Epic

by Lark O'Neal

  What if there’s another one?

  Katy shows me the camp stove, then heads out in a bustling way. It’s not quite eight o’clock. I eat some cereal—a brand I’ve never heard of, like soft granola and uncooked oatmeal, very filling—and stare out the window. Birds flitter around the bushes, telling each other stories. The mountains in the distance are touched by sunlight.

  The silence in the house is deafening. No TV or radio, no voices, no anything. It feels weird to be here by myself, but it’s also a good chance to look around without feeling awkward. I start with the bookshelves in the big family room. There’s a big mix of things—novels that a woman would read, with flowers or animals on the spines; spy novels; some gardening books with gorgeous photos that I think I’ll enjoy browsing; and a whole shelf devoted to viticulture, which is what my dad told me is the study of making wines. That’s also something I’ll like exploring, but right now I’m too restless.

  And all at once it hits me—a huge wave of loneliness and sadness and worry. My whole heart aches with this sense that I’ve ruined everything; that my life is going to be totally screwed up by the decision to come here. I’m zillions of miles away from the people who love me, Henry and Electra and Tyler, who must be worried sick by now. I still don’t know what happened with his court date, but now that I think about it, he didn’t seem all that chipper. Is he going to have to go back to jail?

  Oh, why did I do this?

  I remember the last time I felt panicked and despairing. I was in my little house, with no job and no money, and Tyler had been hauled off to jail for nearly beating my old boyfriend to death. He’d never bothered to tell me that he was on parole, and I felt betrayed and stupid and out of options.

  That was why I took my dad up on his offer to come to New Zealand for a while. The only other option was to move in with my step-dad Henry, who’s a great guy but pretty much a hoarder.

  No, there was no other choice. I had to do this. Calmed a bit, I wander over to the windows to look out at the fields of vines. They’re so tidy and clean looking, ready for the new year. I wonder when spring starts. Fingering the necklace around my neck, I lift it up and peer through the kaleidoscope, watching the pattern change from blue to green to red, a new design every minute. “What do you think, Mom?” I say aloud. “Are you glad I’m here?”

  I think she would be. She’d also tell me, as she did a thousand times, to get outside and get some fresh air. That it will make my mood better.

  I fetch my jacket from upstairs and head out. The dog sees me and comes jogging over happily, and I pet his soft, big head. “I can’t remember your name,” I tell him. “Sorry. It was late, and I had bad jet lag.”

  His brown eyes meet mine with a cheery light as he listens intently. “Do you want to show me around? Let’s go check out the vineyards.”

  The morning sun is gold and makes everything look fresh, falling on the geometric rows, casting shadows beneath. I walk along the edges of the fields, worried that I might break some rule if I walk down the aisles between the vines. They’re not budding or anything yet, but I’d hate to ruin something in my ignorance.

  There really isn’t that much to look at, just row after row after row of dormant vines, but the crisp morning air and the sunshine are raising my spirits. The dog is good company, and I look around curiously at the trees that are so different, and the mountains that are low and rolling and dun colored. In the distance, I can see taller mountains, blue like the ones in Colorado, tipped with snow, and I wonder how high they are.

  I also spy a greenhouse, which I didn’t see or somehow didn’t register on my tour the other night. I’m surprised I didn’t notice it, but then, I could barely string three words together at that point. It lures me like a glowing beacon, pale white walls glowing vaguely green with the light coming from behind. The dog hurries behind me, his footsteps telegraphing my own excitement. I look down at him and laugh. “You didn’t tell me there was a greenhouse!”

  He looks up, tongue lolling in a big smile.

  When I get to the door, however, I know he’s probably not allowed inside, and he seems to know it, too. He sits down to wait, and I pull open the door.

  A greenhouse! One of the things I most wanted when I was looking for work the past couple of years was to get out of restaurants and into a greenhouse. A florist or a plant shop might have fit the bill, but I really, really wanted to work in a greenhouse, and this is why.

  When I step inside, soft moist air greets me. It’s heavy with oxygen because the plants breathe it out, and all that enriched air—especially for a high altitude person like me—is almost like taking a hit of a joint or something. I’m immediately happier, more peaceful, almost giddy.

  It’s not as big or as full as the greenhouse nearby my old house, which grew carnations and lots of garden plants. This one is much smaller, with some kind of potting room to the back walled off from the rest. On this side of the wall are tables set out with little plants stuck into trays of what I think must be perlite or vermiculite or some other growing medium. The ones close to me are good-sized, some almost a foot tall, and they go down in size toward the back.

  I bend over and examine the labels, and they’re all in Latin, but I get the gist of it—they’re grapevines of various types. Each one has two parts, a leaf on a stem that’s been bound to the rootstock in the potting material. I walk between the tables slowly, trying to remember anything about my dad and plants, but I can’t at the moment. Had he always wanted to be a vintner?

  He must be pretty successful. This greenhouse and all the land would not be cheap, and the director knew his label. He must have been getting into it by the time my mom and I left, or there wouldn’t have been time to build up this big productive winery.

  Everything about my dad seems unlike all the things I thought he would be. My mother had made him seem like a loser, somebody with his head in the clouds, maybe even a druggie.

  And I guess I don’t know that he isn’t, but he seems pretty straightforwardly successful. He seems pretty focused. He seems—

  “Oi, girl!”

  I’m so startled I jump about three feet in the air, and yes, I do let out a little screech before I turn around and realize it’s Kaleb.

  He chuckles. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “I thought you went with Katy.”

  “I thought you did.” He’s wearing a cloth apron and rubberized garden gloves. In his hands are a flat of new starts, which he settles on the table in front of him. “Didn’t really fancy going to mop up spilled wine.”

  “I get that.” Walking toward him, I ask, “Is it okay that I’m in here? I really like greenhouses, and I just came in to see what’s growing. Are they vines? Are you grafting them?”

  He tilts his head, unsmiling. “Yes. Yes. And…yes.” He jerks his head toward the potting room. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  I almost dance down the aisle and follow him into the room, which is lined with counters. “I’m working on some of my own experiments today,” he says, taking another apron off a hook and handing it to me. “There’s a course of study I want to take at uni up in Hawkes Bay, but until I can get the money together, this is what I’m doing.”

  Pulling the apron over my head, I step closer to the counter where his supplies are laid out. “New Zealand has very strict laws about importing plants of any kind,” he says, picking up a leaf cutting, “and we’ve made a big name for ourselves with Sauvignon Blanc, but I keep wondering what might happen if we mixed things up a bit, yeah?”

  I nod, letting him talk.

  “This is a Gewürztraminer grape,” he holds the leaf in his left hand, “and I’m grafting it onto the rootstock of a Sauvignon Blanc. The Gewürztraminer has a lot of apricot flavor, which might be great with the grapefruit of the Sauvignon. Maybe the resulting grape will be crisper, or maybe it will be too sweet.”

  “That’s like roses, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How do
you do it?”

  “I cut this leaf in half and dip the stem in rooting hormone, right?” He shows me. “Then make a nick in the rootstock, here—” He uses a clean, sharp knife to do it “—and tuck the stem into the nick, then wrap it in this paper and put the rootstock back into the tray. Done.”

  His accent is lyrical, up and down, up and down. The music of it dances along my shoulders. “Can I try it?”

  “Definitely.” He steps to one side so I can reach the tray of rootstock, which are growing in minuscule plots of dirt. He offers me some gloves and I take them, but it’s hard to feel what I’m doing.

  “Do I have to wear them?”

  “You do, unfortunately. Too many things can get under your fingernails, and we lose about half the grafts already. The gloves are sterilized at night—” He points to a hooded metal drawer. “—so we can get a better survival rate.”

  “Ok.” Carefully, I imitate his actions. He points to the place I should put the nick, and I make it very small.

  “Bit deeper than that.”

  I push the knife a little harder, but it’s very sharp and sinks way too far into the wood. “Oh, shit. Sorry!”

  “No worries,” he says, very calmly. “Takes time to get the feel of it. You can graft it anyway. It might take.”

  I cut the leaf in half, which I already understand from other plants. “I grew a bunch of African violets from leaves I pinched off plants in supermarkets,” I say, focusing carefully on the fit of the stem into the too-big cut. “Like that?”

  “Just like that.” He hands me the paper tape and holds it with one finger while I tear off a length and wrap it around the wound. “Now we mist them.” He soaks the paper tape and the leaves. “We have to do that many times a day until they take.”

  I straighten, and a big bubble of happiness rises up from my chest and splats across my face in a big grin. “Thank you! That’s freaking awesome.”

  He grins. “Most girls don’t get excited about grafting.”

  “Yeah, well, I love plants.”

  “You can do some more if you want.”

  “Really?”

  “Hell, yeah.” He gestures toward the two flats of rootstock and plant stock behind us. “I have a lot to do.”

  He finds a second knife and we work side by side, me much slower than him. He hums under his breath, a tune I don’t recognize. The sound of his voice is low and resonant. We talk, but I’m very focused and afraid to make a mistake, so only a little.

  As we carry the finished flats out to an area marked with neon tape on one of the tables, he says, “So what made you try to root African violets?”

  “They’re expensive. And I wanted to see if I could.”

  “How did you know how?”

  I lift a shoulder. “Internet, and sometimes I would go to this greenhouse by my old house and ask this one person questions.” I brush my hands together. “I really wanted to work there, but they didn’t pay enough.”

  His teeth flash, and those tilted eyes make me think again of a tiger, all golden and unusual. “Plenty of greenhouse work here, for sure.”

  “Really?” I look around at the space, the frosted windows, the plants in tidy rows, and can’t imagine how I could be any happier. “That would be so great.”

  He gives me a considered glance. “Must get it from your pop. He’s crazy about horticulture.”

  “Maybe I do.” The possibility warms me. “How’d you get into it?”

  “Just came here and it caught my attention.”

  “What were you going to do before that?”

  He touches the scar on his eyebrow, smooths it upward. “Don’t know. Wasn’t on a good path after my dad died. Mostly I was drinking beer and talking trash with my bros down the block.”

  “So it was a good thing you came here, right?”

  His gaze is direct. “Yes.” Yiis

  The pinched sound of the word is starting to crack me up.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing. What else can we do in here?”

  “Are you bored?”

  “I was,” I say with a shrug. “There’s no electricity, I think I broke my iPad in the earthquake, and I was hoping to spend time with my dad today.”

  “Worried about that boyfriend?” He moves the trays into alignment and bends over to write something in a small notebook he takes out of his back pocket.

  “Kind of.” I purse my lips. “I was totally feeling sorry for myself before I came out here.”

  “Oh, yeah? What made you stop?”

  “I don’t know.” I’m not about to tell him I have these imaginary conversations with my dead mom. “Seemed like a waste of a good day.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Wish Darcy could learn that.” He heads for another section of the greenhouse. “Come on, I’ll show you how to check for rot.”

  I follow, and he continues. “She just can’t get over the earthquakes. Katy keeps saying that it just takes time, but it bugs me that she’s such a drama queen about it.”

  “It seems like Katy gets kind of annoyed with her sometimes, too, though.”

  “She’s actually pissed off at our mom more than Darcy. She just left us here and hasn’t been back, really. Not fair to Katy and Keiran, but we don’t have anywhere else to go.” He shows me how to test for rot on cuttings that have been growing for a while, and I go around to the other side of the table to test on the opposite side.

  “Where’s your mom?” I ask.

  He shrugs a little. “Europe. Somewhere.” He meets my gaze, and I see simple acceptance there. “She is who she is.”

  “And your dad died?”

  He nods.

  “Not in the earthquakes?”

  “No. In a car accident four years ago.”

  “My mom died four years ago, in February, in a freak accident.”

  “Yeah? My dad died in March. Bad rainstorm, just drove off the road.”

  “Random.”

  “Yeah.” He smiles in a rueful way. “Sorry about your mum.”

  “Sorry about your dad.”

  “Yeah, he was a good guy. I miss him a lot.”

  “I miss my mom, too.” I wiggle a branch, and it practically comes apart in my hands. “Got one.”

  “Pull it out by the roots and dump it in here.” He passes a plastic bucket over to me. “Get some new gloves.”

  I follow instructions and come back, but he’s finished. “That’s about all there is to do today. You want to go into Blenheim and find an Internet cafe?”

  “Really? Yes.” Relief floods through me. “Yes, I would really like that.”

  “You’re not afraid of a scooter, are you?” It’s almost a dare.

  I laugh. “No way!”

  “Good. Go get something warm, then. It’s going to be a bit of a cold ride.”

  Chapter SEVEN

  I pull on a sweater and braid my hair super tight. In the pocket of my jeans I stuff the rest of the New Zealand dollars I got in Auckland, $28. I hope it’s enough for Internet and lunch. Counting the bills, though, I think about the money I’ll get for the commercial and a sense of ease moves through me. I’ll buy new underwear. Maybe some boots, finally. I wonder when they’ll pay us. I should have asked.

  I fly back downstairs and Kaleb is waiting, dragging a feather on a stick around for the cross-eyed Neko.

  “He slept with me last night,” I say. “I loved hearing him purr.”

  “He’s the house ambassador,” Kaleb says. “Wanted to make you feel welcome.”

  “I definitely do.”

  He looks over my clothes. “You have any gloves?”

  “No. It was summer back home.”

  He bends over and rummages through a wicker basket sitting by the door, pulls out a pair of red mittens. “These’ll do.” I pull them on, and they’re especially soft and warm.

  We walk around to the back of the house where a scooter waits. It’s a lot nicer than I expected, a pale green, kinda retro, with plenty of roo
m for two. “Sweet!”

  “Thanks.” He hands me a shiny green helmet and puts on a black one himself. He’s wearing jeans and a worn brown leather jacket, and once his helmet is fastened, he pulls on leather gloves. “Petrol’s so expensive, I had to find something cheap.” His wide grin appears. “Also, it’s flash.”

  I grin back.

  He starts it up, braces it and nods. “Climb aboard and hold on tight.”

  I swing my leg over and settle behind him, gingerly sliding my hands around his waist. I feel sort of awkward—silly, really.

  “Tighter than that, chickee, or you’ll fall right off.”

  He takes off, and although he’s not going that fast, it’s definitely better to lean in closer and hold on harder to his waist. It’s also warmer, because his body blocks the wind. Holding on like this, I get a full sense of his size—broad shoulders above the taut waist, and much taller than me. I try not to notice the way my breasts press into his back, or the way my thighs press into his hips. A fragrance I finally decide is his hair pours over me, smelling of sunlight and summer and earth.

  But it’s just the way it is to ride on a bike with someone. It doesn’t mean anything.

  My dad and I drove this way home from the airport, but I was half-dead with jet lag. Now I’m awake, and the land is right there, spreading out all around us, rolling hills without any trees or really any people, just open.

  “There’re a lot of wineries tucked in here,” Kaleb says, and in the distance I can see rows of dormant grapevines spreading like a loosely knitted blanket over the hill.

  I think it must be the south slope, for the light. “Do they all face south?”

  “North,” he calls over his shoulder. “Sun is north here.”

  “Oh, yeah.” The stars are going to be different here, too. I’ll have to remember to look.

  The ride is exhilarating. The road twists and turns and curves, goes uphill and downhill. Kaleb isn’t some crazy driver—not that the scooter could go that fast, probably. He sings a song in a language I don’t know, and I only catch every third word or so. His body is relaxed under my hands.