Pescador's Wake (21 page)

The moment Margie Bates steps out of the car at the Hartz Mountain carpark she knows the hike is a good idea. The air is crisp on her face and a soft white mist is descending, caressing her with its downy dew. Individual particles of water are visibly suspended in the still air, muting the silvery sheen of tea trees—blushed pink with new growth—and surrounding them like feather cloaks.

‘Thanks so much for agreeing to come, Joan,' Margie says, framing the scene in front of her with her hands to see how it would reproduce as a painting. ‘I hope you're feeling all right about leaving Beth with that carer.'

‘She'll be fine. It'll be good for the pair of us,' Joan says, tying a double knot into the laces of her hiking boots.

Margie takes a photograph from her jacket pocket and studies it closely. It shows a millpond-smooth lake within which is reflected a jagged mountain ridge dusted with snow. Beside the lake is Sam's tent and balanced on a rock at the water's edge are his boots. A wallaby is staring at the camera. Staring at Sam.

Margie rediscovered the photograph in one of Sam's albums just days before, and remembers what he told her
when he first showed her the picture: ‘You could do that walk, Mum. You'd love it. I'll take you myself one day. I promise.' She returns the print to her pocket and pats it through the Gore-tex with her hand. Well, Sam, she thinks, here I am.

Margie can only see five metres in front of her, and imagines painting the veiled scene in watercolour. For the background, a wash—a mix of ultramarine blue and madder brown. While the paper is still wet, she would make soft shadows with tiny dabs of the brush. She'd continue the wet-on-wet technique to build up the tea trees in the foreground, allowing the pinks and green-greys to blend naturally. It would be a challenge to achieve an ethereal quality while still providing enough definition to give the painting some substance. Above all, she mustn't let it get muddy, always a danger when working wet. She would add highlights of raw sienna in the foreground, as though the sun was just making it through the mist to light the rocks closest to her.

She takes her camera from the top of her backpack and fires off three shots, already excited by the prospect of painting the scene when she gets home.

‘We're not even out of the carpark, Margie hon!' Joan laughs. ‘I hope you've got a lot of film in that pack!'

‘Plenty.' Margie chuckles, thinking of the six packets of film stuffed into her sleeping bag for safe-keeping. ‘It's reference material for painting. But if I stop too much, you just go on ahead.'

Margie remembers Sam complaining about Sascha wanting to stop too often on hikes, to watch a bird, or to eat, or drink, or have a wee. She remembers urging him to be patient and enjoy the journey. It had been good advice.

‘Okay, we'd better make tracks,' Margie says. ‘So we're not setting up camp in the dark.'

‘Ready when you are.' Joan swings the pack onto her back, as if she's done it a million times.

Margie struggles into her own pack, and suddenly understands the merit in Sam's dehydrated food. Joan has a few packets of the stuff stowed deep in her pack, but Margie has secretly taken the cans of soup and beans. She takes a few steps towards the start of the track and hopes she'll survive the walk.

‘Okeydokey,' Joan says, springing weightlessly into her first steps as though she is moon-walking. Margie watches her stretching out her short legs in Sam's oversized wet-weather pants and jacket. Both sets of cuffs, at the ankles and at the wrists, have been rolled up two or three times. The pack itself reaches almost to the top of Joan's head, so that all Margie can see of her friend are a few piebald curls bobbing about.

It had been a last-minute decision to offer Sam's hiking gear to Joan. At the time it seemed a sensible and obvious gesture, but now she can't help thinking about the last time Sam wore it, where he had been and what he'd been thinking. A large lump forms in her throat. She focuses on each step and the
calming surrounds, allowing herself to be lulled by the simple act of walking up the winding track. Peace descends and she releases a long sigh. Underfoot, rocks, slippery with moss, dot the red clay like dollops of fresh green paint.

A scarlet robin flits onto the track and drinks hurriedly from a pool of water. Margie gasps, and, telling Joan to stop, crouches down to better see the bird. The lump returns to her throat.

‘It's Sam,' Margie whispers. ‘I saw a robin at the house the day he died. Every time I see one now I think it's his spirit paying me a visit.'

‘I'm sure you're right,' Joan says, resting her hand on Margie's forearm. The robin vanishes into the undergrowth and Margie rises to her feet. Joan takes her cue and walks on without words. They have been friends for long enough to know when to talk, and when to be silent.

At the top of the incline, Margie drinks in the vista rising up above her. Hartz Mountain looms majestically over what is now a level, duckboard track. Off in the distance, Margie glimpses Sam's beloved southwest wilderness.

‘You don't get away from it all, you get back to it all,' Joan says.

‘I've heard that somewhere before.'

‘Peter Dombrovskis, the landscape photographer.'

‘That's right. Sam had a poster with that quote on it.' Margie shakes her head in wonder, taking this as another sign
that her son is with her, here and now. She peers down into the crowns of regal forest giants in the valley below. The treetops merge into one another in an ancient mosaic of every imaginable green. She wonders which of the trees rallying for supremacy are myrtles and which are sassafras, Huon and King Billy pine. Once they are in timber form, made into tables and chairs, Margie can pick them a mile off, but seeing them here, in their natural state, she is at a loss. Sam would have been able to show her, she thinks.

‘Isn't it incredible that these forests have been growing since before white man even set foot on this island?' Joan says. ‘Do you know there are animals down there that are no longer found on the mainland?'

‘No, I didn't,' Margie says. It is as if she is sailing above the sea of green. ‘Can you smell smoke?'

‘Yep,' Joan says, as they wind their way around the mountain track. She points beneath them and both women stare at the ugly blackened scar of clearfelling still smoking from a recent forestry burn.

Margie feels personally assaulted, her inner peace shattered. It's a bit like a death when a forest is logged, she decides. All the structures, the complexity, that were a person or a landscape are erased in one fell swoop.

In silence, the women wind their way further around the mountain, leaving the deforested valley in their wake. They walk for another hour across an undulating plateau, before
being greeted by a perched lake nestled at the base of a rocky peak. Margie recognises the campsite straight away. She pulls Sam's photo out of her jacket pocket and uses it to locate his exact tent spot, and the rock where he left his boots. It sends a sharp pain through her like an invisible winged arrow. Sad, yet strangely happy at the same time.

‘Here we are.' She stops in front of the lake, close to where Sam must have stood to take the photo that now rests in her hand. ‘Our campsite. Sam's campsite.'

Joan releases the hip strap of her rucksack and lets the weight of it fall heavily to the ground. ‘And a beautiful one it is.'

Margie unloads the tent and starts to erect it, fibreglass poles and pegs going in all directions.

‘I take it you didn't do a practice run in the lounge room?' Joan teases.

‘I did actually, but you're one of the few people I'd admit that to.'

A fine rain starts to fall as the tent is raised and the two women make for its cover, dragging their packs in behind them.

Through the smoky haze of the tent fly, Margie watches the rain fall on the lake. She imagines that each delicate drop of water will be casting minute ripples over the dark surface. Perhaps, in some immeasurable way, the tiny ripples will make it to the other side. A feeling of peace again washes over her, a feeling that she might just survive after all.

‘I'll get some water for a cup of tea,' Joan says, grabbing the pot and squeezing herself out of the tent. Margie watches her pull the hood of Sam's jacket over her head and crouch beside the rock where her son sat his boots a lifetime ago. Tears well in her eyes as she imagines that it's Sam collecting water for her. She can't even remember what she said to him when he promised to bring her here one day. She'd probably made a joke that he'd have to carry her half the way. How she wishes she had simply said yes.

As the women boil the billy, Margie wonders how Dave is coping today, Sam's day. Whether he can take a few moments to lose himself in the stars and shed a few tears, or whether he'll be having to be Mr Cool in front of his crew. She doubts he'll mention Sam's anniversary to any of them.

She serves the tea in metal mugs, handing one to Joan. ‘Do you mind if I light a candle? It's something I do every year at this time.'

‘Of course not. You don't have to ask my permission. Would you like some time on your own? I could go for a walk around the lake.'

‘No, you stay put. I'd like the company.' Margie reaches into the side of her pack and locates a large candle the colour of a summer sky strewn with clouds. She climbs out of the tent and walks over to Sam's rock, placing the candle carefully in a hollow that seems to have been ground out of the stone for just this purpose. Once lit, the candle forms a beautiful
beacon in the fading light, attracting moths and small insects that fly to the borders of its warmth before disappearing into the night.

It is in this space, that ancient lichen-encrusted rocks and gnarled, wind-worn alpine vegetation speak their stories to her, and, along with the ripples on the lake, cast their hypnotic spells. All things seem connected, and, for just a moment, she almost forgives the world for what it has taken from her.

Six days after her baby was taken from her body and placed in the humidicrib, his artificial uterus, Julia is back at home. They hadn't wanted her sleeping in the chair beside the humidicrib at the hospital, and she hadn't been able to face another night in the maternity ward, surrounded by the sound of healthy new babies crying for their mother's milk. It is surreal to be back in the outside world, as though someone has turned the lights up before the end of a movie. She thinks of her baby still in neonatal intensive care, where the drama is not yet over.

She stares at a Polaroid image of her son to stimulate the oxytocin-driven let-down reflex, which will start the flow of milk, and she holds the plastic pump in position, ready to draw the life-giving fluid from her breasts. The release of hormones feels like someone is pouring warm treacle down the back of her head and neck. She imagines the milk flowing into her full breasts and then into the mouth of her baby. The visualisation works. To start with, the milk appears thick and yellowish in the sterilised bottle attached to the pump. After a while, it thins out to a bluish white.

She sips on a weak coffee and assures herself it won't harm her baby. Caffeine is given intravenously to the infants in the nursery to stimulate their breathing, she was told just yesterday by a nurse, so a small amount in her breastmilk will be of little consequence. Perhaps it could even help. When Julia asked what other drugs her child might be given, the list was long: steroids, antibiotics, surfactants to clear his lungs and, if necessary, morphine for pain.

‘It's a wonder they don't come out of here as addicts,' Julia had said.

‘It's a wonder some of them come out of here at all,' the nurse had replied, and then, as if sensing the harshness of her words, continued. ‘They're such little miracles, every one of them. I've often thought that these babies have fought more battles just to make it into the world than many of us face in a lifetime.'

Last night, Julia's first night at home, she woke with a sense of dread. She phoned the hospital, to check that everything was all right. It wasn't. Only moments before, the paediatrician had been called to investigate a sudden drop in her son's oxygen levels. When she arrived, her baby boy was blue and being ventilated with a hand pump. The sight of so many medical staff around the humidicrib had sent her into a terrified spin. The intense concentration on the paediatrician's face said it all. A nurse took Julia by the arms and backed her away to the waiting room. There was nothing she could do,
and no room for her anyway at the bedside. In those few minutes, while she sat staring at a wall poster of a smiling breastfeeding mother, her son would either live or die. Life on a knife edge. Just when she had thought he was out of the woods, he was back in them again, and it was darker in there than ever. She had been warned that this was the nature of such extreme prematurity: no guarantees, just sudden turns.

The nurse told her afterwards that one of the tubes into her son's lungs had been too deep, blocking the supply of oxygen, a relatively common occurrence. The tube had been repositioned quickly, and a brain scan showed there was no damage. By then it was four in the morning and Julia steadied herself with a warm, sugary tea and a cream biscuit before going to see her baby.

He appeared peaceful again, although a deep furrow persisted on his tiny brow. How she longed to hold him to her, to feed him, and rock him and sing him a lullaby. How she longed to be held and rocked and sung to herself.

‘Would you like some
tostados,
Julia?' her mother calls out from the kitchen. She'd arrived two days ago to mind María and to help with the cooking and washing. But her presence in the house, while an enormous help and support, has left Julia feeling more dependent and less strong, as if she is a child again. For reasons Julia doesn't understand, the maternal sympathy and concern seem to magnify her own anxieties rather than reduce them.

‘When I get back,' Julia answers.

‘When can I visit my baby brother?' María hollers, bursting into Julia's bedroom.

‘Soon, sweetheart. When he's a bit stronger,' Julia replies, deciding to hold María off for a few more days. To protect her, in case the worst should happen. Who knows if it's the right decision.

Julia places the expressed milk in a small esky containing a freezer brick and prepares to take it to the hospital. Only tiny amounts of breastmilk have been given to her son so far, and her supply in the nursery freezer is becoming embarrassingly large. The nurses have assured her she should keep bringing it in: ‘It's too precious to waste. He'll use it. You'll see.'

Julia opens the door to the nursery and washes her hands automatically at the basin. The routine has become second nature. A curtain is drawn around one of the other humidicribs and Julia can hear a woman crying. The voice of the paediatrician is soft and low, comforting. A sick feeling pervades Julia's stomach and she notices that her hands are shaking as she dries them on a paper towel. The curtain is drawn back and a mother and father are handed a small bundle of baby wrapped in a tiny hospital blanket. Julia sees
the dead infant's face buried into its mother's neck. The tubes have been removed but the baby is ghost white. The tearful parents are shown to a private room at the side of the intensive care area. Their baby, born only a few days ago, and smaller than her own, has died. It's all over. All their hopes, dreams and fears.

Julia thinks she can see, amidst the profound grief, something resembling relief on the mother's face. No more wondering if her baby will survive, or be permanently disabled from the early birth. No more rushing to the hospital at three o'clock in the morning to be told that the baby had given them a scare but that everything is again all right—for now. It's all over. Everything but the loss, which will be there forever.

Julia feels herself holding onto the bench by the milk freezer. She is swaying. How much can people be asked to bear? How cruel can life be?

She places her newly expressed milk in a sterile freezer bag, seals it carefully and writes on the label: ‘Baby Sánchez Pereira, 10/10/02'. Beside her supply is a collection of bags carefully labelled ‘Esmeralda Brovetto Alves'. Julia recognises the name from the humidicrib that now lies bare. She wonders what will happen to the breastmilk.

Making her way to her own baby, Julia passes the room where the bereaved parents are washing and dressing their child for the first and last time.

‘He's breathing by himself today,' one of the nurses says to Julia, bringing her attention back to her son. ‘Some good news for us.' The nurse discreetly wipes away a tear. It occurs to Julia that their job must be one of the hardest. Nursing tiny babies to their early graves. Perhaps the nurse questions whether there was more she could have done for little Esmeralda and her parents. ‘A good day for your first cuddle. What do you think?'

Julia is excited and nervous all at once. ‘Are you sure he'll be all right? I don't want to hurt him.'

‘He'll love it.'

The baby is cautiously taken from the humidicrib with his trail of intravenous lines, and the nurse motions to place him in Julia's arms.

‘Just let me sit down,' Julia says, scrambling for the hospital chair. ‘All right. Ready.'

She takes the baby and holds him against her body. He wriggles his tiny legs against her stomach, this time from the outside. His little eyes are open now and he makes a small cry. It's the sweetest sound she has ever heard. ‘
Te quiero
,' she whispers, placing a kiss on his forehead. The respiratory monitors sound their alarm.

The nurse reaches for the baby. ‘Each day the cuddles will get a little longer, and he'll get a little stronger,' she says, promptly returning him to the humidicrib. His respiration rate returns to normal. ‘He loves his
mamá.
You got him all
excited and he forgot to breathe.' The nurse checks the monitors. ‘Have you decided on a name yet?'

‘No,' Julia says, remembering to breathe herself. ‘Well, almost.' She inhales deeply. ‘Eduardo,' she says, her voice cracking with emotion.

‘Eduardo Sánchez Pereira. That sounds perfect,' the nurse says, as she takes the blank name card from its slot at the end of the crib and cements the baby's identity in black permanent ink. ‘Is Eduardo a family name?'

‘It's the name of my husband's best friend, and this little one's godfather-to-be. It's what we'd spoken about.'

‘
Bueno
,' the nurse says, returning the card to its slot and then attending to the next baby.

‘
Si
.' Julia feels a sense of relief. ‘Eduardo,' she whispers, happy that her child has a name. He deserves that. Just as Esmeralda did.

Julia strokes her baby's hand before leaving the hospital for a waiting bus. She finds a seat to herself beside a window and presses her forehead against the glass. Tears wet her cheeks—tears born of relief that her baby will probably now survive, and tears of exhaustion from nearly a fortnight of little sleep. She cries too for Esmeralda, and her parents, and the knowledge that it could so easily have been her facing that bottomless pit of grief. Julia can still see the parched and drained expression on Esmeralda's mother's face. Her robotic steps to the small private room. Her dead
baby in her arms. Life can be so cruel. How will those parents recover from this? How will they ever trust in life again? Julia closes her eyes and tries to relax her aching muscles. Life has lost its innocence for her too, she realises. It can all change so fast.

She should count her blessings, she tells herself. Her baby is doing well. She pictures his name, newly printed, above his humidicrib. The worst is over.

The bus turns a corner and is flooded by light—the glare off the Río de la Plata. She has a son, she tells herself. She must allow herself to start believing it.

At her apartment door, she sits on the step, taking a few moments before going inside. A blur of cars and buses rush by as they have always done. People are living their lives. Can't they see how radically hers has changed? That she has been to hell and back with these trips into the hospital, hoping with every inch of herself that her baby will survive? That little Eduardo's life has been balanced on the thinnest of blades? An old woman bustles past, blotting her wet eyes with a handkerchief. At her side, being dragged along by the hand, is a small boy. Julia wonders for a moment what their family's story is. Perhaps they have just visited the boy's mother in hospital, or perhaps the boy has been
orphaned and is now his grandmother's charge. She turns her attention to a man of about her own age. His hair is prematurely white and the skin under his eyes unusually dark. Perhaps he too has been dealt a raw hand and survived. It occurs to Julia that she is not alone, but closer to humanity than she has ever been. She has been awakened to the precariousness of life, and that knowledge, she realises, is a gift.

She thinks how much she and Carlos wanted this baby, and how difficult it had been to conceive. She remembers the pain of endometriosis as a teenager and the doctor's warning, in her early twenties, not to delay having children. In ten years of marriage, even without contraception, she still only fell pregnant four times, and two of those pregnancies had ended in miscarriage. The multiple pregnancies have somehow eased the pain of endometriosis, but left the ache of lost babies in its place. It's a miracle that little Eduardo had been born at all.

Julia opens the apartment door and is greeted by her mother's voice.

‘I've made you a
chivito
.'

She enters the lounge room in time to see her mother smack the steak sandwich piled high with cheese, bacon, tomato and lettuce on the table.

‘I thought you'd be hungry. And there are
empanadas
too.'

María is playing on the lounge-room floor with some Barbies on loan from Sofía. She runs to Julia and gives her a tight hug around the legs, before returning to the dolls.

‘How's the baby?' Julia's mother asks guardedly.

‘He's doing well. I held him today.'

‘Praise God!' She clasps her hands together in thanks, and in the same moment tells Julia that she has run out of ingredients for a batch of fried biscuits. ‘The mixture is half ready in the fridge if you feel like going out and buying some more eggs.'

‘
Madre,
just leave me for a moment. I need to have a warm shower. I'm exhausted.'

‘But your lunch?'

Julia closes the bathroom door and eyes the bathtub. In another week she'll be able to have a soak in there without causing problems to the caesarean scar. It seems like an eternity away. She undresses, inspecting the wound, which is just starting to heal, and thanks God that her baby has, so far, been blessed with life. She turns on the shower taps and steps under the stream of water, letting it wash away days of tension from her body.

When she finally emerges, Julia puts on Carlos's dressing gown and goes straight to her computer, hoping for a message
from her husband. As she scans down the emails, she is surprised to see a second message from the Australian woman, Margaret Bates, which she opens.

Dear Julia,

Perhaps I am the last person you want to hear from, but I felt I had to contact you.

You have no doubt been told that your husband's boat has been apprehended and is on its way now to Australia. Thankfully the chase is over, but I do hope that he is returned safely to you soon.

I have also heard that you have had your baby prematurely and I just wanted to let you know that there are people on the other side of the world who are feeling for you, and sending you all our positive thoughts.

I didn't know you were pregnant when I emailed you previously. If there is anything at all that I can do to assist you at this troubling time, please let me know. Please excuse me for seeming so bold, but I know how precious children are, having lost my only son, and feel enormously for what you must be going through.