Don’t cry, he kept whispering, through his own rhythmic crashings, don’t cry.
Kai, do you have any idea how much I’ve missed you…?
I have some idea. Please don’t cry.
There was something fragile in their lovemaking, tentative, as if the magic rite was faltering, as if they both had to be extra careful lest the parchment leaves in their ancient books would crack and fall like cigarette ash. Larissa couldn’t quite put her finger on what was wrong. Was the rhythm off? Was there less panting? Was there one less Oh my God than there should’ve been after three months apart, three months of silence?
Afterward she lay on her back, stretched out, arms flung out in a perpetual eternal cross, questioning, asking, receiving few answers tonight. He was tired, he said. He had worked and driven and had to haggle down the price of the cruiser buyout. He was exhausted. He needed to sleep. So that’s what he did. He fell asleep and she lay under the sky. Bondi was dark, warm but dry, not sticky or muggy like Manila.
Something is flowing out without blessing, Larissa thought. I don’t know what it is. There is a tiny detail in him that’s been assembled incorrectly. There was no assurance, no gold underwriting in the man sleeping next to her. Imperceptibly he was simply saying the wrong things. But what? He was looking at her the wrong way. But how? She couldn’t put her finger on it. She put her finger on his heart. I’m flying flying flying. The wooshing breaking ocean soothed the raw ends, filled in the hollow ill-defined fear. Everything was going to be fine. They’d drive back to Jindabyne. Larissa looked forward to seeing the lake again. Summer was coming, the best time for them, the happiest time. They’d go out to dinner with Bart and Bianca, go drinking with Patrick. They’d find another place to live. She was done living on top of hills. She wanted to try the banks this time, in the aromatic eucalyptus-forested shores on the way to Thredbo. Not too far from town. And maybe this time they could look for an unfurnished place so she could nest and buy homey things for it: pillows, cotton throws, vases to put fresh flowers in. Everything would be all right. We have a fundamental union with each other. Things are never perfect, Father Emilio had told her. We are human and we are not perfect.
But it’s better than it was when I left, Larissa decided, when we didn’t know what was going to happen from one minute to the next. The future’s more certain now, that part is assured. We’ll get back on track.
Still though…something bothered her, was not letting her sleep.
Throwing on a T-shirt, she got up and in the dark climbed inside their vehicle parked nearby, dug out a flashlight from the storage compartment, and unzipped Kai’s travel duffel behind the driver’s side. His jeans were in there, T-shirts, socks, a toothbrush, a few dollars, a little notepad where he wrote down things he didn’t want to forget, like her arrival date except that page had been ripped out, and sandwiched in the notepad, an unsealed envelope addressed to his sister Muriel.
Larissa put the envelope back, and was about to zip up the bag and go back to him on the blanket, but a small tingle of curiosity prodded her, only becasue she herself had received but one letter from him and here was his sister Muriel with whom he had barely communicated in the last how many years, getting what felt like three folded pieces of handwritten paper right around the same time Kai told Larissa he was too tired to write.
She took it out.
Dear Muriel,
I wish I could make you understand the inexpressible longing I feel when I am here, on one of our horses, clomping through the uncharted desert over the rocks. I’ve lived in a few places in my short life, and I know there will be many more, but honestly I cannot imagine ever feeling as completely part of a larger universe than I do when I’m in the Aboriginal wilderness. And when I say wilderness, Muriel, I mean, visibility unlimited, horizon infinite, nothing but the earth and sky as far as the eye can see, and I’m sitting atop a saddled mustang, and my lungs can’t take a deep enough breath to inhale all the things I feel, to speak all the things I want to say.
For some reason when I am here in the saltbush sands, I feel like I have found meaning behind human life. I used to think I had to invent meaning, manufacture it, even when it wasn’t there, imbue things with significance that I myself made up. But here, I understood something—meaning is something that is revealed to me, if I so choose to open my heart and see it. Which is why before it was all about momentary satisfactions. Here it is about a permanent state of grace. My woes have vanished, my sufferings gone away. The cypress pines were here long before I came, the bluebush will be here long after I’m gone. And in the meantime, I have a confidence and a happiness I haven’t had for a while that I can indeed build a meaningful life. Maybe after I make things right and we’re settled, you can come to visit us here, the land of the red sand and the pink cockatoo, and see for yourself the astonishing dry earth, the vastness of the wide open rangelands, the profound seclusion, the world and all its cares a million miles away. There is mystery in everything.
Your brother, Kai
How long did it take Larissa to fall sleep after reading that? She couldn’t stop thinking about the letter he wrote to her, penned as if he had just weeks earlier learned how to write. Okay, she had thought; she’d never seen his writing voice before, and not everyone could be Nabokov, not everyone could dream up, light of my light, fire of my loins. She had accepted that Kai was a man of many gifts, but writing was not one of them. And yet…somehow, in this little missive he carried with him, he managed—to his sister of all people!—to express the physical and the lyrical, to find poetry in a dried-out landscape, to feel things and to reflect on them with significance on paper, to spin together earth science and myth and legend and a numinous metaphysical confession. While in his letter to Larissa, he couldn’t be bothered to make an adjective into a proper adverb. The stables are coming along nice.
What to make of this? And why did it hurt so much?
And more important—or was it less important?—what to make of the content of the letter, if she could will herself to forget the form of it?
What did Pooncarie have to do with their current life?
And how to mention this to the sleeping naked man?
Larissa was missing something, some essential component, a key piece of the puzzle and she didn’t know what it was.
They set out quietly the next morning. She wished they were a little louder, because it was something else to open your eyes and gaze upon the Southern Ocean sparkling crystal green in its morning glory, to want to walk the hills, to swim, to sit with the beautiful people and drink coffee…Larissa wished for a carefree morning in Bondi instead of the one offered to her today. After buying coffee and an egg sandwich, Kai looked over a map and got on the road. Five hours passed slowly and not slowly enough. Time flew and crawled. Larissa said once it was hot.
“Yeah, we’re having a heat spell here the last week or so. But whatever temperature it is in Sydney or Jindabyne, it’s twenty degrees hotter in Pooncarie.”
“What does that have to do with our business?” said Larissa. “We’re not going to Pooncarie, are we?” Challenging him to speak up.
“Guess not,” he said to the road. “Though I would’ve liked for you to see it.”
“Would you.”
And then nothing for another hundred miles.
“You would’ve liked the horses,” he said. “You’ve been on a horse, right?”
“Yes, Kai, we went together in Maui. Up to the volcanos, remember? Horses scare me, though. They’re unpredictable.”
“Yeah, they’re large powerful animals. But they’re incredibly resilient. They do well in the desert.”
“Like camels. But Jindabyne is not the desert, Kai,” she said.
Another hundred miles.
“Was Nalini okay when you left? She wasn’t upset?”
“Upset? Nah,” said Larissa. “She was fine.”
“Really? You wrote she brushed your hair, braided it. She tried to get you to pray. You two so
unded cute together.”
“She’s a sweet kid,” said Larissa. “But it’s not me she wants.” Her arms crunched around her stomach, to keep the falling from the pit of herself.
“Funny,” Kai said. “From your letters, she sounded like she might’ve given you a harder time about leaving.”
“No, she was quite nonchalant about the whole thing.” Larissa couldn’t tell even him the truth. Well, why not? Was he telling her the truth?
Another hundred miles.
They got to Jindabyne after lunch. Kai suggested crashing at Bart and Bianca’s which Larissa thought was a dumb suggestion, but what she craftily said was, “We haven’t seen each other for three months. Privacy might be good, don’t you think?”
He agreed, but not before saying, “I haven’t seen Bart and Bianca either.”
“You’re not having sex with Bart and Bianca,” returned Larissa irritably.
“Okay,” Kai said. “But after twenty minutes, then what?”
When she stared him down, he said, rolling his eyes, “Just kidding. Sheesh.”
They rented a room at the Crackenback Inn, the place they first stayed at when they came to Jindabyne, by the alpine lake in the glaze of a valley, surrounded by the Australian Alps. For a few extra dollars they got a white chalet on the water, with a balcony and a fireplace. Larissa was trying to recreate the sense of awe they both had back then, to be here, to have each other, to be alone. But awe is a funny thing. Awe: reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder. Only one of those words could still be applied to Larissa’s current state of being—one more accurately described as dread.
In the morning she said to Kai, let’s take a ride, talk to Darien, our old buddy at Snowy River Real Estate. He’ll find us something to rent. She got all dressed up and smiley, but after an hour Kai was still in bed. “You go,” he said. “I’m not feeling well. I think I’m coming down with something. Been working too hard. You go, and then if you see something you like, come get me and I’ll go take a look.”
“Are you serious? You want me to go by myself?” He seemed serious, because he was still in bed, face in the pillow.
“I do.” His voice was muffled. “Or let’s wait till tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll feel better then.”
Had she not read his letter to Muriel, Larissa wouldn’t have known what to make of him. But she had. And still she didn’t know what to make of him. She had zero interest in bringing the letter up. She called Darien and went out without Kai, filled with that “dread” part of awe, hoping that if she found them a lovely place, it would make everything better.
She found four lovely places, one better than the next. Two had spectacular access to the lake, and the one on the Banjo Patterson Crescent was brand spanking new, with wood floors and a fireplace, a terrace and bay windows. It was unfurnished and the price was right. She couldn’t believe it hadn’t been rented.
“Just came on the market yesterday,” Darien said. “It won’t be around past the weekend, I guarantee it.”
She dragged Kai to Banjo House that afternoon. Kai, still mopey and not feeling well, didn’t like it. “It’s too bright, too much sun, everything we have will fade.”
“What will fade?” said Larissa. “We have nothing.”
Slowly blinking into the distance, Kai shook his head. “It’s too new. It feels like a hospital, all white and prim. Don’t like it. Got anything else?”
“Not at the moment,” said Darien, eyeing Kai with spectacular disdain.
Larissa asked Darien for a few minutes alone.
“No matter how many minutes alone we have,” Kai said to her, “I’m not going to like it any better.”
“Kai, look at this place! It’s cleaner, larger, nicer than the Rainbow Drive bungalow, which you said was the best place you ever lived!”
“Clearly I was mistaken.”
“Is this an excuse?” she demanded to know. “Is there some other reason you don’t like them?”
“Why are you always looking for an ulterior motive? I just don’t like them. Why can’t we leave it at that?” He looked pale and tired. His mouth was tight. The shorn head made him look gaunt, haunted.
“We have to find a place to live soon. We can’t stay at the waterfront chalet forever.”
He wasn’t convinced. As in, why can’t we? Or worse. I know we can’t, his stiff and apathetic body language seemed to be saying, but I don’t have another solution.
She told Darien they were going to think about it, but the next afternoon when she called, the realtor told her the place had already been rented. Larissa was intensely disappointed.
“It wasn’t meant for us,” Kai said, strumming his ukulele, sitting on the balcony. “If it was meant for us, we would have it.”
“We don’t have it because you said no to it!”
He kept looking out onto the water and the mountains. He said nothing. Strum, strum, something lonely in a minor key, with lows and lows and hollows in the notes.
She tried to humor him. Would you like to go for a bicycle ride in the mountains? Would you like to so swimming? The pool is heated. Would you like to go bowling?
“Larissa, which part of I’m not feeling up to it don’t you understand?”
“The part where I don’t understand what’s on your mind,” she said to him after another two days of sitting and staring at the lake had passed. What’s the matter with you, she wanted to ask. Why are you acting like this? Man up, Kai.
He repeated that he was coming down with a bug, though he had no fever and no outward symptoms of debilitation. How Larissa wished she hadn’t snooped on the letter to Muriel. She didn’t want Kai to say he didn’t want to stay here. After Paranaque, Jindabyne had suddenly acquired a mystical appeal. The lake was beautiful. The weather was beautiful. The snow-capped mountains surrounding Crackenback and Jindabyne were beautiful. The trees, the hills, the friendly people, everything was beautiful. Hoping for a crack in the bad mood, she kept asking Kai every night if he wanted to go to dinner with Bart and Bianca, and he kept saying no. Do you want to go for a drink with Patrick? No. You don’t want to go to Balcony Bar and hang out?
No.
And worse than that: the refusals kept coming even when she asked him to go shopping with her for their business.
“Kai,” she said, “we need two new tents; the old ones ripped. We need eight fishing lines. We need two more blankets, four flasks, a new cooler, disposable cameras, a cell phone.”
“We have a cell phone.” He waved it at her. “I reactivated our service in Pooncarie, knowing we’d be needing it.” Because no one went upstream without having even a weak signal in case of dire emergency.
“You reactivated our service in Pooncarie?” Larissa asked quietly, her brows knitting together.
“What’s the big deal?”
“And didn’t write to let me know so I could call you?”
“I just had it done! I didn’t do it two months ago but last week because I knew we’d be needing it in Jindabyne. Geez, Larissa. What is this?”
“Okay, scratch cell phone,” she said after a few moments of digesting his words. “But our first-aid kit is down. It needs restocking. And the season starts in a week.”
“I know.” He sighed.
“Do you want me to go get these items myself?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“We have to do something,” she beseeched him. “We already have the first tour set up.” They got the reservations and the deposits through the Thredbo Valley Tourism and Visitors Association website. They had always used the site to advertise their guided bushwalk and got quite a lot of international business that way. “What do you want to do, cancel it? We’d have to return all the deposits.”
“No, we shouldn’t cancel it.” He just sat strumming the strings, seven minor sevens in a row, like a broken blues scale.
She perched close to him on the balcony, leaning against the little tea table for support. “Is everything okay, Kai?”
>
“Of course. It’s fine.”
“Well, we need the tents. Otherwise four of our clients are going to be sleeping on the rocks by the Murray with salmon under their heads.”
“You’re right,” he said finally, not looking at her, staring out onto the lake. “We’ll go get the stuff we need. Do you want to shower first?”
Larissa went first. At least something was happening.
When she came out, still wet, Kai was frantically pacing around the living room. It wasn’t the same Kai who had just twenty minutes earlier been sitting on the balcony like a slumping lump, like inert matter. “Plans have changed slightly,” he said, twitching. “I just got a call from Billy-O.”
“Oh.” She was towel-drying her hair. “I didn’t hear the phone ring.”
He stopped moving to glare at her. “You were in the shower,” he said. “It’s a little trill. How could you have heard?”
“That’s true.” She didn’t want a fight. “What did he want?”
“Actually, he needs a huge favor from me.” Kai resumed his caged walk across the hotel room. “He’s out on a brumbie run—you know he’s a rover, he goes out into the bush for the feral horses, brings them back, sells them, or keeps them, but he’s starting his new trail ride business in a week and he just realized he hasn’t planned his course, and unfortunately he has to submit the guided tour route to the Broken Hill Tourism Board and Review so they can approve it and post it on their website, but he’s away and can’t do it. He begged me to come and mark the trails for him. Because otherwise the deadline will pass and he won’t be able to do the trail rides till next year and he’s counting on the income as a major part of his new business model.” Kai was panting.
“I thought it was the only part of his new business model,” said Larissa.
“I told him about what we did here,” Kai continued without breaking stride, “and he is really keen on trying it but with horses.”
“I know all about his interest in the trail tour.” Larissa stopped towel-drying her hair. “When does he want you to do this?”