As she headed towards her grandmother’s room at the end of the corridor, Erin shared a smile with a nurse bustling past. Inside, she found Gran staring out the window from her bed. Gran had been such a lively woman, no one ever believed she was in her nineties. She was always baking a sponge or putting on the kettle after a long morning in the garden. She wasn’t this small hunched woman staring out the window with a blank expression.
‘Gran?’
Her grandmother slowly turned her head and looked at her. Erin waited for Gran’s familiar welcoming smile, but for a long moment there was no smile, no recognition, not so much as a blink of the eye.
‘It’s Erin,’ she said hesitantly, unable to believe she was introducing herself to the woman she’d loved her entire life.
Slowly a smile of recognition tugged at Gran’s dry lips before she gave a small sigh and lifted a hand towards her.
Erin stepped closer and took her hand, noticing how cool it felt. ‘Do you want me to get you another blanket, Gran?’
‘No, dear. I’m all right. Just tired,’ she said, looking out the window again.
Erin pulled a chair closer to the bedside and looked down at the hand she still held. Her grandmother’s hands, which had spent a lifetime working in the garden and on the farm, were thinner than Erin remembered. The network of blue veins and tiny bones stood out beneath the pale, paper-thin skin.
‘I brought your photo album in. I thought you might like to look through it with me,’ said Erin, placing the album on the bed.
Her grandmother remained staring out of the window, seemingly disinterested in anything else.
Erin opened the album and turned to the first page. ‘You were such a beautiful bride, Gran. And look at Pop, he was so handsome.’ The photo of her grandparents standing beside an old car made her smile. She looked up in surprise when Gran reached over to turn the album slightly so she could get a better look.
‘So young,’ Gran said softly. Her eyes searched the image that had gone brown around the edges. ‘I always imagined that when I married I would wear a white wedding gown.’
Erin looked back at the photo. In it her gran was wearing a demure dress that hung just below her knees, with a fitted jacket over the top. It was hard to tell what colour the dress was in the black and white photo, possibly a grey or brown. Her hazel eyes, so much like Erin’s, were indistinguishable in the old photo, but she knew they could sometimes appear green or, in certain lights, blue-grey. Her dark hair was pulled back in an elegant chignon and she looked every inch the 1940s Hollywood starlet.
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Roy wouldn’t let me,’ her voice drifted off.
Erin frowned slightly at the strange comment but didn’t ask her to elaborate. It was hard to accept this new vagueness, when her gran had always been so alert. ‘You still looked beautiful, Gran.’
‘Such a long time ago,’ she whispered, shaking her head, her eyes watering. ‘How did it all go so fast?’
Erin swallowed past a hard lump in her throat and reached across to turn the page, hoping to distract her grandmother. She smiled at the next photo of her grandfather dressed in his uniform. ‘And this is Pop?’
‘Yes,’ Gran said eventually, studying the photo with a sombre expression.
‘Where was this taken? In North Queensland?’ Erin asked, remembering her gran had grown up there.
‘Yes. That’s where your grandfather and I were raised. We were next-door neighbours. Childhood sweethearts.’ Erin’s grandfather had died before she was born but, from the little her mother had said about him, she’d gathered he’d been a stern, rather cold man. He didn’t look that way in these old photos, but fighting in World War Two had changed a whole generation of men.
She flipped through some pages of photos of a tropical-looking town with lots of military vehicles lining the main street. The photos were filled with men in all kinds of uniforms—Australian, American and others she didn’t recognise.
‘What was it like in Townsville back then? It must have been a culture shock, all those Americans suddenly moving into town,’ said Erin.
‘Yes. It was,’ said Gran. ‘It changed everything.’
Erin considered her gran’s answer. She seemed to be almost looking through the photo, but it wasn’t the lost, blank expression she’d been wearing when Erin had arrived. ‘Tell me what it was like, Gran,’ she said, easing back in the chair.
She watched Gran’s face soften and her eyes take on a faraway look.