honey, I have to go away for a week or so.’
Kate had touched her mother’s pale face. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ Elizabeth had whispered, kissing her and leaning down to gather her in tight for a moment. ‘Nana will be here all the time. I’ll be home as soon as I can.’
That night, Kate had tried to feign sleep, sure that her mother would creep in again sometime later and readjust the covers on the bed, as she always did, making sure Kate was warm. But she was simply too tired to keep watch. When she woke up, a cold, empty light had already pushed its way through the windows, and she hastily got up to check her mother’s room, to make sure she hadn’t dreamt the goodbye.
Elizabeth’s bed was neatly made. On the dresser, the elephant family had been moved. The four larger elephants had been arranged in a circle, facing outward, the smallest baby hidden in the centre. Kate went across, hesitated, but left them that way. She didn’t understand, but she would ask her mother about it when she came home.
Kate lies in her tent on the western edge of Australia, listening beyond the dunes to the incessant lisp and rasp of the ocean, thinking of her mother. Each memory is a treasure to cling to. Whenever the details grow hazy, she goes over them obsessively, repainting blurred edges, trying to remember the colours, the sounds, the smells, the exact tone of her mother’s voice. But she has been doing this for so long now, forcing this vividness, that these recollections are overlaid with the stories she has told herself. She can rarely conjure them spontaneously any more.
When Kate discovered the truth about her parents, she had been angry with them for putting other things in life ahead of her. While Nana Jacobs had been understanding, she had not allowed Kate’s resentment to go unchecked. ‘I think that, if you take something from their example, it should be about following your passion,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t think either of them would have gone anywhere had they imagined they wouldn’t get to come home to you. I think they were trying to make their treasured corners of the world a little better. They wanted to preserve the things they knew were beautiful, so that not only you but your children will get to experience them.’
And now she has lost Nana Jacobs too. Kate is not sure what she believes about the afterlife, but maybe, just maybe, they are all together and watching her somewhere. What would they think of the decisions she has made recently? She hopes they would understand.
Jackson’s mention of White Wave has shaken her to the core. Why does it feel as though she betrayed them? The charity had seemed like her salvation for a long time. When her grandparents had told her the truth, life had slipped from its moorings. Nothing she had planned for the following year felt right any more. She did everything her family most feared she would do: she deferred her studies and ran away while she tried to come to terms with this sudden shift in her history.
She travelled to Thailand – somewhere neither of her parents had been – in an attempt to escape their ghosts for a little while. The south was still struggling to get on its feet after the Boxing Day tsunami, and when she heard of White Wave she instantly loved the idea. It was a way to make life meaningful again. For a while it had been redemptive, but the more she got involved, the more she began to see the politics, the bureaucracy, the endless red tape and the misappropriated funds. On almost every project, she witnessed cultural clashes and a slow erosion of values, which were replaced by the desire to keep heads down, do the job, chalk it up as a victory and then get out. Did all waves turn murky in the end, she began to ask herself, with the detritus of their journey? Even waves of kindness, of wanting to do the right thing?
It was obvious there were others who felt the same way. People began to meet in offshoot groups, to discuss different ideas and objectives. Other plans were formed, some more radical than others. And, perhaps inevitably, she was drawn to one particular alliance: those who thought that helping the wildlife was an integral part of helping the community. They were generally in