“You’re more open. Your voice is softer.”
“Really?” She found that hard to believe, but the more she thought about it, the more it felt true. She felt more receptive now, more sensitive to changes in ambient temperature. With only a limited amount of energy to draw from, each movement had to be intentional and serve a purpose. Before the accident, she would have been multitasking right now, tending the fire, searching the forest for dead branches to burn, cooking, listening to a game on the radio, texting someone, and runningher mouth about god knows what, analyzing the next stages of the roof repair project, without paying attention to anything she was doing, because her mind would have been somewhere else.
Now she was content to watch flames lick wood.
She remembered cutting down that dead tree, chainsawing up the limbs, carrying them behind the barn in the front bucket of the mid-sized Kubota tractor, splitting them with the wood splitter, stacking them behind the barn. She sipped her Carlton Mid, watching Nev crouch beside the campfire to add another log.
“Who made the firewood before I came?”
Nev looked surprised. “We didn’t really have fires before you came.”
What?
“What? What do you mean you didn’t have fires before I came?”
Nev shrugged. “Camping is your thing. Kazi and I never did this. Rick-Rac and Barney go home at night.”
She tried to imagine life without campfires, couldn’t.
“What’s the point of living on a farm in the bush if you don’t have fires?”
Nev looked sheepish.
Ronnie felt warm and tingly. The invisible cricket bat she carried around inside her for emergencies was gone, maybe forever. She moved differently without it, cautious, compensating. Her center of gravity had shifted. She would be slow until her abdominals grew back.
“Your eyes,” Nev said.
Ronnie might have been horny and felt drunk, but her friend was actually drunk. An ant crawled along the back of Nev’s hand. Nev took her guitar out of the case and taught Ronnie how to play a C chord, G chord, A minor and F chords.
Ronnie closed her eyes, inhaled weightlessness.
She felt somewhere between a steam engine with a red-hot boiler and a spitfire pilot who had just landed in the dark without wheels or landing gear; bruised, shaking, adrenaline-sick but clear-headed and sharp—lucky, sensitive, nervy and ready, one length ahead of the lightning, locked-in, unable to fail…
“All right?” Nev asked.
Ronnie kept her eyes closed. “Yeah.” Being back here was triggering her old stuff from ten years ago.
“What do you need?”
“Nothing. Give me a minute.” She did deep breathing, asked her body what was wrong. The guitar was something solid to hold onto. Smoke from the fire kept some of the mosquitos away. No wind.
Cold.
She shivered. The aircon inside the place had been icy the night Rainbow was born. The connection made sense now. She opened her eyes. Nev lay beside the fire, hand behind her head, ankles crossed. Ronnie slid closer to the fire, wincing, then warmed her long arms and legs as if she was giving the fire a hug. Immediately she felt better. The clearing smelled sharp and sweet, like eucalyptus.
“I’m back. Sorry, what were you saying?”
“We don’t have to sleep here,” Nev said. “I don’t actually want to, if I’m being honest.”
Ronnie’s incision itched. Under the skin tugged.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
The walk up the hill in the dark took longer than the walk down had. Nev carried the sleeping bags and guitar.
Back at Stone House, in the glass and marble guest bedroom bathroom Nev had remodeled nine years ago into an accessible bathroom for her aging father, Ronnie checked the wound belowher waistband in the mirror. She had overdone it tonight and was lucky that it hadn’t reopened.
She ran a shower, waited for hot water. Lights danced in the corners of the room.
