An Odd Kind Of Wonderful

Chapter Twenty

CHAPTER TWENTY
"These days turned out nothing like I'd planned." (Powderfinger)

    We end up at the edge of the harbour. Raisa gets out of the car first, her skirt waving in the wind behind her. I look around, upwards at the skyscrapers crowded around the shore, and pull the door open, hearing the click as Joel gets out and locks it. "I'm going to stay here," He says, and leans on the bonnet. "I can't have someone stealing it again." I nod at him. Raisa's crouching just where the grass meets the rocks, looking around for something.

    The words 'what are you looking for?' are on my lips, but she's found it, a ragged sheet of newspaper. "The diary," She says, and makes a 'give it' motion with her hands. I go back to the car and grab it from the console. Joel raises his eyebrows at me. "I don't know what she's doing," I offer and shrug, heading back towards her. I just silently give her my diary, and she stares up at me, like I'm guilty of something, for an entire minute, before I blurt, "What?"

    "You have to read it." And she passes it back to me.

    I sit on a flat-surfaced rock next to her. "Why?"

    "It's part of the ritual."

    "You're an actual hippie, oh my God." Joel says from the car.

    Raisa rolls her eyes, takes the diary, rips a page out at what I assume is random and shoves it into my hands. "Read it aloud." She says, with the sort of authority you wouldn't start an argument with. And I wouldn't, usually, but.

    "Raisa, I don't know if..." I try to focus on getting my breaths out more evenly but there's something decidedly brick-like stuck somewhere in my voice box. "Can't we just chuck it in a skip?"

    She gives me a look; a mix of pure, unadulterated disgust. "Don't disrespect the ritual. Chucking it in a skip would give you no closure. It'd just be like throwing the entirety of your history with your mental illness away."

    I give her a look back. "I have no problems with that. In fact, I very much would like to do that."

    "But what would you learn?" Raisa sighs impatiently. "What's to say you won't do it again?"

    "Raisa, I don't think you..."

    "No, Nathan, I don't think you get it." Her voice has an edge to it, now, and it hurts for me to hear it. She holds the paper in the air. "This needs to be burnt. You need to see the ashes of it float away and create different atoms in different places and you need to see it disappear, bit by bit."

    "How are you sure all this works?" I snap.

    She goes quiet. Or at least, quieter. Her breathing remains heavy, and the traffic continues to drip by, the headlights flashing on our backs. How could she berate me like this? How could she come up with some ludicrous theory that a four-year-old would use to deal with the loss of a—

    "Your dad." I say. The words resonate out, bouncing of our skulls, and back into my ears.

    "He made paper boats." Raisa interrupts me. She starts folding the newspaper accordingly. "At Christmas parties. We would always have Christmas lunch at a seafood restaurant at Birkenhead Point, it was right on the water. We'd sail them out. And then we'd have to rent out a real boat just to catch our paper ones." Her voice wavers, like a static signal. "Paper sails aren't very waterproof, did you know that, Nathan?"

    "I." I say, and kick my ankles together.

    She stares down at the folded paper in her hands. "I could never do it." She says. "He explained it to me so many times but I could never fold a paper boat. I could do swans, I could do Sydney Opera Houses, but not boats. Never boats." She unwraps it and starts again, but she fails a second time. A third. By the fourth, the paper has been folded over so many times it's impossible to fold it again, and a tear slips from Raisa's cheeks and falls on her bare foot. "I could never do it." She whispers, and I almost don't hear it. "I could never do it!"