Grace stopped laughing. She gazed over Eve’s shoulder and said, ‘Bye bye.’
Dorothy’s hand flew to her mouth.
‘Oh my god,’ said Eve.
‘Did you hear that? Say it again.’
‘Bye bye,’ Evelyn said, and Grace said, ‘Bye bye, Evie.’
‘She’s talking!’
The baby girl looked from her mother to her aunt and back again with a wide crescent smile, amazing connections firing in her brain. ‘Bye bye.’
7. Dandelion Clock
On the drive to the cabin the sky began to set and darken, the colour of wet concrete. Rain prickled the windscreen. ‘Great,’ said Andrew. ‘Stuck inside with the perfect robot child for a week.’
Dorothy squeezed his leg, the hard muscle above his knee, and moved her hand up his thigh a bit. ‘I like these jeans.’
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hi.’ She kissed his shoulder. In the back seat Amy, the baby, started to cry. ‘I’m thirsty,’ said Grace, and Dorothy swivelled around to pass her the king-size Schweppes bottle filled with water. Grace dropped it and Dot unbuckled her seat belt and said to Andrew, ‘Don’t crash,’ and squeezed through the gap between the front seats to the back and sat with one hand stroking the side of the baby’s breathtakingly soft face and the other hand propping up the bottom of the heavy bottle so that Grace could drink from it. ‘Lou’s only little,’ she said to Andrew. ‘Give her a chance. She’ll turn weird and difficult soon enough.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Andrew. ‘Look at the parents.’
‘Do you mean Aunty Eve and Uncle Nathan?’ said Grace.
‘No,’ said Dorothy, hitting Andrew in the arm. ‘We’re talking about someone else.’
‘Lou means toilet,’ said Grace.
‘It’s a pretty name,’ Dorothy said. ‘Be nice.’
Things had changed for Grace with the baby’s arrival. Maybe it was the week Dot spent away from her, with bird-like, premature Amy in the NICU. Maybe it was simply the fact of another child. The parenting books had a lot to say about introducing new siblings. The word sibling was deceptively bloodless. Grace threw stuff and she wouldn’t take a daytime sleep. She railed against the wind or the sun or the straps on her pushchair and she let food fall half chewed from her mouth and always removed her clothes and shoes once she’d been dressed. She liked being read to, and attempting skew-whiff jigsaw puzzles and perching on the kitchen bench while Dorothy baked, and she liked sitting up against her mother’s side while she breastfed the baby and hitting her lightly in the face.
An electronic jazz riff on the radio announced a traffic report and Andrew turned it up and the newsreader said that a tropical storm was heading east and could develop into a hurricane. Residents were advised to prepare hurricane kits and a flash-flood warning was issued. ‘Motherfucker,’ said Andrew.
‘What do we do?’
‘Everyone’s still driving.’ It was true; the traffic out of town had slowed but all three lanes were moving, the red and yellow car lights glistening through the grey rain.
The car shook in the wind as it edged forward and the windscreen was a blur, carved by the metronome of the wipers, the shifting of water from side to side. The traffic slowed to a crawl and Dot said to Andrew, ‘OK really don’t crash,’ and undid the clasp over Amy’s belly and lifted her into her arms and rucked up her T-shirt and clicked the plastic toggle to release the cup of her bra.
‘This is my one fucking week off, man,’ Andrew shouted at the traffic.
‘Hold my hand, Mummy,’ said Grace, and once the baby was plugged into that rhythmic sucking and the milk was drawing from all the way under Dot’s arm, through the breast and into Amy’s mouth, the fine hair at the nape of her neck damp with sweat, she could free a hand and find Grace’s palm.
Nathan’s newspaper said that the storm might move further east and pass them, that there might not even be lightning and thunder, no need for the canned food, torches, extra nappies and colouring-in books they’d picked up on the way. He showed them a satellite image of the storm, a startling spiral with a tiny hole at its centre through which you could imagine seeing the surface of the earth, the whorl around the eye terrifying to look at, a pocket-size image of force, magnetic suction, and Andrew said, ‘Come on, how is that not a hurricane.’
‘Maybe we’re just out of its path,’ Nathan said. ‘No radio range so we just got to wait and