Just Come Over

by James, Rosalind

  “Road construction,” she said. “Alternate route.”

  “I don’t think so.” He held on tight to his temper. “I already told you I’d pay the airport fare. The little girl’s hungry, and if you don’t have us at the hotel in five minutes, I’ll be filing a complaint.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said, making another turn. “I don’t think you’ll be filing anything today. I’d say you’re done. Uh-huh. I’d say so.”

  He considered sniffing at his armpits. Either he smelled, or he’d lost all his Influence Factor on the way over the Pacific, because he certainly wasn’t impressing anybody in Chicago so far. He’d growled that, and she hadn’t cared a bit.

  The thought flew from his mind in an instant when the woman pulled abruptly across three lanes of traffic as if she were trying out as a stunt driver. Rhys shoved his arm out to brace himself and threw the other across Casey, who stiffened, said, “Hey!” and was drowned out by a chorus of angry hoots from behind them.

  “What the hell?” he was saying just as the driver slammed on the brakes again, making his and Casey’s heads rock forward and slam back against the headrests. When that stopped, he asked Casey, “You OK?”

  “Yeah.” She clutched her doll closer and stage-whispered, “She drives really fast.”

  To top it off, the woman had stopped in a “No Parking” zone, which looked to be a very bad idea, as it was already occupied by an idling police car, its revolving lights painting the gloomy day with flashes of red and blue. It was also, though, not his car and not his problem. “We’re here,” she said. “The Hilton. That’ll be twenty-four dollars.”

  Rhys pulled out his credit card and handed it over. Yes, it was too much, but as far as he was concerned, he couldn’t get out of this mad city fast enough. The pizza had better be good, that was all he had to say.

  The driver ran his card and handed it back as a cop got out of the car ahead, plodded forward through the gathering storm, and rapped on Rhys’s window.

  “Yeah, yeah, buddy,” the driver muttered. “Least you could do is make sure I get paid.”

  Rhys signed the slip, then handed it and the pen back. “I’ve found my Chicago visitor experience lacking, so far,” he told the woman. “You could pass that on to the tourist board for me.”

  She didn’t say anything, possibly because the cop was tapping on the window again with a black-gloved hand, beckoning to him, and a second cop was coming to join him. Rhys said, “Thanks heaps for parking here, too. Extremely convenient. Don’t bother to get out, please.” He opened the door and told Casey, “Let’s go. Pizza ahead.” Sounding jolly again, but what could you do. He’d get his suitcase and Casey’s rubbish bags out of the boot, and . . .

  The cop took a step closer, put his hand on the butt of his weapon, and said, “Sir, can we have a word with you?”

  Rhys said, “We’ll be out of your way in a minute. Just checking into the hotel.”

  The driver leaned across the seat and buzzed the window down. “Ask him why he calls her ‘the little girl’ instead of her name,” she yelled. “Ain’t no man in the world would say that, if he’s talking about his daughter. Ask her about her school, too. Ask her about her mom.”

  “Thanks, ma’am,” the cop said. “We’ve got it. We appreciate the call.”

  Forty minutes later, the server slid twelve inches of high-calorie heaven onto a table that was fortunately now serving only two. At least the cops had let him order Casey’s pizza before the interrogation had started, although probably only because she’d looked at them with those mountain-stream eyes and said, in a tiny voice, “I’m really, really hungry.” They hadn’t been any more resistant to those eyes than Rhys himself, which was why they were in this overheated, tomato-scented space, down the street from the Hilton and bustling with midday diners. It was wide enough for only two rows of booths, and had also turned out to be an excellent place to imprison an overlarge, irate Kiwi.

  Never mind. He and Casey were free once more. They also had pizza. He put a mile-high slice onto her plate, then two onto his own, and contemplated the wisdom of his preferred path from here, which was to dive face-first into every single remaining yeasty, high-topped, cheese-and-tomato-sauce-laden slice, and carbo-load his way into a caloric stupor where he wouldn’t care anymore.

  It hadn’t been the best forty minutes of his life, but at least it was over. The cops hadn’t appeared exceptionally impressed with Casey’s brand-new passport, or by his explanation that he was her father, either, especially once Casey had explained, at another table but loud enough for Rhys to hear, that she was supposed to be at school, because it was a school day, and she didn’t even have her lunchbox, but she had to go with that man instead.

  In the end, he’d had to produce Jada’s name, and then wait until the social worker got back from lunch and deigned to return her calls. Sitting in a booth with a cop beside you, blocking your exit, and another across from you, both of them eyeing you alertly for signs of imminent flight, wasn’t the most relaxed environment he’d ever experienced. He’d wanted to tell Jada, “I told you I needed more documentation than this,” but he hadn’t even got the chance.

  “All right?” he asked Casey now.

  “Yes,” she said, sticking her fork into the middle of her pizza in an awkward sort of way and hacking off a bite. “Except I thought they were going to arrest you. That’s what policemen do.”

  “Maybe they just wanted lunch. Did you think of that?” Bloody hell, this pizza was good. Sausage and all. He’d just sit here for a minute and inhale. Aromatherapy for men.

  “Policemen don’t eat lunch,” she said. “They only come if somebody did a crime. Then they take you to jail, which is like being in a cage, except not nice like a rabbit cage. And a lady police came to my school with Elizabeth when my mommy died, so that’s two things. Arresting and telling bad news. They do that on TV, too, so I know it’s true. But they didn’t even take their handcuffs out. I thought they would do that. Handcuffs are the main part.”

  He kept eating. “Maybe we should invite them back to have another go, if you’re disappointed. I haven’t been terrorized nearly enough today.” Casey was sawing away at her pizza with a knife and fork, but not making terrific progress on the dense crust. “Here,” he said, and reached over to cut it into pieces. The last time he’d done that had surely been for Dylan. At least he knew how to do something semi-parental. “Who’s Elizabeth?”

  “She’s my mom’s friend. The police lady didn’t know I was supposed to take my lunchbox. Elizabeth didn’t know, either, but that’s because Elizabeth doesn’t have any kids. She says that kids make you fat and poor, but my mom said it was just poor, for her.” She studied Rhys with what he could swear was a critical eye. “You’re kind of fat, but not exactly. That’s why I think you’re really Maui and not my dad. You don’t look like a dad. Besides, people don’t just be dads all of a sudden. Your dad has you from when you’re a baby. He only sometimes lives with you, but you still know he’s your dad.”

  “Excuse me,” he said, deciding that this was the easier part of the debate, “but I am not fat. I weigh less now than I did when I was playing, and my waist is three centimeters smaller. I’m big.”

  “Oh. But you’re kind of. Like, your arms are fat.”

  “They’re not fat. They’re muscular. They’re . . . never mind.” He tried to remember what they’d been talking about. He was also rethinking the pizza, given all the talk about his excess weight, except that somehow, he’d finished both slices and had started on a third. A fourth might be in the cards, too. “That lunchbox has come up a fair few times. Maybe we’d better look for a new one of those as well as a suitcase. You’ll need one for school in New Zealand, I guess. I don’t actually know.” Add that question to the list.

  “They might not have one that has Moana,” she said.

  “But they might. Or maybe they’ll have something you like even better.”

  She eyed him skeptically and gave a w
orld-weary sigh. Her hair was mussed. He was going to have to work out what to do about that. And how you did it. He ate some more pizza.

  “I can’t like anything better,” she said. “It’s Moana. That’s my name.”

  “Yeh,” he said, “but your name’s also Casey. Maybe there’ll be one with a locomotive on.”

  “What?”

  “Casey Jones. He was a . . . Never mind. We’ll do our best.” Time to establish some more of those boundaries. “We’ll find something practical, that we both like. A mutual decision, that’s the idea.”

  The department store, when they got there, did not in fact have a Moana lunchbox. Only natural, as the film had come out ages ago. He said, “Never mind. We’ll find something better. Or we can wait until we get to New Zealand, and order it online. Might have to wait a bit, that’s all.”

  “Oh,” Casey said, her voice small again. She glanced up at him, then looked down. “OK.”

  He clearly still wasn’t up to standard. “Or,” he said, “maybe there’s something else you’d like. Look, this one has, uh, girls on.”

  “Those are Disney princesses,” she said. “Not girls.”

  “Huh.” He studied them. “Nah. You’re right. Too blonde. We’re Maori. We’ll hold out for Moana. Let’s go look at suitcases instead.”

  See? he told himself. You handled it. You’re fine. And when Casey spied the enormous pink hard-sided suitcase with an embossed pattern all over it, looking like somebody’s fever-dream of a magnified diamond, which was nothing any reasonable man would have bought a six-year-old? Or anybody? He did his best to handle that, too.

  He knew when Casey saw it, because she stopped, gasped in dramatic fashion, ran over to touch it, and said, “This is the best one. I love it.”

  “It’s not made for kids,” he said, and hefted it with a grimace. “Definitely not. Probably weighs as much as you do. It’s made for . . . dunno who it’s made for. Nobody with any style sense, that’s for sure. A YouTube star, maybe.” The tag said “Rose Gold,” but as far as he was concerned, it was pink.

  “But it’s on sale. See? S-A-L-E. If it has a yellow tag on it, it’s on sale, so you can buy it. It’s saving money!”

  “It’s still a hundred twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, it’s too big for you twice over, and God knows I’m not using it. No. It’s not saving money if you get the wrong thing, and you have to go out afterwards and buy the right thing after all. It’s the opposite. It usually means spending twice as much money.”

  “But I love it.” She was on her knees, now, stroking her hand over the shiny surface. “It’s beautiful. It’s a princess suitcase, like Cinderella has. It’s the best one there could ever, ever be.”

  He retreated to logic and command. His happy place. “No. It’s impractical. Besides, Cinderella doesn’t have a suitcase.”

  “Yes, she does. Because she goes to live in the castle, so she has to take her clothes.”

  For somebody whose own clothes were currently in rubbish bags, she proved impossible to budge, even after he took the time to explain it to her. “She doesn’t have any clothes she’d want to take, surely. That’s the whole idea. Her dresses are rags, but she’s whisked away by the prince, and all her troubles are over. Which isn’t how it works, by the way. There’s no rescue, just hard work.” Wait. He probably shouldn’t be telling her that right now, since he actually was rescuing her.

  Fortunately or otherwise, Casey didn’t care about his life lesson. “She does too have clothes,” she insisted. “She has the most beautiful dress in the world, and it’s blue and sparkly. It’s a ball gown. You have to take a ball gown, because it’s very, very special.”

  “She changes back, though,” he said, “when the coach becomes a pumpkin. The clock strikes twelve, and she’s wearing her old clothes again. All she has left is her shoe. Which doesn’t make sense, actually. If everything else vanished, wouldn’t the shoes vanish as well?”

  “Because it’s magic,” Casey said. “And when Fairy Godmother comes, at the end, she waves her magic wand and changes Cinderella back again, and she has her ball gown again, and her crown.” She bobbed her head in triumph. “So she does too.”

  Did he consider saying that in that case, Cinderella would have been wearing the only item of clothing worth taking with her, and therefore would have had nothing to pack? Yes, but he didn’t say it, did he? He sidestepped. “Look at this one over here. It’s made for kids, which you are, so there you go. It’s round, which is cute, it’s pink, it has unicorns on, and you could pull it yourself, because it doesn’t weigh forty Kg’s before you’ve even packed it.”

  He had now referred to a suitcase as “cute.” His life was officially changed.

  It didn’t work. “I don’t want that one, though,” she said. “I want this one. Please. It’s shiny. It’s the best one ever, and I love it. My mommy says I can have it. She says you should always choose pretty things, especially if they’re on sale.”

  That was how he ended up walking through the airport doors pushing one suitcase in bombproof black fabric, the kind that would bump up and down endless kilometers of conveyer belt and endure all the indignities of international air travel for years on end and still come out looking exactly the same. And one that assaulted his eyeballs, and that Casey had kept her anxious hand on all the way, as if it would kick up its heels otherwise and run away to join the forest of magical tacky sparkle-suitcases. When they checked in and it headed down the conveyer belt, she craned her neck and watched it go.

  All in all, though, he hadn’t done so badly, had he? She wasn’t crying, and he hadn’t been arrested. By the time they boarded, once Casey got over the excitement of flying and they’d had dinner, she’d surely be ready to fall asleep. How much of a sixteen-hour flight could a six-year-old girl sleep through? Nine hours, maybe? Ten, he devoutly hoped. That wasn’t too much to ask after the day she’d had. And when they got to Auckland and he got her settled in school, which was going to be the first day, Wednesday, because he had a team to coach, he’d get some . . . advice. Some help.

  The school would have recommendations. They’d be fine.

  His optimism lasted all the way to Security.

  Casey didn’t complain, not exactly. She just asked.

  When they queued up for Security, she asked, “How come we’re stopping?”

  “Because they need to check us,” he said. “To make sure we’re safe.”

  “How come?”

  “Because sometimes, people might do bad things. Bring a knife or something.” He wasn’t going to say “bomb” in a security queue. He wasn’t a fool.

  “Oh.” She digested that, and the queue moved forward again. “Did you bring a knife?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a good thing your fish hook isn’t big,” she said. “Maybe they’d arrest you, if you had a fish hook as big as Maui’s.”

  “You could at least not sound so hopeful.” He preferred not to talk about being arrested in a security queue, also, especially as they were near the front now, with a TSA agent a couple meters away. “Just feel lucky that we’re in the fast lane,” he told her, putting his backpack into a tub and reaching for hers. “The one benefit of frequent travel is that you don’t have to take off your shoes. Shove your doll in there. Your coat as well.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You have to. They need to scan it.”

  “Why?”

  “They scan everything, in case there’s a weapon anywhere.”

  “My doll doesn’t have a weapon. That would be silly. She’s Moana.” She was clutching the doll tighter. He wasn’t getting it out of her arms, it was clear, without a battle.

  He sighed and waved the couple behind them past. His laptop, which was all of two months old and held every single bit of proprietary information his brain and the Blues possessed, headed into the scanner. He had backups, of course, and even if somebody walked off with it, the chances of them being from a rival Super Rug
by team were slim to nil. He told himself that, even as he wanted to dive in after it. “See?” he told Casey instead. “Look over there. That old lady is getting scanned in her wheelchair. She looks about a hundred. Does she have a weapon? I’m guessing ‘no.’ It’s a rule, that’s all.”

  “Moana is scared, though,” Casey said. “She doesn’t like the dark. She doesn’t want to go in the tunnel.”

  “It’s dark for a minute,” Rhys said. “Less than a minute. A couple seconds.” Casey stared at him, absolutely unmoved, and he cast about for something else. “And there are, uh, X-ray beams that will light her up.”

  An entire family: mum, dad, two kids, and a baby in a pushchair, were passing them now, and the TSA agent was scrutinizing Rhys in a frankly suspicious manner. He recognized that look by now. He’d seen it about five times today.

  “It looks dark, though,” Casey said.

  Rhys had always thought his stubbornness, his absolute refusal to give in or give up, was a positive. He was beginning to see the downside.

  “I promise,” he said. “X-rays. Call it a . . . doll scanner. We’ll go through this big people-scanner ourselves, first you and then me, Moana will get scanned in the doll scanner, and then you can pick her up on the other side and give her a cuddle.”

  “OK,” Casey said. “But she likes it better if I hold her hand.”

  Oh. Casey handed Moana over, and took a huge breath as Rhys set the doll in the tub. That had taken some courage. “We’ll put her looking up,” he said, “so she can see the X-rays.” Then he stepped back into the queue behind the family and took Casey’s hand. It was small and warm, and it clutched his tight. He got that squeezing sensation again, too, around his . . . chest area.

  The only problem was, after he’d urged her into the scanning machine, which she was not daunted by, oddly enough, and had gone through himself, the TSA agent on the other side said, “Please step this way, sir.”