An Absence of Light [Part 1]

I can remember the day almost exactly.

It was Rosie’s birthday. I had a gift for her tucked under my arms (a pile of books, all of them wildly fantastic) and I was running to our little cave in Gull’s Cove. Rosie liked to call it the Secret Garden. I don’t know why. There weren't any plants in there. Just sand and rocks. But that’s Rosie for you, I guess. She had all her quirks and then she’d give inanimate objects their own quirks. That teapot loves knitting. The bus has an awful cold today but the pharmacy doesn’t stock medicine powerful enough for it. My phone wants to be on Australia’s Got Talent but doesn’t actually have a talent. I would laugh at her and then she’d pretend to hit me and say “Shut up Xander, you’re making the phone sad!”

But I digress. It was maybe eight-thirty in the morning. Thursday. Summer holidays. It was incredibly humid, as if God just dropped a bucket of water into the air but it forgot to fall down. I was already sweating.

I knew Rosie would be there already, and Georgie too. Georgie was early to everything. Even school. Some days she would turn up at the school at seven o’clock and just sit outside the gates, waiting for the teachers to turn up and let her in. She called it being punctual. I called it hating herself. Who chooses to wake up at six o’clock every morning? She likes to tell me I should go early with her. I tell her that if she suggests that again, I’ll transfer to the boy’s school down the road.

I raced down the old wooden steps onto the beach and made a beeline for the water. I kicked my sandals off and put them on top of the box I had wrapped for Rosie. She wouldn’t mind if it was a bit sandy. The water was cool on my feet. My footsteps sank into the sand. It felt like a perfect day.

I got to the Secret Garden after ten minutes of nearly getting my feet stuck in the sand. It was quiet in the cave. Maybe they weren’t there yet. But then I saw a shadow move, so I barged right in.

“Happy birthday Rosie!” I yelled. “To many more years of knitting teapots and un-talented iPhones!”

Then I looked up, and Georgie was crying, and I realised that for Rosie, there would be no more years at all.

—

“There was an accident,” Mum told us. “A car accident.”

Georgie sat next to me. I was shaking. Georgie was still crying. She refused to make eye contact with anyone.

“What kind of car accident?” I asked hoarsely.

“There was a drunk driver. He went off the road, and Rosie was walking there…” Mum hesitated. “The paramedics said there was nothing they could do.”

I found Georgie’s hand and gave it a squeeze. Georgie hadn’t said anything to me. All she had done was run after me as I sprinted back home, Rosie's present forgotten on the sand. Mum had been on the phone when I got home.

“Okay,” I said. I meant it as a dismissal, but Mum didn’t leave.

“Xander,” she said quietly.

“No,” I said. I guess that was rude, but I wasn’t in the right mindset to care about manners.

Mum finally took the hint and shuffled out of the room. I closed my eyes and counted to ten, and when I opened them she was gone and the door to my bedroom was closed.

Georgie and I sat like that for a while, just staring at the closed door. It felt like closing the door on Rosie’s life. It was too final, too much.

“It’s not fair,” Georgie bit out.

That was true. No one deserved to be killed by a drunk driver at eight o’clock on a Thursday morning, much less Rosie. Rosie was the kind of person who lived her life in a whirlwind of colour and noise, and that’s how she should’ve gone out. Tied to a firework at the ripe age of 86 and let go with a bang, in an explosion of light in the sky. That was the only way I ever thought Rosie could die. She always seemed so immortal, like nothing could hurt her. I thought she was untouchable.

Evidently not.

“I know,” I said.

Georgie and I didn’t say anything after that.It was too quiet. All I could hear was Georgie breathing and the fan. I didn’t think anything like this could happen on a day like that. Tragedies happen in winter, in the pouring rain under booming claps of thunder. I got my phone out and plugged my headphones in. I put on this emo shit. I don’t know why. I don’t usually listen to that. I guess I just needed something to distract me. Something loud and screamy. Something that reflected the cyclone inside me.

I put my headphones in, then turned the volume way up. I put it louder and louder, until I couldn’t hear anything else at all. Just me, the music, and no Rosie.