“I always thought I was a badass.” I was sweating like crazy, and starting to breathe harder, but I was running the anxiety out, maybe. I could feel it leaving, at least for now. I still had the rage, though. “In an intellectual sense, at least. I was a National Merit Scholar in high school. After my brain tumor. That’s a big deal. It’s a scholarship thing, except that I didn’t get a scholarship, because I had Hemi. I was first in my class at NYU, though. I got it done. And I don’t know why I’m even telling you this.”
“You’re not,” Jax said. “You’re telling yourself. Keep talking.”
“It’s bragging, though.”
“So brag. You’ve told yourself the negative things. Let’s hear you say the positive ones.”
“Whoa. What a concept. All right. Here you go. You asked for it. I was one of Inc. magazine’s ‘Faces of Change’ two years ago, and I spoke at last year’s Biodiversity conference in San Antonio. All right, it’s still nerd smarts, but so what? Nerds rule the world. M&P is going to wish they had me back, because Angel isn’t half as good as I am, and I’m going to laugh in their faces. Like this. Ha ha ha.”
I wasn’t exactly convincing myself yet, but maybe I was going where I needed to. I’d thought my cobwebs were swept out, but I could still have some sweeping to do. “I’m not starting over,” I said, “or not really, because I’m not starting from the bottom this time. Maybe I wasn’t doing too well when I got here, but I’m ready to start figuring it out now. Or if I’m not ready, I’m going to do it anyway. Let’s turn around.”
We did, and when we were headed back, watching the tide ebb again, being sucked out from the boulders ahead of us, Jax said, “I’ve been thinking a bit about some of those things myself. One thing in particular.”
“I thought you were already there. I thought you’d decided.”
“There’s that other part, though, isn’t there,” he said. “Everything I threw away so easily before, because I assumed it would always be there, or I didn’t know I needed it.”
“Oh,” I said. “You mean the love thing.” My heart had picked up. You bet it had. That was the thing I hadn’t said, the other thing I’d thought, when I’d been curled on that bathroom floor. That my sister had been married for about five years by the time she’d been my age. That she’d had two kids by then, and a powerhouse husband who’d have moved heaven and earth for her. I didn’t believe in a woman’s life being defined by reproduction, but I was realizing that work only felt like half of my equation.
“Yeh,” Jax said. “The love thing. I never thought much about it, probably because I assumed I deserved it, the attention and all, and that when I was ready, it would be there. Maybe I mentioned that I was an arsehole. Could be I realized a bit too late that it might not be true, and that the woman I wanted might not look at me now and think, “That’s the man for me!” Not in spite of my leg and my face, and not because of it. For the man I am. And then you came along, and you did look at me like that, and here we are.”
It was easier to say, maybe, when you were running, not having to look into somebody’s eyes. Or maybe it was just that Jax had enough courage for anything. Enough mana to say and do the hard things, and to help the people he loved to say and do them, too.
He’d jumped off the waterfall, leg and all, and it hadn’t been easy. I was going to have to follow him in. Kiwi Rules.
Be honest about how you’re going and what you’re up for, our guide had said. Help your mate, and if you get into trouble, sing out.
Or the way Jax had summed it up. When in doubt, jump.
I said, “All right. My turn. Here I go. You ready?”
“You know I am.”
I took a breath and said it. “I was also lying on the floor because I thought I’d found out for sure that I was too much for a man. Too much snark. Too much competitive drive. Too much energy. Too many brains. I was intimidating, and I was tactless, and I had no boobs. Even a company hadn’t wanted me, and nobody was ever going to love me. Sounds so stupid. Sounds like giving up. That’s how it felt, too.”
“Except that it wasn’t,” Jax said. “It was the bottom of the pit. You climbed out.”
My chest was heaving, and not because of the run. I tried to keep going, and I couldn’t. I slowed down, and then I stopped. I bent over from the waist, and then I dropped down and crouched there on the sand with the wind blowing and the shorebirds flying and the sea going out, my breath feeling louder than any of it.
Jax got down there with me. Sort of. Finally, he said, “Bugger this leg,” sat down on the sand, and pulled me down beside him, making a mess of both of us.
I said, “I want to . . . go places. I want to do things. I want to be alive. I want to have some faith. Not just in work. In my life.”
“If you let yourself dream it,” he said, “you can go after it. The same way you did the first time, but better, because you know more than you did back then.”
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand, in yet another display of either badassery or non-femininity, depending on your viewpoint, got to my feet, put a hand out for him, and said, “I notice you didn’t say, ‘If you dream it, you can do it.’”
He got up himself, and we started to jog again. It felt hard, because my legs had stiffened up, but it felt good, too. “That’s because,” he said, “it’s not necessarily true. You don’t know if you can do that thing you dreamt up until you try. And you might not believe in it until you’ve actually done it. The trick is going forward anyway, into the dark. Maybe you don’t make it all the way. No guarantees. Maybe you’ll hit a bump and have to start over one more time. Or two. Or five. But you’ll be farther down the road when you do. How’s that for wise words? They’re true, though. You can say that I found them out the hard way.”
Jax
I’d said something, but I hadn’t said enough. That was why, four days later, I was lying naked in bed, holding Karen’s hand, in a tiny house kilometers from anywhere, in the heart of the dark, because the house was made entirely from glass. Walls, ceiling, floor, everything.
It wasn’t actually the dark we were in at that, because the little house was lit with all the stars there ever were. I looked at the Milky Way curving across the sky and thought about the sea stretching below us, and how Karen had walked with me up the track through the bush, turned a corner, and seen a house of glass sitting on the edge of a ridge, all alone. How she’d gasped, and how happy it had made her. I thought about how much she was going to love our cycle trip next week, too, and said, “Of course, there’s a place I haven’t gone yet.”
“Mm?” She kissed my shoulder, sighed, and asked, “Where’s that? This is a place I’m glad we went, by the way. Poppy should talk these glass-house-things up more on the website, because this is amazing. Who would know these were even here? I’m telling Hemi that this is so, so much better than camping, and he needs to buy the company. My favorite part was the dinner basket. Well, except for the glass. That’s actually my favorite part. This is my idea of a vacation. Something you could never do anywhere else. Something you never knew was possible.”
“You’ve only seen two of the sites,” I pointed out. “There are nine of them. All sorts of brilliant adventures awaiting the curious traveler.”
“Don’t care. I’m sold.”
“It could be a good thing that Hemi’s deciding,” I said, “and not you. I think you’re too easily influenced by sex and scenery. But seriously, there’s a reason I brought you up here instead of going home after the gym, and why we went through Christchurch along the way.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“I wanted to say”—I had to clear my throat for a second here. Harden up, mate. “That Christchurch is where I’d ask to be stationed, if I were choosing for myself, so I thought I’d show it to you, and you could see what you thought. It’s by the sea, and it’s small, which means you can get away easily to places where you can have adventures. That’s a selling point, in case I forgot to mention
it. But there’s also Wellington or Auckland, like we said.”
“Uh-huh,” she said slowly. “Oh, look. A shooting star.” She sighed. “Look how far it went. It really does leave a trail. That’s so cool. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one, except in movies. It’s my first one, and I’m seeing it here, with my Star Sibling. You’re supposed to make a wish.”
“If you’d shut up,” I said, “I’d tell you my wish. This is hard enough as it is.”
“Oh. OK. I’m listening.”
“You don’t have to go back to the States at all,” I said. “There’s such a thing as a work visa. There’s such a thing as a skilled migrant visa, too, if we’re taking leaps.”
The words hung out there like the blazing roof of light overhead. Karen said, “Wow.”
“‘Wow’ isn’t much of an answer.” My heart was beating like I was about to cut the wire that would either blow me up, or make me safe. Never a comfortable moment.
“That would be . . . quite a leap,” she said.
“You don’t have a job now,” I pointed out.
“Geez, thanks. I hadn’t noticed.” She was trying to scowl at me, but I had my fingers on her pulse, and it was racing as fast as mine was. “So you mean—if it was Auckland or Wellington or Christchurch where I found something, you could ask to be stationed there?”
“That’s what I had in mind, yeh. I could ask to be stationed there, and we could live together, to put it fully out there. Or just live close, but if it’s up to me—together.”
“Huh.”
“That’s not much better than ‘Wow.’”
“I don’t know . . . what I’d do, though,” she said.
“There are food science jobs here, surely,” I said. “Of some sort. I’d say that I’d apply in the States, make this sound more balanced, but they probably aren’t looking for Kiwis to join their services, and I don’t think I’m the mercenary type. Also, I think you like New Zealand better than I’d like New York.”
My joke didn’t work, because she was silent for so long, I half-wondered if she’d gone to sleep. This wasn’t at all what I’d been hoping for. Not even close.
Maybe I should’ve gone all the way, with the ring and all. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about it. It was that I’d thought it would scare her off. Maybe that had been just exactly wrong, though. Maybe it was scarier for her to contemplate it without the ring.
I waited, realized that having to wait was probably not a good sign, and thought that compared to finding your way through the maze of what-ifs that were human emotions, defusing a bomb was easy.
Finally, she said, “You know how it matters to you so much that you do the explosives thing? The military thing? You know all that stuff you said to your dad, and to me?”
This was even further from my planned outcome. “I do remember that, yeh,” I said.
“When you say all that, I think—Yes. I want to try to do that. I want to be with you. I think about going home, away from you, and it’s . . . it just feels dark, you know? Bleak. I can’t imagine it. But it feels that way anyway, to tell you the truth. I have this apartment that I really, really hate. I’ve realized that, at least. But then, when I think about how bad it would feel to leave, I think—how can I be so sure about you after such a short time? Is this just more questionable judgment? And then I get in this whole . . .” She twirled her hand in the air. “Spiral thing. Because the one thing I know for sure is—it’s as important to me to do something that matters, something with food, something important, as it is for you. I can’t see my way forward yet, but I keep thinking it’s right there, just around the corner. I can’t quite grab it, but it’s there.”
“And it’s not worth it to you even to try?” I asked.
She’d sat up, now, like she had too much life force to do anything else. In another second, she’d leap from the bed and start to pace. Holding onto her was like holding quicksilver. You’d never manage it, not unless she wanted to be held. “Yes,” she said. “Of course it’s worth it. I made such a bad choice last time, and I know what everybody else would say, but I can tell—I can tell—” She had a fist over her heart, now. “That this isn’t a bad choice. That you aren’t a bad choice. You feel like my . . . my resting place. Like I’ve been swimming and swimming, fighting off the sharks, for so long, and I don’t know how long I can keep it up, and then there’s you, and you’re this . . . island. You’re my safe place, where I can rest, where I can breathe, and where I know the sharks will never get me. That’s how it feels. And I believe in that. I do. I know that nobody else would believe it, and I don’t care, because I know who you are. I feel who you are in my . . . bones, and my bones work with yours. It’s like we match, even though we’re not the same. It’s like we said at the beginning. Our pieces fit, like that piece of the sky in a jigsaw puzzle, the hole where you’ve tried and tried to make a piece fit, and none of them quite do. And then you finally find it, and it slides into place, just like that, so easily. Which is not a dirty joke, so don’t even go there.”
I wasn’t going to make any joke, dirty or otherwise. “But you don’t feel that enough to move here for it.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard for me to say that,” she went on hurriedly, “but it’s wrong for me if I don’t. I want to ask—couldn’t you have wanted something other than the military, been something other than a soldier? How do I know, even if I do move here, that I’ll be with you enough? How do I know that you won’t . . .” Her hand shook in mine. “Die? I don’t. I don’t know, and I hate it. It scares me so much, but anybody can die. Anybody I love. Everybody I love. And besides—it’s who you are. How can I ask you to be something other than who you are, if I love you?”
I sighed, and then I got both arms around her and pulled her in. What choice did I have? None, that was what. I could walk away, except that it wasn’t possible. “You can’t,” I said. “And neither can I. Bugger.”
The next morning, we drove back to Christchurch, and I took Karen on a run around Hagley Park, along the tree-lined walkway beside the Avon River, and through the botanic gardens, and, once she was sweating and smiling, a few more kilometers to the Black Betty Café for breakfast. We sat at a long wooden table, and she ate a potato cake topped with roast tomato, field mushrooms, wilted spinach, and a poached egg, with a decoration of bacon curls and pesto hollandaise on the side, and said, “One thing about New Zealand—they do savory flavors the best of anybody.”
“Mm,” I said. “Could be because we have the best meat, and the best veg, too, although that’s probably from Queensland. All of it has to do with the soil, and how it’s farmed, I hear. We have something better to work with, maybe.”
“And you think I don’t notice this sales job,” she said. “Running through a beautiful park in gorgeous weather, going out for my favorite kind of food, and reminding me that New Zealand has the best meat. After the whole bed-under-the-stars thing. I don’t like gardens as much as Hope, but that was really pretty. You’d never have torn her away from the roses. She’s got a thing for roses.”
I said, “You compare yourself to your sister a fair amount. Have you noticed that?”
She stopped cutting through her stack of breakfast. “I do?”
“And yet I’d swear,” I said, “that you don’t compare me to Hemi.”
“That’s because you’re nothing like him.”
I raised my coffee cup to her in a significant sort of way, and she said, “Huh.”
“Yeh,” I said. “I’m guessing Hope doesn’t compare herself to you, other than admiring your strength.”
“You think she isn’t strong,” Karen said. “People always miss that. She’s plenty strong. You can’t imagine how hard she worked, and how hard it was to keep going. How hard it was to stand up to Hemi, too. You can’t imagine.”
“I believe it. He loves her to the moon and back, that’s easy to see. When a man loves a woman like that, he’ll do anything for her, even change. I didn’t say she wasn’t
strong. I said that she admires your strength as well.”
“You kind of did,” she muttered, still looking narky.
“You fired up just now, for example, because the two of you have that bond. It’s the same way a soldier feels about his mates. Absolute loyalty.”
“Well, yeah. Of course. She’s my sister. She’s my family.”
“Maybe you’re enough as you are, though,” I said. “Whatever way you’re thinking she’s better than you—I don’t think it’s true. At least not the way I see it, and as we know, I’m always right.”
I made her laugh, at least. “I never used to be insecure,” she said. “I never had time to be insecure. I just got it done. I always could, too. That’s what gives you confidence.”
“You aren’t insecure now,” I said. “Your world’s been shaken up, and you’re looking for that way forward. Once you find it, you’ll be getting it done again.”
She sighed. “Would you quit being so perfect? You’re making this really hard.”
I didn’t ask what. I knew what.
We drove home, after that. Through southern Canterbury, across the Waitaki River, and on into Otago. Nothing grand about it, not here. Farmland, peaceful and sleepy, but with the sea on one side and the hills rising inland, and the knowledge that the peaks and glacier-carved lakes of the Southern Alps lay just beyond.
I wanted to take Karen to see all of it, and to be slowed along the way by a mob of woolly sheep, nearly ready for shearing, being herded up the highway by a couple of dogs who cut and wove their way expertly through the flock, intent on their job. By a fella on a dirty green all-terrain vehicle driving behind them, a battered yellow “Caution” sign stuck onto the rear. One hand on the wheel, a repertoire of whistles at his command, and the absolute assurance that the hurried travelers around him, with fifteen New Zealand destinations to see in three weeks, would have to stop for sheep, and might be reminded that this was one of the reasons they’d come. I wanted to cycle with her on the Otago Rail Trail, just because the trees were beautiful in autumn, shining gold and red, and you earned every coffee stop and pub dinner along the way. I wanted to take her skiing in Queenstown in winter, and backpacking on the Routeburn Track in summer, across swing bridges with the mist of the waterfalls around you, in the shadow of the Alps, and to watch her delight when she found herself, at the end of the day, in a lodge with a spa tub, eating the food she loved and drinking New Zealand wine. I wanted to show her a place where you could care about your work, but you could care about the rest of your life as well, and you could share it with the people you loved, because everybody agreed that was the most important part. I wanted her to feel her pulse slow and her heart expand, and I wanted her to share that heart with me.
Kiwi Rules (New Zealand Ever After Book 1) Page 37