“I’ve read all your books,” she says. “I loved them. Except the first one.”
“Accident of Birth? You didn’t like that one?”
“No. I mean, I haven’t read it. It’s out of print.”
“I brought you a copy.”
“Oh, brilliant. Thank you.”
It’s embarrassing the way her face lights up. As if he’d done something exceedingly generous.
“I wanted you to read that one.”
“It’s about you?”
He’s about to respond with an interview-formulated observation regarding the tendency of first novels to be somewhat autobiographical, but when he looks at her, he just swallows and says, “Yes.”
“When did you start writing?”
“About twelve or thirteen. At first it was just a way of making sense of things. Then I discovered that if I was afraid of things and I wrote about them, they didn’t seem quite so horrible.”
“What were you afraid of?”
He considers the question. What has he been afraid of all these years? “I don’t know…getting lost. Not knowing what to do.”
She raises one pale eyebrow. “Getting lost?”
“That’s one reason I never really made plans. If you were never supposed to be anywhere, you couldn’t be lost.”
“You’re not talking about a real place, like a city.”
“Sorry. I’m not being very clear, am I?”
She shakes her head, smiling. “That’s okay. I don’t know anyone else who says things like you do. I quite like it.”
To his relief, the path finally bottoms out in a lush little valley by a rushing stream. He wonders briefly if the way back involves retracing their steps. She sits down on a jutting rock and pulls something out of her vest pocket…a foil-wrapped chocolate bar. She pats the space next to her.
“Let’s sit for a minute. Then I have to go help Mum with tea.”
She breaks off a piece of dark, aromatic chocolate and offers it to him. He doesn’t really want it, but it melts on his tongue like a bittersweet song. Quite suddenly he finds a memory of Wyn, the way she always carries chocolate in her purse…for emergencies, she said. He was never clear on what sort of emergency would require chocolate.
“There’s the old orchard.” He follows her gaze across the stream to the foot of the next ridge of hills. “We don’t really work it anymore, but a few of the trees still bear the most wonderful apples.”
Yes. The apple orchard where he had tea with Gillian once. Where they lay down afterwards in the tall grass and watched squadrons of dragonflies cruise the meadow and fat honeybees lose themselves in the fragrant white blossoms.
Just as he’s taking the last bite of chocolate, she says proudly, “Mum said that’s where I was conceived.”
A piece of hazelnut sticks in his throat and he begins to choke. Skye thumps him on the back. “Are you all right?”
He coughs again and tries to talk before he can breathe and it comes out all squeaky. “Swallowed wrong.”
“Right.” She laughs. “So you didn’t know.”
Dinner—or tea, as they call it—is excruciating. The discomfort index is equaled only by that awful night when he took Wyn to meet Suzanne. One of them—probably Skye—has stashed his drooping flowers in a jar of water and placed it in the center of the old wooden table. They stand just tall enough to interfere with everyone’s line of sight, but no one seems willing to remove them.
When they first sit down, the only sound is the soft ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. Much of the house seems to have hardly changed in nineteen years, but he doesn’t remember the clock. He asks about it.
Gillian’s reply is carefully civil. It was her grandmother’s and had been at an aunt’s house for years. When the aunt moved into a small flat in Hastings, it came back to the farm. She makes no attempt at conversation after that, as if the effort of the explanation has exhausted her. Skye does her best, chatting about her friend Angela and how they’re planning to share a flat in Auckland next year, wondering aloud if she’ll have to sell her horse, describing for his benefit the class party at the end of term.
“What kind of job are you looking for?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Something interesting. Something in the media. Maybe a presenter.”
“Have you had any interviews?”
“No, but something will turn up,” she assures him. “It isn’t a problem.”
“It might become a problem when your first rent comes due,” Gillian says drily.
This is obviously an on-going issue that he’s stepped in the middle of, so he steps out again, addressing Gillian.
“How are your parents?”
“My da is gone. Influenza about five years ago. My mother lives in Napier in a home.”
“She’s not my gran anymore,” Skye says. “She’s just a sweet old lady who doesn’t know who we are.”
“We won’t bore you with details,” Gillian says firmly.
When he tries to help clear the table, she takes the plate from his hands and asserts that he must be tired in a tone of voice that brooks no discussion. So by nine o’clock he’s stretched out, fully dressed on top of his bunk, reading The Manticore, by Robertson Davies.
Just as he’s about to get up and undress for sleep, there’s a tapping at the door. Skye says, “I brought you a torch. In case you need to find the loo.”
“Thanks.” He takes the heavy flashlight from her.
“I’m not sure if it has batteries.” She giggles irresistibly. “It was just an excuse to come see if she’d scared you off.”
“Not yet,” he says.
She walks past him and takes up her earlier station on the bunk next to his, tilts her head to inspect the book.
“What’s a manticore?”
“It’s a mythical creature with the head of a man and the body of a lion.”
She wrinkles her nose. “Why are you reading a book about that?”
He hands her the book. “Actually, it’s about a man undergoing Jungian analysis. The manticore represents him, the point being that he’s a man who’s partly a beast.” He adds casually, “My shrink thought I should read it.”
“Does everybody in Hollywood have a shrink?”
“I’m not exactly in Hollywood. But I think in general Southern Californians tend to believe that the unexamined life is not worth living.” He sits down on the bed and stuffs the pillow behind his back.
“So that’s why you’re going? To examine your life?”
“I’m going because…”
“I’m sorry.” She seems abashed. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, I don’t mind telling you. I just don’t want to tell you more than you really want to know.”
“I want to know everything. Of course.”
“Well…I suppose I should say that the reason I’ve been seeing a therapist is that I wasn’t functioning very successfully.”
“Could you be a bit more specific?”
“Clinical depression.” He smiles to soften the impact. “I believe the politically correct term is ‘affective disorder.’”
“That sounds much more dignified.”
“I can assure you there’s nothing dignified about it.”
“Does it mean you’re sad all the time?”
He looks at her. “Not just sad. And not all the time.”
“Had you rather not discuss it?”
“Not right now. We’ll talk about it later, but not tonight.”
“Okay,” she says. “Anyway, I wanted to tell you something about Mum.” She holds a pause. “I know she’s been rather rude since you got here, and I don’t want you to think it’s just about you.”
“What else is going on?”
“She’s under a lot of pressure. Financially, I mean. Derek is a lovely bloke and all, but he’s no farmer. Mum pretty much runs the place herself. I help her now, but I’ll be moving away next year.”
“What about her
brother?”
“That’s the other thing, you see. Uncle Rory was killed two years ago next month. Rock climbing down in the Remarkables. It was terrible. None of us could believe it. Mum stayed in her room for weeks.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. We did some climbing together when I was here. He was a good man. A good climber. I liked him.”
She gives him an odd little smile. “He didn’t like you.”
“What do you know about it?”
She shrugs. “Nothing, really. I just heard him say once that he’d never hated anybody till he met you. Then Mum told him to never to say another word like that in front of me.”
“You can’t really blame him.”
She frowns. “It wasn’t your fault, after all. You didn’t know she was sprogged.”
His stomach drops. She doesn’t know. Of course she doesn’t know. Gillian wouldn’t have told her that.
“What’s on the agenda for tomorrow?”
“I thought we might go to Napier.” She grins. “I’ll show you what passes for culture hereabouts.”
He smiles. “Don’t get cynical just yet. You’ve got your whole life to develop an attitude.”
He walks her to the door, still awkward about touching her, but she turns quickly and puts her arms around his waist, her face against his chest. “Sleep well, Mac. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
Suddenly he’s exhausted. He wasn’t able to sleep on the flight, and his internal clock is in turmoil…driving all day, eating at wrong times…
Tossing on the thin mattress in the dark, waiting for sleep, but barely able to lie still, it occurs to him that he might be headed for another “episode.”
He shakes off the thought, gets up and pulls on his clothes, briefly considers going for a walk, but that would be stupid. It’s pitch black out and he’d probably trip over a boulder or step in a hole or the entire pack of dogs would take after him. He finally settles for lying on his back in the grass, hoping there’s no sheep shit or dog shit or the leavings of any other animal, and watching the unfamiliar constellations wheel around. He finds the Southern Cross and squints at it. Fixing his location by its sight. Proving that he’s really here.
A spring rain moves in Tuesday and Skye hauls out the family photo album. He groans inwardly but soon finds himself riveted by the pictures, only intermittently hearing her breezy commentary.
One of the first shots is of a dozen or so people at a wide, sandy beach. There’s a table laden with food, bottles of wine, beer and soda. Everyone is smiling into the camera except Gillian, heavily pregnant, looking off to the side. Skye has obviously taken charge of the scrapbook, drawing an arrow to her mother’s belly and writing in childish script “ME!”
There’s photo in front of a church—one of the little wood frame Anglican churches that dot the New Zealand countryside.
“That’s my christening,” Skye says. “This too.”
She points to a close-up of Gillian and her parents, smiles plastered on pinched faces. Baby Skye rests in the brawny arms of someone—Rory? Derek?—whose head is cut off in the shot. She’s gazing straight up, eyes wide, looking stunned by the strangeness of her new circumstances.
“I don’t even know your whole name,” he says. “What is it?”
“Skye Marie Wellburne.”
“Where did Marie come from?”
“My great grandmother.”
There are more photos than he would have expected from a family that worked so hard all the time. He wouldn’t have thought they’d find time to be constantly grabbing the camera for shots of Skye, squatting over a mud puddle, studying a birthday cake with four candles, first day of school, perched on a small sturdy pony, a smiling man in gumboots and a sweater standing next to her, one arm looped protectively around her back. Derek.
One shot of Skye, alone at the water’s edge, except for the shadow of the photographer, is particularly arresting.
“How old were you there?”
“Seven,” she says without pause. “That’s when I thought you were a Selkie.”
He laughs. “A what?”
She runs her finger along the bottom edge of the page. “You don’t know the story then?”
“No.”
“My gran told me. Her Irish gran told it to her. The Selkies are an old race, living in the sea. Once a male Selkie shed his seal skin to be a man for one night so he could father a child by a mortal woman. The legend says a Selkie who was with a mortal had to go back to the sea for seven years before being human again. I thought it was time for you to come back. Whenever we went to the beach, I used to watch for you.”
The afternoon is darkening on the steady rain, and noises of meal preparation are coming from the kitchen.
“Do you have pictures?” she says when he closes the album.
“No,” he says. He hadn’t even thought about the fact that she would want to know about his family.
“What about your mum and dad?”
“I don’t remember my father too well. He wasn’t home much.”
“He travelled for work?”
“I think that was his excuse. He did some kind of technical writing. He changed jobs a lot.”
“What about your mum?”
“She was beautiful. You look a bit like her. You have her smile. The same color eyes. Like mine.”
“Has she passed on, then?”
“No.”
“You said she was beautiful.”
“I haven’t seen her in about …twelve years.”
“You weren’t close.”
He shakes his head. “I recently found out that she had depression, too. But when I was a kid, I just thought she was always sad. I thought it was my fault. I tried to stay out of her way.”
She listens, digesting this.
“It runs in our family,” he says. “Depression. You need to be aware. If you start being sad or scared or angry for long stretches of time—”
“You mean like the entire holiday when Joe Dealy dumped me?”
“No, not like that. It’s a sadness that has no name, no reason. It seems never ending. It makes you lose interest in everything. It can make you angry. At the wrong people. For the wrong reasons.”
“But you don’t have it now?”
“No…”
“How do you get rid of it?”
“I don’t know. I think it’s like a cycle.”
She studies him, frowning. “Does that mean it might come back?”
The room is quite dark now, and he reaches behind her to turn on a lamp.
“Probably,” he says.
“What about drugs? One of the teachers at school had a breakdown but she’s on pills now.”
He settles into the couch. “I don’t want to take meds. But I guess it could come to that.”
“Why don’t you want to?”
“Oh…lots of reasons.”
“Like what?”
“For one thing, most of them have side effects. So you have to take more drugs to deal with the side effects. And sometimes they stop working…and I guess I just don’t like the whole idea of drugs changing your brain.”
She looks at him. “What if it needs to be changed?”
The rain tapers off during the night and after breakfast Skye proposes taking a lunch and driving up Te Mata Peak.
When he walks up to the house Gillian is at the kitchen table with a ledger, which she closes abruptly when she sees him.
“She’s getting dressed. She’ll be down soon. You’ll probably be more comfortable in the parlor.”
“Gilly…Skye told me about Rory. I’m sorry to hear it.”
“You’re lucky he’s gone. He said if you ever showed your face here he’d kill you. And I think he might have done.”
“She said things were difficult now…with the farm.”
“A couple of lean years is all. It happens.” She folds her arms. “We had a bad drought in ‘98. When we got the sheep to market, nobody wanted them. Couldn’t afford to
feed them. We had to sell at a big loss.”
“I could—”
“We’ll be fine.”
“Jesus, don’t be so stubborn. Let me help.”
“We’ll be fine.”
He pushes on doggedly. “What about Skye’s school fees? I could help with that.”
She gives him a measured look. “Are you in some sort of program?”
“What?”
“You know, where they make you search out everyone you’ve wronged and make amends.”
“No, nothing like that. Not that it’s a bad idea.” He sighs involuntarily. “I wish it was that simple. I wish I could make amends. To you especially. And her.”
There’s a reluctant smile that he remembers. “Well, it’s good you owned up to it…even if it did take you eighteen years. Oh, don’t look so grim. I’ve a good life and so does she.”
“No thanks to me.”
“We didn’t need you.” She says it quietly, without anger. “I just had to be practical.”
“You were always practical.”
“Not always…” She shakes her head. “I had my moments of fancy. For awhile I kept thinking you’d suddenly re-appear. Like in the movies.”
“I’m sorry. I know I can’t—”
“Never mind. I didn’t say it to make you apologize again. I just want you to know how it’s been. Finally I fell in love with Derek. Really in love. He always jokes about how he wore me down, but yes, I love him. He loves Skye like she was his own. It hurt him that she didn’t want to be adopted. So it was just sad, you see. Sad for him because she was always holding out for you. Sad for you because another man raised your daughter.” She looks at him suddenly. “Oh, Mac, for God’s sake, don’t get all weepy.”
“Sorry.” He swipes at his eyes, embarrassed. “Gilly …do you think someday you could forgive me?”
She spreads both hands, palms down on the table and studies them. Then she looks up at him. “I never expected the question to come up,” she says. “So I haven’t thought much about it. Quite honestly, I don’t know.”
At that moment Skye comes through the door, seeming about to speak, but she stops, looks from Mac to her mother.
They both smile.
Gillian says quickly. “You’d better go while the weather holds. And take a tarp to sit on. It’s going to be wet.”
Baker's Blues Page 22
