Walking to the Moon (22 page)

No one else was home when we arrived, for which I was thankful. My mother led me from the back door down a stone path through the garden, which contained a small rock pool and several slender eucalypts, and to her studio, which had been converted for now into my bedroom. Just outside the door, ants were converging on the path, and looking down I saw the drying remains of a small bug-eyed fledgling. My mother made a sad ‘oh' sound and nudged the seething parcel gently into the grass with her foot. Inside there was a kettle and small fridge, and a single bed, for which she apologised, and shutters that I could open or close. She asked if I was hungry or thirsty and we went inside to where Ted was setting a late lunch on to the wooden table in the sunny kitchen. The sons arrived not long after.

Hamish, at fourteen, had his father's pale skin and sloping shoulders and freckles and looked directly into my eyes as he nodded his head. He said ‘hi' with a half smile and slightly raised eyebrows, politely but humorously, as if to say, ‘Well, here we are then—' and this broke the ice in a way that made everybody laugh. Kit, ten, was small and dark and fidgety with dirt or bruises on his knees and shins, and a baseball bat he would not put away even as he ate. He cast me small furtive glances but grinned when we finally made eye contact. He seemed like the sort of brother I could have had.

We talked for a while about this and that—my mother wanted to know about Sydney and how it had changed—and I drank a glass of white wine that Ted offered me, though I could barely taste it or feel its effects. We did not mention my father, or even Hil, and after a while I felt exhaustion rolling in upon me in blank waves and I rose and said I must sleep. My mother glanced at the clock—it was mid-afternoon—and asked should she wake me in a couple of hours but I said no, I would set my alarm. She was being kind, I knew, but I could not manage the thought of her entering the room while I slept.

When at last I lay in the small white bed, though, I could not sleep. The shutters were half closed and from outside came the sounds of children and cars and afternoon in the suburbs. I lay on my back and stared at the white ceiling and felt myself stretching tighter and tighter across the room and thought of the fledgling, the skin hard now and shiny and the tufts of dried feather that had pushed through the stubs of its tiny splayed wings. Eventually the light beyond the shutters began to fade and I pulled myself to sitting and opened my toiletry bag and washed my face in the bowl of cool water my mother had left on her cleared desk.

Inside the house, Hamish was practising his cello somewhere. My mother and Ted were talking quietly in the kitchen as he stirred at a saucepan on the stove and she stood beside him wiping a wooden board with a tea towel.

‘Did you sleep?' she asked, moving towards me, and I said yes, a little, and Ted said there was soda in the fridge, or beer or wine if I preferred.

In the end the evening was partly redeemed. We ate outside on the wooden decking, the five of us, and talked steadily and quite easily. Hamish was writing an English essay on memory and forgetting in literature, and spoke clearly and with what seemed surprising composure for a person of fourteen. Kit, at the other end of the table looked up with a mouthful of food and said curiously, ‘So, are you really our sister?' I shrugged and said I guessed so, and my mother turned to him and said teasingly and tenderly, ‘There now, are you satisfied? She even looks like you.' Tilting her head and regarding me appraisingly. ‘Don't you think, Ted?' And he nodded after consideration and said that yes, he thought so—not the colouring perhaps, but the eyes.

‘And the lips,' said my mother quickly, as if she was going to say more, then half laughed, a quick expulsion, and said, ‘Sorry Jessie'—she called me Jessie—‘I'm afraid you've achieved mythological status for the boys.'

‘No she hasn't,' said Hamish, embarrassed.

‘You look different to your picture,' said Kit, looking towards the mantelpiece where I noticed for the first time the photograph taken by my mother at our last meeting by the harbour, my hair darker then, and pulled back from my face which I had half turned to the camera at her request, with an odd indeterminate expression.

‘It's weird,' said Kit, ‘having a sister who talks funny.'

‘Look who's talking,' I reached across and prodded him in the ribs, making him wriggle. ‘Oh no,' he said, laughing, holding one hand up as if to fend off further attack.

‘Anyway,' he added after a moment, ‘it's neat.'

As it started to get dark, Ted identified the unfamiliar birds still jostling and clacking in the trees, then talked a little about his work at the university. I supposed he must be older than my mother, his hair quite grey. They were very interested, both of them, in my life and my job, and I could tell they were proud, even Ted. My mother leaned forward across the table as I spoke, and rested her chin against the knuckles of her two hands as if I were telling her a story. After we had finished eating the boys retreated again, in what felt to me a remarkably orderly manner, carrying dishes with them to stack in the machine in the kitchen, and then on to homework or television or whatever it was they did. Kit came out a little later and sat in my mother's lap, his hard wiry boy calves knocking rhythmically against her legs until she remonstrated and he wriggled off and away.

Soon after, Ted rose and said he would try and propel Kit towards bed and that then he had some reading to do. He dipped his head in a courtly half-bow before leaving my mother and me alone at the table.

My mother poured more lemon squash into our glasses from a tall clear-plastic jug. ‘How's Hil?' she asked after a pause. I shrugged, much as I had last time she had asked, and said that she was the same. Was she still running the youth centre, my mother wanted to know and I said, yes, three nights a week, and my mother nodded as if in confirmation then fell silent. Had she been happy about my coming over here to visit, she asked eventually. I said I didn't know, she hadn't said.

After a while she asked if Hil ever talked about her, and I said no, because I could think of no other way to say it.

My mother gave a tiny shrug, and the corners of her mouth twitched downward. ‘I have lost my sister,' she said in a small voice, and for a moment she closed her eyes and rubbed with one finger at the bridge of her nose, before looking back up at me.

‘What about you, Jessie?' she said. ‘Are you happy?'

‘I'm okay,' I said, and shrugged, like her, ‘I'm fine.' My mother opened her mouth again as if to speak and I felt then, in a vivid lurch of fear and anticipation, that she was about to say something else, to tell me something else, but the screen door pushed open and Kit, pyjamaed and smelling of toothpaste, came and leaned into her shoulder as she sat. She circled his waist with her arm and pushed her face for a moment into his damp hair, and I took the opportunity to rise and pick up our empty glasses and say it was time for my bed.

A couple of times in the following days my mother made as if to resume the conversation we had not quite begun on the porch, but each time I found myself overcome by weariness, which I put down to jetlag. The second time I excused myself, wondering if I might also have picked up a bug on the plane over. My mother nodded slowly. Later, she said, if I felt well enough, she could show me around the city. I said I would like that.

In the days after that we did things that mothers and daughters do. We went sightseeing and rode on the trams. We drove down streets of candy-coloured houses and picked the ones in which we would like to live. We went to Macy's and my mother picked up a soft blue shirt from the top of its pile and said, ‘May I buy you this?'

We drove by car east from San Francisco. It was a fine day with a wispy sky. My mother had borrowed for our trip a friend's red Mustang, and we drove with the top down, wind grabbing at our hair, precluding conversation. From time to time she would point at some landmark and shout a snatched commentary but for most of the trip we were quiet, facing into the wind
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We drove into Yosemite and got out to inspect the giant redwoods. My mother asked a large American woman to photograph us and we stood side by side and smiled.

Later we parked the car and ate lunch near the river. We were high up on a silvery meadow where the vegetation receded in soft hummocks and tufts, and through which ran a river, a precise meandering channel such as you might draw in primary school, with grassy banks and clear perfect water. My mother told me that this was the place she loved most in America, and that sometimes when she was missing home—I was surprised to realise she meant Australia—she would come here alone and walk. She looked very small as she ate her sandwich.

Nearby there was a kiosk where, along with hot dogs and the usual snacks, you could hire inflatable beds upon which to float downstream. I didn't particularly want to go, but my mother said, ‘You must. We must,' and had already pulled out her purse to pay. Looking down into the river you could clearly see the curved shapes of smooth round river rocks far below. The water was so clean and so cold you felt you would hear a pebble crack before it hit the bottom.

‘I'd get wet first,' said my mother, and walked without hesitation to the edge of the river and stepped in. She ducked for a moment and then reappeared and pulled herself straight out, hair plastered to her head, gasping and laughing. ‘Oh my god.' She gestured for me to do the same, but I declined, trying instead to mount my airbed without causing ripples or wetting myself. The water that rushed into the dips made by my forearms and knees and then around my stomach was so cold I felt I'd been scalded. My mother laughed and I felt suddenly foolish and stranded and turned my face away as if to look downstream.

A little later, as we floated, my mother manoeuvred her lilo towards mine and bumped it gently and said my name. I glanced at her on her belly beside me; said quickly that it was glorious here, wasn't it glorious? And she said yes it was, and then I paddled closer to the bank for a minute, as if to look more closely at the vegetation.

Up ahead of us a family, a mother and father and three or four children, had joined up, each clasping another's inflatable until they spread like a colony of algae across the surface of the river and flowed downstream together, laughing recklessly and shrieking around the bends. My mother and I drifted to opposite sides of the small river but kept pace with each other. From time to time one of us would roll off our inflatable into the shock of the water and then pull ourself back on and lie again in the soft sun. As we drifted I pictured a small stone house on the meadow in which I would live, with flagstone floors and windows opening outwards towards the translucent sky and pale grasses and the dark rim of a mountain beyond. From across the channel, my mother waved to me with her fingers and I waved back. The breeze was soft and light as fingertips and we floated, each encased in our separate bubbles, side by side towards the sea.

I had planned to spend ten days in and around San Francisco and then take myself on to the East Coast and New York City. In the end I lasted less than a week before being overcome by homesickness. It settled upon me after the trip to Yosemite, a dull expanding ache that robbed me of appetite and sleep. I think my mother suspected. She knocked one evening, came into my room and perched quietly on my bed with its white cotton spread while I sat at her desk, where I had been writing a postcard to Hil. She put her hands side by side, flat on her knees and looked up at me. ‘I just wanted you to know that you mean the world to me,' she said, ‘even though we don't know each other so well.'

She patted the bed, and when I sat beside her she looked at me and twisted her lips a little into an almost smile and said, ‘I really am sorry.' I nodded and felt that she would have moved across and stroked my back then, had I wept, but I could not, so I thanked her all the same. She rang the airline and the next day drove me to the airport with Ted, who unloaded my luggage and held my shoulders briefly and said something kind in farewell before driving off to find a park while my mother came into the terminal with me. We hugged at the departure gate in a quite natural and spontaneous way, but I felt in my heart that both of us knew there was nothing more to say.

The wind has come up and rattles through the tops of the eucalypts, sometimes hitting the road in small gusts that send up pale clouds of powdery dirt in front of me. Bushfire weather. The sun is high; I have to walk on the edge of the trail, where the ground is roughest, to find shade. I check my watch. Two o'clock. I must be nearly there. Three kilometres an hour. Five and a half hours, minus half an hour for lunch. I must be close. It occurs to me that I might have miscalculated, that the fifteen kilometres might be closer to twenty.

The trail stretches ahead of me in a steep curve, dropping behind, angophoras holding their clumps of sparse foliage high above the road as if reluctant to cast shade. I have about three quarters of a litre of water. I have been pouring small amounts into my hands every half hour or so, moistening my face and neck, sprinkling it on my head before putting my hat on. Better save the rest for drinking. If I could just find a spring, a creek, a puddle, I would dunk my whole hat and let the water drip down my back as I walked. I would take off my shoes and let my pulsing feet rest in the cool, let the water soothe the inflammation, just for a few minutes.

Even here the water is not drinkable. The guide book warns that the water has been poisoned by the towns along the highway. Bad luck for the wallabies, but right now I'd take my chances. The map shows a darting line of blue running parallel to the track. A kilometre away, maybe two; you'd just head straight down through the bush.

That is how people die.

It is not, I tell myself, an emergency. I am not in danger. I am on the track. I am nearly there. But with the heat and the sapping dry and the wind all around, it is—I allow myself to know this much—like an emergency. It is what an emergency could be. (Everything suddenly tipping.) My brain tells me I am safe, about to be safe. My body is close to panic.