5. Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Ollie awoke to a wet nose in her face.

“What the-” she spluttered, her eyes snapping open on melted chocolate eyes gazing back into her own and a quick lick to her nose. “Ugh!” she lifted her head abruptly.“How did you get in here?”

Rocco the dachshund blinked at her, his expression serious.She looked up and saw her bedroom door open a crack.She knew damn well he hadn’t done that himself.She suspected her mother; the bloody dogs ran this house.She tried to stretch her legs and found the blanket pinned tight to her feet.Pushing herself up she saw Portia, the oversized ancient moggie glaring at her for disturbing her restful nap. And the bloody cat as well.

By the time she’d showered and dressed the day was already heating up.

“Morning arsehole,” greeted Matty where he lazed on the front veranda, thick dark coffee in his hand.Her eldest brother lived with his wife and three kids barely three minutes’ drive away and Ollie strongly suspected he was here not so much to be early for work but to escape the chaos of his household, and so his mother could cook his breakfast for him like Ollie was pretty sure she did every day.

“Morning fuckface,” she ruffled his hair and he dodged.She sat down on one of the wooden deck chairs beside him and took a sip of her own cup. Even in Melbourne, home of good coffee - home of Italian coffee - there was nothing quite like drinking freshly roasted beans that had grown a hundred yards from where they sat.

“Hayley didn’t come up with you, huh?”

She flicked her eyes over his face but the question seemed innocent.

“We broke up,” she said.“Six months ago.”

“Shit Ollie, I didn’t know,” he sat up straight, staring at her.“Jeez, did the grapevine blow a foo-foo valve or what?I didn’t hear a thing.”

Ollie snorted.She and her siblings liked to joke that if you sneezed in a church three thousand miles away, their mother would hear about it within eight minutes flat and that was on a bad day. Privacy between family members was not a thing her parents believed in.

“Mum only found out last night,” she admitted.

“How are you alive right now?” Matty looked at her in wonder.Deep creases were starting around his heavily tanned face and a sprinkling of grey in his thick dark hair.It suited him - a solid hardworking guy, with a life he loved - but Ollie could still see the reckless young footballer he’d once been, teaching her how to tackle in the backyard by bowling her over into the grass so hard she’d had the wind knocked out of her and her dad had put her on concussion watch.

“Oh, I’ll pay, don’t you worry,” she shook her head, watching a kookaburra swoop from a tree branch with incredible speed, down into the grass and fly off with what looked like a hapless frog in his beak.It was a perfect analogy.Her mother would bide her time and swoop when she least expected it.“She’ll be trying to marry me off to a friend’s cousin’s farmer’s daughter within the week.”

“Watch out,” Matty grinned like a little boy, “there’s that many eligible bachelorettes in Ribbonwood just waiting to get swept off their little gay feet by a hotshot Melbourne doctor. Just don’t get anyone pregnant or you’ll be stuck here for life like the rest of us.”

Ollie laughed.

“I think I’m pretty safe on all counts,” she promised.

“Seriously, Ol.Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” She clearly wasn’t particularly convincing because Matty kept watching her face.

“How long are you here for?” he asked.

She hesitated.

“A while.” He didn’t drop his expectant gaze.She sighed. “I’ve taken three months off work,” she admitted.

“Holy shit,” he said, his eyes widening. “What happened?”

“I mean Nonna is dying, Matteo. Jesus, isn’t that enough?”

“You wouldn’t take three months off work even if you were dying,” Matty accused her. “Plus you flit in and out of this place as if your head’s on fire.You haven’t been here longer than a week since the day you left.Three months? ”

“Listen,” she lowered her voice to just above a whisper.“It’s nothing to jump up and down about - okay? - but the head of my department told me to take a sabbatical.I’m…I might be a little burned out. ”

“Shit kiddo,” he leaned forward, his elbows resting on his tanned hairy knees, his big hands clutching his cup.“I’m sorry. What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” she said truthfully. There was no big traumatic event to disclose, just a thousand perfectly regular ones.She was a paediatric emergency physician; if you were someone who loved a child, she’d seen your worst nightmares and she’d seen them every day.She’d witnessed countless catastrophes visited upon tiny bodies and after coping with it again and again, one afternoon, she’d suddenly…stopped. “I just hit a wall,” she summarised neatly for her brother’s sake.“And two weeks into it, Dad called me and told me about Nonna.”She gazed down at her own hands, not soil-stained and large like her brother’s, but capable all the same.Or so she’d thought.She looked up.“Oh shit Matty, you can’t fucking cry, ” she said in dismay.

Her brother burbled out a laugh, his eyes wet, and she immediately burst into tears while laughing in horror at herself.She loved that her brother had always been both absurdly masculine and completely comfortable with his emotions.He had a barrel chest and arms like a bodybuilder and he would cry freely if the moment hit him.Jesus, she’d missed him.He stood up and grabbed her in a hug, both of them weeping and laughing.

“For fuck’s sake,” came another voice.“It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning.”

Nico, her other brother stuck his head out the screen door and looked at them both in disbelief.That just made her laugh harder. She pulled out of Matty’s hug, picked up her coffee and took a big gulp, wiping her eyes.Nico shook his head like he was disgusted, stepping out into the light.

“She hasn’t even been home twenty-four hours and you’re already making her cry.Thought you’d grown out of that big brother bullshit.”

“Come here and I’ll make you cry too, you little pansy,” threatened Matty good-naturedly.

“Oh really, homophobic slurs?” Ollie glared at him.“I really am back in Queensland.”

“Pansy’s not homophobic.” Matty looked startled.“It’s a bloody flower.”

“Oh my god.” Nico and Ollie exchanged disbelieving stares.“Mate, it’s a gay slur,” Nico shook his head. “What planet are you from?”

“Wait, are you serious?”

“Jesus Christ -”

“Enough of the language!” their mother’s voice called from inside, making them all straighten, three grown adults suddenly widening their eyes and closing their mouths.“Come and have some breakfast before you put your Nonna in an early grave.”

“Did she actually just say that?” Nico mouthed, all three of them swallowing appalled giggles as they filed in the door to eat.

Nonna refused the wheelchair so between herself and her mother they practically carried her out into the garden.Together they sat down on the wooden bench beneath the massive Moreton fig that overlooked the lush sprawling vegetable patch where her grandmother had once reigned. It wasn’t particularly hard to move her; her once solid Nonna was now as light as a sparrow.It seemed quite possible that she’d just get lighter and lighter until she faded away from them altogether.

“Don’t look at me like that Viola,” her grandmother frowned, as the thought made her blink back tears.“I’m not dead yet.Now, sit here and tell me why you’re single again.Hayley was such a lovely girl.”

“She was Nonna,” Ollie agreed, swallowing down the part of the story where lovely Hayley found someone she thought was lovelier than Ollie and let the timelines overlap just enough to make the whole thing seem pretty damn grey.It hadn’t felt especially lovely to Ollie in the moment.

“Are you going to try to get her back?” Nonna’s big liquid eyes gazed back at her .

“Oh, no.No thank you,” Ollie told her firmly.“A bit of single time will do me for now.”

“Well, you’re getting a bit long in the tooth for ideas like that,” her mother interjected.

“Mum! Oh my god-”

“You’re in your mid-thirties.You’ll run right out of time to have children with that kind of attitude.”

Ollie and her mother exchanged a meaningful glare right over the top of Nonna’s head.Her mother was well aware that Ollie didn’t want to have kids.Not in her job, not now she’d seen the things she’d seen. Her mother, on the other hand, wasn’t having a bar of that nonsense. Love is risk, she’d argued vehemently when Ollie had first disclosed the news, years ago now. Love means fear and loss and pain, that’s what makes it love. Ollie had stared at her mother. Wow, you’re really selling it, mum.Sign me up. They both knew Ollie was too chicken-shit to argue this one in front of her grandmother.No one was going to die today, be it an elderly woman of dismay or a doctor in her prime receiving a solid whack to the back of her head.

“Are these nice old ladies pestering you? ”

Ollie had never been so damn glad to see her older sister in her life. She jumped to her feet and hugged her as if it were for the first time in months, rather than just since their reunion dinner the night before. Also, she’d be hard to hug for much longer, with the giant baby bump she was sporting.

Pia was an English teacher at Ribbonwood High, a career choice that made Ollie shiver every time she thought about it. Pia loved it, the weirdo, but with this being her third pregnancy she was wrapping up early at just thirty weeks. I’m big as a house , she’d groaned to Ollie over dinner. My classrooms are all running wild because they know full well I can’t be bothered to get up from my desk and sort them out.

Ollie doubted this last part was true.Her sister was warm, caring and made of sharp-honed steel. When she reached the end of her calm nature and her dark eyes flashed, Ollie was sure even the most troublesome of teenagers would sit the hell down and listen. She was only four years younger than Pia and even she knew not to cross her.

Then Ollie’s eyes lit up.

“Aunty Ollieeeeeeee,” came the cry and two small girls came flying down the lawn towards them.Sienna and Rosa were six and four, and both desperately excited to see her, poor Natasha - Matty’s wife - relegated to the boring aunt now their novel Melbourne-based aunty was within reach.

“Niblings!”

Within five minutes she was lying in the grass having fairy crowns made for her out of wild clover and dandelions and feeling very much like the next generation of Gabriellis were far more relaxing than the ones who came before them.

She closed her eyes in the sunshine, just for a second. A bloodied image flashed behind her lids, ripping the breath from her lungs before she quickly jerked them open.The girls were still there.Still whole, still healthy, both giggling: safe.She breathed in slowly and smiled at their little glowing faces.She lay back to let herself feel the sunshine, but she didn’t close her eyes again.