The Heart Is a Star by Megan Rogers

Author:Megan Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-four

A drumroll of rain sounds as we ascend to Mum’s. Water blots out the land, rushes across the dirt road in driving sheets. There’s a sheer drop down to the ocean and I grip the steering wheel tighter. The wharf below is a jumble of motorboats, seaplanes and schooners. The water is serrated, pounding at the stubborn shore, convulsing in the lightning strobe. Milk foam boiling over a saucepan sea.

Dawn leans against the window and twists her hands in her lap. When we reach the property gate, I unhook the chain, open it up just as much as I can until it drags, a perfect arc inscribed on the ground. There is just enough light without headlights to make out the old place. We follow the Huon pines along the property fence line, a ragged silhouette, a narrow, dark torn strip laid under the galvanised sky.

The once-grand Victorian homestead, which was built to survive a harsh environment, to resist the Roaring Forties, snowfall and howling wind, doesn’t seem to have been able to withstand my mother’s sadness. I face Dawn to see if she’s coming in, but she simply looks at me with wide, unblinking eyes.

The stone path to the door is cracked and broken. Inside, the house is dark; cold. The perpetual freeze of sorrow. The curtains are drawn. There is the familiar smell of wet wool, like the odour of our school jumpers after a rainy recess.

‘Mum!’ I shout through the house. ‘Mum!’ There is the stillness you get when no one is in the house, although I start to worry the house might feel like that when there is a body but no life. I run through each room. ‘Mum!’ I shout again. I check the bathroom first, the bath where Willow and I would fold boats and onto them drop wax, the shower with moulddappled curtain.

Through the kitchen, past the mint-green, salmon-pink and baby-blue pantries, into the lounge room with its corduroy couch, the armchair where Mum cried and I uncoiled the yellow wool. I rush into my bedroom, the pine bed pushed against the wall, a purple bedside table, now-hard Blu Tack, chipped paint, a bookshelf with every yellow-spined copy of National Geographic from when I was born until I left home. Willow’s room is empty: all the pictures on the walls have gone, even the jewellery box and old teddy that were here last year have been removed; her bed just a frame.

Lunging into the corridor, I stop and pick up the wall phone’s pale-yellow handset from the floor and place it back it on the receiver. In the garage is the old Mazda that Mum rarely drives and the red ride-on mower she uses weekly. In the gathering darkness, my body deflates. She’s probably at Maggie’s or gone for a drunk walk, as she often does. Fuck. I can’t believe I’ve been sucked into this again. A familiar fury burns inside me, but also a slight disappointment that I have to push away;

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