The Edge of Everything

1

WHEN ONE OF the world’s most endangered birds flies into my bedroom window on the first day of summer holidays, I take it as a sign. I mean, of all the windows in all the houses in all the sprawling suburbs of outer Melbourne, this rare puff of feathers collided with mine. Today, of all days. That’s not a coincidence. It can’t be.

I know that most people don’t believe in signs. But most people have probably never needed one as badly as I do.

So, the bird semi-kamikazes over the neighbour’s fence and straight into my window with a thump right on sunset. ‘Woah!’ I throw my phone aside, press my nose to the glass and look down. It lies motionless on the bricks below.

I race outside into the December dusk and crouch over the creature. It’s got a black-and-white spotted collar of feathers around its neck, a chest of dusty red-brown, delicate twig legs. It’s a plains-wanderer. Thousands of them used to live around here until suburbia claimed the grasslands. Now there’s maybe only a few hundred left in total. I can barely stand thinking about it.

I know about plains-wanderers because the Australian wildlife sanctuary just off the freeway has a captive-breeding program. My brother Charlie and I went there all the time as kids—another reason I’m taking this as a sign. Except the weird thing is, I could have sworn they don’t fly…

I gently stroke the bird with my finger to see if it’s alive. ‘Please don’t die,’ I whisper. ‘ Please don’t make me watch you die.’ For a moment time loses all meaning and I don’t know who I’m begging. My eyes sting and my throat feels thick.

Just then, though, the bird moves, turning its head towards the pink sky. It opens its eyes, glossy black with a golden ring, and looks at me. I mean, it really looks at me with this hopeful expression. Like I’m some kind of bird whisperer. Like I’m destined to save it. Like I matter. Goosebumps shimmer across my skin.

‘Bloody hell,’ says Dad, who’s appeared next to me in his faded Franklin Falcons trackies and T-shirt. ‘Well, it did a good job. Heard the thwack from the study.’

‘Oh no,’ says Mum, who’s materialised on my other side holding her mini houseplant-pruning shears. ‘Is it alive? What is it?’

‘It’s a plains-wanderer,’ I say, annoyed that they’ve interrupted this moment but trying to keep from sounding as on-edge as I feel. I leave out the part about it being a sign because they worry about my mental health enough as it is. I turn back to the bird. ‘It’s alive. Just.’

‘The poor little guy ,’ Mum coos. It’s not that she’s an animal lover per se, she’s just very maternal. This is a woman who names her plants, asks them if they’ve had enough to drink.

‘Pretty sure it’s a female,’ I mutter, pointing to the bird’s markings.

Dad’s knees click as he squats down. ‘Wow. They’re really rare, aren’t they?’ He reaches a hand towards the bird.

‘ Don’t touch her ,’ I snap, and he jerks back looking hurt. Guilt grips me but, then again, he’s far from innocent here. My parents own the biggest real estate agency in our suburb, Franklin, which is the fastest-growing municipality in the country. Their paved-outdoor-dining-area sales pitch is definitely part of the problem.

‘Okay, Luce Cat,’ Mum says, rubbing my back. ‘Calm down. Maybe she’s just stunned.’

Dad chimes in. ‘Is it birds that heal faster than other animals? There’s something that heals weirdly fast.’

I clench my jaw. ‘You’re thinking of tongues , Dad.’

‘You’re definitely thinking of tongues,’ Mum agrees.

‘Oh,’ Dad says. ‘Right.’

I feel like screaming, but my parents’ voices are composed. Their breathing is steady. Unlike me, it doesn’t appear that this reminder of how fragile life is has affected either of them. I’m not surprised. The thing about my parents is, my older brother’s death eleven months ago didn’t completely destroy them. Mum didn’t get addicted to sleeping pills, lock herself in their bedroom and stop consuming anything but air. Dad didn’t start grief-guzzling whisky and disappearing for days at a time, returning with weird, patchy beard growth. After the initial shock and the first few months of a feeling like our real lives had suddenly ended and we’d zombie-risen in a very wrong reality, Mum started dragging herself to the gym in the mornings and Dad started attending Franklin Uniting Church on Sundays. They go to bereavement meetings. They’re accepting help. They’re grieving in a healthy way. They’re coping , as much as that’s humanly possible.

Suddenly I need to be alone.

I turn back to the plains-wanderer. She’s trembling hard and looks really dazed. She’ll probably get eaten by a fox if I leave her out here.

I scoop up the tiny bird in my hands as gently as possible and squeeze backwards through my parents. ‘I’ll take her to the sanctuary tomorrow,’ I say.

‘Nice one, Luce,’ Dad says, giving me a surprised but supportive smile that’s probably because I’m planning to leave the house.

I duck into the kitchen for a tea towel and the cardboard box our new all-purpose kitchen-aid thing came in, then head for my room. On my desk I push aside some crusty cereal bowls, dirty clothes and dog-eared novels that have been sitting there for months, making space for the bird’s temporary home. Then I freeze.

Underneath where the books and bowls and clothes were is the polaroid. I thought I’d lost it. The one from that party. The one I would have thrown out because of who else is in it if it wasn’t the last photo of my brother ever taken. I took it on the day he died, last summer. I pick up the photo with trembling fingers.

I say Charlie is my older brother, which is true, but the gap is closing. Soon I’ll be seventeen, older than he ever was. I still look like him though, with Mum’s dark eyes and bow lips and Dad’s prominent cheekbones. I stare at the polaroid. It’s such a nothing-everything photo. Charlie, with his best mate Lockie. They’re in boardshorts by Kenji’s pool, not looking at the camera because they don’t know I’ve got it. Charlie’s holding a massive water pistol and grinning in that boof head-boy way that contradicts how deep his thoughts were. Lockie’s looking as effortlessly hot as always and holding a six-pack of UDLs. Some girls in their year are in bikinis in the background dancing to a now-silent tune—summer personified. Looking at this photo, you would never guess what was about to happen.

I put the polaroid back down on the desk, tear my gaze away from it and peer inside the cardboard box. The plains-wanderer is standing, looking up at me. The tension in my chest loosens slightly. She might survive the night. Which would make sense, if she’s a sign.

I put the tea towel over the box and flop back onto my bed. Back into the well-worn groove I’ve dedicated myself to deepening for the past eleven months, the one I’ve barely left for anything but school. Back to staring at the tiny crack in the ceiling.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not depressed. I’ve always been a bit like this. Mostly, I like spending a lot of time alone in my room. Sometimes I read or watch Netflix or scroll on my phone. Sometimes I listen for my heart, just to make sure it’s still beating. Sometimes I watch YouTube for so long my eyes itch, but I feel far away from my own body and there’s a kind of numb peace as the videos bleed into each other like a waking unconsciousness. It’s all totally fine and normal.

Suddenly I get the urge to message Jacinta, but I have no idea where my phone is and I’m not sure I can summon the effort to look for it. My eyes slide to the cardboard box. The bird. ‘Are you sending me signs now, Charlie?’ I have to grit my teeth to fight against the swirling pull of the black hole that opened up in my chest after he died.

I close my eyes and I can hear him speaking, voice curling upwards at the edges like when he was on the verge of a bad-taste joke only I would appreciate. ‘All I know, Lucky, is you need to get off your arse and live enough for both of us, or I’m totally going to kill you.’

When we were kids, Charlie and I had this theory: every human is born with the potential to achieve one transcendent thing. We were obsessed with the word transcendent because it made us sound intelligent but also because of the definition: beyond or above the range of normal human experience. But while I was mostly just hopeful our theory was true, Charlie swore he could feel it in himself: this thing . Buried under his ribs, thumping away like a second heart, pumping his veins full of longing.

When we were young, we had pretty wild ideas about what our thing could be. For a while Charlie was sure he could breathe underwater. I thought I could talk to animals. Charlie once broke three bones in his ankle trying to fly out of the gum tree in the backyard, arms pinned to his sides with pure commitment, sacrificing himself to our belief. I checked our letterbox twice a day for my acceptance letter to magic school, stomach in secret knots about all the ways I might fail to be a good-enough witch despite being chosen. Over the years, though, a few slightly more realistic options occurred to us. Maybe I would write a song so amazing it breaks all Spotify streaming records. Maybe Charlie would invent the next cryptocurrency and become an overnight billionaire.

I know it sounds like a pretty optimistic theory, but the fine print beneath the potential for achieving your one transcendent thing is…most people never realise this potential. They never manage to figure out what their thing is. They end up just being ordinary when, if they’d searched a little longer, tried a little harder, they could have been so much more . That’s the scary part. That’s the part that freaked us out.

So that was our mission: to discover our one transcendent thing. But because the possibilities were practically infinite, we decided to narrow the search by looking for a sign—something on the first day of the summer holidays that would point us in the right direction. One year there was a meteor shower, which sparked a search for new planets. Another year a blackout led to a short stint trying to communicate with ghosts. Sometimes there’d be multiple signs that would keep us following their paths all summer.

We never found our transcendent things, but Charlie would end up acquiring a bunch of new skills every summer: designing a basic app, mastering ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the guitar, a skateboard kick flip. Because that was Charlie. I know he would have found his thing one day. But me? One year I sort of got the hang of hula-hooping, even though I broke the hideous swan-shaped vase Dad bought Mum for their anniversary in the process. Yeah, there’s a high likelihood there’s nothing transcendent about me. But still, they were my favourite summers. Happy, hopeful summers. Summers that felt like maybe I was on the way to being something.

Eventually, though, Charlie and I grew out of all that. Or, at least, we pretended to. Except Charlie seemed to discover even more complicated ways to wonder about his place in the world, and I grew even less hopeful I was special.

But now, the plains-wanderer. On the first day of the summer holidays. Like a sign. Something I have to follow. Because there’s an ocean of summer ahead of me, and I’m beginning to realise that if I don’t fill these weeks up with something other than staring at the ceiling it’s possible I’ll drown.