Jellicoe Road (24 page)

My mother looks at Jessa, shaking her head like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. Hannah comes over and helps her into the chair by the window, putting a pillow behind her, and we hover around her.

“Look at our girls,” she says to Hannah and Jude. “How did we get to be so lucky?”

“I think we’ve earned it, Tate.”

Later, she fills the spaces between Hannah’s stories and my imaginings. She tells me about the time my father had a dream about me before I was born. How we were sitting in a tree and he asked me my name and I said it was Taylor.

And life goes on, which seems kind of strange and cruel when you’re watching someone die. But there’s a joy and an abundance of everything, like information and laughter and summer weather and so many stories. My mother urges me to write them down because, “You’re the last of the Markhams, my love.” So I record dates and journeys and personalities and traits and heroes and losers and weaknesses and strengths and I try to capture every one of those people because one day I’ll need what they had to offer. Worst and best of all, I get to see who Tate Markham could have been and sometimes I feel so angry that I only got to know this incredible person just when I’m going to lose her. She has a belly laugh that Narnie wasn’t able to hear in her grief, so Hannah wasn’t able to write about it. But
if Webb had written the story, I would have known that laugh already. She tells me about her sister, Lily, who was only eight years old when she died, and of how she can still remember the day her father placed her in Tate’s arms, when she was four years old, and said, “How blessed can one man be?”

And life goes on.

When some days are worse than others, I find myself walking out of school and sitting at that point on the Jellicoe Road where I can ring Jonah. I’ll feel his frustration and his sense of uselessness at being six hundred kilometres away but I need to hear his stories about Danny and his mum and her boyfriend, Jack, and how they have Thai food on Tuesday nights and watch
The Bill
. I’ll tell him about Jude moving in and how he sleeps in Hannah’s room and of how Tate and I bullied them into going away one weekend by stressing our need to have time alone together. And of how Raffy and I have to share Trini’s room while Lachlan House gets refurbished and how we have to join Trini in prayer at night. And I can sense his envy when he hears about our weekends with the Santangelos and how Chaz’s mum tells Hannah and Tate about
those “two little shits” driving around town in an unregistered car.

And life goes on.

When one day fate visits us again, Jessa comes running into Hannah’s house to tell us the news that they’ve caught the serial killer. Her tone is hushed and I try hard not to look at Jude, who is working on the skirting boards. But I can feel the humour in his gaze as it falls on me and I know that I will never live down the fact that I suspected him. When I ask her, “Who?” slightly curious, she’s already out the door looking for Hannah and Tate. “No one important!” she shouts from the other room. “Just some postman in Yass.” I look at Jude’s face and I see it whiten and we vow never ever to tell the others. My mind that night is full of images of those kids I once saw in the newspaper cuttings on Jessa’s bed and of the two who went missing from Yass on the day Jude caught up with me and Jonah. And of the voice Jonah needed to believe was his father, warning us not to go any farther because we would never come back.

And life goes on.

When we know it’s close I move into the house
and we lie there, my mother and I. I place the earphones in her ears and I let her listen to the music Webb was listening to when he died. Of flame trees and missing those who aren’t around. I tell her that he’s been waiting all these years for her and that ever since she’s been with me he’s visited my dreams every single night. I tell her that the euphoria he feels is like an elixir—one that I believe will be enough to keep her alive.

But one night he’s not there anymore, nor is Fitz, and my despair is beyond words and I’m screaming out for him, for both of them, standing on the branch where we’d sit. “Webb! Fitz! Please. Come back. Please.” And I wake up and I hold her in my arms, sobbing uncontrollably, “Just one more day, please, Mummy, just one more day, please.” And when it hurts too much, I go up to Hannah and Jude’s room and tell them that she’s dead, and I climb between them and I am raw inside.

My mother took seventeen years to die. I counted.

She died in a house on the Jellicoe Road. The prettiest road I’d ever seen, where trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to Shangri-la.

God’s country, Raffy says. She swears to God it’ll change the way I see the world.

Want to believe in something.

But love the world just the way it is.

Some ask me why she didn’t give up earlier. The pain without drugs would have been bad. Others say that it was wrong for us not to ease her pain. But my mother said she wouldn’t die until she had something to leave her daughter.

So we scatter her ashes with Fitz’s from the Prayer Tree and in the summer we finish a journey my father and Hannah began almost two decades ago. Jude arranges a house by the ocean with Griggs and his brother and Chaz and Raffy and Jessa and Narnie and me.

While we watch the others throwing themselves into the surf, I sit with Jessa and Hannah, who cuddles us towards her.

“I wanted to see the ocean,” she tells us, “and my father said that it was about time the four of us made that journey. I remember asking, ‘What’s the difference between a trip and a journey?’ and my father said—”

She stops for a moment, to catch her breath. “He
said, ‘Narnie, my love, when we get there, you’ll understand,’ and that was the last thing he ever said.”

Jessa leans her head against her. “Hannah, do you think that your mum and dad and Tate’s mum and dad and my mum and dad and Webb and Tate are all together someplace?” she asks earnestly.

I look at Hannah, waiting for the answer. And then she smiles. Webb once said that a Narnie smile was a revelation and, at this moment, I need a revelation. And I get one.

“I wonder,” Hannah says.

He sat in the tree, his mind overwhelmed by the idea that growing inside Tate was their baby. The cat purred alongside him, a co-conspirator in his contentment. Through the branches he could see Fitz coming his way, his gun balanced on his shoulders, whistling a tune. So Webb closed his eyes, thinking of the dream he’d had the night before where he sat on the branch of a tree and spoke to their child. In the child’s voice there was so much promise and joy that it took his breath away. He told her about his plans to build a house. He’d make it out of gopherwood, like Noah’s ark, two storeys high, with a view he could look out on every day with wonder. A house for Tate and Narnie and Jude and Fitz and for their families. A home to come back to every day of their lives.

Where they would all belong or long to be.

A place on the Jellicoe Road.

Mum, Dad, Marisa, Daniela, Brendan, Luca, and Daniel. Love you guys to oblivion.

Thanks to all who ploughed through the manuscript in its most basic form and still managed to find words of encouragement: Mum, Anna Musarra, Ben Smith, Margaret Devery, Anthony Poniris, Lesley McFadzean, Siobhan Hannan, Sadie Chrestman, Barbara Barclay, Brother Eric Hyde. Special thanks to Maxim Younger, Patrick Devery, and Edward Hawkins for your thorough notes or extensive feedback.

Much gratitude to Laura Harris and Christine Alesich, Lesley McFadzean, and everyone at Penguin Books, and Cameron Creswell, who make my life a bit less stressful!

Thanks to Farrin Jacobs at US HarperCollins and
Mary Arnold and the Printz Committee: Elizabeth Burns, Donna Cook, Alison Hendon, Caroline Kienzle, Ellen Loughran, Kevin Scanlon, Karyn Silverman, J. Marin Younker, Margaret Butzler, and Gillian Engberg.

I am especially appreciative of the hospitality shown on my Leeton, Colleambally, and Cowra trip in March 2005, which introduced me to the Murrumbidgee and Lachlan rivers. Thank you Margaret and John Devery, Trish and Annabell Malcolm, Neil and Tom Gill, and Vic and Narelle Rossato.

And Patrick and Ben, thanks for coming along and pointing out the rice, citrus, and road kill.

Melina Marchetta
lives in Sydney. She is also the author of the award-winning novels SAVING FRANCESCA, LOOKING FOR ALIBRANDI, and FINNIKIN OF THE ROCK. LOOKING FOR ALIBRANDI was released as a major Australian film.

Visit her online at www.melinamarchetta.com.au.

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Cover art © 2008 by Image100 Photography / Veer & Photographer’s Choice Photography/Veer

Cover design by Jennifer Heuer