Their relationship had always had its edges. Until last night, Michael’s stand-off against children, though always gracious, had been as hard as flint. Despite that, compared to the ditch her first marriage had careened into, her decade with Michael was a yellow brick road. There were the unexpected things. Like last night: “Let’s go barging on a French canal,” he’d said, “before our baby.” Before our baby, a phrase lightly tossed in like a vinaigrette, and without any fanfare despite her years of badgering.
Surprisingly, she’d almost not registered it; the mere mention of an overseas trip had thrown her completely off-guard. After they’d quit New York for Sydney nearly nine years ago and despite their, or rather, his money, they’d only ever flown together within Australia. Never internationally. He, on the other hand. God! she thought, as she turned back onto the track, Michael was such a frequent flyer the airport security people probably knew his shoe size. He must have a trillion international frequent flyer miles but, she reminded herself, she had never enjoyed a single one.
His many, too many, business trips were fleeting, always rushed. Inevitably he returned dishevelled, as if he’d just been trekking for thirty days in Nepal rather than on a three-day flit to Los Angeles or some other business capital. In the beginning, she’d stressed herself about these trips—what wife wouldn’t?—but time wore her down and tolerating them simplified her life, despite her mother’s finger-wagging: one failed marriage was enough, she’d repeatedly warned.
Four minutes…
A child. Sonya hurtled off the end of the track and her shoes dug into the white sand, so fine and clean it squeaked as it stopped her short. She slipped off her sweatshirt and wrapped it round her waist for her cool-down. Her red leotard top was crimson with sweat and her heartbeat was even outpacing her mind.
She’d come round the headland and this end of the beach was tapped in behind, sheltered from the south. Here the palms and eucalypts stood motionless. The barnacled boats moored in close were rocking imperceptibly from the rising tide and there was scarcely a jangle from their glinting halyards. The sun continued to chin itself above the horizon and paint colour onto the eastern cliffs, giving the final crescent of moon a razzle of gold.
She watched the water nudge against the beach, up and back. It hissed up the sand leaving a froth of lace for the seagulls to trample. As her breath slowed she watched the grey scavengers fluffing up their wings and poking their beaks underneath, picking out lice for their breakfast appetisers. A fledgling with a pink-grey beak and legs and spotted wings scrabbled to the water’s edge and dipped its head in and out several times, shaking it in between.
Apart from a drifting foam of cloud, it was a still winter’s morning. Sonya strode over the sand for her final stretch, certain this would be a good day… a good year.
But in three minutes, she’d discover how wrong she was.
At the far end of the beach, the familiarity, the odd ordinariness of their grey slatted fence sandwiched between much grander walls caused her to question Michael’s sudden new leaf and by the time she reached the boardwalk, she was stamping the sand out of her soles as well as her scepticism.
Once again she questioned how she’d lasted so long with a man so guarded, so private. Obscurity and vagueness about his past hovered around Michael like a cloud of summer sand flies but though it was irritating, years of practice had taught Sonya to swat it off as yet another tolerable eccentricity. No longer. Not from today. Today the itch would be scratched.
She recalled how weeks after she’d moved into his New York apartment on Central Park West, she’d knocked his passport from his desk and two strange dried flowers fluttered out of it to the floor. They were shrivelled, brittle and brown though she guessed they’d once been white. Daisies perhaps. As she slid a page of the passport underneath the wilted blooms, carefully so they wouldn’t disintegrate, she’d wondered if they were a memento. But of what? Or whom? She’d never asked. Flipping through the tattered passport that day, she saw some pages were ripped. The corner with his birth-date was gone. Cut or torn, she couldn’t tell. But for the first time she saw his full name: Michael Will Hunt. His name was a sentence.
One minute…
She unlatched her gate smack on what she assumed was 7 am. Courtesy of Ralph their pitch-black Labrador, the time seemed obvious. Ralph was not normally a barker but what usually got him yapping at this time was the racket from the builders a few doors up. Six days a week it was always the same. On the dot of seven the noise dam from the construction site legally sluiced open.
But wait. Apart from Ralph and the squawk of a seagull, and the hiss of the tide, there was no sound. No builders. Not yet. Sonya checked her watch: five before seven.
Something caught her eye and she jerked her head up at the house to see that the glass double-doors of their attic bedroom were ajar, swinging out onto their balcony.
Michael must be up but, at anything before 7:30, that was almost unheard of.