Last year we learned that the Boon Wurrung people called the mountain Wonga and held corroborees—sacred dance ceremonies—lower down on the slopes called Wango—probably about where the parking lot is now.

From the very top of Arthurs Seat, you can see clear across the Mornington Peninsula, where we live, and over the whole bowl of Port Phillip Bay, from the tip of Point Nepean to the silver city of Melbourne winking in the distance. But if you want to go to Arthurs Seat and see all of that, you have to take the chairlift.

Luca first took me there when I was six, the year my mom died.

I was obsessed with great heights back then. I nearly gave everyone a heart attack one day when I crawled out of our neighbor Jed Trần’s bedroom window and onto the slanted shingle roof. I was too chicken to go to the edge like I thought I wanted to, so I ended up sitting somewhere between the gutter and the window, like a flung Frisbee, until Pop called Luca to come and get me.

After Luca roared up on his police motorbike, he went and got the Trầns’ old ladder from the garage while Pop kept calling to me from down below, telling me to stay put.

I could hear Jed’s mom, Vi, somewhere inside too. She was giving her son an earful for letting me climb out there, and for not having the good sense to come get her the second he saw what I was up to.

By the time Luca finally crawled out to me, I was heaving my guts up with tears, but it wasn’t because I was scared. It was hearing Jed’s mother yell at him like that and remembering that mine never would again.

Well, Luca got me down and proved that fathers can yell at reckless children just as well as mothers can. Then he asked me what I’d been trying to achieve in the first place.

“I wanted to see her,” I said.

“See who, Freddo? Maria?” He shook his head. “Your mama?”

I nodded.

“Heaven’s right there.” Then I pointed at the sky, that big endless thing. “I just wanted to see her again.” Because that was all anyone said to me in those days: she was in heaven now, safe and sound and looking down on me.

I still remember the feel of Luca’s polyester police shirt, and how it ended up smelling like salt and his aftershave once I’d cried into it for what felt like a decade. He explained a few things to me then, about heaven being more of an idea and less of a place, much less one you can climb to. But then he said trying to get a little closer to her wasn’t such a bad idea. I’d just gone about it all the wrong way.