denim jacket on the floor between the visitor’s chair and the bed. Instinctively Dot glanced at the end of the cubicle to make sure Nathan wasn’t there. This was not his jacket, not the tobacco pouch in the pocket, the thin paper strip of a bus ticket, the scuffed, faded cuffs and collar, the loose threads coming off the stitches around the metal buttons. The fabric still held the coldness of outside. She smelled it. She clutched it to her, buried her face in it, dark spots on the fabric where it touched her eyes. Was it Daniel’s, or did she just want to believe it was Daniel’s? Could that smell be what created, now, a blooming of leaves, shade, underneathness, the smallness of being a child? And everything, the green leaves, the stippled grass, Daniel cross-legged in their hiding place, all of it belonging to her and to time, time that went so slowly, marked by the long silence that came before the small clean cluck of the second hand on a stolen watch, and the silence that came after it. The cells of her body just the same as the cells of the air, the grass blades, the sunlight and the cells of Daniel’s skin.
The nurse behind the desk knew nothing about the jacket or a random visitor. Blood thumped in Dorothy as she strode the corridor, circled the area by the lifts, the jacket over her arm. It was a fantasy. He was in another country, with someone. The last postcard long ago, Met a girl. Clowning El Salvador. Then nothing. She had got on with mothering children and being married and teaching, absorbed by the dense volume of things to do in her day, as though this was where her life belonged. Or that was an illusion. She had mistaken being busy for being involved. No, that wasn’t fair. Where else could her attention go? She rounded a corner and came upon a woman sobbing against a wall. ‘Sorry,’ Dot said, before backing away.
She should have known if Daniel was back. Should have been told, but should also have just felt it, like knowing bodily where Eve was, that she was all right. Until this. Their connection had told her nothing about this.
Leaving the hospital into the chilly night, she thought she saw him in a wheelchair outside the main entrance, the wind tunnel where the smokers went, but when she went up and opened her mouth to speak it was another man. Dorothy hid the denim jacket in her bag and much later, when everything had happened, she took it home and hung it on a hook in the hallway, where after a time it was covered by a torn, child-sized anorak to be taken for repair, a yoga-mat carrier and a rope-handled beach bag, sand collected like a wiggly line of handwriting in the bottom of the white lining.
Dot sat with Lou, stroking the hair back from her forehead and humming a lullaby until she fell asleep. Her own kids were fine. She’d cried on the phone to Andrew, the sound of his voice. The folders on Eve’s desktop computer were named Home, Lou, Finance. Blood in her ears pounded as Dorothy typed in a document search for Daniel. A subfolder appeared, and in that a word document contained text that looked to have been cut and pasted from emails. Fuck. She closed the file before she could read too much. So, there it was. Daniel and Eve. Of course.
She had fucking known it.
Nathan decided not to take Lou to the hospital while Eve looked like she did. In the morning Dot ran her a bubble bath, which she was still in when Tania came to the door with a Tupperware dish of pumpkin soup. The laundry was all done, the floors vacuumed and the windows cleaned. Dorothy held her at the threshold, a spray bottle of vinegar and a scrunched sheet of newspaper in her hands, and asked point blank if Eve had ever told her about Daniel.
‘Is Nate home?’
‘Of course not.’
Tania glanced back to her car, where her husband waited in the driver’s seat. He passed a wave towards Dorothy, who nodded back. Quickly Tania walked through to the kitchen and placed the sloshy container of soup on the bench top. Dorothy marked her progress, breathing hard.
‘Yes,’ Tania said. ‘It’s over, but I think they’re still in touch.’