Point It North

"The thing about small towns is that distance is the only disinfectant. Rumours can't follow you if you drive fast enough."

The afternoon stretched.

After Denise left, I lay there watching the light shift against the blinds, trying to make my mind go quiet. It wouldn't. The medication they'd given me—something for anxiety, the nurse had said, something to help me rest—had softened the edges of things, made the fluorescent buzz seem further away, but it hadn't stopped the thoughts. If anything, it had made them harder to catch, harder to organise. They slipped past like fish in murky water, surfacing just long enough to flash their scales before disappearing again.

The studio.

The thought surfaced and I grabbed at it, tried to hold it still long enough to examine. The studio. What state was it in? I remembered the mirror shattering—remembered the sound of it, that enormous crash, the glass cascading down the wall like a waterfall of light. I remembered dancing through it. Remembered the way my feet had found the shards, had kept moving despite the cutting, the blood.

How much blood?

I tried to picture it. Tried to imagine what Denise had seen when she'd looked through the window. Glass everywhere, she'd said. Blood. And me, lying in the middle of it, not moving.

The floor would be ruined. All those dark stains soaked into the wood, impossible to clean properly. And the mirror—that mirror had cost a fortune, had been the centrepiece of the whole space. Shattered now. Destroyed by a phone I'd thrown in a moment I could barely remember.

Classes started next week.

The thought hit with physical force. Next week. Term resuming. Students returning. Parents expecting their children to walk into a clean, professional studio and find their teacher ready and capable and whole.

What was I going to tell them?

I looked down at my feet, at the bandages wrapped around them. The cuts were superficial, mostly—that's what they'd said—but some were deeper. Would I even be able to walk properly? To demonstrate? To stand at the barre for hours the way teaching required?

And if I couldn't—if I had to cancel classes, postpone the start of term—what excuse would I give? A stomach bug wouldn't explain bandaged feet. A fall might, but then there'd be questions. Concern. The particular nosiness of small-town parents who thought they had a right to know everything about the people who taught their children.

I could say I'd dropped something. Broken glass in the kitchen. An accident while cleaning up. That was believable enough. Ordinary enough. The kind of thing that happened to anyone.

But that wouldn't explain the mirror.

The mirror that someone would notice, eventually. A parent dropping off their child early, glancing through the window. A student commenting that something looked different. And once one person noticed, everyone would want to know. What happened? Are you all right? We heard you were in the hospital—

Who had heard?

The question opened up like a trapdoor beneath me. The ambulance had come to my house. Sirens. Flashing lights. Paramedics carrying a stretcher through my backyard. In a town like Broken Hill, in a street like mine, that kind of commotion didn't go unnoticed.

Gertrude.

Oh God. Gertrude.

She'd been watching me for days. Had seen Paul's car gone, had noticed my comings and goings, had already started asking questions about the children at Dawn's and the dog left out in the cold. She would have heard the ambulance. Would have seen everything. Would have filed it all away in that mental cabinet of hers, ready to share at the first opportunity.

Did you hear about Claire Smith? Ambulance came to her house this morning. They carried her out on a stretcher. I always knew something wasn't right with that family.

I pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to push the images away. It didn't help. The thoughts kept coming, kept multiplying, each one spawning three more until my head was full of voices, faces, all the people who might know, might be talking, might be spreading the story even now while I lay here helpless.

Denise had promised not to tell. But Denise was one person. One witness among how many? The paramedics. The nurses. The doctors. Everyone at the hospital who had seen my name, my file, the details of what had brought me in. Any one of them might know someone in town. Might mention it casually to a colleague who mentioned it to a friend who mentioned it to someone else until the whole of Broken Hill knew that Claire Smith had overdosed in her dance studio and been found lying in a pool of her own blood.

I needed to get out of here.

The urgency rose in my chest, sudden and fierce. I needed to get out of this hospital, get back to my house, clean up the studio, construct a story that would hold. Every hour I spent lying in this bed was another hour for the rumours to spread, another hour of damage I couldn't control.

But even if they discharged me tomorrow—even if I went home and cleaned everything and came up with a plausible explanation for my bandaged feet—what then? I'd still have to face them. The parents. The neighbours. Gertrude with her knowing looks and her probing questions. I'd have to smile and deflect and pretend everything was fine, week after week, while they all watched and whispered and waited for me to fall apart again.

Unless I wasn't here.

The thought arrived quietly, almost gently, slipping in beneath the noise of all the others. Unless I wasn't here. Unless I was somewhere else, somewhere far away, somewhere no one knew what had happened.

Queensland.

Amelia's face surfaced in my mind—my sister, up in Brisbane, with her big house and her easy life and her standing invitation to visit whenever we wanted. We'd been up there before, the four of us, had spent a glorious week swimming in her pool and eating her cooking and letting the tropical warmth seep into our bones. The kids had loved it. I had loved it. Even Paul had seemed lighter there, further from whatever weight he carried in Broken Hill.

I could go now.

The idea began to take shape, to fill in its own details. I could pack the kids into the car, point it north-east, and just drive. A road trip. An adventure. School was about to start, but they could miss the first week—or two—what did it matter in the scheme of things? We could take our time. Stop at places along the way. Put distance between ourselves and everything that had happened here.

It could work.

For the first time in hours, something that felt almost like hope flickered in my chest. Queensland. Escape. Time to breathe, to think, to exist somewhere without the constant pressure of everyone watching, everyone waiting, everyone knowing.

Somewhere I could figure out who I was going to be now.

But I couldn't go anywhere without telling Paul.

The hope curdled as quickly as it had formed. Paul. Who still hadn't called. Who knew—must know by now—that his wife was in the hospital, that something terrible had happened, and who had responded to that knowledge with continued silence.

The hospital had left him a message hours ago. Karen had told me herself—they'd reached his voicemail, explained the situation, asked him to call back. And nothing. No call. No message. No indication that he cared at all about what had happened to me.

I thought about asking for my phone. Thought about trying to call him again, hearing his voicemail one more time, leaving another message that would go unanswered. But what was the point? He'd made his position clear. He wasn't going to respond to the hospital, and he wasn't going to respond to me.

But maybe he'd respond to someone else.

Greta.

His mother. The woman he ran to whenever things got difficult, whenever our marriage hit a rough patch, whenever he needed someone to tell him he was right and I was wrong. If Paul was anywhere, he was with Greta. And if anyone could get through to him, could make him understand that he needed to call—

I needed my phone.

The thought crystallised into something urgent, necessary. I needed my phone and I needed to call Adelaide and I needed to find out where my husband was before I could make any plans, any decisions, any moves toward Queensland or anywhere else.

A nurse appeared—not Bec this time, someone older, with grey hair and a no-nonsense manner. She checked the machines, made notes on her chart, asked if I needed anything.

"Actually," I said, "I was wondering if I could have my phone back. Just for a few minutes. I need to make a call."

She hesitated. "I'll have to check with the doctor. We don't usually—"

"Please." I made my voice calm, reasonable. The voice of a woman who had been cooperative all day, who had done everything they'd asked, who surely deserved this small concession. "It's about my children. I need to make arrangements."

The nurse studied me for a moment, then nodded. "I'll see what I can do."

She left.

I lay back against the pillows and waited, my mind already composing what I would say. To Greta. To Paul, if by some miracle he answered. To whoever might be standing between me and the information I needed.

The afternoon light was fading now, the stripes against the blinds growing longer, darker. The day was slipping away from me, hour by hour, and I still didn't know where my husband was, still didn't know what was happening to my life, still didn't know if there would be anything left to salvage by the time I finally got out of here.

But I was going to find out.

One way or another, I was going to find out.