“Yeh.” I sniffed some and running my fingers under my eyes, wishing I had a tissue, until my mum rummaged in the nappy bag and handed one over. I blew my nose. “It did. It does. It hurts, and I can’t do it anymore. I can’t, so don’t ask me to. Marrying him in the first place was wrong, maybe. Staying with him was wrong, definitely. But leaving him wasn’t wrong. It’s the most right thing I’ve done. And then there’s Matiu. All he did was try to help me. Why did you do that to him? Why would you?”
The brows came down again. “Came running to you, did he, as soon as it happened. That’s no way for a man to act. You didn’t see the signs with Max, sounds like. I’m telling you the signs now.”
I wasn’t crying anymore when I said, “No. Just exactly not. He didn’t even tell me. Jax told me.”
“Jax. What would Jax know about it?”
“Jax knows almost as much as you do. Somehow.”
Another long pause. “Makes you wonder why he won’t take over the business, then.”
“Dad.” I tried to make it stern. He’d softened me up too much, but he’d still done that to Matiu. “You need to make this right.”
“Doesn’t work that way,” he said. “You don’t ring a fella up and say, ‘Never mind, my daughter says she’s all good with her doctor spending the night.’ Doesn’t really help, does it. No matter what your reasons were, he still did it.”
I wasn’t going to tell him it hadn’t been sexual, because it didn’t matter whether it had been or not. And besides, I’d wanted it to be sexual. I’d felt that pull from the moment Matiu had written his name down on a grease-stained scrap of brown paper on the day he’d delivered my baby, and I’d been feeling it ever since. I said, “It wasn’t wrong, though. I’m done being married, two years to dissolution or not. I’m legally separated. We have a custody agreement. It’s done, and more importantly, Matiu’s done being my doctor. He was done as soon as I left the Emergency Department, and that’s the rule. It’s about the doctor-patient relationship, not the ex-patient relationship.”
My dad was still in there trying. “How do you know? Because he told you? Self-interest and truth aren’t the best bedfellows.”
“I know because I researched it. He didn’t tell me much, and he didn’t want to tell me anything. Do you know why? Because he thought it would hurt me. I have the feeling he’s an extremely good doctor. If you want to be sure, though, don’t listen to me. Research his record for yourself. Ask around. See if I’m right. And when you’ve found out, go to the hospital again and tell them you were wrong. Tell them about Max. Tell them who he is, and what he did. Tell them he wants me back, and tell them why you think that is. I’ll give you a hint. I think it’s got heaps more to do with who you are than with who I am. Tell them about Matiu, and tell them about me. I’d tell them, but why would they listen to me, since I’m meant to be the duped victim here? Please. Tell them. He doesn’t deserve this.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said, and looked at my mum. “We’ll talk about it.”
My mum said, “Darling,” and it took me a second to realize she was talking to me, not my dad. “Don’t worry,” she told me. “If your dad was wrong, he’ll make it right. He won’t be able to do anything else.” She looked at my dad, then, and said, “We always thought Jax was the tough one, didn’t we, Alistair? I’m not so sure anymore.”
“She has you in her, that’s all,” my dad said. Gruffly.
“No, my darling,” my mum said. “Not just me. I don’t think you need to worry about our sweet Poppy after all, because it turns out she has more than me in her. She has you.”
36
Deep Water
Matiu
When I woke in the dark on Monday morning in Tane and June’s guest room once again, the only thing I knew for sure was that my life was slipping out of my control, and that I hadn’t even seen it going.
That, and that Poppy hadn’t texted me when she’d got home. Crossed signals, or mixed signals, maybe. She didn’t know what she wanted from me, or she did, and I didn’t want to give it to her. Or I did, but the price was too high.
I pulled on my clothes and headed out the door with Tane, climbed into his battered old ute, and headed to Koro’s, where we hitched up the trailer and took the winding road through the gray predawn gloom. Past stands of native bush and waving stalks of roadside pampas grass, past the tight, tall hedges of willow that protected the trellised kiwifruit orchards from the wind, and on to Tauranga, on our way to put the boat in the water.
When in doubt, when in pain, the water was my refuge. An odd thing, maybe, considering my history, but there you were. I was Maori, a child of the sea since Tamatekapua and his oarsmen had made landfall on the shores of Maketu after the long journey from Hawaiiki, steering by the stars by night and the sun by day, back when the sea was full of whales.
On the other hand, I wore my life vest.
The light was still gray when I started the boat’s engine and gave Tane the thumbs-up, and he backed the trailer farther down until the boat floated free. By the time he was hoisting himself on board, though, the barest trace of pink was showing.
The band of gold spread across the horizon and turned the black and silver of the choppy waves to a soft blue, and I drove the boat into the rising sun as the wisps of cloud turned pink. We drank the coffee Tane poured, the twin outboards growled, and we reached Astrolabe Reef as the sun came up.
We caught snapper for Tane and June’s tea tonight and terakihi that Tane would smoke for later, and watched the wheeling, diving seabirds in the distance that signaled the presence of kingfish, gorging on the early-summer schools of baitfish. We didn’t have the rig for the size of them and didn’t need the meat anyway, so we contented ourselves with watching for the flash of iridescent silver and blue as they leaped from the water and dove again to compete with the birds for their early-summer feed.
It didn’t take more than an hour to catch what we needed, and then I was getting myself into my wetsuit while Tane motored us past the buoys that marked the submerged wreck of the Rena, the container ship that had gone down here some years back in a spectacular error of judgment, spilling its containers and its oil into the reef. The environmental disaster had eventually become a diver’s fun zone, but it wasn’t my destination today. I had no scuba tanks, and I wanted no complications. Instead, Tane drove to a shallow section of reef, where the deep blue changed to a paler, purer shade, and I pulled my snorkel mask down, slid over the side, and went in.
The shock of cold through the suit, the waving strands of kelp like mermaid’s hair. A school of blue maomao shining like sapphires, another of kahawai moving together like a flock of silvery starlings, and the lazy, tail-waving navigation of an enormous snapper, too wily to be caught. I took my time under the surface, the only sound that of my breath in and out of the snorkel, my movements as languid as the snapper’s. I drifted, and I watched, and I didn’t think about Poppy, about suspensions, about hospitals, about death. I felt the cold on my hands and my head and the freedom you got from your heart rate slowing and your breath coming easy. Living underwater, the closest you could come to being a dolphin.
It was a dangerous thing to compare your inside to somebody else’s outside, even a dolphin’s. Dolphins had troubles of their own. But it felt good to go there for a bit.
When I got back to the boat, Tane was there, helping to pull me in, laughing as I stripped off my wetsuit and shivered my way back into my clothes.
“You’re not meant to do that when you’re not a kid anymore,” he told me. “Or could be you’ve just got no insulation, boy.” I laughed and said something about his belly, and we drove back to Tauranga under a blue sky, where we tied up and headed out for breakfast, walking over the Chapel Street bridge and down through the town, past runners and mums with pushchairs on the footpath by the harbour, and holiday-morning breakfasters under umbrellas on the pavement, enjoying the sunshine.
Tane asked, eventually, “Good to be back, is i
t? Or no?”
“It’d feel better if I were here on holiday,” I said. “It’s odd, not working. This was the end of the run I did after a shift, heading back to the hospital carpark after an hour or so. After midnight, in the dark. Like snorkeling, maybe.”
“Peaceful,” Tane said. “Washed clean. You miss it, down there in Dunedin?”
I had to pause to think about that. “Can’t tell. Too soon, maybe. The work’s the same.”
“But maybe you’re not,” he said. “Could be easier to be somebody else if you’re someplace new.”
We were passing a bookshop, where a woman was just opening the doors for business, and I hesitated, then turned back and told Tane, “Hang on. Quick stop.”
All the way to the children’s section in the back, where Poppy’s eight Hazel the Hippo books were on prominent display in a colorful pasteboard pop-up rack decorated with what must be her characters. Animals dressed in clothes, looking like kids. A cat with curly red hair that reminded me of Olivia, and a blue hippo in a girl’s school uniform.
Tane picked up one of them, paged his way through it, laughed, and showed me a drawing. A puppy racing through the house with a roll of toilet tissue unspooling behind him, and the blue hippo-girl racing after it. “True to life, I reckon,” he said. “And I’m guessing publishers don’t make these special racks for just anybody. She must sell heaps of books. Going to buy one?”
“Yeh,” I said. “Why not. Could give them to my great-nephew, couldn’t I. He’ll be old enough for them soon.”
“You could,” Tane said.
I bought three of them, and we walked on to breakfast, sitting at an outdoor table at Alimento, on a back street away from the tourist traffic. I ate a tiger prawn salad with soba noodles and Tane ate an eggs benny with smoked salmon and enough hollandaise to clog his arteries and laughed at me some more for not knowing the difference between breakfast and lunch, another casualty of confusing your internal clock with too many different shifts for too many years. And we both read about Hazel.
The life burst out of Poppy’s ink drawings. Funny and detailed, from the slope of the ceiling in Hazel’s dormer bedroom to the teapot on the round kitchen table. Not a modern, streamlined New Zealand house, but a homey one made of wood, decorated with yellows and blues and greens, sunny and warm. The illustrations had been finished with watercolor paints, that same sunniness to them, but with subtlety, too, and an expressiveness I should have expected.
Hazel’s First Day, the one I had was called. I remembered Hamish’s first day, how tentative he’d been, standing at the edge of things, and opened the book to see Hazel worrying about the same things, especially that she didn’t know how to read yet, and she might not know where the toilet was. I saw her getting exasperated when her little brother messed up her school uniform, lying neatly on the chair beside her bed, and her mother telling her that in school, everybody would be her age and wouldn’t mess things up, and that the teacher would tell her where the toilets were.
When she wanted to take her special pink blanket to school for the first day, though, her mum said that you didn’t have blankets at school, and when she sneaked it into her backpack anyway, just in case she got scared and needed to go hold it, the other kids saw it and laughed, and she ran all the way home and told her mum that she was going to quit school.
Maybe in three or ten or six more days, she decided, she would quit. She could go to the library instead of school. That would be a good plan. The library was quiet and peaceful, and if she looked at books every day, she could learn all the school things, because school was about looking at books. Her mum said to wait a few more days to decide, maybe until Saturday, because you’d have to learn to read the books by yourself first if you were going to school at the library. That made sense, so she made that her plan instead, especially because her mum said that on Saturday, they could go to the library and get some new books, and then go for special ice cream and have another talk about it.
The next day, she swung on the swings at recess and sang a little Swinging Song she made up and thought about how she would go to school at the library, except that the library didn’t have swings, so that was a problem. A boy named Tom came to swing, too, but he didn’t know how to pump with his feet, and some of the other kids laughed. She showed him how to pump, and he made up a new verse of the Swinging Song, and they sang it together very loudly until the end of recess.
And on Saturday, her mum took her and Tom to the library, and they had ice cream afterwards and decided not to go to school at the library yet, because the library didn’t have swings, and besides, next week it was Hazel’s turn to feed the guinea pig that lived in a cage in the classroom.
She and Tom could go to the library next Saturday, too. Maybe by then, they’d know how to read.
I smiled my way through the whole thing. Hazel was an extremely human-looking hippo, with her little round ears and her blue-and-green-plaid school uniform, and Tom was a very shy bear.
When I closed the book, Tane said, “Funny how well she knows kids, especially since her own kids can’t have been very old when she wrote them. This one came out four years ago. What was Hamish then, a year old?”
“You’re right,” I said. “She’s got hold of it. How important everything feels when you’ve got no perspective and no life history to draw on. Everything’s the first time, and everything’s overwhelming. I recognize that now that I’ve read it, but I wouldn’t have thought of it, and I must see more kids in a day than Poppy ever does.”
“She remembers, I guess,” Tane said.
“Yeh. She notices things. Notices feelings, somehow, as if they’re out there to see.”
I didn’t tell him about her new drawings, because they felt private. Intimate. The first ones in her sketchbook, of the basketball game, and how she’d captured Tane, trying to make up with his bulk and wingspan for what he’d lost in his vertical jump, and the laughter on his face as he did his best. Content in himself and in his life, with his little house next to Koro’s, his wife and his whanau and taking the boat out onto the water, in a way few men were. In a way I’d never been, because I’d needed excitement the same way Tane needed roots.
Could you have roots and excitement? If you had a job that changed from minute to minute, if it wore you down at times, might you want to sail back into that safe harbour again at the end of a day when your actions had been the only difference between living and dying, and the responsibility was sometimes too much? If you had some kids, too, who changed from minute to minute and day to day themselves? And if you had a woman with a mind as nimble as a mongoose, a woman with a heart like a lion. A heart strong enough to hold your own, and a woman brave enough to go out with you into the deep water where you were both over your head, to hold you up there the same way you were holding her.
Poppy had got Jax down, too, his movements more fluid than you could imagine an amputee’s could be. He seemed to have come by his gifts so casually, but I knew it wasn’t true. Battling through the kind of injuries he’d suffered was more about your mental and emotional strength than your physical prowess. And being looked at with revulsion, when you’d been famous for your beautiful face and body? That would be a hard hill to climb. Somehow, Poppy had captured her brother’s dignity, and his pride, as he climbed it.
Karen, too, all the life force of her. The challenge she threw out every single day to her husband, and how much he relished that challenge. It wouldn’t have been right for me, but it was right for him, and you saw it because Poppy saw it, and she showed it.
And then the rest of the pages. How she’d seen me, too, and then how she’d transformed me. First into an alien being, or possibly a superhuman one, and then how she’d made me into something more powerful and more ... dangerous.
Dangerous, because that was the feeling that came through every single drawing. Darkness and desire wound so tightly together, you couldn’t separate one from the other. Both of them, the lioness and the dark jagua
r, drawn in despite themselves, despite every better intention. Knowing this would change their lives, that it might even end them, and unable to care, because they’d promised, and they needed to keep that promise.
Passion. Commitment. Honor.
Not the man I’d ever thought I’d been. The man she saw anyway.
Finally, the way she’d drawn herself. The lioness standing, one paw raised, staring down at a pawprint in the mud, her sisters and aunties in the distance, her comfort zone retreating across the savanna while, in the lower right of the picture, trees draped with vines formed a shadowy portal.
The pictures didn’t need words. I didn’t need any words to know she was tempted, and I didn’t need any words to know she was scared.
Tane asked, “What are you going to do?” No laughter in his eyes. Wisdom, instead, and I realized, with the kind of inner vertigo that was your world shifting, that Tane was going to become Koro. That he very nearly was already.
And that it was time to find my own courage. Time to head out into that deep water. Time to see if I could swim, and if I could hold somebody else up while I did it. Somebody precious. Somebody real.
I said, “I’m going to do my best.”
37
Out of the Woodwork
Poppy
A few things happened on Wednesday.
First, I got a call from the pediatrician’s office.
Have you ever waited for a call like that? You see the number and want to pick up more than anything, because you need that answer, and yet you don’t want to pick up at all, because you know that if you hear the wrong thing, your life will change. It takes courage to pick up, courage to know the truth instead of hoping for the best, and to know that whatever it is, you’ll cope, because that baby is yours, and you’re there for her all the way.
Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2) Page 27