A Single Breath. Lucy Clarke

Eva repeats, tuning back in. ‘No. Not yet.’

      ‘What?’ The pitch of her mother’s voice rises.

      ‘It hasn’t changed my plans out here.’

      ‘What about your scan?’

      ‘They do have hospitals in Australia,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘Anyway, Callie will be out here in a few days.’

      Eva doesn’t need her mother to worry about all the details; she just needs to hear someone tell her, This is fantastic news! You’re going to be a wonderful mother, Eva.

      ‘You’ll worry me to death travelling around out there on your own, pregnant.’ Her mother’s emotional fragility has always meant any problem instantly becomes hers. The pregnancy would become about her anxieties, her involvement, her fears. ‘What about if you have your old room back and I make the spare into a nursery –’

      ‘Mum,’ she cuts in firmly as she pushes away from the wall and steps out onto the deck. The beach is empty and sunlight shimmers tantalizingly over the bay. She’s been on Wattleboon for three days now and already feels a strangely intimate tie to this island, knowing that Jackson spent his summers here as a boy. He would’ve played on many of these beaches, surfed and dived in the waves, fished from the jetty and from his father’s boat. And now, all these years later, Eva and the baby she carries inside her are also here – walking the same shorelines, seeing the same vistas. It’s as if she can feel Jackson’s footprints still warm under the sand.

      She tells her mother, ‘Right now this is where I want to be.’

      *

      That evening, Eva grabs the bottle of wine she’d bought earlier and sets out along the shore towards Saul’s house. He hasn’t visited her at the shack and has only cast a cursory wave in her direction when he’s been going out diving in the bay. It feels as if he’s purposely keeping his distance.

      The smell of seaweed is ripe in the air and crabs scuttle between the tide line and their holes as she passes. At the end of the bay, stone steps cut into a rocky, tree-lined hill. She follows them up into Saul’s garden. Set back in the gum trees is a modest wooden house built on stilts. A wide deck runs along the front and the whole place blends so seamlessly into the surroundings that it could almost pass as a tree house.

      She finds Saul gutting fish on an old wooden workbench, beside which is a faded blue kayak. He has his back to her and is wearing a dark T-shirt with canvas shorts, his feet bare. She watches him for a moment, her gaze lingering on the broadness of his neck – the shape so like Jackson’s. Her fingertips twitch as she imagines touching the soft dark hairs at the nape of her husband’s neck, then running them beneath the starched cotton of his shirt collar, where the smell of aftershave always lingered on his skin.

      Without realizing, Eva sighs and suddenly Saul’s head snaps up. His hair is mussed around his face, the dark brown sun-lightened in streaks. ‘Eva.’

      ‘Hi,’ she says, uncertainly. ‘I … I brought this.’ Saul stares at her, then at the bottle of wine in her hands.

      ‘It’s for you. To say thanks – for the shack.’

      ‘You didn’t need to,’ he says almost tersely.

      Realizing he can’t take the wine because his hands are bloodied from gutting, she draws it awkwardly to her side.

      ‘Dinner?’ she casts into his silence, nodding towards the fish.

      ‘Yeah.’ There’s a pause, then, ‘Did you wanna …?’

      She hadn’t meant the question as a self-invite and feels her cheeks reddening. Yet at the same time she realizes that she would like to stay – to have a chance to talk. Eventually she says, ‘That’d be great.’

      Three lime-green birds burst from a tree behind them. Eva turns, watching their brilliant wings beat at the sky.

      ‘Swift parrots,’ he says, following her gaze. ‘Arrive every spring. Come over the Bass Strait from the mainland. I think they’re nesting in one of the tree hollows behind the house.’

      The birds make a high-pitched piping noise as they disappear into the canopy of another tree at the far side of the garden.

      Eva takes in the rest of the surroundings. ‘Lovely place you’ve got out here. This is where you used to come as kids?’

      He nods.

      ‘Where’s the shack?’

      ‘Used to be right where the house is now.’

      ‘Oh.’ She remembers Jackson pulling her onto his lap and telling her, ‘Owning a shack is a Tassie thing. They’re bolt-holes, a place to disappear to when you’re craving some space, some wilderness.’ He’d spoken of his plan to one day do up their old shack for his father. ‘Dad loved that place once. Maybe he could love it again.’ Eva had noticed the sadness clouding Jackson’s expression as he’d said that, and realized how deeply he missed his father. She’d threaded her arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. ‘What was that for?’ Jackson had asked.

      ‘Just for being you.’

      Saul says, ‘I’m gonna run these guts down to the water. Go in and grab a drink.’

      Inside, the house smells new, like freshly sawn wood. The living-cum-dining room has sliding glass doors that lead out onto the deck. In the corner of the room there’s a wood-burning stove and two baskets of kindling and logs. The place is furnished simply with a wide brown sofa, a low coffee table in a grainy wood, and a large bookcase lit by two old fishing lamps.

      Photos hang from the walls in glass frames: an underwater shot of sunlight streaming through the sea’s surface; sand dunes so vast and perfect they look like a mountain range under fresh snow; a photo of Jackson wearing a heavy backpack as he stands in front of Machu Picchu.

      Saul has a good collection of marine books – The Australian Fisherman, A Biography of Cod, Sea Fishing, A Reflection on Freediving, The Sea Around Us, Knots and Rigs, Shipwrecks of Tasmania – but also a wide range of fiction spanning the classics to modern literature.

      Then she sees a name on a book spine that catches her attention: Lynn Bowe. Saul and Jackson’s mother.

      She sets down the wine bottle and carefully slides the book free.

      Jackson had told her that their mother had been a writer. Apparently she loved coming to Wattleboon because the space helped her think. When the boys were little she’d take them up to a clearing on one of the capes and they’d spend the afternoons reading or drawing while she wrote.

      On the inside sleeve there is a black-and-white photo of a graceful woman with long hair swept into a simple chignon. She has the same dark eyes as Saul, large and serious.

      Turning the page, Eva reads the dedication: For Dirk. Always.

      She tries to place the man she visited with his thinning socks and whisky breath as the beau of this beautiful young woman. She knew from Jackson how devastated Dirk had been by Lynn’s death. She was the head of their family, the sun around which the men orbited.

      ‘My mother,’ Saul says.

      Eva turns, startled.

      Saul stands in the doorway, his dark gaze pinned on her. She feels heat rising in her cheeks. ‘She was very beautiful.’

      ‘Yes,’ Saul agrees. ‘She was.’

      She wants to say something more, but then Saul turns and moves into the kitchen.

      *

      He washes his hands and dries them on a tea towel, then begins roughly chopping red chillies, garlic and a bunch of coriander.

      Eva leans against the kitchen counter and offers to help, twice, and the second time Saul tells her she can make a salad just to give her something to do.