Three Wishes

Relax, Mum, they used to tell her. Poor Mum.

“I smacked her quite hard.”

“I expect she deserved it. You know what this proves?”

“What?” Lyn had gone back to the chopping board. So much for shared parenting values.

“It’s time for us to breed again! She’s ready for a sister or brother.”

Lyn snorted. “Right. So she can have someone to abuse on a daily basis.”

“I mean it. She’s the sort of kid who needs brothers and sisters. We did say we’d start trying this year. That was the five-year plan if you recall.”

Lyn didn’t answer.

Michael’s tone turned teasing. “I’m sure you’ve got it written down somewhere.”

Of course she had it written down. She’d planned to go off the Pill after her next period.

Lyn pushed the garlic into a neat little hill and poured oil into the wok. “Yes, well, obviously that’s got to be put on hold now.”

“What do you mean obviously?”

“Cat, of course.”

“Oh, Cat, of course.”

“Imagine how she’d feel if I just happily announced I was having a baby.”

“So how long do we put our life on hold for?”

“As long as necessary.”

“That’s ridiculous. What if Cat takes months to get pregnant again? Or has another miscarriage?”

“Don’t say that.”

She couldn’t understand why this wasn’t as black-and-white obvious to him as it was to her.

Lyn put the garlic into the hot oil and it sizzled and popped excitedly, while Michael lifted Maddie off his feet and allowed her to go running off on some mission.

“You’re serious.”

“I told you. The other day with Gemma and Mum, she was just, I don’t know. When we were sitting there eating bun, she had exactly the same sort of surprised hurt expression on her face that she got when Mum and Dad sat us down in the living room and told us they were getting a divorce. I’ve never forgotten it. Her little face just crumpled.”

“Well, your little face probably crumpled too.”

“I don’t know if it did or not. That’s just my memory of it. Cat’s face.”

“So. Do you think Cat would do the same for you if the situations were reversed?”

“Yep.”

“I bet she bloody well wouldn’t.”

“I bet she bloody well would.”

Kara appeared in the kitchen. “Yum, it smells good in here. I’m starved to death!”

Lyn’s eyes met Michael’s in shared surprise at this unexpected cheeriness.

“Shall I set the table?”

Michael’s mouth dropped.

“Thanks,” said Lyn, trying for the nonfussy, not-too-enthusiastic tone that Cat seemed to use so effectively with Kara.

“No problemo.”

She opened a cupboard door and began pulling down plates.

Michael gestured wildly and silently at Lyn. “Drugs?” he mouthed frantically, doing something peculiar to his forearm that was presumably meant to be his imitation of somebody injecting a vein.

Lyn rolled her eyes.

Kara closed the cupboard door. “What are you doing, Dad?”

“Oh! Just—you know!”

“You are such an idiot.”

Michael looked relieved and nodded agreeably.

“Mummy!” Maddie toddled back into the kitchen, an expression of perplexed delight on her face. “Look!”

She held up two copies of Good Night, Little Bear.

Lyn said, “Fancy that!” and Maddie plunked down onto her bottom with both books in front of her, her head turning back and forth, as she flipped each page, intent on solving this mystery. The smell of frying garlic filled the kitchen and Michael chomped on a piece of capsicum and the ghost of his childhood dimple dented his cheek as he happily poured too much soy sauce into the stir-fry. Kara rattled efficiently through the drawer for knives and forks and her bare shoulders were young and tanned with skinny white lines from her swimsuit. And for just a moment, in spite of all the reasons not to feel happy (like the sinister bruise of worry over today’s parking lot incident), Lyn experienced an unexpectedly lovely unfurling of happiness.

It didn’t last, of course.

Michael became overexcited by Kara’s sunshiny mood and asked too many offensive questions, like, “So! What have you been up to?” causing her to slump with disgust and ask if she could please eat her dinner in peace and quiet in front of the TV.

After dinner, Maddie had a sudden revelation that her nightly bath was actually a physically painful experience, tantamount to torture. At Michael’s insistence, Lyn finally succumbed to the ferocity of her tantrum and let her go to bed dirty, which went against all of her deepest-held beliefs about personal hygiene and good discipline.

And when the house was finally quiet and Michael and Lyn were settled around the dining room table with coffee and Tim Tams and their respective laptops, Lyn started to tell Michael about what happened in the parking lot and found she couldn’t find the right words.

She could have found the right words if it had happened to someone else. In fact, she’d be the first one offering a diagnosis. “You weren’t having a heart attack, silly!” she’d say and then she’d tell them that they almost certainly had a—and she’d use the words with such calmly knowledgeable, pseudo-psychologist, women’s-magazine authority—panic attack. Yes, a panic attack, which was really nothing to worry about. Oh, she’d be so enthusiastically sympathetic, so know-it-all, typical Lyn. She’d explain how she’d read all about these “attacks” and they were really quite common and there were techniques you could learn to deal with them.

But they weren’t meant to happen to her. Other, more fragile people were meant to have panic attacks. People in need of looking after. O.K., if she was being completely honest—slightly silly people.

Not Lyn.

An event occurred. You flicked through your mental filing case of potential emotional responses and you chose the appropriate response. That was emotional intelligence, that was personal development, that was Lyn’s specialty. So why was she suddenly having a panic attack over not finding an exit and forgetting to buy cockroach spray?

Maybe it was something medical.

Maybe she should talk to a doctor about it.