Ice always melts.
That’s what my mother said to me in the grip of a winter chill. It was her way of saying that, in the end, truth will out.
But I don’t know. I think it’s just a fairytale, the kind mothers tell their kids to buy them the precious years they need to thicken up enough to face the real truth: that life is a twisty, dark affair.
I’ve had the years. All twenty-seven, but still I’m shiver-thin on the inside with nowhere near enough layers to confront life’s unexpected curves. I gear down to avoid a pothole on this long winding drive, as familiar to me as my own skin. I always go gently at night under the canopy of spreading eucalyptus trees. Switching off the pound of music, I bathe in the sudden quiet. Just the even hum of the engine and me, easing through the shadowy forest. It’s funny how the night softens you out.
I miss my mother the most when I drive through the estate’s elaborate wrought iron gates. Every time. I give in to the need to knock my knuckle against the car door three times to help swallow down the jag of grief before it gets to be something.
When I pull on the handbrake in front of my house, this grand sandstone passed down through generations, built on stolen land, it takes me a while to gather my energy against my reluctance to get out, but eventually it’s the cold that makes me open the door. I pick up the bean casserole Amra gave me and do my usual jump to the ground. Amra can’t understand why I bought a Ford Ranger with a cabin so stupidly high that I need to hoist myself up into it and jump out of it. Maybe it’s because it’s so big it carapaces around me like a protective shell.
Up there, nobody can touch me…
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