Maybe Baby: One Small Miracle

‘How’s your mother?’ Such a mundane question, but she had to start somewhere. And when she saw his face shut down before he spoke, it felt as if she’d used a key to a door she hadn’t known existed.

‘Fine. She’s getting married.’

‘Oh,’ she said, feeling blank. Though she was a very attractive woman, Pauline West hadn’t even seen a man since Jared’s father’s death sixteen years ago. ‘When?’

‘Six weeks.’ Jared’s voice was flat. ‘His name’s Michael Anglesey. He’s another failed farmer—she must have a thing for them. They want to marry at Mundabah Flats, and take up running the place again. She wants me to give her away—and she’s asked for enough money to start the place going again.’

‘Well, what’s the problem? We can afford it,’ she replied without thinking. Reverting to thinking of them as Jared and Anna, King and Queen of Jarndirri, was just so easy.

In the tic at his jaw she saw another multi-hued silence, resonating like glass about to shatter. Resisting the urge to touch his hand—so much tension in him, he’d never returned to the West property of Mundabah since his father had died, even though he’d poured money hand over fist to make the property thrive—she stuck to the simple questions. ‘How do you feel about her marrying, and them running Mundabah?’

‘I don’t want the place. Someone might as well run it.’ He shrugged. ‘We land soon.’ Shutting the door on her again, as always.

‘Fine,’ she said tightly. ‘I’ll go sit in the back with Melanie.’

Jared made a harsh sound as she unbuckled her seat belt again, needing distance. ‘What do you want me to say, Anna?’

‘Nothing.’ She forced blandness into her tone, as if she wasn’t burning with the betrayal of his unconscious rejection. ‘I don’t want anything from you but a few lies.’ Nothing you’ve ever been willing to give. ‘We pretend we’re back together until Melanie’s either back with Rosie or the adoption has gone through, and then I’m gone.’

‘That’s not the deal.’

She sighed, standing between the two front seats. ‘You’re not going to say it, are you? You want me to say it for you, make life easy, just as I always have?’

‘I want you to talk, Anna,’ he said quietly. A double-edged sword in six words. Saying everything and nothing at all.

‘Yeah, well, we all want someone to talk to us,’ she mocked, ‘and some of us had it, and some of us got nothing.’ Silence greeted her taunt, and she snapped. ‘Fine, I’ll talk, but I doubt you’ll want to hear it. You want me back in your bed until I leave. You want me to pretend for the sake of the workers and our neighbours I’m back for good, that I’m madly in love with you, and we’re going to make a family with Melanie. Okay, whatever.’ She snorted out a laugh, and shrugged. ‘I can put on a show—I might even enjoy the sex, it always was a good stress relief when you drove me crazy with your silence—but that’s all it will be. If you’re expecting to make me love you again, forget it. It’s dead, Jared—dead.’

She forced her gaze to stay on him, her chin up. Did her hammering heart show the truth: the lady doth protest too much? She might not love him any more—only heaven knew how she felt about anything but Melanie right now—but on a purely physical level she still wanted him, ached for his touch. She hadn’t wanted it at all after the hysterectomy—it felt too much like a farce, trying to pretend she was a normal woman still. But some time in the past five months since she’d left him, her body had awoken again.

Probably with that first kiss he’d planted on her when he’d come to Broome.

As if he’d heard her thoughts, he said coolly, ‘You keep telling yourself that—but you kissed me back yesterday. And the time before that, and the time before that.’

A sigh came out from between clenched teeth. ‘It’s been over a year since I slept with anyone, and you’re the only man I’ve been with—you made sure of that. What else do I know but you? What else can I compare you to? I’m the Mrs West. I’ve been untouchable in the eyes of almost everyone in the Kimberleys from the time I was fifteen.’

Slowly, as if he’d thought about her words before they’d come, he said, ‘And I’ve been the Mr Curran since I was eighteen.’

She sighed. ‘As usual, you’ve taken my point and changed its direction to suit you. Tell me, did you always equate sex with love, Jared? Did you ever know me at all? In all the years you took my love for granted, from fifteen to now, did you ever ask yourself if I was happy, or if the life you wanted and planned for us both was what I wanted out of life?’

‘Sit down and strap in, Anna, we’re approaching the runway,’ was his only answer, as he began pushing the wheel forward, leading by the nose.

The plane lost altitude, making her sit abruptly. She looked out over the wide red land with its patches of cultivated grass for the animals, brown and dry from early summer, not yet green with the drenching of the Wet. The house, creamy yellow with the rust-red tin roof, sat like a proud island of beauty in the wild, arid surrounds. It sat there in pride and defiance against the odds and the elements.

Jarndirri: home and yet not, a place where happiness had always seemed to elude her. Always trying to be perfect, and always failing. How could she have lived here almost all her life, miss it so much when she wasn’t here, and yet always return with such a feeling of conflicted fatalism? Had the stones judged her unworthy of a normal life here?

‘Look, Anna. Look at the beauty, the perfection,’ Jared said as she clipped herself in. He swept his hand around the intense, wild beauty. ‘How could you not be happy here? What else did you—what more could you want from life than what we have?’

Intense loneliness filled her at the incredulity in his question. That was it, the conflict that lay between them. Jarndirri was everything to him; how could she want more, apart from raising a family? To him there was nothing more. Jared loved Jarndirri, would have loved Adam, had he lived. But he’d never loved her. She was The Curran, the means to the life he wanted … especially once she’d responded to his kiss, after Lea hadn’t.

‘What I wanted then is immaterial,’ she said over the roar of the landing plane, refusing to indulge in self-pity. ‘What I want now also seems immaterial.’

He waited until he’d slowed the engine speed to a crawl before he spoke. ‘It’s immaterial to me, you mean?’

She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. If I have Melanie, I can put up with the rest.’

The plane moved gently into the open hangar. ‘Would you like to spell out what “the rest” is?’ he asked, in a tone bordering on dangerous: his don’t go there voice. But he was asking—and she felt reckless. Too many years wasted, playing the Golden Girl, first for Dad and then for Jared. Being what everyone wanted, until she no longer knew who she was.

Now she didn’t have to. She’d lost everything she’d ever wanted.

It was time to take back, to have a life that belonged to her, not hemmed in and surrounded by the expectations or happiness of others.

‘Life in a house with people who expect me to be The Curran, just like my father. Life on a property so isolated the loneliness became my only friend, the only one I could talk to.’ She turned away from the look in his eyes, as hard as coal crystallising into a diamond, and just as black. ‘Being tied to a man who wants things I can never give, and has never given me the one thing I truly want.’

‘There’s one thing you want, asleep behind us,’ he replied in a voice so cold she shuddered beneath the ice he poured on her. ‘If Rosie doesn’t come back, I’ll be committing perjury to give you what you want, despite the sugar coating you put on it. Little white lies are worth prison time if anyone finds out.’

‘Yes,’ she managed to say, feeling small and almost sick at his ruthless ripping apart of her delusions. ‘But while I’m truly grateful, I don’t want to sleep with you again.’

‘I don’t remember saying I expected that—or that I wanted it.’

At his cool, amused tone, a heat far drier than the steam-room kind seeping into the plane now the engine was off scorched her cheeks. ‘You kissed me like that. I guess I assumed it’s what you wanted.’

He lifted one shoulder: his I couldn’t care less shrug. ‘I thought you wanted to come back. Jarndirri’s half yours—and you’re the real Curran. Kissing used to make you happy.’

Swallowing the unexpected lump in her throat, she closed her eyes and willed control. Why did she ever bandy words with him, or expect to get her point across? His few words could always slay her into silence. ‘All right, Jared. You win,’ she said wearily. ‘You always do.’

Jared swore with efficient fluency, rough and angry. ‘Anna, that isn’t what I wanted.’

Too numb to get into an argument she knew she’d only lose, she muttered, ‘Then why won’t you look me in the eye when you say it?’

Silence met her reluctant challenge.

She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. You always end up getting everything you want, one way or another. I don’t think you could stand to lose at anything.’ When he turned to look at her then, moving closer as if to touch her, hold her—knowing it always softened her—she shook her head. ‘Can you please see if it’s clear to go into the house?’ she whispered, fighting tears with everything she had. She’d shed enough for a lifetime.

After a moment that hung between them like a corpse, he swore again and climbed out of the cockpit, stalking to the house across the half-acre of yard that had once been her little veggie patch in dry season.

To her surprise, Jared walked in the straight lines of the plough, because her little patch of ground wasn’t dead. There were green shoots of carrots, the lumps for potatoes and onion, and full heads of broccoli and cabbage everywhere.

She was surprised someone had cared enough to plant more. It was probably Mrs Button, who appreciated that they didn’t have to fly in vegetables every week.

Lifting Melanie out of the car seat, she cuddled the baby and waited in the shadows of the hangar until Jared returned. She wasn’t in a hurry to go back to the house: the beautiful pale yellow homestead with double-glazed windows and wide verandahs that had been her mother’s and grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s home before her, but had never felt like hers.

So many Currans had lived at Jarndirri, with so much history—so much of it forever unspoken. Strong women had married tough, silent men who had worked the land, struggled against the elements and illness, women who’d borne their children in the rooms inside that house because doctors hadn’t existed out here. The Curran women were the perfect complements for their men. Even her mother had taken six long years to surrender to the breast cancer that had killed her, and had only taken to her bed after four of those years. Until then she’d worked the land, run the house, looked after their staff and cared for her daughters, even given birth to her, Anna—she’d been given the breast cancer diagnosis when she’d been pregnant.

And she, the last Curran woman, had only ever felt like a fake. Less than a woman, less than strong, bonded to the land in a love-hate relationship because it had taken the only thing she’d ever wanted from her. She’d even risked her life to try one final time for a child when the doctors had advised against it, because Jared needed a son.

‘They’ve all gone.’

Jared’s voice soaked into her consciousness like the history of this, the land she loved and loathed—and she wondered when he’d become a part of that love and loss and hate. She nodded. ‘Go and do what you have to. I’ll get the bags once Melanie’s settled.’ Words as dead and emotionless as her heart felt.