The Longest Goodbye

Sal drove away from the airport with the cabin of the bus suddenly too quiet around her. She had handed Anth over to the sliding doors a hundred times before, but this was the longest goodbye they had set themselves, six weeks marked out against the shape of her trimester, and the distance felt different for being chosen. There was no resentment in it. Some things you do not stand in the way of, and walking a New Zealand trail beside Torrin was one of them; a stretch of days that might never come round again, father and son on the same track, the sort of thing you carry for the rest of your life. So she pointed herself south to her parents' place and let the missing of him sit beside her, neither fought nor fed, the way the road had taught them both to travel.

University came back at a sprint. Two units, both dense and theoretical, neuroscience and grief therapy, and both close to Sal's heart for the nursing years behind her. They asked a great deal: extra lectures, weekly readings, new concepts that did not settle on the first pass or the second. The assignments were as vast as ever, and she gave each one the long, careful hours it wanted, researching and drafting and polishing until it held. A High Distinction and a Distinction came back for the effort. At the same time her work doubled when a colleague resigned, and the timing could hardly have been worse, falling across the new trimester and a two-day workshop down in Melbourne.

The stress of it was real, with Anth away and uni, work and family all pulling at once. Sal kept herself afloat by the small reliable things: five kilometres on foot each day, strength sessions at the gym nearby, and the steady company of her mum and dad, their conversation rich enough to be its own kind of rest. There was relief, too, in finally closing what she had come to call her tooth-troubled era, the last of eleven appointments over nearly a year for one stubborn tooth, six thousand dollars and twelve months put behind her at last.

The missing was sharpest in the silences. For long stretches there was no proper contact at all, only sporadic satellite messages pinging in as Anth and Torrin pushed through the remote heart of the South Island, the Te Araroa carrying them far past phone signal and into country that answered to no timetable. A few clipped words on a screen, hours or days apart, were all she had of him some weeks. She learned to read a great deal into very little: that he was well, that the weather held or did not, that the next hut was reached. It was enough, and it was not enough, both at once.

Through all of it loomed the placement she had to organise, and the silence she met when she tried. The university did not reply. The agencies she emailed did not reply. Then a thought arrived almost on its own: her old school in Canberra, the one that already knew her, might be glad to have her back. A few calls and emails later it was settled, the face-to-face counselling hours secured to sit alongside the online group work she was already doing through SMART Recovery Australia. One more knot loosened.

The weeks with Grannie and Grandad steadied her in ways the to-do list never could. Mornings often began with a walk alongside Grannie around the broadwalk, the two of them peeling off to Flinders Lane for coffee as a matter of ritual. They drank a good many coffees at that cafe over the season, with Sophie when she came to visit, with Shea when he came, with Andrew when he drove up for the Easter weekend. Sophie stayed about a week, working through crucial assignments of her own for her counselling diploma; for a stretch, mother and daughter studied side by side. With her brother Andrew, Sal walked up Mount Coolum a second time, the challenge of it entirely tangible, her heart going hard against her ribs with every step of the climb to the top.

Easter was lovely. Sal's sister Al and her brother-in-law Paul joined them, and Andrew, for Sunday lunch. There was a Brisbane workshop tucked into the calendar as well, where Sal stayed with Andrew and Tania for the last time. They had hosted her through two years of Brisbane workshops with a warmth that never thinned, and Tania's cooking had been a thing of quiet artistry, every meal considered and set down with care.

Then word came that Anth was coming home early, the trail's last days closed off ahead of schedule by snow and weather. After six weeks of screens and satellites, the thought of him in front of her again felt almost unreal. Sal had built her days around seeing Grandad give a talk at the Anzac Day service, and the homecoming threaded itself awkwardly through those plans, the way real life rarely arrives on cue. Anth and Torrin came through customs at a crawl, slow enough that the neat version of the reunion fell away; in the end they could get only as far as Nambour by train. So Sal drove the bus out to meet them there, and when she finally saw the pair of them step down onto the platform, road-worn and grinning, all the clipped little messages of the past six weeks resolved at once into something solid she could put her arms around. They drove back to Maroochydore to gather the loose threads of plans and belongings, and from there Anth and Torrin took the wheel home to Gympie while Sal stayed on a couple of days more for Grandad's service. The longest goodbye they had ever set themselves had ended the way all the others had, with someone walking back through a door, the bus full and humming once more, and the quiet of those first solo kilometres already fading into memory.Read more