The Knowhere Girl

Epilogue

She plays in the shade of the creek. A beautiful little girl with dark hair and green eyes. It's been five years since I left; it's hard to believe now. It is another world. A vanished world. When I first felt her stirring inside of me, I was consumed with a terror that felt as old as life itself. Only the joy of holding her in my arms could tame it.

Sometimes I still have the waking nightmares that haunt me, Jason standing in the corner, asking why I left him. Other times it's Joker and his nails on chalkboard laugh. They shake my body awake five years later, in an ague of shivers and trembling in the dark watches of the night.

Only when I wake, I remind myself that I have a piece of him here with me. Katia, our daughter. She's the spitting of him. When I come in to check on her, we lay in bed together and I tell her stories about when I was a kid, before I ran away. She's getting to the age where she understands that most kids have fathers, and she asks about Jason. I tell her the same things I always do, but she never gets tired of hearing them.

"He was kind, Kat," I always say. "Tall, handsome, and powerful. But gentle, too. You have his black hair, you know, and his green eyes."

I rub her back to calm her down as much as myself. "I wish he could see you, Katia. He would be so proud."

I just hope she doesn't grow up to resent her father not being here.

But for now, we have each other, and I can make Katia understand in a way that will make her braver. But one day I'll have to explain about my nightmares. Why they came. Why they won't ever really go away.

I'll tell them how I survive it. I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away.

When I finally worked up the courage to visit my mother, my baby bump was just starting to show properly, but she didn't care. We both cried like children like an hour, and I realised how much I missed her. She looked older than someone in their mid-30s should, with more grey streaks in her hair, with more wrinkles and cracked. She thought I was never coming back. I explain to her the I moved to America for a bit — but I avoided talking about being in another dimension. I told her I met a boy, and we worked together (not technically a lie. I don't believe for a minute that Jason and I wouldn't have become friends somehow—that an unexploded bomb wouldn't have gone off and blown us both into the same crater, or that crowbar wouldn't have come along and knocked our heads together in a flash of green sunlight.)

I thought my birth circumstances were a cross I'd bear for the rest of my life, but what had happened between Nonna and Marcus Sandford made me realize that it had never been my cross. I had only made it mine.

And the different cultures thing?

Well, I'm not sure whether everyone in this country will ever understand multiculturalism and that saddens me, because it's as much part of Australian life as rugby and meat pies. But the important thing is that I know where my place in life is.

If someone comes up and asks me what nationality I am, I'll look at them and say that I'm an Australian with Italian blood flowing rapidly through my veins. I'll say that with pride, because it's pride that I feel.

A lot has changed at the Homestead, of course it has. My brother is renting a place in Perth but visits on the holidays. We fight more than we used to. He can sometimes be such a male chauvinist prick, sending my Cain instinct into overdrive (something all older siblings have).

I'm still my dad's right-hand man and best mate, at least that hasn't changed, and unlike my grandfather, he is active in Katia's life.

It's my twenty-fourth birthday today. And tonight, I'll be with friends and family, which is what life is all about. I will sit between two women. The two most influential women in my life, whose relationship was almost destroyed by one man who has been dead for nineteen years.

I will sit between them and be a link and I'll fight with all my might to see that nothing tears my family unit apart. I'm not saying my life will be easier now.  I'm not saying that people will stop whispering about me behind my back. Because I think that if I lived life like a saint and walked with two feet in one shoe; if I wore the clothes of St. Francis of Assisi and suffered like a martyr; if I lived by the rules and never committed a sin, people would still talk. Because human nature is like that. They'll always, like me, find someone to talk about.

I've figured out that it doesn't matter whether I'm Gwen Stallone, or Gisela Kelly who was never an Raldini, who should have been a Sandford and who may never be a Todd. It matters who I feel like I am-and I feel like Mathew and Christina's daughter and Katia's mother; Angela's granddaughter; Darren's sister; and Robert's cousin.

You know, a wonderful thing happened to me when I reflected back on the last five years.

"One day" came.

It's not the life I wanted, but I can make it work. I can teach Kat how to ride horse and muster cattle. I can teach her how to drive. All I can do is make the most of what I have and make the most of my darling daughter...

Who I hope she will become a better woman than I was.

Meme of the day