she’s already off the couch. “No, we need to talk,” he says.

“I won’t be that long,” she says and gathers her purse from off the coffee table.

“What if something happens?”

“It’ll be fine.” She rustles through her purse, puts her hand on something inside of it, then takes it out again. “You have my number, anyway.”

“How long will you be?”

“I’ll be back when I’m back,” she says, and walks out the door before Jason can say anything more. He sits back in his chair for a minute before looking at his mother.

“I don’t know why we’re dragging this all out,” he says quietly, to himself, and lets out a sigh. He looks up at his mother.

“You know how much you’re costing me? Five-hundred dollars. A month. How much do you think I’m making?” He bites his lip.

“Do you understand any of this? Maybe you do. That’s something I worry about.” He leans forward in the chair, elbows on his knees, facing her. “How about this, if you can understand anything I’m saying, lift up your right hand. Just a bit. Let me know you’re there. I saw you lift it up earlier, I know you can do it.”

His mother sits in the wheelchair, hands firmly in her lap, smiling. “Well,” he says, “at least that’s out of the way.”

He gets up and walks towards the picture window. He pulls back the curtain, and the fabric is rough on his fingers. Due to darkness outside and the yellow electric light inside, the window only shows his reflection. He sees himself standing and his mother following him with the whole movement of her head.

“How come you never called me? You know, even during university, it was always me. Christmas, birthdays. Nothing. Do you remember that?” He sighs again. “Of course you don’t. You don’t remember anything.”

His mother’s eyes follow his face, and she’s still wearing the same soft, expressionless mass of happiness she’s been wearing between bouts of crying since he’s gotten there. He turns around and looks at her for a moment. All in extremes, he thinks.

He looks back out the window, close enough not to see the reflection.

“You’re bleeding us, both of us. And you don’t even know it. You don’t know anything.” He has begun to speak more loudly, and now turns around to face his mother, and throws up his hands. “Do you think everyone would do this?”

He falls back into the chair, and pushes his hands against its sides to get himself upright. He looks at her, and his voice is calm. “You should have died, you know. There’s nothing here for you anymore.” He stops and looks at the floor. “I just don’t know what the point of all this is.”

His mother gurgles out sounds that Jason can’t understand. He doesn’t say anything else, but now he’s remembering his father’s funeral again. He thinks back to the empty words and the dry gestures. He thinks that this is the sort of eulogy he should have given. “Nothing,” he mutters. “Just the truth of it.”

He folds one leg over another at the knee, and his mother’s right hand begins to move from her lap and slowly reaches for the glass of water. She grips it, then lifts it in a trembling hand, and some of the water spills onto the tray. He hadn’t thought of how high to fill it. She moves the glass to her mouth, and more water spills onto her chest. When she does get it to her lips, she only takes a small sip before bringing it back to the tray, spilling more on the way back. She sets the glass down on the domes of water that have puddled on the Plexiglas. He puts a hand over his mouth, slowly rubs his whole face, and looks at dark spots blossoming across her sweatshirt and scarf.

He keeps staring at her before he looks around the floor of the room. He takes a T-shirt from the corner and goes to his mother. He picks up the glass and dries the bottom of it before putting the shirt on the tray to soak up the rest of the water. As he lifts it up, his mother places her hand on his. Her hand is clammy and soft and marked with liver spots. He looks at her but can’t say anything. She just keeps the same smile and holds her hand on his, then moves it up his arm, slowly and still with tremors, up to his face where she holds her hand on his cheek. He can feel her shaking.

When she lets go, he takes a step back and sits down with the wet shirt still in his hand and silently runs his fingers through his hair. His mother is still smiling, and they sit like this, looking at each other, until there’s a rustling from outside the door. It opens and Julia walks into the room with two yellow grocery bags in her left hand. She looks at her mother, then at Jason.

“She got water on herself.” He lifts up the T-shirt, “she can’t drink by herself.” He pauses. “I’m sorry,” he says, looking between Julia and his mother. “We should get her cleaned up.”

Julia shifts one of the bags from her right hand to her left. She opens her mouth, but doesn’t say anything at first.

“Are you hungry?” she finally says.

“I am.”

“How about we eat something, and we can talk.”

“I’d like that.”

As Julia walks to the kitchen, Jason realizes he’s still wearing his shoes. He takes them off and follows her into the kitchen, wheeling their mother in front of him.

Danny elbows my ribs and says my face is one of those that shows everything. I will him to read what I’m thinking now, but she plonks on his lap, squashing me into the corner of his smelly couch and smothers his grin with her pink gloss.

I smoke on the balcony and watch the beach. Danny’s apartment is small with rising damp and this smell we can’t get out no matter how much incense we burn. But he’s the first one of us with his own apartment and it faces the beach. Not the nice bit. Not up on the rise of the hill or the sandy stretch that goes on further down the Peninsula. The water is murky and shallow here, blocked by brush for miles. In the winter you can press your face against the cold glass, listen to those waves, and pretend you’re anywhere.

I only touch his albums on the rim: I like to balance them between my palms. The needle never scratches when I place it down. Danny used to notice stuff like that but now he lets people smoke inside. I point out the singed holes that pepper the carpet but he just grins and blinks the way he does when he’s hungover.

Never thought I’d end up having the party house.

I remember last year when we went for a smoke in the Year 11 dunnies when he opened the pack and the smokes were gone. In their place was a note and he scrunched it up into a ball and wouldn’t say what it said. I went back later and it was still there. It was about me and I sat down on the toilet seat lid and read it. I put my head between my legs after and the smell of toilet cleaner made me puke right there on the floor.

I wonder if he remembers now. I want to punch him in his puffy face.

When was the last time you picked up your fucking camera?

But I don’t say it. I don’t say anything. I step over passed-out strangers on the lounge floor and walk into town where there’s a 24-hour Maccas. I pick him up a hash brown. I hate McDonalds. It’s the smell. It gets in your clothes. But I still bring him that small brown bag, all sweaty from the grease at the bottom.

On the last good day we walk down to the beach.

It’s raining lightly and we’re both hunched up because our jackets are too thin. The water is that pissed-off-looking green and we pick our way through the junk and tufts of spiky grass and sit in the dunes.

We play “that’s your husband, that’s your wife” for a while but it gets boring because no-one’s around except for one couple walking their dog over to the pier.

Danny grabs my hand and tells me he’s gonna read my fortune and I pretend that my heart doesn’t start doing stupid flips in my chest.

His fingers are warm and smooth and he says the same about mine.

I shake my head.

They feel all clammy and corpsy.

He grins and turns my hand over.

Ah. This is your fame line. With words like “corpsy” you’ll be bigger than Stephen King.

Shut up.

But I’m grinning too. He’s the only one I’ve told how many horror novels I have stashed under my bed.

He presses his thumb right into the middle of my palm, and makes a dip.

I’m serious, Cat, you’ll get out.

I realise this is the first time he has ever said you instead of we.

At his sister’s 21st, we snuck a six-pack into the bathroom and locked ourselves in. We climbed into the bathtub and every time someone hammered on the door I yelled out I had my period.

Danny told me he was going to be a photographer. That he was going to travel. That his old man could go to hell.

I told him that I had no idea what I wanted to do. How sick I was of everyone telling me how great I was going to be. The first one in our family to go to uni.

I remember asking him about the note and how at first he didn’t want to talk about it. How it was just deadshits at our school and not to worry about it. I remember the ugly handwriting scrawled in Bic.

Cat Adams will blow you for $10 and swallow for $20.

Does everyone think that I do that?

He looked at the tiles above my head.

We’re gonna get out, Cat.

That was the first time he said it. When a sob slipped out from behind my stubby he pinched my hand in the bathtub so tight his nail dug in and made a little scar in the middle of my palm.

I look down now and he’s stroking my palm.

She’s pregnant.

I look out at the waves and see that the dog has dived off the pier. It’s scrabbling alongside, swimming with its nose pointed up while the owners call down. The wind snatches their voices and I can’t tell if they’re worried or amused.

What’re you gonna do?

His nail stops in the exact spot where the scar is. I know without looking down. Without looking away from the dog. I think I can hear the owners calling out a name like Gerald.

It’s my mistake too.

I nod and wonder who calls a dog Gerald. It looks like Gerald isn’t moving anymore and the guy’s taking off his jacket. We watch without saying anything, as the guy splashes into the water and the woman lets out this little scream. We watch without moving as he duck-dives.

I look at Danny and wonder if it shows on my face. He looks different too, shiny, and I wonder why neither of us feels like we should go down and stand by the woman clutching her elbows, or at least stand up and cheer the guy on. Maybe it’s the masks. Then the man is back on the beach and the woman is hugging and kissing them both and they’re suddenly laughing as the dog lets out this giant sneeze.

Danny smiles and says how weird and I nod.

I take my hand out of his and look at my scar.

I tell him I’m happy for him and it’s the first lie out loud between us and it doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.

Then I tell him that I’m going overseas and he stares at Gerald shaking the water off his fur.

I’m happy for you, Cat.

After the second lie it just gets easier.

In this one, you are holding an axe over David’s head. He is sitting below you on the cabin steps, raising a glass of clear brownish liquid to the camera, a big smile on his scarred mouth. You are wearing a brown felt man’s hat and your waist-length hair falls across the side of your face and mostly obscures your bare breasts. You want him to be your lover for more than just that one night. You want to roam with him not only through dense forests of these foothills, but also through cobbled streets, North African bazaars, and mountain passes. His hair, long and tangled, falls to his shoulders, his unbuttoned shirt exposes a sinewy torso, the one that moved over you for hours the night before. You didn’t tell him that it didn’t matter, that you were tired and just wanted to sleep. You let him go on like that, while you watched his narrow hips in the mirror over the bed. It’s supposed to be a joke that axe over the head. You know he can’t be tamed. He’s already shaking you off. He is gone by lunchtime. Later, you go to a dance, where he continues to drink three beers to everyone else’s one. And he unzips his fly and pisses into his boot. You knock the boot out of his hand to keep him from drinking it. And then you introduce him to Laura, keen to have her share in your fascination. Years later, on the other side of the country, through a restaurant window, you see a burning pile of garbage on the far side of the street. When, under the streetlight, a man’s dark shape issues a stream on to the garbage, you say aloud, David Benner. At a party in their loft, David picks up Laura and tosses her over his shoulder like a sack of flour, laughing and smacking her ass, as she pounds his back and shrieks to be put down. You don’t stay to watch him swing across the scaffolding four stories above the alley.

In this one, you are lying on your back, your head turned to the camera, the hard sun of India on your skin. Your knees are up, your mouth wide in a laugh, a notebook open on your bare belly. The burnt red hills frame the clear blue lake where you have come to swim. On the far side of the lake are the silhouettes of young goat herders who gathered to wave and call out to the carpet of naked white bodies spread out on the shore of their watering place. What makes you leave a short time later are those goat herders, when they remove their lungis and stand with their long thin erections in profile against the afternoon sun. You and the two women who shared your taxi, gather up towels and dresses and scramble over the rocks to the waiting taxi driver who squats beside his car, chewing betel and squirting its blood-red juice into the dust. You never go back to that place but choose instead to take the twelve-hour overnight bus to Goa, where you cling to the seat edge as the bus swings up and down razor-edged cliffs while shrill voices, drums, and bells blast from a tinny sound system. You stay in Goa for a month, riding on the back of motorcycles, bodysurfing in the ocean, and eating shrimp in a tea shack that keeps you squatting in dingy outhouses with pigs snuffling underneath for a week. This one is in brilliant colour, sharp and clear as if it were taken yesterday and not twenty-two years ago.

In this one, your son is leaning into you as you both gaze out, in profile, across the river. His shoulder still fits under your arm. The sun has darkened your glasses and fine lines crease the corner of your eye. He is named after the wolf you met two years before he was conceived, when becoming a mother was an impossible dream. The river floods that spring, spilling ice and sweet green water into your wide backyard, making you joke that your first home also doubles as a houseboat. A houseboat in which you would gladly sail away, if it weren’t for your wolf-boy, who has insisted from the age of two, that his is the best home, a home he will never leave. By the age of six, he knows every rock and crevasse, every frog and dragonfly, his nimble feet rooted deep in this land. And when he is five, he sits on your lap, facing you as you rock in your grandmother’s chair, and tugs at your hair, asking if you were in a wheelchair when he first came out of your tummy. He remembers those first moments when you were wheeled in, after he was snatched away, limp and silent, and how he lay with a tube in the shaved side of his head.  He remembers your hair, the way you sat in that chair, and he remembers the room full of rolling tables each with its own baby moving past his line of vision.

In this one, your smile is stiff under the straw hat, your hands clutching the reins of the horse with its jutting hipbones. Behind you, the jungle slides off into a gorge into which you will turn and follow the others, the promise of swimming under a waterfall the only thing that keeps you from dropping into the string hammock in the shade of a mango tree.  Scarlet macaws and capuchins are in the trees, the air is layered with the whir of cicadas, and a horse that will try to rub you off against a boulder paws the ground. Next time you will choose the hammock.