CHAPTER TWO

YES, I WAS CLEARLY STILL in Grandma’s house. But everything looked different. The walls were no longer painted white, as they had been when I’d gone to sleep, but covered in light blue wallpaper, crisscrossed with white lines and adorned with little daisies. In place of the polished wooden floorboards was plush beige carpet.

I sat up in bed—one of those old-fashioned foldaway beds, low to the ground, a thin foam mattress set upon a creaky metal-and-spring frame. The room was the same one I’d been sleeping in with Billy not long ago, only now it contained just one regular-sized bed, up against the far wall.

The chimes, there they were. I counted them again. Six, seven, eight. I’d been lying here, in this familiar-unfamiliar room, for an hour. It must be a weekend morning, I thought, or else surely the figure in bed—I had been staring at her, now, for quite some time—would be up getting ready for school. I was aware of a weird feeling inside, something jumpy and unpleasant, which made me think of a goblin. Who could this be peacefully sleeping, in this oddly transformed room?

I was afraid to move, to make any noise, afraid I would wake up the girl. I wracked my brains for some explanation. Could Grandma have invited the granddaughter of a friend so that I’d have someone to hang out with? Could I have been ill or something—I’d had an awful headache before I went to sleep; maybe I had a violent flu and somehow slept through it all? The girl arriving, then going to sleep? But that wouldn’t explain the changed wallpaper and carpet, the fact that there were now blinds on the windows instead of curtains.

Or maybe I was sicker than I realized—delirious, even. Imagining the blue wallpaper, and that the beds had changed, that Billy sleeping in that bed over there had doubled in size and grown a mane of black hair.

The girl rolled over and let out a sigh. I froze.

I shook my head, opened and closed my eyes several times very forcefully: if it was a delirious vision, perhaps I could shake it loose. But no, there she was, stretching her arms above her head and blinking sleepily. I watched as she emerged from sleep, watched the cloudy expression clear, found myself looking into eyes that were so unexpectedly known, I let out a gasp of surprise. No, it was unthinkable! Surely, I had sunken into some kind of delusional state.

You see, the girl whose eyes I was looking into, who looked to be about fourteen, had a face that was more familiar (and yet, being so young, also suddenly strange) than my own: the very first face, in fact, that I ever saw.

The storm, the dreadful, exhilarating, terrifying storm, must have been not a storm of weather—but of time! Somehow, I had tripped through a portal and been thrown backward more than three decades! I had no idea how to think about this. It was as if the storm had been a wave—a time wave—that had deposited me in the childhood bedroom of my very own mother, who was now sitting up in bed, fully awake.

I heard a voice ring out—a strong man’s voice, full of vigor and good cheer. I knew immediately who it must be: Talia’s father—my Grandpa Jack! Mama’s beloved father, a surgeon, who had died long before I was born. An image flashed in my mind—the photograph my mother kept high on a shelf in her study of a surgeon, his face covered by a cloth surgical mask, bent over an operating table, a light attached to a headband on his forehead. As a small child, I’d never known who it was or what the person was doing, it was just a picture almost out of sight in the study where my mother spent hours each day, writing her children’s books. One day, it occurred to me to ask.

“Who’s that, Mama?”

“Who’s who?” she’d asked; she was busy working when I’d entered the room.

“That,” I said, pointing emphatically up at the framed photograph. She put down her pencil, her eyebrows raised quizzically.

“Why, that’s Grandpa Jack, of course!” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

I shook my head.

“All these years that picture’s been up on my shelf, and you never knew who it was?” She let out an incredulous laugh. “For heaven’s sake! That’s your grandfather!”

“You never told me,” I said in a small voice. For some reason, my mother’s response had filled me with shame, and I found my lip trembling.

“Darling, don’t be upset!” Mama said, drawing me near. “It’s my fault! I can’t imagine why I never thought to tell you.”

That was really the first time I’d heard in any detail about my grandfather. He was a surgeon, who’d saved people’s lives. Mama told me about how when she was a child, it was not unusual for her to see her father walking into the house as she was leaving for school, bone-weary after having operated for ten, twelve, even fourteen hours straight. She’d ask him what he’d done that night and he’d say something like—“Oh, it was a vascular transplant. But we ran into trouble.” Or: “Kidney transplant. Cross fingers it won’t be rejected.” She’d felt awed and proud. He’d kiss the top of her head and then go in to sleep for an hour or two before showering and returning to the hospital to conduct rounds.

I could hardly believe that I was about to meet him! And then, the most wonderful and startling thing happened. Bounding into the room was a man of impressive height, with a handsome, youthful face and a shock of silver hair. He entered the room with a feeling so strong you could almost hear it—like an invisible jazz band in full swing.

“It’s up and at ‘em, Talia!” he said, his voice as luminous as his presence. “How about going up in the plane? I was thinking of Broken Hill.”

The girl—my mother—looked over at me and her eyes fluttered with confusion as she met my gaze; at the same time, her father also seemed to notice me for the first time.

“I’d forgotten you had your friend sleeping over. You’ll join us, of course. For a day trip to Broken Hill. Ever been in a small plane?”

Behind Talia’s face was now an unreadable flicker. “Funny, I’d sort of forgotten you were sleeping over myself. I must have been having a ripper of a dream.” She offered me a warm, if sleepy, smile. “Jasmine—I’m so glad you’re here!”

Jasmine, I knew, was my mother’s favorite flower.

I followed Talia’s gaze to a shelf across the room; it held a silver vase from which a sprig of jasmine hung. Now, I placed the sweet scent I’d been vaguely aware of since waking up in this altered time-space. I did the math quickly in my head; if my mother was about my age, fourteen, then the year must be—1974.

I looked at Talia’s father. Grandpa Jack. The larger-than-life figure who’d bounded through the world full of passion for everything he did. And he did do everything—from devising new surgical techniques, to flying small aircraft, to collecting ancient coins, to raising prize-winning cattle as a weekend “gentleman” farmer.

It hit me then. I knew this look, this energy—the electric exuberance and infectious spirit that flashed through the room. Billy! My mischievous five-year-old brother! His soul was there, spreading across Grandpa Jack’s face. Or—should I say—Grandpa Jack’s soul had fired from the heavens beyond, long after his premature death, into my little brother, Billy.

My face must have revealed some of what I was thinking as Grandpa Jack—Talia’s father—was eyeing me oddly. I’d been about to throw my arms around him and hug him with all my might, but instead drew my arms around myself and held on tight.

“I’d love to come,” I said, jumping at the sound of my own voice, which resounded, surprisingly, with an Australian accent.

“Well then, I’ll leave you girls to get dressed.”

Talia sat up in bed and stretched. “Why don’t you call your mother and ask if you can sleep over again?” she asked. “We won’t be back until after dark.”

Her face held a strange, secretive look—as if she knew the idea of me calling my parents made no sense but had decided she needed to go along with the charade: as if we were in a play and there were some audience we needed, together, to convince.

“They’ll be fine with it. But I’ll go give them a quick ring.”

I headed toward where I knew I’d find the kitchen. Luckily, no one was around. It was early, still, and I figured that Grandma—how fun it would be to see her before she was in fact Grandma!—was still asleep.

In the kitchen, I walked over to the phone, picked up the receiver, and dialed our New York number, recalling the necessary pre-number codes, having memorized them before leaving New York. I don’t know what I expected, but I found myself feeling jittery as the phone rang. Who was at the other end of this line? Where was this phone sitting, on the other side of the world, as it rang on and on? It could not possibly be ringing in our Brooklyn brownstone—as there was no house belonging to the woman I knew as my mama, since she wasn’t yet a woman; she was, in fact, the girl I’d just been talking to in the other room!

For that matter, where was Grandma—the Grandma I knew, not Talia’s young mother, who was still asleep in her room here, in this different-though-still-the-same house? And where was I—the me of my time? Had I disappeared from the house I knew as Grandma’s house, ahead in the future? Was Grandma frantically searching for me? Had she alerted my mother and was she, too, distraught that I was lost? My head was spinning; my thoughts felt like leaves in a cyclone, whipping around and around. A feeling of unbearable bewilderment overcame me. I willed the thoughts to slide away.

Playing along with the strange charade, I talked into the empty echo of the ongoing ring.

“Hi, Mama? It’s—um—ah, Jasmine. Is it okay if I stay over at Talia’s house again tonight? Yes? Great! I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Around noon.” I hung up, aware of a chilly feeling all over, and noticing little goose bumps up and down my arms.

I walked back to Talia’s room.

“My mom said it would be just fine,” I said. And then, I realized a frightening truth: if I were not to sleep here again, tonight, where would I, in fact, have gone?

Talia’s face broke into a smile—a smile I knew intimately and yet did not know at all. She sat up abruptly and threw a pillow at my head.

“Why the serious face? Get dressed. We’ve got a plane to catch!”

It was a cold, windy day. We put on our jeans and Talia handed me a heavy woolen sweater. “Here,” she said. “You’ll need a jumper.” Jumper—the Australian word for sweater.

We went to the kitchen and fixed ourselves a sandwich to eat on the way—cheese and tomato on whole-wheat bread.

“Where’s your mom?” I asked.

“She has trouble falling asleep, so on weekends, she sleeps in.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed, as I’d been hoping to meet this different younger Grandma. I pictured her sparkling, fun-loving eyes—and felt a spear of intense yearning for her, though of course here, she’d not yet become a grandmother! Here, she was just Talia’s mother.

“Can we wake her?” I said, feeling foolish the minute the words were out.

Talia looked at me oddly.

“Why would we do that? She works hard all week—she deserves a little rest! You are a silly thing!”

My heart squeezed tightly. I wouldn’t be seeing Grandma, at least not for now.

Outside, the air was crisp, and the sun was dishing up its usual bounty of light. We got into Grandpa’s white sports car. Above the silver bumper I read: Datsun 240Z. He pulled out of the driveway, accelerating quickly to an impressive speed.

We drove through thoroughfares presided over by older versions of the bright green-and-yellow trams I loved that ran on silver tracks and were guided above by triangular electrical wires attached to their crowns. The trams seemed both lumbering and sleek, like large zoo animals—lions or tigers—bulky at rest but able to spring to graceful action. Grandpa Jack drove with the windows down; I shivered a little at the inrush of cold air. We turned onto smaller streets, lined with old-style Edwardian houses half hidden by overgrown English gardens—lots of dark green shrubbery and heavy hanging foliage. Here and there, we came upon a shopping strip that was already alive with shoppers.

As we progressed into the outer suburbs, the houses became more uniform—rectangular and built of orange brick, with strips of green lawn bordered by neat flower beds, each with the same kinds of flowering plants.

“I love those rhododendrons,” Talia said. “Like old ladies dressed up as clowns. Do you know how they get those zany colors? Blue and purple—look, there’s one that’s hot pink. They pour food coloring into the soil. The roots suck it up and it goes to the blooms.”

I liked the pansy borders: mostly bright yellow flowers with patches of black, though there were other colors, too—hot pink, iridescent blue, and white with light purple fringes. Like moth colonies, hovering above the ground with outstretched wings.

Finally, we turned onto a road with a loose-stone surface that ran alongside the small airport. We passed a series of simple hangars: makeshift affairs each consisting of a wooden hut with a light aircraft parked alongside. Grandpa Jack slowed as we approached the security gate; the sign read Moorabbin airport. The guard, sporting a friendly grin, raised the beam.

“G’day, Prof,” he called out as we sailed by.

“G’day, Bazza,” Grandpa Jack said, raising his hand through the open window.

We pulled up to Hangar Number Five and came to a halt by a small blue-and-white plane: Cessna 172 was painted prominently on its tail.

“How’s my girl!” Grandpa Jack said as he leapt from the car. Talia turned to me with a sheepish smile.

“He only just bought this plane,” she said. “It’s the latest love of his life.”

She gazed proudly over at her father, who was walking around the plane, eyeing it appraisingly.

“My dad collects interests. Did I tell you about his farm? He raises cattle in his spare time—his steer actually win prizes. He also has a passion for ancient Greek and Roman coins. He started an International Numismatic Society. But flying is his number one. Mum hates it. These dinky little planes scare her—and she vomits terribly, every time she goes up. But Michael and I love it. Not sure how Liora feels—I guess she thinks it’s okay.”

“Where are your brother and sister, anyway?” I asked. What fun it would be to see Uncle Michael as a boy and Auntie Liora as a teenager!

“Michael’s sleeping at a friend’s house. Liora’s away at camp. I thought I told you that already …”

Talia looked at me again in that sideways manner, as if wondering something, frown marks between her hazel eyes.

“Of course,” I said. “I just forgot.”

Talia brightened. “Come on! Don’t you want to get going?”

We jumped out of the car. A wiry young man carrying a clipboard emerged from the hut, and Grandpa Jack greeted him with the same exuberance he seemed to have for everyone. They exchanged pleasantries, Australian style: G’day Mate, ‘Ow’s it goin’? And Grandpa Jack asked after the man’s wife and baby. Then it was all flying jargon—longitudes, latitudes, headwinds, tailwinds. Grandpa took the clipboard, then climbed into the pilot’s seat and immediately began checking the instruments and fiddling with dials.

We climbed into the four-seater plane after him. I’d never been in an aircraft so small. As we wedged our way into the back, I was struck by how flimsy it all seemed. The windows opened outward with a silver lever, like old-fashioned car windows. The smell of new leather mixed in with the repulsive odor of airplane fuel.

“Okay, kids. Are you ready?” Grandpa Jack asked.

“Ready for takeoff, Dad!” Talia said. Grandpa Jack hand-signaled to the young man waving triangular flags on the ground, then began to turn knobs and pull levers. The engine whirred to life.

Soon we were taxiing down the runway, which was much shorter and narrower than the commercial runways I was used to. The body of the plane rattled, the engine roared and the propellers whirred. As the plane lifted from the ground and we glided up into the air, the rattling diminished. The intense smell of airplane fuel sent a wave of nausea through me.

“Don’t worry, it gets better!” Talia said over the roaring engine. I could see Grandpa Jack’s strong, handsome profile from where I sat diagonally behind him; he had a marvelous look in his face—a combination of intelligence, concentration, and joy.

The landscape unfurled beneath us. The boxy orange-brick houses soon gave way to countryside: a raggedy mix of brush, undergrowth, and towering eucalyptus that opened out into an uneven patchwork of cultivated fields in rich shades of browns and greens.

The little plane rode low over the fields. I could see all kinds of detail: trucks and cars crawling along dirt roadways, farmhouses and outbuildings dotting the fields, even miniature people, going about their business.

We flew for some time in silence. The nausea lifted and I was able to enjoy the feeling of speed. Talia looked intently out the window. The fields spread out beneath us in seemingly endless supply, as if the whole world were fertile ground, freshly tilled and sown.

“Hey,” Talia said, her voice now audible over the grinding hum. “Let’s play a game!”

“Sure,” I said, wondering what kind of game we could play up here in the noisy, vibrating plane.

“Let’s do Where, What, With Whom.” Talia was wearing a mischievous expression I of course knew well—open, fun loving, and a bit outrageous.

“I’ll start. Let’s use the first letter rule.”

“Hmmm,” I said, though I had no clue what she was talking about.

“Go on, you galah, give me a letter!”

Galah. A word Mama had used in jest ever since I was little.

“M,” I said, entranced by the fun in Talia’s face.

“M,” she said, then without missing a beat: “‘Merica, Manuscript-maker, Mind-worker. There! Now the questions.”

“‘Merica doesn’t count,” I said. “You can’t just drop a letter like that to make it work!”

“Yes, I can,” she said. “Truth rules—and that’s the truth, I feel it. As long as you can shoehorn the truth into the parameters, you’re golden.” She gave a quick wink. “Kind of like life, don’t you think?”

The truth, I thought. America, Manuscript-maker—a writer. That was on the money. Talia—my mother—would move to America and become a writer. As for the With Whom, which I took to mean the person who was to be one’s life partner, she’d uncannily gotten that right as well. Talia was going to marry a professor—mind-worker was a perfect descriptor!—the man I knew would be the love of her life, the words my mother had used when she told me how she and my father had met, perhaps my favorite of all my mother’s personal anecdotes.

“Mind-worker … what exactly is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“You know, someone who earns their living with their mind.”

“A thinker, then,” I said.

“Bingo. I don’t know—a professor, maybe?”

There was a quick reversion in Talia’s eyes to opacity, as if she were looking inward. Her face grew serious. “Yes, it’s right. I can feel it—I’d be willing to offer a guarantee. You can call me one day to congratulate me—I don’t know ten, maybe fifteen years from now! Course, it will be long-distance, so you better have a career that throws up lots of dosh. Other questions?”

“How many kids? What sex? What will they be like?” The words shot out of my mouth before I had time to consider.

“Two. A girl and a boy. The boy will be quirky—funny, a bit of a rogue. The girl, well, she’ll be more serious. An artist of some kind.” Her smile had turned soulful; she eyed me with an unwavering gaze.

“Kind of like you, Jasmine,” she said, grabbing my hand and giving it a squeeze. “I hope so, in any case. Your turn. Letter Q.”

“No fair …” I said.

Talia let out a ripple of laughter. “Come on, give it a go!”

“OK. Quebec—I don’t have much choice about that. What other place is there? Queen of the Artists, as you suggest. And Quintuplet-maker. There, I’ll be marrying a fertility doctor! You’ve boxed me into Quite the future!”

Below us, the richly colored patchwork melted away, replaced by long stretches of dry yellow grass and clumps of grayish-green vegetation. We flew in silence, aloft in clear blue skies streaked with foggy cloud.

Looming ahead, I saw the rise of stony brown mountains.

I turned to see that Talia’s face was alive with excitement.

“This is my favorite part,” she said. “Heading toward the Barrier Range.”

I craned my neck to take in the impressive sweep of the landscape, which now showed true desert of the most extraordinary color—bright orangey-red, with outcroppings of similarly colored rock. Along one ridge were the signs of a small city, its patches of green a startling interruption to the aridness all around.

“There it is. Broken Hill,” Talia said, pointing to the town.

Grandpa Jack began a burst of renewed activity at the controls.

“Coming in for a landing.”

A landing strip appeared, at the side of which stood a tall pole with a large wind sock that thrust out forcefully in a horizontal direction.

“We’ve got a strong headwind!” Grandpa Jack said. “I’m going to circle around and come in from the other side.”

The plane swerved in a U-turn; I clutched onto the chrome handle above my seat.

“I’m bringing her down!” Grandpa Jack said. The intense rattling resumed, the propellers increased their whirring, and the engine heightened its roar. There was another sickening blast of fumes. My stomach lurched, and I grabbed for the sick bag in the seat-back pocket. Talia smiled sympathetically as I heaved into the bag. She reached over and held my arm.

“The first time is the worst,” she said above the noise.

Then, we were bumping over the tarmac. The engine shut down, the whirring stopped. I crumpled up the sick bag and listened to the sudden, intense silence.

“Great flight, girls. What do you think?” Grandpa Jack said with a grin. “Sorry about that, Jasmine,” he added, nodding toward the sick bag I was holding. “You’ve been inaugurated. It will only get better.”

We clambered down, to be greeted by another man, this one older than his Moorabbin counterpart.

“G’day, Prof. ‘Ow’s it goin’? J’ave a good flight?”

“A beauty.” Grandpa Jack clapped the man on the back.

“Welcome to New South Wales!” the man said, helping us down from the plane.

There were three rickety taxis waiting at the large wooden hut that was the Broken Hill Royal Flying Doctor Service airport. We climbed into one of them and headed for the town. I marveled at the redness of the desert soil as we drove—even richer in tone than it had seemed from the sky. The clumps of dry vegetation were subtle shades of mauve and dusty green.

We drove through the residential outskirts—simple fenced-in houses with sparse, rocky front yards—and entered the commercial district, passing several hotel pubs boasting the impressive Victorian wooden and wrought iron balconies I’d seen in Melbourne. In front of each were several horses hitched to posts. We decided to have lunch in one of the pubs and then head toward the Miners Memorial.

After a lunch of hot meat pies, an Australian specialty, followed by a bowl of vanilla ice cream, we set out along Federation Way toward the Line of Lode, the central mining location. It seemed that from anywhere in the town, one could see the towering structures of the mining industry, some rusty and ancient, others modern and new.

I asked Talia about Broken Hill’s history; having flown here many times with her father—I had to keep reminding myself that he was my Grandpa Jack!—she had lots of facts at her fingertips. She told me the structures were called “dumps” and “headframes,” and that it had been here, in the mid-nineteenth century, that Australia’s mining industry was born. Part of the country’s leap from a largely agricultural society into the industrial age.

“Did you know that the eight-hour workday came into being right here, in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia? The rest of the Western world has us to thank for that.”

Beneath Talia’s enthusiasm, however, I sensed a sadness, which I found a little confusing. It was a lovely day—hotter, here, than it had been in Melbourne—and there was much to see and do; to me, it was a grand adventure. Perhaps she was a little bored with the place, having been here so many times, though I sensed there was more to it.

At the end of Federation Way, we stopped to examine the Miners Memorial. Talia rattled off the local history; every now and then Grandpa Jack jumped in to add some point of interest.

I realized what was troubling in Talia’s descriptions. She lacked the pride that was clear in the voice of the taxi driver as he described the sights, or in the manner of the man at the airport who’d welcomed us to New South Wales. For all her knowledge of the place, Talia sounded like a tourist—as if, like me, she were merely a visitor from some foreign place and time. As if all the things she was talking about were just facts from a history book with little to do with her.

Grandpa Jack went off in search of a men’s room; Talia and I sat on a bench, watching the other visitors to the memorial as they milled around, enjoying the early-afternoon warmth.

“You know an awful lot about this place,” I said.

Talia shrugged. She was watching a group of children playing tag ahead on the path.

“Dad likes to come here. It’s an easy flight from Melbourne. Mum’s sick of going with him and my brother and sister are always busy—he plays sports, she does music and dance. So, I come along.”

“I noticed something earlier,” I said. “It struck me as a little strange.”

“Oh?”

“It was like you were talking as a tourist.”

“I am a tourist, really. I don’t live here, after all.”

“No, I mean like you’re not—I don’t know, an Australian.”

“Well I’m not Australian. Not really.” She looked a bit startled, as if her own words had come as a surprise.

“But you’ve spent your whole life here!”

“We’re immigrants. You know that. I was born in South Africa and came here as a baby.”

The children she’d been watching wandered off; Talia cast about a distracted gaze. “You seem to know a lot about my family,” she said, a flash of confusion in her face.

“Only what I’ve learned from you,” I said, thinking of the times my mother had talked to me about her early life.

“It’s funny, being a Jew. I always feel somehow like we’re, I don’t know—well, temporary.”

Two enormous black-and-white magpies plopped from nowhere onto the path in front of us, and set about their nonchalant, hoppy bird-walk.

Talia’s face relaxed into a faint smile. “Quirky little chaps, aren’t they,” she said, watching the magpies poking about in the clumps of scraggy greenery at the edge of the path.

“I suppose it’s silly of me … World War II is already history … it’s weird … but I feel like I have to be on guard … ”

I didn’t fully understand what Talia was talking about. And yet I recognized something—the dark brooding that came over her, along with a familiar shadow of anxiety in myself.

“My brother got beaten up one time—not badly, but still. And someone in a pastry shop once told me to Go Home. I said—where? Where should I go?”

Talia gave a forced, humorless little laugh. “Hardly counts as serious anti-Semitism. But it kind of bites into how you feel about a place. Do you know what I mean?”

I didn’t really know what she meant, so I remained silent.

“It’s nothing compared with the racism here. It makes me sick the way the First Australians are treated. As if they don’t count at all.”

I knew that look in Talia’s face—I’d seen it in Mama’s. Talia—it hit me afresh: Mama as a girl!

“The Jews have been exiled so many times,” she said, her voice far away.

I tried to remember what I knew—the Babylonian Exile, the expulsion from Spain, decades of pogroms, the Holocaust. It was all jumbled up in my mind. Not only exiles, but murder, mass murder, genocide. How little I knew about any of it—the child of a Jewish mother, and yet I knew almost nothing about Jewish history.

“It doesn’t make any sense, does it,” she said. “White Australia is all about exile—not just criminals, but poor people who might have stolen a bit of bread for their kids. Sent away—Beyond the Seven Seas—forever, forbidden to return to England, their home. I should feel a kinship with that. I don’t know…”

Talia was staring at the magpies with an intensity I recognized; I was here with Mama, after all, though she was not yet my mother …

The magpies flapped their wings then lifted off; Talia followed their movement with her gaze, her face softening into an expression of appreciative calm.

“Hey,” she said, brightening. “Wanna race?” She jumped up, scanned the surrounds. “Okay. Over to that tree, around it five times, across to the pub with the veranda, up and down the steps three times, then back over here.”

Not waiting for a response, she crouched to a racing preparation position. I assumed the same position then repeated the instructions she’d just given.

“Ready … set … Go!”

I glanced across to see Talia’s long, dark hair flying behind her, heard the rippling laugh I knew deep in my bones, though the tone was lighter, the pitch of a girl’s voice. A raw feeling of joy took hold of me, intensified by the sheer pleasure of rapid motion. My legs pumped beneath me and all thought fell away; in my vision were blurred swatches of faded color against bright blue and cloud, the rusty color of dessert clay, and people turned to fluid streaks.

We arrived back at our starting place and collapsed, laughing.

“Incredible,” Talia said through soft gasps. “Dead heat. You’d think we were twins!”

I tried to return her broad, unselfconscious grin, but found myself constrained by pangs of longing: for that different-same person—my mother, as I knew her—who was both here and not here. Just then, Grandpa Jack returned.

“Sorry, girls. Got carried away talking to a nice chap—he’s also a pilot. He told me about a different route to Melbourne; might be fun to have a change of scenery on the way back. Let’s go visit the base of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, first. It’s not far.”

He paused, looking at our reddened faces. “What’ve you girls been up to?” he asked, tousling Talia’s hair. “Shenanigans, ey? Flying around in your own way.”

Another pang—a wish that Grandpa Jack would tousle my hair, too. A moment later, he did.

My mother had told me about the famous “flying doctors” of Australia, who responded to emergencies in the Outback. Grandpa Jack, himself a surgeon, had visited the base many times and knew people there.

We took another jalopy of a taxi and sat in silence as we bounced along the road. Looking out the window, I felt a kind of visual hunger—like I’d been starving for these colors, for this rocky-red clay earth, for the sage-and-olive hues of nature’s green, here, so different from what I was used to back home.

At the base we were welcomed with the good-natured cheer that was as bright and abundant here as the light. Everybody seemed to know Grandpa Jack, who had an impressive ability to remember people’s names and those of husbands and children and wives. There was lots of backslapping and arms flung around shoulders. Talia seemed to enjoy it all and showed me around the base as she’d shown me around other parts of Broken Hill.

We were invited to join a group for tea; by this time, we were hungry again and happily tucked into scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream, and lamingtons—cubes of yellow sponge cake soaked in chocolate sauce and rolled in coconut. The teapot seemed like the treacle jug in an Enid Blyton story my mother read to me when I was little: magically and endlessly full. I must have gulped down five cups of the strong, sweet, milky brew.

“Good Lord!” Grandpa Jack said, looking at his watch. “I had no idea of the time. We really must get going. I don’t relish the thought of flying in the dark.”

Out the window, I saw the light fading and the sky streaked orange and pink.

We made quick business of our goodbyes then climbed into the car of a guy who offered to drive us to the airport. By the time we got to the hangar where Grandpa Jack’s Cessna awaited us, the sun was bobbing down behind the mountains and the air was hazy with dusk.

“We’ve done this hop at night before, eh Tal?” Grandpa Jack said. “It’s always gone without a hitch.”

Despite the casual sound of his voice, I could see a shadow of anxiety in Grandpa Jack’s face.

He turned his concentration to the instruments. Talia and I sat silently in the back seats, looking out at the darkening shapes of the mining structures that crouched above Broken Hill like protective, watchful beasts.

The engine started up: whirring, rattling, the sickening wafts of diesel fuel. We lifted from the ground and were airborne. Gone, now, that carefree thrill I’d felt upon taking off in Melbourne, when we’d found ourselves high up in a sunny sky, with its weightless blue freedom, the landscape spread out cheerfully before us. Now, we flew into dark shadows that swallowed our sight as if we were entering a cave, the whirring propellers like flapping bat wings in my ears.

I focused on my breath, tried to still the rapid pounding of my heart. We were silent, as if clenching our mental strength to help Grandpa Jack navigate the dark skies and bring us safely home.

All of a sudden, I realized that we were turning around in a large arc. Something in the atmosphere of the plane seemed to have changed; I felt it, pure anguish coming from the pilot seat where Grandpa Jack was engaged in a new burst of activity at the controls. Then, I heard his voice. Quiet, low, but what he said was unmistakable.

“Shit! I’ve taken a wrong turn.” He paused, busy at the controls. “Sorry about the language, girls. Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.” There was something ominous in his tone.

We circled again, another wide arc, which seemed to go on forever. As the propellers ground away at the increasingly dark night air, I could feel my heart pounding with panic. For a moment, we went into an eerie, slow descent; we seemed to hover for an instant, as if the plane were taking a quick, short breath and holding it in—and then, a sudden blast of acceleration.

Something was happening to the wind; the whistling turned to a howl, and the windows shook wildly.

“Don’t worry, girls!” Grandpa Jack shouted again from the front seat, but his voice was unconvincing. And then something further I couldn’t make out.

This was probably just typical when flying in a small aircraft, I said to myself, searching for calm. They must have been through this kind of thing many times—and Grandpa Jack was so brilliant and knowledgeable, surely he knew what to do. I looked over at Talia, expecting her to shoot me a reassuring smile, to reach over and pat my arm. Instead, her face was ashen and there was fear in her eyes. She reached over, but instead of patting my arm, she gripped my hand and held fast. The panic rose in me like pressurized steam. Oh my god, I thought. I might die here, in the Australian Outback! Without even having a chance to say goodbye to Mama and Papa and Billy! The plane was now thwacking about, as if the air outside were pummeling it. My head banged against the window, wrenching my neck. I felt a jolt of pain wrap around my skull.

“We’re coming in for a landing!” Grandpa Jack shouted above the racket of the propellers. He was no longer trying to sound nonchalant.

“But Dad! There’s no airstrip!”

“It’s pretty smooth ground. There’s a strong tailwind and there seems to be something wrong with one of the props. Tighten your belts!”

I reeled as the plane tipped sharply, and Talia and I were jammed up against each other. I gripped her as she’d been gripping me, our panic turning to terror. I yanked hard on the seat belt flap, which had been comfortably loose across my lap, then glanced at Grandpa Jack, who was battling the steering control, his face clenched with concentration. Another dip, this time in the opposite direction, and then a forward slant.

Now we were tipping even farther forward—not quite a nose dive, but definitely heading in a direction that didn’t seem right for a plane: directly down. Grandpa Jack’s face was white. Talia’s was mottled grayish-green. My stomach plunged and I let out a thin scream. I realized that Talia was doing the same, calling out “Maaaa-maaaa,” in a panicky voice.

In a flash, we were hurtling toward the ground. The earth thrust up toward us, trying to meet us halfway. A series of powerful jolts shook the plane; I heard a horrible crunching, and then an unnerving, smoldering stench filled the cabin. The whirring propeller suddenly ceased.

Then, we were bouncing along the ground. Talia was still gripping my arm and we were slammed first against one side of the plane and then against the other. I closed my eyes tightly and a picture of Billy’s pixie face appeared in my mind, nose crinkled and eyes twinkling. Then Papa: elegant, thoughtful, kind. And Mama. Not tired, thin Mama, but funny, lively Mama, her face shining with love.

For a moment, we were off the ground again. I opened my eyes and looked through the window to see that we were sailing over what seemed to be a small hill. The wing and propeller on my side of the plane were no longer there. The plane—what was left of it—tipped ninety degrees, and we came to a sudden halt, in a position that had all three of us, still strapped into our seats, perpendicular to the ground.

There was a long and echoing silence.

“Girls. Are you alright?” Grandpa’s steady voice came from the front seat, where he was struggling to unlatch his pilot’s harness.

I heard Talia’s voice from beside me, shaky and weak.

“Okay, here, Dad. Jasmine?”

“Okay, too.” My own voice sounded as shaky as Talia’s.

“Quick, girls. Out! The tank might blow!”

My seat belt snapped free. I reached above my head to where the door now was and managed to hoist myself up and push the door upward. One by one, we climbed up and out of the cabin. As we scrambled from the plane, I could see, in the moonlight, that the cabin was all that was left of Grandpa Jack’s spanking new blue-and-white Cessna. Wings, tail, propellers, and nose had all been ripped clear—by trees?—in our crash landing. It was a miracle that the cabin had remained intact, and that we were unharmed.

“Holy moly,” Grandpa said, a great weight of relief compressed into the sound of his whisper.

As we hurried away from the plane, I could see that Talia was limping. I took her hand and we crossed quickly—some two or three hundred yards, picking our way through undergrowth that included thick, dry branches and crackly old leaves. Here and there, bits of twisted debris from the plane shone dully in the moonlight. We stopped under a tall eucalyptus tree, crouching beneath its leaves.

Grandpa Jack was very still, and serious. After a time, he said: “I don’t think the tank’s going to blow. I’m going back to the cabin to fetch some supplies. You stay here.”

He strode back toward the cabin and clambered up the wreckage, disappearing into the hole below the open door, which looked like the stiff, outthrust wing of a dead bird. Talia lowered herself to the ground. Only then did I notice the tear in her jeans at the calf, and the dark stains growing on either side of the tear.

“Talia,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice, “you’re hurt.”

She looked down, placed her hand by the wound.

“God, I didn’t even notice.”

“Does it hurt?”

“I guess so,” she said, her face going pale. “Now that I’m paying attention to it.”

Grandpa Jack’s head had reappeared above the open door of what was left of the plane, and I saw him place several objects on top of the cabin. He re-entered and again reemerged, his arms full. It took him two trips to get all the stuff back to where we were sitting under the tree. He set everything down.

“Talia’s injured,” I said.

“Darling, what’s wrong?” he asked, kneeling beside her, his brow furrowed.

Talia pointed to her calf. “I don’t think it’s serious,” Talia said.

Grandpa Jack grabbed the first aid kit he’d brought back with him from the damaged plane, also the flashlight, which he shone close to the wound.

“You’re right,” he said. “Not too serious, but you will need a few stitches.” He sounded relieved, but I could see that his face was still hung with worry. Carefully, he lifted the hem of Talia’s bell-bottomed jeans and pulled it up to the knee. Then, he cleaned the wound with a disinfectant wipe and applied several butterfly bandages, pulling them tightly across the wound. He added several dabs of antibiotic cream, then covered the area with a wad of gauze and first aid tape.

“That will do for now,” he said, casting a glance around, taking in the surrounds, the tall eucalyptus trees, clumps of grayish-green vegetation and rocky outcroppings in the rust-colored soil.

“Jasmine,” he said, eyeing me closely, “you sure you’re okay?”

My head was in fact aching where it had banged against the window, and my wrenched neck felt uncomfortable. There was no cut, though, or anything he might tend to. I didn’t see the point of worrying him further.

“I’m fine, truly,” I said. I reached up and touched the spot on my head that hurt to find a large, tender bump, but no wetness that would suggest blood.

“Okay,” Grandpa Jack said, all business now, “let me show you what we have.

We turned to examine the supplies he’d brought from the plane.

Two warm, lightweight blankets; the first aid kit; an emergency box that contained a compact lantern, three flashlights, spare batteries, flares, and a Swiss Army knife with all the extras; a fire-making kit—lighter fluid, several gas cigarette lighters, and a compressed material that functioned as tinder; and a carton of food supplies—dried beef jerky, several cans of tuna, a box of tea bags, six large bottles of water, dried milk, sugar, three packets of Marie biscuits, and four large bars of Cadbury milk chocolate.

There was also a “billy” drinking tin. And a lightweight tent folded into a pouch, with several retractable aluminum poles shortened to a length of about six inches and attached to the pouch with a clip.

Surveying our goods, the reality of what had just happened hit me and I started to shake—from the top of my head down through my fingertips and all the way to my toes. I could hear my own teeth chattering. Talia must have heard them too.

“Jasmine. You’re shaking like a leaf!” She wrapped a blanket around my shoulders.

Grandpa Jack eyed me with concern. “We’re very lucky, you know, girls. That little plane sure took care of us.”

“It’s like it decided to take all the hits, and spare us,” Talia said, glancing toward the wreckage strewn for several hundred yards around us. The moon, which had been mysteriously absent during our doomed flight, was not very bright, but we could see fairly well by its light.

“All these trees helped,” Grandpa Jack said. “Once we got close to the ground, they broke the speed.”

The plane had careened through the trees, which in ripping off the wings, the propellers, the nose, and the tail, had brought the plane to a halt.

“I can’t believe the cabin wasn’t crushed,” I said through my chattering teeth.

Grandpa Jack nodded. “I know. It’s a good plane, that Cessna. Look, girls. I’m going to go for help.”

He glanced again at Talia’s calf. “It’s fine for now, don’t worry. But I do want to get that leg of yours seen to. I’m not sure exactly where we are, but you can see that we’re well out of the desert, at least. You should be all right through the night. It’s cool, but it shouldn’t get too cold. You have the blankets, and it’s safe to make a fire in this clearing, if you want; it’s not too dry.”

He explained how to use the flares, then picked out a few supplies to take with him: one flashlight, extra batteries, a bottle of water, a package of biscuits, and one bar of chocolate.

“Just stay put. I’ll get back as quickly as I can.”

He gave Talia a hug and kissed her cheek. Then, he turned to me.

“How about a quick hug for the road,” he said, enveloping me in his arms.

The shaking in my body stopped. Tears sprang to my eyes. I realized that all my life, I’d longed for my grandfather—longed for the three grandparents I’d never known.

He whispered one last thing to Talia, and then was off, loping into the bush with his forthright stride. I was hoping Talia would tell me what it was he’d said, but I didn’t want to intrude by asking.

“Good old Dad,” Talia said. “He’ll be back sooner than you think. He has a way of making things right.”

I thought of Papa, back in New York, or should I say, ahead in New York. It suddenly occurred to me: here, it is 1974, which would have made my father—not, of course, yet my father—a boy of seventeen. Was he at school, now? Sitting in a classroom? Kicking a soccer ball around a field? I thought of the permanent furrow that creased his brow, etched there by years of worrying that seemed imposed on him by his nature. I thought of the way he looked at me from beneath that furrowed brow, his blue eyes filled with affection.

“My father has the oddest expressions. Just now he said: ‘Give it a tonk, Tal!’ That’s what he says when I have some challenge to face, like a difficult exam.”

“Is he always so cheerful?” I asked.

“Pretty much. I bet my dad just popped out into the world with a grin, then went scooting about in search of anything and everything to be interested in and love.”

Talia could have been describing Billy! His temperament must have come directly from Grandpa Jack. The thought of her father seemed to energize Talia, lifting her concern.

“I may as well get a fire going,” she said. “Why don’t you figure out the tent? It probably just springs up somehow and then needs the poles stretched out and inserted.”

“You okay to do that? Your leg …” I said.

“It’s nothing, truly. I’m fine,” Talia said, rising and testing her weight on the leg. I watched her head toward the little eucalyptus woods, favoring the good leg.

Talia was right. The tent did spring up, once I unfolded it and pulled here and there on the flexible wire frame. I unfurled the aluminum poles and found the narrow pockets into which they slid. Fifteen minutes later, I was admiring my work.

“Home sweet home!” I announced.

Talia, busy over the pile of twigs and logs she’d gathered, turned toward me and grinned. “Who needs civilization?”

Then, I saw her freeze. The next instant, I heard what she’d heard. A crackle and snap. There was a pause. Then another crackle and snap. Talia carefully laid down the lighter and phial of fluid she’d been holding, put a finger to her lips and made a barely audible “Sssh.” I froze, too, and listened. There it was again. The crackle of dry leaves, the tiny snap of a twig. Crackle again, no snap this time. The sound of a heavy tread. Not a small animal, or even a large one. It was the sound of a person, someone who was carefully choosing each step to avoid making too much noise.

I crouched, peered through the foliage. I thought I saw the bottom of a pair of pants—blue jeans.

“Hello?” I said, without thinking. “Who’s there?”

A man emerged from the clump of bushes, barefoot, taking in the scene. The blue jeans had frayed bottoms and tears in both knees. A football shirt of some kind completed his outfit; it was black with a diagonal red stripe. His eyes were wide set and dark; his long, stringy hair was light brown and streaked blond. Pursing his lips, he let out a low whistle.

“See you had big trouble with your plane, eh?” he said. “I never liked planes myself. I like to get about on these,” and he slapped his thighs.

“You barrack for Essendon?” Talia said. The man’s face relaxed into a grin. “Nope, Collingwood. Me mate gave me this as a joke. But I don’t go in for footy much anymore. Not since I left town.”

He tossed his head in Talia’s direction. A small flame had leapt up from the little pile she’d built.

“You wanna keep that goin’ or you’ll lose it. You girls got a billy? I could use a cuppa myself.” He reached behind him and tugged at something around his waist. His hand reappeared and I saw he was holding a tin mug.

“Jimmy’s the name. Walkabout’s my game. Sorry if I scared you.”

He strode up toward us and hunkered down near the fire, which was spurting to life.

“Nice fire,” he said, looking into the flames, which were beginning to dance blue and yellow in the dark night air.

“Only kidding, about the walkabout.” He pointed to our faces. “Gubba think we Kooris are always goin’ walkabout.” I figured that gubba was an Aboriginal word for white people. “We do, now and then. Sometimes, though, we’re just goin’ from one place to another, like anyone. I got work down in Menindee.” Jimmy pointed again, this time toward the plain stretching out beneath us. “Down there, by the Darling River.”

Jimmy looked back in the direction of the plane wreckage. “So, what happened, anyway?”

The inflections of Jimmy’s voice intrigued me; his Aussie accent was broader than Talia’s and Grandpa Jack’s. I was also wondering whether or not to be scared. There was something disconcerting about Jimmy, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. I felt in my gut though that he meant us no harm.

Talia gave a brief account of our misadventure.

“Your dad will be back here, one two three,” Jimmy said, eyeing Talia as she picked up one of our bottles to pour water into the billy. “Hang onto that, you’ll need it. The Darling’s got lots of little creeks and stuff. They’re like her granddaughters. Nice, sweet water. Just have to know where.”

Jimmy reached over, took the billy and disappeared back into the scrub.

Talia and I looked at each other.

“What d’ya reckon?” Talia said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He seems nice and like he wants to help. But there’s something odd about him.” I pulled the blanket tightly around my shoulders.

Talia nodded. “I know what you mean.”

“His face is smooth, but he has the eyes of an old man. No, a child. I don’t know, it goes back and forth, like he’s young and old at the same time.”

We were both quiet for a while.

“I’ve never met an Aboriginal person before,” I said.

“There aren’t a lot of Aboriginal peoples in the city,” Talia said. “Not in Melbourne. I knew an Aboriginal girl, Alexi, when I was in third grade. She lived in the orphanage. I went there a few times to play with her. She slept in a dormitory with the other girls, and they were all like sisters. But the housemother was horrible. The kids were scared of her.”

Talia poked among the sticks on the ground in front of her.

“I never asked her what happened to her parents. Why she was living in the orphanage, not with relatives or something.” Her voice was grim, her face looked tight and closed. “I’ve thought about her a lot lately. With all the news stories about the stolen generations. I can’t believe the terrible things our government did. This is their country, their land. Imagine! Stealing children from their homes. Destroying families. Decimating cultures. Makes me want to run away to someplace else. But where would I go? It’s not like there’s some perfect place where peoples have never been mistreated.”

I thought of Billy, asking that little boy in Nashville if he was a slave: thought of our own terrible history, in all its brutality. Of the countless injustices that still prevailed in so many areas of our society.

“After I left primary school, I never saw Alexi again. I always felt like there was some awful secret going on. I can’t explain it, but I felt it. And it was true! There was an awful secret!” Talia’s eyes filled with tears. “I want to—I don’t know, say sorry to her.”

This seemed to make Talia remember something. She sat up bolt straight. “You know, the Aboriginal people have asked the Australian government to apologize for their terrible brutality. For stealing children. For destroying their culture. And the government won’t! They’re too afraid of having stuff taken away from them—the land that they stole in the first place!”

I remembered so clearly the day, a few years ago, when Mama excitedly showed me the video recording of the new Australian prime minister finally issuing the long overdue apology to the First Nations. Way too late, and way too little, Mama had said, but still, she had smiled through her tears as she watched. I closed my eyes and again saw in my mind’s eye the prime minister, reading from his notes, heard again his words—so clearly, as if he were speaking right into my ear. “To the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say Sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say Sorry.”

I wanted to take Talia’s hand and tell her that one day, many years from now—thirty-four to be exact—Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would finally issue the apology to the First Nations, though of course this would do nothing to undo the unforgivable wrongs that had traumatized the Aboriginal peoples.

So much had happened in the past day, I found myself feeling confused trying to take it all in. Before I could sort my thoughts out, Jimmy reappeared, holding our billy, filled to the brim with water.

“That was quick,” Talia said. “The river must be nearby. Funny, I don’t hear the sound of water.”

Jimmy set the billy down on the string Talia had rigged up, tied to two long, sturdy sticks, above the thriving flames of the fire.

“It’s just a creek,” he said. “I hear it. But my ears are from around these parts. You girls from the city, yeah?”

We both nodded.

“Here—look,” Jimmy said, walking a few yards to where the bush thinned a little. He gestured to us to follow. Rising, my knees creaked, and my ankles wobbled. We followed Jimmy and then all three of us crouched down by a bare patch in among the bushes. Jimmy pointed through this opening. I saw a glimmer and, a moment later, heard the faint sound of moving water, as if my glimpse of the creek had brought the sound to my ears.

Jimmy smiled, as if he’d just sighted an old friend.

“Gubba give some real stupid names to things,” he said. Then caught himself, adding: “No offense. But I like that one—the Darling River. She is a darling. She’s my mother’s sister.”

We walked back together to the fire.

“You girls hungry?” Jimmy asked. “I’ve got some bush tucker.”

“Yes, please,” I said. We’d not eaten since our afternoon tea at the Flying Doctor Service base. Talia nodded, too. Jimmy opened the canvas satchel that was slung across his chest and drew out a bag of sliced white bread—what we called, in America, “Wonder Bread”—a jar of mayonnaise, and a package wrapped in wax paper and tied with twine.

“Dried ‘roo meat,” he said, untying the twine and pulling some reddish-brown strips from the wax paper. I let out a little involuntary groan.

“No worries,” he said. “Tastes just like chicken.” He proceeded to coat three slices of the white bread with a thick layer of mayonnaise then placed a single strip of dried meat on each. He handed one open sandwich to Talia, the second to me, then placed his own on a large dried leaf in front of him.

The water was beginning to boil; Talia put a teabag in each cup, filled them with hot water, and added a teaspoon of dried milk and sugar.

Jimmy bowed his head in what looked like mock prayer, a little smile playing around his lips.

“Rub a dub dub. Thanks for the grub. Yay, Lord!” How amazing! That was the funny grace Mama had taught us when we were little, the one Billy loved to say. An Aussie thing, poking fun at everything. I was surprised, though, that Jimmy just happened to know it and trot it out now.

“Grace,” he said through his mouthful of sandwich. “Learned that from my gubba mates at school.”

Jimmy was beginning to see, I think, that neither of us seemed to get his jokes very well. I didn’t know how Talia felt, but I was a little nervous. Here we were alone with a man who was a complete stranger.

Jimmy put down his sandwich, chewing thoughtfully.

“You very safe, here,” Jimmy said, his smile gone. He had read my mind! That seemed to keep happening here, on my strange journey. “This is friendly country. We’re happy to have you here. I’m gonna wait with you till your dad comes back. I will tell you about this country, if you like. I will introduce you, very serious.”

Now, he looked directly into my eyes. “I’ll even tell you secrets—some secrets of my people, of this land.”

The kangaroo meat tasted surprisingly good—Jimmy had been right, it was like chicken, with a gamey aftertaste. And it went surprisingly well with the white bread and mayonnaise. Maybe I was just so hungry I’d have found live witchetty grubs delicious!

For a moment, I recalled seeing the kangaroos at the Melbourne zoo on two past trips to Australia with my parents. But then I reminded myself that for farmers, kangaroos were pests—like rabbits could be in America. In parts of the country, kangaroos had over-multiplied and needed to be controlled to maintain the ecological balance.

The fire quickly warmed our hands, feet, and faces. It also provided additional light, by which I could make out the contours of the bush around us. As I looked around, the dark shapes of the unusual variety of bushes and trees started to seem like appealing creatures that might soon uproot themselves from the dusty brown soil and join us around the fire.

Jimmy had finished eating and was drinking his tea, his face glowing in the firelight. He turned toward me and I saw that his eyes had changed once again. No longer young-old but timeless, like water or sky.

“You want to know about my people?” he asked, his eyes brushing over me like a breeze.

I nodded.

“I want to know, too,” Talia said.

“When the gubba—white man—first came here, you know, real long time ago, he said to his boss, no man owns this land. No fields ploughed, no houses or churches. Okay, no owners, we take the land. They was wrong, of course. My people was here. Many peoples, all one people.

“Even today, a lot of people say Kooris never ploughed, never grew wheat, never planted apple trees and orange trees. We never had to. Our mother, the earth, she gave herself freely to us. And because we respected her and loved her, we never had to go and do all them other things. That would have been harming our mother. So we just took what she gave us.

“You see, this land, it is my father’s land, my grandfather’s land, my grandmother’s land. I am related to it, it give me my identity. That’s why I left town and came back to live on the land that is the land of my grandfather and grandmother.”

Jimmy looked at me again with airy eyes—like he was looking right through me.

“Our story is in the land … it is written in those sacred places, that’s the law. Dreaming place … you can’t change it, no matter who you are.

“This is what Kooris—Aboriginal people—believe. I believe it is true for all peoples, gubba too. Just they don’t know it. So, like I say, this is my Mother.” Jimmy reached down with one hand and stroked the ground at his feet—lovingly, as one might caress a baby.

“Mother to my people. We are the Yuin Monaro. We live here a very long time, all the way back to the Beginning, to the time of the Dreaming.”

Jimmy paused. He seemed to be thinking something over. Again, he looked at me—singling me out, I felt, which made me a little uncomfortable. Talia did not seem to notice.

I had the uncanny feeling that Jimmy knew me, or had known me, long ago.

“You are interested in water, no?” Jimmy said to me with that faint and private smile. “Our Darling River. My people have depended on it since the Beginning. I will tell you how the waters came to our Mother. I will tell you about the creation of Toonkoo and Ngaardi, in the Dreamtime.

“When Darama, the Great Spirit, came down to the earth, he made all the animals and the birds. He gave them all their names. He also made Toonkoo and Ngaardi. One day, Toonkoo said to Ngaardi that he’d go out hunting. He went out hunting kangaroos and emus, while Ngaardi stayed home and got some bush tucker. She was waiting and waiting, but Toonkoo never came home.”

I was getting used to Jimmy’s way of speaking; now I could understand everything he said. He was lost in his story, staring into the flames, which sent light and shadow dancing across his features.

“Ngaardi started worrying. Then she started crying and as the tears ran down her face, she made the rivers and creeks come down that mountain. She waited there all day for him to come back with the food, but he never came back.

“As Toonkoo was out there hunting, he chucked a spear and got a kangaroo. Then he walked a bit farther and he looked up and saw Darama, the Great Spirit, up in the sky, watching him. He chucked a spear up to the sky, up to hit Darama, but Darama caught it, bent it, and chucked it back. As it came back it turned into a boomerang. That’s how we got our boomerang.”

I thought of the boomerang my mother had bought me at the Sydney airport when I was five, on my first trip to Australia, sitting in its pride of place on my bedroom dresser. I saw again the smooth wood with the splashes of color in the center, a lizard painted in traditional Aboriginal dot style, then in my mind’s eye looked around my bedroom: the bookshelf packed with my books, the windowsills and shelves mounted on the walls filled with mementos—shells from the beach, pretty rocks and stones I’d foraged during our many family trips. There was the door, leading out onto the hallway, across which my parents’ room was to be found.

I turned my attention back to Jimmy’s story.

“Toonkoo was out hunting and he was still wild with Darama, so Darama took him away and put him in the moon. As the moon was coming up, Ngaardi was still crying. As she saw the moon coming up over the horizon, over the sea, she looked up into the full moon and there she saw her man, Toonkoo.

“She went to the mountain and she laid down. She said to herself: ‘If ever he should come back, I’ll leave my heart on the mountain for him to find.’ Today, her heart is the red flower called the waratah.”

Jimmy’s gentle voice cast a spell. I looked over to Talia; to my surprise, she was fast asleep, curled up by the fire, wrapped in a blanket.

Jimmy stared into the dwindling flames. He picked up a stick and poked at the embers.

“You liked the part about the boomerang, yeah?” he asked, still staring into the flames. I sat very still. Had Jimmy actually read my mind this time? Could he have known that my thoughts had turned to my own home, so very far away, as his Dreamtime story explained the origin of the boomerang?

I nodded, slowly.

“Boomerangs. They go from the earth—our Mother, our home. They fly up and across, very high. Toonkoo—he sent it all the way into the sky, where the spirit people live. But they come back. They always come back to your country, to your Mother.”

I was beginning to understand the special way Jimmy used certain words. For him, the words country, people, mother, land, earth, and home seemed to all mean more or less the same thing.

“But that’s only one message of the story,” Jimmy said. He put down the stick and turned to look at me. “And for you, not the main one.”

Jimmy’s eyes held the reflection of the flames, though he was no longer looking into the fire.

“The story tells of the origins of water in this land. Our land is very dry, which makes water even more precious. The Dreaming story tells us that water—it comes from crying. But it is life.”

He looked back into the flames of the fire.

“You know about water, don’t you? Anyway, what is your name?”

I almost said Emily but caught myself. “Jasmine,” I said. “My name is Jasmine.”

Jimmy smiled. “You are a flower. You need water to blossom and grow. You are not red, like waratah, heart flower. But Jasmine: white. Like a star. You are Star Flower. You travel in the sky, but you search for your place. Where you can put in your roots. Find the water of the land. Blossom and grow.”

I had begun to tremble again—not from cold, this time, as it was warm by the fire, but from the way Jimmy had reached right in and touched my soul.

How did he know all this? About my strange, impossible journey? About me?

Jimmy leaned close toward me, placed one hand on my arm.

“You will find your country, your Mother,” he said, his hand patting the earth again, as he had done before. “She has cried her river for you and you will come to settle on its banks.”

I glanced up at the black sky. The stars shone fiercely.

“Yes, but how do I find it?” I whispered back. Jimmy extended his hand. Tentatively, I reached for it. His palm was smooth and dry.

He put his lips up to my ear, as a child does when telling a secret. “You will hold their sadnesses in your hand,” he said, “but you must also be touching their land. Then you will tumble, and in your tumbling, you will find what you are looking for.”

What did he mean? The thought of the pink baby booties Grandma had given me flashed across my mind; I had forgotten all about them. I stuck my hand in the pocket of my sweater. They closed around the soft little wad. Here they were! They had been with me all along! I clutched onto them. You will hold their sadnesses in your hand. Then, you will tumble. I had been holding these booties when the storm had hit in Grandma’s house. You must also be touching their land. I had been sitting on the bankie chair, that beloved object from Grandma’s own childhood home, made of rare South African stinkwood, which she had brought to Australia from South Africa—her home, however troubled a home it might have been.

I closed my eyes. The pain in my head had thankfully receded, though my neck still ached. Exhaustion poured through my limbs. The warmth of the fire felt soothing, lapping against my body like hot, feathery waves.

The sound of rumbling wheels snapped my eyes open. I jumped up, Jimmy jumped up; our hands flew apart.

“Your dad. He’s back,” Jimmy said. In one quick movement, Jimmy had his mug tied around his waist, and his satchel packed. He leaned down, took me by the shoulders, looked at me straight with his deep and changing eyes.

“Remember,” he said, “the Dreaming happened long ago, it is happening still, it will always be happening.”

His eyes flashed with humor and warmth. “You have a white face, but you are like my people. You must go walkabout to find yourself. Follow the water, it will take you home.”

And he was off—a streak in the dark. I stared into the bushes. The leaves, in their small fluttering motion, shuddered and shook a little, and then were still.

Over by the fire, which must have flickered out while Jimmy was saying his goodbye, I saw that Talia had opened her eyes and was looking at me sleepily.

“I hear a motor,” I said.

Talia jumped up. On the other side of the spent fire, where the plain stretched out, I could see an open Jeep, bumping along the rocky ground. As it got closer, I saw Grandpa Jack’s silver-white hair flying around his handsome, youthful face.

“Look! It’s Dad!” Talia limped surprisingly quickly in the direction of the approaching Jeep. I stayed put, watching as the distance between them closed. The Jeep slowed, then stopped, and Grandpa Jack leapt out and wrapped his arms around Talia. They stood there like that for some time. Another man was at the wheel—an Aboriginal person somewhat older than Jimmy. Soon, Talia and her father were back in the Jeep heading toward me.

“Jasmine! Talia’s been telling me about your visitor. Where is he?” The Jeep came to a halt. Grandpa Jack climbed out; he put out an arm and drew me to his side.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He took off when he heard the Jeep coming.”

“Too bad. I would have liked to thank him for taking care of my two girls.”

My heart leapt at this: my two girls. Grandpa Jack smiled down at me. Looking into those welcoming brown eyes, I felt overcome by a feeling of calm joy; for a moment, the ache of missing home—of missing Mama and Papa and Billy, my house, my neighborhood, my friends, my school—vanished. Here, in this foreign time and place, looking into eyes that were strangely familiar, I was, for an instant, also home.

“How’s the leg, Tal?” he asked.

“Hurts a bit, not too bad,” Talia said.

“There’s a clinic, about two hours away,” Grandpa Jack said. “I’m exhausted, though. Need a bit of sleep, first. So does Mick, I think. Give us an hour, then we’ll get going.”

The man in the Jeep nodded. Both of them did look very tired. I suddenly noticed that the sky, at the horizon, was faintly streaked with gold and pink.

“You’ve been gone longer than I realized,” I said.

Grandpa Jack grinned. “Four solid hours of walking in this bush didn’t go so fast for me.” He yawned widely.

“I see you’ve set up the tent. Why don’t you girls go in there and grab some sleep. I’ll cuddle up to this rock here.”

Talia and I insisted that Grandpa Jack take the tent; he was the one who’d done all the walking, not to mention the strain of battle-worthy piloting, before our terrible—but miraculous—crash landing. With a little coaxing, he agreed. The driver, Mick, stretched out on the back seat of the Jeep and in a moment the sound of his quiet snoring reached our ears.

Talia and I sat back down by the spent fire.

“What happened to Jimmy?” she asked.

“He finished his story and then, when he heard the Jeep, he just took off.”

“He didn’t say goodbye?”

“Well yes, he did, as a matter of fact. But it was strange—like he was leaving me with a puzzle.”

“A puzzle?”

“Something to solve. Something important.”

“I missed the ending of the story,” Talia said. “I got to the part about Ngaardi crying tears that became the rivers and lakes. Didn’t he have a wonderful voice? I was so tired, though. I couldn’t help falling asleep. Like someone hit me on the back of the head and knocked me out.” Talia sat up, shook off the blanket. “What sort of puzzle did he leave you with?”

I hesitated before I spoke. “He seemed to think I was on some kind of journey. As if I was looking for—”

“For what?”

“For my people. For my home.”

“Well, are you?”

Above the mountain in the distance, the sky was lighting up with dawn.

“I don’t really know,” I said. “Yes, maybe I am.”

Talia reached up and fiddled at the back of her neck. When she drew her hands down, she was holding something, which she passed to me.

“This is a Star of David,” she said. “I wear it underneath my clothing, so you’ve probably never noticed it. It was my grandmother’s. She brought it with her to South Africa from Lithuania when she was about our age. They had to flee the pogroms.”

“Pogroms?”

“I wish I knew more about her, about her life. I hardly knew her, really.”

Talia gave me that look again, the sidelong glance.

“You’re not Jewish … Why do I not know this?”

“Actually, I’m half Jewish,” I said in a halting voice. “My mother’s Jewish, my father’s not.”

Talia shook her head, as I’d seen her do, now, several times, as if she was trying to shake something perturbing away.

“It makes no difference. This Star of David is special. I can’t explain it. And I don’t know why, but I have this feeling …”

“Yes?”

“I have this feeling that it belongs to you.”

Talia waved her arm in a semicircle, bringing it to rest with her hand pointing at the plane’s cabin some three hundred yards from where we were sitting.

“We might have lost our lives, here. It’s like we were spared by the gods. Given a second chance. I know this is going to sound really weird, but I sense that you being here with us is what saved us.”

Talia looked down at the necklace she was holding, and when she spoke, it was as if she was talking not to me, but to the little Star of David.

“Jasmine,” she said, “who are you?”

Then, she looked up at me. The frown appeared again only this time, instead of confusion in her eyes, I saw inklings of a troubled realization. Was the truth dawning on her? That the girl sitting with her, the girl she thought of as her friend Jasmine, was in fact a person from her own future—the child she would one day name Emily? Her very own daughter?

Talia blushed. “I’m sorry, I must be going mad. The crash, hardly any sleep. It’s been such a long night. I don’t know, being here, in the bush. I think it’s all been a bit too much.”

I could see the distress bubbling up; Talia’s face crumpled a little, as if she was about to cry. She did not, after all, know the truth, and yet my presence, here, was upsetting her. I felt I owed her an explanation, though I had no idea what I could say that would make any sense.

“I’ve often wondered,” I found myself saying, “how you can tell where a river begins and where it ends. It seems to me that in the end, it’s rather arbitrary. The labels we give to things.”

Talia’s face relaxed. She seemed relieved. “I love such riddles myself,” she said.

I lowered my voice to a whisper. “In answer to your question, the truth is I’m not sure I quite know. Who I am.”

Something my mother told me once came back to me. “Isn’t that what the Sphinx said was the ultimate point of life? To know thyself?”

We both looked soberly at the gray ashes of what had been our cozy little fire.

Talia nodded. “I think I know what you mean,” she said.

“Jimmy was trying to tell me something,” I said in a whisper, almost to myself. Watching the dawn light diffuse the remaining shadows of night, it occurred to me that perhaps Jimmy was my guide. Isn’t that what Mama had said to me, through the terror of the squall, as I was hurtling back through time?

There will be guides to help you. If you keep your eyes open, you will find them.

I looked over at Talia. Now, she smiled.

“Here, take it,” she said, handing me the Star of David.

There it was, that mischievous, fully alive smile: my mama’s smile. I felt a ballooning happiness.

“What a night,” she said. “I feel like we need some kind of ceremony. I know! I’m going to say a blessing—a Jewish prayer. I don’t usually go in for stuff like this but—I don’t know, it seems right.

“For religious Jews, this prayer is the most important one of the day. They’re supposed to say it every morning, when they wake up. The English translation goes like this: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Blessed be the Holy Name of the Lord, King of the Universe forever. Okay, now in Hebrew.”

Through the pain in my eyes, which was rising in gloomy crescendo, I looked at the necklace she’d handed me: the fine gold chain bearing a small gold star with two Hebrew letters in the center, which of course I did not know how to read. I closed my fist tightly around the star. We both stood: I felt the firm land beneath my feet, breathed in the rich scent of the bush, strongly tinged with eucalyptus, and closed my eyes.

“Shemah Yisroel, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehud,” Talia said. The words sounded so foreign to me—if it had been Hindi, they would have been no more familiar—and yet they slipped from Talia’s mouth like a native tongue. “Baruch Shem K’vod Malchutoh L’Olam Va’ed.”

But then, Talia winced and she sat back down. Her hand reached for her calf.

“Okay?” I asked.

“Wow—”

“What?”

“Dunno, like someone just stabbed into it.”

“Let’s get your dad,” I said, the panic returning.

Talia shook her head. “No, let him sleep. Mick, too. We have a long drive. I’m just going to take a quick look.”

Talia reached down and removed the tape and the gauze.

“Here,” I said, flicking on the flashlight and directing the beam to the wound.

It looked awful, nothing like the clean, dressed cut of last night. Her calf was swollen and the skin around it was mottled red. A sliver of something yellow shone in the beam of light.

“Pus,” Talia said. “This isn’t good.”

My head was getting worse by the minute. I looked over at Talia. Something shifted in the atmosphere, something peculiar, as if the air were being sucked away.

“Hey,” Talia said, glancing over to the ruined cabin of the plane. “Did you tell your mum you were going up in a small airplane?”

I shook my head, no.

“We should have gotten their permission,” she said. “They’re going to be upset. We shouldn’t have brought you, not without their permission.”

An abrupt dread poured into me, leaving a chalky feeling in my mouth of doom. I looked at Talia. Her skin was tinged green. What if my being here at all was undermining everything? What if I had somehow been responsible for the crash? What if the infection in Talia’s leg had turned septic? I knew about septicemia. Knew that one day, Grandma would end up in a coma for a month with a raging case that almost killed her. The pain in my head was now excruciating. I reached up to find the small bump on my head had grown to the size of a large plum.

“Jasmine, are you okay?” Talia asked. “You’re doing it again—shaking all over like a leaf.”

I couldn’t speak.

“We’ll call your mum as soon as we get to town. We’ll—”

A terrible loneliness filled my veins. How lost I was! How far from everything I’d ever known. From home, from my family—but no! She was my family! It was impossible, but—

“Talia!” I said, almost shouting. “Don’t you see? Don’t you know who you are?”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, looking afraid herself.

“I can’t tell my mother anything! Not unless I tell you!”

Grandpa Jack popped his head out of the tent.

“Girls, is everything okay?” he asked.

I could see his head there, at the opening of the tent, but everything was pitching, turning sideways. I tried to speak, but no sound came out. And then, something erupted in Talia’s face, a look of horror that was the most frightening thing of all. The ground was sliding. Talia’s hands flew out to steady herself, as if she were trying to take hold of the ground and set it to rights.

What if I’d done something terrible! What if Talia was going to get really, really ill, even die, so that—so that—how could that be? Then I would never be born?

I had to tell her! Had to tell her everything—that she’d grow up and leave her home, that she’d raise her own children far from her family, that she’d hardly see her parents and siblings as the years poured by, that her father—Grandpa Jack! How vital he was! So utterly alive!—would die way too young, when Talia was not yet out of graduate school, that she would herself get very sick when I was only—well, the exact age I was now, with Billy, her darling little boy, only five years old. That—

Her face was a mask of fear as the earth slid and she slid with it, down into the dark shadow that had abruptly opened up in the sky and plunged down to where we were sitting on the ground.

And then, my whole body tipped. My eyes slammed shut, I tried to open them but they were glued tight, and the spinning began. All around me, a shuddering cold: I was tumbling again. I stretched out my arms—tried to howl—Talia! Grandpa Jack! Come back! Don’t leave me! I need you! The words stormed in my head; I tumbled into the cold, whipping wind, a motion crazier even than the motion of the first storm. Inside, I was shrieking. Mama! Mama! I recalled Talia’s desperate cry as the plane was crashing through the trees, bouncing every which way, filling us all with the great danger of what was happening, with the dreadful awareness that perhaps our lives were about to end.

In the midst of the terrible cold and wind, the tumbling that sucked away my breath, I heard it again—the calm, loving voice of my mother. Not Talia, the girl who would be my mother one day, but my grown mother, who was at that moment very ill, far away in Brooklyn.

“Stay brave and you will return. I am here, waiting for you.”

With the sound of her voice, the panic within evaporated; suddenly, I felt I was on a calm sea. I opened my mouth to respond to my mother’s voice—and found that my lips were no longer sealed, nor my eyes, which now opened.

Gone, the Australian bush. Gone, the plane wreckage. Gone, Talia—Mama, as a girl. Gone, Grandpa Jack—the grandfather I’d never known, who had died before I was born. A surge of grief took hold of me, but then also, a feeling of gratitude. On this strange journey, I had finally met my Grandpa Jack.

Now I was walking on a dirt road in an utterly unfamiliar landscape. Dry grass all around, but of a different color than in Australia: washed-out, wintry browns and greens. All around me, rather than wild bush, were crudely cultivated fields. In the distance, I could see a small colony of mud huts, with roofs of thatched straw. I looked down to see unfamiliar shoes on my feet—old-fashioned leather boots with worn soles and badly scuffed toes. Someone was walking beside me. A girl. She was talking in a beautiful, melodic voice. And with a different accent from Talia’s broad Australian tones. Much more English sounding. I turned to look at her, and as I did so, before I actually saw her face, I realized with a jolt where I was, realized what had happened. Understood, with astonishment, with whom I was walking.