Wildlife (23 page)

I don’t deserve it, but I’m the one who sees him first.

A little white light, a hovering dot like a firefly.

He’s wearing a head lamp. He didn’t run off to end it all; he ran off to run.

Someone screams out, “He’s alive.” (It’s me.)

I grab Lou, and we run outside; the others follow.

I’m shouting his name, and I can’t stop. He runs in from the end of the home trail, pulling off the head lamp, and understanding in a glance what is happening. He says something about where he’s been. WHO CARES? HE’S BACK.

I grab him and hug him. I cannot let go. I’m crying and laughing.

I’m thanking all the gods of every persuasion ever invented throughout the whole of history of the world and their squads of angels and Santa’s helpers, and the universe which has decided tonight to be benevolent.

saturday 24 november

When Michael runs back just before dawn, he is surprised and (one half second later) acutely embarrassed at the kerfuffle. He has been running for six hours.

Made it to Walcott Spur, he says, as he removes his head lamp.

He apologizes to all, didn’t think he’d be missed.

Dr. Kwong looks him over, contains her relief, smiles, shakes her head at his parents, and says she’ll alert the police and SES.

Sibylla probably needs someone to slap her face really hard, but I know what it is to wait for a friend, so it’s not going to be me doing the slapping.

Michael tries to distribute the hugs that are needed; his mother, controlling herself with every fiber: now her boy is safe, she is not about to do anything to add to his discomfort. She is shaking and she crosses her arms to hide it. His father is contained, and tired. I realize looking at him as he hugs Michael and pats his back that he was at least half confident that Michael had run off in a planned way. Michael is just like him.

Sibylla’s volume of happiness has woken a few people; Ben and Hamish filter out from Michael’s house, Cleveland.

I made it to Walcott, says Michael, already almost recovered.

I hand him some water. He smiles his thanks, and I get a hug, too. This unaccountably makes me release a large sob I didn’t even know I was holding.

He is boiling hot, soaking with rain and sweat, and alive. He bends down to my eye level, I’m so sorry to worry you, he says quietly. I really needed to run.

More people are coming outside and realizing what has happened. Ben is one of the first people to congratulate Michael; back-slapping and handshakes are added to hugs.

That’s so awesome, man, I’m never going to make up that distance. I hand it to you. He is formally conceding the distance-running trophy/record for our term to Michael.

Ben looks a little uncomfortable at Sibylla’s extravagant happiness but knows that now is not the time for quibbling.

Sibylla has no time for any of us except Michael.

I’m fine, Michael is reassuring her. A little lie to make her feel less horribly upset.

The teachers, Ms. Ladislaw and Mr. Epstein, emerge from along the home trail, looking wrecked until they see Michael in the dawn light.

Mr. Epstein runs up and claps Michael on the back. That’s the boy. Knew you weren’t an idiot. Take a fucking sat phone next time you run off, will you?

Everyone laughs and understands, and he apologizes for
the language. Michael’s parents thank him and Ms. Ladislaw so much.

And Ms. Ladislaw is saying she just knew he’d be okay; it’s the lunar eclipse next week, and she tried to bet Mr. Epstein one hundred dollars that Michael wouldn’t miss that in a million years, but Mr. Epstein wouldn’t take the bet because he thought the same.

Dr. Kwong asks Michael’s parents if they would like her to get a doctor. No, Michael’s father is a physician. He asks Michael if he’s okay, Michael says yes, he’s fine. Did he have any falls, or bump his head? No. That’s good enough for Michael’s father.

Michael has a couple of scratches on his face, nothing needing stitches. His father says that Michael probably just needs food, a hot shower, and some sleep. They are pretty low-key with each other.

Dr. Kwong shoos us all off to bed for some sleep before breakfast, and says, let’s give Michael and his parents some time alone together, and we all go.

No one thought to check when people realized Michael had disappeared between 11
PM
and midnight, but he had actually written his run down on the track sheet.

I am deep inside a dream about having to carefully place small shells and buttons into a container, knowing it is my job to fill it precisely, and noticing some baby teeth and seed pearls in there, wondering if they belong with the buttons and shells or if I have to remove them and start again, when Holly’s voice scratches across the strangely worrying collection. “Have you two finally gone lezzer? I knew it had to happen sometime.”

I open one eye a fraction of a semi-squint: Annie and Lou are coming out of the bathroom together. Light is soft and low; it mustn’t be more than an hour after daybreak.

A wave of thankfulness: Michael got back safely.

A wave of annoyance: Holly.

A wave of exhaustion: I need more sleep. I throw a pillow in Holly’s direction and tell her to shut up, but despite being tired, and wanting to be asleep, I’m pleased to hear Lou biting back.

“Not that I want to talk to you, but no, we are not,” says Lou.

“Not that it would be any of your business,” adds Annie, tired and grumpy.

“And PS, ‘Hol,’ my parents are both women,” says Lou.

“Two women?” says Holly. “You have two mothers?”

“My mother is Maggie, and my other mother is Biff. It’s Elizabeth, but she’s always been called Biff, since her little brother couldn’t pronounce it. He said ‘Liffabiff.’ ”

“That is gross. Do you even know who your father is?”

“He’s my uncle James. Biff’s brother. The one who couldn’t pronounce her name.”

“That’s freaking incest,” says Holly.

“Wow, you really are almost as stupid as you look. He is not related to my mom. He was their donor. It means I’m biologically related to Biff as well as to Mom, that’s all.”

“That’s sick.”

“No, it’s bloody not, now shut up,” I say.

“Of course you’d defend them,” Holly says. “What
were
you two doing in the bathroom?” She really doesn’t want to take no for an answer on this one.

“You guys freaked me out so much I can’t go in there by myself anymore. Lou stands guard for me,” says Annie.

“Against?”

“Maisy and the charcoal man, of course. Who do you think, you idiot?” says Annie, putting a pillow over her head and pulling the duvet up over that.

I need some more sleep before I can figure out how I’ll ever be able to make amends to Michael.

tuesday 27 november

We get permission to go on a hike together. Just the two of us. How?

They’re so relieved that Michael didn’t go and die on them that they’ve bent the rules? Or maybe Michael’s parents have asked them to be lenient. Perhaps they saw his eye tic. Or maybe my mothers asked. Or Merill put in a good word for us.

We go up to Snow Gum Flat, the scene of the infamous “party” that neither of us went to. We take a picnic. We take our time.

We stretch out between the springy grass and the sky’s endlessness. Touch the crisp petals of the everlasting daisies. Hear only birds and swooping dragonflies. Here, only us. Eat. Doze. Read.

Michael says, you know the snow gums?

I know them.

They have to survive such harsh conditions, such extremes of weather, bits of them die. And they are able to grow new wood around the old dead wood. That’s how they get to be such strange and beautiful shapes. They are hardier and more complicated than, say, the messmate or
peppermint eucalypts farther down the mountain, which are protected by a softer climate.

Thank you. That’s a lovely way to think about it, I say.

We look at each other.

I was talking about myself, he says. I was being resilient in the wake of Sibylla’s public repudiation, and the ridicule that followed it.

We start laughing. We laugh at our respective self-involvement.

I want to be the snow gum, I say. You need a taller metaphor for your mending heart damage.

My heart will recover; I take the long view.

He picks something up from the grass. It’s a dead dragonfly.

Would you like this?

I would love it, I say.

He hands it over, and I tip it gently into a specimen jar from my backpack. Dragonflies are hands down on the Top Ten list of the most beautiful things in the universe.

I know I’ll keep it forever and, looking at it, remember this day. A day on which I felt hope and contentment, and knew sadness was in retreat. A day on which my smile remembered how to work without needing specific instructions. On this day, I will remember, the future woke up, stretched out, and opened its arms to me again. And it felt quite possible to come out of the room of one-day-at-a-time.

I need to cry, because feeling good means I’m taking a step away from you, Fred.

I can cry in front of Michael. I trust him, and so would you.

They’re exactly how I imagined fairy wings when I was a kid, I say.

I’m talking about the dragonfly, but Michael knows that is not what’s making me cry.

I decide it has to be a letter fairly bristling with nine-letter words.

I read it out.

I risk looking up.

He is smiling. “You had me at
hideosity
.”

“I took the liberty of a few spelling cheats.”

He nods gravely. “That’s okay.”

I hand his letter to me back to him, resealed in an envelope with his name on the outside. “I didn’t read it.”

“You can if you like, it’s nothing you don’t already know,” he says. “And you already heard some edited highlights.”

I shake my head. “Nuh-uh—it’s the one thing I could do to show you I’m your friend.”

“I know you’re my friend, Sibylla.”

I’m floating.

The absence of pain is powerful.

So now if I can just catch up on some work, and figure out where the hell I am with Ben, everything is shaping up kind of okay for the end of term. Because finally, it’s countdown time—the last ten days. What I’ve been hanging out for since day one. It gives me a pang, though, not the spike of joy I would have thought. Seriously, if I’m getting nostalgic…

Annie is becoming obsessed with our impending astrological event, the lunar eclipse.

Someone made the mistake of showing her
Melancholia
, a great movie in which a planet, Melancholia, may or may not be on a collision course with planet Earth. Spoiler alert: Turns out it is on a collision course, and in the last scene Melancholia hits Earth, and it’s a giant blinding
ka-boom
, good night, folks. We were crowded around a Mac in Bennett House watching it, and at the end everyone sat in complete stunned silence for a while.

The kid in the film makes a simple instrument to measure and monitor the planet Melancholia’s position relative to Earth: a circular wire loop on the end of a stick will, when you look through the loop, show if the planet is
getting smaller (farther away) or larger (closer) relative to the circumference of the loop.

So Annie has made her own wire loop-on-stick measuring instrument and is worrying nonstop that the moon is going to crash into Earth.

We have all at different times now during the course of the day reminded her that
Melancholia
is a movie. It’s fiction. There is no such planet as Melancholia. The moon is not about to crash into Earth. And so on.

But this is the girl who thought—no doubt secretly still thinks—that dinosaurs are mythological, so it’s no stretch for her to think we are bullshitting her about the possibility of the moon being dangerous.

“They thought Melancholia wouldn’t crash in the movie, too, for a while,
then it did
. So how do you know that the moon isn’t going to crash?” How can you argue when a fictional narrative is offered as evidence?

And she still doesn’t get what
literally
means, which doesn’t augur well for her future—or current—study of English. When she came back from the exeat weekend with a new haircut, for instance, she told anyone who’d listen, “I literally look like a piece of shit.” We tried to explain that this would mean she was like a big brown baguette-shaped thing, with no face or arms or legs. And she looked at us as if we were crazy as we became more and more hysterical and she became increasingly annoyed. “Are you girls on drugs? What does a baguette have to do with anything?”

“Nothing,” said Vincent. “They just don’t want to say it would mean you’d look like a giant crap.”

“You stay out of it. You’re disgusting,” Annie said. “I wish I could go home now. You literally all make me sick.”

“No,” Lou started explaining, “we don’t ‘literally’ make you sick—if we did you’d have a temperature, or be vomiting…”

Annie’s alarm is growing as her wire loop appears to indicate that the moon is indeed coming closer to Earth, that is to say: looking bigger relative to the circumference of the wire loop.

Michael takes her aside during Elevensies, and as Annie eats two nervous lemon slices, he explains the whole cycle of the moon to her, with diagrams, which is really kind and more involved with a human he doesn’t know very well than he would usually get.

He told her that at the moment the moon looks fourteen percent bigger, shines about thirty percent more brightly than usual, but even when it is as close as it ever gets, it’s still about two hundred and forty thousand miles from the earth.

“Since when are you so nice to people like Annie?” I ask him. Still privately feeling a rush of relief that he is here. He is safe. Thank you, universe.

He looks at me. “Good question. I technically am not. I did that because Louisa told me Annie was worrying herself into a state of insomnia, which meant Louisa was not really able to sleep, because she is the one in whom Annie can confide her fears.”

“Lou and Annie are friends?”

“Perhaps not ‘friends,’ but Louisa is… sympathetic.”

She’s nice enough to take the time to talk properly to Annie, and notice when she’s freaking out about planet crashes and bathroom ghosts. I used to be that person. But this term I got transplanted into the zone where you just talk to Annie to laugh at her.