It takes a mother’s courage.
“Her results came back negative,” the nurse said, and my legs started shaking so badly, I had to sit down.
“Th-thank you,” I said, and rang off. After that, I had to sit there a few minutes and breathe, while Olivia hopped around the kitchen telling me a long, rambling story about a bunny, and Buddy pranced after her, wagging his tail and pretending that he hadn’t been shedding all over the house and hadn’t built a pile of all Hamish’s shoes this morning in a corner of the laundry room, then lain down with his paws around them like a black-and-white dragon guarding a pile of gold, or maybe just like a dog missing his boy and not understanding the concept of “school.” Meanwhile, Isobel caught me looking at her, waved her fists, kicked her legs, and smiled, all blue eyes, pink gums, and joyful dimples, as if she were saying, “See, Mummy, I’m happy and strong! Soon I’ll be crawling and putting everything into my mouth, including all the dog toys! Won’t we be having fun then!”
“Why are you crying, Mummy?” Olivia asked. “We’re a bunny family, and bunnies don’t cry.”
An hour later, after I’d fixed Olivia her Bunny Sandwich with the crusts cut off, plus carrot sticks with special Bunny Dipping Sauce, my gynecologist’s office rang with the same news about me, which didn’t matter nearly as much, and half an hour after that, Grandad rang up. We talked a while, and in another hour, he and Nan walked through the door.
“We could try it for a bit and see how it works,” I was still trying to say after they’d been there a while. I was folding the washing on the breakfast bar by this point.
“After your grandad’s worked so hard to get all our lives sorted?” Nan asked. She was already cuddling Isobel. “No, darling. Your mum’s visit yesterday was nothing but putting together the final piece of the puzzle that we all should’ve seen sooner. Here we are, after all, none of us getting any younger, missing our chance to spend time with these little ones, because they’ll never be three and five again, will they? Let alone tiny like this precious girl. We won’t be missing it anymore, though.” She told Olivia, “Grandad Charlie and I are going to come to your house and have fun with you every Monday and every Wednesday afternoon, like today, so your mummy can have time to work and maybe even—oh, I don’t know, maybe have some grownup fun of her own. Seems like time for that. Past time, if you ask me.”
“Will Hamish be there too?” Olivia asked. “Because Hamish likes to play with me.”
“After he’s done with school, he will,” Nan said. “And on Thursdays after lunch, you’re all going to go to your Nana and Grandad’s house, and your Nana’s cleaner is coming here and getting your house beautiful again while you’re gone, like magic. You’ll have your nap there, and so will the baby, and then you’ll all go to school and collect Hamish and do all the fun things there are at their house, and maybe some things outside of their house as well. You’re going to have dinner there, and come home at bedtime.”
“I want to swim in the big pool,” Olivia said, “and help grow Nana’s plants in the glass house and make cookies, because Nana does the best cooking, and go in Nana’s big car and have ice cream. But I don’t want to take a nap. The baby can take a nap, because she’s little.”
“You can talk that over with your Nana,” Grandad said, and winked at me. “She’s had three kids herself, hasn’t she. Besides, she’s still got stamina.”
“I don’t ...” I was still trying to say. “It’s wonderful, of course. You can’t imagine how good all of that sounds right now. Especially the cleaner. But ... should I want it?”
“Of course you should want it,” Nan said.
Grandad, though, held up a hand and said, “Let her ask, Bethany.”
“Isn’t it ...” I tried to explain. “Isn’t it my responsibility?”
Grandad sat at the breakfast bar, set his elbows on a pile of sheets and steepled his fingers—his thoughtful pose—and said, “Interesting question. I think I’d ask—isn’t it ours? Maybe we haven’t shifted course quickly enough, haven’t recognized what’s been right there to see. What was there before Max left, for that matter. You don’t need to be Maori, I hope, to know what it means to care for your whanau, to lend a hand. And you surely don’t have to be Maori to come over twice a week and play with your great-grandchildren.”
“I should hope not,” Nan said. “Because I’m holding this baby as much as I can get her.”
“You could wonder,” Grandad said, “why we haven’t done it before. But I think I know the answer. You’ve always seemed to have things under control, haven’t you. You’ve juggled everything and kept a smile on your face doing it. Shame on us, maybe, for not looking deeper.”
“And your mum says,” Nan said, “that you can pay the cleaner yourself. Though actually, I imagine that was your dad.”
I was choking up, but I was laughing, too. “I reckon you’re right,” I said. “But I seemed to have things under control? Me, with my piles of washing and my mad dashes to the supermarket, queen of the sticky note?”
“Yes,” Grandad said. “You. It may have felt like chaos, but it hasn’t been chaos, has it? Here you still are, in fact, getting it all done, the kids and the books and the business and all. The kids won’t be tiny forever, and maybe you’ll want to do something else anyway. Hire a nanny, maybe. There’ll be time to think about that, but the time isn’t now, not when they’re adjusting to so many changes and you’re doing the same. When you’re starting to draw again, too.”
Since my sketchpad was right in front of me, I could hardly deny it. “Yes,” I said. “It’s an odd direction I’m taking, nothing I ever thought I’d do, but maybe it’s the road that leads me on. Hard to say.”
“The road that leads you on,” Grandad said slowly, and smiled. “I like that. I like it very much.”
The doorbell rang, and I rose to answer it, and to give myself a chance to gather my disordered wits. I wasn’t expecting anybody, and I probably had charcoal streaks on my cheek. I generally did. Also, it was almost time to go collect Hamish.
Oh, well. I had things under control, apparently. I answered the door.
It was a woman. She was standing behind an arrangement of something very white and very large, and she handed it over, saying, “Careful. It’s heavy,” and was off.
I headed back to the kitchen just as my phone rang. From somewhere. Not my pocket, because for once, I was wearing something prettier than the sludge-colored cardigan. From the laundry room, possibly. It stopped ringing, and then it started up again.
So much for getting things under control.
Matiu
By noon on Wednesday, I couldn’t sit around another minute. Instead, I strapped my surfboard to the roof rack, threw the bag with my thickest wetsuit into the car, headed to Andersons Bay to collect Daisy, fastened her surfboard up next to mine, and drove the ten minutes to St. Clair Beach.
The wind was blowing strong and warm out of the northeast, and the waves were forming the kind of hollow tubes you hoped for. Daisy was a very good surfer, no surprise, the kind of partner you wanted out here on a day when the tide was running strong and the rips threatened. We surfed a couple hours, then took our cold, worked-out-to-jelly bodies to the Starfish Café, where I checked my phone and found zero missed calls, and Daisy had a burger and I ate salmon.
“I’m eating for the night shift, though,” she told me, “and you’re eating to sit around on your gorgeous arse for five more days.”
“Cheers,” I said, and she laughed.
“No worries,” she said. “Soon be over, and besides, everybody knows you didn’t do it.”
I looked up, startled. “They do? How?”
She laughed again, then looked at my face and laughed some more. “Matiu. Be serious. Yeh, you brought that reputation with you. You also look like a film star and have a smile that should come with a warning label and a body like sin. You look like pure dark temptation, but I invited you back for a coffee every single time we ran, at le
ast I did at the start. And what happened there?”
I said, “Wait, what? I came for a coffee, at least most of the time.”
This time, she laughed harder. “I’d think it was me,” she said, wiping her eyes on a napkin, “but let’s be honest here, I’m pretty bloody fit. Nah, it’s not me. And then there’s Samantha, who’s both curvier and blonder, and what did you do when she came to you on that quiet night shift and asked about that intubation?”
“I ... talked to her about the intubation?” Samantha was an intern, and, yes, she was pretty bloody fit herself.
Daisy reached across the table and stabbed her forefinger into my chest. “Exactly. Exactly. All I can say is, Tauranga’s idea of a hot doc is seriously lacking. Could be you’re just not up to Otago standard, or could be you’ve been coasting on your reputation, because, boy? You don’t measure up. I’d think you were gay, reputation or no, but you notice who’s cute. You appreciate it, too. You just don’t care.”
“Oh.” I felt pretty stupid. I was also smiling. “Sorry to offend.”
She waved a hand. “Nah. I’m over it, and I reckon Poppy Cantwell’s safe, too. Doesn’t sound up to your speed, if your speed is anywhere close to what we were promised. I doubt she’s shagging clueless, uninterested Dr. McHotbody, no matter what her lunatic ex thinks. She writes kids’ books about hippos, and she just had a baby. I saw her, remember? She’s a mum. So come on, finish up and drive me home. No point in hanging about here if you’re not going to jump my beautiful bones. I’ll take myself off to the hospital instead. Who knows? Maybe I’ll meet a single billionaire tonight, curiously holidaying in Dunedin, because he’s odd like that, and nurse him back to health.”
“If he’s in Emergency,” I said, “he’s likely to be a billionaire with a pacemaker. Probably be bald, too.”
“Stop pissing on my dreams,” she said, and now, we were both laughing.
When I got back to my place at last around five, still with zero calls showing on my phone, there was a woman sitting at the table on my tiny slab of deck.
No, not that woman. It was Jennifer, the blonde gynecologist from the hospital.
I had bags of women, it seemed. I had women coming out of the woodwork. Just not the right one.
38
A White Heron
Poppy
The woman at my front door handed me a bouquet. Not wrapped in cellophane, and not tied with ribbon. In an enormously heavy vase. Enormous, because it had to hold all these flowers.
My breath was coming so short, I nearly had to stop to rest on the way back to the kitchen. It could have been from the strain of carrying that vase, but it wasn’t. It was the strain of not knowing.
I set the vase down beside the pile of kids’ undies and T-shirts and Babygros on the kitchen bench. Unicorns and kittens and ladybugs, yellow ducks and pink giraffes, Spiderman and Paw Patrol, and a billowing mass of white petals rising out of a cut-glass vase.
Nan said, “Oh, my.” Grandad didn’t say anything.
I said, “It’s so ... white.”
“It is,” Nan said. “White roses, white hydrangeas, and snapdragons. Just lovely.”
I said, “I could identify the roses, anyway,” and then I didn’t say anything. I was overwhelmed by scent and texture and message. The arrangement was lush, feathery, old-fashioned, and as unexpectedly sensual as a featherbed covered in the finest white Egyptian cotton and heaped with pillows, the dusty green of eucalyptus driving the softness home. These flowers said Come lie down with me like they were singing it. And then there was the scent, the kind that angels would use in heaven.
A white envelope was stuck into the midst of the arrangement, and it was calling to me, but it was like that call from the pediatrician, too. I wanted to open that envelope so much, and I was afraid to open it. My heart was trying to say something, or maybe it wasn’t saying it. Maybe it was hoping it, and that much hope was dangerous.
Nan’s eyes were sparkling, and she didn’t seem to have any mixed feelings at all, because she said, “Open it, darling.”
“It must be Max,” I said. “Max always does flowers. It’s the only thing he knows, and he wants me back. He’s been texting every day, and I’ve been ignoring him, because what’s the point? Flowers would totally be his next step, though. It has to be him, because I haven’t done anything else to get flowers. I’d say my publisher, that maybe I’ve reached some sales milestone, but they always send me cheerful things. Poppy-type things, or actually, Hazel-type things. A bouquet of iced tulip-shaped cookies on sticks, that’s more their style.”
Grandad’s blue eyes had sharpened. “What do you imagine,” he said, “that a woman has to do to get flowers?”
“I think we all know the answer to that,” I said, because Olivia was right there.
“Maybe you haven’t known the right man, then,” Grandad said. “Only one good reason to send a woman flowers that I know of. That you’re thinking of her, and you want her to know it.”
“Come on, darling,” Nan said. “Open it. It’s not even for me, and I’m dying to know. Anybody with a soul romantic enough to send those flowers knows exactly what to say in a note, and I want to hear it.”
“That’s what I’m wondering,” I said. “Is it just a ... romantic gesture?”
“Would that be bad?” Grandad asked.
I didn’t say anything, because it sounded ridiculous. Yes, it would be bad. If it were practiced, if it were part of some seduction routine, it would be worse than bad. It would break my heart.
You couldn’t stand and stare at an envelope forever, though, and I was tired of being stuck and tired of being scared. Also, I recognized the handwriting, at least I thought I did. More of a scrawl, really. Couldn’t be a florist. There was only one profession whose practitioners had handwriting that bad. I took a breath, plucked the envelope from its holder, opened it, and pulled out a card.
Fine, heavy white stock. Linen, maybe, and scored by a human hand, not a machine. On the front was a photograph. Gray water, and gray mist rising from it, the darker gray branches of willow forming a delicate tracery in the background. A misty dawn on a marsh, and a white bird skimming over it, its long tail nearly brushing the water, its wide white wings curved, its endlessly long, slim neck describing a perfect S, the entire graceful shape of it reflected in the water beneath.
It was probably the most beautiful photograph I’d ever seen. It was mystery and magic, suspended in midair, caught in flight. But it still didn’t fit any idea of “romantic gesture” I’d ever heard of. It was a bird.
I opened the card.
No signature. Completely blank inside, in fact, except for four words.
He kotuku rerenga tahi. Written better than he’d written my name. Written carefully, so I could read it.
I said, “I don’t know what it means, though,” and showed it to my grandparents.
“Best look it up, wouldn’t you say?” Grandad asked.
“Oh.” I felt stupid. “Yes.”
I still couldn’t remember where my phone was, so I went upstairs for my laptop instead, my thoughts whirling. How could flowers and a card feel this important? How?
I brought the laptop down without finding any answers in my head, afraid to listen to the answers in my heart, and typed the phrase into the search bar.
A white heron flies once.
I said, “I still don’t understand.”
Grandad said, “May I?” When I shoved the laptop over to him, past the unicorns and the kittens and the Paw Patrol, he clicked around a while, then smiled and read aloud, the Maori words rolling off his tongue, because he’d taught Maori literature, too, once upon a time. Because he had so much wisdom in him, and so much magic.
“He kotuku rerenga tahi,” he said. “The white heron flies but once. A bird of the spirit, beautiful and rare. A bird of the lonely marshes, seldom seen. Something that appears only once in a lifetime. Used to refer to something special. Something precious. Something unique.”
Matiu
I had my surfboard under one arm and my drenched wetsuit bag in the other. I was sandy and cold and tired.
I’d checked my phone again in the car.
No missed calls.
I said, “Hi,” to Jennifer, then, “Come in.”
“I will,” she said. “I bring you interesting news. Be all over the hospital by tomorrow, I’m sure. You haven’t heard yet?”
“I’ve been surfing,” I said, laying my surfboard against the outer wall and unlocking the door. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear interesting news. “I need a shower. Get yourself a beer, if you like. Ten minutes.”
That was why, though, I was naked when the doorbell rang, and grabbing a towel when it rang again. Racing out of the bedroom and across the lounge before Jennifer’s amused eyes, then thinking, partway there, that it might not be the best look to answer the door to my landlady, for example, wearing only a pretty skimpy towel.
Also, Poppy didn’t have my address.
The doorbell rang again, and I opened the door anyway. My head was telling me no, but my heart was telling me yes, and for once, my heart was winning.
It was Poppy. Wearing a soft yellow dress that tied at the side, her hair a bit tousled, and no makeup at all on her pretty face. She was brimming with excitement, or emotion, or something. Something that made me think, She got them. And she didn’t call me. She came. Somehow, she came. My heart was trying to float away, and I couldn’t feel my feet. That would be because I wasn’t taking in enough oxygen. Breathing too shallowly. And I couldn’t do anything about it.
Her eyes dropped to my chest, to the towel, then back up again. “Oh,” she said. “Hi.” She laughed, a breathless sound, and I couldn’t do anything else. I put my arms around her, keeping it gentle, and then I pulled her into me and kissed her. Softly at first, and then a little better, because she had a hand on my shoulder and the other one at the back of my neck, and she was kissing me back. I could feel that tiny gap between her teeth and all of her softness against me, and I was drowning in the scent of her, like clean cotton on the washing line and the wind from the sea.
Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2) Page 28