Twig stood silently and shook out the cramps in her legs, then crept back to the path and followed it home. Inside the seedling house, she unearthed the plastic pouch of yellowed papers holding the truth of Alice’s life, then went into the house to wait for Alice to return.
She sat on the couch. Thought about making a coffee. Closed her eyes for just a minute.
It was a regret Twig would carry from that day on, sinking into a sleep so deep that she didn’t hear the floorboards creak when Alice came in.
The next morning, Alice was out running a delivery into town when June came downstairs. Twig was in the kitchen making her mid-morning cuppa and turned to offer June one, but stopped short. June stood in the doorway, Alice’s journal dangling open in one hand.
‘June?’ Twig eyed the journal, its pages filled with the loops and curls of Alice’s handwriting.
June walked slowly out the back. For a while she sat on the verandah staring into the flower field. Twig set a cup of tea down beside her. Cockatoos screeched overhead. June didn’t speak.
For the rest of the morning Twig busied herself with the Flowers, keeping them all out of June’s way. Even Harry gave her a wide berth. Every now and then Twig would glance at June on the back verandah. Whether she’d made her peace with it or not, June had been changed forever by Alice’s arrival as a child. Now Alice was grown, on the cusp of independence, and in love; as June herself knew, there wasn’t much in the world more threatening than a woman who knew her own mind.
It was mid-afternoon when June moved. Twig hovered, expecting June to go to the workshop or get in her truck. Instead she walked inside, into the study, and closed the door behind her. Twig followed and pressed her ear to the door. She could hear June’s voice but couldn’t make out what she was saying. After a long pause, Twig knocked. Once, then again, harder. She tried the doorknob and it twisted open. As she walked in, June hung up the phone. The look on June’s face stopped Twig mid-stride.
‘What have you done?’ Twig asked flatly.
Behind her desk, June turned to look out through the window as Alice’s truck puttered into the driveway. They both watched Alice and Oggi get out of the truck, and come together by the workshop, talking and laughing.
‘What I had to do,’ June replied. A tear rolled down her cheek.
It was years since Twig had seen June cry. The absence of the smell of whisky in the room only caused her more alarm.
June roughly wiped her cheeks and stood. ‘What I had to do,’ she said again. ‘All right, Twig?’ She stood, as if trying to hide something from Twig’s view.
‘What’s going on?’ Twig asked, taking a step forward.
In a fluster, June tried to sweep the stack of letters on her desk into a drawer, but only managed to scatter them across the floor. She swore under her breath. Twig crouched, gathering letter after letter and photo after photo, all of the same little boy. She turned to face June. ‘How could you keep these from her?’ she whispered.
‘Because I know what’s best for her,’ June snapped. ‘I’m her grandmother.’
Twig stood and glared at June, the letters shaking in her fists. Without another word, she threw them at June and left, slamming the door after her. Outside, it was windy. Twig leant against the verandah, taking long, cooling breaths. Alice and Oggi were mucking about by the workshop, teasing each other.
As she watched them, Twig braced her arms over her chest where the wind cut through her clothes. She could feel it in her bones; a northwesterly had blown in.
Alice eased her bedroom door open and stood at the top of the winding staircase, listening. The only sounds in the house were the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock and the muffled snores from June’s bedroom. A sudden heaviness weighed on Alice’s body. She remembered the night she arrived, unable to speak and barely able to hold her head up under the weight of sorrow. June had washed her face with a hot facecloth. I’m not going anywhere, she’d said. And that was the truth. She’d always been right there. At the end of a school day, over flowers in the garden, at the head of the dinner table, in the workshop overseeing Alice’s bouquet arrangements. Alice thought of June’s hands, their tough calluses, holding the steering wheel, waving at the gate, ruffling Harry’s ears, holding Alice tight. Too tight.
With one last glance around her room, Alice picked up her suitcase and crept down the stairs as if she were made of the same ghostly vapour as the Thornfield memories from which she was so desperate to disentangle herself.
Alice tiptoed down the hall. Harry’s collar tinkled in the lounge room as he twitched on his bed. She knelt down to kiss his head. Even in slumber he kept her secrets.
Her hands shook as she opened the screen door. She took a deep breath of the fragrant night. When she stepped off the verandah onto the dirt, Alice broke into a run.
The scrub scratched her bare ankles as she stumbled in the dark through the bush. Tears streaked from her eyes, but she pushed on. The night was cold, dry and full of cicada song. Light from the moon cast the world in milky light. Her future glowed ahead of her, an ember waiting to be breathed to life.
Alice reached the river. She put her suitcase down. Wiped her brow. In the moonlight she studied the names etched into the gum tree of the women in her family, who’d sat at that very spot and cast their dreams into the river. She ran her fingers over her own name, and Oggi’s, and smelled the scent of cut wood on her fingertips, remembering when she was a child and first came to the river, thinking she might follow it all the way home. Instead, the river had brought Oggi to her. He was her home now. He was her story.
She arranged herself neatly on the smooth grey rock at the base of the gum and listened for Oggi’s footsteps. Lifted her locket from under the neckline of her shirt. ‘I’m here,’ she whispered, looking at her mother’s face. She wrapped her scarf around her body, and propped herself up against the trunk of the gum tree.
Alice leaned her head back, watching for falling stars.
She waited.
A squawk of galahs woke her. She had a pain in her neck, and her skin was damp. Wincing, she straightened herself, shivering. The river churned in the cold light of morning.
His name sprang to her lips. Alice stood and scrambled over the grey rocks and tree roots by the riverbank. No notes wedged between the stones, nothing tied in the low branches of the tree. Maybe he was waiting for her at the flower farm. A cackle rose from the trees as kookaburras started their early morning chorus. Alice left her suitcase and ran, cutting through the long grass and trees, trying to outrun the pit of fear in her stomach.
When she got back to Thornfield, the Flowers were in their aprons, dotting the fields as they tended to the plants. Alice began to weep. She went up the back steps and into the kitchen. June was standing at the counter, drinking coffee.
‘Morning, love. What can I get you? Toast? Cuppa?’
‘Is he here?’ she asked, her voice breaking.
‘Who?’ June asked calmly.
‘You know who,’ she said, exasperated.
‘Oggi?’ June put her mug down, frowning. ‘Alice,’ she said, coming around the counter to embrace her. ‘Alice, what is it?’
‘Where is he?’ she cried.
‘At home, I expect, getting ready for work as you should be,’ June said, looking Alice up and down in her crumpled dress. ‘What’s going on?’
Alice wrenched herself out of June’s arms, grabbed her keys off the wall hook and ran to her truck.