A Story of Now

Claire takes a deep breath and dials the number. She breathes as steadily as she can through the short voice mail message, nervously awaits the beep, and plunges in.

“Uh, hey, I’m just calling again to tell you Rhiannon—the little girl from the lake—her mum called my mum. Apparently Rhiannon is fine. She’s just going to have to have her arm in a cast for a while. And her mum said to say thank you, again. So…uh…anyway, I just thought you might want to know.” She bites down her lip until it hurts, urgently trying to decide which way to go next. “Anyway, I hope your grandmother is okay too. Um, okay, I’m going to go. Maybe call me if you, I don’t know, want to catch up sometime?” She cringes and grips the edge of her doona. “Bye.”

She hurriedly hangs up the phone before she can say anything else dumb. She pushes her face into the pillow and blushes even though no one else can see her.

Catch up. It sounds so ridiculous given this new direction their relationship has taken—or not taken. But she didn’t know what else to say in her desperation to sound casual, to not let on just how much Mia’s sudden silence has thrown her. She pulls the covers over her head, curses loudly, and wishes she could take that message back and start again.

Maybe if she weren’t so hungover, she would have been better at it. And maybe if she weren’t so crazily fixed on the fact that she hasn’t heard anything from Mia that she can’t seem to hold a sane thought in her head, she might have come up with something better.

She slowly pulls the covers down, blinks into the muted morning light of her bedroom, and listens to the remote sounds of her mother as she charges around the house. She has a day off, and Claire is supposed to go to lunch with her today. Any minute now, she’ll rap on Claire’s bedroom door to tell her to get ready. And more than most days, Claire wishes she didn’t have to. All she wants to do is lie right here and stew on the fact that Mia didn’t pick up the phone when Claire called. Again.

They haven’t seen each other since the lake. And it’s been six days. Six whole, impossible, nerve-wracking days of Claire putting out tentative feelers and Mia doing nothing in response. Well, barely anything. And it’s been six days of Claire freaking out more and more about it.

In fact, they haven’t even spoken since the day they left the lake, after her parents unexpectedly turned up. That experience was awkward as hell, and Claire knows it’s partly her fault that it was so uncomfortable. But how could it not have been? When she’d just asked Mia to stay there another night with her and most definitely not to hold hands and play Scrabble. And then her parents show up? And then to turn around and introduce her as a new friend? Not ideal. Claire also knows she didn’t do much to make that encounter any easier. But she couldn’t. She was too paralysed by their sudden, invasive presence to do anything but merely function.

And that awkwardness stayed with them as they drove back to the real world again, leaving behind the bubble of their short, glorious little holiday. Claire climbed into the car that morning harried and annoyed by her mother’s last-minute round of reminders and instructions. It was as if Claire had never made the drive between the lake and home before, as if she didn’t know the blind spots on the roads, or she didn’t know to disable the security alarm back home in Melbourne or anything else her mother felt the need to remind her of.

She was in a foul mood by the time she got in the car. But once on the road, she took in a deep breath and then turned to Mia and smiled.

“I’m sorry. My mother makes me a little tense.”

“That’s okay.” Mia smiled and stared at the road ahead. “She seems like an intense person.”

And that’s all she said. And that’s all Claire could bring herself to say too. For the rest of the drive home, they didn’t talk about anything to do with what had passed between them, let alone touch or look at each other. In fact, they were mostly silent. Claire played music to quiet the silence, but it was still irrepressibly there.

Then, when they finally arrived at Mia’s house, and it was time for goodbyes, Mia’s father was out on the footpath. They’d given him uncomfortable waves as he approached the car and greeted them exuberantly. He didn’t even notice the mood, just asked about the trip and helped Mia with her bag as Blue jumped and whimpered with excitement.

All Mia gave Claire in that moment was a quick smile and goodbye and told her she’d talk to her soon. Then she turned and walked inside with her father without looking back.

Claire rolls onto her back and contemplates getting up to nip her mother’s nag in the bud. But she really doesn’t want to. If Claire has her way, she’ll lie in bed all day and stew and wait. That’s all she wants to do right now.

And it feels as though, if Mia has her way, they will just lapse into silence altogether. For the umpteenth time in the last few days, Claire scrolls back over her messages between them since they got back from the lake, the few that there are.

She sent the first one a couple of days after they got back after she hadn’t heard anything. Unsure what this sudden protracted silence meant, she sent it to Mia just to gauge her response.

My mother didn’t say a single thing about the state of the house. We must have actually done a good cleaning job.

The response was brief. Ha, I’m glad.

Then there is another message a couple of days later when, embarrassingly unnerved by Mia’s three-word response followed by days of silence, she sent another trivial message.

My mother just used the word potential in a lecture eight times in ten minutes.

This time the response doesn’t arrive for eleven hours. Wow. Highly annoying, but actually kind of impressive.

I know, right?

But then nothing.

As she scrolls through the next couple of days, she only sees messages from Robbie, Nina, and Cam. She didn’t hear anything else from Mia until Friday. That was the day after Claire cracked and tried to call her. But, getting Mia’s brief, cheerful voice mail, Claire backed out and hung up at the last minute.

Later that day, Mia messaged.

Hey, sorry, my grandmother is in hospital, and we had to go up and see her this weekend. Back Sunday night.

That message calmed Claire a little. But it was only temporary because now it’s Tuesday, and she still hasn’t heard a word. And she’s too scared to call again after this morning’s clumsy message.

But it freaks Claire out because she knows it’s a change. A significant one. She knows if she were to scroll back to the time before the lake, she’d see at least a message a day, if not more, between the two of them. Not now.

She keeps reviewing every single moment they spent together. What does it mean? Is Mia completely regretting it now? Or was it nothing to her? It didn’t seem like nothing. And Mia certainly didn’t treat it like nothing at the time.

That night at the lake Claire feels as though she went over a precipice and she—maybe stupidly—assumed Mia had gone over with her. But maybe she didn’t. Does Mia regret this thing they started? This thing Mia started but now seems to have stopped participating in?

Claire thumps her phone against the covers a couple of times, contemplative. These short, polite messages throw Claire. She’s not used to such brevity or distance from Mia. And she isn’t used to it in her romantic life either. Guys who are interested in her are usually pretty persistent, a response to Claire’s knee-jerk cold shoulder act, which is her usual means of testing the water and their interest.

She didn’t even think to do that with Mia. But now it seems Mia’s doing the silent thing to her. And Claire’s fairly certain Mia isn’t doing it for the same reason. She’s way too nice for that. So, Claire has spent hours turning this over and over in her mind, wondering why. And now she’s frightened that maybe this thing isn’t as serious for Mia as it feels as though it might be for her.

Claire has stewed over this last message, particularly. The one that said she’d be back on Sunday. Didn’t that mean Mia would call when she got back? She hasn’t yet. Then she chastises herself for being crazy about it and tries to force herself to chill, which is why she made herself go out with Nina for a drink last night. It was no fun, though. In fact, she was so anxious and despondent, she nearly told Nina everything. But all Nina wanted to do was dance and check out guys and for Claire to join in. And Claire suffered through it, receiving an unwanted phone number and a hangover for her troubles.

And Mia didn’t call. So, she still feels anxious and despondent. With this hangover, she adds sick and tired to the mix too. And her clumsy message this morning might be the last bit of brave she has left. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if she continues to hear nothing.

She rolls over on the mattress, too committed to her misery to move. This silence has frightened her in a way no silence ever has before. And she hates it.

At first she thought maybe Mia needed some space or some time away from her after the intensity of those few days. Because it was intense. And it’s not as though Claire isn’t feeling those aftershocks too. Every now and then, between her anxieties over Mia’s silence, Claire runs her mind over the fact she’s so deeply, perplexingly attracted to a girl in a way she’s never been attracted to anyone before. Her thoughts touch on the seismic shifts that this is likely to set off in her life but then abandons them. For now, she can’t bring herself to care such is her need to make sense of her and Mia. But to do that Claire feels as if she needs Mia in her actual sights. It’s a pity Mia’s not cooperating with that one.

Fighting tears, Claire squeezes her eyes shut and wishes she could backpedal right into sleep and erase this morning, maybe even erase this week. But when the loud knock on her door sounds, when the call to arms comes, she knows she doesn’t have a chance in hell of either of those options.