Just Not Mine (Escape to New Zealand)

by Rosalind James

  Hugh was losing track of the conversation. That hadn’t been what he’d taken from the billboard, that girls liked horses, but if that skin care stuff was for women, he guessed the advert might be for women too, though he still had his doubts. “It is?”

  She sighed with exasperation. “Well, duh. Pony club books?”

  “Uh … Are there pony club books?”

  “Of course there are,” she said. “Heaps of them.”

  “And Misty of Chincoteague,” Josie put in. “National Velvet.”

  “I don’t know those,” Amelia said doubtfully.

  “Oh, you should read them,” Josie said. “They’re just wonderful. We can look at the library, if you like. I could show you.”

  “But there are books about other animals.” Charlie was still pursuing the original topic. “Like dogs. There are loads of books about dogs.”

  “For boys,” Amelia said impatiently. “Boys like dogs, and girls like horses. Like I said. Girls like cats, too,” she added as an afterthought. “There are cat books. Cats are sexy, too, I think, though you couldn’t lie on one, of course. Anything you can stroke, like a horse, or a cat,” she decided. “I think that’s what makes it sexy. And that’s pretty, of course.”

  Yeh, pretty things you could stroke, that worked for Hugh.

  “And goats,” Josie put in helpfully. “Heidi.”

  Goats? Hugh was so confused.

  “Animal books for girls,” Josie explained, seeing it. “Not sexy animals.” Ah.

  “I haven’t read that either,” Amelia said.

  “Oh!’ Charlie jumped. “Pigs! There are ones about pigs. Because Babe. Mum read us Babe.” His face clouded over. “I remember that. We were almost done when she …” He stopped.

  “When she died,” Hugh said. The kids didn’t refer often to it anymore, but of course they thought about it. What should he do about that? What had Aunt Cora been doing about that? He didn’t even know.

  “You could get that too,” Josie suggested. “At the library. I’m not sure how hard it is, but Amelia could read it aloud, couldn’t she? Or Hugh could,” she said with a glance at him. “Even better. It isn’t right to leave a good book unfinished, or a good memory, either.”

  “I’m not too good at reading aloud,” he began to say. But Josie was frowning a bit at him, giving her head an infinitesimal shake, so he changed it to, “but I could try. Course we could read it aloud.” She was smiling at him now, so that was obviously the right answer.

  “But we’d better go have dinner,” Hugh said. “Looks like you two have done your best to clean out Josie’s fridge, but I’m starved. And we need to let Josie get on with her own dinner as well.”

  “Maybe she could come eat with us,” Charlie said. “Can you, Josie? Because you said if somebody helped you, you should feed them, and you helped us.”

  “Nah,” she said with a quick glance at Hugh. “You helped me, remember? With the pot plants?”

  “Oh, I think it’s me in debt,” Hugh said. Again, not how he was used to getting his dinner dates, but he’d take her company any way he could get it. “Got a couple roast chickens, some vegies, that’s all, but if you don’t mind eating that, we’d like to have you come.”

  “A feast,” she said. “Roast chicken? Sounds good to me.”

  Letting Your Hair Down

  “Thanks very much for that,” Josie said after a dinner that they’d all fixed together, had eaten to the accompaniment of plenty of friendly chat at the kitchen table. Another point on the Hugh as Undemanding-for-Now-Neighbor scoreboard, he hoped.

  She got up and carried her dishes across to the sink. “And I should be off.”

  “If you could stay for a bit,” Hugh offered, because this was an opportunity he wasn’t going to let go by, “we could put these two on washing-up duty, and we could sit and have a glass of wine. I’m still getting over my traumatic experience, the kids gone missing. I may need a medical professional to sit with me and see that I recover properly.”

  “Josie’s not really a medical professional,” Amelia told him. “That’s just her part.”

  Hugh ignored her. “One glass of wine.” He held up his index finger for demonstration purposes. “One. In the lounge. Can I talk you into that much excess?”

  “Maybe,” she said, and she was smiling. “One.”

  “Good.” He was smiling like a fool himself as he jumped up and went for the fridge before she could change her mind. “White OK?”

  “White’s awesome.”

  “Washing-up, homework for tomorrow in the backpack, showers, bed,” he told the kids, grabbing a couple glasses. “Eight-thirty. I’ll be checking.”

  “Holly’s bedtime is nine-thirty,” Amelia said, apparently deciding that this was the ideal moment to have this conversation.

  “Wonderful,” he said. “Tell her I said congratulations.”

  Josie was laughing when he set the bottle and glasses on the coffee table. “Good job,” she told him. “You’re sounding more natural at that every day.”

  “You think?” He grinned at her, switched on the lamp on the end table, then turned the dimmers down on the overhead light. Low, but not too low. He gestured her to the couch, poured them each a glass, handed hers over and sat down in the easy chair at a right angle to her seat. Good distance, good nonverbal communication, he hoped.

  “Yeh,” Josie said. “I can just hear Amelia complaining about it to Holly tomorrow. Exactly the way it should be. If you’re not infringing on their freedoms, failing to understand how mature they are now, you’re probably not doing it right.”

  She leaned forward, touched her glass lightly to his with a murmured ‘Cheers,’ then settled back again, pulling her long, bare legs up under her. Her eyes smiled at him over the rim as she took a sip, and he blanked for a moment on what they’d been talking about.

  “First time I’ve seen you drink anything,” he said. “Next thing we know, you’ll be letting your hair down. Feel free, by the way.”

  She smiled again, but didn’t answer him directly. “And now you know why. And why I don’t drink beer, and don’t eat pizza.”

  “Or potatoes, or mince, or bacon. Strictly low-kilojoule pursuits, wasn’t it?”

  “Mmm. More points there, quoting my words back to me. Somebody’s been to Dating School.”

  She really was flirting. “We aim to please,” he told her, and if he smiled at her a little more while he said it, let his gaze heat up a bit, well, nonverbal communication could work both ways.

  She lowered her eyes and took another sip. “Yeh, well, doesn’t take too many beers and bikkies to knock the naked billboards right out of the running, and that’s the contract that gave me the courage to buy the house at last. Pays heaps better than being Dr. Eva all year, shocking as that is. Although Dr. Eva has to watch the beers and bikkies too.”

  “I’ve noticed she can’t seem to keep her clothes on,” he agreed. “The kids and I had a look,” he explained at her questioning glance. “And then I turned it off,” he hastened to add, because he had a feeling that otherwise, the points were going to be disappearing from the scoreboard. “You were right. Dr. Eva isn’t age-appropriate.”

  “Mmm. She’s not. Good on ya for paying attention to that.”

  “Yeh, trying. Like we said.”

  “When is your aunt back?” she asked.

  “About seven weeks. We’re nearly halfway through, and not too bad, would you say?”

  “I’d say not too bad at all.”

  “You can probably tell, though,” he said, “that I’ve got a ways to go still. That thing about the reading … thanks for that. That would be good, you think, to read Charlie that book?”

  “For Amelia too,” she said. “She’ll probably say she’s not interested. But do the reading in here, that’d be my suggestion.”

  “Yeh? Why?”

  “If you sit on the couch,” she explained, “right in the middle of it, then Charlie has to sit close, on one side of you
. And just that, just having an adult body next to his—he probably misses that. Sometimes having someone to touch is what we miss most, isn’t it? Especially for a kid like Charlie who’s lost both parents. He needs it more than anyone, and I’m guessing he doesn’t know how to ask for it.”

  “You think?” he asked, startled. “You can tell that?”

  “Yeh. I do. I think he’s scared to touch you. He’s scared you wouldn’t want to, that you won’t think he’s tough enough for you.”

  “That’s not true, though,” he said. “He’s eight. I know he’s eight.”

  “Maybe you could show him it’s all right, then. If you don’t make a big deal of it, just sit where he’ll be touching you without having to try, that could do it. And then, once you start reading, my guess is, Amelia will come sit too. If you’re in the middle, she can sit on the other side, do you see? And then you’ve got them both close. Read that book, Babe, then read another one, and another. Dick King-Smith wrote heaps of them, I know, so that’d be easy, and natural.”

  He could do that. “Should I be talking about their parents, too?” he asked. “I saw you did that, about their mum, about her kitchen.”

  “Yeh. Do you really want to know what I think, though? Or is this just …” She waved her wine glass. “Chatting up? Making me believe you do?”

  “I really do want to know. And, yeh,” he admitted, because he liked her so much, and he didn’t want to lie to her, “it’s probably chatting up, too. But I really want to know all the same.”

  “Then here’s my wisdom,” she said. She laughed a little, then sobered, sat and thought a minute.

  “One of the hardest things when somebody dies, I think,” she said slowly, “is that people don’t mention them again, don’t ever say their names. It’s because they’re embarrassed, because they feel awkward, don’t want to show their own pain, maybe, whatever it is, but it can make you feel … it could make Charlie and Amelia feel like their parents aren’t just gone, they’re forgotten. That’s one of the worst things there is, to be forgotten, to have somebody we loved so much be forgotten. Our biggest fear, isn’t it? That we’ll die, and nobody will care? That we won’t have mattered? When people die, as long as they’re remembered, they’re not really gone, are they? But if nobody ever mentions them again, if nobody remembers … then they’re lost. And I think that’s how Charlie feels. That his parents are lost, and it doesn’t matter to anybody else, and nobody understands how it feels.”

  “How do you know all this?” he asked, and he wasn’t flirting now.

  “I’m an actor,” she said. “It’s my job to know how emotions feel, to read body language so I can convey that. And for me, I have to actually feel the emotions to convey them. Some actors don’t, but I do.”

  “I didn’t think Dr. Eva had any tender emotions,” he said.

  “I wasn’t always Dr. Eva, though. And I won’t be her forever. And on the loss thing,” she went on, “that’s being Maori, I guess. I think that’s one thing we do better than Pakeha. We keep our loved ones alive in our memories, in our thoughts, and when we say their names, when we honor them, that lets the other people who loved them keep them alive, too.”

  “Should they be hanging onto the past, though?” he asked.

  “That’s not it,” she said, sounding absolutely sure. “Grieving isn’t hanging on. It’s letting yourself do what you need to do in order to move into the future. Letting yourself feel the pain and the loss so you can go on and live again. Because the loss and the pain are still there whether you acknowledge them or not, aren’t they? If you bottle them so tightly that even you can never see them, that doesn’t make them go away. It just means it’ll never stop hurting, like a wound that’s got infected.”

  “Ouch.”

  She laughed, breaking the somber mood. “Yeh. Not the best metaphor, I guess, but that’s how it feels, isn’t it?”

  “You think that’s how it feels for Charlie? For Amelia?”

  “I’m guessing,” she said. “How does it feel for you?”

  “For me?”

  “Yeh. You lost your dad, too, right? Can’t have been easy.”

  “I was an adult, though.”

  “Does that make it easy?”

  “Well, none of it was easy,” he admitted. “But there was a lot to do at the time, so I just got on with it, I suppose.”

  “Mmm,” she said, and took another sip of wine. “Because you weren’t living here, obviously.”

  “No. I was living in Wellington, always, playing for the Hurricanes. Hardly here at all, ever. I wasn’t even in En Zed when it happened. I was all the way over in Perth, playing the Western Force. I found out after the match, in the sheds.”

  It had been a tough loss, a defensive implosion by the Hurricanes against the Force. There’d be some honest talk to come, it had been clear, but at the time, it had been a quiet group stripping down, getting the tape off, showering. Until the two police officers had walked into the room, and then it had gone even quieter.

  They’d had a word to the coach, then they were walking through the room with every eye on them, every man praying they wouldn’t stop in front of him. Every one of them no doubt running through his recent actions, hoping they weren’t there for him.

  And they’d stopped in front of Hugh.

  “Hugh Latimer?” the elder one asked, his face deadly serious.

  “Yeh,” he said, his mind a whirl, his mouth dry.

  “Got some bad news, I’m afraid. We’ve just heard from the Auckland Police. They’ve asked us to come find you.”

  Auckland. But he lived in Wellington. And he hadn’t done anything wrong in Auckland. He hadn’t done anything wrong in Wellington, for that matter, but when you were a sportsman, that sometimes didn’t make any difference.

  Some girl. Shit. Some accusation he wasn’t going to be able to defend himself against, some casual thing she’d decided wasn’t going to be casual after all. Shit. Shit.

  “There’s been an accident,” the man said now, and Hugh stopped swearing inside, because he was past fear.

  “What … what kind of accident?”

  “Your father and …” The man looked at his pad. “Stepmother, I guess. A road accident. Hit by another car, a drink driver, by the sound of it.”

  “It’s bad?” Hugh managed to ask. He wished he were dressed, that he wasn’t sitting on a bench in his underwear.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said, and paused. “I’m afraid they’re both gone. They were clipped on the motorway, went under the back of a truck. They didn’t have a chance. It would have been instantaneous. I’m very sorry.”

  Hugh tried to stand up, but his legs wouldn’t hold him. The room had gone dead quiet, he realized in some distant corner of his brain.

  “The kids,” he managed to say. “Amelia and Charlie. Were they with them?”

  “No,” the man said. “No kids. I didn’t hear anything about that.”

  “Who’s …” Hugh felt his body threatening to shake with the relief of it, tried to ignore it, tried to think. “Who’s looking after the kids?”

  “I don’t know,” the man said.

  “Then find out,” Hugh said. His voice was rising, and he was furious. “Find out.”

  “Calm down,” the man said.

  “No. I won’t calm down. Find out who’s looking after those kids.” He was up now, pulling on his warmups. “Make sure somebody is. And then ring me and tell me, so I can find them when I get there.”

  All he’d been able to think about on the plane was that last text from his dad. The one he hadn’t answered.

  Best of luck tonight. Can’t watch this one, but I’ll catch it later.

  Story of his life, he’d thought when he’d got it. Can’t be there this time. Got a meeting with a client. Got a crew to sort out. Got these other kids, the ones I wanted, the ones whose lives I want to be part of. Got this new wife, the one I can love, the one whose kids I can love. Got something—anything—to do that
’s more important than you.

  So he hadn’t answered. And now it didn’t matter. Because both of them were dead.

  * * *

  “So what did you do?” Josie asked quietly when he’d told her. Not all of that, of course. Just what had happened, that the other driver had been killed as well, nobody left to focus his fury on, nothing to be done but move on.

  “Stayed with them for a couple weeks,” he said. “Until we could decide what to do.”

  “Weren’t there grandparents?” she asked.

  “Juliette—my stepmum—she was French,” he explained. “Her parents are there. And my dad only had his mum left, in the UK. She was over eighty, and her health’s not great, so that was out. In the end, Aunt Cora came, my dad’s sister. We talked, decided the best thing was for them to stay where they were, with her. So they could stay in their house, in their school, with their friends. Get as much—normality, I guess—as they could. She was able to do that, stay with them. I still had my contract with the Hurricanes to finish out, and then it was the All Blacks, of course. I was spending most of my time on the road by that point in the season, couldn’t shift myself to Auckland and the Blues until after the Northern Tour, until January, actually. I don’t know what I’d have done if she hadn’t been able to come.”

  “But you did move,” she said. “You did that.”

  “I didn’t know I was going to,” he admitted. “But they had some trouble, the kids. Well, I guess that would happen, wouldn’t it. They had some therapy, but it was still rough. The therapist thought it would be better if I were here, even though it wouldn’t be all the time, and even though I’m nobody’s idea of a parental figure. It seemed like it would be best. So I came.”

  He’d come, yeh, in the end, and he hadn’t been one bit happy about it. He’d signed with the Blues, had gone from a team that was just getting some traction to one that was struggling badly with the retirement of their coach, the loss of so many of their senior players—their senior All Blacks, which had made it even worse. He’d come to a squad that was easily going to spend a year rebuilding, which hadn’t been the plan at all, not at the peak of his career, when it mattered most of all.