The next morning, Pip’s pull-up is dry and Annie wants to cry with the relief of it, but doesn’t.
She ruffles Pip’s uneven hair instead. ‘That must feel nice, Pip.’
And Pip smiles at her and starts rummaging in her backpack.
‘Mum,’ she says, holding out a hunk of wood almost shyly. Annie’s heart hammers quickly. She runs her fingers along the carved wood.
She blinks at it. ‘You did this, Pip?’
‘With Nana’s knives, Mumma.’
‘You know you shouldn’t touch sharp things, Pip.’
‘I know.’
‘This is extraordinary.’ Annie runs her fingers along the shape of Luna, rearing up. The strokes are blunt and childlike. She shudders at the thought of Pip’s fingers, so close to the knife’s edge. Even so, the shape of Luna is better than she’s ever achieved, with her adult fingers and adult eyes.
Annie gazes at Pip, pleased and worried and uncertain. ‘Did Gran show you how to do this?’
Pip shakes her head and sits on her knees on the bed. ‘You know how I told you I dream of Nana?’
‘Yeah …’
‘In my room? Just us two?’
‘I remember, Pip.’
‘Well. She teaches me. In my dreams.’ Pip reaches out a finger to touch the shape of the wood, almost marvelling. ‘Nana taught me how to whittle.’
Annie’s fingers close around Luna. She’s never touched anything so precious.
Later, Annie is in the veggie patch, Pip dozing in the shade nearby and Susan crooning to Gilbert around the back of the sheds. She went out to do the bees, but Annie hasn’t heard the scrape of a single lid being opened.
She has planted most of her seedlings. There’s not much more she has to do in the veggie patch, except weed.
Pip wakes slowly in the shade. Her feet moving in slow arcs against the grass, her arms stretched wide over her head. She has always woken fast, in the city. In that clotted little terrace that makes Annie’s breath catch uncomfortably each time she thinks of it. But here she wakes slowly. Languid and soft. She gets slowly to her feet and gazes at Annie, hunkered down in the corn.
‘Gran?’ she calls, pausing to yawn. ‘Gran! Does Gilbert like lettuce?’
‘Yes.’ Susan’s voice, from around the back of the shed. ‘He loves lettuce!’
Pip wanders over to Annie. ‘Mum?’
‘Pip?’
‘Can I have some lettuce for Gilbert? Please?’
Annie opens her mouth, about to explain that the lettuce is for people, but she changes her mind when she stares into the calm, expectant face. ‘Oh, fine.’ She pulls off a handful from the lettuce head. ‘Here.’
Pip grins and beetles off towards the shed. ‘Gran! I got lettuce for Gilbert!’
Annie keeps weeding the vegetable patch, listening to Pip and Susan. They grow silent and Susan appears, leaning over the fence of the vegetable patch.
‘Pip’s asleep,’ Susan says. ‘One minute she’s feeding Gilbert the lettuce through the fence, the next minute she’s sprawled flat out on her back, snoring.’
‘In the shade?’
‘Yes, the shade. She won’t burn.’
Annie straightens from the vegetable patch and sees Len, half out of the car, looking at her in that way he and Susan both have, the way that lets Annie know they are looking at her but seeing their mother. Seeing Gladys in her skin.
Len’s face is warm and sad when Annie meets him near the verandah, dusting dirt off the seat of her jeans. He claps her shoulder and bows his head and for a moment it’s like Gladys has died all over again.
When Annie catches Susan staring at her and seeing Gladys, Susan’s expression is different. Sometimes it’s sadness, annoyance, confusion. Other times it’s a sort of hurt resentment that makes Annie’s whole chest lurch.
‘Been on the tracks,’ he says.
‘Any luck?’
He shakes his head and takes his hat off. ‘Won’t stay. Just wanted to drop in a cake for Pip to say thanks for yesterday. She was a big help.’
‘She’s sleeping.’ Annie nods towards the sheds.
Len smiles and hands her a paper bag. ‘It’ll keep.’
‘Thanks, Len.’
He braces his back and peers out at the veggie patch. ‘Gave me a bit of a fright, you know. You look a lot like Mum from a distance.’
‘Do I?’
‘I mean when she was younger. Same short brown hair, same way of moving. Reckon it just spun me out for a tick.’
Annie smiles and settles down on the verandah railing with the paper bag still clenched in her fingers. ‘They’re out there,’ she says. She almost tells him about the siren sounds. The curling tail feather Alex brought around. The flash of silver when she was out on the Christmas truck.
Almost. But until she has something solid, something less dreamy, she will wait. She will watch like Len watches. They will watch together, but alone. The same tracks, straining their ears hopefully, breathlessly, at the same sounds. But until she is certain, she will keep the siren noises to herself.
Len’s whole body seems to sag. ‘I hope so.’
* * *
When Gladys visited Annie and Pip in hospital just after Pip was born, she stalked in, put a carved letter P on the bedside table and then sat in the chair by the bed and cried.
Len and Susan ignored her at first. They took turns cuddling Pip and asking Annie how she was and congratulated Tom, who couldn’t stop grinning. Then they handed Pip to Gladys and eventually the four of them just watched her, the silent tracking of tears down her cheeks.
‘She’s so perfect! Oh, Annie. She’s perfect,’ Gladys kept saying.
Annie just stared. She’d never seen Gladys cry before. She’d never seen her so emotional. Her hands shook as she brushed her dirt-veined fingers across Pip’s downy cheeks, her impossibly tiny hands.
‘She’s so perfect, Annie.’ Gladys sniffed deeply. ‘She’s so bloody perfect.’
‘Is she going to dehydrate?’ Len murmured to Susan who snorted.
‘Last time she cried was when you were born, Annie,’ Susan said, her face pulled into an expression somewhere between a grin and a grimace. ‘But I’m not sure that they were happy tears, quite frankly.’
* * *
Annie makes Pip breakfast and stares out at Susan, who is sitting with her blank sketchbook out in the grass under the lemon-scented gum. It feels tropical on their mountain today. Still and humid.
The phone rings.
‘Annie. I’ve got the car. It’s been a nightmare but it’s okay. I’m coming up now. I miss you guys. Nell from work’s taking Boogey while I’m away. I miss you so fucking much and work has been shit. It doesn’t matter, look. I’m leaving once I get a few things organised. I’ll be up soon. I love you.’
‘I love you,’ she says. She says it again, louder. ‘I love you!’
‘I’ll be up soon, okay? I’ll be up soon.’
Annie smiles. ‘Hear that, Pip?’
‘Hear what?’
‘Your dad’s coming up really soon!’
Pip smiles. ‘I love Dad,’ she says, staring up at Annie’s eyes. ‘I fucking love him, Mum.’
Annie rubs the bridge of her nose. ‘Don’t say that word, Pip.’
Alex’s car appears and Annie feels a lurching, tripping sensation. She’d decided he’d leave without saying goodbye. She’s been steeling herself for it.
He stands in the doorway and Pip waves an apple at him. ‘You hungry?’
‘I’m fine. Thanks though, Phillip.’
‘I’m Pip,’ she says, and smiles. ‘But sometimes I’m Nana.’
Alex smiles at her and then looks at Annie. ‘I’ve done a fair chunk of it,’ he says.
Annie makes him a coffee without a word and hands it to him.
‘Thank you,’ he murmurs. He’s staring at the drawing Annie has made on the wall. Alex touches the lines. Nobody else has touched them, traced them. Everyone else stands back and tilts their head, as though hers is a sort of insanity that is catching. Contagious and fascinating.
Alex looks up at her. ‘They’re maps.’
Annie sits down. ‘What?’
‘They’re maps.’ Alex grabs her hand and his is cool and dry and Annie wants to pull her hot, sweating hand away. He brushes her fingers along the chalked lines.
‘The Ridge Track,’ he says. ‘The place where it goes over the creek, see? Then the Horse Room Track which runs north …’ He lets her hand go. She wonders if she imagines the shiver of his skin. ‘What were you dreaming about?’
‘The lyrebirds.’
Alex grins, sudden and shocking. And he’s so beautiful, like she remembers, and she thinks of the mountain that used to be green.
‘Don’t you get it?’ Alex stands up. ‘You’ve been trying to find them.’
* * *
Later, there is the first crack of thunder. The heat, the stillness. Annie stands up from weeding around the fallen cypress, pulling out wild mustard and shoots from the silver birch. She presses her hands into her lower back and leans backwards, like she did when she was pregnant and aching from the weight and shock of carrying Pip.
Susan comes out of the kitchen and rests her hands on the railing. ‘Was that thunder?’
‘Think so.’
‘Good.’ Susan closes her eyes. ‘I hope it rains.’
‘It will. You can taste it.’
Susan sticks out her tongue and grins when Annie rolls her eyes.
‘I’ve never been able to taste it,’ Susan says. ‘Mum could. I’m just hanging out for better internet up here so I can watch the weather radar like you do in the city.’
‘I dunno,’ says Annie, coming up onto the verandah and kicking off her boots as the first fat droplets of rain start to fall. ‘The radar sort of takes the magic out of it.’
Another shudder of thunder that sends Pip skidding out from behind the shed.
‘What were you doing, my little thing?’ Susan asks as Pip ducks behind her legs and shivers.
‘Saying hi to Gilbert. Watching the bees,’ she says. ‘They were all on the outside of the hive.’
‘Keeping it cool,’ says Susan.
‘Then they all disappeared inside.’
Susan strokes her hair. ‘They can feel the storm. Can you?’
‘Can I what?’
‘Can you taste the rain?’
Pip sticks her tongue out and shakes her head. Susan squeezes her hand. ‘Me neither.’ And Annie smiles at them, the two of them, who fit so neatly together. As she once fitted with Gladys. It is something she feels suddenly joyful about.