At Home With The Templetons (10 page)

‘I’ve loved you since the first day I saw you,’ he told her. ‘You have? Why did it take you so long to tell me?’

‘I wanted to be sure you’d improve

with age,’ he’d said with a grin.

She’d hit him playfully and he’d grabbed her hand and kissed it, his face serious for once. ‘You did. You get better every single day.’

They lived together in Brisbane for a year until he was offered a management job with a big sugar company in Mackay, just an hour from her home town. He accepted it, they got engaged a month later, and were married in her hometown church eight months after that. Their plan was to rent somewhere locally while they saved up for a deposit on a house and then think about trying for a baby. Tom, it seemed, had other ideas. She’d just turned twenty-three when she found out she was pregnant. Nick was twenty-five.

It was an easy, happy nine months, no morning sickness, only some tiredness. A textbook pregnancy, her doctor called it. She went into labour just after lunch on her due date, to her surprise as much as everyone else’s. Even her mother had insisted first babies never arrive on time. Nick hadn’t hesitated about going to work that morning as normal.

When the pains started, she rang him. They decided it was probably a false alarm and she talked him into staying at work. The second time she phoned he knew from her voice that it was serious. He made it back to their house in thirty minutes, a record even by his fast-driving standards. He knew every road like the back of his hand, he always reassured her, whenever she worried about him driving home exhausted after his twelve-hour days. He fussed over her, took charge, rang the hospital another hour away in the other direction, rang her parents, his parents, her sister, his brother, his voice a rush of excitement and happiness, letting everyone know that this first baby was going to arrive on time, and was on its way already. He’d just started calling the rest of the people on their phone list - aunts, uncles, cousins, friends - when she gently reminded him that perhaps they should think about getting her to the hospital.

He drove more slowly than she’d ever seen him do, one hand on the wheel, the other tightly holding her hand, until she told him it really would be okay if he went faster than twenty kilo metres an hour. He refused to let her walk into the hospital, stopping the car outside the front door, running into reception, begging the use of a wheelchair, despite her insistence she was fine to walk.

‘We’re having a baby,’ he said to anyone they passed in the corridor. ‘My wife is having a baby.’

‘Good thing you’re in a maternity hospital, then,’ an amused nurse replied.

Nina had just settled into her room and was lying back on her bed breathing deeply as she’d been taught, Nick doing the breathing alongside her a little too enthusiastically, when she remembered in all the fuss they’d left her suitcase at home. Nick checked with the doctor. Was there time for him to go back and get it?

Time to go there and back two or three times, the doctor assured them. ‘Your baby’s just letting us know he or she’s on the way. We’ve a long wait yet.’ ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ Nick said, kissing her forehead. ‘I love you.’ They were his last words to her.

She was in full labour when she was told the news. She’d been scared by the sudden arrival and intensity of the pain, she needed Nick there, now, beside her, now. She couldn’t understand where he was. She called his name, shouted it, began screaming it, asking the nurses to get him, shouting at her obstetrician, her mother, her father, anyone, begging them to find him. It was her mother who eventually came into the labour ward, her face ashen, her hands clenched. It was her hands Nina noticed, even through her own pain. Her mother never clenched her hands like that.

Later, she learnt there had been passionate arguments outside the delivery room about whether to tell her or not, and when to tell her. She reacted badly when she heard that. ‘You were just going to pretend Nick wasn’t dead? That he’d gone out for a coffee while his child was being born? Taken a wrong turn and got lost?’ She became hysterical, shouting at the doctor, at her parents, at her sister, at anyone who came into her room who wasn’t Nick.

Three hours later, Tom was born, a strong, healthy baby. A beautiful baby. She learnt from Hilary much later that there was fear in the family she would reject Tom. That her shock about Nick’s death would overwhelm any love she might feel for her son. It didn’t happen like that. Her grief for Nick was the worst pain she’d ever felt - sharp, raw, frightening - yet her love for her baby son was as immediate and overwhelming. He was the only thing that was good in her life. He was now, suddenly, shockingly, the person she loved most in the world.

She managed three days in hospital before she discharged herself, against everyone’s advice. ‘I know what I need to do,’ she said. It was a phrase she’d repeat many times over the next few weeks, the next few years, as too many people tried to tell her how to feel, what to do, how she should be behaving.

If it had been hard in the hospital, it was worse outside. Every moment of every day she missed Nick so much it was a physical pain. Each day she was confronted with the horrible, constant reality of his absence. She walked the streets they’d walked together, pushed the pram they’d chosen together, drove the roads they’d travelled together. After Tom went to sleep each night, she sat alone in their living room, slept alone in their bed. If she went to visit her mother and father, she had to drive through the intersection where Nick was killed.

Everyone in the town knew who she was and what had happened. She couldn’t walk into the post office or the supermarket or the bakery without noticing conversations stop, seeing people rearrange the expressions on their faces or hearing murmurs and comments even before she’d walked out

side again. ‘The poor things. What a tragedy.’ The closer it got to Tom’s first birthday and Nick’s first anniversary, the more she felt it.

Two weeks before Tom turned one she knew she had to leave. She ended the lease on the house they had rented, gave their furniture to the local charity shop and said her goodbyes. She ignored her parents’ pleas, Hilary’s phone calls, Nick’s parents’ advice. She had to. This wasn’t about them. They weren’t living with a constant soundtrack in their heads of what should have been, what could have been.

To begin with, she just drove. Simply packed as many clothes and toys into the car as she could and drove. Tom was a calm child even then, content in his chair in the back seat. They took the coast road south, staying in caravan parks and cheap motels. She made up stories if anyone asked her questions. She was going to meet up with her husband who worked on the oil rigs. She was bringing her baby to meet his grandparents for the first time, and no, unfortunately her husband hadn’t been able to get time off work. She said anything she could to stop herself from saying the truth. My husband was killed in a car accident three hours before our son was born.

She stayed in Queensland at first. After a month driving aimlessly from town to town, she rented a furnished apartment by the sea in a town south of Brisbane and stayed there, with Tom, for a year. She didn’t have to work. There was life insurance that she hadn’t even known Nick had taken out. If she was careful, it was enough to live on for several years. Not that she felt she could ever work again. She hadn’t turned on a computer or even picked up a pencil since the day Tom was born.

Her family visited, Nick’s family visited. Everyone tried to talk her into coming back home, but no one succeeded. As Tom’s second birthday and Nick’s second anniversary approached, she became restless again. There was more pressure from home. ‘We’re sad too. Let us grieve with you,’ was the message from everyone. Somewhere inside her, buried deep, she recognised that, but it was no help to her and she couldn’t help them. It was just her and Tom now.

The day before Tom’s birthday, she decided to move again. She needed the distraction. As she drove, she sang songs to Tom, all the songs she could think of, except ‘Happy Birthday’. It seemed too sad and unfair that he should share a date like that. She spent the next twelve months in a small town in northern New South Wales. The next in Newcastle, five hours further down the coast. A year in another town south of Sydney. Her family still worried. Her sister tried being mad at her. ‘Nina, you’re just running away. It’s not good for you or for Tom, to be uprooted every twelve months like this. We miss you. Come back to Queensland.’ But she couldn’t. This constant movement was her life now. If she wasn’t going to have the life she’d dreamed about, the permanent, settled, ordinary life she and Nick had planned, then she was going to have these different, temporary lives. She told herself she liked it that way. It suited her personality. Twelve months was the perfect amount of time to stay in one place, long enough to gather some impressions, short enough not to form too many friendships.

‘But what do you do all day?’ Hilary wanted to know.

At first, Nina did only what needed to be done. She looked after Tom. It took every minute she had. She wondered constantly how it would have been if Nick had been there with her. Sometimes it was a hardship, the constancy of it, the repetitiveness of it. But there was also a rhythm, a soothing sameness to being this close to another person, a child that she loved. They were a team. It was the two of them against the world.

The year Tom turned five, there was more pressure from her family. ‘You have to stay in one place now Tom’s starting school,’ her sister said. ‘He needs stability. Come home.’

She considered it. She imagined Tom back in her home town in Queensland, in the local school, playing alongside the sons and daughters of people she’d been to school with herself. Her thoughts stopped there. Each of those sons and daughters and their parents knew it all. From the first day Tom set foot in the playground their story would follow him. Poor tragic Tom, born the day his father drove into a truck and killed himself.

‘Nick didn’t do it deliberately, Nina. It was an accident,’ Hilary said when Nina tried to explain her feelings.

‘It doesn’t matter. I hate that gossip about me and I don’t want it for Tom.’

‘Then do whatever you need to do,’ Hilary said, finally. Nina kept moving, three times in Tom’s first three years of school. Not far each time, just to towns two or three hours away, but each move felt necessary. The school mothers always started to get too curious. She’d tried just not mentioning Tom’s father, but there was always one who asked. Was she divorced? Separated? If she finally said that he had died, even more questions would follow. ‘I’d rather not talk about it,’ she’d end up answering, knowing it sounded stuck-up but preferring that to telling the truth.

Tom had also started asking questions. He’d always known his father was dead, but it was only when he started school that it became a constant talking point. ‘The other kids have all got dads and I haven’t. Why not? Why did he die? Did the vet put him down?’

Nina related that particular conversation to Hilary one night after Tom had gone to bed. At least she knew what had sparked Tom’s question. One of the teachers had told her the news that day of the school cat’s untimely death.

‘It’s healthy that he’s asking questions, Nina. It’s a good thing. So did you tell him everything, at last?’

Nina hesitated before answering. ‘Nina?’

‘I changed the subject.’

‘You changed the subject? The subject being the truth about his own father’s

death? Nina, you have to stop lying to him.’

But she’d had to lie to him, from the very beginning, for both their sakes. Not that everything she said had been,a lie. Since the day he was old enough to understand, she’d told him the true things too, over and over again: how wanted he was, how much she and Nick had loved him from the moment they knew she was pregnant. What a punctual baby he had been, arriving right on time. But she hadn’t been able to stop there.

She’d told Tom how excited Nick had been that day in the delivery room. That his father had helped cut the umbilical cord, that Nick had been the one to shout - yes, shout - at the top of his voice, ‘It’s a boy!’ the moment Tom was born. Shout so loudly that her parents outside had been able to hear it! She’d told Tom how much Nick had loved holding him, playing with him, bathing him, dressing him. How Nick used to sing him to sleep. How good he had been at changing Tom’s nappies. How he used to get up two or three times a night just to check his little son was sleeping well. How his favourite thing to do after work was sit out on the verandah of their small house, put his feet up on the rail and nestle his baby son against his chest, telling him in the most serious of voices everything that had happened at work that day. ‘You were a great listener even back then, Tom,’ she’d tell her son.

She told him it was Nick who bought him his first football the year he turned one; his miniature cricket bat and ball set for his second birthday; the little bike with trainer wheels for his third. The child-size football jumper with his name on the back for Christmas that same year. Nick who first took him swimming at the local beach - ‘He told me you roared like a lion when your toes first touched the water.’ She’d painted every possible detail of the first three years of a father-son relationship, given Tom

every memory she could, to spare him the knowledge that his father had never even seen him, let alone held him.

‘You told Tom he was three years old when his father died?’ Hilary said when Nina finally confessed. ‘Oh, Nina. Why?’

She tried to explain, to let Hilary know that she was fully aware of the mess she’d got herself into. Hilary, to her great credit, kept asking questions until she understood it all.

‘But hasn’t he ever asked. to see pictures of himself with his dad?’ she asked.

Nina hesitated. ‘I told him there was a flood in one of our houses. That all the photos of them together were destroyed.’ ‘Oh, Nina,’ Hilary said again.

Hilary had made her promise to tell Tom soon. Each year as his birthday approached she’d vowed to herself she’d do it. Each year the date had passed without it happening.