Salt stings my eyes at the rare, uncharitable thought about my husband. Never speak ill of the dead, Kate. It’s another impossible standard to which widows are held while they slip and falter across the unstable ice of grief, hoping it will hold.
‘Are you in trouble?’ Hugh asks. The muscles in his jaw have tightened, and I’m sorry I’ve worried him. There have been very few personal crises over the last four years that Hugh hasn’t shown up for. That said, this is the first to involve the authorities.
‘It’s not how it sounds.’ I step through the doorway and out into the cold shock of crisp winter air. ‘It’s not the cops, exactly . . .’
I know that chin tilt. Blue-grey eyes bore into mine, wanting the truth.
‘Technically, it’s the bomb squad,’ Justin clarifies, eavesdropping through the hall.
I need to manage this unfolding situation. So I opt for the same matter-of-fact tone I use in our Monday meetings, when I update Hugh on the progress of our philanthropic pipeline over a latte and a double-shot long black in the cafe near our campus office.
‘Look, we’re just waiting on a small team of military experts from the explosive ordnance cell in Defence. Charlie found a vintage grenade in Cam’s study. I’m sure it’s fine, but everyone has totally lost their minds.’ Would you like sugar with that, Hugh? How was your run this morning?
‘Who’s that inside?’ he asks, as if he’s missed the central thesis of my story. We have a bomb! Have my emergencies become so predictable that the most noteworthy aspect of this is the strange man inside my house?
‘That’s Justin.’ Why am I blushing? ‘He’s taking care of my explosive.’
The police hadn’t told me exactly what to do with it; I doubt the Queanbeyan station gets many calls from local mothers on this topic. They just said to keep it away from kids, which is obviously Lesson A in Grenade Ownership 101 – a subject I appear to have very much bombed.
Hugh dumps the manila folders in my arms. The tired grey leaves his eyes almost instantly, replaced by steel blue. It’s the colour I notice sometimes during difficult negotiations at work, when the stakes are high and he’s entirely switched on. Those eyes sweep over my face now, checking I’m serious, just as a patrol car flashing red and blue lights drives purposefully up our street and pulls in at a jaunty angle on my nature strip, as if to reinforce my story. Why must I always have an audience when things get so decidedly out of control? This audience, in particular.
Hugh steps towards me, and I freak out about Grace and place my hand flat across his chest, blocking his entry. He shuts his eyes for a second, as if summoning patience from a deity, then looks into my upturned face.
‘Am I an accessory after the fact?’ he asks, deadpan. Here is a person who’s become clinically desensitised through repeated exposure to myriad crises over the course of our whole professional relationship. ‘This is a false alarm, Kate. Isn’t it?’
‘Oh, I’m not worried about the grenade.’ Cam’s got this. Or he did have it, years ago.
I lean in so close I pick up the echo of this morning’s cologne on Hugh’s neck. ‘Grace is here,’ I admit, in a whisper.
And there’s that familiar catch in his breath.
3
Constable Wentworth seems very green, both in experience and skin tone. So green, I wonder if this is his first ever call-out, and whether he needs a bucket. I glance into the house and notice that Justin has moved the ‘crime scene’ from the lounge room into the kitchen area out the back, where there’s more room.
‘The team from explosive ordnance is about five minutes away,’ the young constable advises, looking over his shoulder for backup from his partner, who is forensically scouring my weed-ridden yard. ‘The important thing is not to panic.’
He seems to deliver this pep talk to himself. Is he even old enough to carry a gun? I’m at the age where new professionals are starting to appear impossibly youthful, but this kid seems fresh from high school.
He leads me and Hugh through the front hall and straight into the fray: two days’ worth of dishes piled high in the sink, a herd of clothes horses staggering near the window, Lego just . . . everywhere.
‘Uncle Hugh!’ Charlie squeals, bounding in from the lounge and leaping into my boss’s arms, almost knocking him off balance.
Grace’s entry into the room, and into Hugh’s presence, is frostier. What’s that saying again? Never play matchmaker and dip your best friend’s pen in your boss’s ink? No. That’s not it. Is it the other way around? I’m trying to rearrange the analogy in my head when the officer says, ‘Right. Where is this object?’
Justin reveals the grenade on the kitchen bench like he’s a model on Wheel of Fortune. He’s sensibly placed it in a melamine Peppa Pig bowl left over from Charlie’s afternoon snack.
The constable looks into the bowl and says, ‘That actually looks like a grenade.’
I don’t know what he expected. Why would I make this up?
Hugh can’t help himself. He moves closer, and now it’s the three of them bent over my kitchen bench, heads together, examining the evidence like they’re on a Boys’ Own Adventure.
‘These items are sold to enthusiasts all the time,’ Hugh says while the constable takes photos. I imagine the pictures being tendered in court as evidence and wish he’d let me tidy up a bit.
‘If you can just stand back, please,’ the officer says, pulling out a notebook. ‘It’s not going to explode if we don’t pull the pin?’
It’s unclear whether that’s a statement or a question. I place the pile of submissions on the distressed pine table, pull out a chair and sink into it. The sudden injection of testosterone in my kitchen fills me with nostalgia. I used to sit there at that same bench, sipping wine, eating cheese, flicking through the weekend papers and solving the world’s problems with Cam as he ad-libbed something incredible for dinner. A ghost of that memory seems superimposed on the image before me now of the constable, Hugh, and Justin, and I wonder how in hell I got from point A to B.
Stand back from Kate, everyone. Don’t pull the pin . . .
If I lost this house, I’d lose Cam all over again. His presence is cemented into the very foundations. It’s painted onto the walls and sewn into the fabric of the soft furnishings. He’s everywhere, in every room. Even in the tired sticky notes he used to obsessively label everything when he got sick, in a way that, years later, is helping Charlie learn to read. I trace one now, stuck to the back of the chair beside me, reinforced with tape. I flick the hot-pink paper where the edges have curled and faded in the sun. The word ‘chair’ is written in Cam’s solid handwriting, and I move my thumb across the individual letters, trying to sense the pressure of his pen on this inconsequential little note, made magical because Cam once touched it, too. It’s a thing his eyes once focused on, like mine are now, as I try to align us through time and space and somehow bring him back.
‘I’ve secured the weapon,’ the constable reports into his two-way radio. I’m not sure Peppa Pig is a suitable guardian for Cam’s grenade, but okay. Then he looks across the room at me. ‘What were you doing when your son wandered out with this?’