Jess read the message a second time but was left deflated. She hadn’t realized until now how invested she’d become in the idea that the Turner family’s deaths had, in fact, been a case of accidental poisoning by blue-green algae. She didn’t want to think that Isabel had intended to kill herself and her older children, that she’d abandoned her newborn child to fend for herself in the world. Knowing that the baby left behind in the white wicker basket had been her own mother made the whole thing even more abhorrent.
What must Polly be making of all this? If Jess was finding it impossible to fathom, Polly, who was already fragile, must be suffering terribly. Jess wished they were closer. Her instinct was to provide comfort; she’d have liked to receive some in return. But in all of the important ways, they were strangers to one another. Nonetheless, Jess decided to walk down to the cove. They could at least be alone together with the news.
Polly was standing by the rocks with her eyes closed, listening to the waves slap against the shore. She knew this place: the smell, the sound, the salt in the air. She knew it in the pores of her skin. This fact was some comfort, as her thoughts scattered around her like a thousand grains of sand.
Thea Turner.
The words came softly, quietly from her lips; she tried to find something solid in them, something real. She felt strangely reassured. The contents of the tape had explained certain things she’d struggled with all her life. How different she was from Nora, for one, but more than that, Nora’s constant fear of losing her, the way she’d held onso tightly that Polly felt sometimes that she struggled to breathe. It hadn’t been intrinsic to Polly, after all; she wasn’t fundamentally fragile. The anxiety in their relationship had been driven by Nora.
And how ironic that amid so many untruths told to her by her mother, the single anecdote she had known to be an invention had turned out to be true. Shehadbeen found in a flower garden. Not the dahlia patch of Darling House, perhaps, but the rose garden of a house in a town called Tambilla.
Polly removed her necklace and then her dress and stood in her underwear. The air brushed warm against her skin, its fragrance of bruised gardenia and brine. She walked down to the shoreline and when she reached it kept going. The water was a welcome shock.
Refusing to allow herself the time to hesitate and change her mind, she raised her arms and dived forward, disappearing beneath the surface, rejoicing as the water found her fingers, her shoulders, the skin between her toes.
When she came to the surface she rolled onto her back, floating like a starfish. Her eyes were on the faraway sky, lightening now, warming.
Jess didn’t know it, but Polly had been to Tambilla once before. She had planned to tell her daughter about it the other night, after the funeral, when she’d handed over Daniel Miller’s book, but the conversation hadn’t gone as she’d expected. Jess had been overwhelmed, grieving the loss of Nora, upset at receiving the book, put out that Polly had known the family story and failed to tell her; she had then charged Polly with abandoning both her and Nora.
But it hadn’t been like that at all. It had happened incrementally. Polly had thought she was doing the right thing. Sometimes, in those early days in Brisbane, she’d been convinced that nothing was more important than that she and Jess stay together. But then she would think of all the things she couldn’t afford to give her daughter, comforts and opportunities that Nora could offer, and she would see her desire to keep her daughter for herself as selfish. She’d thought aboutmoving back to Sydney, living in Darling House with Nora and Jess, but she withered in proximity to Nora; she became all of the things she’d been told she was—weak, forgetful, delicate, nervy. Polly knew she could be more than that, a better person, a better parent, out from under Nora’s thumb. But would Polly herself be enough for Jess?
And so it went, her thoughts going round and round and round, until two years had passed, Jess lived in Sydney and she in Brisbane, and the time for decisions was over.
Strangely, it was their separation that had led her to Tambilla. Polly had visited the place almost twenty-nine years ago to the day, December 1989. She hadn’t meant to go anywhere that summer. Jess was booked to come to Brisbane for a fortnight and Polly had taken the whole glorious two weeks off work. Nora’s phone call had been devastating.
“But I need her to come,” Polly had said, sounding, even to her own ears like a petulant teenager.
“Darling, I know you’re looking forward to seeing her, but it’s the NIDA summer school. Places are as rare as hen’s teeth—I had to pull strings to get her in.”
Silence fell as Polly bit down hard on the words she wanted to say.
Finally, Nora broke the impasse: “Of course, if it’s important to you, I can cancel the course. I’m sure Jessica will understand... in time.”
Polly felt the prick of tears. Itwasimportant to her that Jess come to Brisbane, desperately important.
“How’s the new job going?”
Somehow, Nora had intuited her strain.
“It’s good,” said Polly, trying to sound confident. “I’ve got a lot to learn, but I like it.”
“Not too stressful?”
“It’s okay. I’m okay.”
“That’s good, so long as you’re taking care. Now, what would you like me to tell Jess? Would you like me to send her north?”
Polly had closed her eyes. “No.” The word was bitter in her mouth.
“What’s that?”
“No, she should do the summer school.”
“Are you sure?”
Polly had twisted the phone cord tightly around her finger. “It’s a great opportunity.”
She’d wept when she hung up. Hot, angry tears of disappointment and resentment, even as she told herself it was the right decision. There was nothing to be gained by putting herself and her own needs above her daughter’s. Jess loved drama. To be the cause of canceling the NIDA course would have cast a pall over the whole visit.
