Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [62]
He shifts a little, grabs at my finger without looking at it, and I cannot describe the size or shape of the warmth and the excitement and the anxiety and the responsibility that settle around me. This can’t be how you feel about a sibling; this is how you feel about a child. This is, as a friend had said it would be, a whole other way of loving.
When I glimpse myself now in a mirror or a window, I see somebody’s mother—just one somebody. And I see myself more clearly, more distinctly than I ever have before, as if I’m recognising myself properly for the first time.
This little life, lying across my lap, his head as soft as velvet, his skin as smooth as silk. It’s four in the morning and while my son lies here with his cheek resting on one hand, his father is next to me, asleep, his own cheek resting on his own hand. Outside, the light is coming up through silver, through mauve, and the first kookaburras are beginning to sing. Inside, the three of us are breathing together, safe and warm.
There’s no correct maths for families—they’re the embodiment of infinite variety, irreducible to models or theories, right or wrong sizes or shapes or numbers. This is my family: these are the numbers and the people that feel right, from the generation above to the generation below.
That’s all.
THE YARRA
Nam Le
Hours before sunrise my body’s already soaked with sweat, as though in anticipation of the real heat. Melbourne’s in drought. The city a plain of dust and fire. I wake amidst dreams of Saturday sports as a schoolboy, shin guards and box chafing where the sheets have twisted; noise, collision down the pitch as faraway as a deeper dream. There are tupperware containers at half-time, frozen wedges of orange. Then a sudden switch and charge, players all around me, the rising breathing in my ears—I am sprinting, dread-filled, from here to there, and here the ball is kicked to there, and there it’s booted—at the very moment I’ve chased it down—somewhere else. The sun is on my face and then it is dark. My brother, my blood and bones, confessor and protector, came in last night, he must be sleeping downstairs, and—as always when he comes—I find my hand on my heart and my mind wide open and wheeling.
I get up and wash my face. The water from the cold faucet is warm, and smells of dirt. Downstairs, a reflexive propriety forestalls me looking at the sleeping form on the couch, and then I look. My brother, Thuan, comes bringing no clues where he’s been. As always, he lies on his back. His mouth is open, his eyelids violent with their shuddered thoughts, and under the thin sheet I can see the heavy limbs, flat and parallel as though lying in state. He has a powerful body.
I make some coffee in a plunger—not bothering to keep the noise down—and take it outside to the back deck. Surrounded by cicada song I sit down, stare out. Something is wrong. Why else would he have come? I wonder where he’s been but then why does it matter? Away’s where he’s been. I think of his last visit three years ago, then Baby’s visit a few months later—how quiet and uncertain she was, how unlike his girlfriend from those rowdier times. Before leaving she hesitated, then asked for thirty dollars; I gave it to her and never saw her again.
Against the darkness, other faces from that shared past occur to my mind with stunning vividness. Even closer, thicker, than the dark is the heat. Another scorcher on the way. Somewhere out there a forest is burning, and a family crouching under wet towels in a bathtub, waiting as their green lungs fill with steam and soot muck. I test the coffee’s temperature. As often happens at this time of morning I find myself in a strange sleep-bleared funk that’s not quite sadness. It’s not quite anything. Through the trees below, the river sucks in the lambency of city, creeps it back up the bank, and slowly, in this way, as I have seen and cherished it for years, the darkness reacquaints itself into new morning.
He’s there now, I sense him, but I say nothing. Minutes pass. A line of second lightness rises into view