Candy put the last of the brunch dishes away and made herself a black coffee. She drank it watching the Flowers milling in the fields, checking the new blooms. Their usual babble and laughter was thin. Something frosty had settled over Thornfield. After brunch, Oggi and Alice had slipped away, thinking they’d gone unnoticed. June had stalked into her workshop, slamming the door behind her. Twig went to the seedling houses to tend her trays of desert peas. And Candy scrubbed the dishes with steel wool until her knuckles were raw.
It was no longer ignorable: the days of Alice’s childhood were long gone. Neither Twig, Candy nor June talked about how difficult it was to see Agnes’s hopefulness and Clem’s wildness in the depths of Alice’s eyes. Sometimes, when Alice passed her in the house or in the fields, Candy’s first instinct was to look to the sky for smoke; she could swear she smelled something catching alight.
Even though she’d never heard from Clem after he’d left with Agnes, Candy had never broken their promise. She was there, her life sewn to his, only now through his daughter, who was fast becoming a woman with her own mind. A woman who didn’t seem to have inherited Clem’s demons, who seemed to be breaking free of Thornfield’s story. Something Candy had never managed.
She drank the last of her coffee, grimacing as she swallowed the bitter grinds. She might be thirty-four, but she was still nine, the girl in a cubby house made of sticks, bound to a shadow that was never coming home.
When the afternoon began to soften, Alice ran home from the river. Her fingertips tingled for her pen and journal. How would she write about this day? Everything was luminous: the yellow wings of Cleopatra butterflies as they fluttered over the bushes and flowers; the air sharpened by the smell of lemon-scented gum leaves crushed under her footsteps; the golden quality of the light. Oggi’s voice rang in her ears. We could be different people and live different lives.
As she ran, June’s face filled her thoughts. What would her leaving Thornfield do to June? Guilt pinched hard between her ribs.
Alice slowed to catch her breath and tried to push June’s face away. When she picked up her pace again, her heartbeat and footsteps were back in sync.
15. Blue lady orchid
Meaning: Consumed by love
Thelymitra crinita | Western Australia
Perennial spring-flowering orchid. Flowers are intensely blue and form a delicate star shape. Does not need a bushfire to stimulate flowering, but can be smothered by other vegetation, so periodic burns to restrict taller-growing shrubs are beneficial.
That year, leading up to Alice’s eighteenth birthday, Twig saw what no one else at Thornfield did. Night after night she sat in the shadows and watched as the back screen door swept open and Alice, with her long hair streaming behind her, crept across the verandah, down the steps, and into the blooming flower fields under the moonlight. Twig sat smoking long after Alice’s silvered silhouette disappeared into the bush. Although she knew June wanted Alice to be different, to be immune, the truth was on the path that led to the river for anyone to see: Alice was deeply, wildly, blindly in the thick of first love.
The night Alice turned eighteen, after the fancy roast and second helpings of the tiered vanilla lily cake that Candy baked, everyone went to bed tipsy from the crate of Moët that June ordered in specially. Twig sat on the back verandah rolling a smoke, grateful for the silence of the winter stars. Things were changing. You could smell it in the air like a new season. Alice was unsettled. As was Twig over the lies she’d told Alice every time Alice had asked about her family. Although she’d fought against June’s dishonesty, Twig was complicit; she too had kept secrets from Alice for nearly as long as June had.
When the form Twig had filled out and returned to the state adoption services led to nothing, she’d gone back to the Yellow Pages and picked up the phone. She gave the first private investigator to answer her call the name of the woman Agnes noted in her will, and the name of the town where Alice grew up. Not long after Alice had started school the investigator’s report arrived by mail. Twig had to walk all the way to the river before she calmed down enough to read it. Alice’s baby brother was healthy and well, in the care of the woman Agnes instructed should be the guardian of her children if June was not fit or able to raise them. Alice and her brother were living without each other, unaware — were Nina and Johnny the same? Contrary to common belief, Twig knew that not even Thornfield could save a woman from her past. She’d made a good life there, raising Candy, and she’d done her best with Clem. She’d cared for Agnes and the rest of the Flowers, managing the farm and running a good business. But the truth was that no amount of second chances, not even at Thornfield, could change the past, no matter how much June wished it were so. Twig’s relationship with June had never been the same since June came home with only Alice in the truck. I’m the executor of the will, Twig, she’d drunkenly hissed over the years, more times than Twig could count. I made the hard choice that was in everyone’s best interests. Twig hid the investigator’s report and a secret copy of Agnes’s will in the seedling house. She’d waited nine years for the right moment to give them to Alice. Still they stayed hidden, among desert pea seedlings.
When the screen door opened, Twig shrank into the shadows, watching Alice creep into the flower fields, a faint trail of champagne in the air behind her. Alice had drunk flute after flute at dinner. Something was brewing in her life, Twig could sense it as well as any shift in the weather. She counted silently, waiting a whole minute to be sure Alice wouldn’t hear her footsteps, before she hurried down the path to the river, following her.
Oggi was waiting on the riverbank, with a small fire burning by the giant river gum. He’d been especially quiet at dinner. Twig crouched behind a cluster of skinny iron bark trees. Alice flung herself at him as if she’d not seen him for years, their skin painted bronze by the firelight. They kissed tenderly. The look on Oggi’s face at the sight of Alice caused Twig’s eyes to well. She’d loved someone like that once. She remembered how it felt to be so clearly seen by another person, to be so unbroken.
They drew apart and Alice sat leaning against him, cradled in his arms. ‘Tell me the plan again.’
He kissed the top of her head. ‘We meet tomorrow at midnight, right here. We bring one suitcase each. That’s it. We travel light.’ He kissed her temple, her cheek, her neck. ‘We catch the first bus to the city airport, and pick up our tickets. We fly for so long you’ll think we’re never going to land, but we will, in Sofia, where we’ll go to my grandparents’ house, drink rakija, eat shopska salata, sleep off our jet lag, wake up and catch the cable car up Mount Vitosha, to stand on the lake of stones and look out over the world. We’ll walk the goats in the mornings. The bells on their collars sound better than Christmas Day. On the weekends, we’ll take my grandfather’s truck and drive across the border to Greece, where we’ll swim in the sea, and eat olives and grilled cheese.’
‘Oggi,’ Alice whispered dreamily, turning to him. ‘Do you have your pocketknife?’
They carved their names into the trunk of the gum tree, then fell into one another, kissing with the hunger of adolescence. The child who came to Thornfield, so silent, so wrought with horror, was more alive than Twig had ever seen her.