Just Come Over

by James, Rosalind

  “First,” Hayden said, “you’d need to tell me where your place is. Zora hasn’t clued me in yet.”

  “Rhys,” Zora was saying. “No.”

  He told Hayden, “Hang on,” put the phone against his chest, and told Zora, “I need to talk to you.” He checked out her feet. “We could go by your place so you could change into some trainers and grab a jacket. A walk sounds good. A run sounds better.”

  “I am not going for a run.” She was looking cross now, at least, instead of shut down, which was better. He could handle trouble. He couldn’t handle silence, and not knowing.

  “No,” he said, “but I have a feeling I may need one. We’ll walk first. Then I’ll run.” He got on the phone again. “Change of plans. Come to Zora’s instead. If you’ll bring some takeaway for you and the kids, I’ll owe you.”

  He may not have been a natural as a dad, but he was learning. You always had to think about dinner.

  Zora drove on the way home, and she didn’t talk, so he did.

  “Did you ride in any subway cars in Japan?” Isaiah asked. “They push you in like sardines, because they’re so crowded.”

  “Yeh,” Rhys said. “We did. People stared at us on there, especially the big boys. You could say we didn’t blend. Asked us if we were the All Blacks, and were a bit disappointed when we said no. Humbling, eh.”

  “You are an All Black, though,” Isaiah said.

  “That’s not how they meant it. I don’t think they’d have been impressed. We rode the train to Harajuku and visited a famous place called the Meiji Shrine. Very peaceful.”

  “Oh,” Isaiah said, sounding disappointed.

  “And then I went to the shops,” Rhys said. “Biggest shopping area you’ve ever seen. They’ve got one called Kiddy Land that’s a toy store.”

  “Did you go inside?” Casey asked.

  “I may have done,” he said. In fact, he’d had to buy another duffel. He may have got carried away, but then, he was new at this. “I can’t remember. It was a long flight. Maybe when we get to Auntie Zora’s house, I’ll remember.”

  “Auntie Zora,” Casey said, “can you please drive very fast?”

  When they got to Zora’s and he pulled out the first box and set it on the coffee table, Isaiah lost his words. He stared at it, then at Rhys, and Rhys crouched down again and said, “Yeh, mate. That’s for you. Because I missed you, too.”

  Isaiah said, “It’s LEGO Boost Creative Toolbox! I can make robots. Cool.” After that, he seemed to run out of things to say.

  “Nearly forgot this.” Rhys added the other thing, a kids’ tablet computer. “Controller, eh. Your mum will probably have some rules about using this thing, so I’ll leave that to her.”

  Isaiah threw his arms around him. First time that had happened. Rhys held him tight for long seconds, then said, some gruffness in his voice that he couldn’t help, “I’m your uncle, you know. Maybe I wasn’t around much before, but I’m here now.”

  “Thank you,” Isaiah said. “It’s very exciting. It costs two hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, though.” He looked at Zora. “Can I play with it now, Mum?”

  “Yeh,” she said. “You can. There are probably instructions.”

  “I can read instructions,” Isaiah said, then sat himself down and started opening the box. Rhys considered offering up some advice, like, “Take care how you go there,” but Isaiah didn’t need it. Besides, Casey was standing beside him, wriggling, moving from foot to foot.

  Rhys asked, “Do you need to use the toilet?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m just very excited. Because I think you have a present for me, too.”

  “Do you?” He rummaged in his bag. “Not sure.”

  Casey was nearly jumping up and down now, and Rhys felt like Father Christmas. It wasn’t a bad feeling at all. He said, “Oh, here’s one,” and drew out a squashy parcel. “You have to roll it out.”

  She did, then lay on top of it and hugged it, because it was a sleeping bag in the form of a teddy bear. It had been ridiculously expensive, it was silly, and when he’d seen it, he’d known he needed to buy it for her.

  “This way,” he told her, “when I’m not here, if you need a cuddle, your bear can cuddle you.”

  “I love it.” She was already crawling inside and reaching down to rub the bear’s fuzzy white tummy. “It’s the best sleeping bag ever. I never had one before.”

  “A few more things,” he said. “I think so, at least. Where did they go?” He felt around in his duffel, and Casey was scrambling out of her bag and right there with him, pulling out the packages.

  “Oh.” It was a sigh. “It’s Moana clothes. Three kinds.”

  “Yeh. I got some modern ones as well, so she could dress like you. Now you can change her clothes and play with her on your special rug, with your bunnies.”

  “And there can be magic.”

  “There can definitely be magic.”

  She had her arms around his neck again, and he was picking her up, smoothing back her hair, kissing her cheek, saying, “I’m glad to be home.” And meaning it.

  “And you came back.”

  “I told you. I’ll always come back.”

  When he set her down again, Zora wasn’t there, but Hayden was.

  “Uncle Hayden!” Isaiah said. “Uncle Rhys bought me LEGO Boost! It’s almost three hundred dollars.” Casey didn’t say anything. She was sitting in her sleeping bag, changing Moana’s clothes.

  “Raising the bar,” Hayden told Rhys, and he shrugged and said, “Yeh, nah. Can’t be helped.”

  Hayden raised his brows in the direction Zora had gone and asked, “What’s going on?”

  “Dunno.” Rhys stepped away from the kids. “I was hoping you could tell me. She wouldn’t take my roof. Paid for it herself and told me afterwards.”

  That seemed to take Hayden as much by surprise as it had Rhys. “She wouldn’t?”

  Zora came out of the back of the house, looked from one of them to the other, and said, “If you’re ready, Rhys, let’s go,” with all the excited anticipation of a woman on the way to her colonoscopy.

  Hayden said, “Oh . . . kay,” and Rhys thought, You could say that, mate, and did his level best to stay focused, to stay right here.

  Whatever it was, he could make it better. That was his job.

  Rhys changed into a track suit and trainers out of his bag in Zora’s bathroom and thought about how she hadn’t worn any makeup to come meet him, and about the shadows under her eyes. And this time, he drove.

  It was less than ten minutes to the Arataki Visitor Centre. When they got there, she said, “I’m still not running,” sounding a whole lot more narky than fearful, and climbed out of the car.

  She wasn’t ill. She was furious. She was filthy. He tried to think what he’d done, and couldn’t come up with anything. “I never said you were running,” he said, and led the way to the track that started behind the building. “Good to be out in the open, though. That way, you can yell as loud as you like, and say anything you need to. Go on. Fire away.”

  “You say that like you want to hear it,” she said.

  “Because I do.” He headed down the track. “I’ve got a thick skin, and I get up from the tackle every time. So go on. Give me the bad news. I can handle it.”

  Silence, and finally, from behind him, “How much did you know? And when? Did you two . . .” Her voice trembled. “Laugh at me? Was it all a joke, then? Was it a deal you made? I’d stay with Dylan, take care of him, and you’d handle the rest of it? Except that the plan went wrong, didn’t it? And you still didn’t tell me. All this time. All these years.”

  “Wait.” His feet slowed on the packed earth. “What? Explain.”

  “I thought you said you could take it.”

  He turned around. Whose stupid idea had it been to take a walk? He needed to see her face. “I can take it. I just have to know what it is. Are you all right, then? Not ill?”

  “What? Me?” She st
ared at him, then laughed, an angry huff, and shoved her hair back from her face. “I’m never ill. Don’t you get it? It’s never me.” Her voice trembled. “I never get to . . .” Her hands rose, then fell. “To fall apart. I . . . I can’t do this, though. I can’t. I’ve been waiting, because I couldn’t fly to Japan like I wanted to, not with two kids, and fourteen deliveries, and a wedding, and I’ve just had to wait, and . . .”

  He had his arms around her, but there was nowhere to sit. He said, “Hang on. This was a stupid idea. We’re going back.”

  By the time they were on a bench, with the few visitors around at five-thirty on a March evening giving them a wide berth, because clearly, they looked like two people on the verge of an explosion, Zora had a hand over her nose and mouth, either trying to breathe, or trying to hold back. He kept an arm around her, wished she was in his lap, because he needed to hold her more, and better, and completely, and said, “First—no. I didn’t know. Whatever you found out—I didn’t know, other than that Dylan cheated and lied about it. That, I knew. But you knew it, too.”

  She looked at him, then. Finally. “Is that true? Even though he was using your name?”

  “I’m a rubbish liar.”

  Her face twisted. “I don’t know what to . . . believe anymore. Everything’s just a . . .” She waved a helpless arm. “A lie, you know? Everything’s a lie.”

  “I’m not,” he said. Fiercely, because that was how he felt. “I’m not a lie.”

  Another heave of her chest, and the tears came. He wrapped her up, held her close, rocked her back and forth, and let her cry. Just like he’d done before, except that this time, he got to kiss the top of her head, run his hand down her back, and say, “Shh, baby. Shh. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.” And he thought, She’s OK, then. She’s OK. Thank you, God.

  He’d said he could take anything. It wasn’t true.

  She sat up, finally, wiped her face on her shirt, and tried to laugh, and he said, “The toilets aren’t even open anymore. After hours, eh.”

  “Never mind. I’ll just be disgusting.”

  “Tell me. What happened?”

  She looked at him, then. Soberly. Straight on. Pink nose, blotchy cheeks. Honest as the day. “Casey’s not yours. She’s Dylan’s.”

  It was a kick in the gut. “No. She’s mine.”

  “No, Rhys. She’s not. I found his emails with her mum. With India Hawk. And with other women, too. With . . .” She stopped, breathed, and went on. “Heni Johnson, in Nelson. I’ve met her. She cried, at Dylan’s tangi, and I thought, that’s sweet. But every time the Blues played the Crusaders, she came to see Dylan. Not to see him. To ‘bring him luck.’ Are you going to tell me you didn’t know that?”

  Heni Johnson. Their cousin Franklin’s partner. Tall and beautiful in a lush Maori way that wasn’t anything like Zora. “That particularly?” he said. “No. I didn’t.”

  “And how many others? How many, Rhys? And all that time, he was paying for Casey. The payments stopped when he got ill. When did you take over? And why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t take over.”

  She stood up like a Jack-in-the-box. “Don’t lie to me. I know you did. You must have, eventually, once he couldn’t, because you were there as soon as her mum died, weren’t you? I saw the email where she told him she was pregnant. I saw all of it, and I saw when she stopped asking. I found the email address he was using. He used the same password every time, did you know that? My name, and his All Blacks number. He used my name on the password he used to cheat. Who does that? How could he do that to me?”

  He wanted to say, He used it because he loved you, but he couldn’t say that. It would be a slap in the face. Instead, he said, “I don’t know. I never knew. If I’d had you and Isaiah, I’d never have let you go.”

  She was barely listening to him. She couldn’t. She had to get this out. “I found the account, too,” she said. “I know you must have known about that.”

  “What account?”

  “The one with a hundred twenty-seven thousand dollars in it. The secret one. Why didn’t you tell me?” She was tearing up again. Too bad. He was just going to have to put up with it. “Why did you let me make a fool of myself? Do you know how hard it’s been? Do you have any idea how I’ve worried?”

  “Wait. Back up. Dylan left an account with money in it?”

  “Yes. He was hiding money from me for years. For all . . .” Another breath. “All the years we were married. At least once I was pregnant with Isaiah.” Her voice was shaking. “Do you know how that feels? Do you know how it hurts? I know I’m not glamorous. I’ve always known. I thought I wasn’t . . . that it was me.”

  “No. It wasn’t you. It was Dylan. And no, I don’t know how it feels, but I can guess.”

  “And when Isaiah was born with a hole in his heart. When I was spending my time in hospital with him. That was when the emails started for real.” She put a hand up and dashed away the tears. Stupid tears. “Like life was too much, and we weren’t what he wanted after all, and he was just waiting to run away from it. From us. He was waiting for his chance, but his chance was there. Why didn’t he take it? What, I couldn’t have handled it? I could have handled it. I did. I am. I handled his dying. Why couldn’t he have just left me, if he didn’t want Isaiah, if he didn’t want . . .” Her chin wobbled, and she hated that, too. “Me? Why couldn’t he have left, so I didn’t have to handle it anymore?”

  “You could’ve handled it. But he couldn’t. And so you know? I want to punch a wall right now. If Dylan were here, I’d punch him, except that I told myself I’d never do that again. D’you want to know how many times I’ve thought that since he died? I couldn’t even tell you.”

  “What do you mean, he couldn’t?”

  This conversation was all over the place. Rhys’s face had flushed dark, but that was good. That was what needed to happen. She needed this out, and she needed it over. “He couldn’t take you leaving him,” he said. “It was his biggest fear, when he fell ill, that you’d leave him alone. If he was saving money? He was saving it because he thought he was the one who’d be alone. He was so afraid of it, he made it happen. He was a brilliant rugby player, with heaps more talent than I ever had. Better looking, that’s certain, and he lit up the room. Everybody wanted to be around him. Always. And he was a bloody fool and his own worst enemy, too. Also always.”

  “That makes no sense. None of it does. He didn’t have to hide money away. He was the one earning. He took Isaiah’s living from him. We ate eggs and brown rice for dinner twice a week after he died. We ate beans and kumara and . . . and . . .” She was running out of breath. “I lay awake at night and thought about losing the house.”

  “I didn’t say it was right. I just said it was true. And you should’ve told me. Or I should’ve asked you. I should’ve known.”

  She bounced up, wound to her limit, and walked a circle, because she couldn’t keep sitting. “What about Casey? Tell the truth, Rhys. I have to know now. I can’t take any more lies.”

  He stood up, too, and stood solid, like you wouldn’t move him with a crane. “First I heard of her was after her mum died. That’s when I found out he’d put my name on the birth certificate.”

  “But you had to know she wasn’t yours.” She looked into his mountain-stream eyes, and the blood left her head. “Wait. No.”

  “No what?”

  She was backing up. “You didn’t know whose she was, because you knew she could’ve been yours just as easily. Tell me you both didn’t sleep with her. That that wasn’t a . . . thing between you.” She was rocking again. “No.” She had her hands over her ears, she realized, like she didn’t want to hear. She took them away. “Or tell me if it’s true. If I’m . . . part of it. If it was some kind of competition, some sick agreement. Tell me. I have to know.”

  “No.” It came out as a roar, and she jumped. “No. I was engaged to Victoria.”

  “And you didn’t cheat? C
ome on, Rhys.”

  He was glowering now. Dylan had been wonderful at reassurance. Wonderful at talking. Wonderful at apology. Rhys wasn’t wonderful at any of them. “No. Are you through insulting me? I never had a threesome with my brother. And, yeh, I cheated on girlfriends when I was younger. More than once. In Aussie. I got called out for it. I still hear about it. Couple of incidents there where somebody took a photo. You probably saw. I did everything wrong, I felt like shit, and I stopped doing it.”

  “That’s your life lesson?” She was going to laugh. It was mad. It was impossible. But still, she was going to laugh.

  “Yes, it’s my life lesson. Don’t do shit things that will make you feel like shit.”

  She did laugh, and she sat down again, too. “Noted.”

  He sat down beside her, looking like he was either going to growl, or he was going to smile. He smiled. Clearly reluctantly. She sobered and asked, “So if it wasn’t you, couldn’t have been you . . . why did you say she was yours?”

  “What else could I do?”

  “Well, let’s see . . . take a DNA test?”

  “Have you seen Casey’s eyes?’

  Her eyes? “That her eyes are like yours?” she hazarded.

  It took him a minute, and when the words came out, they were jerky. “We weren’t wanted kids. I wonder if you know what that means. I waited three days in the cold one winter, in Invercargill, for our Nan, wondering if she’d come. In the school holidays, that was, and our mum was gone, off with some fella. There’s no school breakfast and lunch in the school holidays. We ate a packet of bologna out of the fridge, and five eggs, two every day until the last day, when there was only one to share between us. I took the blue bits off the bread and spread Marmite on the toast so you couldn’t taste the mold. The heat was off, because she hadn’t paid the bill. Dylan was supposed to go in the toilet every time. He was three. He kept forgetting. I’d shout at him. Hit him. When our Nan came at last, he had bruises on his arms.” His eyes, when he looked at her again, were bleak. “She asked if our mum had done it. I said yes. Our mum didn’t do it. I did. I hit him, and I lied about it. I know what it’s like when nobody wants you, and you can only count on yourself, because somebody else will only take their anger and frustration out on you. I knew what Dylan felt, because I did it to him. I don’t want that for Casey.”