I can still picture the tiny room in that hotel, the bare walls, the worn carpet, the narrow bed beneath a window that looked out to a brick wall. I nearly went home—I came so close. I began dozens of letters to Mum and Dad, explaining what had happened, but I never sent them. Pretending to be a tourist, I visited the National Air Museum and the National History Museum, walking for hours through rooms of flying machines, stuffed birds, insects stuck through with pins, forever suspended in a glass drawer. I walked through the cool marble interior of the Lincoln Memorial, down the National Mall to the Washington Monument, up the eight hundred and ninety-eight steps to the top and down again, my legs shaking as I descended. I walked past the green sloping lawns and white pillars of the White House, through the cobblestoned streets of Georgetown and along the banks of the Potomac River. It was a relief to be among so much history that had nothing to do with me. I only spoke to people to ask directions, and even then it was as though my voice was not my own. It came out croaky, dusty.

It came to me when I was standing in front of an enclosure that held two black bears, a male and a female, at the National Zoo in Rock Creek Park. Their fur was mangy and their eyes glassy; they slept in a patch of sun as though the place held no interest for them anymore. They were trapped, but I was free. And I would stay. To go back was to admit defeat. To pick up where I had left off: the heavy silence at the dinner table, the empty place where Jack once sat, watching Fred limp through his chores, hearing Mum’s muffled wail behind a door.

•

The following Monday, after hours of waiting in a queue, I spoke to a woman at the Australian embassy. She said that to stay I would need to find work and apply for a new visa. She would give me a grace period of a few weeks in which to find work. I had never heard that phrase before—a grace period—and I loved how it sounded. Grace was exactly what I needed now.

Between ten and eleven each morning—the lull between the breakfast and lunch rushes—I went into diners and small restaurants that served tourists near the Capitol and gave them my name and the telephone number of the hotel, saying I was available to work any shift they had. One owner brushed his short, stubby fingers on his grease-stained apron and said, ‘How’re you gonna be a waitress if no one can understand your accent?’

‘I can speak slowly. I find most people do understand me.’

‘It’s cute, honey, don’t get me wrong, you’re cute, but we don’t need cute. We need hard-working. We need experience.’