Hearts in the Land of Ferns

by Jude Knight

  Jamie withdrew a plaque about the size of a postcard and held it up so they could see. A piece of wood, painted on both sides, one with tree baubles against a green background and the other with a border of Christmas presents and the words, “The Best Christmas Present is a Happy Family.”

  Granddad spoke for them all when he looked around his family gathered together, and said, “Amen.”

  * * *

  THE END

  Part IV

  Abbie’s Wish

  Abbie’s Christmas wish draws three men to her mother. One of them is a monster.

  After too many horrifying experiences, Claudia Westerson has given up on men. She’s done everything possible to exorcise the men in her life, short of changing her name and appearance. They’re unpredictable, controlling and, worst of all, dangerous. Besides, all her energies are devoted to therapy for her daughter, Abbie, who is recovering from a brain injury.

  But after Abbie is photographed making a wish for Christmas, Claudia begins receiving anonymous threats, proving her quiet refuge is not nearly hidden enough.

  Who can she trust? Three men hope to make her theirs:

  Jack, the driver from her daughter’s accident

  Ethan, her daughter’s biological father

  Rhys, a local school teacher and widower.

  They all sound sincere, but which one isn’t?

  1

  “No, Mumma,” Abbie insisted. “Jus’ me.” She pointed to the sign.

  “Christmas Wishing Tree,” it proclaimed. “One gold coin. No adults.” And, in much smaller letters, “All proceeds to Pukanui High School Cycle Team uniform fund.”

  The organisers had barricaded one corner of the large exhibition hall at the show grounds, close to the short hallway to the cafeteria, where the enormous Christmas tree would attract passers-by. It had certainly caught Abbie, who begged for a dollar entry fee, forgetting the hunger that had driven them inside.

  An improbably large Santa’s elf gave the child paper and a crayon in return for her coin, and Abbie tolerated Claudia opening the safety gate that led into the enclosure. In moments, Abbie was lying on her tummy on the rug by the enormous Christmas tree, bare feet waving in the air, face screwed up in concentration.

  “It’s two months till Christmas,” Claudia muttered. Her father never permitted discussion of the festival before December, and wouldn’t tolerate any decorating until a few days before the twenty-fifth. “Stupid commercial feast,” he would say. “It’s Little Lent, or that’s what it used to be. Prayer, fasting, and penitence. Besides, we don’t have time for all that nonsense, Princess.” And he would send her back to repeat whatever exercise she had just finished.

  “It’s never too early to have fun,” her grandmother retorted the first year she’d come to the A&P Show, held every year in late October, and found references to Christmas among the stalls and exhibits. Raised in the United States since she was eight, she’d needed a translation—A&P: Agriculture and Pastoral—and many of the exhibits were true to those origins. But not all.

  Abbie folded her paper, and then concentrated on making it to her feet without incident. The hardest part of the child’s increasing agility was leaving her to manage on her own.

  “Excuse me.” The speaker was a tall, thin woman with square spectacles, bright purple hair, and an anxious smile. “I’m Maggie. From Maggie’s Martonvale? We met at RDA?”

  Oh yes. The journalist. Her hair had been a vibrant pink last time. She worked for the local news site; once a newspaper but now a local website and a small spot on the local television station.

  “I took some photos of Abigail,” the woman said. “She looked so cute, concentrating so hard on her wish. I won’t… That is, would you sign the consent form for me to use them? It’ll be good advertising for the A&P Show, and might help the cycle team get their uniforms.”

  Claudia was silent, considering different angles, wondering if she was imagining the danger, and Maggie hurried on with more persuasion. “I could mention RDA in the caption, if you liked. I know they always need more volunteers and more money.”

  The Riding for the Disabled Association provided hippotherapy for children and adults. “The movements of the horse’s muscles teach Abbie’s muscles how to move again and balancing on the horse improves her sense of where her body is in relation to the ground,” the doctor had said when he wrote the prescription that gave her child access. Claudia owed RDA a great deal, but no. Agreeing to publicity in order to help them might be a step too far.

  Abbie was struggling with the peg, the tip of her tongue shoved out between her teeth as she concentrated.

  “Do you need to go help?” The reporter asked.

  “She wants to do it herself,” Claudia explained, and Maggie laughed. “I have one just like that. It can be hard to watch, can’t it?”

  The shared mother moment tipped the scale. “Yes, I’ll sign the consent,” Claudia agreed. “But no names, Maggie. And just make it about the A&P Show and the cycle team. No details about Abbie.”

  In the end, the woman took two more photos, one with Abbie showing Claudia the sticker the elf had put on her tee shirt. “I made a Christmas wish,” with a border of red, green, and yellow bicycles.

  After all, what harm could it do?

  He followed the seller into the garage, which was as filthy, cluttered, and disorganized as he’d feared. But the man owned a twin to the Triumph carburetor he had come to see, and the pair together were worth four times the asking price. Not that he’d let on. Far from it. He had every intention of beating the price down, if only because he was inside this disgusting hole risking septicaemia or worse.

  He cast a disgusted look at the sink bench, where car parts, tools, greasy rags, and other bits and pieces lay scattered among plates with congealed food scraps, dirty cups half-filled with cold liquid substances, and a tottering stack of fast-food boxes. He curled his lip at the pinups above the bench—little girls, none of them over ten, the pictures home printed and ornamented with hearts and comments.

  Where was the man? He craned to see over a pile of boxes of parts, some labelled, most anonymous, but as he did something about the disturbing montage registered in his mind, and in two short strides he was next to the bench, peering at the little girl with the dark curly hair and the delighted smile.

  The same girl was on the next clipping, which had been pinned up first, and half covered so he could see there was someone else in the picture, but not who it was. He checked again to make sure the owner couldn’t see him, then unpinned the top photo. He would have to scrub his hands, but it was worth it. “So that’s where you are,” he murmured to the woman, quickly scanning the paragraph or two of text that went with the image. He slipped both clippings into his pocket and was back by the doorway by the time the seller had emerged from his search, triumphantly waving the part.

  He returned the smile with one of his own. Genuine, indeed. Just what he needed to complete the restoration of his classic motor cycle. A couple of weeks of evenings, and he’d be ready for a road trip. And—he patted the pocket that held the stolen pictures—he knew just where he wanted to go.

  2

  The girls were taking turns on Abbie’s totter board, turning physiotherapy into a game that had them in fits of laughter. It was a circle of plywood with a hemisphere of solid wood fixed at its centre, and the person standing on the flat upper surface had to recover her balance when given a light shove by the other. Because Abbie’s brain injury had left her unable to recognize the sensation of falling before she hit the ground, her brain needed to be retrained, and the totter board was designed as a safe way to learn what off-balance felt like.

  “Abbie, be gentle,” Claudia warned, as Abbie knocked her friend off the centre of the board so that Polly Becker had to put out a foot to save herself. The totter board dipped on that side, touching the ground, and Polly overcorrected the other way, which ended with her having to jump right off the board, catching her balance by hol
ding on to Abbie.

  “My turn,” Abbie crowed.

  Polly, without being asked, offered both hands for Abbie to hold while she took up position on the board, her legs spread, her knees bent.

  “They’re having fun,” Carly observed. The two mothers were leaning on the bench between the small kitchenette and the flat’s living room.

  “I try to get her to do about ten minutes a day,” Claudia said, “but they’ve been at it for half-an-hour. I should borrow your daughter every day.”

  “You can, if it will help. Abbie has come a long way, hasn’t she?”

  Since Abbie and Claudia had moved to Fairburn in time for the start of the school year, she meant. “Riding has been good for her,” Claudia noted. Perhaps Abbie had just turned a corner ten months ago after eighteen months of physio, occupational, psychological, and speech therapy. But RDA was a big factor, Claudia believed.

  “You should have seen her today!” Carly marvelled. “She and Rosie went over the trot poles. You would have been so proud!”

  Claudia suppressed a small stab of envy that her friend had seen the achievement and she had missed it. “That’s wonderful.” Letting Abbie go to RDA with Carly, who volunteered as a helper twice a week, had been hard but right. Abbie had refused to go anywhere without Claudia for months after she was released from Starship, the specialist children’s hospital. In recent months, Claudia’s counsellor had suggested that Claudia had needed that clinginess as much as Abbie, and that it was time to let go, just a little.

  “Abbie, it is time to feed Edward,” she said. Another sign of progress. The rabbit they’d bought at the A&P Show in October was Abbie’s responsibility. She fed the animal and cleaned his hutch, with Claudia only stepping in to lift anything too heavy for the child.

  “Wanna help?” Abbie said to her friend, and the two ran outside, Claudia—as always—holding her breath at the lurch from side to side, each fast step a corrected fall, that was Abbie’s run. “Every time Rosie trots, I expect Abbie to fall off,” she confessed. Rosie was one of the patient mounts RDA used to provide hippotherapy. Abbie’s riding was an ungainly bounce, and it seemed a miracle to Claudia that she ended back in the saddle after each flight into the air on one side of the horse or the other.

  “Even more motivation to find your centre than on the totter board,” Carly observed. “Rosie’s just a pony, but still, she’s twelve hands. A long way to fall for a little ’un.”

  Which is what the people running each side of the horse were for, but they hadn’t needed to catch Abbie in months, and she’d graduated to a single helper.

  “More coffee?” Claudia waved the plunger pot vaguely in the direction of the electric kettle, but Carly shook her head. “I should go rescue poor Trent. He has a book thingy on tonight, and so I’m up for feeding the munchkins and getting them off to bed. I’ll just give Polly a few minutes with your giant rabbit, and then we’ll be off.”

  Another stab of envy, this one sharper. Carly and Trent restored Claudia’s much dented faith that good marriages were possible, and that the world held men who didn’t have to dominate and control their women and children. Not for her, though. Better to be alone than to trust her own judgement again, and be wrong. Again.

  “Not another book launch?” she asked.

  “Not this time. He got number seven off to the editor, though, so we’re starting to plan for May. No, this is a book club over the hill in Wellington. They’ve been reading the series, and invited him to come and answer questions. He’s very nervous!”

  “He’ll be great.” Trent Becker had been writing the first in his detective series more than eight years ago when the three of them had been the youngest people at ante-natal classes. Claudia, back from the United States with no ties except to her grandmother, had been grateful for the way they cheerfully welcomed her into their lives. She’d moved away when her grandmother died, but had met Carly within a week of her return ten months ago, and the three had quickly fallen into their old friendship.

  “Of course, he will.” Carly was Trent’s first reader, his sounding board, and his cheerleader. And he returned the support, fitting his writing around stay-at-home parenting for Polly and her two little sisters so that Carly could finish her Masters in environmental studies and work part time as environmental health officer for the local council.

  “Anyway, he’ll be panicking if I’m not home soon. Polly! Say goodbye to Abbie. Time for us to go.”

  The girls came obediently inside, Polly clutching Edward, who dangled phlegmatically from her arms and made no objection to being transferred to Abbie when Carly urged her to hurry up and get her shoes on.

  Carly, now that she’d decided to leave, hovered impatiently as Polly sat on the doorstep tying her laces. “What’s this?” she said, and bent to pick something up—a white envelope that had been slipped under the rubber welcome mat.

  “Must have been hand delivered,” she commented, handing it to Claudia. “Come on, Pol. Bye, Abbie. Bye, Claudia. See you tomorrow.”

  Claudia responded, and closed the door as her friend chivvied Polly into the car. She didn’t take her eyes off her name on the envelope, written using purple in neat block capitals.

  “Whad is i’?” Abbie demanded, her sentence short and blurred and all on one note. After two years of voice therapy and physio, she could manage some of the small muscle movements to stop and start her breath for ‘p’, ‘t’ and ‘k’ sounds, but not by the end of the day, when she was tired.

  “Let’s see.” Claudia turned the envelope over. Nothing there. She broke the seal and pulled out the single slip of paper, some instinct warning her to keep her face from reacting. “Just someone selling something,” she said, putting the envelope and its pernicious contents up onto the shelf with the cookery books. “Let me get dinner on, sweetheart, and then I’ll hear your spelling. Do you have any other homework?”

  The evening routines distracted the child, but Claudia’s mind circled back and back to the words that had been hand delivered to her doorstep.

  “I KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.”

  Ethan watched from the street as the other woman and girl left, and Claudia and her daughter went inside and closed the door. After eight years, he’d finally found her.

  No name on the electoral roll, no name in the white pages. When he’d been free to travel again, she’d disappeared without a trace, and it was only by the merest chance he’d come across a photo of her and Abbie and been able to trace her to Fairburn.

  He’d looked there before, arriving just a few weeks after her grandmother’s funeral, and she had already left town. No one would talk to a stranger about where she might have gone, if they even knew.

  This time, he’d taken a job at the local garage, figuring she would come in for something: to fill her car up, to buy milk or a Lotto ticket, to get her wheels realigned. Something. Sooner or later.

  And his gamble had paid off today, when he’d been asked to check a non-blinking indicator light. And there it was on the job sheet, in his boss’s clear block capitals. Claudia’s address, at last.

  So, he’d walked this way home. She was as far across Fairburn as she could be from her grandmother’s house, and living in what he thought of as a granny flat—a small stand-alone dwelling on the back of someone else’s section. The room he was renting in a boarding house was only two blocks away. They were practically neighbours.

  He looked longingly at the closed door. The glimpse he’d had of Claudia and little Abbie had left him eager for more. He toyed briefly with the idea of knocking on the door. Would she slam it in his face? He deserved that and more for the pain he’d put her through, but he wasn’t that person any more. He hoped for the chance to prove it to her, and to pay some of the debt he owed for the hurt he’d caused.

  Approaching her now was too much of a risk.

  He couldn’t loiter here any longer, but it was hard to walk away.

  “Patience,” he told himself. In his racing days, they used to
call him the hare, but he’d be tortoise slow if it would win him this race. He’d had lots of practice waiting, and he could do some more. But soon—very soon—he and Claudia were going to have their long overdue accounting.

  3

  Claudia began the run up to Christmas on the first of December, when she put up the Jesse Tree, a painted tree branch, fastened to a stand, that Grandma had made the year after Abbie was born. Grandma had made the felt ornaments, too, one for each day until Christmas. Each ornament had a story from the Bible, for the Jesse Tree was an old traditional way of tracking the salvation story from the creation of the universe to the birth of Jesus.

  “But I don’t believe what you believe,” Claudia had explained, her father’s rigid form of Christianity having put her off religion of all kinds. But Grandma said the stories were part of her cultural heritage, and she—and Abbie too, as she grew older—could enjoy them without putting any more weight on them than on tales of King Arthur and his Round Table or Maui fishing up the North Island of New Zealand.

  When Grandma died and Claudia moved to the city, she’d packed the branch and the ornaments away, but they’d come out again to decorate Abbie’s hospital room after the accident. Claudia had whiled away the days and nights spent waiting for Abbie to recover consciousness by looking up the story to go with the ornament of the day, telling it in simpler words to the child lying still and white in the clean bed, writing it down, and illustrating the page. The pages, now bound, still recalled to her mind the long hours in the hospital, and the joy when, a few days before Christmas, a nurse had interrupted the story of Gabriel’s visit to Mary to take Abbie’s pulse, and Abbie had wrenched her hand away and demanded that the story continue.