A cross-generational novel of love, loss, longing and redemption, Where All the Waters Meet is the story of the last four days of 59 year old Emma Sommerton’s life.  A celebrated painter, Emma confronts both a past that has fractured two generations of her family and a present falling into darkness as she approaches her ending.

Part One
What images return

1

I know this place as well as my own skin, every curve, every furrowed line, more colour than form, lapis melting into aquamarine, the bleached arc of sand edging walls of running jade.  The rush of breaking waves, leaves rippling against leaves, a tui calling; the sounds flow through me like a river, lifting me up and up, higher into the dream, where gannets turn on wheels of blue. 
And in the distance, Te Hauturu-o-Toi, floating like a dream between ocean and sky.  Resting place of the wind.
A girl on the beach, her hair a bright ribbon in the sun.  She seems to draw the light to her.  I want to stay but my dream moves me on.  Behind the beach a house, in the house a room, and in the room a man between youth and middle age.  So much pain.
My son.  My beloved son is here.
Now my dream lets me wait.  Is this my face this mask of skin and bone?  Why could I not have dreamt myself as a child like the girl on the beach?  This is the body that won races, was once a child.  The body that once bore the man standing in the river of white curtain.
This poor, broken thing.

2

The room breathes to the rhythm of the cerulean sea.  The murmur of waves, the rattle of letters, of open books and magazines shifting in the circling air, the whispering of the restive curtains.
Chris stands motionless by his mother's bed. He has come so far, and now he finds himself dreading the moment of her waking.   He turns away and walks to the open French windows, trying to build a case of steel around his pain, wrapping it deep inside.  Framed against the blue on blue of sea and sky, he lets the curtains twist around him, an old childhood habit, feeling the reassuring caress of the fabric on his skin.  On the beach, he can see Josie collecting shells.  Once he played on that same beach, his skin darkening through elastic summers, secure in the knowledge that the world was immutable.  Perhaps the cancer had been there in his mother even then, a thread of darkness invisible in the sunlight.
Behind him, his mother’s voice.  “Chris.”
The turning of his head seems to take an eternity.  He tries to smile, moving as if through water to the bed where his mother waits.  So much love.  It seems to Chris that she must burn up with its intensity. 
She takes his hands, smothers them with kisses, holding, holding.  Despite all the distances between them, the child and mother remain. 

Josie hears her father calling but chooses not to respond immediately.   In front of her, a gannet rides the uplift from a cresting wave, wing tip tracing a line in the hollowing green wall for a moment before the wave crashes down into a churning tumble of white, lifting the gannet into the sky on an invisible fountain of air.   The bird banks tightly and spears down again into a school of small fish flickering like a cloud of silver tinsel inside the following swell.  The gannet disappears into a plume of white; a moment, then it bobs to the surface like a dazzling cork, a fish struggling in its beak. 
The voice closer now, that familiar, impatient edge.  “Didn't you hear me calling?” 
“No,” she says, bending to pick up another shell, avoiding eye contact.
“Your grandmother’s awake.”
Josie has been dreading this moment.  She curls her hand around her shells and follows her father through the slipping sand and up to the house.

Jack enters Emma’s bedroom. The room that was once their bedroom.  Even now he’s not used to seeing Emma as she is, emaciated and colourless in that bed that had been theirs, together, for so long.  Each time he has to prepare himself before he enters the room.  To try to let nothing but love show.
“They’re coming up now,” he says.
How Emma hates this demeaning helplessness.  “I need to sit up higher.  Another pillow.”
Jack gently lifts her from the bed and places an extra pillow behind her shoulders.  Knots of pain twist through her with the movement. 
“Em?  Are you ok?”
“I’m fine.” She will make it be fine.
“Do you want the ordine?”
Emma shakes her head.  “No.”  Nothing that takes her away from this moment. 
This is the most difficult thing of all for Jack, seeing her in pain.  “Em, I can see you need it…”
“Jack, I said no,” she snaps.  Then, regretting her sharpness.  “I can manage this.” She has come to know so much about pain.   But she can manage this.  She can.  She will. 
She imagines the pain inside her as a sun, and she focuses on making it smaller and smaller until finally the force of her will reduces it to the size of a marble, burning suspended in the darkness, waiting.

The house feels still and shadowed after the colour and sound of the beach.  Josie and her father pause in the living room for Chris to make stiffly unfamiliar adjustments to her hair and clothes.
“Now remember, your grandma will look different to the last time you saw her, but she’s still the same person.
Josie’s only clear memory of her grandmother is when she last came to Sydney, two years ago, not long after she had turned seven.  She brought a late birthday present, a beautiful set of paints.  Josie remembers a face, a definite face. And there was a brightness to her grandmother’s eyes.  She had liked her grandmother’s smile.  Her mother had explained what cancer was and how it would change how her grandmother looked.  And she looked on the internet.  There were pictures of people with cancer.  Afterwards, she wished she hadn’t looked. 
Her father stands in front of her.  “Ready?”
Josie nods mutely, and her father guides her down the hallway towards the fateful bedroom. 

Josie expected her grandmother’s room to be a curtained twilight world, the kind of room she imagined someone dying in.  Instead, the bedroom doorway frames a dazzle of light and sea sound; and inside, colour everywhere – paintings on the walls, vases of flowers.  The surprise takes away the nausea that has been twisting tighter and tighter inside Josie as she draws closer to this moment. 
But there are other things in the room too.  Her grandfather, sitting by the bed, collapsed under his sadness. Her father who hopes for too much.  Her grandmother propped up on a hill of pillows.   Her father and mother had warned her, and she had seen the pictures on the internet, but still, seeing her grandmother’s skin on bone face, the paleness of her skin.  Not even white.  The kind of nothing colour that you’d imagine a ghost would be.
Her grandmother smiles when she sees her come through the door. “Here she is.  My word, haven’t you grown up since I last saw you.”
The voice has changed too, now thin as the skin across her grandmother’s cheekbones.  Josie feels her father’s hand on her back, gently but insistently moving her towards the bed.  Bottles of medicine crowd the bedside table.  The chemical smell almost overwhelms her.      
“Give your Grandma a hug.”
Josie leans forward into thin, bony arms, holding the embrace for the shortest possible moment.
“Thank you for coming all this way to see me.”
Josie can feel all the eyes watching her. Everybody wanting.  What do you say to a dying person?  Her grandmother smiles, and, just for a moment, Josie looks into her grandmother’s eyes and sees understanding. 
“So, what do you think of our beach?”
“Good.” 
“I expect it’s a bit different to Sydney.”
Josie nods with the first suggestion of a smile.  “Yep.”
She would like to do better.  She would like to be what her father wants her to be, right now in this room.  But how can she be more than herself?
“Sit next to me, darling,” says her grandmother, indicating the chair by the bed.  Josie sits stiffly, feeling the eyes upon her.
“What were you doing on the beach?”
“Collecting shells.”  Josie opens her hand to reveal her small collection, relieved to be able to offer something to the exchange.
“Ah yes, it’s a good beach for shells.  Those small round holes, as if someone’s drilled into the shells. Do you know what makes those?”
Josie had wondered about that.  They were such perfect little holes and only on the flat shells.  “No.”
“Other shellfish.  They’re called Moon snails. They drill those holes with their tongue.”
“Their tongues?”  Josie’s discomfort is being rapidly forgotten.
“It’s not like our tongue.  It’s covered with sharp little teeth, and it squirts out acid to soften the shell to help it drill.  Then it uses the hole to squirt in stuff that turns the other shellfish into a kind of a smoothie and sucks it out.”
Josie is both impressed and disgusted.  “Really?”
“Thing I have never understood, though,” Josie’s grandmother says, lifting one shell from Josie’s palm, “is how every hole is so perfect.”
Josie looks at her drilled shells.  Every hole is, as her grandmother says, perfect.
Her grandmother pauses, watching her.  “Well, the important thing is that you have a nice time while you’re here, so you’d better get out there and enjoy this beautiful day.  There’ll be plenty of time for us to talk.”
Josie can’t believe it.  Release.  She glances at her father for confirmation but looks away quickly when she sees the disappointment on his face. 
“Come and see me later,” her grandmother continues, smiling.  “There’s lots of things to do here, but you need a bit of local knowledge.”
Josie likes the way her grandmother smiles.  She has lines around her eyes and mouth that fit the smile exactly.  It’s a smile that’s been used a lot.  “Thank you, Grandma,” she says, glancing once more at her father.  With his almost imperceptible nod, she’s released.

What Josie doesn’t see as she passes through the doorway, escaping the silent house into the opalescent day, is her grandmother sinking back grey-faced into the pillows.   It has taken so much to hold the pain at bay for that conversation. 
“Jack… the ordine.”  The cup is ready for her on the bedside table.  She has only to reach out for it, but only through absolute stillness can she keep the pain from overwhelming her. 
The plastic against her lips, then that familiar sticky, sweet orange-not-orange on her tongue.  Swallowing sends ripples of pain chording down her throat into her chest. Now she must wait. Let the pain flow through, knowing it will ebb.  Twenty minutes.  How hard this must be for Josie.  She must make this the best it can be, this sliver of time.  Four days, and then Josie’s gone. 
She can feel the ordine beginning to work in the now familiar way, gradually separating her from her pain, her thoughts becoming loosely connected, drifting like boats in a current.  Four days.  Ninety-six hours.  But how many waking hours?   Four days, minus…what?  The computations are impossible.  Four days.  She had asked Marion – when? –  how long she had left, even though she known that Marion couldn’t give her an answer.  Or wouldn’t give her an answer.  Not months, she knows that.  But weeks or days? 
Marion, sitting by the bed, pale and tense.  Dreading these questions.
How will it end? 
You won’t know anything, Emma.  You’ll be unconscious.
I want to know.
The hesitation before the reply.  Marion, thinking of the words she will use.
Most likely your lungs will fill with fluid. 
Poor Marion. Too young for this.
The pain a landscape retreating into the distance.  Further away with every minute. 
Left it too late asking them to come.   But they said six months.  Time to put everything in order and ask them to come.  They were wrong.  Can’t know where it’s going, what it’s doing.  All different.  Everyone their own universe of nerves and muscle and bone and blood. 
Fuck chemo what was the point 
be alive two months longer and sick the whole time. 
Jack so upset
all he could see was that she would be alive for longer
maybe she had been wrong maybe she should have had the chemo 
so angry 
fifty-nine only fifty-nine. 
and a retrospective in the New Year at the Auckland Gallery
to have seen all those paintings in one place
all those parts of her brought together again
would have been
but the chemo wouldn’t have got her there so what was the point
all those parts of her disconnected from life
just another dead artist
And the words of her thoughts uncouple from one another now, replaced by that most wonderful of moments, when the release from pain is complete.
four days 

3

The conversation at dinner circles long silences punctuated by the rattle of cutlery.   The food is a casserole from the freezer, donated by someone in the village. Josie’s grandfather’s freezer is full of gifted meals from people trying to help.  There’s a brief exchange about when her aunt Ali is arriving, and her grandfather asks, once, about interest in her father from America, but there’s no way he’s going to talk about that.  As far as Josie’s concerned her aunt can’t arrive soon enough if every dinner will be like this.  You’d think that her father and grandfather would have something to say to each other.  She hadn’t realised until now how much noise knives and forks make on plates as people eat.  Everyone, not just her, wants to be somewhere else.  She can’t stand it any longer. 
“Can I get down from the table, please?”
Her father looks at her plate.  “You haven’t eaten much.”
“I’m not hungry.”  She can find something in the kitchen later.  
He looks at her for a moment, considering, then decides it’s not worth an argument.  “Alright. But don’t say you’re hungry later.” 
Taking care not to let her relief show, she slides from her seat and escapes to the unpeopled space of the deck at the front of the house.  She leans against the wooden railing, looking out over the moon-silvered sea.  She’s used to noise at night.  Cars, sirens, the low rumble everyone can hear in Sydney when it’s unusually quiet.  But this is different, every sound cut sharp and clear and separate against a silence like black velvet.  And the songs.  The night is full of whirring songs.
She looks up at a field of stars free of streetlights and is dazzled by their new brilliance.  The tensions of the adult world fall away behind her like an unwanted coat.  It’s as if she can hear the world breathing.
Along the veranda that leads off the deck and along the front of the house, she can see the French windows to her grandmother’s room still open.  Her grandmother has slept since Josie went to her room.  Her father and mother had told her that her grandmother would sleep a lot.
She moves soundlessly along the veranda, pausing at the edge of the open windows.  The room inside is a still as a photograph.  Flowers sleep in their vases, resting their colours.  On their shelves and tabletops, books wait for someone to open them.   Paintings and photos crowd the walls, each one holding a secret story.
Her grandfather appears, a silhouette in the doorway, checking.
“Em?  Everything ok?”
Silence.  Her grandmother doesn’t move, and his shadow disappears.
Josie can see her father in her grandmother’s face.   That thin, straight nose.  The lines of their bones.    There would be other things too, she knows.  You’d never know whose heart your heart looked like, whose brain.  And then there was who you were like inside, the sort of person you were.  You couldn’t see something like that.  People say she looks like her father, but inside she’s sure she looks like her mother.
She knows she shouldn’t, but it’s good to be able to just look.  Easier to see the person past the sickness.   The sleeping room is full of beautiful things, all the books and paintings and sculptures and flowers that are a picture of her grandmother dying in her bed.

Am I awake or am I dreaming?   I can see her at the edge of the curtains, looking in.  But I can see myself too, motionless in the bed.  It’s as if I’m beside her, that I can almost reach out and touch her.  But I won’t, because I don’t want to break the dream.  I can see my son in her face.  The child that he was. 
No.  Stop.
Don’t begin to regret.  You know where those whispers lead.
We all played our part.  They’re here now.  And soon Ali.  We’ll all be together.
Accept.  Accept and be here, now.
Four days.  Remember. Four days.
Oh but wouldn’t you change so many things? 
Don’t.  Don’t lose the dream. It’s uncertain, like a mirage. Hold it close.
Look to the child, see how she shines.  I have no Saviour to stand beside me, no Blessed Virgin.  The wonder of creation and the wonder of love are my charms. These are my only incantations as I face the night beyond darkness of my ending and what I must pass through to reach it. 
See how she shines.  Hold love and beauty close because they alone can save you from despair.  Look at this child in this sequinned night and feel the miracle of this creation. 
So do I speak to myself as if to another, seeking without hope to prevail.
And yet the trap is sprung because I cannot look at her without seeing what has been lost.  Wherever we turn we are nebulae composed of the dust of our past.
She’s so close that I touch her.  Remember the sensation of a child’s skin.  How I have missed my children. 
But already I’m falling away, already the dream slips and slides around me, the gravity of consciousness pulling me back down into the world, into my unwelcome bed with the cloy of nausea and drugs and the suffocating weight of sheets and blankets, the walls assembling themselves around me like the cage they have become, while outside still, the now unseen moon casts its net upon the unquiet sea and travels on through the night while I must remain here in this room, in this bed.
But I will hold the memory of this dream as long as I can.
Outside.  What a magical word. 

Josie’s mother calls, and she listens to her parents talking, so carefully polite.  Then it’s her turn, and it’s so good to hear her mother’s voice again, even though it makes Josie miss her even more, and it’s hard not to let tears ruin everything.  Harder still when she can hear the tears in her mother’s voice and in the silences between her words.  So she tells her mother about the flight out and the endless red roofs of Sydney, how New Zealand appeared out of the blue sea first as a line of cliffs, then the green, so bright, so unlike Australia, and the milky blue of Auckland harbour, like an opal, and when they were driving north, all the tall ferns like giant emerald starfish. 
All the colours of this new world.  Without the shadows.
“I wish you were here, Mum,” she says, and from the corners of her eyes she sees the flicker on her father’s face as he turns away.

Later, in her bed that feels like someone else’s shoes, Josie listens to her father and grandfather in the living room, talking with the stiffness of strangers.  She knows nothing about her grandfather.  Her father never talks about him.  She remembers, when she was five, her mother taking her to see her grandparents in Sydney.  Her father didn’t come.  He was busy with work, or so he said.  And then, when she was seven, the last time, just her grandmother came over.  Her father came too that time, but she could feel that there was something not right.  Nobody was as happy as they should have been. Her father spent the whole time looking as if he needed to be somewhere else. Which, she knows, is just what he’s like, but this was his mother.
She hears her father’s door close and now there’s only threads of classical music from the living room weaving through the sound of the sea.   She tries to think of another time when she’s gone to sleep to the sound of waves.  Just once, that time they went for a holiday in Brunswick Heads.  Such a lovely sound.   It must be nice to have that sound all the time.  At least that was something for her grandmother.
She kneels on her bed and leans her elbows on the windowsill and looks out over the moon glimmer sea to the dark island floating like a ghost ship on the horizon.  So few lights.  The headlands at each end of the beach are completely dark.  Just this necklace of stars along the beach.  At home there were nothing but windows.  Windows everywhere, crowding out the sky.  Lives stacked one on top of the other like boxes on a supermarket shelf.
How strange to find yourself, in the space of only a day, in a whole other country, in a place where the stars owned the sky.