Miriam taught her niece the things she needed to (Nessa’s ways hadn’t been lost, although not all the family approved), made sure the girl understood what she was meant to find. What she had to do. Miriam didn’t consider herself up to the task; she was too weary and worn by life and the loss of a home. Her niece and the other were the required vessels; two for Eden, two-by-two, two to tango. She’d left Adie alone with a burden to carry forward. The burden of names.
Michael locates the bed-and-breakfast sometime after lunch. The woman at the front desk looks him up and down when he walks in, suspicious. Not the best way to encourage the tourist trade, he thinks, but feels too tired to make a point. Instead, he hitches a smile—the same one he deploys when he’s occasionally unlikely to make rent because the costs of being a millennial have caught up with him—and detects only the slightest defrosting.
“Uh, hello. My girlfriend’s already checked in? Adie Kane? A few hours ago?”
The woman’s expression doesn’t get better or worse. Michael accepts he’s not going to make any friends here; his hostess’s got permafrost of the personality and his charm is wasted. But she fishes about under the counter and dredges up a key, big and old-fashioned, attached to a small chunk of raw copper. She holds it out like a lure and he half expects her to tug it away when he reaches for it.
But no, there it is, hard in his hand.
“Back out the front, turn right and take the path to the rear garden. Foxglove Cottage.”
“Is Adie here?”
She shakes her head, and Michael feels he’s been given all he’s likely to get; he beats a hasty retreat. It doesn’t occur to him that the hostility might be directed mainly at Adie, and only peripherally at him. He’s the center of the universe, after all.
The cottage is sweet, blue and cream walls and furnishings, a large open-plan room; toasty air burring up through vents in the floor. A sofa, TV and coffee table mark out a sitting area; in one corner, a small fridge with a kettle and assorted items on top. A brass-framed bed and a spa bath take up the other half of the space. One door leads to a cupboard (where he sees Adie’s overnighter), another to a small loo, shower and handbasin (her makeup bag already on the sink). Michael unwinds his scarf—one of the ones his grandmother made compulsively in her final years, like she could knit her world back together as the memories were plucked from her day by day—dumps his backpack on the sofa, and makes for the bed.
Starfished facedown on the soft mattress, he closes his eyes and moans. Stillness for a while, no more Tasmanian roads, warmth. Food soon, Adie sooner, he hopes. His pocket buzzes and vibrates beneath him. He groans, wants to ignore it. Obeys and pulls forth the mobile.
At the dam. Bring food.
He considers ignoring this for a moment too. Thinks about filling the spa bath and soaking there until she comes back. Looks at the minibar bottle of local wine, the artisanal cookies and the cylinder of Pringles. Michael heaves himself up with a grunt.
The names of the drowned are these:
Rose McColl (single, fifty-seven, kept seven cats).
Agnew Foster (forty-five, widower, owned the local grocery store).
Sian Jones (eighty-nine, blind, made jam).
Abel and his brother Cain Katzenjammer (fifty-three, unmarried, twin sons of religious parents).
Scout Taylor (twenty-six, pregnant, daughter of a mother obsessed with Harper Lee; her husband did not stay).
Elizabeth and Benedict Kane (Kane on both sides, a closer blood relationship than either church or state preferred, landowners); their daughter Sarah Kane (Adie’s mother; Adie’s father unknown).
All those too stubborn to leave, too foolish to believe the government wouldn’t flood the valley. They all bore, to some degree, the blood of Nessa Kane and her sacrifice.
These, they stayed.
These, they drowned.
In the end, the house of sandstone and polished wood sank beneath the black waters as easily as the corrugated tin shacks and small wooden abodes, the petrol station and the general store. Even the unnamed man’s blood wasn’t enough to keep such a flood at bay; perhaps age had weakened it. The magic had faded, paled, enfeebled.
The flooding of the valley was another kind of magic, an unintentional one but its power was enough to overwhelm what Nessa had wrought.
Not wash it entirely away, however.
A matter of potential, floating beneath the surface.
But it was there.
And it waited.
A thread that stretched back. A thread that might as easily lead forward. A thread, waiting to be pulled. A thread of blood, thicker than water.
“Ganymede’s a shithole.”
The moment the words are out of his mouth, they don’t feel like a joke. They taste flat as they exit his lips and he regrets them. He sounds childish. He rustles the plastic bag from the takeaway shop as if it might cover up. It didn’t take him too long to find her—the rental car (considerably bigger than his, more expensive, less likely to be run off the road) was the giveaway—but the fast food’s cooling rapidly.
She doesn’t answer him, just shifts over so he can sit beside her. He holds the mouth of the bag open so she reach in.
“Sausage roll. Easier to manage than a pie.” He looks sideways at her: skin pale, green eyes bright, crow’s feet deeper than he remembers from a week ago in Brisbane, brows dark as a raven’s wingspan, lips full. He leans over and kisses them: so cold, a little chafed from the wind. How long’s she been here? He touches her face: icy. Reproachful as he says, “Adie.”
She takes two bites of the sausage roll before starting to chew.
“Thanks,” she says around the flaky pastry. “Starved.”
“Couldn’t we have had lunch in town? Together? Couldn’t we have met your family for lunch? Couldn’t we have stayed with your family?” Instead of staying at the Bates Motel, he thinks. Cheaper, he thinks.
“We are with my family,” she says, then polishes off her meal. She doesn’t offer to pay him back because she never does, and she never does because she always pays for the expensive things they share (like Foxglove Cottage). Doesn’t stop him from resenting it.
“Where’s their place?” he asks doubtfully and hunches into his jacket, burying his nose in the scarf.
“Here.”
“Adie.” He doesn’t know why he thinks of his grandmother and her dementia when Adie’s behaving like this. She’s older than him, sure, but not that much older. Not really. He changes tack. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
She’d arrived a few days before him on that pretext. She nods.
“Well. That’s good.”
“I found it before I left, really,” she says, and links an arm around his. There’s not much warmth coming off her; he feels like she’s stealing his. “You had family down here, right?”
“Yeah. Somewhere. Didn’t talk about it much.” He shrugs. He never paid much attention, but remembers Granny whispering, “Best forget,” as her fingers dug into the meat of his upper arm. “What is this place, Adie?”
“This is the drowned town.” There’s a catch in her voice, but no sign of emotion on her face.
“Drowned?”
“To make the dam. They keep calling it a lake like it’s a natural thing, like it might make people forget what was here. But we remember. There was a place called Nessa’s View.”
“Don’t they compensate people when that happens?” he asked and knew from the way she stiffened it was the wrong thing. Again.
“How do you compensate someone for drowning their home? Taking away everything they’ve ever had? The place they’ve bled into, onto?” She turns to look at him and he thinks for a moment she’s stared so long at the lake—dam—that it’s leached into her eyes, they’ve darkened so much.