There was something soft and warm around my neck, and someone’s hand was moving up and down the small of my back quickly, like they were trying to start a fire.
“Come on, Lulu”—Julia, in her dressing gown—“we need to go inside now.”
I nodded at her, wondering why she was outside. She should be home, I thought, with Boris, helping him with Rose’s dresses.
“It’s the shock,” someone said in a low voice, and I wanted to tell them to go away but my own voice had slipped down deep inside the sand, gathered itself there in a cool, dark place where, I imagined, it would hold its breath for six months.
“We need to get her inside.”
“Stop talking as if she can’t hear you.”
“Who found her?”
“Lyle Wilkins—he could hear Barney barking from his house.”
Will sat beside me.
“Lulu,” he said, “I’m going to pick you up, all right? I’m just going to put my arms around you and pick you up, like this.”
I felt him lean down into me, take up my arms, and loop them around his neck.
“You don’t have to do anything,” he said, “but hang on.”
I nodded at him, still mute.
“Sweetheart,” Simone said, at the boat ramp, standing beside Stella.
“Lulu,” Stella said, and I saw she was crying.
“Stop it, Stella,” I heard Simone hiss at her as they put my bags in the boot.
“I can’t,” Stella said, “I can’t.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I told them, looking out the window at the nothing, all the way home to Harry’s.
Left onto Swan Terrace, right onto Plantation Street, past the bus stop and some ginger-haired girls sucking on ice blocks, looking at my face through the window. One of them poked her tongue out, stretching it out like a purple lizard in the sun, and I poked mine back halfheartedly at her. Past Mrs. Delaney’s front blinds, closed like winks against the sun. Simone and Stella in the front, me in the back with Barney, his head in my lap, my hands around his collar.
I waited, looking for the sign.
DE LONGLAND PLUMBERS—PLUMBING THE DEPTHS OF EXCELLENCE.
“We’ll walk you into the house,” Simone said, pulling into the driveway.
“No, thank you.”
“Lulu,” she said, “I think you should let us come in with you.”
“It’s all right,” I told her, getting out of the car. “I know the way.”
I waited until I was sure they had gone before I walked up the path, and called out “Harry,” and went out to the back garden, where I knew he would be.
“Hello, love,” Harry said, looking at me with old and startled eyes from the garden swing. “Good trip over?”
I climbed all the way into him and we rocked back and forth, together.
It was an accident.
Nothing more than an accident, with no one to blame, no blood on anyone’s hands, least of all Rose’s, holding on to the wheel of her station wagon, on her way in Greta to the shops to get dinner. The other driver had been lost, distracted, Rose trying to get out of the way, too late, hitting the pole, all over that quickly.
“She wouldn’t have felt anything,” the policewoman told Harry, Mattie, Sam, and me, sitting across from us on the couch and eating Rose’s biscuits. “When things like this happen so quickly, it’s very comforting, I think, to know that the person involved didn’t feel anything—it’s so quick, you see,” she continued.
Harry and I looked at each other and the woman who didn’t see anything at all, because she didn’t know Rose, did not know that Rose felt everything.
Later that night, I went to say good night to Mattie and Sam, Barney padding behind me like a shadow.
They were both stretched out in their childhood beds, much too small for them now, of course.
“I’m going to sleep,” I said. “Do you need anything?”
“Can Barney stay with us?” Mattie asked.
“Of course—up, Barney,” I told him, patting Mattie’s bed.
I sat down at the end of Sam’s, and he flung his feet over my lap.
We were tumbling back in time in this room, with its fading rocket wallpaper and glow-in-the-dark stickers still clinging to the ceiling.
I had sat at the end of these beds so many nights, the three of us and Zac McCain and his very large brain. I would tell stories until Mattie pulled his quilt up to his chin, and Sam drew his feet up to his knees, then quietly reach over to switch off the lights, and leave them to their dreaming.
Even though they were far closer to men than boys, I began to tell stories again now, grown-up versions of Zac McCain. I told them about the plans for the WIASA, how I’d like them to help out Will during their uni holidays, repairing and repainting all the water sports gear, and, if enough guests came, taking small groups on guided tours down the river.
I talked into the night, until Mattie pulled his quilt to his chin, his legs so long it left his feet exposed beneath it. I talked until Sam drew his feet up to his knees, and I heard them both relax in the darkness, Mattie’s grunts eventually joined by Sam’s deep breaths.
I stood up to turn off their lamps, and Barney lifted his head.
“Stay,” I told him, and he settled back down, Mattie’s leg thrown over the arch of his back.
Then I went downstairs to check on Harry.
“The boys are asleep.”
“Thanks, Lulu.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry, love, I just can’t seem to help them at the moment.”
Harry in his dressing gown, his reading glasses in his pocket.
“You’ll lose those, you know,” I said automatically, in my mother’s voice.
Rose was always trying to mend the holes in his gown’s pockets, but Harry wouldn’t let her, dangling his fingers out of the bottom and saying, “Leave it, I like them the way they are.”
Harry pushed his fingers through and waggled them at me.
“Hello, Rosey-girl,” he said, and I knew my father was undone.
I waggled my fingers back at him anyway.
“Have you done anything,” Father Duffy asked the next day, “about the arrangements?”
Harry looked out the window, and I answered for both of us.
“No, we’ve just been here at home, with Mattie and Sam.”
Father Duffy nodded his head and looked at Harry.
“It isn’t easy,” he said. “It’s never easy, that’s why I’ve come, to help, if you need it.”
Rose had always liked Joe Duffy, I remembered, said he liked a laugh and didn’t mind if you sometimes didn’t laugh with him.
“We need it,” I told him, “we seem to have no idea what to do.”
“I do,” Father Duffy replied. “Rose told me.”
Rose’s ashes were scattered near the lake where she’d once dived naked and wonderful and had told Harry to do the same.
“It seems so far away,” he had fretted. “It doesn’t seem right she’s not near us.”
But Rose had left instructions about where she wanted to be, who she wanted to wear—Alexis, who would never go anywhere quietly—what she wanted to hear: “No ballads,” she had written firmly, then in capitals: “NO ORGAN MUSIC WHATSOEVER.”
So we said our good-byes to Rose in the church in the town where she had grown up under the watchful eyes of the two sisters, Audrey and Constance.
“Why do you think your mum wanted the service here?” Simone asked me afterward, “instead of Saint Rita’s?”
I wasn’t entirely sure, but I told her what I thought, that Rose had wanted to leave the earth from the first place she’d felt safe on it.
We had a morning tea in the hall next to the church, everyone “bringing a plate,” mostly, I noticed, of biscuits and slices made from Rose’s recipes, but none of them tasting quite the same.
When the last person had left—Mrs. Delaney in bright yellow, “I loved your mother, you know, Lulu, so brave”—Harry and I walked slowly back to his truck, Harry’s feet dragging, hating to leave Rose behind. We got into the cabin, and Harry started the engine, his eyes darting to the rearview mirror.
I leaned into him from across my seat.
“There’s no such thing as afar,” I told him.
I did not cry for Rose.
There was so much to do, calls to answer and letters to write, people to thank, dinners to cook, and words to find to tell people with the question half-open on their lips that no, it was just an accident.
I waited until about a fortnight after the funeral, until there were no more lasagnas left on our doorstep, or letters to answer, or calls to make, and then I went into my mother’s kitchen.
“Righto, Rose,” I said, “let’s bake our way to goodness.”
I found one of Rose’s exercise books on the shelf and opened it on the bench in front of me. Basic Butter Cake in Rose’s big childish writing—perfect. I wasn’t about to attempt anything complicated.
Preheat oven to 180 degrees.
Cream 250 g butter, 1 cup caster sugar, 2 teaspoons vanilla essence in bowl.
Add three eggs—one at a time—with two and half cups SR flour and 1/2 cup milk, pour in slowly.
I began to add the ingredients in, hearing Rose’s voice in my ear, and feeling her hand slide over mine holding the wooden spoon.
“Don’t beat it to death, now,” she said.
I remembered at the last minute to throw in some sultanas. “Don’t skimp, Lulu,” I heard her say, so I threw in another handful and poured the mixture into one of the battered old tins she had always refused to throw out. I laughed a little, remembering Harry trying to sell her on the idea of buying a new set of baking tins. “They’ve got Teflon ones now, Rosey-girl,” he’d said. “Nothing sticks to them.” Rose had looked up at him from the table where she had been rolling out piecrust pastry. “What’s the point of that?” She’d smiled at him.
I put the cake in the oven, then sat down at my mother’s table and waited for it to rise. Then, when it was done, when I had pushed the skewer in and it had come out clean, just as she had taught me, and the kitchen was filled with the sweet aroma of Rose’s last cake, I took it out and turned it onto a cake rack, taking care not to break it.
I sat back and considered it.
Then I cried for my mother.
“Lulu.”
I looked up to the kitchen doorway, startled to see Annie Andrews standing there.
“Lulu,” she said again, Annie’s voice so quiet, Annie herself so still that I had not heard her knock, not one jangled hint of her necklaces and bangles.
“I’ve brought you something,” she said, walking over to place a book in my hands.
I stared at it, knowing it instantly, knowing the last time I had touched it I had placed it high in a tree house for her daughter’s hands to find.
Annabelle had, Annie told me, kept it with her all those years, taking it with her wherever she and Josh traveled, wrapping it in plastic in places where the humidity could eat away at it, packing it in her carry-on luggage at airports, once, Annie said, having a stand-up screaming fight with an official in Thailand who’d said the made-up words were obviously some sort of code and tried to confiscate it.
Now she had sent it back to me.
“It arrived today, Lulu,” Annie said. “I came to bring it to you. Annabelle says it’s very important you have it.”
She leaned down and kissed me, enveloping me in sandalwood, and placed the book on my lap, where a striped bookmark held the page Annabelle meant for me to open.
“I’ll let myself out,” Annie was saying. “I’m staying at the old house—at Frank’s—if you need me.”
I heard the click of the front gate, and Annie’s car start up on the street, taking her back to her own past as I stared at my own.
Opening the book at the page Annabelle had marked, I saw my own hand, big, flowery letters.
Emergensis: emergency/crisis—A situation so direbolical, either party must attend forthwith.
Beside it, Annabelle had written in her own loopy hand, On my way.
Annabelle.
On her way.