Part IV
15
Sydney
December 11, 2018
Jess was late to the hospital that afternoon, and she still had Daniel Miller’s voice in her head when she arrived. The town of Tambilla, its surrounding area and the people who lived there, would not leave her. The landscape, as described by Miller—the silver-trunked gums and hidden congress of water through bush that ticked and teemed with insects, the corrugated-iron roofs and caramel stone settlers’ dwellings—was an Australia she recognized from childhood books and films, and yet it was unknown to her. Despite having traveled extensively through Europe, she’d never ventured farther west than the Blue Mountains.
Sitting in a taxi as the driver battled his way along Oxford Street, she’d typed “Adelaide Hills” into her phone’s search engine and scrolled through the images presented. The pictures she’d formed in her mind as she read Daniel Miller’s book overlay the photographs of vineyards and misty green hills and autumnal trees with startling red and yellow leaves. The effect was disquieting. She felt a frisson: the strange dissonance, as she looked at the pictures, that the world of Isabel and Thomas Turner, Mr. Drumming, Mrs. Pike, Betty Diamond, and Meg Summers was something she’d experienced, rather than a place she’d read about. As if, were she to lean near enough to the images and close her eyes, she might suddenly hear the Onkaparinga River trickling through the bush.
This was not an entirely unfamiliar sensation. It was, Jess suspected, the common preserve of all true readers. This was the magic of books, the curious alchemy that allowed a human mind to turn black ink on white pages into a whole other world. Nonetheless, thehold that Tambilla had assumed over her went beyond the usual. She was overcome with an impatient feeling, agitated, an emotion almost like hunger or envy. As if she needed to know everything there was to know, to possess the place; as if she felt she had somerightto possess it.
As twenty-first-century Bondi Junction passed by outside the taxi window, Jess viewed it distantly: bumper-to-bumper traffic, shopping centers, apartment towers. She wondered what the Turner family from the holiday snap of 1955 would have made of it all. Jess had saved the image on her phone and sat studying Isabel Turner as they approached the hospital. No longer a stranger, she was a woman with a favorite teacup. A transplant to a different country, something Jess well understood: belonging, but never quite fully, while another place, far, far away, maintained a stubborn claim as “home.”
But was homesickness enough to explain what she’d done? Jess thought of some of the more difficult times she’d faced; to feel alone in a far-off land could be extremely isolating and must have been even more acute back then. But Jess was willing to bet that there was more to it. A few of the articles she’d read online had mentioned testimony given at the inquiry that the coroner had suppressed. It seemed likely that whatever it was that had encouraged him to find Isabel Turner culpable for the murder of her children was contained within that evidence.
When they finally pulled over at the entrance to the hospital, Jess paid the driver and hurried through the glass doors. A glance at the clock above the nurses’ station confirmed that she’d missed forty-five minutes of visiting time.
She arrived at Nora’s room just in time to cross paths with a nurse she hadn’t seen before. Her name tag readAimee,and she smiled kindly at Jess.
“How is she?” Jess asked, moving quickly to set her bag down on the visitor’s chair by Nora’s bedside.
“A bit unsettled, but we gave her something to help her sleep.”
Jess mustn’t have managed to hide her disappointment, becauseAimee’s voice carried a hint of consolation as she continued: “It really is the best thing for her at this stage.”
“I’m just so eager to speak with her,” explained Jess, taking Nora’s hand. Her grandmother’s face was relaxed to the point of slackness, and it made Jess realize how animated it usually was and how much she yearned to have the old Nora back.
“You can still speak to her, you know,” the nurse said, as she updated Nora’s chart. “People often feel they need to keep a reverent silence, but I’ve always thought it must be lonely, this strange, artificial setting. We do our best, but it’s far better to fill the room with the voices of loved ones.”
“Can she hear me?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“It won’t disturb her?”
The nurse tucked the chart back over the end of Nora’s bed and offered a reassuring smile. “How could your presence ever disturb her?”
The room was noticeably still and hushed in the nurse’s wake. Jess thought about what Aimee had said. It felt self-indulgent to speak to her sleeping grandmother, but she was willing to give it a try. After a moment’s hesitation she said tentatively, “Hello, Nora, it’s me, Jess.” She thought at once of Judy Blume and ardent teenage Margaret, and couldn’t help but laugh. It was an unexpected, jittery noise, but it loosened her up. “Hello, Nora,” she repeated. “I’m here. I wanted to let you know that I’ve been thinking about Isabel.”
Nora did not move a muscle.
Jess tried again: “I’ve been thinking aboutIssy.” She watched her grandmother closely, because that’s what Nora had been saying in the hospital the day before, she realized now; not Jessy, but Issy—Issy, help me—right before she mentioned Halcyon.
“I found your book about the Turner family,” Jess continued, “As If They Were Asleep. I’ve been reading it.”
Still no reaction. The quiet when Jess stopped talking stretched all the way to the stale, sun-warmed corner by the window. Outsidethe distant sound of construction droned, machinery and loud male interjections.
She gave it one more try: “I’ve been reading about Thomas.”
Nothing. Jess dragged the visitor’s chair closer and sat down. If mention of her brother couldn’t raise a sign from Nora, it seemed unlikely that anything would. Deflated, she resigned herself to watching her grandmother sleep.
What, she wondered, as the hospital clock slunk sullenly from second to second, had Nora made of Daniel Miller’s book? What had she thought of his depiction of Thomas Turner, the beloved older brother whose absence had been a tremendous grief in her life? Every story Nora told Jess had made Thomas Turner seem a heroic figure, and Jess had never questioned the portrayal. Now, viewed through the lens of Daniel Miller’s essay and book, Thomas Turner appeared more complex. Charming, but mercurial. Well-liked, but flawed, capable of being selfish and thoughtless, of letting his ego override his better angels.
Of course, Daniel Miller’s portrait was just one writer’s opinion. He was not the arbiter of truth any more than Nora was. It was a fact of human existence that no two people could ever see a set of facts in precisely the same way; furthermore, that each would swear—and probably believe—they spoke “the truth.”
“What is the truth anyway?” Jess had once been asked by a curious friend.
