I had set myself adrift on a sea of unfamiliarity. I had sailed through a flowing darkness of rain and stars away from all that was light and known. And now I was here.

And I couldn’t stay here. No matter what my plan had been. I couldn’t.

I couldn’t stay here, but I couldn’t go back either.

And outside, the darkness flowed and flowed.

I hunkered down further under the doona. The blue crocheted bedspread that had been Mum’s provided absolutely no warmth, so I bunched it up around my face instead, clutching it, weaving my fingers through the crocheted web and holding on tight. I pointed my phone light onto my memento mori so I could see it in the dark.

They were complicated objects, the both of them – Mum’s old bedspread and my memento mori. They were symbols of everything I had left behind.

But I held on to them anyway. I held on to them because right now they felt like the only anchors I had.

My Cathy,

Won’t you please come home? Even just for a visit?

You know your room is always here, waiting for you. We all would like to see you so much – all of us. Especially now.

We don’t understand why you left. How could you have left us like that?

Why won’t you answer any of my letters?

If you come home we could all be a family again. We could all have dinner together. It would be like old times.

And you could bring my baby granddaughter. I’m old, Cathy. I don’t have forever to wait. Why won’t you come and visit? I’d like to meet my granddaughter before I die. Don’t I deserve that at least?

Your loving mother, Bette

Please don’t tell that I wrote.

6

I wasn’t going to sleep. I was going to lie there trying to keep warm, and then I was going to get up before dawn, get my things together, sneak out and get on the first bus back to Melbourne. I wasn’t even going to say anything to my grandmother – Grandma Bette had never been part of my life before and we could easily go back to that. The bus would whisk me away as if I’d never arrived, and I could find somewhere else to stay in Melbourne, a nice clean warm anonymous hostel perhaps, while I got myself sorted out and came up with a new plan.

It had to be done. Because the absolute wrongness of everything here couldn’t be clearer. I had read Grandma’s letter and imagined a lovely old farmhouse with a cute little room for me, perhaps with a wooden floor and a rocking chair, a window with a rolling pastoral view – the perfect retreat for an industrious student undergoing a period of recuperation. But this here? This place? I didn’t even know what the view outside this house looked like. Where the hell was I, anyway? And as for the inside . . .