I said, “I’d think it would help to have Matiu around, though, with you getting older and all. I know he’s a good doctor, and I’m guessing he tells the truth even when it’s hard to hear. Grandad says that’s the worst of doctors, how hard it is to get them to tell you the truth. Thinking you can’t handle knowing and you’re scared of hearing, when you’re old enough to know that being scared won’t change a thing.”
“Too right,” Koro said. “You can sit around every day wondering if that’s the day that you’ll die, or you can decide it’s another day that you’re alive, so why not live. Running to the doctor every time you get a pain isn’t living. What do I want Matiu hanging over me for? I’ve got a doctor of my own, not that I want to see him, and Matiu’s had enough of waiting and enough of watching people die. Anyway, old men don’t want to live forever. You get a bit tired, after ninety-six years. Going to sleep doesn’t sound so bad. We want our mokopuna to find their way before we go, that’s all. A good way. That’s our forever.”
“You want them to be happy,” I said.
“Happy,” he said. “That’s a young person’s wish, to be happy. Old people know you’re not always going to be happy. That doesn’t mean life’s not worth living, and that’s what we want you to do. We want you to take your sorrows and your joys, not be afraid to feel them. A tree won’t grow without water, and nothing good grows between two people without some tears. We want to see you with your own whanau, carrying on through all of it. We want you to live.” He looked up into the avocado tree, its heavy fruits ripening slowly in the sun and the rain of the Bay of Plenty, and said slowly, “Te tiro atu to kanohi ki tairawhiti ana tera whiti te ra kite ataata ka hinga ki muri kia koe. That’s what we want to see you do before we go.”
I didn’t really know him, and I did. I put my hand over his, and he didn’t object. “What does it mean?” I asked.
“If you turn your face to the sun,” he said, “the shadows will fall behind you. We want to see you turning your face to the sun.”
33
Buddy
Poppy
Some moments, you want to bottle up and hold onto. The last part of that visit was one of them.
And, no, it wasn’t that I lay down in the green grass and let Matiu drive me up slowly until I reached thigh-cramping cataclysms of pleasure. I didn’t even get to kiss him again. How could I? For one thing, nothing had magically become any fairer to him today than it had been last night, since here I still was, complications and all. For another thing, Karen was leaving for the States and Jax was off to Christchurch, putting an end to the discreet-childminding possibilities, even if Matiu had decided he was just bloody fine with sneaking off to that hotel, or possibly that he couldn’t live another day without doing it. Or maybe that was me.
I thought of all the possibilities. Of course I did. I could have stayed over another night and coerced some foolishly confident member of Matiu’s whanau to keep three kids with them overnight, including a nursing seven-week-old and a three-year-old who could decide to make an “egg” deposit in your back garden at any moment. Not happening, because there was no way anybody not related to me would have volunteered.
All right, I could have stayed alone overnight in the house, once Jax and Karen had left. Alone, that is, except for one sleep-schedule-confused infant who thought my breasts existed for her personal pleasure, and two very curious children, one of whom had a disturbing tendency to have bad dreams, crawl into my bed, and stick her freezing feet against my back. Yeh, that would be romantic.
In short, there was no way for Matiu and me to be together without (A) my kids informing Max that Mummy went away all night long while she was visiting Uncle Jax, and by the way, Matiu took them to the beach at Auntie Karen’s house even though Olivia was naked; (B) having Matiu sneak in after the kids had gone to bed, almost certainly resulting in somebody waking up and crying, the expectation of which would put a serious crimp in my progression toward the head-banging and so forth, since my personal Orgasm Highway wasn’t exactly a high-speed arterial at the best of times; or (C) somebody asking why Matiu and I were wrestling. Or (B) plus (C). There was no way the naked-man-hurting-Mummy-because-she-kept-screaming story wouldn’t be brought to Max’s attention next weekend, which would start the whole thing up again. And any “Don’t-tell-Daddy-about-Mummy’s-naked-friend” message was pretty much the definition of “forcing your children to take on inappropriate responsibility.”
And then there was the fact that although Matiu had been pretty unforthcoming with the details of what the hospital had told him, “Stay away from Poppy Cantwell” was bound to be part of it. Oh, and one more thing: that I could be diseased. Nothing says, “Lick me there some more” like confessing your potential case of chlamydia.
That was why I went back around the corner of the house, discovered that Matiu had changed Isobel and was currently walking her around the garden and singing to her—in Samoan, because of course he knew a Samoan lullaby—adding to the reasons he was Number One on my personal hit parade and making it even more impossible to be unfair to him; sat down and fed the baby and didn’t ask Matiu if he’d looked at my pictures, because I had a feeling things would escalate again, and a woman’s noble resistance could only stretch so far; and instead of asking him to kiss my neck some more, asked him the extremely romantic question, “Would you mind coming inside with me and taking Olivia to the toilet? There’s something I need to talk over with Hamish, and you know how hard it is to keep her out of anything he’s doing.”
“No worries,” he said. He took Isobel with him, too. Not easy to manage both of them, but I suspected he was almost as good at one-handed child wrangling as I was. He was a very capable man.
That was why I was sitting alone with Hamish on the couch in the lounge a few minutes later. Or almost alone, since Buddy was curled up beneath his feet, lost in the blissful rest of a dog satisfied by hours of playing with a boy who wanted nothing more.
I said, “You like the dog very much, don’t you?”
Hamish said, “He’s a very friendly dog, that’s why. Even when we first found him, when he was hungry and messy and his paws hurt, he was friendly, and now he’s even more friendly. I think he’s probably the best dog in the world.”
I said, “What would you think about taking him home with us, then?”
Hamish turned a face to me that made my heart turn over. “Can we really?” he asked. “Even if Daddy’s allergic?”
“Daddy doesn’t live at our house anymore,” I said. “And,” I added in a heroic gesture that had better be getting me karmic points, “I know that’s hard for you, and that you miss him and the way our life used to be. Sometimes you think that you have to take care of too many things, too.”
“I have to take care of Olivia,” he said, “because she’s just little.”
I put my arms around him and gave him a proper, two-armed cuddle. “You help me so much. But you’re five years old, and I’m a grownup and a mummy. If you get tired of helping, you may want to go in your room or out in the garden to play. It may be easier to do that if you have a friend, and Buddy’s a pretty good friend.”
“He’s the best friend,” Hamish said, “because he likes to just watch what’s happening and play and have fun, like me, and he never cries or shouts or gets angry. His name is Buddy, but maybe it’s really Budgie!” He laughed, the freckles on his dear little face seeming to glow with it. “I think his inner animal might be a budgie, like mine.”
“Then,” I said, my love for him welling up inside me the way it had since they’d first put him into my arms, “I think we should take him home so the two of you can be budgies together, and friends forever.”
Hamish’s face clouded over. “Except that he’s other people’s friend, too. And the duck’s, because they’re best friends. They may not want me to take him, if they need him too.”
“You know whose idea it was, for you to have him?” I asked.
“Whose?”
/> “It was Koro’s.”
As if he’d heard his name, the old man came in and lowered himself slowly into the old recliner that was so clearly his. He said, “Ah. Is your mum telling you about our dog plan, mate?”
“Yes,” Hamish said. “But you like Buddy. If I take him, you may be sad.”
“I may be,” Koro said. “But I’ll be happy as well. Know why?”
“No,” Hamish said. A bit shyly, and a bit like he was holding his breath. “Why?”
“Because he’s really your dog, is why. Saved him, didn’t you, when he was running around lost, no home to go to, no boy to play with. I was keeping him until you could take him, maybe. He made me happy, and now, I’ll be happy to know he’s playing with you. Happy to know that he’ll be with his boy. What d’you reckon? Got room for him at your place?”
“Yes, please,” Hamish breathed.
“Dog’s a responsibility, of course,” the old man went on. “Got to remember to feed him, make sure he has water every day, and pick up the nasty bits after he poos, because you don’t want your mum having to do that, not a big kid like you.”
“I can do that,” Hamish said. “I help Mum change Isobel when she’s stinky. I’m good at doing hard things.”
Koro nodded slowly. “Could be you are, mate. Could be. Got to play with him every day, too, but I reckon that won’t be too much trouble.”
“No,” Hamish said. “I can throw the ball for him every day before school, and when I come home, too, and he can sleep in my room. And when we go down to the beach, maybe he could go swimming with us, and I could give him a shower outside and dry him off with the towel so he doesn’t get the floors all sandy.”
Koro slapped both hands onto the cracked leather arms of the recliner and said, “Well, then, my son, I reckon you’ve got a dog.”
They smiled at each other, and then Hamish slid off the couch, ran across to him, and threw his arms around him. “Thank you,” he said. “This is the best thing ever. I’ll take very, very good care of him.”
Koro patted his skinny back with his big, gnarled hand. “I reckon you will, mate,” he said. “I reckon you will.”
34
Not a Meerkat
Poppy
When we flew home to Dunedin on Monday morning, my neighbors didn’t just have my naked chest, my wailing baby, and my questionable children to object to. Now, there was also a dog in a carrier under the seat in front of Hamish.
The dog was the quietest of all of them, although Hamish came close. He would’ve ridden under the seat himself if I’d let him, stretched out happily amidst the teeming bacterial life of an airplane floor with his arms around the carrier and his head as close to Buddy’s as he could possibly get it. Buddy might be a dog who’d found his boy, but Hamish was a boy who’d found his dog.
After that, I went home and thought about Matiu too much.
Although it wasn’t exactly thinking. Instead, I drew more of my story in every moment I could snatch during the day, in between buying dog supplies and grocery shopping and hanging out the washing and the rest of the hundred and one tasks that filled my days, and I worked until two A.M. that night, when the unfinished tasks had been put off until the next day, curled up on the couch in my sitting room with my charcoal in my hand, soft music playing from the speakers, and a cup of tea getting cold on the coffee table. And while I did it, I felt Matiu, and I felt my jaguar, too, because I was my lioness and she was me.
When she sneaked away in the last hours before dawn while everybody else was sleeping off their meal, when she loped across the savanna with all the stars in the African night lighting up the sky, feeling that she was much too visible, that this was much too dangerous, and doing it anyway, I knew. When she reached the shelter of the trees after a long hour, her heart beating too hard from running and from excitement and from fear, I knew that, too. And when the jaguar stepped slowly out from behind their tree and his golden eyes met hers, I knew best of all.
I hadn’t had sex with another person in five months, and I hadn’t had an orgasm with another person in the room in longer than that, and I knew like it had already happened.
I was also realizing that I wasn’t a mongoose. I couldn’t be, because I was definitely this lion. As protective of my babies, as single-minded in my determination, and as drawn to my man. Even if it wasn’t the man it was supposed to be, because it seemed I was a rogue lioness. I might be a pack animal, but I drove my own road.
On Tuesday morning at nine, after walking Hamish to school, I made three phone calls. As a result, at nine-thirty, I watched Olivia run into Grandad’s arms with Buddy trotting behind, wagging his feathery black tail, figuring, in typical Buddy fashion, that these people weren’t Hamish, but they’d do, because he had enough love to go around. Phone call one, a favor asked and granted.
At nine forty-five, I got my cheek swabbed and had a wee in a plastic cup at my gynecologist’s office. Phone call two. At ten-thirty, I held Isobel while the pediatrician checked her over. Phone call three. I told her, “My husband was having at least one affair during my pregnancy, and I need to make sure I haven’t infected the baby with anything,” I didn’t look down, either. I looked straight into Dr. Maarten’s eyes.
She didn’t even look surprised. She continued checking the inside of Isobel’s mouth and nose, and then her genitals, examining them with a light and all her attention, and I thought, I will kill you, Max. I will kill you. That was a sight no mother should have to see.
She looked up, finally, snapped off her gloves, and said, “She arrived early, of course, which can be a consequence of a sexually transmitted infection, but she’s checked out well since and looks all good today. She had her eye drops at birth, which means we don’t need to worry about that aspect. Has she been extra-fussy, though? Seemed to have any pain in her joints? Anything else you’re concerned about, that you’ve noticed?”
“No,” I said. “She likes to be carried, but she’s pretty calm, normally. Alert, too. What was that about eye drops?” Isobel was calm right now, in fact, despite all the checking, sucking on her fist and clutching my finger with the other hand, her blue eyes staring into mine. I tried to smile at her, and her entire face scrunched up in a joyous smile that showed both her dimples. My baby.
Dr. Maarten said, “If Mum doesn’t think there’s a problem, there’s usually not a problem. We’ll run the tests to make sure, but I wouldn’t worry too much. The eye drops are a precaution we take with all newborns, as several different STIs can cause blindness. Other than that, we’re beyond worrying about premature birth and miscarriage, and if there is a problem—well, now we know, don’t we?” She glanced at my bare left hand. “I hope you’re taking precautions now, though, and that you’ve got yourself checked as well.”
I’d taken off my rings after Hamish’s first day of school. The day Max hadn’t shown up. The day I’d wondered why I still had them on, and the day I’d divorced him in my heart.
“I’m separated,” I said. “Legally and otherwise. I did it two days after Isobel was born. I’m waiting on my own results, and no worries, I’m not taking him back, no matter what he thinks.”
“Do you have any reason to fear for your safety?” the doctor asked, which made the second time I’d been asked that this morning, since my gynecologist had asked the same thing. It was on an advice pamphlet to doctors somewhere, I was sure.
“No,” I said, and thought, But if any of these tests come back positive, Max should fear for his.
At eleven, I pulled into a side street off the Octagon. I could’ve circled, looking for a carpark amidst the high-end shops, the Art Gallery, and the highest of high-rent office space. Instead, I drove straight into the entrance to the parking garage in the not-quite-Art Deco, gray-and-white-and-glass building with MacGregor on a discreetly posh sign carved from granite at the corner, stopped the car, and dialed a number.
I hadn’t made Phone Call Number Four earlier, because for this one, I wasn’t asking.
“Alistair MacGregor’s office,” the voice said.
“Hi, Louise,” I said. “Poppy here. I’m here to see Dad. Can you buzz me into the garage, please?”
She didn’t tell me my dad was in a meeting, though I was sure he was. She said, “Of course,” and buzzed me in. Louise always did the most important thing, the efficient thing. In other words, she was the kind of woman I’d never be if I lived to be a hundred, and I didn’t care. I was this woman.
I pulled into a visitor’s space and took Isobel out in her portable carrier. I might need my hands for this.
It’s not easy to be an avenging fury when you’re carrying a baby and a nappy bag. I didn’t care about that, either.
The lift all the way to the top, then, more discreet poshness in brushed nickel and gray fabric, and the walk through the open-plan office. Hellos and exclamations, women jumping up to have a look at the baby, which made progress slow, but I kept moving all the way to the back. All the way to the corner suite, in fact, through the first door and up to the guardian at the gate.
She was sitting in an anteroom with a polished teak desk and credenza, all of it absolutely modern, absolutely spare, and absolutely neat. No plants, no photos. Just Louise, her perfectly cut, perfectly silver short hair, her red cashmere cardigan over a black skirt and tights, her statement pearls around her neck, rising from her chair and saying with equally perfect poise and no haste at all, “He’s in a meeting. Your mum’s in, though.”
Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2) Page 25