She was fine. Of course she was fine. It was just that she’d been with me ever since she was born, except for that terrifying night with Max, and now I’d gone off to have fun and left her with somebody I really didn’t know that well, and ... and ...
And I’d done it because he was attractive. Well, no. I’d done it because he made my heart race and my cheeks flush and my body remember things it had nearly forgotten and wanted to learn all over again.
Could you have judgment this bad twice? Apparently you could, if your hormones were out of balance, if everything you were had been rejected and you were stubbornly, irredeemably visual, much too easily influenced by the flash of white teeth and the light in a pair of golden-brown eyes, the blue ink of a tattoo on a bronzed bicep. Not to mention Matiu’s voice. The sureness of it, and the calm. The command and the kindness I kept getting from him, no matter what Karen thought, what anybody thought. And the scent of him, too. All things that meant nothing, nothing, compared to keeping your babies safe, but here I was still noticing them. Still feeling them.
And the way I’d wanted to put on a minidress and waltz off for a haircut and assorted beauty routines like a woman who wasn’t well over thirty, who’d hadn’t just had her third child, who wasn’t making herself ridiculous right this very second.
It was the black leather trousers. It was happening. The arms over the head, the scream dancing, and the cougar thing were probably right down the track. And I’d been so stupid.
Koro—I couldn’t think of him any other way, for some reason, even though his name was actually Wiremu—said nothing. Karen said, “Wait, what?” Matiu said, his voice absolutely calm, “It’s a push mower. No worries, Poppy. I had them safe.”
“Oh,” I said, rising to my feet, a bit weak in the knees. “Right. Sorry. That wasn’t ... I didn’t ...”
“Nah,” Koro said. “Course you thought so, because nobody’s willing to push a mower anymore. Why would you have one of those great noisy things, though, spoiling the peace of the day, smelling of nothing but petrol, when you could use the muscles God gave you and do it yourself? Save yourself a trip to the gym as well, eh, Matiu, carrying around those weights of yours. Why wouldn’t this be better, when it lets you keep the babies safe with you, lets them smell fresh-cut grass instead of fumes?”
“Mum!” Hamish came running and threw his arms around my legs in a purely joyful way I’d almost forgotten. “The dog’s name is Buddy, because a buddy is like a friend, and he can catch the ball sometimes in his teeth! He tries every time, but he can’t always, because he’s not very good at it, but he tries his hardest anyway.”
“He does,” Koro said. “He’s been though some hard times, maybe, but he’s a plucky wee fella, that dog. Happy now, that’s certain.” The duck lifted his round little head as if he’d noticed people were talking about animals, shook his tail feathers, and waddled over to the dog, who bowed down, barked once, pranced in a circle around him, and wagged his own tail like he was happy to pay homage.
I was trying not to cry, my emotions swinging once again. I hadn’t quite looked at Matiu. He was standing up, I knew that. Angry, and probably deservedly so. What had I said? He said, though, “You were right to ask. Right to care. Motor mowers account for more injuries than people realize. Not as many as ladders, but you see enough of them all the same. Flying debris, and then the daft things people do with them, like the thrifty Kiwis who decide there’s no need for a hedge trimmer, not if you tip the thing sideways. And, no, I didn’t leave any ladders standing about either. Olivia’d be planning her nest on the roof the minute she saw that.”
He was smiling, breezy as always, and I said, trying for steadiness and not achieving it, “Which you’d know even better than I do, since you see them. The accidents. Well, since you see my children, too, because you’re right about Olivia. She asked for bunk beds already, so she can jump off and fly. I explained, but it didn’t sink in, obviously. She thinks that if only she gets high enough and flaps hard enough, it’ll happen. Maybe I shouldn’t draw so many pictures of anthropomorphized animals, what d’you reckon?”
He was laughing now. “Nah, I think you should draw all the pictures of animals you like. And keep Olivia’s furniture low to the ground. Also—yeh, I would know. No worries, Poppy. It’s all good. I had them.” That last part was gentle, like the man who’d knelt by me in the grass and told me my kids were safe, that he was here to help.
I was so confused. Half of me wanted to keep laughing, to retreat to my funny, happy place, but I was also still much too close to tears. How long had it been since Max had said my name like that? Like he loved the sound of it?
And why, why, why did I have to compare everything to Max?
I wanted to pick up the baby, but she was sleeping. Even Hamish, the disloyal little rat, had run off with the dog again. There was no convenient child-shaped shield to hide behind at all, in fact. And now, Karen had to say, “What do you think of Poppy’s new hair, Matiu?”
I said, “Don’t ask him that. What’s he going to say, ‘Blech. Looks rubbish?’ Half of me wonders what I was thinking. What part of ‘your hair is your best feature’ don’t I remember?”
“But the other half,” Karen said irrepressibly, “is reminding you that just because Moronic Max—is it OK that I call him that? Because I’m going to anyway—and maybe some other guys you’re never going to sleep with anyway love long hair and would’ve said something creepy to you about yours, if only you’d kept it long so you could experience that amazing pleasure, you don’t have to care about it anymore, because you’re experimenting with the lovely freedom of doing what you actually want and looking how you actually want and feeling what you actually feel, and that when you got up out of that chair, you felt amazing. You felt new.”
“Reckon Matiu wouldn’t say that anyway,” Koro said. “Reckon he’ll tell you that you look pretty, and more than that. That you look happy, and that he’s happy to see it.”
Why were we talking about what Matiu thought? I touched my hair. I still wasn’t used to it. I’d worn my hair long all my life. A fine-textured, wavy mixture of copper, bronze, and gold, it had reached halfway to my waist and had always attracted attention. Well, it had when I’d worn it down and styled it and so forth. It didn’t attract much attention stuck up into a messy knot with a pencil through it. I said, “It’s short.”
“Yes,” Matiu said, “it is, a bit. Got all that curl to it, though, and it still reaches your shoulders. You could still put it up if you liked. Still look any way you like.”
I said, “Yeh, got it. You mean, it’s fine that I love it, but a man wouldn’t. Too bad. I’m flying solo now.” I was faking it, of course.
“You’re pleasing yourself,” Matiu said. “If you’re asking me, though ...” And I thought, Right. I didn’t do it to please you, mate. That was the bloody point. I’m trying so hard to hold that thought here.
“Oh, yeah?” Karen said. “All right, we are asking you. What do you think, Matiu? What’s your verdict on Poppy’s beautiful new hair? Choose your words wisely.”
“I think she looks just bloody fine,” he said. “I think she looks free, and it’s a good look on her.” He wasn’t looking at Karen. He was looking at me. And, possibly, at the new sandals I’d bought to go with my wavy bob and that yellow dress. Just for today. Just for fun, because why not? Why couldn’t I be a mum of three, and a fair bit confused and heartbroken, and have new shoes? They weren’t leather trousers, and I was thirty-three, not sixty-three. And, all right, even if I had been sixty-three, why shouldn’t I have shoes that made me feel sexy? With a wedge heel, and straps that crisscrossed over my foot and up over the ankle, and a bow quite a few daring centimeters up my leg? My new shoes were flirty, and they might even be sexy, but it was more than that. They were fun, and so was my hair, and I wanted to have fun.
“It’s the dress,” I said. “Which is Karen’s.”
“So I hear,” Matiu said. “But you’re the one wear
ing it.”
“Plus, swimming,” Karen said. “So much easier with short hair, and here you are staying with me, by the non-freezing sea. There’s a full moon tonight.” She sighed. “I love swimming at night. It makes me feel like a water sprite or something. Or possibly a nymph, mysterious and magical.”
“Then,” a voice said from behind us, “we’d better see that you get to do it. If you’re going to be mysterious and magical.”
Karen gave a cry like a seabird and flung herself at him. My brother Jax, of course, though he wasn’t meant to be here. He had his arms around Karen and was lifting her off her feet and twirling her as if he hadn’t seen her days ago, and I tried not to let that twinge of jealousy in.
“Why are you here?” she asked, still with her arms around his neck. “You’re supposed to be doing your course.”
“Postponed,” Jax said, leaning over to give me a kiss on the cheek. “Bout of very nasty food poisoning in the camp, believe it or not. But as I didn’t succumb ... here I am. Iron stomach, fortunately, so I’m here to be with my wife, and here for my sister.” He looked at Matiu. “Good thing, too, because I reckon I needed to see you as well, mate, and see what we do about this.”
“About what?” Karen said. “Believe me, he’s forgotten he ever flirted with me, once, barely, despite my legendary, unrequited, decade-long, fully visible crush on him, so you can just get over it. Geez, you and Hemi.”
“It’s not about you,” Jax said. “It’s about Poppy.”
My mouth had opened, somehow, and I was gaping like a goldfish. Also feeling naked and exposed. The dress’s forgiving, structured lines camouflaged my “extras,” but there they were anyway. Thighs, belly, bum. It felt like I was standing there showing off all of them, and showing off the pathetically obvious statement of my freshly waxed legs, too, flashing iridescent white from the combination of a ginger’s complexion and the Dunedin winter. Exposed like I expected somebody to want to touch them, to touch me.
“I’m not—” I said, then couldn’t think how to go on. “I’m fine,” I said. “Fine. Alone. I’m fine alone.” Isobel started to stir, and I crouched down, my cheeks burning, conscious of the amount of thigh I was revealing and practically toppling in the unaccustomed heels. Feeling a hand under my elbow, and knowing it was Matiu there, steadying me once again.
“That’s all good,” Jax said, “but Matiu’s been suspended from work. For seeing you. And I’m wondering why.”
22
Rock Breaks Scissors
Matiu
I stood up and took two breaths. One wasn’t always enough. Better to take the time and take that second one, give the other party a chance to think again, and give yourself back the advantage in the confrontation, not to mention a chance to come up with an answer other than physical violence. The person who speaks first and sharpest doesn’t necessarily win in the end, not if the other person holds onto his calm and doesn’t succumb. Rock breaks scissors, in the game and in life.
And yet the adrenaline had the hair standing up on the back of my neck anyway. It didn’t matter that Jax was a Special Forces soldier and I most definitely wasn’t, that he had one leg and I had two, or that Poppy was newly separated, newly delivered of a child, newly much-too-many things. It mattered that he felt like my adversary over something that mattered. The message wasn’t coming from my brain, or if it was, it was coming from my limbic system, my mammalian brain, all emotions and urges. I was back to butting antlers on the savanna and not operating one bit from my rational cortex. Which meant it felt like the message was coming from his body into mine. Gut level, you could say.
I didn’t operate from my gut. Another message that wasn’t getting through.
That was why I didn’t quite manage the two-breaths alternative answer, because I said, “I’m wondering why as well, no worries. I’ve been wondering since it happened. Whose bloody business it is, for one, which is why I’m also wondering what you think ‘we’ have to do about it. Seems to me I’m the only one with a vested interest here. Why are you weighing in?”
“Matiu.” It was Koro, just a couple syllables uttered in the old man’s wheezing, cracked voice. The voice of authority all the same, and my frustration about the whole business hovered there, unable to be let loose and unable to be tucked away again, either. “Come inside and sit down, all of you,” Koro went on. “Kia ora, Jax. Haere mai. Good to see you again. Good to have you here.”
“Kia ora,” Jax answered after a fraught moment, then leaned down and touched his forehead and nose to Koro’s in a hongi. Their hands on each other’s shoulders, the respect flowing both ways.
I was going to get nowhere with this anger. I was good at calm. Good at lightness. Good at finding a solution. I was going to have to call on all my self-control now, because none of that was where I wanted to go.
“You’re kidding,” Karen, of course, said. “Seriously? How come you didn’t tell me, Poppy? But why would that—”
“Matiu,” Poppy said, her distress clear, all her fragile, newfound joy and pride in taking those first few tentative steps away from her old life and into a new one vanishing from one moment to the next. “No. Why didn’t you tell me? How could that even happen?”
“Cup of tea,” Koro announced again, leaning on his stick to get up. He didn’t look at any of us, just stumped off toward the house, and we followed him in a ragged crocodile, Poppy bringing up the rear with the kids and the dog. Through the lounge and into the kitchen, where Vanessa looked up from where she was preparing something for the family dinner at Tane’s tonight. Lamingtons, probably, because she was cutting vanilla sponge into cubes. It was a reminder, if I’d needed one, that whanau came first, and that like it or not, Jax was part of that.
“Jax and Karen can make the tea,” Koro announced. “Matiu and Poppy, bring the kids and sit. Always better to sit outside, feel the breeze, eh. Remember what matters.”
Poppy was behind me now. She said, her voice subdued, all her pleasure in her new hair and her pretty dress and shoes gone away, “I need to take Olivia to the potty and get her down for a nap. Also feed Isobel.”
“Give me a few minutes, love,” Vanessa said, “and I’ll help you. It’s Ari’s nap time as well.” She had a pan full of chocolate icing and a dish of coconut. I’d been right about the lamingtons. She also had Ari clinging to her legs like a limpet.
“I’ll take the littlies,” I said, “and put them down in Ari’s room.”
“You’ll have to change a nappy first,” Vanessa said, as Jax filled the electric jug and set it to boil. “And from the smell of it, it won’t be a pleasant one.”
“No worries,” I said. “I’ve got it.” I was pretty much a professional uncle by this point. I hefted Ari into my arms and said, “Come on, mate, and let’s take care of that. Olivia, come help me with this one.”
“I want to stay with Hamish,” Olivia said, as her brother disappeared out the back with the dog and Koro.
“Nah,” I said, keeping it light, getting my hand around hers. “I need a helper, and you’re the biggest kid here, so I’m afraid that’s you. We need to tell Ari a story before his nap as well, and you’re the best at that, eh.”
“Because there are very many stories about magic,” Olivia said, “and they all live in my head.”
“Lucky for me,” I said, smiling despite my tension, heading to the house’s single bathroom, past the room where Koro had lain alone every night for nearly thirty years, ever since he’d lost his wife. The steady, solitary rock through family upheavals and tragedies large and small.
The loss of his elder son, my dad, together with my mum, in a motorway smash fifteen years back. Disappointment with his younger son, Hemi’s dad, with his drinking and his promises, the money constantly owed and never repaid. Quarrels between sisters-in-law, and all the family tensions that blazed suddenly, like a grease fire, and flamed out again. The heartbreaking loss of Kahakura, and the sorrow that had followed. The drama of Hope and Hemi’s
odd courtship, soon after the loss of my parents, and then the joy of babies arriving, babies who’d be loved and cared for. The constant in all of it Koro’s steady hand, steering the whanau through conversations and reflections and reparations, and the certainty that family was forever. Reminding you that you didn’t get to be there for the babies and the weddings if you weren’t there for the pain.
It made sense that Jax had brought this to Koro’s, I told my still-unsettled mind. No place better for it. Everybody brought Koro their troubles and their joys. No difference today, except that it was personal. It was never personal, but today, it was.
Which meant I was out of my depth. I was all about the rational cortex, decision-wise. The limbic system? Not so much.
Fifteen minutes later, Olivia had fallen asleep in the midst of telling Ari a story about a girl who turned into a bird, and Ari had fallen asleep at the beginning. I checked that the front door was latched up high before heading out again, to where Jax was sitting at the big table on the back patio, looking like he’d much rather be out for a run. At the gym. Having a swim. Something, anything where he could work off the tension. I knew how he felt. I’d signed up for child-minding and possibly some ... some what? For whatever hopeless thing I was doing here, not a showdown over the very subject I least wanted to talk about.
This whole thing with Poppy was the least productive way I’d spent my time in a decade. It had already disrupted my life and damaged my career, and I couldn’t see any way it wouldn’t disrupt it more unless I left now, and left her strictly alone after that, and how could I do that? There she was, having her hair cut into a saucy bob that fell around her face like she’d just got out of bed, and wearing the prettiest little dress I’d ever seen, plus the kind of black lace-up sandals a man couldn’t stop staring at, showing off her pretty body and her gorgeous skin and looking at me with all that bruised intelligence and all that vulnerability. I knew she was wounded, that she’d be floundering here. I knew it, and I didn’t want to hurt her more. I just wanted to ...
Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2) Page 17