My mother wiped her brow. She wrung her hands. She rocked back and forth, she gasped and cried and thumped her chest. My mother pantomimed grief.
She had arrived in my house the day after Greg died. She was uninvited, like a vampire, and she hovered on my doorstep, tears lying in wait, until I stepped aside and let her in. I made the coffee, I prepared the food, I bit my tongue, and I made the commiserating noises one is forced to make in these situations. My mother wailed and sat, delicately sipping her coffee, allowing me to look after her. In the wake of my husband's death.
"Don't pretend now that you didn't hate him," I said blandly, taking my own seat at the table. I was expecting the children home shortly, and my focus was on getting my mother out of my house, ideally without forcing her out at knifepoint, but I never like to rule out options.
Her face snapped up to meet mine, her eyes quivering with despair, her chin trembling.
"Elaine! I never hated him!"
I sighed.
"You hated him from the second you met him."
She stared at me, defiant, all signs of trembling sadness having evaporated.
"And then I grew to love him."
The only part of Greg that my mother ever loved was his earning capacity. As soon as she had realised he earned a good living she had softened on him. The same had happened with Sam. While she was young and struggling, our mother had harangued her endlessly to pursue a more lucrative career. As soon as Sam had become a successful ceramicist, exhibited and awarded, our mother had suddenly warmed to the idea of an artist in the family. Even Kane had taken his turn as the family failure, the black sheep hiding in the shadows, until he started doing well. He may have made his living counting down to inevitable brain damage, but he was very good at knocking other men out, and thus my mother found a way to welcome him (and his prize purses) back into our family. It's a wonderful talent, the way she can bend reality to her will, that it may serve her better.
She sighed daintily, and cradled her mug with both hands.
"What will happen to you now, Elaine? I barely remember you before you were just a part of him."
I barely remembered that, either. I'm not sure, most days, that it ever happened. I remember being a girl, a collection of sharp, bright memories. But it was over for me before most girls even know how babies are made. I looked at my mother, across the vast expanse of a tiny table, into the acidic vastness between us.
"Nothing will happen to me, mother. I will stay here, with my children. And life will go on."
She gazed back at me, evenly, as though shutters had been pulled down over her eyes. I couldn't tell, for once, what was happening inside her head. Detective Munday hadn't made me squirm under her gaze, but my mother was very close to achieving it now.
"Perhaps," she said mildly, the weight of unnamed wisdom hanging just behind her words, "life will begin." She sipped at her coffee as though she was telling me the time. I felt my heart rate quicken. I felt my scalp grow warm. I did not move.
Once I had ejected my mother, gently, from the house, I spared a thought for Sam. I had sent her to pick up the children from their various friends houses. The night before, I had to make three very performative phone calls, asking the parents of those friends to keep my children for an extra night. I had whispered conspiratorially to them that my husband had died in an accident. I hinted, subtly, that each of them were close friends of mine, and that I only told them this because I knew I could trust them not to tell the children. I asked them to leave that for me. I charged them with giving the three little half-orphans one more carefree night, before the ten tonne weight of a dead parent came stumbling into their lives.
I knew each one of those parents would refrain from saying a word to the children. But I also knew I could rely on them to tell a dozen other adults – each – before dinnertime. By now, I knew, the news of Gregory Wrigley's death would be all over the town. Sympathy for me would be growing. There's always some detractors, of course. But there would be enough. Enough people who would swear to the police that I was a dutiful and loving wife, that I was dedicated to my family, that I would have done anything for them.
And no word of it would be a lie.
I tidied up from my mother's visit, and I cooked spaghetti for dinner. I knew no one would be likely to want to eat it, but I made it anyway. My mother always told me that even if no one wants it, nourishment should be at hand. It was one thing we could always rely on when we were growing up. There was always food, and most of it was better than anything our friends were provided with on special occasions.
My mother is a creature of broken arithmetic. Her dinners tasted like resentment. The four of us would have eaten toast every night if we could have traded the meat and three veg for affection from her. The elements of a good life, of a beautiful childhood were always in place. But they were given with a cold stare. Every moment of gold star parenting was presented with a 'there, are you happy now?' A dull vibration of bitterness ran through our lives. Our mother gave us everything she had, but it was little enough that she had nothing left to give herself. In my adulthood I have arrived at a certain compassion for her. I will never love her, not in the way that a child should feel free to love their parent, but I have uncovered a kindness for her. She is a limited person, and she pushed those limits where she could. For us. She knew it would strip her bare and grind her down, and she did it anyway.
I suspect that by the time she knew she didn't enjoy being a mother, there were already two or three children running around. Kane was a surprise, flinging himself into our fragile family dynamic with reckless abandon. He paid for it his whole life.
Samantha arrived home with the children just as the sun was going down. She looked ghostly, pale and tired. The usual joyous energy that followed her around was subdued tonight. The children seemed tired, too. The listlessness that infected their aunt had spread to them, and when I asked them to sit on the lounge and listen to what I had to tell them, I could see that they already knew something was terribly wrong.
For a moment I couldn't say anything. I was hearing in my head my own mother.
"Tommy's crashed, and died." Then the vortex of silence that comes after.
My three children sat on the lounge, staring up at me. Waiting for me to say something serious – but not catastrophic. Waiting for me to deliver the bad news with a hug and a platitude. I froze.
"Tommy's crashed, and died."
"It's about dad," I started. Kelly understood immediately. She stared at me with eyes like saucers.
"Tommy's crashed, and died."
I could barely hear what I was saying over the echoes in my head. I looked at Samantha for help. She stared at me like I was drowning, and she wasn't sure what to do.
"There was an accident, after the party."
"Tommy's crashed, and died."
Trevor looked at me as though he was willing me to disappear.
"I'm sorry guys but dad died."
Angus was the first one to cry. He flung himself onto me, burying his face in my shoulder. That beautiful unleashing of raw emotion that I have always so envied in children. It exploded now in my youngest boy. But the older two have been around me too long. They stared in sullen silence, daring me to correct the information I had just dropped on them.
"What happened?" hissed Kelly.
Finally, Samantha awoke, and came to my aide.
"He fell, Kelly. He slipped down the steep slope, and he was too injured to hold himself up in the creek. He drowned."
Trevor got up slowly. He didn't look at anyone else. He walked over to the sliding door, and disappeared through it. I did not try to stop him. Angus continued unburdening himself of tears on my shoulder. Kelly stared, unflinching. She folded her arms across her chest.
"You're lying."
It wasn't addressed to Sam, although Sam had been the one who spoke. Kelly's blue eyes drilled into mine, her chest moving up and down with steady breath.
"You're lying."
No one else spoke.
