Just Come Over

by James, Rosalind

They turned onto another street, and the neighborhood got a bit better. The house, when they pulled up to it, was small and white, not too unlike his Nan’s house in Nelson. Nothing flash, but trying its best.

  He followed Jada up the walk. She said, “You need a better coat. Also gloves and a hat.”

  “Nah,” he said. “If I ignore it, it doesn’t exist, that’s the idea. Besides, I’m flying out tonight.”

  “You could lose your fingers to frostbite by then.” She laughed. That was her version of humor, apparently. She rang the bell, and Rhys stood beside her on the concrete porch and focused on the way his breath emerged in icy puffs. The peephole on the front of the door darkened, and after a rattle of chains, the door opened. A smell of overheated floral air freshener wafted out, and the woman behind it, who was holding a curly-haired baby on her hip, said, “Hi. You must be here for Casey.”

  “Yes,” Jada said.

  The woman pushed the door open a little more with one hand. “Come on in.” She held out a hand, the one that wasn’t holding the baby, to Rhys. “Tiana Hooper.”

  The girl was sitting on the couch, a green-flowered thing with a crocheted blanket draped over it. To either side, little tables were covered by doilies, and the coffee table had a glass top. With a crocheted doily-thing underneath it. The carpet was pink, and above the couch, glass shelves held a collection of porcelain birds that would have rained down in a shower of splinters the first time there was an earthquake.

  The girl sat rigid, wearing jeans, trainers, and a blue T-shirt, printed with a flying horse with gold sparkles in its mane and tail and the word “Magical” written underneath, a shirt that looked much too insubstantial for the weather. On her lap, she held a backpack and a doll, one hand clutching each, and there were two white rubbish bags at her feet and a navy-blue puffer jacket beside her. Her hair was loose, not in a ponytail or even fastened with the clips, or whatever you called them, that she’d worn in the school photo. The clips had had bows on.

  Somebody had brushed her thick, wavy hair today, but that was all. Rhys got a flash of how he and Dylan had used to look, their impossible hair always too long and too tangled. When you went to school looking like that, it sent a message that didn’t help you a bit. How much worse would it be for a girl?

  Casey’s mum had known that, clearly. That had been the reason for the bows on the hair clips, and the neat ponytail.

  “This is Casey,” Tiana said, joggling the toddler. “And this is your dad, Casey, here to take you home.”

  “Hi,” Rhys said. You can do this, he told himself. This is not a mistake. This is the only solution.

  Casey studied him, but she didn’t get up. “Are you going to take me back to my house in your car?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t have a car here, and we’re going to my house.”

  She said, “I want to go back to my house instead, please. You can call an Uber, if you don’t have a car. That’s what my mommy does, if she’s late and she has to go to work and she doesn’t have time to go on the El. It’s a school day. I could go back to my school for the afternoon part. My lunchbox is still in my cubby, because I forgot it. It has a sandwich in it, and cookies. I could eat lunch there.”

  He’d been here sixty seconds, and he was already in trouble. “We can’t do that,” he said. No point in lying to her. “I don’t live here. I live in New Zealand, so that’s where we need to go.” Surely somebody had told her that. Hadn’t they? What were these people thinking?

  “I never heard of that,” she said. “Is it on the north side?”

  “No. It’s a different country. We’re going to fly there.”

  “I can’t fly.”

  What? Why? Did she have some condition he didn’t know about? He glanced at Jada. She shrugged. Very helpful.

  “Why can’t you fly?” he asked when nothing else was forthcoming.

  Casey looked at him like he was stupid. “Because I don’t have wings.”

  He laughed, and she didn’t. Oh. It hadn’t been a joke. “We’re going on a plane. The plane flies, not us. You must have seen that in . . . in cartoons.” That was where he’d first seen it. He hadn’t been on a plane until he’d made the First XV at seventeen. He’d known what they were, though, hadn’t he, at six? He couldn’t remember.

  “Is my mommy coming too?” she asked.

  His heart did something odd, like a sponge that somebody was squeezing out. And nobody else was saying anything. How was he meant to cope with this? Surely, somebody had told her. He was going to operate on that assumption, anyway.

  “No,” he decided to say, and sat down beside her, next to the puffy coat. He wasn’t a good liar, and anyway, she looked to him like she didn’t appreciate lying. Or he told himself that, because he had no clue, otherwise. “Your mum’s gone. She died, remember? That happens sometimes. I had to leave my mum when I was a couple years older than you. My Nan—my grandma—took my brother and me in. We went to a new house, and I went to a new school. Good as gold.”

  Not exactly, but close enough. Besides, he wasn’t a worn-out sixty-five-year-old with an addict for a daughter. He was a forty-year-old rugby coach, he was tough, he had a grand total of one child to look after, and he had the means to do it properly.

  Casey looked at him measuringly. “If my mommy isn’t going to be there,” she announced, “I don’t want to go.”

  What did he say now? “Where are you planning to go instead?” he asked.

  She wasn’t solid, not really. She was slim, like her mother. And her father. But when she set her jaw, she looked solid. She said, “I’m going to stay here and wait for my mommy. She said she would never leave. She promised. If I go away from here, she won’t know where I am. She has to know where I am, so she can come get me.”

  He was about to tear up. He could feel it coming, and that wouldn’t do anybody any good, least of all him.

  He was still trying to work out how to answer her when Tiana said, “I’m afraid you can’t stay here, Casey. I’m your foster mother. I told you that. ‘Foster’ means, ‘for a little while, until there’s another place for you to go.’ Now, there’s another place. Your mommy’s in Heaven now, like we talked about, with the angels, but you have a daddy, and he’s going to take you home, to a brand-new house. Isn’t that exciting?”

  Casey looked Rhys over. “No,” she said.

  This hadn’t occurred to him. People generally did what he said. Correction—people always did what he said. He considered shouting, “I’m the rescuer here, damn it! Let’s go, and smartly.” He didn’t think it would work, though. He cast about for something—anything—to say, and finally lit on the backpack in her lap. It was blue, printed with Hawaiian flowers, and featured a Polynesian girl with her hand on her hip and a confident smile on her face. At the top, the word was spelled out. Moana.

  That was the doll from the film, too, he realized, that she was holding. He may have been under a rock in terms of popular culture, but he recognized this.

  If you couldn’t break the line, you found another way. You sidestepped. He touched the backpack lightly and said, “Moana, eh.”

  Tiana shifted position. She and the social worker were still standing, and the baby was starting to fuss. He looked up at them and said, “Maybe you could give us ten minutes.”

  Jada looked at her watch. He told her, “If you need to leave, go on. I’ll find my own way back.”

  “I have a few minutes,” she said.

  “Come have a cup of coffee,” Tiana said. She asked Rhys, “Would you like one?”

  It would be served in a cup and saucer, he had no doubt. Possibly on a doily. It would also be weak. Chicago coffee was rubbish. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m good.” He might be in the Twilight Zone, but he was working on a plan. After that, he stopped paying attention to them and asked Casey, “Do you know what this is?” He touched the silvery disk on the doll’s necklace.

  “It’s a necklace,” she said flatly. Her expression
said, Obviously, and he had to smile.

  “It’s a paua shell,” he said. “Or it’s meant to be. Moana’s traveling from the homeland, across the seas, with Maui’s help.” Which covered everything he knew about the film. “She’s going to New Zealand. She’s going to become a Maori.”

  She wasn’t looking at him like he was stupid anymore, anyway. She was just looking at him like he was crazy. “That’s not in the movie.”

  “No, it’s not. But it’s something you know in your heart if you’re Maori. I’ll bet you knew it already.” He reached inside his own shirt and pulled out the pounamu pendant on its black braided cord. “Just like I do. See, I have the hei matau. The fish hook pendant, for the sea and for determination. Mine has a muri paraoa as well, a whale tail, on the other end, for speed and strength and protectiveness. That’s all the important things. This was carved from a jade boulder that came from Tasman Bay, which is where I come from as well. It touches my skin and roots me to my family, to the ancestors, to our mountain and our river. Moana has a pendant, too. It reminds her where she came from, and who her people are.”

  There you were. Logic. Rationality. And a bit of magic as well, maybe. You could need magic, if your mum had died. That might be the reason for the T-shirt.

  Casey’s eyes had flecks of gold amidst the green and were as extravagantly dark-lashed as Dylan’s had been. Right now, they were fixed on his, like nobody had ever told her to look down, to look away, and she wouldn’t have listened if they had. There was as much intensity in her slim form as in any player about to run out onto the field, too, when she said, “My mommy said that. She said I was Maori, like Moana, and someday, Maui would come across the ocean for us and take us home. Nobody else said that, though.”

  “Except me,” he said. “That’s because I’m your dad. You see how that works?” First time he’d said the D-word.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, and he thought, Now what? She went on to tell him. “I think you’re Maui.”

  “Nah, sorry,” he said. “I’m not him. Maui is much bigger. He’s also a demigod. I’m not even a semi-god.”

  “He fished up the ocean with a fish hook,” she pointed out. “And you have a fish hook.”

  “Because I’m Maori. Not because I’m Maui. Every Maori has a pendant.”

  “I don’t.”

  “That’s because it has to be a gift. Nobody’s given you yours yet, that’s all.”

  She wasn’t getting heated. She was just frowning. Ferociously. Her eyebrows were as straight and as black as his, too. She said, “That doesn’t make sense. If everybody has one, I would have one. It makes sense that you’re Maui. You’re big like Maui, and your hair’s like his.”

  “Because I was a rugby player,” he said, not pulling on said hair. Also, if his hair looked like Maui’s in that film, he needed to have it cut. He’d better not let her see his tattoo for a while, either. “That’s why I’m big. They play rugby in New Zealand. Girls, too. When you go to school, you can play. I have a feeling rugby will suit you.”

  She appeared to be thinking that over. “What about rabbits?”

  “What about rabbits?” He thought that was a pretty smart parry to a rubbish question.

  “Do you have rabbits at your house?”

  “Uh . . . no. Why would I have rabbits?”

  “Oh.” Her thin shoulders drooped. “I had rabbits ever since I was little. Hoppy and Fluffy. Tiana said they went to live on a farm, and a farm is nice, because they could eat real grass, but I can’t have a rabbit here, Tiana said. Plus, it’s temp—temp—”

  “Temporary,” he said. “It’s not temporary anymore. When you go to New Zealand with me, it’s permanent. That’s the opposite. It means you’re going home to stay. Like Moana.”

  She clutched her doll a little tighter. “So can I have rabbits?”

  A man had to recognize defeat. “Yes. You can have rabbits.”

  “Three?”

  A man had to recognize manipulation, too. “No. You can have two.” Compassion was all well and good, but drawing the line would be important, too. Setting limits. Being firm.

  Fortunately, he was good at that.

  He’d been a father for about two hours. He was already wondering how he was going to make it through the day.

  At the moment, they were in a taxi, headed north from the Children and Family Services building, where they’d left Jada. He’d told the driver to take them to the airport, but he was realizing that it may not have been the best plan.

  Casey hadn’t said much on the drive into the city, and he hadn’t been able to think of any conversation starters. Jada had played some overly bouncy music on the car stereo instead, which had been grating to the nerves, but, he was belatedly realizing, better than silence. It was twelve-thirty in the afternoon, and trying to keep a kid occupied for six hours until takeoff in all the atmospheric charm of O’Hare Airport was probably going to be beyond him. Keeping her occupied for three hours was probably going to be beyond him, for that matter, but he’d tackle that later.

  He should have hung onto the hotel room for another day. Maybe he should check in again, in fact. It was mad, but so was every other plan he could come up with, and they needed some kind of . . . base. Also, he needed to see what Casey had in those bags and remedy any omissions now, because when they got back to Auckland, he needed to get her into school and himself back to work. They’d do their shopping today, when he had time to spare. A much better idea. He told the driver, “Change of plan. Take us to a department store instead of the airport. One that’s near the Hilton, if possible.”

  She looked at him in the rearview mirror. Suspiciously, he’d call that, like he was cheating her out of her fare, which he probably was. The airport would have been a much pricier ride. “Which Hilton?” she asked.

  “The one downtown.”

  “There are four of them downtown. Which one do you want to go to?”

  “I don’t care. The one nearest the department store that you’re taking us to.” He knew about carrying your clothes in rubbish bags, and he needed to do better. He told Casey, “We’ll buy you a suitcase and whatever else you need, and then we’ll go to a hotel and have a rest before the airport.”

  Would they think it was odd that he was checking in with a six-year-old girl, though? Should he get Casey her own room?

  No. Kids that age couldn’t stay in a hotel room alone. She was his daughter. Supposedly. He was overthinking this.

  Casey asked, “Do they have lunch there?”

  Oh. He tended to ignore meals when he had something more important to do. He guessed you couldn’t do that with kids. “Right,” he said. “We’ll go to the hotel first, drop off your things, and have lunch. We could even order room service. You’ll like that. Afterwards, we’ll go shopping. Good, eh.”

  He sounded like that music Jada had been playing, like any minute, he was going to jump up, clap his hands, and shout, “Let’s have fun!” He was going to have to find a happy medium between his Game Face and his Nearly-Dad Face, because that level of cheerfulness wasn’t sustainable. He told the driver, “Another change of plan. Hilton first.”

  She muttered something and scrutinized him in the mirror again, and he said, “Charge me what you’d have charged for driving to the airport, then.” He’d probably lose his own New Zealand citizenship for that kind of rash spending, but there you were.

  “I could go to my school,” Casey said. “And get my lunchbox. Then I could have my lunch that my mommy made me. I don’t want to go to a hotel. My mommy said I shouldn’t go places without her, and I already went to Tiana’s house.”

  The driver looked in the mirror again. He wished she’d watch the road, which was bound to be icy, because it had started to snow, huge, wet flakes smacking the windscreen and sticking there. He considered telling Casey that her lunch, if it had still existed, would have grown an entire bacterial colony over the past weeks and probably forced the evacuation of the school, but he didn’t
. She was missing familiarity, that was all, like a nineteen-year-old rugby player from the wop-wops, away from home for the first time. What did those boys miss most? Food. Always, it was food. “What’s your favorite thing to eat?” he asked. “We’ll have that. Uh . . .” He tried to think what his favorite had been, at six. They probably didn’t have whitebait fritters in Chicago. “Hamburger. Hot dog. Ice cream. You’d like an ice cream, surely.” They had ice cream cones everywhere in the States, didn’t they? That was one cultural advantage the country had over New Zealand.

  Wait. In winter? Maybe not.

  The driver hit the brakes hard enough to jolt them against their seatbelts, then swung into a service station and pulled up to the pumps with a screech of tires and announced, “I need gas.”

  He thought, Shouldn’t you have considered that before you picked up a ride? She was out of the car and on her phone now, and she hadn’t even got the nozzle in the pump yet. He was regretting the “airport fare” idea already.

  Never mind. They’d spend a few minutes of their six hours here, which was fine. Stay centered, he told himself. Keep your focus. You can only live through one minute at a time. There’s no speeding it up.

  Casey said, “We could have pizza for lunch. That’s my favorite. It’s very expensive to eat it at a restaurant, though. It’s better to cook things at home. That way they have more flavor.”

  Huh. He was beginning to like India Hawk, even though she’d complicated his life. She’d clearly done her best, which was all you could ask. “You’re right,” he said. “But we’re not at home yet, so we’ll eat in a restaurant today. Pizza it is.” His nutrition plan was another thing, apparently, that was going out the window. Just for today, until he got this sorted. Then it would be back to normal. “We’ll get some lunch, and then we’ll make a plan. Life’s always easier with a plan.”

  Which all sounded solid enough, but the journey was taking forever, even after the driver got back into the car. She kept taking turns that surely weren’t necessary. At least, they didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. He told her, “We weren’t this far from downtown. We were nearly there when we started.”