by Bowes, K T
Hana gave herself a moment to calm down and then rang again, this time to ask to speak to her doctor. She was surprised when he came on the line, expecting to be told he was with a patient, or on the golf course, or just plain too busy to talk to an out-of-control-middle-aged-pregnant-woman. She explained the dilemma and he provided a solution, in four simple words, “My wife’s a midwife.”
Finally, someone who could help her. One more call, which meant Sheila spent another five minutes at Hana’s desk and then Hana had secured herself the services of a midwife and booked a house call for that same evening at five-thirty. The midwife would seek out the blood results and bring them. Hana was simultaneously relieved and terrified. Logan had an after school staff meeting and brought the bike to work, so Hana was able to leave as four o’clock came around, dashing home to make herself presentable for the midwife.
She was home quickly and having left herself such a decent amount of time, wasn’t quite sure what she needed it for. She freshened herself up, changed her clothes twice and then boiled the kettle for tea. She peered in the freezer downstairs for food and then resisted making horrid food smells by cooking anything. She was a bag of nerves and rattled around the house for the remaining fifteen minutes, jumping out of her skin when the intercom sounded, to announce the midwife’s arrival.
The woman was small, dark haired, pretty and English. But she treated the whole thing like a job interview, as though expecting Hana to grill her and then choose whether or not to invite her to be her midwife. Hana was confused and for once, said so. “I had my other children in England…a very long time ago,” she confessed. “I really don’t get how this system works.”
It seemed the New Zealand Maternity Services were different from anything Hana experienced more than twenty years previously. She felt outclassed and out of practice. But she liked the woman and could imagine spending the next five and a bit months turning into an Easter egg under her capable eye. She signed the necessary paperwork, piled up the requisite leaflets and then waited nervously for Emma to hand over the envelope containing the blood results.
Normal. All of them.
Hana looked over at the woman perched on the two-seater sofa. She offered the results to her with a shaking hand, but Emma nodded happily, having already read them back at the office. “Good news hey?”
Hana nodded unsteadily. She hadn’t dared to believe they would be fine. A rush of so many different emotions flooded through her. It was such good news she felt like yelling up into the bush and out over the river. Instead, poor Hana burst into tears. She couldn’t wait to tell her husband. Emma spent extra time over a cup of tea, explaining how any increased or abnormal levels in the pregnancy hormones they tested for, would have flagged problems. All of Hana’s levels were as expected for the duration of her pregnancy to date. So for now, all was fine. They discussed the amniocentesis procedure at length and the risks involved.
“My husband and I have decided not to risk it. What will be, will be,” Hana said, sounding much more confident than she felt.
“You’re very brave,” Emma said with genuine kindness and Hana didn’t know whether to feel comforted or doomed. But they parted amicably after Emma did her observations with a mobile kit and for the first time, Hana felt flutters of excitement about her baby. Her new midwife left around six thirty, waving goodbye in the darkness and leaving Hana surprised Logan hadn’t yet come home.
When he still wasn’t home two hours later, Hana texted him concerned. Staff meetings in the English department didn’t usually take five hours, even when they went out for a drink afterwards. She knew Logan would decline a drink anyway as he was riding the bike home. She ached to tell him the good news and rattled around the house until the phone rang.
It was Bodie. “Logan’s at Amy’s. He was followed. He ended up riding over the fields at Claudelands Events Centre on his motorbike and had to shoot quickly down the side of Amy’s house and turn the bike off before they found him. He’s been riding round town trailing a Subaru for about an hour.”
Apparently Logan also narrowly avoided being hit with a nightstick by an off-duty Amy as he rapped hurriedly and quietly on her back door. The evening shift of cops patrolled quickly but didn’t apprehend the offending vehicle, although there were sightings of it cruising the area. By the time they were tasked to pull it over, it had disappeared. Hana’s happiness turned instantly to dismay.
“Don’t stress, Mum,” Bodie told her. “I’m going to pick up Logan in my car and take him up to the Gordonton house to fetch the old truck. He’ll be home but it’ll be late.”
Hana couldn’t settle. She shut all the curtains and then spent the next few hours milling around. She cleaned and tidied even though it didn’t need it, resorting to shifting around some of the furniture in the living room. It seemed like an age before she heard the gate alarm and the roar of the truck clambering up the driveway. Despite the cold, she was out on the drive in her jamas, hugging Logan as he got out of the vehicle. He looked fatigued, hugging her tightly, his bag in one hand and his other arm firmly wrapped around Hana. He breathed in the scent of her hair and then looking down, noticed her bare feet on the driveway which was beginning to frost over. “Come on in,” he said.
Logan guided her gently up the stairs and into the lighted hallway. It felt welcoming and warm despite the cold which rushed through the open doorway. Hana shut the front door, locking and bolting it tightly before standing back quietly while Logan stripped off his leather jacket and his biking trousers. He struggled initially, having forgotten to unlace his shoes first but finally he stood in his work trousers and white shirt. His tie had come adrift and was askew on his neckline. He wrenched it undone and fumbled to undo his top button. Hana was alarmed to see he had aged in the last few hours and his face was drawn with anxious lines.
“Were you scared?” she asked him and to her surprise, he shook his head.
“To be honest, I just wanted to stop, pull them out of the damn car and deal with them. It’s what I would have done a year ago. Armed or not, I would have smacked the snot out of them.”
At the look of pure alarm in Hana’s face, Logan flapped his arm at her. “See, that’s why I didn’t. I’ve got too much to lose now. I feel like I’ve been…oh it doesn’t matter. I can’t explain it.”
“Tied down?” Hana whispered and Logan looked horrified.
“Hell no! Anchored, that’s the word I needed. I’ve got somewhere to be and someone to hold onto. Before, I was just this drifting, lost cause. I didn’t care and I suppose it made me invincible. I’m not riding round town like a dick again though. Next time, they’re going to get what’s coming to them!” He jabbed his finger to punctuate his statement and Hana blanched.
“Maybe ride round town like a dick twice more?” she begged her husband. “Then maybe the cops will pick them up and you won’t have to get shot or beaten, or dumped in the river.” Even the choices made her shiver with fear.
It was as though there was a brick lodged in her stomach. Hana found it hard to sit at the kitchen table and say nothing while Logan, slowly unwound. There was an air of defeatism in the room as though both had run out of ideas. There was always previously a sense that a solution would present itself, but none had. It was only a matter of time before the men showed up at Culver’s Cottage and Logan and Hana were no further towards being able to provide the unknown ‘item’ which would satiate the men’s’ appetite for hounding Hana. Not that providing the-whatever-it-was would guarantee safety. It seemed there were no guarantees to be had.
Logan sighed and ran his hands through his hair. As he did, Hana noticed the faintest glint of grey beginning at the roots of his sideburns. It was only one or two hairs but she felt guilty nonetheless. Like it was somehow her fault.
“What did Bo say?” Hana asked eventually, her fingers tapping a quiet tattoo on the sides of her tea mug.
“You don’t want to know,” replied Logan, his tone betraying a rashness that caused his
wife’s stomach to lurch, “unless you want to go into witness protection for the rest of your life.”
Hana looked aghast. “But we aren’t witnesses. We haven’t actually seen anything!”
Logan shook his head slightly. “We’ve seen enough. We’re a liability.”
“I don’t think honestly Bo knows anything,” said Hana thoughtfully, “whenever I tell him something and he passes it on, I get the feeling he’s getting very little back from whoever he passes it on to. It’s like there’s some interest down at the police station and they are evidently after this Laval guy, but they won’t lift a finger to help us.”
“I know what you mean,” replied Logan, “I asked him once if we were the bait and he said he thought we might be. It occurred to me again as I rode around Claudelands like a maniac.” He smiled, “I rode right over the events ground and through the park. I even rallied round the bush through all the tracks. Maybe I should tick that off my bucket list. Don’t think I’m likely to get to repeat it.”
Hana frowned. “How did you manage to do that? It’s usually locked.”
Logan smirked. “A guy was mowing the grass. It must have looked quite freaky actually. I ended up doing a wheelie and riding off a low wall.”
“What if he took your rego and you get a ticket?” Hana bit her bottom lip, always the good citizen.
Logan laughed outright. “Well, the bike is now at the home of a policewoman. She can explain it away, can’t she?”
Hana nodded slowly. Thoughts ran randomly through her head and she didn’t know where to start. Finally, she seemed to make a decision and went out into the darkened hallway. Logan heard the click of the telephone and then Hana talking to someone on the other end. “Under the bed, or the cupboard near the window,” he heard her say. “Apparently it’s paper, folded really, really tightly. Jas has the box it came out of.”
Logan looked at her questioningly, eyebrows raised as Hana came back to the table and cradled her cooling cup of tea. “I rang Bo,” she said in answer, “he’s going to go round first thing tomorrow when Jas is at kindy and take the room apart.”
Logan groaned and leaned back in his chair, his hands over his eyes. “Tomorrow! I need to get over today before I think about facing that! I thought you were going to hold off telling him about finding the metal box.”
“I was,” Hana replied. “I just hadn’t worked out why I felt the need to keep it secret from him. It’s not achieving anything is it?”
“You know he’ll find it and hand it straight over, don’t you? Then we’ll have no leverage. At least now, we have the chance to maybe give them what they want. Once Supercop gets his paws on it, it’s game-over.”
Just as Hana was mentally sympathising with him, she was distracted by a sharp jab in her pelvis. She winced and shifted in her seat. The tiny being inside her began what felt like a tap dance routine and Hana headed for yet another trip to the bathroom, her bladder under fire again.
Hana Du Rose
Chapter 29
Hana lay with her head cradled in the crook of Logan’s arm, wide awake an hour before the alarm started chirping. Neither of them slept particularly well, dozing fitfully, starting at every creak and groan of the old house. Tiger sensed their unease and prowled around for most of the night, trying to help but invariably getting into awkward places and then knocking things off with a clatter.
Logan had nodded off, but Hana knew if she as much as shifted her head he would be wide awake again. She mulled things over in her brain, but no astounding solution presented itself in the darkness. She felt exhausted. Part of the night was taken up with her trying to remember if the men knew Logan’s old 4 x 4. She had a feeling it was what he drove when he encountered them at the Flagstaff house and ended up hitting the bigger of the two. In which case, they would almost certainly have seen it. Meaning they would recognise it if Logan tried to use it for work in a few short hours.
Hana wrestled with all kinds of ideas through the night hours and thought of all manner of people who might swap vehicles with them on a rotation basis. As sleep momentarily snatched her away for only minutes at a time, dreams slipped into her conscious decisions and strange mottled pink women, whose skin expanded over the tops of their collars, increasing and swelling like growing marshmallows, gave her bad advice about what to do next. Around four, she finally decided to do what she should have done more of from the start. She prayed.
Hana used her imagination to place her massive, insurmountable problems at the foot of a wooden cross. In her mind’s eye, she saw the scarred wood and huge nails holding it together. She placed her problems at the bottom, as though she was laying down pebbles one after another. The pile grew high and Hana feared it would topple. Did Jesus ever get fed up of balancing other people’s problems she wondered? Was there a point at which one pebble became the straw that broke the camel’s back? The bible said not. How did it go, that verse she memorised so many years ago? “Cast all your cares on Him, for his yolk is easy and his burden is light.” Maybe she was misquoting things. But there was no bolt of lightning and the pebbles didn’t fall. So she kept on piling them up as they came to mind, big worries, little worries. Hana brought them all.
The alarm went off loudly and Logan fumbled down by the bedside to turn it off, causing Hana’s head to fall roughly onto the mattress as his arm disappeared out from under her. She felt sleep deprived and wretched. He snuggled down for a few more minutes and kissing Hana’s forehead, stroked her face with gentle fingers. She peered into his fathomless grey eyes seeing a distorted reflection of herself in the glow from the bedside light.
Hana looked hard at her husband and could still see the teenage boy on the train, not glancing with furtiveness as most awkward teenagers might, but openly studying her with an intentness beyond his years. He said he loved her from then and rejected Caroline for her. Sometimes Hana felt like she didn’t deserve him, she couldn’t possibly meet his expectations and yet he never complained, he still kept coming home to her like he had promised he would.
Logan blinked slowly, his long, black eyelashes grazing his cheeks and he smiled at Hana; that same smile which made her heart flop over and land in her stomach and other women; hairdressers, cashiers, passers-by, turn for a second look at this really hot guy. Right then, despite it all, Hana felt like the luckiest woman alive. “What are we going to do?” Her voice was a whisper, as though afraid someone else was listening.
“Go to work,” came the surprising reply, “my Year 13’s are doing an assessment today and they need the credits.” Logan snuggled in closer, “But you look really tired. Why don’t you call in sick?”
Hana was tempted. She felt exhausted. But then she thought about the previous night waiting home for Logan to arrive, not knowing where, or how he was. “I don’t want to go through another day like yesterday.”
At least if she were with him, for better or for worse, she would know what was happening. So, despite the comfort of a warm and squashy bed and the softness of the sheets, Hana shrugged off her tiredness and dragged herself into work.
Logan drove the truck and once again, they parked miles away and walked down through the gully, arriving at school with muddy shoes and frayed nerves.
The biology teacher who rented Hana’s house on Achilles Rise was waiting for her as she got to the office. His mother-in-law died and the family was heading off down to Christchurch on the next flight. He handed a set of keys to Hana. “Please can you take care of our small chocolate coloured kitten for us? The kids won’t come unless you do.”
“Erm…”
“I knew you wouldn’t refuse,” he gushed and then dashed away.
Hana stood holding the keys, a sense of doom filling her heart. Part of her knew going back to Achilles Rise would be utter stupidity, but another part wondered if there was safety in going somewhere the Laval crowd knew she had moved on from. Logan was going to hit the roof. Literally.
At lunchtime, Hana met her husband in the staffroom.
He sat with Pete and they were laughing about something as she walked up to them. Logan rose slightly from his seat to acknowledge her presence and Hana admired, for the millionth time, his impeccable, old-fashioned manners. Miriam may have got a lot of things wrong as a mother, but this was not one of them. Pete, on the other hand, stayed lolling in his chair, pinching the other half of Logan’s piece of toast as he transferred his gaze to his wife.
Logan sat down, looking at his plate slightly confused and a little disappointed, before turning his full attention to Hana. “Hey, gorgeous,” he whispered and gave her a coy look.
“Enough, already!” Pete grumbled and yelped as Logan’s smart, black cowboy boot administered a spiteful kick under the table. Hana steeled her nerves to tell her husband she promised to go up to the Flagstaff house twice a day, to sort out the biology teacher’s cat, but Logan spoke before she could properly form the words.
“Hey babe,” he began, “there’s another departmental meeting tonight. I hadn’t realised. Would it be ok if Pete took you home?”
He looked apologetically at her, knowing she would end up feeding Pete, probably until Logan got home unless… “Is Henrietta in town?”
Turning back to ask his friend the question, he spotted the last of his toast disappearing into Pete’s mouth and scowled. Pete beamed that puppy-dog look which told Logan she was. With his mouth jam packed, Pete informed anyone within a five-table radius, his beloved was arriving on the seven o’clock flight from Wellington to Auckland and he was fetching her. The five-table radius of listeners were also showered in toast crumbs and butter splashes and interest was quickly extinguished.
“Fantastic!” concluded Logan. “Our place is on your way then.” He looked pleased with himself. Hana would have to give Pete dinner, but then the irritating little man would need to be off shortly afterwards. After years of friendship, Logan would happily tell Pete to clear off when he outstayed his welcome, but he knew Hana wouldn’t.