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Over the months, four different drugs fail on Louisa and as they fail she spirals into another place and becomes a more wasted version of herself. So the hospital tries shock treatment. A buckling picture of a smiling dolphin looks down from the ceiling above the treatment table in the ECT suite. It’s there to give patients something to linger on while they embrace the nightfall of anaesthesia. She knows she saw it and that’s a comfort because, while it saved her, her memory never fully recovers from shock treatment.

In time she gets used to waking in the recovery room and hearing Rozzie, her favourite nurse, move around slowly and carefully, calling each patient by name, gently, like a mother.

‘Louie are you there, my dear? Back with us yet?’ and touches her cheek and rearranges the white cotton blanket and then floats away to tend to the others. She hums softly to the old hits playing low on a little radio. She sings for the lost ones who wash up here in the recovery room after ECT, the ones whose brains have badly let them down. Often on hearing her, Louisa wants to weep with joy, partly because after ECT she’s so damned bright she’s nearly normal, and partly because kindness, wherever you find it, is a visit from angels.

After the recovery room, she wakes up again later in a ward, one side of her hair stiff with the gel that conducts the shock, her doctor sitting in the chair beside her writing his notes. ‘You’re just having a snooze,’ he tells her and, in a while, he’s gone. In a day or two the treatment wears away and the slide begins again, the gradual tapering.

Emmett comes alone to the hospital one Wednesday afternoon. He’s driving a white Commodore these days and he’s rapt about finding a shady car park. Ah, the little things, he thinks. He walks fast through the brilliant day, not noticing the crepe myrtles in bloom, their redness like a memory of hearts. He’s not interested. He’s looking forward to the pub later. Tell the truth, he’s not completely convinced about this depression business. Nothing a drink wouldn’t fix, he reckons, hitching up his trousers and thinking about the counter lunch that awaits him at the North Star.

Emmett’s nervous about this kind of place though and doubtful about the whole shebang and when he comes upon Louisa in room 602, he’s thinking about telling her to get her act together. But then he sees her and something overcomes him and he kneels before her chair and wraps his arms around her and begins to weep on the top of her head. He can’t make himself stop.

With her weary eyes and her slow blood, Louisa wonders what’s going on here. Time is still so slow and having Emmett here is outside of everything. After a while, Emmett looks at her and remembers to wipe his face and with two hands out behind him staggers back to find the bed. He has called into her house on the way and picked a rose from the climber out the front and popped it in his shirt pocket where it has been a bit crushed. Thought she might like to see something of her own and he lays the pearly thing on her knee.

Though Louisa isn’t talking, she still looks at people and now she studies him. He doesn’t look like much but she still can’t completely place him. She’s not glad he’s here. The thing about fathers is beyond her.

She’ll always remember the day Rob and the kids came to get her at the hospital. Though there are many outpatient treatments to go, it still feels like a milestone. And that last day seeing Beck in her pretty dress and Tom looking serious with his hair all combed and Rob, the big goose, in his denim jacket with a bunch of straggly pink carnations for her, seeing them lifts her but not too high, she hopes. As they walk out to the carpark together, she’s reminded precisely of what she almost lost. What nearly went away.

At home she walks inside the house gingerly as if she might break. But in time she finds she’s able to talk more and even to eat again.

Mr Conti has helped where he can. One Friday night he thrusts an envelope with five hundred dollars at her. He stands at the front door, hand out, and says in his choppy accent, ‘For you dear Luisa and for your babies,’ and he kisses her hand and is gone. And then there’s the dole.

She needs ECT as an outpatient, at first twice a week, and Rob, still sleeping on the couch in the battered pine family room, drives her to the hospital at six-thirty on Monday and Friday mornings and picks her up a few hours later. His business is floundering, but he is able to do a fair bit when she doesn’t need him.

Louisa can’t remember much about the trips to the hospital in the morning, but she never forgets the emptiness that surrounds her as she walks across the carpark at dawn and that void is always the most recognisable part of the experience.

And yet, even though she believes it will not end, in time she does recover. She has ECT once a week, then once a fort-night, then only when the doctor thinks she needs it. And now a new medication is working.

And the lifting is so gradual, she barely notices but there’s a day when she’s leaving the house to go to work and she sees the sky and it’s as if it hadn’t been there all that time, as if it had run away.

She never forgets the way the sky opens up over her that day. The structure of clouds, she thinks, and remembers geo graphy lessons and how mastery over the names of clouds exalted her, that these are, well, alto-somethings. She smiles. She feels so new at being alive, as if even her skin is newborn.

To see the world again, to have her eyes working again after all this time is enough to last her forever. The small surrounding things make her feel alive. To think what she has missed, but she stops herself because that road, with blame hiding in every corner, will lead her the wrong way.

For part of that first day she feels she’s come back but she keeps it a secret, even scared to smile outright at the force of it. It’s okay, she reckons, they think I’m nuts anyway. She’s been away and she’s lucky to be back. Never wants to go there again. People climb mountains and sail solo around the world because they’re looking for a challenge. Ha! she thinks, they ought to trying climbing back after such a depression but sponsorships would probably be out of the question, she speculates shrewdly.