Kiwi Strong (New Zealand Ever After Book 3)

by Rosalind James

  I looked around.

  There. Under the stairs, bits of duct tape flapping.

  I got the ladder set, and I was up it fast. Below me, Xena kept barking through the half-open window, a startling volley of deep-throated, big-chested Labrador sound. I tumbled into the window the same way I had the previous day. Onto my palms, walking them forward, jumping my feet down, rising again. I did it faster this time, though.

  I caught it from the corner of my eye as I came up. The door to the flat, standing open. And something else. The slam of a door, the resonance of boots on metal. Feet on the stairs.

  I didn’t go down the ladder. Too slow. I went out the door.

  The passage first, dimly lit, smelling of curry and onions and mold. The outer door. And at the end of the alley, a man in brown trousers and a white shirt, disappearing around the corner.

  I all but slid down those stairs. Xena had her paws on the edge of the window and was barking her head off, and I ran past her, to the end of the alley, onto Princes Street. Looking left and right.

  Cars, going too fast. Pedestrians on their way home or their way out. A group of uni students, laughing, talking, careless. And brake lights down the street as a ute even older than mine, a white Ford, backed out of a tight spot.

  I ran. He shot forward at a not-sharp-enough angle, and I heard the crunch as he hit the bumper of the car ahead. He didn’t stop, just backed again, and I was almost there. I grabbed the edge of the bed and saw his reflection in the rearview mirror. A face made of angles, cheekbones and jaw and chin. Dark hair.

  I saw his eyes.

  He shot forward again and into the street, swerving violently, sending me sprawling. An angry, panicked hoot and the screech of brakes, and I scrambled back out of the traffic.

  He was gone.

  Daisy

  When we got home after our errands, Fruitful went to take the first shower, and Obedience and I got to work cooking for tomorrow, since the afternoon was going to be busy enough, and maybe because … because I wanted to make Gray something special.

  Well, anyway. We were cooking. I was using my hands to mix ground venison, bulgur wheat, onion, anchovies, and seasonings, and Obedience was chopping dates for a sticky-date pudding. I had music on, because it made me feel a bit more normal, a bit less like I was in a stranger’s house with two sisters who were nearly strangers themselves, with no car and no flat and with my normally controlled life careening dangerously close to out of control.

  Obedience said, staring down at her dates, “People were looking at me today.”

  “Yes,” I said, keeping on with my squishy mixing and adding a bit more garlic powder. Men liked garlic. “People do look at other people, and you’re pretty.”

  She didn’t look up.

  I said, “It’s all right to be pretty. It’s all right to stand out. You can think of it as a gift from God, if you like. We all have gifts.” Obedience was, in fact, the prettiest of all of us. Her dark eyes were huge, her eyebrows winged, her features delicate, her hair wavy and colored a rich chestnut. She had more curves than Fruitful or me, too, even at sixteen, and she was the tallest.

  She said, “That isn’t why they were looking. It’s because I was wearing your dress, and … you know. My legs being so … odd.”

  “What?” I said. “Your legs are pretty.” Which they were.

  “No.” She was flushing a little, measuring flour and sugar, not looking at me. “Nobody else has hair on them. I saw, because they were all wearing such short … things. Shorts and skirts. Showing their legs. Only men have hair, except for Fruitful and me. Are we … deformed, at Mount Zion? Is something wrong with our … inner parts? Our hormones?”

  I laughed out loud, and when she looked stricken, I said, “Sorry, love. No. You’re not deformed. Women usually remove the hair from their legs and underarms. Men do their chests sometimes, too. They shave them, or they wax the hair off.”

  She was staring at me now. “They do not,” she breathed.

  Fruitful came out of the bath, crutching along in my dressing gown with her hair wrapped in a towel, and took a seat at the island as if she did it every day. “They do not what?” she asked.

  “Daisy says men shave their chests, Outside,” Obedience said. “So they look like boys. And women shave their legs.”

  “You’re in for more of a shock than that,” I said. “Some women shave or wax their vulva, take all the hair off, or most of it.” And when they did nothing but stare at me, I threw caution to the winds and said, “Their genital area. That’s what it’s called. Your vulva. I do that myself, the waxing. I like it because it feels more sensitive, and that’s an area where it’s nice to be sensitive. Most women at least get rid of some hair there, and so do men. Looks nicer. Neater.”

  “No, they don’t,” Fruitful said. “That’s not possible. It’s … not having hair would look like you’re not a woman yet. Why would you want to do that?” She didn’t address the rest of it.

  “You saw me,” I reminded them. “In the shower. And you saw Gray without his shirt as well.”

  “I thought you had an accident,” Obedience said. “Or were ill, maybe. Or something. And that Gray was … that he’s …” She blushed deeper.

  “She means that he’s dark-skinned,” Fruitful said. “And maybe that she’s ashamed she looked. It’s all right to look,” she told Obedience. “Daisy said so.”

  “Gray may grow some body hair,” I said, “as his dad wasn’t Samoan.” It was funny, really. You’d think your day would be full of conversation about whether you had to be … well, obedient and fruitful, for example. Instead, you talked about body hair. “Nobody’s making you do it,” I went on. “There are no rules. You can do what you like. Men, too. They can shave, or grow beards. Keep the hair on their chests, or trim it, or wax it off. Either way. Any way.”

  Which told you why body hair was as subversive a topic as everything else. They mulled that over, and I began to work on the sauce for my meatballs, hoped Gray would like this dinner, too, and spent about two seconds wondering whether it meant something nefarious that I wanted to cook dinner for a man this much.

  It couldn’t be. A man who was letting me borrow his cherry-red Mustang? The least I could do was cook him some meatballs and pasta, right? In his kitchen. In his yurt. Which I was living in. With my sisters.

  I didn’t think he shaved his chest, actually. It had looked smooth to me this morning, when he’d taken off his shirt, and it had looked smooth when he’d done it before, too. When he’d been climbing through my window for me. Anyway, Gray wasn’t the kind of man who spent much extra time on getting his grooming exactly right. I’d been right about the work boots and the jeans, the working-man strength of him. He had to know he looked that good, but he didn’t seem to care.

  While I was mulling over that dangerous line of thought, the girls seemed to be doing the same, because Fruitful pulled aside the dressing gown, looked at her leg, dusted by the fine dark hair bequeathed by our Indian mother, and said, “I choose to take it off, then.”

  “Underarms as well?” I asked.

  Fruitful considered. “Show me yours.”

  I did, pulling down my sleeve, and Fruitful lifted her own arm, checked herself out, made a face, and said, “That too.”

  “It’s like cutting the hair on your head,” I said. “You can choose one thing today, and something else next month. You can color your hair. You can shave your head. You can braid your underarm hair. You can do anything you like, and then you can do something else.”

  “You don’t have to say all that,” Fruitful said. “I’m sure.”

  “Right, then,” I laid my forearms on the benchtop and did some stretching, one hamstring at a time. As usual, I’d run a bit fast this morning. Running away from the bad thoughts, or trying to impress Gray, I wasn’t sure.

  Nah, I was sure. I’d been trying to impress Gray. Who’d taken off his shirt for me. I’d washed it already and hung it on the line outside. If I’d h
ad an iron, I’d have ironed it. That was how that gesture had felt to me.

  He hadn’t said much at all. He’d just held me, and then he’d let me go. And given me his shirt.

  I gave up thinking about that and said, “Next question. Waxing or shaving. Waxing stings like billy-o, especially the first time, but it’s smoother, and it lasts longer.”

  “I don’t care if it hurts,” Fruitful said. “I’m used to hurting.”

  It lay out there, a bald statement of fact. I didn’t rush to fill the gap. I wanted her to know she’d said it, and that the sky hadn’t fallen. I kept on stirring my sauce, and Obedience asked, as tentatively as if she were picking her way across a minefield, “Did Gilead hurt you?”

  “Yes,” Fruitful said.

  “Me too,” I said, and had to take a couple of deep breaths. It was more than I’d ever confessed.

  Obedience asked, “Like … Dad? Spanking?” Her voice quiet. Hesitant.

  Fruitful said, “Yeh. But worse. And sex hurt.”

  I said, “Oh, baby,” and stopped stirring. “I’m sorry.” And I was. Sorry for her. Sorry for me. “And I’m proud of you for saying it.”

  “Oh,” Obedience said, then: “I don’t understand hitting people.”

  My head came up, and I said, “Neither do I. And that’s brave of you to say.” It was more than brave. It was independent thought.

  “If you’re bigger anyway,” Obedience said, “why do you have to hurt somebody to prove it? They already know you can. Why do you have to actually do it? And why do men want to hurt people anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you could ask Gray, later tonight. I’m thinking he’ll have an opinion, and that he’ll be willing to share it.”

  Which she could have done, I thought hours later, if Gray were here. It was after six now, and Matiu and his family had arrived as promised. And Gray hadn’t.

  I’d thought he would come. I really had.

  Matiu had brought pizza, which the girls were extremely excited about. He’d also brought Hamish, Olivia, and Isobel, aged seven, five, and two, respectively, plus his wife, Poppy, eight months pregnant, and their little dog, Buddy. Which was the kind of crowd the girls were used to, and that I wasn’t one bit used to anymore.

  When we’d first seen it, the yurt had felt spacious and spare. Now, it was anything but. The pizza was warming in the oven, and the older kids were upstairs in the loft with Obedience, doing “gymnastics.”

  The gymnastics had been Olivia’s idea. When she’d met Obedience, she’d said, “You have a very pretty shirt. It has flowers, and I like flowers. Do you want to be my friend?”

  “Yes,” Obedience had answered. “I do.”

  “Then we should do gymnastics,” Olivia had announced, like the little ginger general she was. “And Hamish can do gymnastics too, and Isobel can do gymnastics, except she’s too little and she can’t do anything.”

  “Isobel can stay downstairs with me,” Matiu had said. “The stairs aren’t safe for littlies.”

  “OK,” Olivia had said. “Then just me and Hamish can do gymnastics,” she’d told Obedience. “Come on. We can hold hands.”

  Olivia was about as far from a Mount-Zion-approved child as you could possibly get. There was more than one kind of way, maybe, to be a role model. From the sound of the thumping and the shrieks up there, Obedience was doing some gymnastics herself, and from the sound of the barking, Buddy was helping.

  Meanwhile, Poppy and Matiu were on the couch, Matiu holding Isobel in his lap as she ate dry cereal out of a plastic tub, and Fruitful was in a chair with her foot propped on a cushion. As for me? I was standing at the island pouring wine and water into glasses, battered by activity and noise and emotion, waiting for Gray, and jumpy as a cat.

  Matiu said to Fruitful, “I like the new clothes, and the new hair, too. Looks good. Expressing yourself, eh.”

  Fruitful touched a shiny dark strand as if she couldn’t believe it was hers, that she was wearing it down and not hiding it from everybody but her husband, and said something that may have been, “Thanks.”

  Poppy asked, “Was it longer, then, before?”

  “Yes,” Fruitful said. “It reached to below my knees.” She found it easier to look at Poppy than Matiu, I could tell. Whether it was Matiu’s looks, or just that he was a man, I didn’t know. If you needed to get used to talking directly to men, though, Matiu was a good start. Calming nervous patients was the story of his life.

  “That’s long,” Poppy said. “Hard to wash and take care of, maybe.”

  “Yes,” Fruitful said. “It was.”

  “I had long hair myself,” Poppy said, “before. Below my shoulder blades, anyway. About the length yours is now, in fact.” She laughed. “Too long for me. I got it cut to this length and layered like yours exactly seven weeks after I separated from my husband. Declaration of independence, eh.” She sighed. “It felt so good. I cut my hair, and I started drawing something new. That same day.” She looked at Matiu. “I just realized that.”

  Matiu smiled at her, a subtle thing, more eyes than mouth, picked up her hand, rubbed his thumb over the emerald on her finger, and said, “That’s right. You did.”

  Dorian did that sometimes with Chelsea, too, that easy touching thing. I wondered how that would feel. If it could be as nonthreatening as a touch from your sister, but still exciting. Still … different.

  Fruitful asked, “Really? The hair? You were—separated?”

  “Yes,” Poppy said. She must have heard why Fruitful and Obedience were here, because she went on. “I think it was one of the first things I did just for me, without feeling guilty. It was my hair, after all. And I started wearing makeup again, and prettier clothes, too.” She smiled at Fruitful. “Like you. Breaking out. Breaking free. Also, I kissed Matiu. That was the very best part.”

  Fruitful blinked, like she didn’t quite know what to do with that information. She was wearing makeup. Lipstick, a bit of mineral foundation, and eyeliner, to be exact. The makeup had been, unlike the clothes, nothing but fun. By the time they’d chosen their lipstick colors, the backs of the girls’ hands had been striped with every pink and red on the spectrum, and even some purple. They’d loved it. Fruitful was also wearing loose white chinos and a pale-coral top, and there was a pair of delicate backstrapped flat sandals by the door in a daring bronze, suitable for crutches. Suitable for toenail varnish, too. Mani/pedi: another item on the list for tomorrow. There’d be more color-choosing then, because the world was opening its doors.

  I handed Matiu his glass of wine and sat down. The girls still needed new names, and passports. I still needed a car. We still needed to see the lawyer and enroll them in school. And what had we done today? We’d gone to the hair salon, and we’d gone shopping for clothes. Shopping for food. Shopping for shoes. Shopping for everything.

  If you wanted to be somebody new, though, you needed to feel like somebody new.

  Now, I wondered where Gray was. I’d put the pizza under foil, but it was going to be drying out. He’d said he’d come tonight. Hadn’t he? I couldn’t quite remember.

  I was still wondering when I heard the knock at the door.

  Oh, good. Finally.

  Or not. Could be an explosion. It depended on Matiu, and it depended on Gray. Men were different. You’d think they weren’t, and then there they’d be, different after all.

  What did it matter, though? If Fruitful was used to hurting, I was used to explosions. I was an Emergency nurse. I’d been through the fire, and I didn’t cower.

  Things could hurt. I could survive. It wasn’t as if I had any illusions left.

  29

  No Florence Nightingale

  Daisy

  It was Gray at the door. He had Xena with him, and he was still in dirty jeans and boots, which I’ll admit surprised me. Somehow, I’d expected him to … what? Dress up? After a full day of work?

  Geez, I was picky. Why was I so picky? The jeans had a tear at the knee, too.<
br />
  I said, “I wondered if you’d …” and then stopped talking, because something was wrong.

  He asked, “What does Gilead look like?”

  The chill went straight through me, and I had my arms wrapped over my chest again. “He’s … dark. Uh … medium height. But I haven’t seen him for twelve years. Did you think you saw him? What’s wrong? What’s happened?” I put my hands on his arms, now, wanting to check him over. Was he hurt? He was. I could tell he was.

  There. On the underside of his forearms. I picked up his hands and checked. Road rash, down his forearms and on the heels of his hands, like he’d gone over the handlebars of a bike. Swollen, angry red abrasions, and a triangular flap of skin on a palm where he’d hit something sharp. Ground-in dirt. Very nasty and painful. I asked, “Did Gilead do this? How? What happened to you?”

  “Nothing happened to me,” he said, pulling his hands away. “I need you to—”

  Fruitful said from behind me, “You saw Gilead?”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling stupid. “Fruitful will be able to describe him better. You need to stop just standing there, though, so I can clean these up.”

  He said, “I’m trying to tell you something!” He roared it, actually. I could hear the thump-thump as Fruitful took a step back on her crutches, and then Matiu’s Emergency-doctor voice, full of command presence, asking, “Something wrong?”

  Gray looked like he was fighting for control. Finally, he said, “Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m trying to explain to the most aggravating woman in the world that I caught her ex-husband, Fruitful’s current husband, breaking into her flat, and she wants to talk about how I scraped my hands!”

  “Because you’re injured,” I said, “and that’s what matters right now. I’m cleaning and dressing this, and while I do it, you can tell me.”

  I could swear Gray was grinding his teeth. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. Wash my hands. Fine.”

  “Oh,” I realized belatedly. “Do you have Dettol over at your place? Gauze?”