We Don't Get Our Days Back

We always used to picnic on the summer solstice, dreaming of sun and eternity. ‘Longest of the year’ is what my mother told me as a young girl, when I asked about what made the day so special. ‘Don’t waste it. We don’t get our days back’. So we didn’t. Summer was when we fell in love with the world again, with the flowers and the birds and the taste of strawberries. I always wished those days would never end. That last picnic almost convinced me they wouldn’t.

It was hot and we lay in the dappled shade of eucalypts, listening to the cicadas chirping angrily and the soft babble of the creek from the grassy bank where we’d arranged our lunch. It was a patchwork affair, really. Two picnic rugs strewn across a stretch of clover. Packets of open chips. A fruit platter attracting lazy wasps. Cushions and wide-brimmed hats left behind. Picturesque. Someone could’ve painted a perfect summer scene of that last family picnic. My sister and I lay sprawled out on a blue-and-white check blanket, looking upward at a blue and white sky where clouds whisked by as if on whim.

Charlotte stirred. She’d been sleeping, lost to that dreamy, half-conscious state that’s brought on by the heat of the midday sun. I thought she looked peaceful, flushed by the day’s warmth and too much sugar, her eyelashes gently fluttering as though she was lost in some kind of strange dream. Her eyes blinked open.

“It’s so hot, Lucy,” Charlotte muttered, swiping a patch of her dark hair off her forehead. I propped myself up a little and dramatically fanned myself with the magazine I’d been reading earlier. My sister laughed and swatted it out of my hands.

“Girls, don’t hit.” my mother said dryly whilst cutting an apricot neatly down its center line, knife glinting in the sun and juice sticking to her fingers.

“We’re just playing”, I retorted, grasping again at the magazine. Charlotte glanced over my shoulder and down the bank as I grabbed it out of her hands.

“Where’s Ollie?” she asked.

“Down by the waterhole with your Dad. Swimming.”, my mother answered. “Why?”.

“They said they’d be back for cake”. My mother didn’t look up from the apricots. “They’re fine. Your dad keeps an eye on him”

The whole bushland had a kind of midday sleepiness. The cicadas chirped on, but the cockatoos had gone quiet and stopped ripping shreds of bark from the nearby gum trees, and the air was still.

Charlotte sat up and brushed grass from the backs of her thighs. “It’s just… it’s so quiet”.

I sat up too, the heat pressing against my chest like a hand. The waterhole wasn’t far, just a short climb down the bank and across the smooth black rocks and around the bend in the creek to where the cool, green water ran into a still pool. I could hear babbling from the creek still, but it was true. There were no voices, no splashes. Just the cicadas droning on feverishly in the bush.

My mother shaded her eyes with one sticky hand and looked absently off into the trees. “They’re fine. Go check if you’d like”. Charlotte had already stood up, and I followed. We left our sunhats behind.

The creek sparkled in the dappled sunlight, gently tinkling like a far-off bell, while dragonflies flitted carelessly over its rippling surface, their wings bright against the green. We pushed first through long grass and then down the beaten track and past the cone-shaped lilies that grew by the water’s edge. I stopped for a moment. A person could lose track of time out here, spend an entire day getting drunk on sunshine and believe it’d just been a few hours. A person could get lost here among the trees. I’d once loved that.

“Coming, Lucy?”, Charlotte called from a little way ahead of me. I nodded, and soon we were scrambling over stones.

Just past the bend in the creek, the waterhole lay ahead of us, quiet and dark and waiting. Impossibly smooth. Charlotte called out first.

“Ollie, dad, where are you?”.

Silence answered and my sister furrowed her brows at me in confusion. There was no sign of them, besides the sandals and towels and drink bottles they’d left on a shady rock at the base of a towering eucalypt. I looked over at Charlotte, who’d gone quiet. The track didn’t lead any further than the waterhole. We waited for a while.

“Guys? This isn’t funny”, I called out, louder. Silence. The lilies down by the water were browning and curled at the edges and the cicadas were a screeching, maddening orchestra.

The heat pressed in, and I don’t remember screaming. But I remember Charlotte did. I remember the sound of it rising through the trees and breaking through the sleepy, summer air. I remember running barefoot back up the grassy hill, sharp little seeds catching in our clothes. My mother dropping the apricot. The juice shining on her hands. The knife glinting in the grass.

We didn’t even pack up our picnic that day. Our rugs and cushions and Tupperware containers were still there, covered in dew when we went back early the next morning with local police, too. They sent rangers, dogs, divers, detectives and they found nothing. No traces of struggle, no foul play, and so, after months, the search ended along with the questions. We never picnicked again.

The sun has risen and set a thousand times over the waterhole since that day, over countless other picnics and other families who splash in the quiet, green water. I still visit. The lilies grow in the same clusters along the banks. I remember the apricots and the cockatoos and lying on our blanket, thinking things would never really change. But I was wrong, of course. We don’t get our days back.

Sometimes I sit by the water’s edge, imagining myself diving in, suddenly immersed in a liquid green, bubbles swirling around my head and hair held aloft. I imagine, for a moment, seeing a glimpse of a pale hand. Or a still, glassy eye. Charlotte had stopped swimming since then and neither of us talked about it anymore. Our mother was quieter. My dreams turned green.

And so, summer ended, as it always does. The days shortened, the heat receded, the creek dried up, and everything was folded away, as if it really were all just a picnic.