In the Shadow

I have relived this day a thousand times, and it always starts the same way: with the hiss of the coffee machine piercing the silence.

At 5.45AM in summer the kitchen was already light. Since returning to work after maternity leave, I’d been getting up increasingly earlier each morning, in an attempt to grab a moment of stillness before the day began and everyone else’s needs started pulling at me.

Sun filtered through the curtains, illuminating the living room and the debris left from our children sweeping through.

Beside the couch was Thomas’s play mat with the colored balls hanging motionless. There were the shoes kicked in a corner by my stepson, the script my stepdaughter had been learning piled on the coffee table.

Down the hallway in the bedrooms, they were all quiet still. Greg in the last moment of sleep before his alarm went off at 6.15AM. Our room was dark and breezy with blackout curtains and a standing fan aimed at the bed.

Opposite us was Ethan’s room, his floor a sea of electric cords trailing to his phone and TV and Xbox and laptop. “What color do you want your room painted?” I had asked him, when we moved in here four years ago. He was twelve then, and I wanted him to feel like it was a good thing his dad was remarrying.

“Black,” he said, without hesitation. I had hesitated. Sometimes I wondered if my own child would be such an uncomplicated person one day. I half wanted him to barge through life the same confident way his brother did, half dreaded the thought of a son who discussed nothing more complex than sports games and You Tube video’s.

I had selected a slate gray instead, unable to bring myself to cover the walls of my new home in black paint. Upon seeing it, Ethan looked straight at the queen-sized bed and big screen TV and grinned. “Cool,” he said, and as far as I knew he was happy.

Charlotte, my stepdaughter, had the smallest room. Her choice. She was an anxious child even then at nine and I had given her first pick of the three children’s bedrooms, back before Thomas was even thought of, hoping to help her feel comfortable.

“This one, it’s so cozy,” she’d said, hugging herself as she stood in the little room which overlooked the garden. Her color of choice was a soft hazy purple. I’d hung curtains printed with stars and a light shade strung with glass beads which reflected the sun. If I wasn’t an adult with a husband I was expected to share with, I’d have wanted that room too.

And then in the room beside ours, my baby in his cot, sleeping beneath his mobile of fabric clouds. My baby. It still seemed unreal sometimes. He was seven months old and I was thirty-nine. For years I didn’t want a baby until one day I did.

“I might not even be able to get pregnant anymore,” I had told Greg.

Two months later I was in my bathroom, staring at a test. Relief filling me, as if I had just escaped a tsunami or a volcano, outrunning nature. I had imagined it would never happen for me, this most every day of things.

I added sugar to my coffee and stirred it in. My phone beeped on the bench. I glanced down at it and saw the reminder popped up.

Charlotte rehearsal 7.45AM

I had been wary when she joined the Drama Club at school, secretly worried she would suffer stage fright at the last minute, but it turned out pretending to be another person was easier for her than being herself. Up on stage she shone.

The big end of year show coming up involved rehearsal every morning before school that week, as well as two evenings.

We had her alternate weeks, each Friday evening she moved between us and her mother and stepfather. Ethan used to do the same, but the week Thomas was born he’d moved in full time with us, after an argument with his stepfather.

It wasn’t the baby homecoming I’d imagined, with Greg pacing around outside on phone calls to his ex-wife, but I’d figured Ethan would cool off and go back to the normal routine. It hadn’t happened. He told me he was sick of moving back and forward, and he was sick of his stepfather bossing him around.

Bossing him around was something I’d never done, instead walking a line somewhere between fun big sister and caring aunt. It was the reason I’d always gotten on well with him. It was also the reason I felt I couldn’t tell him to pick his shit up when he left it lying around.

I swiped away the reminder and the next popped up.

Conference today. Venue: Golf Club.

I pulled up the schedule on my phone and ran over it, even though I could have quoted it in my sleep, and possibly had some nights.

The PA who was organizing it had quit the week I came back from leave, and I’d been roped into taking over. Before I had finished my coffee, a wail came from Thomas’s room.

He was pulling himself up on the bars of his cot, and when he saw me, his face scrunched up in a smile, the pure kind of love no one else had ever shown me.

“Hi, Tommy, hey sweetie.”

I picked him up and pressed my face into his neck. Each morning, when I stood with him in my arms, it felt like my whole life had been building up to this, just to be here for this moment.

In the kitchen I held Thomas on one hip and watched the microwave as his bottle warmed. I never realized how much of life with children would be spent watching the clock. Waiting for something to start or finish or be ready.

Greg walked out, hair damp from the shower. “Morning,” he said. He sat beside me at the table and scooted his chair close to kiss the baby and then me.

For a quiet minute we sat together, our son between us. I had worried Greg might not find our own baby special, having already been through it twice, but he’d filmed our sons first smiles as eagerly as he watched Ethan shooting hoops or Charlotte singing on stage.

“It’s not like I love each kid less than the one before,” he’d said. But I was his second wife, and maybe that was why it played on my mind sometimes.

Charlotte appeared next. She dropped into a chair and gazed down at her phone.

“Rehearsal has been moved, it’s starting at 7.30AM now,” she said.

“Can you drop her?” Greg asked me, getting himself a coffee. “Charlotte, is your brother up?”

“Yeah, he’s in the shower,” she said, leaning over to tickle Thomas’s chin as I put him down in the highchair beside her. I’d worried she and Ethan would be jealous of the baby, or simply not interested, but they both loved him. Charlotte in the same way she loved playing with her dolls not so long ago, Ethan in a protective yet slightly distant way.

“Is he alright?” he would ask me, if the baby coughed or whimpered.

I spooned pureed apples into a bowl and wrapped a bib around Thomas’s neck. He felt warm as my hand brushed him and I paused, touched his cheek, his forehead.

“He feels hot. Greg, do you think he looks flushed?”

“He’s fine,” Greg said, without looking. Greg often told me he worried less than me because Thomas was his third baby, and after the first you realize they're built to survive.

Sometimes though, I wondered if there was something in our genetic code which meant males only noticed the bigger things. The way I knew Ethan would probably jump in front of a speeding car for his baby brother, but Charlotte was the one who would notice if he pulled his hat off while we were out.

Ethan came out half dressed, pulling his t shirt over his shoulders. Greg tousled his wet hair as he passed, even though Ethan stood about two inches taller than him.

I’d always loved how much he loved his children. It was what made thoughts of a baby of our own start creeping into my head, when I watched him with them.

Ethan’s eyes met mine as he passed me on the way to the fridge.

“Hi, Sara,” he greeted me, like he always did. But there was a question in him too, in the way he glanced at me again.

Two days before, I’d arrived home after picking Thomas up early from daycare and walked out to the back garden to find him and two of his friends smoking a joint.

“Uh, hey,” Ethan had said, casually stubbing the joint out. “Didn’t think you’d be home yet.”

“Clearly not,” I said. And then we stood in silence, neither knowing what to say.

I still hadn’t told Greg, and it was weighing on me. And on Ethan too, I knew. But there was always something else happening we needed to talk about. Mostly, I hated the thought of how disappointed he’d be.

“Alright, kid, you want a ride?” Greg asked Ethan. He nodded, mumbled something around a mouthful of food. I watched them leave the house together.

I’d always known, since I first met Ethan when he was only ten years old, that the day would come he’d want to live with his dad.

“You ready in five?” I asked Charlotte, shoving plates into the dishwasher. “I’ve got to get across town after I drop you.”

My phone was vibrating in my pocket. I pulled it out, turned the dishwasher on. A message from the speaker I’d organized to say her flight was delayed.

“Shit, damn,” I said, wiping the baby’s face with a cloth before hoisting him out. The carefully constructed day ahead teetered. I ran over the schedule in my head, wondering what I could shuffle around.

“Here,” Charlotte said, waving the nappy bag at me as we headed out.

The car already felt warm in the dim interior of the garage. I strapped Thomas into his seat and put my phone in its holder.

“I’m so nervous,” Charlotte said. “I don’t even know my lines yet.” She twisted her skirt in her hands. She got like this every time she had a show coming up. One night we had to pull over on the way there because she kept thinking she was going to throw up.

“You’ll be fine, you always are,” I said, hitting my manager’s number and putting the phone on speaker. I pulled out into our street, still quiet, and turned toward the main road where traffic was building up.

By the time I dropped Charlotte at school and headed for Thomas’s daycare, I’d already rearranged the schedule. My manager would go first, our delayed speaker would take his spot before lunch. I already felt calmer, the way everything slotted smoothly back in to a new order. No one would even notice how smoothly it all went, they would only know if there was a hitch; an empty slot, a late lunch, a cold coffee urn.

My phone rang again as I headed down the motorway, away from the city. I glanced down at the number as I answered, the phone still in its holder.

“Hello, Sara? It’s Nicola. Can we talk?”

The voice of my husband’s ex-wife bounced around my car. I could picture her as she spoke. She was as tall as Greg, always perfectly dressed, and I was slightly intimidated by her in many ways. Maybe that was why I had wanted to have a baby. Because otherwise, she would share something with him in a way I never could.

“Yeah, but I’m driving right now,” I said.

“It’s about Ethan,” she said. I was suspicious yet curious. Usually, anything to do with their children was discussed between her and Greg.

“Ok, sure,” I said. It occurred to me she must have found out about the pot smoking and I felt a surge of regret at not telling Greg already. A deep part of me aware I hadn’t because I felt like Ethan already soaked up so much of his time and attention.

She sighed into the phone, sounding irritated, as if I'd already given the wrong answer.

“I need to sort out this situation with Ethan. He can’t just avoid coming to his own mother’s house. I have to meet him at a café it I want to see him, it’s ridiculous.”

“I know, he just thinks it’s best if he avoids Mark for now.”

“For now,” she repeated. “He’s avoided him for seven months. He's like his father, never lets anything go. I want him to come around for dinner this weekend, so we can all sit down and talk.”

I turned off down the road which led to the golf club. Cars and houses quickly gave way to flat grassy fields and rows of trees.

“Have you spoken to Greg?” I asked her. “I don’t really get in the middle of –“

“Oh, stop,” she said. “My son lives with you. Don’t pretend you’re not in the middle of everything.”

“But I’m not his mother,” I said, because I wanted to reassure her. Realising then that she had something to fear too. “I can’t tell him what to do.”

I turned off the speaker and picked up the phone as I pulled into the carpark. The golf club stretched ahead of me, long and low. Trees towered behind it, creating a shaded garden area where we could take our breaks.

“Exactly, you’re not his mother, that’s why you might be able to actually convince him of something,” Nicola said.

“I can’t even get him to take his shoes to his room.”

I parked away from the trees. When I was here looking at the venue, I parked underneath them and came out to a car spotted with bird poo.

“I know Greg’s not going to be any help with this,” Nicola said.

I got out the car with the phone against my ear still, thinking of the night Ethan turned up at our house. He’d ran through the rain and was soaked and shaking with cold and indignation.

“I’m not ever going back there,” he said. Greg had snapped into action, sending Ethan to shower and dry off, putting a pizza in the oven to heat up for him, messaging Nicola to let her know he was here.

I was on the couch nursing my newborn son, and saw in Greg the sheen of victory. He was happy for this, to have his son disown the imposter father. I stroked our baby’s head and held him to my breast, and I couldn’t even imagine a day when this would happen to me, that my son would run from my house.

“Alright, I’ll talk to him,” I said. I dropped the phone into my bag, held my hand out behind me with the remote to lock the car. Walked toward the golf club, where the first arrivals were heading for the entrance.

X

I have relived this day a thousand times, and every time I imagine this is what happens next:

 I stop there. I turn, look back to the car glinting in the sun. And I see him, the top of his dark head just visible. Open the door and my baby boy is there in his car seat, asleep. 

A shadow passes over me, like some great predatory bird swooping low, and I glimpse the bottomless horror I almost fell into.

“I can’t believe it,” I say to him. “I forgot to drop you at daycare!”

I pick him up, feeling the weight of him, safe in my arms.

The whole happy life full of laundry and car rides and conversations I didn’t want to have and ones I did, the small joys which were everything and the worries which I understand now were small too – it all comes rushing back to me.

The shadow moves past me, and it’s just another day in my life.