eyes.
Saul thinks about her drifting around Hobart, asking questions about Jackson – and he knows that’s not a good idea. All the tension that his dive had eased now begins to creep back into his body, tightening in his temples and the base of his jaw.
He looks towards the shack, turning an idea through his head. Out here on Wattleboon barely anyone will remember Jackson, as he hasn’t been on the island since he was 15. But in Hobart there are people who know.
After a moment Saul says, ‘The shack’s free for a while. You’re welcome to stay on, if you want?’
You asked me once why Saul and I fell out, so I told you.
But it was only half of the truth.
I was shaving at the time, and carefully smoothed foam over my jaw as I contemplated my answer. I needed to get it right.
‘It was my birthday,’ I began, feeling my heart start to pound. ‘I had a barbecue down on the bluff near where I was living. I didn’t organize many things like that, but I wanted to that year because there was … this girl. Someone I thought was special. I wanted to introduce her to my friends.’
I drew the razor over my cheek, pulling my lips to the side to keep the skin taut as I told you, ‘Saul turned up late – and drunk – but I was just pleased he’d come. I slung an arm over his shoulder and walked him to the barbecue, where my girlfriend stood. Before he’d even said a word, I knew he was gonna make a play for her. I could see just by the way he was looking at her.’
‘Did he?’ you asked carefully, watching my reflection in the mirror.
I laughed, a dark sound. ‘Couldn’t help himself. He always had to get the girl. I saw him with her later that night. Right in front of me – like he didn’t even care. Like he wanted me to see.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I shrugged, tried to brighten my voice. ‘Maybe it worked out for the best. Saul kept on seeing her, so I ended up getting out of Tas for a few months.’
‘That’s when you went to South America?’
‘Yeah. Travelled up through Chile and Peru, then across to Brazil. I surfed, hiked, got some work building trail paths, bought a motorbike in Brazil. It was a good time – a good thing for me to do.’
‘What about when you came back?’
‘She and Saul were livin’ together up north. I stayed down south. We didn’t see each other.’
‘They’re still together?’
‘No. Not now.’
‘And you can’t forgive him?’
I put the razor down and clenched the edge of the sink, lowered my head. ‘He’s a liar. I can’t trust him.’
You crossed the bathroom and placed the flat of your hand in the space between my shoulder blades and ran it in smooth strokes. It was like you were reaching inside me, soothing somewhere that I didn’t know still hurt.
I looked up and our gazes locked in the mirror. ‘Do you think people can change, Eva? Do you think it’s possible?’
I think the intensity of my voice startled you because you dropped your hand and said, ‘Yes. People can change.’
But here’s the thing that terrified me: What if they can’t?
Eva drifts through the shack as her mother continues talking. She catches the words scan, due date, trimester – words she associates with work, not her own pregnancy.
She pauses by a photo of her and Jackson she’d brought with her from England. It was taken last summer at a 1920s-themed jazz festival in London. In the picture Eva is wearing a drop-waisted flapper-girl dress and a beaded headband, and Jackson has one hand around her waist, and with his other he’s touching the brow of his black hat, laughing. There’s sun flare behind them and they both look tanned and happy, in love.
Tucking the phone under her ear, Eva takes down the picture. It’s housed in a thin glass frame, and she uses the hem of her dress to clean her fingerprints from the glass. She moves the fabric in slow circles until it is polished clear, and then she sets it back on the shelf.
‘So you’ll be coming home?’ her mother is saying.
‘Home?’ 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
