don’t believe that.”
She laughed. “No, I don’t, but I should! Because it doesn’t make sense that it’s so important. I’m not expecting you to understand any of this.”
“Give me some credit.”
“No, I didn’t mean that you’re not smart or—You’re not a writer, that’s all.”
“Do I have to be? Isn’t there only one thing I need to understand? Without it, you’re incomplete,” he said simply.
She nodded silently, stunned at the words.
Yes.
She’d never heard it put so plainly.
Without it she was incomplete.
“You just said it,” she stammered. “Y-you’re so right. How—?”
“Everyone has things like that. Their kids, their work, their land. Their gardening, their guitar playing, their sport.” His tone had changed, sounded more distant and defensive, like a lecture. But then he couldn’t sustain it, and seemed to give up the attempt. His voice dropped again, the pitch low and personal. “You don’t need to ask yourself or anyone else why writing is important, Jacinda. You just need to know—I have to have this in my life to feel complete. That’s okay. That’s no big deal. The bad, impossible part is that if something takes it away, it kills you, doesn’t it? It cripples you, torments you, until you find a way to get it back.”
“How did you know that?” It was almost a whisper. Barely aware of her action, she grabbed his hand, let the couch lean her in closer to him. “Just hearing you say it is … great, such a relief … thank you. For taking it seriously. For saying it. But how did you know about the torment?”
His body sagged. His eye contact dropped as if the thread of communication between them had been sliced through. He looked as if he was talking to the floorboards or to his shoes, not to her.
“Hell, Jacinda! D’you honestly think you’re the only one it’s ever happened to?” he muttered.
Chapter Nine
Callan wouldn’t follow through.
Jacinda didn’t push or demand, but she wanted to understand what he meant. How had it happened to him? Where was he incomplete? He couldn’t be talking about the loss of Liz, because there was grief in that, yes, but no shame and she was certain that she’d seen shame in him when he’d said those words.
D’you honestly think you’re the only one it’s ever happened to?
Shame? Why?
They had common ground, it wasn’t a source of shame, and she thought they should grab at it and make use of it, but he clammed up and wouldn’t talk about it, said it wasn’t important, he couldn’t explain, she should just forget it. Carly’s arrival on the veranda a moment or two later gave him an easy way out that he snatched up as shamelessly as a serial dater might claim, “I lost your phone number.”
“Woo-hoo, Carlz!” he said. “Ready for another big day?”
Knowing how much she didn’t want to feel pressured about her writing and therefore not wanting to pressure Callan in return, Jac let it go for the time being. Instead, she hugged Carly, closed Lockie’s old notebook and took it into the house. Four pages was enough for now. Four pages was good. Even a sentence would have been good, so four pages was actually great.
Three days later, she’d written fifteen.
They still weren’t a part of anything. Too disjointed and personal for a story. Too poetic for a diary. Not jazzy and chatty enough for a blog on the Net.
She wrote about the colors of her favorite hen’s feathers in the sun, about the feel of bread dough in her hands, and the words that Kerry had used when she’d taught the recipe and the technique. She wrote two pages of stuff she imagined herself yelling at Kurt, not in his huge executive office or out front of Carly’s preschool, but the things she would have yelled if she’d been standing on the rock ledge at the water hole about to jump in, while Kurt was down on the sand—and okay, admittedly, since this was a fantasy, cowering there.
She wrote out the words six hundred thousand acres and they looked really good on the page, much better than just the numbers. They looked so good that she found out some other numbers from Callan—the distance around the perimeter of Lake Frome, the length of all the fences on his land, the height above sea level of Mount Hindley and Mount Fitton and Mount Neil—and wrote those down in words, also.
She wrote about all the new things Carly did, and the new discoveries she made.
Including a snake.
Yep, bit of a shock, that. She and Carly had gone out to collect eggs before lunch on Tuesday and hadn’t even seen the huge, silent thing coiled against the shade cloth at the side of the chook house until they were close enough to touch.
Oh … dear … Lord.
Her heart had felt like it had stopped, but Carly’s scream was more one of surprise than fear. Kerry had come running from her vegetable garden and had quickly been able to tell them it was only a carpet python.
Right.
Only.
Harmless, Kerry had said. Really. Wouldn’t even squeeze you to death, which had been Jac’s second theory, once she’d abandoned the toxic venom idea.
“Take a look at it, Carly,” Kerry had invited, and Carly had looked.
From a little farther away, so had Jac.
They’d seen the markings and Kerry had told Carly her version of an Australian aboriginal myth about a lizard and a snake who had taken turns to paint markings on each other’s backs, which had kept both Carly and Jacinda looking at the python long enough to really see its beauty.
Because it was beautiful. The markings were like the neat stitches in a knitting pattern, with subtle variations of creams and yellows on a background of brownish gray—gorgeous and neat and intricate. Jacinda was discovering so much that was beautiful on Callan’s land, and Callan watched her doing it, knew she was writing about it, and seemed to be happy with that, even though he didn’t say very much.
On Thursday, they drove for three hours with Carly to Leigh Creek in the truck, and picked up fence posts and postcards, among other supplies. The town was modern and neat and pretty, with young, white-trunked eucalyptus trees and drought-tolerant shrubs flowering pink, yellow and red. For lunch they stopped in a tiny and much older railway town called Copley just a few miles to the north of Leigh Creek and ate at Tulloch’s Bush Bakery and Quandong Café—well-known in the area, apparently, as well as a popular tourist stop.
“You have to taste a quandong pie for dessert,” Callan decreed, so the three of them ate the wild peach treats, which tasted deliciously tangy and tart, something like rhubarb, inside a shortcrust pastry with crumbly German-style streusel on top.
Jac sat in the café for a little longer and wrote her postcards, while Callan entertained Carly by taking her for
