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She didn’t know whether to feel good that she’d made her dad lose control like that, made him actually apologize to her, or to feel guilty that she’d upset him so much that he had lost it. She didn’t know how she felt about anything anymore. It was like a whole mass of feelings was all churning inside of her, out of her control, like a volcano inside her body that erupted again and again, without warning. Always at her father. She picked up the photo—a copy of the one in the living room—and put it on her bedspread, stroking the glass softly. Her mother smiled up at her. She was smiling in all the photos Ellen had of her around the apartment. Ellen only wanted to remember her mother as being happy. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would remember other things about her too. The games they played. The stories Anna read her. And then, no matter how much Ellen tried to block out the memories, she would remember her mother when she was so sick, in those final weeks. Ellen remembered it all. The whispering, at first. Everyone kept whispering and they would stop talking if they saw Ellen was listening. Then one day she was taken to her and Lola’s favorite spot at the motel, the bench that looked over the vine-covered hill, and her dad and her auntie Bett told her everything. That her mother was very sick and that she wasn’t going to be better and the time they had now was very precious and special.
    Ellen wasn’t sure anymore if she remembered the actual funeral or all the times she had replayed it in her mind, adding little details here and there. For the first two years after Anna died, Ellen and her dad had gone back to the Clare Valley on the anniversary of her death. But not the third year. Ellen had been sick with tonsillitis and they’d agreed it was best to stay home in Singapore. On the fourth anniversary, they’d been in the middle of their move to Hong Kong, for her dad’s job. There had been many conversations between Lola and Glenn, and as many conversations between Ellen and Lola.
    “Do you think about your mum every day, darling?” Lola had asked.
    “Of course,” Ellen answered.
    “Where?”
    “Wherever I am. At school, at home, in the park.”
    “You see, darling. Your thoughts happen inside you, no matter what’s outside you. Perhaps it’s time for you to start your own special ceremony for Anna, wherever you are at the time, rather than thinking it can only happen here, at her grave, or at the motel where she died.”
    Ellen liked that her great-grandmother wasn’t scared to use words like “grave” and “died.” Too many people used strange words with her when they heard that her mother was dead. Passed away. Gone to heaven. In God’s arms. Final resting place. Lola had also gently explained that, in her opinion, Anna was far, far away from the Clare Valley now, in any case. Part of the sky, the stars, the moon, even. “That’s the wonderful thing, Ellen. Your mum can be wherever you want her to be, because she’s wherever you are, in your thoughts.”
    That fourth year Ellen and her dad made their own ceremony in Hong Kong, high up in the hotel they’d been staying in until their apartment was ready, looking out over Victoria Harbour. There were skyscrapers all around them, a bustle of ferries, freighters, and little boats in the water far below, so many at once it always amazed Ellen that they didn’t keep crashing into each other. They sat at a table right by the window, so high that Ellen felt a bit sick looking down. Her dad ordered two elaborate cocktails for them both, his with champagne, Anna’s favorite drink, and Ellen’s with three different fruit juices, four curly straws, umbrellas and enough fruit that it was more a fruit salad than a cocktail. They made a toast, to Anna and to each other and to everyone back home in Australia, and then her dad let her ring the motel on his mobile phone.
    The whole family was there. She’d talked to Lola and her