In this photo my father was smiling, with one hand resting on Rocket’s neck. A giant grin covered my face, still chubby and round with baby fat. As I stared at the photo, the moment came back to me like it happened yesterday.
Mum had taken the picture. Grandma was telling me to smile, but she didn’t have to. Sitting high up on that big old horse was the most exciting thing I’d ever done and I couldn’t have stopped smiling if I’d tried. The funny thing was I didn’t remember my father being there. It was like I had erased him from that moment in time.
Kevin stuck his head in again. ‘I’ll be back soon.’
I pulled the photo from under the plastic sleeve and put it in my pocket. ‘Okay.’ I got up off the floor. ‘What about those? I haven’t been though them yet.’ I pointed to what looked like new storage boxes toward the back wall of the room.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ he said.
I glanced at the stack of boxes again. ‘But I might as well—’
‘No. Don’t touch them. That’s Lily’s stuff.’ He stood for a second as if gauging my reaction and then walked away.
When I was sure Kevin was gone, I opened the first of the boxes and found Mum’s patchwork quilt. In another I discovered three paintings of the waterhole and her paintbrushes wrapped in a piece of leather. In others were some of her old clothes, even her farm T-shirts that should have been thrown out long ago. Kevin hadn’t thrown her things out. He’d kept them all.
It took me a while, but I went through every box. Everything was there: her jewellery, her hairbrush, even a bottle of tablets with her name on the front. As I searched, a plan began to form in my mind. What if I found another trace of my father? A letter, an address book? Something that could tell me where my real dad might be.
I rummaged through the rest of the boxes and found some of Mum’s papers: her passport, her birth certificate, but not what I needed.
‘There’s got to be something,’ I mumbled, looking around. But after the last box I still had nothing and there was stuff everywhere. The only other place in the room was a mirrored wardrobe behind the boxes. I slid them all back out of the way and opened the creaky door.
The wardrobe was filled with the rest of Mum’s clothes. I ran my hand along the colourful row of skirts and dresses until it rested on a red skirt embroidered with tiny mirrors in rows along the bottom. ‘I remember you,’ I said, pulling it out. It was her favourite.
She once told me that the mirrors trapped the evil eye, protecting the wearer from bad spirits. Hesitating only for a second, I leant down and pulled the elastic waist over my shorts. Mum was a bit taller than me and the material fell all the way to my feet. I closed the wardrobe door and looked in the mirror, admiring how the skirt, thick with a hundred folds of magenta, draped nicely over my hips and legs. I stared at my reflection for a minute. Slowly I twirled around. The gathered material lifted and rose into a large circle around me.
As I spun around I saw a figure in the doorway. I stopped mid-spin, nearly falling over.
Kevin stood there, with his hand on the door knob. He stared at me for a few moments, grey faced. ‘What are you doing?’
My fists froze around the handfuls of skirt. ‘Um, nothing, I was … It’s her …’
Kevin looked me up and down.
My face grew hot. I didn’t know what to say, feeling as though I had just been caught stealing. Sick to my stomach, I fled past him to my room where I stepped out of the skirt and shoved it under my bed.
The next morning I was exhausted after a night of waking and thinking and having something my friend insomnia likes to call the ‘Three O’clock Horrors’.
Three O’clock Horrors facts: you wake up and can’t go back to sleep because you’re thinking of every depressing thing in the world; between the hours of three and four, absolutely everything is shit – every thought in your head is black; you remember everything bad that ever happened to you, like when someone sat on your lunch in grade two, or when your best friend dumped you for a prettier, funnier, smarter girl; you imagine everything disastrous that could possibly happen in the future – for example, it’s probable that you will become a hoarder like your grandmother and die of suffocation when you become pinned under an avalanche of newspapers from the 2000s. The proximity of dawn is in direct inverse correlation to the intensity of horrors a person can conjure in their mind.
I reckon there must be lots of miserable souls awake between the hours of three and four and they’re probably feeding each other bad vibes across the dark hemisphere of the Earth like some giant evil network of despair.
Of course I thought about the accident too, working my way through the Swiss Cheese Effect and adjusting each part of the scenario so that Mum didn’t get into the car that morning. Something like: Mum never read about the show, the cows decided to graze on the other side of the paddock that morning and not near the fence, Kevin got off his lazy arse and went with Mum to the show. Or, even better, Mum had never met Kevin in the first place. You know, just one little change, one tweak to that alternative universe and I would have her back.
But I was also thinking about Dylan. I don’t know why.
‘You should eat breakfast,’ Kevin said as he
