The Forrests

9. Family Room





Dorothy and Andrew were in Cornwall Park with the kids when the call came through. The toddler, Donald, clutched at a length of banana with his fists, and squelches of creamy fruit bulged through his fingers. Shadows from the latticed leaves flitted over the tartan rug. The big roll of kitchen towel unravelled when Dorothy tried to tear off a sheet, not enough perforation, and Donald dropped the banana to grab at the soft white cone of a flower. She took him by the wrists and wiped his hands back and forth over the grass. At the sharp ringing of the cell phone, a wedding party posing for photos looked over from the ginkgo trees. Dorothy called out, ‘Sorry!’ Andrew liked to keep up with technology; it was a guy thing. One day that groom would understand.

Finally Andrew found the persistent phone and answered the call, taking it away from the rest of them, by the russet-winged paradise ducks. Those birds, stalking the paths, gawkily big. Reggae music started from a boom box at someone else’s picnic and Amy jumped along off the beat, around and under the picnic table, and Grace read a book on her stomach on the grass, her hair so long and falling into the clover.

Dorothy watched Andrew nod and listen. There was, in the air around his head, a sort of pulsing that she could feel too. Amy yelped sharply and emerged from under the table. She stood in front of her mother, face pruned-up with pain, tears in her eyes, rubbing her forehead. At last Dorothy saw the child, she came into focus, and she drew Amy into her arms and kissed her hair. The phone call ended – Andrew reached the handset out towards Dot across the metres of grass, as though he was showing her something on the screen or wanted her to take this contaminated object from him, and he gestured clumsily for her to come, past the children, through the bright afternoon, his nose wrinkled, his face helpless. One duck charged another, chests up, wings pointed to the ground, and a small terrier barked at them, straining at the leash.