“She didn’t ask me to be a bridesmaid. She doesn’t want me around. What was I supposed to do? Papa told me about Alex, and I was there.”
“Hiding outside in your car.”
“Yeah, hiding outside in my car. I’m no good with funerals, all right? But I was there.”
The memory of the car outside the Gardners’ house comes back to me. Peeling yellow paint, figure on the dash.
“You didn’t have to run away,” Vinnie says.
Bella sighs. “Really? You’re going to start in on me about that again?”
Vinnie makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “Blood is thicker than water.”
“Yeah, no kidding. You ever clean up blood, Vinnie? No? Well, I have. Don’t act so smug. It was complicated and you know it.”
Bella continues to put things away. Sleep is finally, slowly, leaving me. Vinnie watches Bella work, his arms crossed.
He glances down at a bicep and gives a little shrug. “Yeah, well, why is she so pissed at you? Is it something else? Something to do with her guy? The merigan—Alex.”
I manage to prop myself up, blinking as fast as I can, as though it will help the sleepiness dissipate.
“You shouldn’t call him that,” Bella mutters.
“Chiddu facia calari’u latti sulu a sintillu.” He made the milk dry up.
“Where’d you pull that saying from? God, Vinnie, come on. He wasn’t that boring.”
“What was with those two anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why didn’t he come to things? Why didn’t he, you know, touch and kiss her like a normal—”
“Please don’t tell me you’re putting yourself in the ‘normal’ category?”
“What do you mean?” Vinnie’s voice is lilting, teasing.
“You suck the face off of a girl when you are given half a chance.”
“I don’t.”
“You do. It’s gross.”
“I’m just sayin’ it was a bit weird. . . . He didn’t really seem to be into—”
“Stop!” That’s my voice, louder than I imagined it would be. Both Vinnie and Bella spin around.
“Frankie—”
“Hey, you’re awake.”
“Get out of here!” I shout.
Vinnie steps towards me. “Mom and your dad, they sent me over with some food.”
“I don’t want you here either.”
He manages to look a little hurt. “But—”
“Both of you. Out.”
Bella sets down the tinfoil package she’s holding and steps towards the bed. “Frankie . . .”
I shake my head. My whole body feels leaden. “What did you give me?” I press my hands against my temples. “I feel terrible.”
“Just a little, um . . . diazepam to calm—”
“What?”
Vinnie laughs and shakes his head.
Bella looks at him doe-eyed. “She was practically catatonic. . . . You weren’t here. . . . Daniel was upset too. I had a bottle in the car—”
“What is it?” I ask fiercely.
“Just Valium.”
“Valium. Right.”
Bella looks like she’s about to cry. “Frankie, you were really upset. It really wasn’t that much. A lot of the patients take it and I know how—”
“Just get out.”
She nods and murmurs, “Okay.”
Vinnie watches her leave, grinning. “I never thought about her getting drugs. I mean, with the seniors’ home and that. When I hooked her up with that job I should have—”
“Vinnie?”
He turns to me. “Yeah?”
“Please go away.”
“You didn’t really mean . . . me too . . .”
“Yeah, I really did.”
“Oh.” He steps towards the door, before turning back, one hand on the doorframe. “I just wanted to ask you . . . about a few friends coming here. Not many. I mean . . . seriously, this pad could do with a . . . If you had a hot tub, man—”
“Vinnie.” I point to the door.
“Right, right. Got it.”
* * *
After I’ve washed and dressed, I slip on the black watch. Alex’s watch. It’s the first time I’ve worn it since the day it was given to me and it rolls around on my wrist, thick, black, and plastic. It’s ugly; probably the reason Mrs. Gardner let me keep it. If he’d been wearing his wedding ring, if we’d been married, I wonder if she would have let me have that.
The truth is, I don’t know what else they found or what they gave to his mother as evidence or consolation. I’ve never asked. Maybe they gave her the bag he took out surfing, the one that probably had his other watch in it, the gold one his mom and dad gave him when he turned twenty-one; the one he wore to work. It had a saying inscribed inside, something in Latin. A family motto. I can’t remember it. I just know that Alex preferred the watch that now hangs down against my hand, threatening to fall off. He wore it surfing, and when he was surfing he felt free. “Out there,” he’d tell me in whispers, in the dark of our room, his skin still smelling of wet suit rubber, “I’m nothing. Or everything. I don’t know.” And then he’d laugh because he was making no sense.
He always laughed more after surfing. His body was loose, his shoulders relaxed. He’d be tired, but somehow filled up from the inside. His hair thick with salt, dried crispy; the whites of his eyes pink; the skin on his hands tanned from the sunlight reflecting off the glassy surface of the water. And that was how he disappeared. Feeling like a fish, feeling like himself, like nothing and everything, caught in the lick of the ocean, a giant tongue that drew him in and swallowed him whole. It wanted him for itself.
I run my finger over the plastic joints of the watch strap, hardened from sun and water and wear to the consistency of bone, a knuckle or a shin. The big face of it stares at me; silver buttons I don’t know how to use stud both sides. It’s 4:09 p.m. I have slept most of the day.
It, what we had, wasn’t weird. We weren’t weird. I hate Vinnie for talking about Alex and me like that. I want the memory of Vinnie’s dumb voice saying dumb things, as per usual, out of my head.
And Valium? Who has Valium in their car? I was almost starting to believe Bella’s life was normal: a regular job, one she’s kept for some time, a house, a neighbor’s cat. Now I wonder if any of it is true. Perhaps she doesn’t live in Portland at all. Perhaps she lives in her car and sells prescription drugs on the street. My mind skips through horrible imaginings. Homeless. Addict. Prostitute. I curse myself for that last one. I’m being nasty. But it’s her fault that I am. If she would just leave me alone I might find some peace.
My ghosts might visit, wrap their misty arms about me, console and hide me. Bella’s presence is driving them away and me into the bright light of reality like a rabbit scared out of its burrow. I hate her for it. I hate them both. I wish that water was thicker than blood so I could be done with the whole bloody lot of them. Except Papa, of course.
When I peek out of my window, it’s not Bella but Huia I see, picking her way through the ferns with a basket. She’s wearing a red cardigan, as though she’s Little Red Riding Hood. I walk out of the cabin.
“Hey, Frankie.” She skips over.
“What are you doing?”
“Foraging,” she says delightedly. “Look.”
She lifts her basket so I can see the contents. The bottom is covered in little green coils. They’re strange and pretty, curled like commas. There are also some ferns, different from the ones around the cabin.
“Fiddleheads,” she tells me. “And some licorice fern for Merriem. Merriem says the forest is full of treasures.”
It sounds like something Merriem would say; I can even hear the way she’d say it. I imagine what the aunties would think of the ingredients in Huia’s basket. They’d frown to start with, inadequately restrain their concern that the girl has to pull things out of the forest in order to eat. Doesn’t her father buy groceries? Where’s her mother? She’s muc
h too thin for a growing girl. Then they’d look again. You could batter and fry them, Aunty Connie would say, like zucchini flowers. They’d start arguing about which seasoning to use, which herbs, whether to fry or roast, serve with pasta or on bread.
“I’m looking for morels,” Huia tells me in a whisper.
“What are they?”
She giggles. “Mushrooms. You don’t know?”
I shake my head.
She assesses me. “Do you wanna come with me?”
“Oh, I—”
“It’ll be fun,” she urges.
“Well . . .” I glance around, checking for Bella, but can’t see her. I suddenly realize her car is gone. My heart lifts. “Okay. I’ll come.”
“Yes!” Huia sings out and I can’t help but smile.
As we walk, she tells me how yummy morels are, and how they grow in areas where there’s been forest fire and how you have to keep your eyes peeled. She bulges out her eyes to demonstrate, making me laugh.
It turns out her eyes are much better trained for foraging than mine. To me, the forest is simply green and vast, but Huia knows exactly what she’s looking for and points things out from a distance. But slowly I learn. I distinguish devil’s club and stinging nettles and salmonberry. I spot the hummingbirds that dart and quiver around pink flowers. I spy a patch of fiddleheads and start plucking before Huia warns me to take only a few so the plant can keep growing for next season. I am the student.
The fiddleheads are aptly named, shaped just like the top of a violin, and soon Huia declares her basket “full enough” of them. We dawdle through the forest, aimlessly it seems to me, though she appears to know exactly where she is, pausing every now and then to watch birds and pick flowers. We sit on a log that’s sprouting soft, hopeful ferns, a “nurse log,” Huia calls it, and I show her how to make a crown of daisies. She gets me to make the slits in the stems with my nails and then weaves one for me too.
Soon, the light is starting to dim. Time has slipped away from us. Huia is several feet away from me, knee deep in jewel-green fronds.
“Perhaps we should call it a day.” I gesture with her basket, now in my hands. “You’ve got a good haul.”
“Yeah,” she replies with a shy smile. She steps over to me and we both investigate our harvest. She tugs, gently, on the hem of my shirt. “Come to my house.”
“Oh, no, I should be—”
“Pleeeeeease?”
“But your dad—”
“He’ll be okay. He’s working on a terrarium.”
“I don’t want to interrupt.”
“He won’t mind,” Huia insists. “Honest.”
I mull on the invitation, keen to avoid my sister who may be back at the cabin. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes, yes!”
She takes hold of my hand and skips so I almost drop the basket.
“Hey, whoa! Careful.” But we’re both giggling.
* * *
Huia grips my hand most of the way, dragging me along like an unwilling puppy, until we reach the driveway, which she half runs, half skips up to reach a small white weatherboard house pretty well enclosed by tall trees. There’s a small concrete statue of a rabbit by the door and a pair of work boots with a girl’s hair clip attached to the top of one. I find myself plucking it off as we walk past, and moving it between my fingers.
Huia smiles at me and pushes the door open wide. “Come on.”
I step inside.
“Dad!” she calls, walking ahead of me towards the back of the house.
We pass through a short hallway with a row of wall hooks holding jackets and a bright yellow rain hat, and three doors leading off it. Then a kitchen and living room out the back, with an entire wall of sliding doors, much like Merriem’s place. The homes were probably built at the same time, in the 1960s or ’70s, as vacation houses. Huia slides open a door and strides out towards a newer, black studio building, beckoning me to come with her. She’s still calling for her father.
A door opens at the side of the studio and Jack pokes his head out. “Hey, bub.” He spots me trailing behind. He smiles. “Oh, hi, Frankie.”
“Hi. I—”
“I told her she could come,” Huia interrupts. “That you wouldn’t mind.”
“Of course I don’t mind,” Jack says.
Huia grabs hold of her father’s hands, which are in dirty, thick gardening gloves, and climbs her feet up his legs like an acrobat.
Jack groans. “You’re not as small as you once were, circus girl.” He turns to me. “Do you want to come in for a look? I was just finishing up before putting on the kettle.”
Huia leaps off her father and skips ahead of us. I step inside and glance around. The outside of the studio is stained black, but inside the timber is raw and exposed. It smells as though it could be cedar. There’s light coming in from a huge rose window at one end and a large skylight in the roof, partially open.
Jack goes over to a crank on a wall and twists it to close the skylight. Flanking him are shelves upon shelves of glass containers: some tiny globes, like the one he gave Merriem; others almost a meter tall. Many of them house little ecosystems of tiny ferns, moss-covered stones, ground cover dotted with purple flowers shaped like stars. It’s like bonsai gardening but with more elements. And more wild somehow—less manicured. The smell in the studio is heady, dark, and fecund: the rich, musty soil mixed with the sweet, strong fragrance of the resin in the timber.
I step around the large wooden table in the center of the studio; on top of it is a terrarium in progress—a tall glass vase half-filled with stones and plants and surrounded by a scattering of soil—to reach the shelving, where I stare at the rows of vases and their mini-worlds. In one I notice a tiny silver bird perched in a tree.
Jack follows my gaze as he unpeels his gloves from his hands. “For Huia,” he whispers, then adds more loudly, “If she doesn’t drive me crazy before I’m finished.”
“Hey,” Huia protests halfheartedly. She’s dipping her hand into a bag full of pebbles.
“She still wants to go to ballet classes?” I whisper back, but Huia’s humming and no longer listening.
Jack nods. “She’s unlikely to give up on an idea once she’s got hold of one.”
We both watch her till she looks up and demands, “What?”
“Nothing.” Jack laughs and turns back to me. “Tea? Or I can do coffee but I’ve only got instant.”
“Tea is fine.”
“Good. Huia and I made banana bread on the weekend. We can have that too. What’s the time?”
I look down at Alex’s watch, and Jack does too.
“Hell. Dinnertime,” he says. “Where does time go?”
I shrug. The watch falls back down my wrist.
“It’s this place,” he says, “Te ngahere. The forest.”
I stare at him. The word he uses almost sounds Italian. Huia skips over to us. “We found heaps of stuff, Dad. Enough for dinner and then some. Right, Frankie?”
I nod. “A lot of fiddleheads.”
“Is that so? Well then, we’ve got a bounty. Lucky you’re here, Frankie, or we’d turn into fiddlehead blimps.”
“Daaaa-ad,” Huia groans, splitting the word into two syllables.
“What?” he says.
“Nothing.” She laughs, mimicking his reply from earlier, then tugs on one of his trouser pockets.
Chapter Thirteen
• • • •
It’s comfortable inside Jack’s house. The kitchen is stripped, as though he’s in the middle of a renovation. All the cupboards above waist height have been removed, with timber shelves replacing them, and it’s clean if not finished. Huia shows her father the basket and they go through everything inside. Then Jack plucks two cups and saucers from a shelf—green cups with saucers covered in a floral print.
Huia is busy chatting about school. “And then Nora said she wasn’t going to get a pink backpack anymore but that her favorite color’s purple now because—”
/>
“Fetch the banana bread, bub?”
Huia on one leg. “Because . . . purple . . . is . . . a . . . much . . . cooler . . . color.”
Jack rolls his eyes at me. “Right.”
Huia hops back with the bread. Jack cuts two thick slices and puts them into a toaster.
“Pink is for little kids.”
“Butter?”
Huia hops to the fridge. The kettle finishes boiling and Jack drops tea bags into the cups.
Huia stops hopping and looks at me. “Hopping’s hard work.”
“Sure is.” I try not to smile.
“So, Dad . . .”
“Yes, Huia.”
“I was thinking . . .”
“I’m not getting you a new backpack.”
“But I didn’t even ask yet!”
“You having banana bread?”
She shakes her head, disarmed.
“How about you do some coloring then? After we’ve had some tea I’ll get your dinner ready.”
I lean over the kitchen counter. “I don’t want to interrupt—”
Jack waves away my concern. “Nothing to interrupt. We’re just going about our boring business, eh, Huia?”
She nods, then dashes off down the hallway. When she returns she’s holding a very large notepad and a fistful of coloring pencils.
Jack plates up steaming-hot slices of banana bread with generous, melting swipes of butter, and nods towards the teacups. I pick them up and carry them over to the living room. There’s an old lounge suite in faded and nubby corduroy with fat arms that have wooden rests for mugs or plates. I take the couch and Jack takes the armchair. Huia crouches on the ground and lays out her paper on a pine coffee table. I blow on my tea and we both watch her. She declares that she’s going to draw birds for me, so I can learn. She expertly draws the outline of a wing, outstretched, and picks through her pencils to find the right shade of brown.
“Huia told me she’s named after a bird,” I say.
Jack nods. “That’s right. A New Zealand native bird.”
“But they’re all dead,” Huia says, lifting her head from her drawing.
Jack laughs. “They are extinct. But they were quite beautiful—a bluish black color with a metallic sheen . . . I mean, I never actually saw one. They had long tail feathers, tipped white—”
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