by Karina Halle
He closes it behind him and I am left half-naked.
Alone.
And scared.
Chapter Nine
JOSH
I can hear them fucking. It’s got to be the worst sound in the world.
Amber doesn’t seem to be bothered. She’s busy unpacking her backpack and hanging up an array of floaty skirts from the railings of the top bunk, as if she’s making a privacy curtain for the bottom bunk, all while humming to herself.
The French doors to the courtyard area are open and I can hear Nick’s groans waft in with the breeze. She may be able to ignore it but I can’t take this.
“I’m going to go take a look around,” I tell Amber. I turn around and leave, even though I feel like she’s opened her mouth to say something.
The hostel is tiny and it really is no more than a house. It’s something special though, and I wish I could sit on the patio table and just stare at the horizon. But I can’t. I would need earplugs and alcohol to do that.
Instead I go into the living room area, shutting the door to the moans, and start flipping through a book about New Zealand. Then I peruse the guest book and I’m shocked to see the name of a girl I went to high school with, dated a few months back. Small fucking world again.
Gemma had told us we were going to spend several days in Abel Tasman National Park tomorrow, kayaking and tramping—which I assume means hiking and not whoring ourselves out. I go to the giant map on the wall and find where we are, just this tiny dot on the southwest tip of the North Island. Directly across from us is the tip of the South Island.
I turn around and look at the silhouetted peaks of the mountains across the water. That’s what our view is of: tomorrow. It’s amazing to think I’ll be there, on another island, in another place I’ve never been.
I start to relax a bit at that thought and wander into the kitchen, where I meet Craig and Braydon, two post-college kids from Dublin. They invite me to have a beer and the pasta they just made, but I politely decline. The food, that is—I never turn down a beer.
Sitting there and talking to these guys makes me remember why I’m there—to travel, to meet people, to open my eyes and get a fucking life. All this shit with Gemma and Nick has started to mess me up and forget the big picture. I have to remind myself she was only my reason for being here. She isn’t my everything.
Curiously, I’m not listening to their travel adventures for long before I see Nick walk past the kitchen and out the front door. He gives me a nod of acknowledgment, which is big for him. I expect Gemma to follow behind any minute.
She doesn’t. Strange.
A little while later, when the sun starts to set behind the mountains of the South Island and the two Irish lads move their beers to the patio, Amber and Gemma come by and ask what kind of beer and pizza I want. Half an hour after that, we’re all on the patio, enjoying good Kiwi beer and shitty Kiwi pizza.
“No offense,” I say, shoving the last bit of pizza into my mouth, “but your pizza sucks. It’s like eating cardboard with tomato sauce.”
Gemma sticks her tongue out at me. “Then why did you eat it all?”
“Because it’s food.”
“I thought it was fine,” Amber says, always diplomatic. She eyes me mischievously. “It’s hard to cook cardboard just right.”
“Well, yours is for sure,” Gemma points out, ignoring our jabs. “You’re eating gluten-free.”
The air around us has settled to a soft, silvery blue. Dusk is here and the sun is long gone, though the light seems to stay, burning the area where the sea meets the sky and the mountains fade into the night. There’s a fresh breeze coming off the water and you can hear the steady rhythm of the waves as they pound into the shore.
Gemma had told me that Nick went to the local pub, needing some alone time, and I guess that’s why the Irish guys have moved in on our little group. I don’t mind; it’s nice to have them break up our unit, which has started to feel a bit claustrophobic at times, plus they’ve introduced us to a crazy drinking game.
For once, I’m not the most drunk. I’m taking it easy, not entirely trusting myself these days. Not around her, anyway.
Instead it’s Gemma who’s tying one on. She has one beer, then another, trying valiantly to keep up with the Irish boys. I want to tell her that’s one battle she doesn’t want to win, but I’m not sure if it’s my place.
Finally, the hippie-lady owner of the hostel has to come out and tell us all to be quiet—there’s too much laughing, too much shrieking, too much spilling. At this, the Irish decide to join Nick at the pub and invite us to come along. Gemma, suddenly growing stone-faced and silent, vigorously shakes her head no. There’s no way I’m going without her.
Amber decides to go with them, though—she’s been flirty with the Braydon guy all night—and soon it’s just me and Gemma, alone in the chairs. It’s dark, save for a faint light from inside the hostel, and the sound of crickets competes with the crashing waves.
It’s romantic. So uncomfortably romantic.
And quiet. Gemma isn’t saying a word and I have to stare at her closely, her features muddy in the dark, before I realize she’s staring right at me.
“Are you okay?” I ask quietly, taken aback by her hidden perusal.
She swallows, licks her lips, then looks to the sea. “I don’t know.”
“Drunk?”
She nods. “I guess that’s it.”
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to be able to tell when something is bothering a girl. They wear it plainly on their face, in their tone, in their posture. It does take a brain surgeon to actually extract that information from the girl. The most you’ll get is a hard “I’m fine,” and the rest remains buried.
Still, I care about her and I can’t let things go. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
I sigh and lean back in the chair. I finish another beer, the silence thickening between us, before I say, “You know you can talk to me about everything. I know we aren’t close or anything, but if you need someone . . . I’m here.”
I can see the white of her teeth as she smiles but her voice is dry. “You are the last person I can talk to.”
I frown. “Why?”
She doesn’t say anything. I can almost hear those wheels in her head turning. Without thinking, I reach over and I grab her left hand, hoping to get her to spill.
It’s trembling in my grasp.
“You’re shaking,” I tell her, and she quickly snatches it back, far away.
“It’s nothing,” she says, her voice raised and almost panicky.
“Are you cold? I can get you my sweater.” I begin to rise from my chair.
“No,” she snaps. She sighs and rubs her other hand down her face. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I just mean, it’s fine. I’m not cold. My hand just shakes sometimes.”
I sit back down. “Just the left one?”
“Yeah,” she says softly.
“I don’t mean to get personal,” I say, even though that’s exactly what I want, “but why?”
I can barely see through the dark but I can feel it. She’s giving me a look that says, None of your damn business. But it doesn’t scare me off. I stare right back at her.
“What happened?” I press on.
She exhales slowly. The waves continue to crash. There’s a sound in the bushes, rustling, but then it stops.
“It’s not a big deal,” she says in a warning tone. “I hurt it a long time ago. In an accident. It was crushed and I had a bunch of operations on it but it’s fine now. It just shakes once in a while. I was left-handed, but now I have to write with my right. It’s steadier, though it’s not the same.”
I have so many questions but I’m not sure how far I’ll get. “But your hand is okay for the most part. Obviously you can lift weights, throw
a punch, drive a stick.”
“And give a hand job,” she says. “Yes, it’s fine.”
“So you can handle big things,” I tell her, grinning to myself.
“Yes, if you want to think about it that way. But when it comes to the smaller things, stuff that takes precision, I can’t.” Her voice falters at the end.
“What was the accident?”
I sense her freezing up. I should apologize, tell her I don’t need to know. But I don’t. I want to know.
“You know, you’re very nosy,” she says.
“I’m just interested,” I tell her. “Remember what you said in the caves. I could get to know you. This is me getting to know you. But I want the real you, the one you hide deep down. Not the you that everyone else sees. Not the you that Nick sees.”
“Don’t bring him into this,” she says.
“But he is in this. You know it.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then tell me. Tell me something. Tell me about your accident.”
“Persistent bastard,” she mumbles to herself as she shakes her head.
“That’s true,” I admit. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
A few beats roll by, thick as the night, then she says, “Fine. If you must know, when my dad died, I was with him. I was fifteen and coming back from an art exhibit in Hastings. Our family winery is about half an hour away and my dad had a small showing that night. My mom had gone earlier but left because of a headache, and I stayed behind with my dad for company and other stuff.”
I can already tell this is going to be bad, and I’m sorry for being such a nosy son-of-a-bitch.
“My dad only had two glasses of wine that night and he had a pretty high tolerance since he operated a vineyard when he wasn’t painting. So he was fine to drive. They later said it wasn’t his fault. We were about fifteen minutes outside of town when a truck came around the corner too fast and in our lane. It hit us head-on. Most of the impact was on my father’s side of the car, but then we spun out and went crashing into a tree. My arm was pinned beneath the steel. My dad was alive for a few moments. He called my name and I told him I was scared and I loved him, and then he stopped breathing. When the ambulance came, it was too late. We both had to be removed with the jaws of life.”
I am shocked. Horrified. I can’t even breathe. I can’t even tell her how sorry I am. My heart feels like it’s drowning at the bottom of the sea.
She goes on, her voice harder now. “So, they pulled me out and my hand and arm were broken in a bunch of places, and so was my ankle. My ankle and arm healed up the easiest though, but my hand was a real problem. I had a lot of operations on it.”
Suddenly she picks up my hand with her right one and guides my fingers over her open palm. It’s warm and soft and there are a few raised lines inside that I hadn’t paid attention to before. I feel like I’m reading her past, the real her.
“I was in physiotherapy for a long time. I’ll never be as good as I used to be. But I’m okay.”
“Gemma,” I whisper softly. Before I know what I’m doing, I’m raising her palm to my lips and kissing along her scar. She smells so good, feels even better.
She lets me do it for a moment then she awkwardly clears her throat.
Don’t make me let go, I think. Please don’t make me let go.
The rustle in the bushes is back again. Gemma jerks her hand away, as if we’re about to be caught by Nick the Peeping Tom, as if we’re doing something wrong.
Are we doing something wrong?
Suddenly the air around us fills with squeals, and the rustling increases. The nearest bush to us at the base of the yard, near the fence, starts to move back and forth.
I stand up out of my chair to get a better look and see what looks to be little creatures waddling out of the bushes and heading for the side of the house. Once they hit a patch of light coming from the house, I can see what they are.
Little blue penguins.
“What the fuck?” I say softly, feeling like my mind has just imploded. “What the hell are those?”
“Little blue penguins,” she says proudly.
I turn to her in disbelief. “Are you serious?” I thought I was making that up. In my head.
She nods. “Yup. Little blue penguins.”
And she’s right. They’re about a foot high, miniature versions of the ones I’ve seen on TV, and they’re entirely blue in color. I thought it was just the darkness playing tricks on me but no, once they hit the light, you can see the color on their oily feathers.
“I don’t get it,” I say, watching as the last of their group quickly scampers out of sight. That might have been the cutest and weirdest thing I have ever seen.
“You never head of them?” she asks. “They probably have a burrow under the house. It’s actually quite common for beach houses.”
“Look, I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t do a whole lot of research about the country.”
“I can see that,” she says. “Well, how about that, then.”
“How about that,” I say, sitting back down. The penguins’ magical appearance has somehow taken Gemma’s heartbreaking story to another place, and she’s quick to jump on the transition. She tells me all about the interesting birdlife in New Zealand, from yellow-eyed penguins on the Otago Peninsula down south, to the kea—cheeky green parrots that live in the snow-covered Alps. She’s animated as she tells me all she knows, and I absorb it like a sponge. I drink my beer and she goes back to drinking hers, and before Nick, Amber, and the Irish show up all sloshed, she’s painted a beautiful picture of what’s to come. I can only hope I’ll continue to be part of the picture.
“So how is the art coming along?” Vera asks me, her voice sounding so crazy clear over the cell phone. It’s nuts to think that not only is it eight p.m. where she is—yesterday—and eight a.m. here, she’s literally halfway across the world. Yet I’m able to talk to her like she’s right beside me.
“It’s picking up,” I tell her. “I didn’t start sketching until we were in Abel Tasman Park, but it was like I couldn’t stop myself. I wish I brought more than my watercolor pencils though.”
I breathe in the fresh mountain air and look around me. If we weren’t leaving in ten minutes, I’d be trying to paint this place as well. We’re in Makarora on the South Island, a place by an area called Haast Pass, sort of the halfway point between the resort towns of Wanaka and Queensland and the Wild West Coast that we were just on. There’s nothing to Makarora except maybe the holiday park we stayed at and farms scattered about, bastions of civilization trying to survive among the encroaching wilderness. But shit, is this place ever beautiful.
I’m sitting on top of a picnic table, the air sweet with morning dew while the sun slowly starts to heat up. I’m still amazed at how strong it is down here and how quickly you can burn. I learned that all too well during a kayak trip, though the burn on my upper body has turned into a deep tan.
Everywhere you look are mountains—big, ridiculously hefty mountains, like someone has placed sugar-dusted anvils at the sides of the valley. What I like most about them is how bare they are. Though the valley floor is green, green, green, with grassy fields of sharp-bladed flax and palmlike cabbage trees, the foliage peters off halfway up the mountains, leaving their upper halves bare. They’re brown and tan and nude, covered in what Gemma calls tussock grass, and because of this you can see every little cranny and crevice. It’s like looking at living velvet, and I can literally just stare at them for hours.
Vera clears her throat. “And is that the only thing picking up since we last talked?” she asks, trying to hide her curiosity.
I last talked to her the morning after Paekakariki and the little blue penguins. I bought a calling card at the ferry terminal to the South Island and spent the majority of the rough and wild voyage across Cook
Strait filling her in on the trip so far.
That was ten days ago. Everything since then passed by in a dreamy, hazy blur. Sometimes it felt like a good dream. Other times it was a nightmare.
“Well,” I say hesitantly before launching into it.
After we left the North Island, Nick and Gemma’s relationship became a bit strained. Normally, that would have made me happy—I wanted nothing more than for them to break up. But it only made things awkward and Gemma miserable.
Somewhere during our Abel Tasman trip, though, things went back to normal. At least it seemed that way. That’s when the dream got nightmarish again. If anything, they seemed closer, more affectionate.
By day I was sharing a double kayak with Amber and slowly paddling through pale turquoise waters occasionally peppered with dolphins and, yes, little blue penguins. The sun was hot and heavy and we were navigating ourselves through the shallow coves of what looked like a tropical paradise.
By night, we were hauling our kayaks up onto soft, golden sand beaches and camping out between the sea and the forest. Gemma and Nick had picked up an extra tent in the eclectic city of Nelson, a place I wouldn’t have minded spending a few days in, which meant I had to share with Amber.
At first this wasn’t a problem. But by the third night, Nick and Gemma were back to their horrifically loud fucking, and Amber started to get ideas of her own.
Naturally, being a hot-blooded male, I didn’t quite have the energy to fend her off. Not that she was doing anything more than snuggling against me as we fell asleep, but I started to fear that if she did start getting horny, I would be powerless to stop her. Powerless, as in, I was getting pretty fucking horny, too, but not for the reasons she’d want.
After our tramping and kayaking trip was over, we gladly piled back into Mr. Orange, filling him with sand and the smell of salt water. We made our way to a place called Nelson Lakes for a few nights, a place of sublime alpine scenery and a lake so still you’d swear it was holding its breath. It reminded me of back home a lot, particularly the area around Lake Okanagan, and for the first time I felt a twinge of homesickness. I sketched and painted my way out of it.