Page 40

The walk is slow in the dark, but I retrace the path we took, Dom, Orly, and me. The moon and the stars are bright. I pause by the crystal albatross lake, now a black sky pit to swallow me whole. I come to the grassy plateau where the baby petrels nest; it looks very different in this light, a sea of silver scales. I move swiftly as we did the first time, but I take a new route. He promised the wind he wouldn’t come this way, and I don’t know what I will find, but if I have to scour every last inch of this island to discover an answer I will do it. I will not sit still and wait.

Beneath the ash I see a glint. I unearth its source, brushing it off with a gloved hand. The glass has melted into a new form, it is curved and almost graceful. I don’t know what this thing used to be—a vase, maybe, or a wine glass—but I am transfixed by the way the light is moving through its twists and arches.

“Oh god,” I hear. I look up from the patch of debris I am standing within—once our kitchen—to the square Hank is sorting through—once our bedroom. I have the floorplan of the house marked out in a grid for us to work our way through methodically, sorting and removing and cleaning as if we are at an archaeological site. It is impossible to recognize any of these rooms now, so we have only the plan to help us understand where in the house we’re standing, but even within these areas none of the possessions (if any are recognizable) are where we expect them to be. The fire has collapsed everything inward. We’ve only just begun, but I have a system: we carry rubbish and debris in buckets to the skip and then we sift through the remaining ash and charcoal with our sifting trays, and we will work our way thoroughly through one section at a time.

“My trophies,” Hank says now, holding up a scorched and melted golden trophy he received as a child in some science fair. The fact that he had these items shipped from his childhood home in New York, over half the world and several oceans, goes a fair way to explain how much they mean to him. And yet Hank has been reacting this way, with vivid despair, at every recognizable item he has come across, from old CDs to beard trimmers.

I suppose, woodenly, that my lack of sentimentality has turned out to be a good thing, that it was right, in the end, not to keep anything of my mother’s, and to tell myself it was because I wanted nothing from her or of her.

“Put your mask back on,” I say to Hank.

He slumps onto his overturned bucket, holding the trophy to his chest and gazing around at the house. I pick my way over to him and gently move his mask into position. I stroke his hair, once. Then I return to my work, knowing that it will be me who clears and sorts through this house, room by room, while my husband grieves his losses.

“I’m going to take the job on Shearwater,” he tells me without warning.

I straighten and look at him over the wreckage. I am so hot under this protective gear.

“I’ve been saying no because I needed to be here if we were going to have kids,” he adds. “But you’re never going to give me those, are you?”

My mouth opens but no sound comes. That he is doing this now, in this moment, is astounding to me.

“There’s nothing here for me anymore,” Hank says.

I turn and walk out of the ruins. I walk past where the eucalypts stood tall and proud and so very old. Then into the forest of alpine ash. They are dead now. Everything seems to be. It is an eerie place of white and black. There is no birdsong. No rustle of tiny feet under brush. I sink onto an overturned piece of roofing tin that has flown a long way to land here. I don’t cry for my husband, who wishes to leave me. I cry for the forest. For the trees and the shrubs and for all who lived within it. So many species. So many creatures I’d come down here to look for each day, and delight in the glimpses I caught. I cry for my life here, in this little patch of paradise. For the safety I felt. For the woman I was while living here. I fed the magpies each evening in this spot. I waited for the passage of mother wombat and her baby, ambling slowly by. Her burrow was here somewhere.

I stop crying and stand to look, unsure why I would do this to myself. Any remains I might find will only make it worse. But I lift the sheet of tin and rest it against the burned husk of a tree. I can see the opening of the burrow in the earth. I get down on my knees, then onto my stomach, pressing my whole body flat into the ash. And I look.

I think my husband loved me as a vessel. Not consciously, I don’t think so little of him that I believe he could be conscious of this. But somewhere deep within. A buried truth in the darkness. He never took the time to discover my body, he never explored it for what it could offer aside from the obvious, he never found in me, in my essence, a purpose other than to carry children, and when I admitted I couldn’t do this for him he turned away from me. He had no more use for my limbs or my skin, my muscles or tongue or fingertips. He couldn’t even see me anymore, my flesh. I’m not sure that such a turning away could exist in the same body as love. I’m not sure it’s possible to make so small a thing of love. I think love expands when it needs to, it adapts, it embraces.

But then, mine didn’t do that either, did it?

Hank and I carried on, pretending it was alright. He video called me from the island once a week. There was comfort in the familiarity of him. Still married, after all. Maybe I would follow him to Shearwater one day. Maybe we could salvage a life together. But every day I did not come.

And now there is this day. Here on a windswept, starlit hill, and I think I have found something, and the broken years fall away. I think only of him as he was in the beginning, when he taught me how things could grow, how they could entangle. I think of how I loved him when that love was simple. Because I am quite certain I have found his grave.