Hello Stranger

“Better. So much better.”

That choked up my words in my throat, and I smiled, mute. Smiled with the burn in my chest. Smiled with the urge to break like the little boy she’d held in her arms all those years ago.

Unfortunately, that flare in Mum’s deteriorating darkness didn’t last all that long. She stroked the beast for a few long minutes until she was spent, exhausted and fading in her seat.

Jason took some pictures on my phone before we left, but we were done shortly afterwards and ready to leave the day behind us.

“Thank you,” I said to the keeper. “I appreciate it.”

“Glad I could help,” he replied, and led me on out of there.

The drive home was a long one. Mum’s oxygen kept on pumping, but she was slumped, exhausted, and my brain had time to spin on its axis. Grinding the gears.

I felt strangely alone and strangely vulnerable in that seat behind the steering wheel. Strangely human, in the face of being so cold.

And strangely like I wanted to be sitting back in that train seat with the freckle-faced girl sitting opposite. One day without her, and I was feeling it – void of my one flash of fantasy in the grey.

I needed it.

Needed her.

Needed that flare of light in my own deteriorating reality.

Insanity knows no limits, and it was exceeding all of mine, whirling around the rational and stamping it down.

Chloe was there in my thoughts, blurring with the beauty of Mum’s day. I wondered if she would have enjoyed meeting Wellington as much as we had, and if she’d ever seen an elephant before.

Maybe she loved them?

Maybe she had even half of the elephant ornaments my mother had dotted all over her room.

Maybe she liked giraffes instead? Or penguins? Or dolphins?

I wondered if she’d like Pilsner. I wondered if she’d have smiled along with my mum and been just as excited to see the signs on the road.

But it didn’t matter. That’s what I had to keep telling myself.

It didn’t matter because I’d never know.

I roused Mum once we we’d pulled onto the driveway, and Olivia helped me upstairs with her, then settled her down to sleep. I left them to it until Olivia was out of the front door, then headed on through to Mum’s bedroom.

She pointed up at the list at the wall as soon as I stepped inside, and cleared her throat before she spoke.

“Put a tick up next to it, please.”

“We’re ticking them off, are we? Actually ticking them off?”

She nodded with a grin. “Yep, we sure are. We’re ticking them off, alright. One down.”

“You’d better keep that pulse beating until we get to complete the list, then,” I said.

“Better meet up with Amy then, and get that last one ticked off,” she winked. “Or you’ll have to put up with me for bloody years.”

“You’d better buckle up for the long haul.” I winked back. “You’ll be hanging on a long damn time if you’re counting on that last one being ticked.”

I looked at that list afresh. One of them down, another load to come.

Meet an elephant.

Climb a mountain.

Ride the back of a motorcycle around a sharp corner.

Put my toes in the sea.

Get a daughter-in-law.

She squeezed my hand, and I knew what was coming. I’d heard it so many times before.

“Why won’t you let someone love you?” she asked me. “Please, Logan, just tell me. Why won’t you let yourself fall in love?”

But I couldn’t tell her.

I didn’t want to.

She knew I wouldn’t give her an answer and sighed.

“Please,” she said again. “I don’t want to leave you here alone. Don’t make me, please. That’s the most important thing of all on my list, that I don’t have to leave you alone.”

I squeezed her hand back but didn’t speak, and she sighed again.

“All those nights it was me holding you, the strength in your storm when you were just a tiny little boy, and now you’re the strength in mine. You’re doing a damn good job of it, darling.”

“It’s my pleasure,” I said, and she looked up at me with enough love to slam my chest.

“It was mine, too,” she said. “Seeing you pull through the storm and being a part of that strength was the greatest pleasure there could ever be.”

I laughed. “Even greater a pleasure than meeting Wellington the elephant?”

She laughed along with me. “Even greater a pleasure than that. It was a bloody good pleasure though.” She paused, and gestured up to the shelf behind her head. “Grab me that elephant picture down, will you?”

I pulled down the postcard and handed it over.

“I never really thought I might meet one. Thought I’d be long dead and gone before I had the chance.”

“Very honoured I could help,” I said.

I was staring at the postcard while she stared at me. I could feel it. That all out beam of love in her eyes.