Amy resolutely turned her head the other way as she walked past her old bedroom where Savannah now slept. Selfish! Childish! No-one else in the family still considers any room in this house ‘their bedroom’！ She heard the toilet flush as Simon completed his fake bathroom visit.
She pushed open the door of her parents’ bedroom. It smelled as it always had: a comforting mix of her mother’s perfume, her father’s deodorant, and the old-fashioned furniture polish still used by Good Old Barb and Amy’s mother when they cleaned together.
Her mother lay on her side facing away from the door, the covers pulled right up over her shoulders. Her hair – which brought her so many compliments – was mussed against the pillow. Amy tiptoed to the end of the bed. Her mother was asleep, breathing steadily, one hand curled up near her lips so that she seemed to be kissing her knuckles. She had told her children this was because she had sucked her thumb as a child, and it still gave her comfort to have her banned thumb close to her mouth.
The lines on Joy’s face looked like crevices. Amy breathed fast as that old familiar terror gripped her. All children feared their parents dying. Except Amy had once been so consumed by her fear that she hyperventilated, and had to breathe into a paper bag, and the babysitter had to call Joy and Stan to come home fast because this kid was weird.
She wondered what would have happened if her mother had died when Amy was a child. How could the reality of grief be worse than her imagining of it, when she had imagined it so very, very hard? How would she cope now, when her parents inevitably did die, as parents inevitably did, and you had to be so grown-up and mature about it? How did people cope with ordinary predictable tragedy? It was impossible, insurmountable . . .
‘Amy?’
Her mother opened her eyes and sat up. She put on her glasses from her bedside table, smoothed down her hair and smiled. ‘Amy? You’ve caught me napping.’
‘It’s good that you’re napping, Mum.’ Amy breathed slowly in and out. Her mother wasn’t going to die for decades. ‘You’ve been in hospital. You should be resting.’
Joy waved her hand dismissively. ‘I took my last antibiotic this morning. I’m fine now. I just get tired in the middle of the day. Come here.’ She patted the side of the bed. ‘Give me a hug.’
Amy went and sat next to her, and her mother hugged her fiercely.
‘You look especially beautiful today, darling. I wasn’t so keen on the blue hair at first but now I think it really makes your eyes pop.’
‘Thanks, Mum, although I guess they’d pop more if my eyes were blue. You should dye yours blue.’
‘Narelle is in charge of my hair, and I don’t think she’s keen on blue.’ Her mother stifled a yawn. ‘Why are you here, anyway? Where’s Savannah? Where’s your dad?’
Savannah before Dad.
‘Savannah is making you soup, and Dad is asleep in front of the television.’
‘He has this idea in his head that he never naps,’ said her mother. ‘He just “briefly closes his eyes”。 Will you please pass me my hairbrush?’
Amy got up and passed her the heavy silver embossed hairbrush that had always sat on her mother’s dressing table since Amy was a child. Her mother had received it when she won a district tournament as a teenager, back when ‘brush and comb’ sets were common prizes for female competitors, while the men got cigarette cases. Amy still coveted that brush. It looked like something a princess would use.
‘You visited the hospital. You didn’t need to come again.’ Her mother used swift movements to brush her hair back into its smooth white bob, so that the frail old lady vanished, to be replaced by Amy’s trim, senior citizen mother, wearing a long-sleeved cherry-coloured jersey. She threw back the covers to reveal her vulnerable little legs in tracksuit pants. ‘Have you seen Brooke? How do you think she’s coping with this separation? I couldn’t tell when she visited. Do you think Grant left her for another woman?’
‘No,’ said Amy. ‘But I think he’ll move on to someone new with lightning speed.’
‘Do you remember when Brooke was a little girl?’ said her mother. ‘And every year she fell in love with a new boy in her class?’
‘I do,’ said Amy. ‘She was very cute.’ Brooke used to write love letters to boys. It was hard to imagine now.
‘I was just thinking about that,’ said Joy. ‘For some reason. She used to be so passionate and then it felt like growing up just . . . flattened her. Those damned migraines.’ She frowned and put a hand to the side of her mouth and whispered, ‘I feel like Grant kind of flattened her too.’