Maybe Baby: One Small Miracle

CHAPTER FOUR

‘THAT’S what I said, Ollie. Take a week off—everyone. Go away somewhere on full pay. Anna’s coming home with me, and we want the place to ourselves,’ Jared said to the station’s foreman over the chopper’s radio, sounding clipped, just a touch embarrassed. Outback men did not do emotion, and especially not in front of other men.

‘How’re we gonna get out of here now, Jared?’ The surprise was clear in Ollie’s voice, but the curiosity was under tight control. This was personal stuff, and the one thing the Jarndirri men did well, besides work from before dawn to after dusk, was keep their own stuff locked under a tight drum. Following the example set them for years by her father: real men did not share their feelings; they worked, played football and drank beer. Bonding, talking was what women did. ‘The Wet’s about an hour from starting—’

‘Take the other plane—the Jeeps are too dangerous with the Wet coming. Stay at a town or resort, take the wives and girlfriends—it’s on me.’ He spoke in a light tone, but he kept throwing glances back at a sleeping Melanie.

Anna was similarly anxious. If she woke up and Ollie heard the wails.

‘John and Ellie Button won’t want to go anywhere,’ Ollie argued, while Anna became more and more nervous. ‘Jarndirri’s their only home unless they visit their kids, which they don’t do in the Wet.’

‘Then make it clear they’re on paid leave. I can’t leave Jarndirri, but we want time on our own.’ He was back to that stiff awkwardness that told Ollie to back off.

‘You’ll need help, even in the Wet—’

‘Anna will help me. She knows the place backwards, and it’s only for a week. Will you stop arguing, Ollie, and take the holiday?’

Filled with urgency, Anna leaned to his ear. ‘Don’t say any more to him, or it will look suspicious,’ she whispered, feeling the heat of him warm her shivers, relieving her fears just by being here. Jared was so good at thinking on his feet, and finding the solution to any emergency—as perfect at it as he was at flying. Though the winds were fickle and lightning flickered in the distance, the Cessna hadn’t so much as wobbled. He was in full control, plane and life.

He nodded at her warning. ‘We’ll be there in a few hours. Feed the animals and corral them first.’ He signed off without saying anything as sappy and uncharacteristic as Have a good holiday. Like the harsh red land they flew over, massive monolithic rocks that looked like God’s marbles, the deep, inaccessible rivers and impossible waterfalls spread across Jarndirri, the men were silent, rugged, remote—and strangely unforgettable. Haunting her soul: they were her men, her land. She could leave, she could run, start a new life anywhere, but a part of her heart would always be here in the Kimberleys.

Turning, she looked at the sleeping form in the car seat—Melanie had a dreaming smile on her face—and Anna felt that gaping, shell-blasted hole inside her soul touched again with balm, sweet as baby powder, absolute as the trust this baby girl gave her.

It would never heal. She could never forget Adam, would never stop aching for the other babies that never had the chance to live because of her thin uterus walls. But when this beautiful baby was with her, she felt alive again. Even if it was for a few weeks, a few months, she’d take the time with Melanie … and then, maybe, she’d find the strength to walk away from the only real home she’d ever known, to divorce the only man she’d ever loved and still wanted, even if she wasn’t in love with him now—

‘Don’t think about it.’

She started and pulled herself together. ‘What?’

His gaze met hers, his strong, calm. ‘You’ll be a mother—either of this baby, or another. Don’t give up hope. It’s going to happen.’

His eyes held the depth of a thousand words unspoken. Anna felt a juddering shiver touch her neck. Again he’d known her heart was bleeding, and he was always there.

There finding a solution for her, because he had to make everything right and he didn’t do emotion—and she’d held onto his solutions like a lifeline for too many years. We can do IVF, Anna. We can try again, Anna. Just one more try for a baby, Anna. I know it’s been tough on you, but think of the end result—the baby you’ve craved for years.

That was what he’d always say: It’s been tough on you, the baby you want, as if losing four babies hadn’t affected him at all.

Had any of it hurt him, made him feel the loss as acutely as she had? Until Adam, she hadn’t truly known. He’d never shown any emotion during those years. He’d kept on working, planning for the next child. But when Adam had died, he’d cried in her arms; and the echoes of his cry when she’d collapsed the next day still rang in her heart.

Anna! For God’s sake, someone, help us!

But the feeling, the emotional connection she’d yearned to know in the man she’d loved all her life seemed to be no more than a day’s aberration. The old unemotional Jared had returned the moment he’d been back on Jarndirri soil a week later, working from four in the morning till six at night as usual. The only hint of emotion he’d showed had been a state of repressed anger and the sense of exhausted patience at her ongoing grief and refusal to touch him, or share their bed.

Even today, when she was close to the sharing he claimed he wanted to hear, it was no different. Don’t get depressed, Anna, you’ll be a mother.

He’d been dry-eyed at his father’s funeral, at her father’s funeral. Even after the hysterectomy, he’d been calm, focussed on her pain, her loss. We’ll find a way, Anna. But he’d cried when Adam had died. For a whole hour, he’d cried …

‘Thank you.’ Stilted words through a tight throat; she didn’t know what else to say. Like her dad, Jared held to the old code of honour: Never back down, never surrender. Always keep your word. He’d married her, so he’d stick to her for life. She knew he’d do his best to never show her the resentment, how cheated he was that she’d never given him a son.

Regret was weakness to Jared; divorce would be seen as the ultimate failure.

She’d already been through a failure, a loss and madness so deep and profound that divorce could only be dessert after a heavy main course—it would almost feel like sweet relief.

Almost.

‘She’ll have to make do with a bed pushed against the wall with chairs for a day or two, until I can fly to Geraldton to get some baby things,’ he said, his voice flat.

She frowned at him. ‘Why? Where are … the things we had for Adam …?’ She almost choked, saying it. Her arms and heart ached with useless longing.

In the ten seconds that followed their son’s name she heard every beat of her heart.

‘I gave them away.’ His voice was taut.

Her heart jerked, and one shoulder moved forward, not a shrug but a tiny movement that showed too much. ‘When?’

‘Three weeks ago.’ Jared had turned back to the horizon, watching where he flew. The flight path was one he knew like his own skin, but he wasn’t looking at her. Jared could always look her in the face as he talked about her emotions, but she doubted he even acknowledged his own existed. ‘The Lowes needed some new things for their baby.’

That was it, all he had to say about destroying their son’s nursery? The last vestiges of their son’s life had been pulled apart … the Lowes had eight kids now, by her count. It was so unfair. They had the kids and the things she’d made or painted for Adam with her own hands.

She nearly choked on the fury, the gut-level jealousy she’d never lose. ‘And you never thought to ask me about it?’

Her pulse beat so hard against her throat, she heard it beating. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six … boom-boom, boom-boom … ‘You hung up on me.’

She turned to look out the window. They were flying over the mining community of Tom Price. The scattered houses and gaping holes in the earth looked so lonely from up here. ‘I see.’

After a long silence, he said in a quiet voice that hid all emotion, ‘Say it, Anna.’

She shrugged, as if she didn’t care. ‘What’s the point? It’s done.’

He said nothing in response, and she refused to make it easy for him. She kept looking at the world below while everything they weren’t saying grew legs and arms, put a timer device together on the bomb of silence and set it ticking down. The unseen contest had no winners because he never spoke, and she had nothing to say—or too much. Fury, jealousy, betrayal and all the useless regret.

She had to stop this, find accord with Jared somehow, or they’d never survive the next few weeks together. Why didn’t Melanie wake up? If she’d make a single sound …

Three, two, one—

‘They’re in danger of losing everything.’

It took her a moment to realise what he meant. He’d taken the safe option, talking of the nursery furniture and the Lowes. She should have known he would. Jared had never had to reach out to her—he waited for her to come to him, to tell him what she needed, so he could fix it. She had always gone to him—until she’d had nothing left to say, nothing left to ask him to fix.

Countdown reset, defences built, places of refuge established. Husband and wife stared out of separate windows, facing each other down from either side of a silent battleground. It was Christmas detente, meeting in the middle for a meaningless game of football, knowing hostilities would soon be resumed. Too much had been left unsaid between them, too many emotions buried in the trenches of memory. The fragile cobweb of deception for the sake of a baby was the only thing holding them together.

‘Fair enough,’ was all she said in response, trying to dull the sharp edge of the bayonet she’d been stabbing him with. What was the point? His armour was impenetrable.

Three, two, one—

‘I thought you’d understand. People matter more than things. Isn’t that what you always said every time you gave our things away to someone in need?’ he growled out of nowhere.

‘I’m surprised you remember that,’ she replied without inflection.

‘I remember everything.’ His gaze was cold, and again she shivered. When she didn’t answer, he sighed with the exaggerated patience she hated. ‘Tell me what’s going on in your head, Anna. We’ve got to find a way to put this right, climb out of this crazy mess we’re in.’

At least he was finally asking, instead of telling her to come home, or using his body to bring her to capitulation; but didn’t he know that, if he had to ask what she wanted, it was useless to her? ‘There’s nothing either of us can do, Jared. There’s no solution. Nothing can change what’s done. It’s over.’

‘Obviously—that’s why you called me, why you’re here now.’

The frozen tone put her on the defensive. ‘I don’t know any other man who keeps secrets the way you do, who hides emotion so well. If you have any emotion.’

He made some adjustments to their flight path. He frowned hard at the horizon, as if there was imminent danger. ‘One day you’re going to have to face that what happened last year happened to us both, instead of thinking it was only your pain, your sorrow. One day you’ll know running from it does nothing.’

‘I didn’t run from anything. I left you.’ She felt her nostrils flare as she dragged in air. ‘Just because we aren’t together any more doesn’t mean I haven’t faced it—all of it.’ What I lost—and what I am. Cold and shivering to her soul, she’d faced it. She had no choice: Adam came to visit her nightly, that cold, sweet, sleeping face. Eternal sleep in a cold white casket instead of the sky-blue cradle they’d made for him, with stencils of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse … the pretty mobiles dangling above for him to laugh at, to reach for.

‘You never talked about it.’

Anna heard a disbelieving laugh, a half-sneer in it, and part of her didn’t believe it had come from her; she’d never heard it come from her lips before. Yet she was glad for the distraction. ‘So which are you in this scenario, the pot or the kettle?’

Very quiet, so quiet she barely heard him over the plane’s rumble, he said, ‘The doctors told me to wait for you to start.’

‘And of course that was the only thing stopping you,’ she retorted. ‘You’re just a pillar of communication. Always so open with what you feel.’

He didn’t answer that—and in the silence something in her snapped. ‘That’s it, Jared, retreat into your own head, don’t tell me anything. I always made it so easy for you, didn’t I? I did the talking, the loving, and you didn’t have to try. That’s what’s getting to you, isn’t it? For the first time in twelve years I’m not blurting out my every feeling and emotion to you, so you can work out how to fix it all. I walked out, and didn’t want or need your solutions or to make things right—and you couldn’t handle it. For months you’ve been the one coming to me, but I didn’t come home as you expected. How embarrassing has it been for you? The Great Jared West is a failure with his own wife. Is everyone laughing at you—or, worse, pitying you?’

She waited, her heart pounding hard. After long moments, he spoke without emotion. ‘It’s nothing I’m not used to. And I’m still here.’

Anna blinked, blinked again. What did that mean? The cold, emotionless Jared West, the King of Jarndirri, had actually felt like a failure at some point in his life?

A little wail came from behind as she tried to work out what he was trying to tell her. As ever, his verbal economy hid a wealth of secrets, but she didn’t have the tools to dig for it.

The baby’s wail grew in decibels. She sounded frightened. Relieved to have something to do, she unbuckled her seat belt and moved to Melanie. She picked her up and cuddled her, crooning to the baby, but Melanie’s cries grew stronger. As Anna sat in a back seat, Melanie began head-butting Anna, screaming now, pulling at her ears and staring at Anna in pleading and indignation combined.

Helpless, she said out loud, ‘What’s wrong with her? She seems really upset. Maybe she’s hungry, or her nappy needs changing?’

She didn’t really expect an answer—so she started when Jared said, ‘The unfamiliar surroundings probably confused her, and cabin pressure in planes often upsets babies. They don’t know how to pop their ears, so the pressure grows until it hurts. Give her a bottle, or a pacifier. The sucking motion will pop her ears, and stop the pain.’

He was right. The moment Anna unwrapped the warmed bottle from the foil—a makeshift warmer—and put the teat in Melanie’s mouth, the baby sucked frantically, and the mottled colour in her face faded. She left off pulling her ears, and grabbed at the bottle, sucking hungrily. Then she smiled at Anna around the teat, making a milky mess of her face, and Anna’s heart nearly exploded with joy and love. Beautiful, darling girl.

‘Give her a teething rusk when she’s finished with the bottle. Chewing or sucking relieves the pressure on her ears,’ Jared called back a minute later.

Anna didn’t even want to question his authority—a course of wisdom proven right when Melanie grabbed at the hard-baked bread called a teething rusk with a gurgle of happiness.

‘Thank you,’ she said much later, as the baby sat back in the adapted car seat, nappy changed, making a gruel-mess all over her face with the rusk. ‘How did you know?’

‘Dad taught me to fly when I was twelve,’ he said briefly.

‘And?’ she pushed, when he didn’t embellish. Jared so rarely spoke of his father, who’d died when he’d been fourteen.

‘Nicky was about that age. Mum asked me to take him up with Dad and Andie one day when he was teething, and she needed an hour’s sleep. She loaded us up with bottles and teething rusks for the cabin pressure—but though she packed one, she forgot to tell us to change his nappy.’ Jared chuckled. ‘She gave us all a serve about his nappy rash that night.’

Taken aback by the unexpected intimacy of the memory shared, Anna couldn’t help wondering why he’d told her—he’d never once shared anything meaningful or joyful about his childhood with her. ‘So who grovelled to her the most?’ she teased, keeping it light, hiding her intense curiosity. She knew so little of him outside the work yards and bedroom.

‘Dad.’ That was it, no embellishment. She ought to have known he wouldn’t say more—and yet the single word held cadences in all shades of the rainbow: resignation, bitterness, anger and a world of pain unhealed. The numbness of endless loss—

Maybe he’d understand how she felt more than she’d assumed?

She’d heard the rumours that his father had killed himself when he’d lost the West property, Mundabah Flats … but Jared had never said a word about it to her, either in denial or confirmation. As if it hadn’t happened … or it hadn’t affected him in the least. He’d just come to Jarndirri, found a new father, a new property to run, and he’d gone on with life as if nothing had changed.

No. They stood looking at the same rainbow, but from opposite ends. He kept digging for the pot of gold when she’d long ago decided there was nothing left to find.

‘How’s your mother?’ Such a mundane question, but she had to start somewhere. And when she saw his face shut down before he spoke, it felt as if she’d used a key to a door she hadn’t known existed.

‘Fine. She’s getting married.’

‘Oh,’ she said, feeling blank. Though she was a very attractive woman, Pauline West hadn’t even seen a man since Jared’s father’s death sixteen years ago. ‘When?’

‘Six weeks.’ Jared’s voice was flat. ‘His name’s Michael Anglesey. He’s another failed farmer—she must have a thing for them. They want to marry at Mundabah Flats, and take up running the place again. She wants me to give her away—and she’s asked for enough money to start the place going again.’

‘Well, what’s the problem? We can afford it,’ she replied without thinking. Reverting to thinking of them as Jared and Anna, King and Queen of Jarndirri, was just so easy.

In the tic at his jaw she saw another multi-hued silence, resonating like glass about to shatter. Resisting the urge to touch his hand—so much tension in him, he’d never returned to the West property of Mundabah since his father had died, even though he’d poured money hand over fist to make the property thrive—she stuck to the simple questions. ‘How do you feel about her marrying, and them running Mundabah?’

‘I don’t want the place. Someone might as well run it.’ He shrugged. ‘We land soon.’ Shutting the door on her again, as always.

‘Fine,’ she said tightly. ‘I’ll go sit in the back with Melanie.’

Jared made a harsh sound as she unbuckled her seat belt again, needing distance. ‘What do you want me to say, Anna?’

‘Nothing.’ She forced blandness into her tone, as if she wasn’t burning with the betrayal of his unconscious rejection. ‘I don’t want anything from you but a few lies.’ Nothing you’ve ever been willing to give. ‘We pretend we’re back together until Melanie’s either back with Rosie or the adoption has gone through, and then I’m gone.’

‘That’s not the deal.’

She sighed, standing between the two front seats. ‘You’re not going to say it, are you? You want me to say it for you, make life easy, just as I always have?’

‘I want you to talk, Anna,’ he said quietly. A double-edged sword in six words. Saying everything and nothing at all.

‘Yeah, well, we all want someone to talk to us,’ she mocked, ‘and some of us had it, and some of us got nothing.’ Silence greeted her taunt, and she snapped. ‘Fine, I’ll talk, but I doubt you’ll want to hear it. You want me back in your bed until I leave. You want me to pretend for the sake of the workers and our neighbours I’m back for good, that I’m madly in love with you, and we’re going to make a family with Melanie. Okay, whatever.’ She snorted out a laugh, and shrugged. ‘I can put on a show—I might even enjoy the sex, it always was a good stress relief when you drove me crazy with your silence—but that’s all it will be. If you’re expecting to make me love you again, forget it. It’s dead, Jared—dead.’

She forced her gaze to stay on him, her chin up. Did her hammering heart show the truth: the lady doth protest too much? She might not love him any more—only heaven knew how she felt about anything but Melanie right now—but on a purely physical level she still wanted him, ached for his touch. She hadn’t wanted it at all after the hysterectomy—it felt too much like a farce, trying to pretend she was a normal woman still. But some time in the past five months since she’d left him, her body had awoken again.

Probably with that first kiss he’d planted on her when he’d come to Broome.

As if he’d heard her thoughts, he said coolly, ‘You keep telling yourself that—but you kissed me back yesterday. And the time before that, and the time before that.’

A sigh came out from between clenched teeth. ‘It’s been over a year since I slept with anyone, and you’re the only man I’ve been with—you made sure of that. What else do I know but you? What else can I compare you to? I’m the Mrs West. I’ve been untouchable in the eyes of almost everyone in the Kimberleys from the time I was fifteen.’

Slowly, as if he’d thought about her words before they’d come, he said, ‘And I’ve been the Mr Curran since I was eighteen.’

She sighed. ‘As usual, you’ve taken my point and changed its direction to suit you. Tell me, did you always equate sex with love, Jared? Did you ever know me at all? In all the years you took my love for granted, from fifteen to now, did you ever ask yourself if I was happy, or if the life you wanted and planned for us both was what I wanted out of life?’

‘Sit down and strap in, Anna, we’re approaching the runway,’ was his only answer, as he began pushing the wheel forward, leading by the nose.

The plane lost altitude, making her sit abruptly. She looked out over the wide red land with its patches of cultivated grass for the animals, brown and dry from early summer, not yet green with the drenching of the Wet. The house, creamy yellow with the rust-red tin roof, sat like a proud island of beauty in the wild, arid surrounds. It sat there in pride and defiance against the odds and the elements.

Jarndirri: home and yet not, a place where happiness had always seemed to elude her. Always trying to be perfect, and always failing. How could she have lived here almost all her life, miss it so much when she wasn’t here, and yet always return with such a feeling of conflicted fatalism? Had the stones judged her unworthy of a normal life here?

‘Look, Anna. Look at the beauty, the perfection,’ Jared said as she clipped herself in. He swept his hand around the intense, wild beauty. ‘How could you not be happy here? What else did you—what more could you want from life than what we have?’

Intense loneliness filled her at the incredulity in his question. That was it, the conflict that lay between them. Jarndirri was everything to him; how could she want more, apart from raising a family? To him there was nothing more. Jared loved Jarndirri, would have loved Adam, had he lived. But he’d never loved her. She was The Curran, the means to the life he wanted … especially once she’d responded to his kiss, after Lea hadn’t.

‘What I wanted then is immaterial,’ she said over the roar of the landing plane, refusing to indulge in self-pity. ‘What I want now also seems immaterial.’

He waited until he’d slowed the engine speed to a crawl before he spoke. ‘It’s immaterial to me, you mean?’

She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. If I have Melanie, I can put up with the rest.’