Mountains tonight. The pall of smoke was still so thick she could hardly see the path, but the smoke was lifting a little. They could sometimes see a faint moon, with smoke drifting over, sending them from deep dark to a little sight and back again. It didn’t matter, though. They weren’t here to see the moon or the Blue Mountains. They were here...to yodel.
‘Right,’ Julie said as they reached the platform. ‘Go ahead.’
‘Really?’
‘Was it all hot air? You never meant it?’
He chuckled. ‘It won’t be pretty.’
‘I’m not interested in pretty!’
‘Well, you asked for it.’ And he breathed in, swelled, pummelled his chest—and yodelled.
It was a truly heroic yodel. It made Julie double with laughter. It made her feel...feel...as if she was thirteen years old again, in love for the first time and life was just beginning.
It was a true Tarzan yodel.
‘You’ve practised,’ she said accusingly. ‘No one could make a yodel sound that good first try.’
‘My therapist said I should let go my anger,’ he told her. ‘It started with standing in the shower and yelling at the soap. After a while I started experimenting elsewhere.’
‘Moving on?’
‘It’s what you have to do.’
‘Rob...’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You haven’t. But you will. Try it yourself. Open your mouth and yell.’ And he stood back and dared her with his eyes. He was laughing, with her, though, not at her. Daring her to laugh with him. Daring her to yodel?
And finally, amazingly, it felt as if she could. How long had it been since she’d felt this free? This alive? Maybe never. Even when they were courting, even when the twins were born, she’d always felt the constraints of work. The constraints of life. But now...
Rob’s hands were exerting a gentle pressure but that pressure was no constraint. She was facing outward into the rest of the world.
She was facing outward into the rest of her life.
‘Can you do it?’ Rob asked, and he kissed the nape of her neck. ‘Not that I doubt you. My wife can do anything.’
And she could. Or at least maybe she could.
Deep breath. Pummel a little.
Yodel.
And she was doing it, yodelling like a mad woman, and she took another breath and tried again and this time Rob joined her.
It was crazy. It was ridiculous.
It was fun.
‘We’ve delivered a Christmas baby,’ Rob managed as finally they ran out of puff, as finally they ran out of yodel. ‘A new life. And we’re learning Christmas yodelling duets! Is there nothing we’re not capable of? Happy Christmas, Mrs McDowell, and, by the way, will you marry me? Again? Make our vows again? I know we’re not divorced but it surely feels like we have been. Can we be a family? Can we take our past and live with it? Can we love what we’ve had, and love each other again for the rest of our lives?’
And the smoke suddenly cleared. Everything cleared. Rob was standing in front of her, he was holding her and the future was hers to grasp and to hold.
And in the end there was nothing to say except the most obvious response in the whole world.
‘Why, yes, Mr McDowell,’ she whispered. ‘Happy Christmas, my love, and yes, I believe I will marry you again. I believe I will marry you—for ever.’
A RETAKING OF weddings vows shouldn’t be as romantic as the first time around. That was what Julie’s mother had read somewhere, but she watched her daughter marry for the second time and she thought: what do ‘they’ know?
People go into a second marriage with their eyes wide open, with all the knowledge of the trials and pitfalls of marriage behind them, and yet they choose to step forward again, and step forward with joy. Because they know what love is. Because they know that, despite the hassles and the day-to-day trivia, and sometimes despite the tragedy and the heartache, they know that love is worth it.
So Julie’s mother held her husband’s hand and watched her daughter retake her vows, and felt her heart swell with pride. They’d ached every step of the way with their daughter. They’d ached for their grandsons and for the hurt they’d known their son-in-law must be feeling. But in the end they’d stopped watching. Julie had driven them away, as she’d driven away most people in her life. But somehow one magical Christmas had brought healing.
It was almost Easter now. Julie had wanted to get on with their lives with no fuss, but Rob wasn’t having any part of such a lame new beginning. ‘I watch people have parties for their new homes,’ he’d said. ‘How much more important is this? We’re having a party for our new lives.’
And they would be new lives. So much had changed.
They’d moved—Julie from her sterile apartment in Sydney, Rob from his bachelor pad in Adelaide—but they’d decided not to move back to the Blue Mountains. Amina and Henry were in desperate need of a house—‘and we need to move on,’ they’d told them.
Together they’d found a ramshackle weatherboard cottage on the beach just south of Sydney. They’d both abandoned their jobs for the duration and were tackling the house with energy and passion—if not skill. It might end up a bit wonky round the edges, but already it felt like home.
But... Home. Home is where the heart is, so somehow, some way, it felt right that their vows were being made back here. On the newly sprouting gardens around Amina and Henry’s home in the Blue Mountains, where there was love in spades. Amina and Henry had been overjoyed when Rob and Julie had asked to have the ceremony here.
‘Because your love brought us together again,’ Julie had told Amina. ‘You and Henry, with your courage and your love for each other.’
‘You were together all the time,’ Amina had whispered, holding her baby daughter close. ‘You just didn’t know it.’
Rob and Julie were now godparents. More. They were landlords and they were also sponsoring Henry through retraining. There’d be no more working in the mines. No more long absences. This family deserved to stay together.
As did Julie and Rob.
‘I asked you this seven years ago,’ the celebrant said, smiling mistily at them. She must have seen hundreds of weddings, but did she mist up for all of them? Surely not. ‘But I can’t tell you the joy it gives me to ask you again. Rob, do you take Julie—again—to be your lawful wedded wife, to love and to cherish, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, for as long as you both shall live?’
‘I do—and the rest,’ Rob said softly, speaking to Julie and
