Here Until August. Josephine Rowe

      At the deepest point of the crossing, the ocean reaches my lower lip, and I hold on to Mum. Feel my feet levitate from the shell grit below. Become cargo swinging from her strong gold shoulder, safe in her smell of coconut oil and warm bread as she pushes on towards the island.

      Around us the ocean thickens to an algaeic soup that stinks of dead things; proof that the plankton are here, though invisible for now—it isn’t dark enough to give them away yet. This is the point where Fynn’s raft begins to keel, the empty buckets unhitching, and Sara responds with a lot of high-pitched wailing and clutching at salty air.

      When the raft breaks apart, Fynn keeps his word, and Sara scrambles up from the wreckage to ride his bony shoulders, her little grabby starfish hands clenching fistfuls of his tawny hair. It must hurt badly, his face like a cheap rubber mask of itself, but he says nothing while trying to shepherd pieces of the debris ahead of himself.

      Waves slap at his face, trying to get in through his mouth and nose. He screws his eyes shut, snorts water, while higher up Sara sings, oblivious, her stubby little feet hooked under his wrists.

      Hey mate, Dad offers, I can take her. But both Fynn and Sara shake their heads, so Dad just cruises alongside in a coast-guardish sort of way, until the ocean finally slips from Fynn’s shoulders and leaves Sara cheerily marooned up there.

      There are no photographs of this day. Mum dropped the disposable QuickSnap crossing back to the mainland, and though we groped and kicked around no one turned it up. Perhaps that’s why I remember it so vividly. Fynn stumbling through the breakers with Sara, delivering her safely to the dry sand and waiting until Mum had led her off to squeak into some penguin burrows before he doubled over and gushed out all that swallowed seawater into a patch of saltbrush. Fiery stinger marks striped his quaky legs.

      Years later, somewhere into adulthood, I’ll decide that this is a story to one day tell at my brother’s wedding. Or else his funeral. Possibly both—as with a certain kind of suit, it seems workable for either occasion.

      Instead of the wedding and/or funeral speech (though sure, there’s still time enough for both) I’m delivering this story to my wife. Trying to wrest my brother back from what local mythology has made of him. Careless Idiot at best. Murderer at worst. Ti has been driving past those crosses at the shoulder of Highridge Road for years, since before we even met. Shed-made, white as desert-bleached bones. Coated with a fresh layer of paint every spring, strung with teddy bears, ribbons, other sentimental lark. Trinkets refreshed each September. The grandparents’ work, we suspect; the father too modest for that sort of rubbish.

      This is all Ti knows of my brother. This, and the couple-three cards he’s sent, and the shedful of furniture he left behind; all gliding teak curves and high-tension wires. Mid-century harpsichord, Ti calls it, explaining how their father was a luthier when friends admire the coffee table, the only piece that makes sense with the rest of our house.

      My father, I’ll sometimes add. My father was the luthier.

      Why, Ti wants to know, would your brother come back here?

      I ask myself the same.

      After the hearing, depending on who you care to ask, Fynn either ran, slunk, snuck, crawled, choofed off, fucked off, hauled arse, or simply went to the Northern Isles of Scotland, where the Atlantic charges in to meet the North Sea, and where he got some shit-kicking work at a whisky distillery. There he puts in five or six shifts a week, making nothing that anyone could put his name to.

      I still draw sometimes, he told me once, glitchy at his end of our sole Skype attempt. His face freezing then catching up with itself.

      I still sketch out ideas for things I might make one day if I ever [garble].

      Last year Mum and Dad retired to Norfolk Island, from where Mum phones every Sunday to talk politics and weather and to ask what the hell she did wrong. Sara is twenty-five, working as an image and style consultant in Sydney. Who knows what she thinks; she’s less scrutable than a butchy boy. She doesn’t remember that trip to the island, or the raft, and I’m not sure she remembers a time when she liked either of us, Fynn or me. Her first memories start at five, and by then Fynn was sixteen, flakey as a box of Frosties, and I was a monster. Long gone are the days when she would laugh along with whatever jokes we told, not understanding but not wanting to be left out. Sometimes we would laugh just to make her laugh, tell jokes that weren’t funny, or weren’t even real jokes but had the rhythm of jokes. Just to test her, to watch her go. Now she doesn’t find anything funny.

      I think you ruined her, Mum says down the phone one weekend. You and that brother of yours.

      When did he become mine? is a question I do not ask.

      Fynn arrives on a Saturday morning with one duffel bag, his blondness gone to seed, hair brushing the collar of the bomber jacket he wears in spite of the January heat. Dead pine trees still line the curb, flung out for green waste.

      My brother lopes across the scorched front lawn, looking even older than he did in court, older than I figured possible. Walking taller than he wants to be, ghosting up the morning. Out on the street there’s his rental hatchback, some hairdryer, crouching as though it, too, hopes not to be seen. As though six years might be too soon.

      I’m waiting behind the flyscreen, feeling everything I’d neatly flat-packed springing up in me. I will punch him, I think. No, I will bring him in close. I will tell him . . . I don’t know what.

      Yes, I might’ve picked him up from the airport, traveled that eighty K with him—school doesn’t start back till February, the course is all set, no one needs a thing from me till then. But I was thinking, To hell with it. After this long and this much silence he can manage, at least, to make his own way back here.

      He’s turning silver gray at the temples, and when he finally looks up his blue eyes waver as though he is gazing at something unstill. He reminds me of those huskies that people, out of vanity or stupidity, see fit to keep as pets in this climate. Ti’s hands ball into little fists when she sees them, these bewildered, patchy-coated animals paraded around Perth’s richer suburbs, humiliated wolves.

      Fynn is humiliated, of course. He is beyond humiliated.

      Hey! I say. Then, like an idiot, Welcome back!

      Raf, is all he says, putting his hand forward like I’m about to go and shake it.

      I step out into the glare and grab him around the shoulders, and he stands there stiffly for a few seconds, finally relenting to the hug.

      Still in the doorway he rummages through the duffel bag. Brought you a gift, he says, but he says it like geft, this new lilt in his voice. Your wedding, he says, handing over a fancy wooden booze box. Sorry I missed … Then he waves a hand to mean: Everything.

      It strikes me that this is what strangers do. Make offerings before stepping over the threshold of each other’s house. That this is what we are now.

      Get in here, would you?

      Inside he shucks off the bomber jacket. His skin is the bluish white of those axolotls Dad never bought us.

      Six summers, he explains, like an apology. A lot to make up for—mind if I go photosynthesize? Then he spends the next few hours just lying in our backyard, stripped down to his undies. Ti will be at work a few hours yet, dislodging pieces of Lego from the throats of small stupid dogs, treating pissed-off cats for gingivitis. Fynn keeps his eyes closed as we speak about nothing much: Mum and Sara synching up their mid-and quarter-life crises; the Perth mining boom; the resulting ice boom; the inevitable rehab boom.

      I rant about my students, mostly write-offs. Teaching them the difference between Rhizaria and Chromalveolata when it’d be more use teaching