I take a few steps further out until the water laps the hem of my skirt. It’s icy and clear, a stark contrast to the warmth of the sun on my shoulders. Every so often a bigger wave hits and I sink deeper and dig my toes further into the sand to keep my balance.
Suddenly, there’s a much bigger wave coming and no time to back away from it. I’ll be saturated in my dry-clean-only skirt but I don’t care. I know it will knock me off my feet and drag me along the sand unless I dive under it. And when I do that, fully clothed, I feel reckless and crazy, and shockingly cold.
Sometimes I flirt with death. It’s just a fleeting glance. A blip, somewhere on the outer edge of my radar. A faint, comforting reminder it’s always there in case I need it.
A mother shouldn’t have these thoughts.
I don’t know how long I stand there, soaked through, after that. There are no more waves that big. I think the tide is going out. I’m frozen. Stuck. And I want to cry, but I can’t. The afternoon breeze is increasing, clouds are billowing and now I’m shivering. I take a few steps backwards until I’m back on dry sand. Spent.
I know he’s standing there before I even turn around. I can sense him. Watching from a respectful distance. Protecting me. Letting me lose it, right to the edge, but not quite over it.
I close my eyes and in moments he is standing right behind me. Close enough for me to feel his energy.
Cam.
He never lets me down at the beach.
‘I miss you,’ I breathe, and I feel his energy slip away again. I said too much. Felt too viscerally. Spooked him. Spooked me? Now he’s gone and I’m standing alone again, looking at the ocean, frozen to the bone. Desperately in need of a warm shower, a long sleep and a stretch of time where no-one expects a single thing from me.
But I can’t bring myself to leave this spot, where Cam was. I rub my arms, wet shirt and skirt clinging to my body, the wind covering me in sand and goosebumps.
Footsteps cut into the sand behind me. Real footsteps this time. The towel is large and warm and wrapped tightly around my shoulders and across my front. I can’t even move my hands to grasp hold of it, I’m so cold. I just turn around and stand there shivering, teeth chattering, looking at him, feeling utterly bedraggled and the lowest I’ve been in a very long while, yet unable to articulate that. Or anything else.
He pulls the towel tighter. I want him to hug me, for physical warmth, but he doesn’t. Maybe I want it for emotional warmth too.
‘I’ll light the fire,’ he says, and on some primal level, I feel taken care of.
There was so much help in the beginning. They say grief changes your address book and it surprised me who stepped up, and how. I found that I’d completely underestimated Canberra, making the classic mistake of thinking it was a sterile city, full of politicians. Instead, we were embraced by new friends, friends of friends, neighbours, strangers . . . And it went far beyond casseroles and lasagne. It was sitting beside me at the bank while I closed his account. Fixing towel rails and running loads of recycling to the tip. Late-night hot chocolates in pyjamas when we couldn’t stop crying.
A composer friend heard about Cam’s death while she was on an interstate bus and was moved to write a piece of music, then and there, that captured the full force of our love so exquisitely, I had it played at the funeral. And then that first Christmas, a group of random friends joined forces over social media; when Charlie and I drove in after the end-of-year concert at childcare, our whole house was twinkling in fairy lights. In that moment, I felt like the richest woman in the world.
But at some point people have to go back to their own lives. You can’t expect them to sit with you forever or be there for every leaking tap or flat tyre. As that first wave of support retreats, you’re forced to turn into the single parent you never signed up to be.
So, when someone does something thoughtful now, no matter how small – like light a fire, when it’s usually you in charge of the heating, the electricity, the food, the homework, the actual work – the kindness just seeps into your skin. Right now, it shocks me out of this trance, enough to find my feet again, take one backwards glance to where I felt Cam for a few seconds, and walk back over the sand with Hugh. Stumbling over it. Covered in it.
We reach the back door and I know I can’t trample this straight into the house. There’s an outdoor shower with a tap down low, and Hugh turns it on so we can stick our feet under it, standing on the grass. I pull the towel tightly around me and he leans down and brushes sand from his calves.
‘Hold still,’ he says, on his haunches beside me. He takes my heel in his palm and moves my foot gently under the flow of water, brushing the sand away. I reach for his shoulder to balance, while he does the same with my other foot and I have an out-of-body experience because this is my boss, Hugh, washing my feet. It should be a hundred times weirder than it is.
‘I’ll run the shower,’ he says, shutting the tap off and standing up again. ‘Inside.’
He grabs a towel he’d left at the door and dries his feet. I step inside and stand on the rattan doormat, water still dripping from me and no energy to deal with it.
‘Kate?’ he calls from the bathroom a minute later.
I feel disembodied. Is this shock? No. Surely it can’t be, two years after the event.
I’m shivering. Steam is swirling out of the downstairs bathroom, through the doorway in the corridor. Hugh emerges through it.
‘You coming? Water’s hot.’
I can’t.
He dries his hands on a towel and crosses the room. When he reaches me, I want to speak, but no sound comes out. I’m locked inside my own body, horrified by the realisation that’s crashing into my consciousness, very belatedly.
‘He stays dead,’ I whisper.
Even though they’re barely audible, Hugh catches my words. Holds them.
‘He keeps on not coming back,’ I continue, as if discovering this truth for the first time. Hearing my own words, I start to panic. So much of my grief has been about Charlie losing his dad. Nowhere near enough of it, I realise now, has been about me losing my husband. It’s like I’ve woken up on the crest of a roller-coaster I didn’t know I’d boarded, I’m not strapped in, and we’ve just come over the peak.
‘I’m so sorry, Kate.’ He’s said it before, of course. At the time. Everyone has said it. It’s the phrase we’re socially contracted to put ourselves through when someone dies, before normal interaction can continue. But this time, I feel it.
He is sorry. Deeply, empathetically, heart-wrenchingly sorry.
Through his eyes, finally, after two years of this relentless absence and half a day of space, I finally see my situation from the outside. And I feel sorry for myself, too. Achingly so.
What an inconceivable loss.
Water is pelting onto the shower floor. I follow him across the living room, into the bathroom. He checks the temperature and dries his hands. ‘Okay?’ he asks.
I drop the towel and step into the shower. Fully clothed.
Warm water runs over my face and saturates my clothes again. I back up against the tiled wall and sink slowly until I’m sitting on the floor, thoroughly miserable.
Maybe this is my rock bottom. I’m forever adjusting the measure. Once, when I was particularly distraught, I took out Cam’s X-rays and scans from various injuries over the years and laid them out on the living room floor in the shape of a person. Then I got down and lay on top of them, desperate to be close to his body. And when I put them away, in my mind’s eye, the ghostly images of his heart and lungs seemed to move and beat and breathe. I couldn’t destroy the X-rays. It would be like obliterating him all over again.