On the farm, bereaved, alone and with a new baby, June spent nights crying guilt and terror into her pillow, fearful that her neglect caused her mother to die, fearful that her son would have the same callous nature as his father. Night after night was the same, until the warm day when unexpected friendship walked up her driveway.
June riffled through the hazelwood box until she found them: a bunch of dried twiggy daisies. She cradled them between her palms, turning them over in her hands.
It was a clear spring morning when Tamara North arrived at Thornfield with one small bag and a pot of blooming daisies to her name. June answered the knock at the front door, unwashed and stinking of sour milk, with Clem screaming in her arms and a farm of dying flowers at her back. She offered Tamara a job on the spot. Doing what, she wasn’t sure; farmhand or friend, June needed both. Tamara put her bag and pot plant down and took Clem from June’s arms.
You put a fussing baby in water, she said. Water calms them.
Tamara walked confidently to the bathroom, as if she was utterly sure of where she was going and what she was doing. June stayed in the hall, bewildered by the sounds of running bath water, Tamara’s soothing song and Clem’s subsiding wails.
On Tamara’s first night at Thornfield, after she’d put Clem to bed and settled herself into her new bedroom, June clipped some of the daisies from her pot plant. She hung a small bunch to dry upside down by her window and pressed a few more into the Thornfield Dictionary with a new entry beside them.
Twiggy Daisy Bush. Your presence softens my pains.
Tamara had answered to Twig and softened June’s pains ever since. Even when June wouldn’t listen.
She put the dried flowers back into the box. Ran her fingertips over its whorls. It was the last thing Clem gave her before he found out Thornfield would never be his. Before the temper that simmered just below his skin ever since he was a baby tore through him irrevocably. I wish it was you I never knew and I was raised by my father instead, he screamed at June before he grabbed Agnes and took off in his truck. The hoarseness of his voice and his sickly pallor were still vivid in her memory, as was the emptiness in Agnes’s eyes through the passenger window.
June’s gut twisted as she wondered if her son chose hazelwood intentionally, though he couldn’t possibly have known how its meaning would haunt her in years to come: reconciliation. Before a sob could escape her, June hurriedly dug through the box until she found what she needed to make Alice’s birthday present.
She slammed the lid shut and reached a shaky hand for her flask. After a few long glugs, she left her room and went through the house, outside and across to the workshop.
Long after everyone went to bed, June worked at her desk, under her jeweller’s lamp, until her eyes burned and her flask was dry. Once her letter to Alice was written and her gift was finished and wrapped, June switched the lamp off. She left the workshop, stumbled through the dark into the house, and up to Alice’s bedroom.
Alice stirred in her sleep. She sat up. In the thin moonlight falling through her windows she saw June at her desk, but, unable to keep her eyes open, she sank back to sleep onto her pillow. When she awoke it was light. Her tenth birthday. Remembering her vision in the night, she leapt up. On her desk sat a present and a letter.
She tore at the wrapping, opened the jewellery box inside, and gasped. A large silver locket hung from a silver chain. Encased in resin, the lid of the locket held a cluster of pressed red petals. Alice slid a fingernail into the clasp. The locket sprang open. Looking up at her from behind a thin sheet of glass was a black and white photo of her mother. Hot tears rolled down Alice’s cheeks. She put the necklace on and picked up the letter.
Dear Alice,
Sometimes, some things are just too hard to say. I know you understand this better than most people.
When I was about your age I started to learn the language of flowers from my mother, your great-grandmother — who in turn learned it from her mother — using the flowers that grow from this land, our home. They help us to say what words sometimes cannot.
It breaks my heart that I can’t fix what has been taken from you. Just like you’ve lost your voice, I seem to have lost part of mine when it comes to talking about your mother and father. And that’s not okay, I know that. I know you need answers. I’m figuring this out as we go along, just like I know you are too. When I find the part of my voice that’s missing, please know I will give you every answer I can to every question you have. I promise. Maybe we’ll find our voices together.
I am your grandmother. I loved your parents very much. And I love you. I will always love you. We are each other’s family now. And will be, always. Twig and Candy, too.
This is the one photo I have of your mother. It now belongs to you. I made this locket using pressed petals from Sturt’s desert peas. To the women in our family, they mean courage. Have courage, take heart.
Thornfield is your mother’s home, your grandmother’s home, your great-, and great-great-grandmother’s home. Now, it can be yours too. It will open its stories to you just like this locket. If you’ll let it.
Alice closed the letter and ran her fingers along the fold. She tucked it into her pocket and held the locket open in her palm, staring at the photograph of her mother’s face. Maybe June was right. Some things were too hard to say. Some things were too hard to remember. And some things were just too hard to know. But June had promised: if Alice could find her voice, June would find answers.
Alice tugged on her blue boots and crept out of the house into the cool purple morning.
Downstairs in the office, Twig kept the phone to her ear even though the conversation had ended. Her heart drummed loudly. It had been too easy: the state’s adoption services department was in the Yellow Pages. She’d simply picked up the phone, dialled the number, said her name was June Hart and that she wanted to register an enquiry about the adoption of her grandson. Gave her postal address care of Tamara North, Thornfield Farm Manager, and was told the forms she needed would arrive in seven to ten working days. It took no more than five minutes. Then the line went dead. And Twig just sat there, listening to the dial tone hum in her ear. It was the sound of fate set in motion, a sound she never succeeded in hearing in her search for her own children. On paper, there was no record of Nina and Johnny’s existence. But Twig marked their birthdays every year, planting a new seedling. There were over sixty such plants and trees around Thornfield now.
Outside, the sun shone down on the Flowers, who were busy cutting branches of flowering wattle and gathering them in buckets. One of them was singing an old hymn. Twig thought about humming along but didn’t. She stopped going to church years ago.
No sounds came from June’s bedroom. Twig knew she’d been up until the early hours, making amends the best way she knew, through flowers. But guilt was a strange seed; the deeper you buried it, the harder it fought to grow. If June wouldn’t tell Alice about the baby, Twig was prepared to. And that meant she needed information.
As she leant forward to put the phone receiver back in its cradle, something glinted in the sunshine outside. Twig narrowed her eyes, following the light. Alice’s new necklace caught the sun as she tiptoed past the Flowers to scurry into the bush. Twig knew who Alice was going to meet at the river. She didn’t have any interest in stopping her either. That child needed all the solace and comfort she could get.