He didn’t think that way about Elizabeth’s death any more.
Or not often, anyway. He’d accepted it.
She had received an invitation from her GP practice partner and his wife to fly with them in their light plane to Tamworth for a weekend of country music, line dancing and outdoor meals. Byron himself had insisted—maybe he’d been too high-handed about it—that she needed a break. She should go and he’d be fine with Tori, who had been a pretty exhausting child even then.
‘I’ll only go if I’ve expressed enough milk, and if we’ve practised with her taking a bottle from you,’ Elizabeth had said.
Don’t think about what would have happened if Tori had refused to take a bottle.
Tori had taken to the bottle with no trouble at all, and so Elizabeth had gone to Tamworth. There had been a mechanical failure. The plane had crashed into the wild country of the Dividing Range, near Barrington Tops. All five people on the aircraft had been killed instantly, but it had taken State Emergency Service volunteers and other rescue workers more than four days to locate the wreckage. When they finally had, it at least had provided a form of certainty and reality to the tragedy.
It had happened.
Now there had been another accident, and there was a new set of if onlys.
If only Elizabeth’s parents hadn’t decided to move north to Queensland to be closer to their other two children. Byron still felt uneasy about their move.
He wondered if Elizabeth’s mother had been unhappy about looking after Tori full time while he was working. If so, she should have said. Had that been the problem? It had seemed so sudden, and their reasons had been vague at best.
He had thought this many times over the past few months, hated this sort of powerless questioning at the best of times. He vastly preferred a situation where he could take action, and where he knew exactly what he was dealing with.
And was he wrong to have returned to Arden? It had seemed like the right thing to do. The obvious thing to do. An action he could take. He’d made his home and his career in Sydney mainly because that had been where Elizabeth had wanted to be. Theirs had been the kind of partnership where both of them had made willing sacrifices.
But then his widowed mother had been keen to see more of him and Tori, and had insisted that she’d be fine looking after her granddaughter while Byron was at work.
‘After all, she’ll be in preschool for three mornings a week this year,’ his mother had said. ‘I’ll get a break. And it’s not as if she’s still a Terrible Two.’
No, but she was a pretty full-on four and a half!
He should have insisted that it was too much for Mum. She’d looked so tired when he’d come home each day, but she’d kept saying that everything was fine, that she loved it, that Tori was no trouble. Since when had Tori ever been ‘no trouble’?
Even Elizabeth’s mother Monica, who was active and energetic and only fifty-four, would throw up her hands some days and say, ‘Take her home! I’ve had enough!’
Mum was sixty-eight.
In the bed, his daughter stirred and moaned, and Byron’s eyes pricked with stinging tears that he steeled himself not to give way to.
Victoria Louise Galloway Black had a personality even bigger than her name. She was so bright, so confident. Dangerously so, it had proved. She wouldn’t have thought twice about getting lunch on her own for herself and Grandma. Her favourite, of course, soft-boiled eggs with bread-and-butter fingers to dip into the runny orange yolk.
And he kept wondering about the ‘nap’, too. He knew that Mum and Tori watched children’s TV shows together on the ABC in the late afternoons. Play School and Madeline and Bob The Builder. Maybe today wasn’t the first time Mum had taken a nap on the couch. She often fell asleep in front of the television at night, he knew.
Did Tori regularly end up pottering around by herself, having ideas more ambitious than her small hands could manage, while Mum snoozed?
He should have insisted that it was too much...
Byron heard a soft movement behind him and turned, expecting it to be Tori’s nurse, come to carry out her scheduled set of observations. Instead, it was Hayley Kennett. Except, no, she wasn’t Kennett any more, he remembered vaguely. She’d married Chris someone. Only...wasn’t she divorced now? Someone had passed on that bit of news to him. So perhaps it was Kennett again, after all.
He ransacked his brain, trying to fill in the landscape of her life in more detail, but couldn’t do it. He also felt bad that he hadn’t recognised her at first today. She had always been one of the nicest girls at swim club—fun-loving, hardworking, competitive and zestful, with a body as sleek as a seal’s and no falseness in the way she’d congratulated those who’d been more successful than her.
He wasn’t surprised that she’d succeeded in the demanding career she had chosen. The NSW Ambulance Service often received over a thousand applications for every advertised trainee position. Odds like that wouldn’t have scared Hayley off.
‘Hello,’ she said quietly. ‘I wanted to see how she was getting on. And your mother.’
‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognise you today.’ He touched her hand briefly. It was pleasantly cool.
She shook her head, and her dangling earrings caught the light. ‘You had other things to think about.’
‘Thank you for being there.’
‘I was just doing my job.’
‘You’re not doing it now, though. You didn’t need to follow up.’
‘I wanted to.’
‘I really appreciate it, Hayley.’
It was the sort of thing that you said anyway, but he discovered, as he tasted the words in his mouth, that he really meant them. What was this new feeling that had been nagging at him lately? Whatever it was, the sight of Hayley made it diminish immediately. Something uncoiled inside him, and the perpetual tightness at his temples and in the back of his throat slowly and fractionally eased.
‘How’s Tori?’ she asked.
They both looked down at the sleeping child. Byron knew that she was the most beautiful child in the whole world, with her creamy skin and long lashes and fine, blond-streaked light brown hair. He accepted that there was perhaps a tiny hint of parental bias in his opinion, and that other people didn’t think the same way, but that was their problem!
‘We pulled her through the real danger—the shock—and she’s stable now,’ he said. ‘Kidney output is good. We’re still giving her a lot of fluid, high pain relief. There’s very little full-thickness burning. She’ll only need a couple of small grafts, which I can take her to Canberra for. Thank heavens. I keep thinking, if she hadn’t known how to dial OOO... If she hadn’t remembered our address...’
‘But she did. Those what ifs are dangerous, Byron,’ Hayley said. ‘What if she hadn’t burned herself at all, and she’d gone on thinking that your mother was just having a sleep? Your mum could have lost her airway
