To the Sea

  Eva was glad that Zoe had come to her so late in life. If she’d come with all the other children, Eva didn’t know how she would have been able to spend the time she needed with her. She needed this time as much as Zoe did and Eva could feel herself healing as she taught her daughter the stories and the ways of her life.

  Eva had been frightened sending Zoe off to school. She’d tried to talk John into letting Zoe stay at home but John was adamant that Zoe was to live as normal a life as he could create for her and school was part of that life.

  In the years before Zoe went to school, Eva tried to establish rules, but she struggled. She knew the stories and the lessons but she had no knowledge or experience of discipline. Her grandmother had to stand aside and let Branna teach. It must be mother to daughter. But Eva’s mother had been lost to another world.

  Eva thought Zoe must be the first of all the daughters of the line to go to school while she was still not much more than a baby. And five-year-old girls don’t understand the importance of secrets. Not even five-year-old girls whose very lives depend upon them. Eva and John did their best. John was the disciplinarian. That first morning when Eva left Zoe in her classroom with all the other little girls in their yellow dresses and brown buckle shoes and she walked home to the house on Sandy Bay Road, her heart was racing. She wanted to go to the sea but she couldn’t drive and she had no way of getting to Rosetta. Diving into the Derwent from one of the jetties along Sandy Bay Road was too dangerous. So she went home and sat in the armchair in the lounge room and waited until three o’clock.

  Zoe was excited to see her and promised her that she had said nothing. But then she talked of all the things that happened at school and the friends she had made and all the stories tumbled over and into each other and Eva had no idea what Zoe had actually said to others.

  John and Eva were tense and fearful through those first years of primary school, waiting for the mistake, the slip that could not be explained away. The first pictures Zoe brought home from school were worrying. Always blue, always the sea. Always a smiling Zoe flashing through the blue.

  But those early school years were fun for Zoe. Everything was fun for Zoe. She had the cleverness and discipline that Eva lacked. Zoe managed her lives and kept them each where they belonged. She had no sorrow in her life. And Eva was determined that Zoe should continue to live undamaged by loss and sadness and fear. It took all of Eva’s strength but she was happy to give it all to Zoe. Why else did she have it?

  It was soon apparent that Zoe was bright and her school lessons came easily to her. She was eager to please. She knew not to attract attention and for the most part she didn’t. And Eva was not a pushy mother, always at the school demanding the teacher’s time. Eva didn’t join any of the parent groups. She didn’t play tennis or sail or cocktail with the other mothers. She threw all the school newsletters in the bin unread.

  Zoe, on the other hand, exuberantly joined in everything her school offered. She played a sport called minky on Saturday mornings. Eva rarely went to watch these games but John and Zoe would leave the house wearing their dreary green and brown ribbons and cheering before they had even reached the front gate.

  Years passed and life settled and became easier for Eva. No one expected anything of her, and so she gave them all just what they expected.

  It was as Zoe got older that Eva began to fully understand the gaps in her own knowledge. Zoe asked questions Eva couldn’t answer. Zoe took things past the limits that Eva had thought were fixed and eternal. Zoe was stronger than Eva. She was faster, braver, cleverer. She wouldn’t accept Eva’s boundaries. She wasn’t disobedient or rebellious; she just understood her powers and wasn’t afraid to test them. Zoe couldn’t understand why Eva was so timid, so afraid things might go awry, too fretful to take her life into unfathomable depths.

  Eva watched her teenage daughter in wonder. Zoe truly transformed at sea. She was lost in light and bubbles and silver and gold and dived to depths and leapt to heights and moved at speeds that Eva was too afraid to attempt. Zoe said she could feel Connery in her and all around her. And she wasn’t afraid of him. She swam out to him. Calling him. Daring him to come to her. Do his worst. Or his best. To show himself and tell her everything she longed to know. Tell her and show her all the things that Eva could not.

  Where Eva had accepted the gaps in her knowledge and her life, Zoe would not. She told Eva she couldn’t live her life trying to put together a whole from which half the pieces were missing.

  The past year had been the hardest for Eva. She and Zoe had spent the last Australian summer in Ireland. Mostly at Kindea. Her grandfather and uncles had been dead for many years. Dermot’s son, Thomas, lived there still with his family. She and Zoe settled into the big old house with widowed Thomas and his son Padraig and his new Danish wife, Freja. Eva had been going to Kindea for holidays her whole life. She could not stay long on that turbulent coast but Mayo was her other home and she returned to it for as long as she dared and as frequently as she could. It was a happy arrival back in that familiar land, but Zoe had made a different holiday of it than Eva could have ever imagined when they’d planned it together back in Hobart.

  Zoe was not as careful in Ireland as she needed to be. On the shores of Mayo, and in that empty ocean calling her more stridently than any voice raised against it, Eva heard her warnings to her adventurous daughter for the mewlings that they were.

  Zoe became obsessed with Ornice, and tried to retrace Ornice’s life. She was convinced that Ornice had lived somewhere near Kindea. That Fingal, Bran and Wynne had played on this shore as children and been forced into exile when Wynne turned seven. Lorcan had drowned in one of these coves. Somewhere along this shore, Connery had seen Ornice for the first time. Somewhere close by, he had pulled his drowning love from the depths of a Perigean tide and taken her to the island. Ornice and Connery had lived out their story there, on an island off the coast near Kindea.

  Zoe told Eva of her certainties about Ornice and this shore. She believed that if she could find the island and spend time there, she would understand all that her mother did not. That all the women before her had not.

  She knew the island intimately from the descriptions Ornice had left of it. Zoe wanted to be in those waters. All the secrets and all the knowledge of who she was and who she might become were there. There was no evidence to support her belief but believers don’t need evidence. They require faith, and Zoe had found her faith in Mayo. But unlike the truly devout, she wasn’t satisfied with faith alone.

  One snowy day two weeks after they had arrived at Kindea, Zoe took a bus to Castlebar and spent the day in the library there. But one day was not enough and every few days she would disappear on the bus from Westport, arriving back at Kindea in the dark of early evening.

  She wanted to go to Iceland. Eva refused. Zoe was certain Connery was from Iceland and that his trail might be picked up more easily there. Eva agreed that Connery was likely from Iceland, given the stories he told and the runes on the silver band he wore around his neck and Branna’s songs and drawings. This was reason enough for Eva to stay far away.

  Zoe wasn’t readily put off but she was sixteen. She couldn’t go without Eva or, at the very least, her consent. And Eva wouldn’t give it. Zoe railed and disappeared from the house, forcing Eva to lie and tell Padraig that Zoe was visiting some old family friends in Belmullet for a few days. Eva feared her lie would be exposed but Zoe returned after three days as she had promised, exhausted and silent. Eva had never seen her so weak and withdrawn. She spent the next two days in bed.

  Eva sat beside her sleeping daughter and was scared for her. She knew she was losing her. Memories of her own mother solidified the fear deep within her. She couldn’t bear to watch Zoe disappear the way Branna had. But Zoe slept and the cold whiteness of her face passed and she returned to her strong and healthy self. Yes, she told the others, she had visited friends in Belmullet and now she was glad to be back at Kindea. Eva watched and tried to follo
w Zoe’s moods but she was merely a spectator to what Zoe chose to present to her. Zoe was on her own journey.

  On a three-day visit to Dublin with Padraig and Freja, Zoe visited all the museums and spent hours in bookshops specialising in Irish, Celtic and Norse history. Eva was nervous. She didn’t know what Zoe was looking for, but even more, she was afraid of what Zoe would do when she found it. Zoe may not have had enough money to fly to Iceland but she had enough to buy expensive illustrated editions of the Icelandic sagas. Over subsequent months, even after they returned to Tasmania, she tried with CDs and books to teach herself the impossible language of Icelanders. But to Eva’s relief, some things were too hard even for Zoe. She would never master that strange otherworldly tongue. Zoe returned to all that she could find in Mayo.

  Woken from a somnambulant Australian summer by freezing gales and heavy grey skies, Zoe blossomed in the cold wetness of Mayo. She was in awe of the huge grey Atlantic swells that broke on the windswept shores. In awe but not afraid. She looked out longingly to the islands. That they were shrouded in swirling snow didn’t deter her. She was delighted that it wasn’t tourist season. She needed Mayo to be empty and dark and screaming with wind so she could move around it unnoticed.

  On the windy beaches, she was alone. She stood watching the cold grey sky obliterating the horizon, ready to drop its load of blinding sleet or snow at any unsuspecting minute. And the waters were empty of people. Not even the most determined fishermen or the sturdiest island ferries would sail in the biggest swells and wildest winds. They could be holed up for days. And on those days Zoe told her mother she would have total freedom in these waters and on these shores. Here she could abandon herself to the sea and not have to waste her energy and precious time on wetsuits and sailboats and snorkels and other props. Here she could leap from a cliff unseen and disappear.

  Eva was afraid for Zoe but knew she couldn’t stop her. Some days she was quick enough to follow in Zoe’s wake and keep an eye on her. But this ocean scared Eva. It was too grey, too deep, too full of noise. Eva knew to turn away from it and race for the shore. But Zoe strained to hear every lilt, every ululating tone, and she rushed towards it.

  Although she knew she shouldn’t, Eva felt relieved on the mornings she woke and Zoe was already gone. Eva could go through the motions of the protective mother but she knew she could look for a hundred years and not find Zoe. On those days, Eva told the others that Zoe had gone into Westport or further afield to Castlebar for the day. And she waited at Kindea.

  Zoe would come back. She always came back.

  One day, Zoe returned before dawn and crept into the house. She walked softly along the wide upstairs hallway and into Eva’s room. She crawled into bed beside her sleeping mother. Zoe had been gone for twenty-four hours and her skin was salty damp. But Eva was not concerned. The night snow was still falling slow and soft. She could see the flakes drifting into a deep pile on the stone windowsill. The wind had dropped in the freezing stillness but Eva knew that Zoe would not be cold. Not on the inside.

  It had been a long time since Zoe had come into Eva’s bed and Eva had missed it. She wrapped her arms around her beloved daughter and smelled the cold Atlantic in Zoe’s damp hair. Zoe lay still in her mother’s arms.

  Eva thought Zoe had come for warmth and comfort and would soon fall asleep after her long journey. But just as Eva was beginning to feel her own eyelids grow heavy, Zoe began to talk. Her Gaeilge was musical. Old. Spoken as it had been five hundred years ago. Hers was the voice of a poet. Padraig and others had commented on it and loved to listen to their Australian cousin speak in the beautiful tones they’d lost over the centuries as their language had faltered and very nearly died in its own land.

  Zoe had been looking for the island for weeks. She talked of it with others she met, hoping that locals might be able to fill in the gaps of the tales, for Ornice’s tale wasn’t the only one that spoke of an island beyond the horizon and the people of the sea. In her search, Zoe said, she’d gone further from land than she’d ever ventured before. She’d felt the surging power of the massive north Atlantic swell roll through her body; she’d felt her blood and her bones peak and fall with the ocean. She’d travelled til she could no longer feel her body, til there was just a mighty ocean and some of its drops bore the essence of Zoe Kennett. She was from a different ocean but she had come back to where it had all begun and she’d been welcomed home.

  As she floated with just the sleet and wind above her, she’d thought of Ornice, in the same ocean on a blue day with Connery. Zoe wanted Ornice’s experience. But Zoe had no one. Zoe knew Eva wouldn’t understand because she had someone to fill the emptiness the ocean could not reach. She had John. Zoe could fall apart into a million droplets but she had to put herself back together after each encounter. When she was a child, this had been enough. But now it was not nearly enough.

  And so she’d kept going. She didn’t tire. How can a wave tire? She went deep. Into the green darkness Ornice had entered before her. She looked for the golden embrace. The water pressed on her, dragged her along the ocean floor and tumbled her in its eddies but it didn’t succour her. She was a part of it. She couldn’t succour herself.

  Zoe was Connery. He had had to look to the land to find his succour. He had had to bring it to him. She had to do the same.

  Zoe could have gone further. She could have done what her mother had forbidden her. She could have flowed up past the rocky Faroes all the way to Connery’s homeland. To that land of ice mountains, milky blue lakes, snowy plains and blonde people with ocean blue cat eyes who knew the power and mystery of the sea. But she wouldn’t leave her mother alone to worry.

  Zoe knew now that the Atlantic Ocean was as empty as the Southern Ocean. Mayo was as empty as Tasmania. Zoe had gone as far as her will could take her. She wasn’t afraid of the calling. Not afraid of getting lost. Or taken. She didn’t believe what she’d been told. What they’d all been told. Ornice fled Connery’s calling to save Wynne for herself, but now there was nothing to flee.

  Zoe wanted what Ornice and Connery had found. Only they had experienced the fullness of each other’s lives. She wondered why Eva had never taken John out into the blue. Was the blue natural state not what all the women since Ornice had been called to? A blue day could sustain a life. Eva had never known it. Nor Branna. Nor Getha. Nor Meara. Nor any of them save Ornice, the only one who had been brave enough to go the distance.

  Zoe wanted to have her own blue day with the one brave enough to share it with her. No secrets. No holding back. And then the calling could be calmed. She would have come back. Come back to who she had always been and was born to be.

  And she couldn’t wait.

  Eva lay holding her daughter on that white Mayo morning listening to Zoe’s soft words and wondering who this girl was. This brave girl who knew more than she had been taught.

  Zoe was calmly telling Eva that the calling was not a choice between the worlds. It was a gift to meld the two into a magnificent whole.

  Terror smothered Eva as she realised what Zoe was suggesting. Zoe wouldn’t model herself on Ornice, as they all had. The one who waited for the call, longed to hear it, and then fled from it when it asked too much. Zoe was going to try to make the worlds collide. She wanted the glorious whole of both worlds. But Zoe was just a girl. Eva held her tight and murmured her fears into her daughter’s tangled hair. She begged Zoe to abandon her quest. It could only end in disaster.

  But Zoe kept talking as if Eva had never spoken. Zoe was of Connery’s line. She was the caller. Her call would drown out all others. She would find and lure. She would be the one waiting with the golden embrace. She would ask for everything and give everything. She was only sixteen years old but she had waited long enough. She had been waiting five hundred years.

  Zoe would do what no one before her had been strong enough, sure enough, to do.

  Or she would die trying.

  Tony

  ‘BOSS.’

  It
was Narelle. She stepped down from the front verandah onto the lawn where Tony was standing looking out at the islands. He was lost in the story of Ornice and Connery and all the women who were part of it. He wanted to find Zoe.

  Narelle walked over to the deep shade of the pine tree against the eastern side of the house. Tony walked over to join her and was glad of the cool respite. He wanted to reach out and touch Narelle. To feel another live human being. To ground himself.

  ‘We have another missing person reported,’ Narelle said.

  Her words brought him back from Mayo and the cold Atlantic.

  He wondered why the call had gone to Narelle and not to him. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. He remembered turning it off earlier when he was down on the shoreline. A procedural breach. Narelle looked at his dead phone. Tony turned it on and it flashed to life. Messages began pinging at him. He put it back in his pocket.

  Narelle talked him through the new case.

  ‘You go,’ he said.

  She raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

  ‘I’ll catch up with you in the office at eight tomorrow morning for a full briefing. Or call me if you need me.’

  ‘No real developments here. I think everyone except the mother is prepared for the worst. Jack’s found a couple of short videos of Zoe taken on phones. One was taken down on the jetty the morning she disappeared, the other one from a couple of days earlier. The photos of Zoe we found the other night were taken by the younger kids. Josh got a new phone for Christmas and gave his old one to the kids so they could take some photos. That’s why Jack missed it. The little kids told him they didn’t own phones or cameras, which was true. Kids.’

  Tony liked that Narelle was looking after Jack.

  ‘Nothing of import that I can see,’ she went on, ‘but I got Jack to email them to you plus some messages he found. Lots of incomings to Zoe’s phone from her friends. Jack’s catalogued them all. They’re probably on your phone,’ she said, pointing to Tony’s pocket where his phone had continued to beep while they were talking.