The heat eased off slightly, but the sky had darkened. Sam couldn’t remember the last time he had seen anything but smoke above the horizon, and as they pushed on, more of the landscape became stripped and charred around them. Whole paddocks were decimated, fences sunken and collapsed, livestock burnt. Road signs were folded over, melted in the heat, and Sam saw a whole house that had been reduced to a smouldering frame, its corrugated roof tumbled in upon itself.
A little further on a barricade had been set up to block traffic, propping up a large yellow sign that read Road Closed. Even the sandbags that held it in place had been scorched. As the car pushed around it, Katie started to speak, but Dettie shushed her quiet.
Sam’s rage had faded, but he was not yet sure what had replaced it. In the midst of his new, peculiar calm he was realising that his anger had been with him a lot longer than just the past day. Long before they’d abandoned Jon. Even back before the entire journey began. The cold sensation twisting in his belly had been there since at least his operation. Perhaps even before. Since he and Katie had sat on his bed, reading his father’s letter aloud. He wondered if that was why he had believed Dettie.
Her story was preposterous. Their parents had gotten back together with one phone call, after years of shouting arguments and conversations seething with unspoken accusation. The memory of his father sleeping on the couch for months. Roger, and his father’s job, and the months that had gone by without even a word from him. Sam had wanted so badly to undo it all that he never stopped to properly think it through. He’d embraced the lie. Like everyone else. He’d let it calm the rage that so often pinned him in place, left him breathless and terrified.
And it had.
For a few days, even with his skin pulled tight and peeling, he’d no longer felt so much like a shell of himself, lost and echoing with empty fury. The thought of his father’s return seemed to have filled in that hollow for a time. But in truth, beneath it all, the ache had remained, gnawing at his gut, tethering him to the past like the blankets tangled at his feet. Like the belt that pinned him to his seat.
Looking down at his greyed knees, at the black soot up his arms, he realised: he was just like the burnt-down house that had slipped by on the road. Eaten away. Exposed. Everything stripped from him. Everyone gone. His voice. His home. His father. His mother. Jon. All gone. Gone wherever Dettie’s husband was. Wherever the girl behind the curtain had been led. Perhaps dead, perhaps missing, but lost either way. He couldn’t run to them, or rely on them. He couldn’t will them back into being, no matter how much he thrashed and sulked.
He was burnt down, his emptiness exposed. But as he sat, swept along by the shudder of the car beneath him, it no longer hung upon him like a weight—the pain of what was lost fixing him in place, breathless. Instead he felt unburdened. It was the curious sensation of freedom that had made him woozy as he peered up at the blue sky.
Sam had spent the past several months grieving for what had been taken from him. But this trip, this journey into Dettie’s fixation on the past, her deluded longing to bring it back into being, had liberated him. He could no more change what had happened up to this point than he could open up his mouth and sing. All he could control was what was to come. Because Katie needed him. He was still afraid. For her. For himself. But it no longer paralysed him. He would be ready.
He groped around on the floor and gathered up Jon’s hitchhiking sign and a stray dark green colouring pencil.
Keeping the cardboard tilted away from Katie, so as not to frighten her, he changed Help Me, I’m British to Help Us! Kidnapped!
‘What you doing there, Sammy?’ Dettie said, angling to see in the rear-vision mirror. ‘You doing some drawing?’
He glanced up at her. He nodded.
‘Good. That’s good. That’s something nice and quiet to do. Good boy.’
He finished up the thick lettering and tucked the sign back behind his legs.
Ahead of them, the road disappeared into a wall of smoke. The cloud lay across the ground, motionless in the breeze, and within it Sam could see specks of flame lapping at the outlines of trees. The air was suddenly like a furnace. He felt it scalding his face. And he knew immediately that behind that curtain of smoke was the fire front. He stiffened, felt the heat in his lungs, and then they were inside it, swallowed by the white.
When the landscape disappeared, all at once, Katie shouted.
‘Katie, I said be quiet.’
‘No! Don’t!’
‘We’ll be through in a minute.’
Sam couldn’t make out anything, just grey smoke winding through white, flickers of orange, and the occasional flash of blistered roadside poles.
Embers swam in the air, peppering the windshield. Dettie snapped on the wipers, but it only smeared the soot around. The car swerved and pitched on the road, and Sam wasn’t sure how his aunt even knew where she was going. Their tyres sounded wet through the tar, and something crackled against his door.
Katie was screaming, hysterical.
‘Shut up, girl! Be quiet!’
Smoke blasted through the vents. Sam was holding his breath. He reached for Katie, holding her hand while bracing himself against the door.
‘For goodness sake! Enough!’ Dettie was reaching back, slapping her hand on the back seat. ‘Shut up, damn it!’ Her palm thumped on flesh. ‘Listen to your brother!’
Sam was clutching the doorhandle. He could feel the tension in his chest, the urge to cough. He would have been screaming too if he could. His eyes were screaming. He couldn’t afford to dissolve into a hacking fit. He squeezed Katie’s hand and refused to let go.
The clouds parted momentarily to show a lacework of fire eating the scrub. Katie thrashed and shrieked, and it was gone again.
Dettie shuddered behind the wheel, squinting. Her lips were pressed tight, coughing into her neck. Her whole body leant with each turn, the car lurching. Katie’s tears tracked black lines through the ash on her face.
Everything was gone. The road. The sky. Everything beyond the window was white, and eerily bright. Almost luminescent. Sam was wheezing. His stoma felt raw and torn. His eyes stung. For a moment it was like being back there. Like waking after his operation. The white. The sweat. The pain. No shadows. Fluorescent bulbs. Just whiteness and blur. He blinked his eyes into focus. Squeezed Katie’s hand until she turned and looked in his face.
He nodded.
The clouds swelled, and Dettie swerved to miss a charcoaled branch on the road. She yelped, and Katie shrieked. As Sam was thrown against the door the wind was knocked from his chest.