I’d been right. I had to ease into it. “At the beginning, then. The people we were staying with—Roger and Pamela—well, Pamela gave us a lift into town sometimes, those first weeks. Once we had clothes to wear and didn’t feel so … odd. Once she’d cut my hair the first time.”
He didn’t ask the question I’d thought he would, about who Roger and Pamela were. Instead, he asked, “Cut your hair?”
“You’re not allowed to cut it, in Mount Zion. A woman is never allowed to cut her hair.”
“Never?”
Why is it so much easier to talk when you’re running side by side? Endorphins, probably, and lack of eye contact. “Never. By the time I left, my hair was below my knees. Faithful and Obedience’s is, too. When Pamela cut it off …” I sighed. “I can’t tell you how that felt. I was so light, I could fly. For a wee while there, I cut it short as yours. Kept getting friendly overtures from women.”
He laughed, and I said, “Yeh. I can’t tell you how confusing that was. Somebody had to explain it to me. But Roger and Pamela … Roger picked us up, Dorian and me, the first day. He was out with the dogs, before seven in the morning. He saw us walking down the road, half frozen, covered with mud and scared to death, flattening ourselves in the ditch whenever we heard a car behind us. He put us into the ute with him and took us home to Pamela. We weren’t the first ones they’d done that for, it turned out. They were something like a halfway house. Halfway down the hill, and halfway to freedom. The kindest people I’d ever known, and I was so confused. We were taught that Outside was ruled by the Devil. Not just taught. We knew. Once we left, we were damned. Our name wouldn’t be spoken, even in our family. We were dead. Worse than dead. We were gone. And here were these lovely people, giving us clothes to wear, cutting my hair, helping us navigate the system to get the help we needed, explaining how to choose when we’d never chosen anything. How could they be ruled by the Devil?”
“And one of the things they explained to you,” Gray said, “was the Wanaka Tree.”
We were around the curve, now, and could see it in the distance. Growing out of the water, tiny and graceful and strong. I said, “I finally got the courage to ask them about it when we’d been with them about a week. I’d spent the afternoon cooking for them, making four times what we needed, because I’d never cooked for less than hundreds, or cooked by myself at all. Dorian helped me, after he’d chopped wood for their wood burner, both of us doing anything we could think of to earn our keep. Dorian was useless in the kitchen, didn’t know how to do a single thing: peel an onion, chop a carrot, use a can opener. He told me, ‘Tomorrow, you can show me how to do the washing,’ and I said, ‘And you can show me how to chop wood.’”
“And he said,” Gray guessed, “that it was too dangerous.”
“Yeh. Too dangerous, and too hard. I said, ‘Who just sliced his finger with the knife trying to chop an onion, then?’ And the next day, I did learn how to chop wood.”
“Good on ya,” Gray said. “But the Wanaka Tree.”
“Yeh. It was the first question I’d really asked, the first time I’d brought something up myself, is why I remember it. I was like Obedience is now, not like Fruitful, maybe because I had absolutely no example of how to be anyone different. Women don’t lead the conversation, you see. I asked them, ‘Why does everybody take a photo of the tree in the lake?’ And hoped it wasn’t stupid. Most of my questions were so stupid.”
I fell silent, then, remembering. The scared girl I’d been, and the defiant one, careening between those emotions and so many others. And how Roger and Pamela had answered.
“Ah,” Roger had said, his pale-blue eyes so kind in his weathered face, “you’ve noticed that, have you. Because it’s growing out of the water, I reckon, all alone like that. And because it makes a kind of foreground, you see. A focus point, maybe, for a photo.”
“Oh,” I said doubtfully, but Dorian said eagerly, “That’s what I thought. That it was perfect. The shape of it. The solitariness of it.”
“You’ve got a poet’s soul,” Pamela said, and Dorian flushed and looked down. Pamela said, “No, that’s good. It’s always good to look. It’s even better to see.”
“I want to do that,” Dorian said, the red creeping up into his cheeks. “To be able to stop and look.”
“Right,” I said, because I didn’t have a poet’s soul. “Because it makes a good photo.”
“Oh,” Pamela said, “I don’t think that’s all of it. I think it’s the symbolism, don’t you?”
I looked at her blankly, but Dorian said, “Oh. I see.” And when she looked inquiring, and Roger looked tolerant, he said, “That it’s growing out there alone, and it keeps growing, even though its roots are in the water.”
“Grew out of a fence post,” Roger said. “Hard to kill a willow.”
“You,” Pamela told him, “do not have a poet’s soul,” but she smiled when she said it. “It grew up like that, you see,” she told Dorian, “in the least fertile conditions possible. You couldn’t kill it, and you couldn’t keep it down, and it grew so beautiful. It holds on, year after year, and now, it’s famous all over the world. Started as a fence post and became a beautiful thing, and an icon. We’re quite proud of our little tree and the way it hangs on.”
“Resilience,” Roger said. “Persistence, keeping on growing after you’ve been told it’s impossible. You could be right at that, love,” he told Pamela. “Could be a symbol for these two, maybe. You may be a fence post now, but if you keep trying …” He winked at us. “Some day, you’ll be a willow.”
Now, I told that part to Gray and said, “Reckon I’m still a fence post. Not sure I’ll ever be a willow.”
He said, “Willows are good. So are fence posts. Why can’t you be both?” And while I was still trying to sort out how to answer that, he asked, “Are they still here? Do you see them?”
“No. They sold the farm five years ago, went to live with their daughter in Canada. I’ll take photos, later, and email Pamela. I’d like to tell her …” I stopped.
“What,” Gray prompted.
I looked at the delicate, fragile little tree, all alone in the middle of the lake, and said, “I’d like to tell her that I’m going to do my best to grow two more willows, and that the only reason I have any idea of how to do that is that she did it with me. I need to find the courage to say what I’ve never been able to put into words. How different my life would have been without them, and how grateful I am for that. It was three weeks, and it was a lifetime. It was my new life.”
17
Food of the Gods
Gray
I got Daisy to agree to wait until morning to leave, at least. If she’d got more than four hours of sleep after all that almost-dying and rescuing, I didn’t see when she’d have done it, and getting home at midnight with two girls newly arrived from the Jurassic Period, trying to start them on their next chapter with all that emotion racketing around in her body, would be too much even for somebody as competent as Daisy.
I didn’t say that, of course. I said, while we were loitering in the entryway at Francesca’s, waiting for our pizzas, “Nah, let’s not go tonight. Tomorrow morning, early as you like. Before six, even, but not tonight. Pizza’s rubbish without a beer. I could want two, in fact, and how’m I meant to drive after that?”
“Especially since you still have a headache,” she said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes. You do.” When I just looked at her, she pointed to her eyes and said, “Sunglasses indoors?”
I shrugged. “Maybe a bit.” I didn’t.
She huffed a little. It was cute. I didn’t tell her so. “Well,” she said, “don’t expect me to do my patented temple massage if you make it flare up again. You can just suffer.”
I smiled. “Thank you, Florence Nightingale.”
She laughed, but she also stopped talking about going home tonight, or about her brother coming to get her. She’d done some quick ringing-up, using my phone,
while I’d been ordering, and judging from the extra-breezy tone of her voice and the length of the conversation, this Dorian fella wasn’t any more enamored of his sister’s tendency toward unilateral action than I was myself.
She’d be one hell of a frustrating woman to be involved with. I was guessing the ferret fought with tooth and claw. I was also guessing, though, that she’d make up with just that much intensity, too. There could even be some teeth and claws involved, which wasn’t exactly a horrible thought. Also, her T-shirt was clinging to her, because it was damp from all that running. She was wearing a bra under it, but as I’d already noted, it wasn’t the most structured item I’d ever seen in my life—she didn’t need much support, I guessed, being so perky and little—and it was showing through a bit, what with that dampness and all. That was another not-horrible development.
I couldn’t help noticing. She was right there.
It would have been nicer to eat dinner with her here. The high ceiling was hung with dozens of tiny lights shaded by hurricane glass, suspended at different heights. The floor was wood, the walls were whitewashed, the ceiling was bisected by huge wooden beams, and the enormous brick chimney at the end of the room reminded you that there was a pizza oven on the other side. The whole place was warm, intimate, casual, and just a little noisy, so you’d have to lean close across the table to hear each other. A couple glasses of rich red wine, watching Daisy having to lick the corner of her mouth to catch all the delicious bits of molten mozzarella, and carefully not looking down the scoop neckline of her still-damp T-shirt? That was an evening that worked for me.
Except, of course, that we weren’t doing it. I collected my boxes with a “Cheers,” and asked her, “Ready to go?”
She said, “Ah, Gray?”
“Yeh?”
“Who did you invite to this dinner? A rugby team?”
I thought, What? And tried to sort out what she could possibly have seen. It wasn’t like I had framed jerseys on the walls, or my World Cup winner’s medal, either. I wasn’t much for memorabilia. You didn’t get ahead in life by looking behind you.
She gestured at the flat boxes and white plastic bags. “Four pizzas? And what else?”
“Oh.” I laughed. Relief, that was, although why? Eventually, she was going to find out.
Later. Later worked. “Nah,” I said. “If it’s their first time having pizza, shouldn’t they get to try every kind?”
“Here,” she said, attempting to take the bags from me. “I’ll get it.”
“No, I’ve got it,” I said, not letting go. “You can get the door.”
She sighed. But she got the door.
Daisy
I ate so much pizza.
What is it about pizza that gets you so relaxed? Maybe that you eat it with your hands, or that it’s so incredibly delicious if it’s good, and so satisfying. All that cheese. Or, possibly, that I was in Gray’s mum’s dressing gown again, as I’d had to wash all my clothes again, and Gray had opened a bottle of Two Paddocks Pinot Noir. It said “Proprietor’s Reserve” on the label, which sounded pretty flash.
He tipped the cherry-red liquid into five stemmed glasses, then lifted his and said, “Cheers.”
Obedience said, “It’s alcohol,” and stared at it like snakes would arise from the bottle to devour her.
“Yeh,” Gray said. “Taste of freedom, eh.”
Fruitful said, “Well, I’m going to try it.” She grabbed her glass and took a gulp like she was drinking grape juice, then got a horrified expression on her face, set down her glass with so much haste, a bit of wine slopped over, and hobbled as fast as she could to the kitchen sink. When she came back, I’m afraid Gray and I were laughing, and his mum was smiling, too.
Honor, her name was, and she’d been perfectly happy to have pizza and wine for dinner with her son. He’d kissed her at the door when she’d come in from work, and given her a cuddle that may have been the sweetest thing I’d ever seen. He’d also lifted her off her feet, which was impressive.
I told Fruitful, “You do a toast first. Like this.”
I lifted my glass, and the others did the same. Except for Fruitful, who said, “I thought it’d be nice, as it’s so sinful and all, but it’s … it’s just horrible.”
Gray and I started to laugh, and we couldn’t stop. I had to lean against him, in fact. His shoulder made a very nice resting place for your head. Solid, and all that.
Honor said, “Never mind, love,” proving that she was a better person than me, or possibly just not as hysterical. “It’s an acquired taste, and nobody says you have to acquire it. You can drink water instead. Just lift your glass and clink it against mine and say, ‘Cheers,’ and then Daisy can drink yours after she drinks her own.”
“Dunno,” Gray said. “Daisy’s pretty little. She could get a wee bit tipsy, two glasses of this stuff. Who knows what decadence may happen then?”
I sighed. “I’d so like to tell you that I could drink you under the table, but I suspect it’s not true.”
“I suspect you’re right,” he said. “Could be fun to try, though. But we should do a different toast, shouldn’t we? Special occasion. First dinner.”
I held up my glass and said, “To freedom.” Gray and Honor echoed me, and I told the girls, “You say it, too. That’s how toasts work.” So they did. Fruitful looked like she was thinking, “I hope the rest of freedom is nicer than this horrible alcohol,” but she didn’t say it.
Obedience didn’t spit out her wine. She took a teeny, tiny sip, made a face, said, “Maybe the second one tastes better,” and tried again.
“That’s how I always get into trouble,” Gray said with a sigh. “Because the second one does taste better.”
“You do not,” I said. “And this wine is amazing.” I closed my eyes to taste it better, and it drifted over my tongue like silk and spice. “It tastes like … I don’t know.” I didn’t want to say the “silk and spice” thing. It sounded dirty, I was wearing a dressing gown and absolutely nothing else, and Gray was smiling at me like he knew it. He was in yet another T-shirt and a different pair of soft, worn jeans. These were a bit more snug, he had all that tattoo and chest and arm and thigh happening, and I was getting some tingles.
It was the smile. Or the wine. Or the jeans. Or the nakedness. Or the fact that he could run faster than me.
“Cherry,” he said. “Rhubarb. Vanilla.” When I raised my eyebrows at him, he grinned and said, “I read the label.” The grin looked good, too. I took another sip of wine and tried to think cool thoughts.
“Well, I don’t think it tastes like rhubarb,” Fruitful said. “Or vanilla. Does it, Obedience?”
“No,” Obedience said. “Rhubarb and vanilla would be lovely. Like, a rhubarb slump with custard.” Her eyes got a dreamy look, the same kind I may have had just now, but instead of thinking about tasting Gray, imagining what he’d be like to kiss—or what he’d be like kissing you, because he would definitely be kissing you—she was thinking about tasting rhubarb.
I took another sip of wine.
“What’s a slump?” Honor asked. “Rhubarb with custard does sound delicious.”
“It’s a sort of cakey thing,” Obedience said. “You bake it on top of the fruit, sprinkled with sugar so it comes out lovely and golden and crispy, and then you make a custard with the freshest eggs, and cream that you’ve just separated—and vanilla—and pour it over each serving while the rest of it’s still hot. You only have it on special days, of course, when you do a sweet. Like Joining days.”
I paused in the act of chewing my pizza. This one was mozzarella, capers, and aubergine. It went extremely well with wine, although the white buffalo mozzarella was so pliant and gooey, I had to grab for a napkin, and then lick tomato sauce out of the corner of my mouth. Gray was staring at me, and I got my bite under control and said, “Sorry. Messy.”
“Nah,” he said. “Good.”
“This is excellent pizza,” I said. “I think this one’s my favorite,
though I’m going to need another piece of the ham and spinach one to say for sure. Also more salad.”
He didn’t say anything, just reached for the container holding the salad of arugula, pear, gorgonzola, and toasted hazelnuts and dished me up a hefty forkful. “Somehow,” he said, “I knew you’d enjoy eating.”
Honor was the one laughing this time, saying, “That’s not your best line, love. Try harder, maybe.”
I told the girls, “Now you know what pizza is. What do you think?”
“It’s lovely,” Obedience said. “Like bread, but … not. How it’s thin but still so chewy—that’s extra gluten, maybe? My favorite is this one, with the red things. I’ve never had anything so spicy.” She reached for the box, then drew her hand back in obvious confusion.
“Go on,” I said. “Pizza’s casual, eh. Grab and go. No rules with pizza. And the red things are pepperoni. Spicy sausage.”
“Venison pepperoni,” Gray said. “And you’re right about the crust. Food of the gods, pizza.” That caused both the girls to stop eating. “It’s a saying, that’s all,” he explained. “Not that you worship other gods.”
Obedience whispered something. Probably “false gods.”
“It comes from the Greek gods, I guess,” Gray said, “who lived on Mount Olympus and … ate food. Special food.” He looked at me. “What kind of food?”
“You’re asking me?” I said. “I went to nursing school. What did you learn in Uni?”
“Didn’t go,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I almost didn’t. I mean, I only did, and the final couple years of high school, too, because of leaving. Leaving Mount Zion. And having to learn something. A skill.”
I was babbling. I was embarrassed. I drank some more wine. I knew too many doctors with too much education. I’d assumed.
“Daisy.” Gray was smiling, fortunately. “I’m not fussed about it. I’ve done all right.”
“Oh. Good.” Well, obviously, this house and all. I was still flustered. Possibly that was because I’d drunk all my wine, had somehow started on Fruitful’s glass, and may have been eyeing Obedience’s.
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