The Lightkeeper's Wife - By Karen Viggers Page 0,109

were as indistinct as the tufts of grass waving on the dunes in the endless wind.

Earlier in the week, her two sons had come, Gary and Tom. Was it Wednesday or Thursday? It didn’t matter. At least she remembered that they visited. She had known things must be getting worse for the two of them to show up—in her lucid moments she was aware of her deterioration. But Jan hadn’t arrived, so the end was not yet nigh.

It saddened her that Gary was so large these days—he was so big he seemed to fill the cabin, everything soft where it should have been firm. She now had to look hard within her son’s heavy features to see the slip of a boy he once was—all arms and legs, with Jack’s smile. Of course, Gary had never had Jack’s aloof shyness. Tom was comfortable saying only what needed to be said, but Gary seemed compelled to fill all the spaces with words. While Tom set the kettle on to boil in the kitchen, and found cups and biscuits, Gary reclined in the armchair and spun an endless monologue about work, Judy, the B&B, and Jan’s opinions about Mary’s health. Instead of listening, Mary found herself staring vacantly out the window, tuning in to the wind and the short blasts of rain that flushed in and out over Gary’s one-way conversation.

Tom was in a strange mood, very different from his last visit. Mary vaguely remembered something he’d said about a girl and the possibility of going south, but she couldn’t quite recollect the details. Perhaps the girl had already knocked the buoyancy out of him. Tom wasn’t very resilient when it came to relationships. He wasn’t very good at relationships at all. Poor lad.

She sensed he was brooding on something while he waited for the kettle to boil, but she concluded that he was blunted by the overwhelming presence of Gary in the room. She used to wish her two sons could be closer; however, there were too many years between them. They had spent too little time together as boys, and their personalities were too different.

If she’d anticipated what Tom was building up to, she might have been more prepared. But she had no idea what was brewing in his mind, no idea that he could rattle her so suddenly and so unexpectedly. Numbed by Gary’s constant blather, when Tom’s question came, she felt as though she’d been hit with a brick.

‘Mum, what happened in that storm on the cape before I was born?’

Gary spluttered tea and coughed biscuit. And Mary was breathless, unable to speak.

‘Something about a broken leg,’ Tom said. ‘Gary mentioned it the other day. Something to do with Auntie Rose.’

Gary tried to stop him with a voice like iron. ‘I told you to ask Jan. Not Mum.’

But Tom was looking at her, hopeful, unaware that her breathing had stalled and that she was drowning in shock and in lungs full of fluid. Drowning in a past that wouldn’t leave her alone.

Then the boys were hopping around her, white-faced and anxious, rubbing her back, holding her medication, pressing a glass of water to her lips. She was weak, and Tom was so horrified that he didn’t push further. But Mary knew she must provide some sort of answer. When she could talk again, she gave the boys her edited version of the saga. Not the veins and muscles and flesh of it—that was the stuff she planned to die with. Instead, she gave them small pieces of the facts.

‘There was a massive storm on the cape and the pony got out,’ she said. ‘I was trying to get him back inside when I had a fall from a cliff, breaking my leg. Prior to the storm, your father and I had been having a difficult time in our marriage. I suppose the accident saved us, in a way. We’d been on the cape so long we had forgotten how to appreciate it. Over the years we’d started taking things for granted. Like the beautiful place we lived in. And each other. It’s not hard to do. Life gets busy and you forget to look after one another. Then the accident happened. Your Aunt Rose came to stay for a while to help out while I was in hospital. While we were apart, your father and I realised how far our relationship had slipped. When I came home, we worked hard to fix things between us. It took time,