Jack held Timmy's hand as they ran towards the gate. Dave was pulling in the ute for the day. The sun was sinking low in the sky and the two little boys chattered to each other, crossing the dirt that used to be lawn to greet their dad. Dave would be hot and tired from a day spent in the dusty paddocks.
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Lavinia sighed deeply, in the momentary quiet.
Her breath flooded her lungs and her chest expanded, drawing her awareness to the heaviness that she carried upon her, like a cloak.
It seemed that she communicated in sighs rather than words now. Timmy spilled his juice. Sigh. The dog vomited on the carpet. Sigh. The electricity bill arrived. Sigh. The cracked tile above the bath -the one she had asked Dave to fix at least 12 times- fell off and broke the soap holder. Sigh.
Sighs, all sighs.
She used to laugh and crack jokes and tell stories that built up suspense before dropping a killer punchline. She would sing her favourite songs and speak poetry aloud, recalling English lessons on Shakespeare and Keats. She would cry, wail, scream and sob over lost friends, her parents divorce, failing an exam and crashing her car. She used to be filled with emotion and expression.
Sigh.
She can hear Dave in the yard with the boys. One of them, Jack she guesses, is pressing the car horn in a long, monotonous blast. Dave is yelling at him to stop, but with a childish tone that suggests he thinks it's funny, so the sound carries on.
Sigh.
When did it all become so dull, she wonders? When did she stop laughing, and singing and crying? It feels like yesterday, and yet it feels like so long ago that she doubts that she ever really was that person at all. Perhaps she imagined it all... her life before.
Sigh.
The car horn stops. The dog is barking, insistent that Dave feed him. She hears Dave rounding them up, the boys and the dog, to get the feed dish and the biscuits from the shed. She hears Timmy whining about it being his turn to put the biscuits in, while Jack argues that it's been Timmy's turn all week, and it's not fair that everyone gives in to Timmy because he's the baby.
Sigh.
She met Dave through a friend at uni's brother. Lavinia had almost completed her Bachelor of Political Science and was about to start an internship with the Human Rights Commission when she sidled up beside the handsome young aspiring vet at a party and asked for a glass of rose. He handed her a cold beer.
Sigh.
Neither Lavinia or Dave could have predicted that this chance encounter would result in an unplanned pregnancy that propelled them both towards this exact moment in time.
They were not to know that within 6 months of meeting and becoming pregnant, Dave's father would die unexpectedly, leaving Dave to quit his studies to tend his mother's broken heart, and his family's broken future.
He was no longer a vet, and Lavinia was no longer a humanitarian. They were thrust in to the roles of farmer and wife (well, not technically), impending parents, and carers for Dave's mother who was lost in grief.
Sigh.
Dave calls out "put the dinner on, love" and she hears the familiar echo "Mu-uuum, we're hungry" from Jack. The boys will be tired now too, with all the pent up excitement of dad coming home spent. Her grandmother used to call it "the arsenic hour" - that time of the evening when all calm and logic goes out the window and you're operating purely off survival.
Sigh.
When Jack was born it had been like a dream for a while. Dave was committed to being hands on, and his modern ideas about sharing the load allowed Lavinia to believe that maybe she could recapture some of her career aspirations. "Once he's a little bit older", Dave would say when she highlighted ads for jobs that looked interesting. "When I get this next lot of cattle to market, maybe then we can sit down and think about how it will work", Dave offered. It's not that he didn't support her... it's just that life got busy... and then Timmy came along.
Sigh.
Now there is crying. It sounds like a firetruck siren building up to an ear piercing crescendo, but instead of "woooooooooop" it sounds like "waaaaaaaaaah"! Timmy caught his finger in the shed door. There's no blood, but the crying is blood curdling. "I'll run the bath" Dave says, as he bundles both kids inside the hot, stuffy house.
Sigh.
Two boys- what a blessing, everyone said. How lucky she was to be fertile and to have 'good' pregnancies. How special it would be for them to grow up together, so close in age. Having a second baby was harder than Lavinia could ever have imagined.
Perhaps it was because she knew what she would be giving up-her body, sleep, her sense of identity, her hopes and dreams- that bred the resentment inside her. It was as if someone pressed the reset button on the world's slowest countdown clock.
Sigh.
She gets up to help Dave in the bathroom and feels it- a faint flutter, barely noticeable amongst the other aches and pains her body carries these days. Her heart stops momentarily and she can't breathe.
In her innermost core, the realisation dawns on her. The nausea she thought was from eating four-day-old curried chicken leftovers... the bloated belly that wouldn't be restrained in her favourite jeans... the tiredness that made her teeth ache...
She flips the calendar back looking for the familiar smiley face stamp that's her way of keeping track of things. The last one is April. Three months ago. Just before Julie's wedding, when her and Dave both got a bit tipsy after a rare night out together.
Sigh.
