“All right, mate?”
Dean blinked back a glitter of tears as the foreman’s calloused hand settled on his shoulder. The pine’s grain swam back into focus. He’d been doing it again. That thing where his mind wandered away to a dark, distant place he didn’t have a map for. He cleared his throat and busied himself with his tool belt.
“All good, Jim.” Dean scrubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. “Last of the framing and she’ll be right for the sparkies to come through tomorrow.” He raised his hammer, all productivity and performance. He could feel Jim’s shrewd gaze on his back as he drove a nail into the timber.
“You don’t need to be here, Deano,” Jim said finally. His words were soft around the edges, a stark contrast to his usual jobsite bellow. “Enzo can finish off. Why don’t you call it a day, hey mate? Maybe go and see Wendy. How long’s it been now? Or that therapist they put you in touch with. Couldn’t hurt.”
Couldn’t hurt. Oh, but it could. It hurt every goddamn minute of every goddamn day. The pain was excruciating—an intolerable blanket of sorrow so heavy he felt he was suffocating under its weight. Dean hammered another nail into the framework.
“Just think about it, okay?” Jim gave Dean’s shoulder a rough final squeeze. “When the black dog starts nipping atcha heels, you really need to speak to the experts. ‘Specially with…well, ‘specially with what you’ve been through.”
The foreman’s boots crunched over gravel. Dean waited until he heard the ute door slam and Jim’s engine rumble to life before lowering his hammer. His head felt too heavy for his shoulders; his eyeballs too large for their sockets. Christ, how long had it been since he’d had a decent night’s sleep?
You know the answer to that, the insidious voice whispered. Nine months, two weeks, three days, eight hours…
The voice came all the time now. Sometimes it was a sly whisper-chuckle in the nocturnal hours between god-knew-when and dawn, when the morning grey leeched through his window stretching sinister shadows across the ceiling. Other times it was a booming roar, or a relentless I-know-what-you-did chant that settled in for the day—the world’s ugliest earworm. And sometimes—oh, God—sometimes it was Owen’s voice he heard, screaming for him from the darkest chamber of his mind.
The voice was the song of grief and guilt. A ghost that swarmed and seethed, rattling its chains with ‘what ifs’ and ‘whys’ and ‘if onlys’.
Dean’s hands shook as he reholstered his hammer. He needed a drink.
He manoeuvered his car into one of the parallel parks outside the strip of shops close to home. Well, it wasn’t home. Not really. Home was the three bedroom brick and tile house he’d shared with Wendy and Owen. Not the dog box of a studio he’d moved into when he and Wendy couldn’t find their way back to each other. The fog was too thick; Wendy’s tears too raw; his drinking too escalatory.
The day she’d swept an armload of empty bottles from the coffee table onto the tiled loungeroom floor as he sat staring glaze-eyed at the blank TV screen was the day she’d told him to leave. She’d stood among the shattered glass in bare feet, oblivious to the bloody footprints she made as she paced around him like a wild animal, teeth bared, nostrils flared.
Dean’s grief was a deep dive down a dark hole of despair, a soul-sucking static, but Wendy…Wendy’s was a physical thing—a twisting torrent of emotion that could not be contained. It spilled from her, spitting and snarling, turning her inside out with its pathos, then seizing her in thorn-forged arms and carrying her to a prison he couldn’t breach.
“You’re killing yourself! Killing us!” She’d screamed at him, her face contorted with anguish. “Just like you killed—” She clapped a hand to her mouth.
The stale scent of beer stung Dean’s nostrils. He couldn’t meet Wendy’s eyes, so he fixed his gaze on the cherry birthmark that bruised her forehead like a little kiss. How many times he’d kissed it himself over the years…
And then she was throwing a bag at him, throwing him out…even as he was throwing up.
The bell above the liquor store tinkled as Dean pushed it open. As he stepped into the store, he felt a velvety nuzzle against the back of his calf. He gave his leg a shake, and glanced behind him.
“Jelly?” The name escaped his lips in an incredulous whisper.
The attendant looked up from the counter. “Alright, Deano? Got a special on craft beer this week if you wanna try something diff’rent. Local brew from that new Dromana taphouse. Otherwise, VB’s in the usual spot.”
Dean may as well have been underwater. The words floated somewhere above him on a distant surface. His focus was on the small blue elephant at his heels.
It stroked his leg with its trunk again, where his fluorescent yellow sock met his bare skin. Dean could see the top of the elephant’s felt head was threadbare from countless strokes by chubby-fingered hands. The trunk that tapped his leg a third time was misshapen at the tip, comfort-chewed over the years until stuffing threatened to bulge from its strained threads. The white plush tusks framing it were grubby at their tips.
The blue elephant was unmistakably—impossibly—Jelly.
Dean’s heart jackhammered in his chest. He looked around to see if anyone else could see what he could, but the store was mostly empty. An old lady paid for a bottle of Moscato at the counter; two girls in skinny-leg jeans were engrossed in the bottled pre-mixed spirits in the glass-doored fridges. He glanced back down. Jelly was gone.
Dean lurched to the rear of the store and shouldered his way into the cold room. He grabbed a carton of VB from the shelf and carried it to the counter.
“The usual it is, then!” The attendant gave Dean a cheerful wink, as he scanned the barcode.
As an afterthought, Dean picked up a bottle of bourbon from the specials selection next to the till. “And this.”
If there was ever a day to ramp oblivion up a notch, this was it.
Dean woke from his nightmare, sweating and sour-breathed. He ran a shaking hand over his eyes, as if he could remove the imagery of his dream—Owen, sitting in the front seat with Daddy like a big boy. Just this once, okay? Click goes the seatbelt. Buckle Jelly in too. Stopping at the traffic lights. See the red light? That means stop. Green again, that means go. Off they go and go and go. But wait… Another car. Sailing through the intersection. Too fast, too fast… Crunch of metal, tangled chrome, time stands still, but Owen…is he flying? Fade to black.
Count to three, Owen, and everything will be okay. Oh please, oh please, oh God. Ready? One. Two…
Three. The same age his beautiful boy had been when the impact sent him flying forward into the dashboard.
Dean croaked a sob. His tongue felt as if he’d licked the bottom of a bird cage. A drill bit bored into the soft tissue behind his eyes. Even the luminous glow from his clock radio hurt as he glanced to check the time. 2:06am.
He reached for the bottle of bourbon he’d left by the bed, but it was empty. He groaned and rolled back onto the mattress. A weight settled on his chest. In the clock’s thin artificial light he made out a blue silhouette with large flappy ears. The elephant’s head was tilted on a slight angle as if it were regarding him with curiosity…or was it pity?
“Jelly.” Dean’s tears were hot twin rivers down his cheeks. A soft trunk stretched out to gently blot them, and Dean scooped his son’s favourite toy into his arms, rolled over and hugged him to his face. He inhaled Jelly’s scent—soap and milk and drool and bedtime stories—and howled his pain into his fur.
When he woke to the song of warbling magpies and the rumble of the rubbish truck, Jelly was gone.
On the job site, Jelly was back. And the next day, and the next. The small blue elephant, trotted behind him whether he was wheeling barrowloads of bricks, queued at the smoko truck, or taking a piss in the port-a-loo. Its trunk reached and snuffled, and sometimes—when Dean stood still—wrapped around his leg in a felt-soft hug.
Dean kept stealing glances around him to see if any of the fellows on the jobsite could see Jelly, but they just carried on as normal.
Normal? Dean mused. This is not normal. Jelly simply cannot be here. And he knew this to be true because Jelly was permanently positioned on the pillow on Owen’s bed. Wendy had refused to change the sheets, and, while the door to Owen’s bedroom remained closed, over the months they had both entered it, seeking separate versions of solace as Jelly watched on with glass eyes. In the week after they lost Owen, they had debated what to do: Dean had suggested Jelly be buried with Owen. The boy had never been without his comfort toy, and he couldn’t bear the thought of him lonely in the afterlife. Wendy had railed against this, saying Jelly was the closest thing they had left of Owen. Dean had relented—if there was only one small thing he could do for his wife whose happiness he’d destroyed, he would gladly oblige.
At knock off, Dean trudged back to his car, his pulse already rising at the thought of cracking the top off a cold beer. Jelly jogged behind him, his trunk tap-tap-tapping at his heel. Almost nipping with his urgency.
Jim’s words clanged in his mind: When the black dog starts nipping atcha heels, you really need to speak to the experts.
Was his son’s blue elephant Dean’s version of the black dog?
The thought halted him in his tracks.
If that was the case then he owed his son’s memory more than the empty shell of the man he’d become.
He opened his car and rummaged through the glove box. The card had to be there somewhere. The kind murmur of the funeral director as she pressed it into his hand was a tattered memory, but he had a vague recollection of tossing it where all other superfluous paperwork ended up.
He found it wedged between his service manual and a receipt from the liquor store. Mornington Peninsula MindCare: Grief and Loss Counselling was stamped on the card in gold embossed script.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed the number listed beneath with a trembling finger. A pleasant voice answered the phone on the second ring.
“There,” he said to Jelly who sat on his haunches at his feet. “Appointment made.” Dean went to put his phone back in his pocket, then paused. He brought up Wendy’s number and stared at the screen for a long time. Would she even want to talk to him? What if she hung up in his ear, or worse, didn’t pick up at all.
Jelly waved his trunk emphatically.
Dean took a deep breath and pressed Wendy’s number. She answered on the fifth ring.
“Wendy.” It was all he could trust himself to say.
“Dean?” Wendy’s voice was quiet, cautious. “What—”
“Do you…do you think it would be okay if I came over? Just to talk. I won’t stay long, Wend. If you don’t think it’s a good idea, I understand…”
The silence that followed felt endless.
Then, “I think that would be okay. I…I’ve missed you, Dean.”
He raised his eyes to the heavens as tears spilled down his cheeks, then looked back down at Jelly.
But the little blue elephant had vanished.