“YOU ALWAYS LEAVE SOMETHING BEHIND”
Alexandra Geneve’s heartbreaking work of fiction.
Sleep came easily. More easily than it should have. No-one had told her how simple the whole thing would be. She could almost pretend, if she wanted to, that the last seven weeks had never taken place. She assumed, when the pamphlet said it was seven times less likely to be fatal than actually going through with the birth, that it still meant she was going to be torn and tattered by the end. Torn by guilt, not just the machine that had hummed below her on the floor.
But she wasn’t. She hardly even bled. It all seemed too easy somehow. Too much like a trip to the dentist.
When they arrived home, it took her twice as long as usual to mount the stairs to the room they rented on the fourth floor. She got into their bed and rested her head on the wall behind. She tried not to remember.
They had gone and had Chinese afterwards. He limped with her from the car to the restaurant. As they sat in the corner booth with the mirrors, she had tried not to catch herself in the reflection.
They spoke of so many things that day and she was pleased he was not afraid to hear what she had gone through behind door number nine. He listened and held her hand while seven weeks of numbness, that had threatened to turn to something worse, thawed easily and completely; as easily as the knowledge that the vertigo and sickness were over. She remembered, as they shared their food in the quiet, weekday lull, that around every corner, behind every door, had been the words: No. You know this can never be.
Later that afternoon she awoke from her effortless valium sleep to the intrusive sounds of raised voices from the floor below. For a moment that lasted too long, she thought she was at home in her own childhood bed. Back in Australia before she had met Stefan. She thought the voices she heard were those of her brothers, beyond the bedroom door in the house where she had grown up. The round table with the chairs that scraped on the tiles in summer; tiles the colour of sea water.
But she wasn’t home. She was in a strange country that only rarely felt like home to her. Sometimes she would catch herself thinking – this is my haunt. The rest of the time it was like standing on the street, hands cupped to the window, looking in. And anyway, that house she called home – the house of her dreams – had been sold 10 years ago, after she had moved out; the last one to fly the coop. But it was always home in that muffled time between midnight and dawn. She wondered, as she lay there listening to the voices below, if that would always be so. Even when she had a house of her own. A haunt. A family and children. Would she continue to go back there, to the house with the high roof and the sea-green tiles? The tiles that her mother had covered with rugs every winter.
Stefan walked in the door and stood looking at her. It was late afternoon. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Can I get you anything?”
She smiled through the haze. She thought she knew what would be going through his mind. As he stood there holding open the door, he’d be thinking What a sad smile that is. What a sad
girl... “No, Stefan. I’m fine,” she replied. I’m not sad. I’m not.
He came and sat on the bed. “Dick’s asked me if I want to go out for dinner.”
“You go,” she said. “I’ll be more than fine. I’ll probably read or watch some telly.” She smiled again and reached up and rubbed his shoulder. “I’ll be fine, really.”
It’s easy.
So he kissed her and shut the door behind him. Alice and Stefan had met one day on an old hotel staircase in West Hollywood and discussed, of all things, sewing machines. Alice knew nothing about them, and Stefan had made his own curtains. Alice had laughed at that and he hadn’t understood why.
In the hotel where they met, Stefan did his washing in the groundfloor laundry because he knew Alice was living in the room he had to pass to get there. He didn’t know this but she was writing home to her best friend all about him. Once she chose to write a letter in the coffee shop beneath the building and she had to slam the writing pad shut when he sat down next to her and told her shyly he was just waiting for a cappuccino and his washing to be done. She believed him. They went everywhere together after that.
They came to the Denver Youth Hostel by way of an argument. Since then, in her dry way, she had coined the place, silently, The International House of Fun. Stefan thought it best to spend a little more and get better accommodation. Alice said they didn’t have enough money to throw around and they should take the cheapest place in town. She got her way. Like always.
Neither had any inclination to stay more than a couple of days, at most a week. Both changed their minds when they unlocked the room on the fourth floor and saw the view.
Later that same heavy, white afternoon they lay in bed together breathing in each other’s warm scent; argument forgotten. She lay cushioned in his arms and didn’t want to move to tell him his shoulder bone hurt her ear. The sound of the city noise entered through the open window like an animal wanting food. The air four floors above the street cracked as the winter glassiness stalked in and touched her face.
Winter moves to spring slowly in Colorado. The last snow falls right up into April. The mountains keep their white caps almost the whole year round and sometimes blend with the white of the sky so you can’t tell where mountain peak ends and clouds begin. A picnic planned on a sunny morning, while viewing the sky from a bedroom window, will just as quickly be abandoned once the sleet and spits of rain come down and change that moment as you watch. Temperatures drop, and then maybe while you’re stubbornly packing the picnic basket, the warmth of the sun behind a moving sky will coat you like a yellow sheet being lowered on a breeze.
They eventually got up to go to the window and, wrapped together in a blanket, they held their hands out, cupped, to catch the snow and taste it on their tongues. The window bay was small and they had to squeeze in, facing each other, just to fit. The roof sloped down below them to where a car park housed 50 or so snow-covered cars. But, of course, everything was white.
“She even stopped DRINKING COFFEE in case it affected the BABY”
Alice had noticed some outdoor benches on one of the balconies on their way up the stairs with their backpacks. Cushions of snow piled up 20 centimetres thick on them. She had stopped to rest and had thought, maybe by spring we’ll be sitting out there for breakfast. It was only February. Winter had barely begun.
By early March, Stefan had found himself the chief maintenance man for the hostel. Dick, the owner, had big plans to turn the other side of the building into little apartments. He’d taken a shine to Stefan and his courteous but direct German ways and they often went out bargain hunting for cheap materials in the afternoons and didn’t make it home for dinner.
Alice worked the office downstairs, which meant greeting new hostel guests and keeping the coffee pot on the boil. Stefan would fix the washing machines down in the laundry and bomb regularly for inner-city roaches. Alice would make bowls of popcorn and take them to the two television rooms; one down in the basement, the other on the top floor. She would clean the sheets and make sure everyone had what they wanted. Once a fortnight she’d spend the day at Smiley’s, the laundromat on 6th Street, where she washed all the blankets, drank Mountain Dew and sat around watching music videos on the TV in the corner.
When she found out she was pregnant, she went straight to Smiley’s. She had no blankets to wash but she sat on the bench and felt the damp warmth from the driers waft towards her and the familiar hum of 75 washing machines vibrating. That day she drank Miller Lite and said hi to the few people she knew.
When Stefan found her, she was crouched in the corner with her hands across her knees. She was talking with another woman and laughing with her head back.
“Alice?” he said looking around him. “Have you been here all day?”
She turned at the mention of her name. “Hi, darling,” she said. “Hey, this is Winnie.” She pointed to the other woman. “Hi,” they both said together. “I was just telling Winnie here the Aussie expression for ‘knocked up’.” Both women laughed. Stefan frowned. Winnie, still laughing, said, “Up the bloody duff, mate,” in a terrible Australian accent. Alice raised her bottle. Up the fucking duff. Alice and Stefan went out for a meal a few days later to celebrate at an expensive little place around the corner from the hostel. And, when they got back to the little room they rented for almost nothing, he got down on one knee and asked her to be his wife. On the way home they had walked under a clear sky and could see the stars. There hadn’t been snow for a few days.
When Alice woke the next morning, she couldn’t remember what she’d eaten the night before, or the colour of the carpet. It was only when she glanced across at the green dress flung on the back of the chair that she remembered what she’d been wearing.
The day she told Stefan she didn’t want to have a baby was the day the city was struck by hailstones the size of her fist. They had just finished eating a huge stuffed jacket potato left over from a few evenings before. Stefan had said, “Do you think this has spoiled?” Alice was about to reply when the building resounded with a sonic clatter that lasted four seconds. When they both reached the sash window to look out, Alice thought, nothing’s
changed here. The streets were solid white ice. The road, usually wet-black even during the heaviest of snowfalls, was not even visible. No car, no garden was left uncovered. Alice wondered what the result would have been if she had stepped outside just at the moment of the crash.
“I want an abortion,” she said, both their hands placed on the windowsill as they looked down at the scene.
At precisely that moment, Stefan said, “God no!”
Alice never knew if he had exclaimed this because of what she had said, or the sudden shock of the record hail fall that damaged the city that day.
She was woken again by the voices from below. A friendly card game had turned into a heated argument. Alice heard so many different accents mingled together, she couldn’t unpick Liverpudlian from French, or Australian from Middle American.
She opened her eyes just enough to see outside to the slowly falling dusk; the most beautiful time of day in a polluted city. Dusk. She loved that word. Its connotations of pinks and oranges – and bleeding reds. They all combined to provide a backdrop more lovely than the ocean sunsets she knew well from home.
Alice remembered crawling into her mother’s bed when she was a child. When it was just the two of them. She kicked in her sleep and her mother bruised easily. Sometimes they went for weeks like that, sleeping side by side. Other times Alice would call out from her end of the house… “Mummy, Mum…” Over and over until she heard, “Yes?” “Can I come and sleep in your bed? I’ve had a bad dream.” “Yes. Don’t kick me.”
The first night after Alice had moved out from home, she cried to herself quietly under the covers, because she’d left her mother alone in the big family house. Through the haze she felt a quickening of panic and held her breath.
But Stefan always came back. He’s only gone for dinner. After a few seconds she breathed out once again.
He doesn’t know I stand at that window every afternoon, sometimes feeling the melted snow falling from the gutter above, and, if I lean out, sometimes catching the rays of sun as they filter through a stray cloud. Sometimes during thunderstorms I watch the lightning on the far horizon and imagine angry, black tornadoes sweeping across towards me and carrying me off.
“Alice wanted her MOTHER SO BADLY, she thought she might actually die”
But there were no tornadoes that day, only the slow-sweeping hum of traffic on the Avenue, and the whining of someone’s cat in the alleyway behind.
She imagined the city viewed from the distant and cold safety of those mountains: an amethyst nestled between jagged rock and then rudely cracked open to reveal its dazzling, purply brilliance. That day it still lay under a coating of snow as it spread below the cushion of the mountains. Noisy, complicated, hurried. No different from any other city except through its unique relationship with that arc of mountains and their rugged, protective stance.
The city streets were not so white though. Alice sat and pushed herself up from the mattress and could just see through the buildings to the buses making their way up and down 16th Street. Not so white where it’s been trampled by shoppers and commuters on their way to offices and stores. The snow turns grey and forbidding there, and slush builds up around the bases of street lamps. The fairy lights on the mall wait for the night to twinkle wearily under the weight of melting snowflakes. And life waits; it waits for that moment, that sudden dawning of the summer day when everyone can once again boast to tourists and relatives living in New York and Perth that their Denver sun sets on blue sky 300 days in every year.
Alice would have done it whether Stefan approved or not. She knew he could not even bring himself to say the word. And he was persuasive in his argument to love and cherish her forever, as he held her in the bath and cried. “If only,” he said. If only had come in the shape of an amethyst ring. He had searched second-hand shops for something he could afford. When Alice saw it, she had smiled and said, ”It’s lovely.” They had sipped from a six-pack of summer coolers and squeezed into their window alcove to watch the street.
She cried too, of course. There was no stopping her some days. Sitting on the covers of their bed, alone. Holding herself, and rocking. “I’m sorry,” she would say. “I’m sorry. Next time, I promise.” But nobody was listening, she feared. There was no one there to listen. And to such a poor apology.
“You don’t even want to give it a chance!” Stefan had said to her when he found her crying on the toilet. “Why can’t you be happy for God’s sake?”
Some days she spent the whole of the morning lying in the bath after Stefan had gone off to do his work. She would let out some of the water every half hour or so and refill the tub with hot. She would fall asleep for 25 minutes at a time and awake drowsy and confused and not quite sure what she was doing there.
Often she wandered down to the second-hand book shop on the corner and sat on the floor flipping through books on natural childbirth and macrobiotics and imagining she could do this; sometimes she looked at travel guides. She had even stopped drinking coffee in case it affected the baby. In case she changed her mind. The occasional can of Mountain Dew was a luxury now and she tried yoga techniques for pregnant woman, when she had never done yoga before.
“Just give it the weekend, okay?” Stefan had said as they drove south to a rental cottage in the mountains. She stared unfocused from the car window and tried to smile. Stefan smiled and rubbed her knee. “You’ll see,” he said. “You’ll see.”
She never did. But she heard when Stefan shouted at her after she’d darted through the front door and only just made it to the bathroom before throwing up her lunch. And she felt it when he tried to pull her from the bed the next morning by her feet, saying the sickness was all in her head and if she just got up, god damn it, she would be alright.
Alice wanted her mother so badly that weekend, she thought she might actually die. She couldn’t tell whether the pain was in her heart or in her belly, but she lay there cold on the old cottage bed and groaned and cried and rocked from side to side.
Stefan paced the room in front of her, yelling and pleading with her to stop. “Other women do it,” he said. “Other women do it. Why can’t you?”
Alice didn’t know why. But she thought death would have been better. So part of her lay there trying to die.
On the way back to the city, he stopped and left her in the car, to walk through the Garden of the Gods. He held up his hand as she went to get out of the car with him. She watched him wander off. He came back to the car with wet eyes as the sun was leaving its mark on the huge red boulders that defined the pathways of the park. They sat silent the rest of the way back.
Alice awoke once again from her dreams, to the sounds of shouting coming up through the drainpipe that lay beyond the wall at the head of the bed. Stefan was not back yet and it was past 10pm. Downstairs the card game had finally turned nasty. She could hear an American declaring that no queer collegeboy could tell him that he should never have done what he’d done. Alice sat up in bed and turned on the light.
When Stefan came in 15 minutes later, Alice noticed that the building was silent for the first time that night. They lay side by side and Stefan fell straight to sleep after asking about her evening. “Oh I just read and watched some telly. And slept.” It’s all too easy, she thought. It’s just too easy. But Alice stayed awake, eyes open, until just before dawn. Three weeks later, Alice sat and finished her can of Mountain Dew. Stefan walked in and picked up the last of their luggage. She got up and placed the empty can on the table. He turned to her as he struggled with her bags. “Have you done a final check? You always leave something behind,” he said.