Warriors on both sides of the bloodline.
They were Rhys’s eyes, and his hairline.
“Right,” he said. “She looks like me. But I still didn’t sleep with her mum. Absolutely not.” His mouth said the words, even as the rest of him was acknowledging the truth.
“I’ll give you the gist of the statement from the friend,” Colin said. “Elizabeth Hartwell.” He was speaking so deliberately now, his words came down like concrete. “India met you in a pizza place—Pizzeria Uno—two days before the All Blacks game, with a few other men who introduced themselves as New Zealand rugby players. As All Blacks. She was a waitress there, and you ended up exchanging numbers. You were persistent. She was excited. After the game, she met you in a sports bar—I don’t have the name of that—by previous arrangement. You had drinks, and you talked about flying her over to London for the next stop of the Northern Tour. You went home with her, and left her place before dawn, saying you had to get back to the hotel in order to fly out with the team. You promised to email her, but when you did, you said the London trip wouldn’t be possible. She was disappointed. The rest of the email was about . . .” Colin gave a dry little lawyer-cough. “Intimacies. You definitely gave your name to her, though, as Rhys Fletcher, and you definitely told her—multiple times—that you played for the All Blacks. You wouldn’t let her take your photo.”
“So far,” Rhys said, “it’s nothing.” Except for that school photo, and those eyes.
Colin went on. “When she emailed you a few months later to tell you she was pregnant and was having the baby, you promised to take care of her, but asked her not to contact you again, because you’d got married since the two of you had met. You sent her four hundred dollars a month for three and a half years, deposited directly into her bank account, after which the payments became sporadic, and then stopped altogether. I find that timing significant, given what you’ve just told me. I’m sure you do, too. Her emails went unanswered, and as the United States and New Zealand don’t have a reciprocity agreement for child support, she had no way of collecting. ‘She couldn’t afford to go to a lawyer for nothing,’ were the friend’s exact words. ‘She knew she was stuck.’ If you’re certain it wasn’t you, we have to ask ourselves why she looks so much like you, and why the actual father gave your name.”
What Rhys wanted to say was, “It’s a sad story, but it wasn’t me, too bad. I’m not the only man in the world with hazel eyes. It was some other tattooed fella, feeding a pretty blonde a line to get her between the sheets. ‘I’m an All Black’ isn’t the least-used tactic in the world for a Kiwi abroad, I hear.”
He didn’t say it, because the All Blacks hadn’t been the only team playing that weekend, and because Te Rangi had more than one cousin. The Maori All Blacks had played the night before the marquee event, and Dylan had been selected for the Maori All Blacks that year. Not happy to have been left out of the ABs squad once again, and resenting, as much as happy-go-lucky Dylan had been able to resent anything, his big brother, who hadn’t been left out. Also as usual. Borrowing Rhys’s name, and his stature, for a night, and looking enough like him for a girl checking out a photo online to be fooled. A too-young, too-credulous girl, maybe, who believed in Cinderella, in flights to London and a whirlwind future. In being swept off your feet. Rhys’s hand was fisting at the thought.
Dylan had also been married. Another excellent reason to borrow your brother’s identity, if you had a wife and a year-old baby at home. And if that baby had just had surgery for a hole in his heart, and you were a man who thought life hadn’t been quite fair to you, and what was the harm in snatching a little harmless fun when you had the chance? What Zora didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and she barely had time for you, anyway.
Which meant that Dylan wasn’t getting as much sex as he wanted. Rhys hadn’t needed to hear that last bit spelled out. He’d wanted to put his fist through the wall when Dylan had said it, after Rhys had caught him kissing a pretty brunette in the toilet corridor of a Christchurch bar, a couple months before Chicago. Actually, he’d wanted to put his fist through his brother.
He didn’t want to ask the next question, but there was no way around it. He had to know. “What is it, exactly, that I’m meant to do now?”
“The mother died, as I mentioned,” Colin said. “Suddenly, without being able to make plans for her daughter. Hit by an inattentive driver—an uninsured driver, unfortunately—at a pedestrian crossing, on her way to work. Which leaves the other parent as sole guardian. As things stand—you.”
Yeh. A gut punch.
“I’m single,” Rhys said. “Not in a position to take care of a kid.”
“She could have said the same, of course.”
He wished Colin wouldn’t be so bloody reasonable. “There must be somebody else,” he realized with relief. “Somebody more fit. They’re probably frantic now, the grandparents or the auntie or whoever, thinking they’ve got to let her go to En Zed, to a dad she doesn’t even know and who never cared enough to meet her. Who’s she with now? That’s where she should stay, surely.”
He’d pay. He’d have to pay. No getting around it. Those eyes. That hairline. The defiant way she looked at the camera.
Most people ran from fear. Other people made fear do the running. He had a feeling he knew which kind she was.
“Now?” Colin said. “She’s in temporary foster care. She’s been there for . . . let’s see . . . six days. That’s how long it took them to track you down and get in contact with me, after finding your name on the birth certificate, the Acknowledgment of Paternity filed with the state, and hearing the details from the friend.”
“No grandparents, then,” Rhys said. “No aunties.” That hollow feeling in his stomach? That was what it felt like to have the lift drop ten stories all at once beneath you.
“No,” Colin said. “Just you. If you want the girl, you call them and tell them so, and she stays in foster care until you come to get her, simple as that. That’s one option. If you don’t want to take her, I tell them, sorry, he denies it absolutely. His signature was forged, and he wasn’t the one making the payments. This is the first he’s heard of her. At that point, she’d become a ward of the state. As I mentioned, New Zealand has no reciprocal agreement with the United States, much less with the state of Illinois. They can’t compel a DNA test, or child support, for that matter, any more than they could six years ago. You can ask for a test, of course. That would probably be simplest, if you’re certain it would absolve you. Anything less than ninety-nine percent probability would be as good as a total miss. ‘Close’ doesn’t count.”
“I just have one question,” Rhys said.
“Go ahead.”
“Why the hell would you tell me that, when you know it isn’t an option? And when you know bloody well that if it had been me in that hotel room, that apartment, whatever it was, I’d have stepped up six years ago, and kept stepping up, for the same reason I will now, and not with four hundred dollars a month, either? Because it’s not a choice.” The dragon was loose. No holding him back. “She’s my responsibility, and you know it. Where would I have been if my Nan had felt that way, or the aunties? If they’d said, ‘Sorry, mate, got no room for you and your little brother. Good luck to him once the two of you are separated, but there’s nobody here with time or space in their life to cope with that nuisance.’ It’s not a bloody choice. Why would you tell me it was?”
“Because,” Colin said, “it isn’t my choice. He wasn’t my brother.”
It was freezing in Chicago. Literally. When you added the biting wind to the mixture, it was worse. Rhys remembered that from the Chicago trip. It was about all he did remember, other than the match itself, and the hockey game some of the boys had gone to see a couple nights before, during which time Dylan had been chatting up a teenaged waitress at the pizza place.
Who’d been barely nineteen, as it turned out, and just out of high school. Rhys had had to stuff down another blast of cold rage wh
en he’d learned that. Dylan had been nearly thirty.
He hadn’t even eaten any deep-dish pizza on that trip. Not on his nutrition plan. He hadn’t eaten it last night, either, after he’d arrived at the hotel, even though there was a place down the street serving it up, and it smelled amazing. Just because your life was falling apart, though, just because you’d left your team in the care of your assistant coach days before their first Super Rugby match of the season, and you’d been flying out of Auckland when you should have been having a breakfast date with your sister-in-law, that didn’t mean you lost your discipline. Comfort eating led to no comfort at all, when you were sweating off the extra Kg’s in the gym. Life was all about consequences.
He finished paying the driver and headed across the pavement, accepting the polar blast until he got through the glass doors and into the lobby of the Children and Family Services building, a drab thing made of concrete that matched the steel-gray sky overhead, heavy with the frozen promise of snow. Up in the lift, down the corridor, giving his name to a receptionist, then sitting in the last available seat, in an arrangement of chairs like a doctor’s waiting room, only less cozy.
There was a reason it was the last seat. To his right, a woman was holding a toddler. Barely. The kid—a boy—was thrashing, crying, his eyes and nose streaming in his dark face. “Want to go home,” he moaned. “AJ all done. All done. Want to go home.” Rhys knew how he felt.
He had to look at the kid, because to his left, a woman was nursing a baby, and he wasn’t looking over there. It wasn’t that he thought she shouldn’t be doing it. He just didn’t think he should be watching. He was also too big for this chair, he was having to hold his elbows close to his sides to keep from banging into somebody, and he was the only man in the place.
The toddler had stopped crying, at least. Instead, he was staring at Rhys, his brown eyes big as saucers.
Rhys tried a smile. “Hi,” he said.
The kid started crying again. Brilliant.
After what felt like an hour, but was probably fifteen minutes—during which time somebody else started feeding her baby, and Rhys seriously considered just closing his eyes until it was over—a woman appeared at the doorway and called out, “Rice Fletcher?” Exactly like a doctor’s office, mangled name and all.
He got up with a silent prayer of thanksgiving. “Rhys,” he said, pronouncing it the way you were meant to. Reece. “I’m here.”
“Jada Franklin,” she said, shaking his hand. “We spoke on the phone.” And yet she’d forgotten how to pronounce his name. “Come on back.”
He followed her, not into an office, but into a cubicle, where he wedged himself into another chair in not enough space.
“So,” he said.
“So,” she said. “Casey Moana Hawk. Your daughter. She’s ready to go.”
Nine words, dropping into the restrained hubbub around them like nine nails being driven into his coffin. He said, “It can’t be that simple, surely. You aren’t just going to hand her over without knowing more about me than that. I had some of it done for you, though. Background check.” He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, pulled out a sheaf of printed papers, and handed them to her together with the passport he’d picked up at the consulate that morning, which would allow the girl to travel to New Zealand with him. Colin had pulled major strings to get it this fast, but the kid had been in foster care for two weeks now, and Rhys needed to get her out. Anyway, if you had to do something, you didn’t moan about it. You just went ahead and did it.
Jada’s brown eyes held a career’s worth of shattered illusions, and she didn’t even look at the papers, just handed them back. “You’ve acknowledged paternity, her mother’s dead, and you’re the other parent. As far as the State of Illinois is concerned, she’s yours. Let’s go get her.”
“I’m not adopting a kitten at the SPCA,” he said. “Come to think of it, you probably have to do more to adopt a kitten. I’m not . . . I’m not a dad. I’m single. Don’t you have some—paperwork? A bloody interview? A brochure? Something?”
She smiled, which was the last thing he’d have expected. “You’re the first person I’ve ever heard request more bureaucracy. You do realize that’s exactly the thought in every dad’s mind when the nurse hands the baby over at the hospital curb, and he tries to put her in the car seat for the first time and realizes exactly how small she is and exactly how much she’s his responsibility now. Nobody’s ready to have a child, although some people are less ready than others. You learn as you go. Your own social services offers parenting classes, I’m sure. The fact that you’re aware you need support is a good sign. You’ll be fine.”
He wouldn’t be fine. This was a girl. He knew about having a little brother. He even knew how to change a nappy. What he didn’t know was what he was going to do with a six-year-old girl. He was going to have to talk to her about boys. He was going to have to learn about clothes. He was going to have to fix her hair.
That wasn’t the real problem. He knew that, too. He was panicking, was what it was. Getting himself out of the moment, watching the scoreboard instead of the field. He took a breath and refocused.
He could have called in the whanau. Somebody would have taken her, some auntie or cousin, once he’d explained that she wasn’t his, but she was theirs. He didn’t trust half of them, though, when it came down to it. Not with a life. Not with a child. His Nan had done her best, but she’d been too old and too tired to take charge of two more rambunctious boys, as well as two of their cousins—male cousins. Which had left the kids to sort it out themselves. He wasn’t dropping Casey, determined stare or not, into Lord of the Flies. And then there’d have been telling Zora the truth about her husband, and leaving her to pick up yet more pieces. That was a no.
He put the papers back in his jacket pocket, because nobody was interested in reading about the fact that he owned his home, was gainfully employed, paid his debts, and had never been charged with a crime.
Maybe he’d hang onto them for dating purposes. That would move things along.
He was stalling again.
Jada said, “Come on. Let’s go get your daughter.”
He’d been mad to think he could do this.
Too late now.
The foster home was well south of the central city, and it took a good forty minutes to get there. They drove past boarded-up shops, over cracked asphalt, past mounds of gray snow piled up in the gutters and bare trees whose limbs shook in the wind like old bones. Depressing as hell.
Some of his whanau may not have had any more money than this, but at least it was New Zealand. You saw some green, you could grow your own veggies, and there was always an uncle ready to take you out on the boat, for the price of some fish-gutting. It also wasn’t covered by gray snow.
It wasn’t like he’d never been cold before. He’d played his rugby in Christchurch. It froze in winter there, from time to time, but it was never like this.
The church had hell all wrong, he’d always thought. Hell wasn’t heat. Heat was the off-season, long summer days spent on the boat fishing, clearing your mind of rugby and your body of ten months’ worth of niggles and knocks. Or, even better, under the water, spearfishing for snapper or collecting paua, that most delectable and hard-won of kai moana—seafood. Heat was sitting on the beach afterwards, having a beer with your mates, with nowhere to go and all week to get there. Heat was a girl in a bikini and no makeup, brushing her wet hair back and smiling at you as she stepped out of the sea.
However hot it got, heat wasn’t horrible. Horrible was darkness and cold, the bone-chilling, skin-burning freeze that killed everything green and alive and relaxed in the world.
That last winter, when he and Dylan had been living with their mum in Invercargill—that was his own definition of hell. He could still remember seeing his breath inside the house, on the day the electric company had shut off the power. He’d had to bring Dylan into his bed and pile both their blankets on top that winter, telling
him what a nuisance he was the entire time.
“Why do you have to be such a baby?” he’d asked his brother one night, the coldest one yet, as he’d got out of bed, savage with fury and shivering in the freezing night, to find them each another pair of socks and to rearrange their jackets over them. “You’re bloody useless. If you don’t stop crying, I’m not going to take you with me when I get rich and get out of here. I’m going to leave you alone.”
The next day, he’d rung up their Nan and asked her to come get them. He’d stood on the cracked yellow lino of the kitchen floor, the icy fingers of cold whistling in from around the window frames, held the chilly, hard piece of plastic to his ear, and waited to see if she’d answer. When he’d listened to it ring, watched a roach crawling over a stack of dirty plates, waving its antennae, and wondered if she’d pick up—that moment was still the coldest he’d ever been. Except maybe for the days afterwards, when he hadn’t known whether she would come. And the night he’d told his three-year-old brother he’d leave him alone, and Dylan had cried like his heart was breaking.
It was hard to pick a winner. All those times had sucked.
He’d never been back to Invercargill since. When he’d been offered a coaching job in Leicester, in the north of England, after his two-year stint in Japan, he hadn’t taken it. Leicester was the better club, no question, but he’d taken Toulon instead, on the Riviera. He’d told himself he could make more impact there. It had been true, but that wasn’t the reason he’d done it. He’d done it because it was warmer.
He also still hated cockroaches. And disorder. And unwashed dishes. Possibly also tears, especially if they were his own. Tears were giving up, and he didn’t give up.
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