Page 120 of Homecoming

With a shiver, Jess pushed open the door to Nora’s room and went inside. This was where her grandmother had slept in the last weeks of her uncomfortable pregnancy, and where she’d had her baby; from that window over there, she’d watched Isabel in the garden below.

Jess went to the window now.

The property was very overgrown, just as the agent had said, filled with creepers and weeds, but Jess saw it as it had been back then. The roses, the walnut tree, and, farther up the bend of the drive, the henhouse and vegetable patch. But it was Polly, and not Isabel, who was wandering among the trees today; Jess wondered whether her mother was thinking about the night she was left there to be found, the dawn in which Nora had slipped out of the house and discovered her among the roses, and her life was set on a different path. No longer Thea Turner, but Polly Turner-Bridges.

Jess had a sudden urge to leave this room, to be outside. She went down the stairs and across the entrance hall, aware that she was walking in Isabel’s footsteps from that long-ago Christmas Eve. As she stepped through the front door onto the verandah, a warm breeze brushed her face and she felt a heavy wave of deep familiarity: the smell of eucalyptus and sunbaked dirt, the light so bright it put creases around her eyes just to look at it. The slender blue gums on the ridge, ancient and watchful. This was the landscape of her childhood and she would never be able to escape its influence.

But just as Daniel Miller had brought her to Halcyon, the books that she’d read as a child, lying beneath the ferns at Darling House, had taken her to lands where trees with names like oak and chestnut and elm grew in great, ancient forests, and the soil was moist and the sun was gentle, where there were magical words like “hedgerow” and “conker,” and snow kissed the glass of windows in winter, and children went sledding at Christmas and ate “pudding” and “blancmange.” And so, she had come to know another landscape, not justintellectually, but viscerally: a landscape of the imagination as real to her as the geographical landscape in which she moved. When she first arrived in England as a twenty-year-old graduate, she had stepped off the plane and known it already.

Standing here now, looking across the valley toward the facing hill, Jess could imagine how homesick Isabel must have felt at times. She herself had been thinking about “home” a lot. Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.” When someone said, “I want to go home,” what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore.

She had put away the travel article. Instead, she was going to write something different, more ambitious. The ideas were a bit random yet, but had to do with home and belonging, connection and family; and Polly had said something at dinner last night about Isabel and setting the record straight. “She’s been remembered in the most horrific light, and none of it is warranted or true.” Somehow—Jess wasn’t sure exactly how yet—it all fit together.

Across the gravel, Jess noticed that Polly was accepting a glossy sales brochure from the agent. She had assumed that they’d been looking out of curiosity, for history’s sake. And perhaps Polly was just being polite. Though it was possible, Jess realized, her mother’s interest was more serious than that. She didn’t know the secrets of Polly’s heart, but she realized that she wanted to.

Polly smiled in greeting as Jess joined them. “Deb was just saying it’s okay for us to take a walk around the grounds and down toward the creek.”

“I can’t stay much longer, unfortunately,” the agent explained. “My daughter’s singing in the Christmas Eve service tonight, and I need to get her to rehearsal. I’ve locked up the house, but the two of you are welcome to wander around. The gardens have been let go, but I’m sure you’ll be able to see the potential. I should mention”—her smilewavered, and Jess noticed a flicker of hesitation in her eyes as she lowered her voice—“there was something of an incident on the property, a long time ago.”

“Yes,” said Polly with a smile. “Thank you, we already know about that.”

Deb Green’s bonhomie returned. “That’s good. And I have to say, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve always felt what’s past is past. No need to dwell; look forward, not back.”

It wasn’t exactly what Polly had said, but neither she nor Jess made any attempt to clarify.

Deb Green shook their hands, wished them a happy Christmas, and then took off in her red Mazda.

In the wake of her departure, Jess and Polly stood without speaking, letting the sounds of the garden resettle. A flock of tiny fairy wrens darted busily in and around the base of a nearby plum tree, crickets ticked in the long grass, and a sense of timelessness, of nature, older and more pervasive than anything human beings and their histories could generate, grew thick and warm around them.

“Shall we walk down together?” said Polly.

Jess noticed a new note of self-possession in her mother’s voice. Summery air threaded across the back of her neck, and she felt a pull, suddenly, deep inside her. She didn’t know whether it was being here, in this place, or the beautiful weather that evoked long childhood days in which the hours stretched away to be filled only with pleasure, or the fact that it was Christmas Eve, or that her mother was standing here with her, solid and present in a way she hadn’t been before, so that Jess was seeing her as if for the first time. But she felt a sensation in her chest that was quite the opposite of loneliness.

“Are you with me?” Polly was searching Jess’s face, waiting for an answer.

Jess gave a nod and smiled. “I am.”