Anybody else.
‘It’s flat here,’ he said as they drove down the highway.
It was the first thing he’d said and Holly swung her head around. ‘It is around here. What’s it like in Italy?’
He shrugged. ‘Different.’
‘Like, it has hills?’
‘Yes.’
Great, she thought, so much for conversation. And she wondered if she’d imagined it. She looked out the window again. Looked back. ‘So what made you go to Italy when all your family are in England?’
‘My mother is Italian,’ he answered with a shrug.
‘Do you live near her?’
There was a pause that she sensed was weighted with meaning. And then he asked, ‘How far is it to Port MacDonnell again?’
The township of Penola was long behind them, the road more windy. She could have sat there enjoying the scenery, but while the view was pretty, it gave her time to think about other things, and the one thing that dominated her mind was Franco.
His scent filled her every breath. His proximity alerted her every moment. Silence was no respite. He didn’t have to talk for her to know he was right there, alongside her, no matter how hard she studied the view.
In which case there was no reason she shouldn’t ask the questions she wanted to ask. ‘So why did you move to Italy?’
He spared her but a glance before checking his mirrors. ‘It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’
‘And,’ she ventured warily, ‘was it?’
‘It was,’ he said, indicating to overtake a car towing a horse float. ‘The absolute right thing.’
‘Do you see much of your family?’
‘Not much.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Is it? I thought you were the one who believed my family was good for nothing more than magazine fodder.’
And it shamed her into silence that he was right.
The road was quiet and they made good time, so good that they did have time to check out the Blue Lake on the way.
‘Do you want to stop?’ she asked.
‘I thought we didn’t have time,’ he said, and she knew he’d known she hadn’t wanted him along.
‘There was less traffic than I expected.’
Franco just smiled that knowing smile again and she hated that he seemed able to peel away her words and see into her mind. They walked to the lookout at the crater’s edge, where the bush-covered walls of the crater fell steeply away to the lake below.
‘It doesn’t look very blue,’ he said, peering down at the steel-grey waters.
‘It never does this time of year. It’s this steel-grey colour from about April to November. But if you were here in December you’d see it turn a vivid blue, almost overnight it seems to happen.’
He looked down at the cold grey lake below them and then over at her. ‘As blue as your eyes?’
She blinked, clamping down on a zipper line of sensation that shimmied down her spine and left her tingling in all sorts of places she didn’t realise could tingle. Strange, she thought, when all he’d done was notice her eyes were blue. ‘Much deeper,’ she said, unimpressed with the little tremor that rattled through her words. She licked her lips and tried for steadier this time. ‘More a cobalt or a sapphire-blue.’
‘Whereas yours are what?’ He took his own good time studying them, although if she wasn’t mistaken, those eyes had also spent a goodly amount of time examining her mouth. ‘What would you call them? Turquoise?’
She shrugged and turned away, feeling a little bit thrown, a little bit off balance. ‘I guess.’ She pointed out an old stone building, eager to happen upon a diversion, eager to change the subject. ‘Over there is the old pumping station. It’s not in operation any more,’ she babbled, ‘even though Mount Gambier still takes its water from the lake.’
He nodded and for a moment she imagined she was home free. ‘And what’s that?’ he said, referring to the abandoned ruins across from the lookout on the crater edge.
‘Ah,’ she answered a little wistfully, sad to be reminded of the wreck it had been allowed to become, a connection to her earliest days now just a derelict eyesore surrounded by chain-link fence. ‘That’s the old hospital.’
Although it could never just be the ‘old hospital’ to her, because she knew her father had once walked those hallways treating his patients and her mother had given birth to her in a room overlooking the lake. And in the end, that’s where they’d both been taken after the crash that had claimed their lives.
But now only the shell of that building remained in place of memories, and even across the crater’s rim, she could sense the wind whistle and moan through the shattered windows and up the empty stairwells, giving voice to the ghosts of the past.