“I’m not running away to Adelaide with somebody’s boyfriend!” I announce forthrightly, once he ends the call.
My statement catches him off guard and he stares blankly at me for a second. “Chloe and I aren’t together,” he replies. “It’s—”
“Complicated?” I accuse him. Of course it is. She might be his ex-girlfriend, but Harriet is her daughter.Theirdaughter. Why else would he be taking her to the zoo? “She’s not your sister?” I confirm.
“No.”
“So, just a friend?”
“Evie!” He’s exasperated now.
Is he daring me to ignore every red flag he’s waved at me since yesterday and just trust him? I don’t know much about my almost thirty-year-old self, but I hope I haven’t become this gullible. I was always attracted to men of honor, with manners and standards. Yes, they were mostly fictional, but isn’t art supposed to imitate life?
Friends? Come on, now! Drew was your best friend, Evie. Don’t you remember?
Rose’s words echo in my ears. Rose, whom Idotrust.
I survey Drew again, sunlight beaming through the giant Moreton Bay Fig tree behind him. His earnest brown eyes bore into mine, trying to convince me to believe in him. A big part of me wants to, the one who has nobody else. The part who doesn’t want to get on a plane on my own and face the music in South Australia. The part buried deep beneath this unrelenting amnesia, violently trying to push its way out of it.
29
Drew
We decide to call a truce and take a head-clearing walk on the beach before our flight. As I sling the camera bag over my shoulder, slam the trunk, and walk down the path toward the sand dunes, images of our old photography rambles flood back.
She’s taking photos with her iPhone, using the wooden fence to create strong leading lines, unaware how good she is at this. Photography is an art she intimately understands. Surely that will come back. You might lose your memory, but it doesn’t change how artistic you are. I think back to our first time at the ocean together, when she captured the driftwood under the stars.
As we make our way toward the bottom of the cliffs, water washing over the rocks and pooling in valleys, I pass her my camera to hold while I put the bag up the beach a little way, paranoid a rogue wave will destroy my expensive lenses. When I turn around, she’s kneeling on the sand, focused on the shells of some tiny periwinkle snails barnacled to a rock, but I can tell that’s not what she’s really trying to capture. It’s the miniature starbursts of sunlight that hit the still water in the rockpool. In the soft focus of the background, she’s creating sparklesof bokeh as light hits the ocean, a spray of white foam rising into the sky.
She admires the shot, and smiles in surprise. “Look at this!” she says, eyes wide and sparkling in her unexpected achievement, and holds out the camera to show me, strap still around her neck. I have to lean in close to see the image, the wind flicking her hair into my face, a cocktail of strawberry shampoo and salt.
“I expect nothing less,” I say, stepping back.
Now she’s flicking back through the last few stored images from a shoot in Sydney last weekend. Raw, unprocessed photos of an intergenerational initiative between an aged-care facility and a local preschool—bright-eyed four-year-olds bounding exuberantly through the wheelchairs and walkers, among wrinkled smiles and wistful glances.
Since she’s confirmed her parents are actually alive, she’s relaxed. I think in her mind it’s a simple matter of knocking on their door and all will be well. I don’t know what exactly led to their estrangement, just that estrangement was a common theme. First Breanna, then me. And later, presumably, her mum and dad. I don’t think she realizes this isn’t over just because they still exist.
“You’re very good,” Evie says, handing me my camera.
I flash to our long afternoons lazing by the pool in Year Twelve, dreaming up futures that didn’t pan out as planned—for either of us. She walks into the water a little, while I hang back and fire off a few shots of the cliffs, then pan around until I find her in the frame.
It’s like she’s never left the ocean. She’s in a world of her own, making patterns in the wet sand with her toes as the waves rush in and carve ditches in the sand around the hollows of herankles. I imagine my own memories carving a similar path in my heart, pumping through my veins until they’ve flooded every cell. Again. And I find myself capturing her, until she turns and sees me and smiles. One perfect moment in the middle of our extraordinary mess.
30
Evie
As I turn around and he takes the photo, I’m thrown back in time. Another beach. Another photo. Him behind the camera. Me …
This time, the memory isn’t a blur. Not like it was last night, while I was grappling to hold fragments of memories about Oliver. This one is sharp. And it’s not about being awed and overwhelmed by light. It’s a sense of peace. Safety. A feeling of being moremyselfthan I’ve felt with any other person, even Breanna.
Maybe hewasmy best friend.
“We’ve done this before,” I say.
He looks out from behind the viewfinder.
“You and me,” I say. “At the beach, with a camera.”
