Page 50 of Just Say (Hell) No
The doctor patted Ella’s hand, said, “It’s your choice. Don’t let anybody make it for you. No wrong answers. Hang in there,” and left. A busy man who’d made some extra time.
Marko squeezed Ella’s hand and looked at Nyree. It wasn’t a hard look to read.Help me.
“What was the card of the day?” she asked him.
His eyes lightened, and some of his tension eased. Even Ella looked interested. “The Fool,” Marko said. “Again. Short message with it this time. ‘The answer to the question is Yes.’ I may have had a different question in mind, though.”
“Maybe we should have her do Ella’s,” Nyree said.
Marko smiled. “Maybe so.”
Nyree waited with Marko once more while Ella got dressed. When she came out, he asked her, “Riding home with Nyree? Or with me?”
“I’d rather walk,” she said. “It’s not far.” Her face was shut down. Closed, and so was her body language.
Marko looked at Nyree, and she said, “Quiet time, eh. Are you hungry, though?”
“Yeh,” Ella said. “Starved.”
“I’ll make you a toastie,” Nyree said. “For when you get home.”
Ella took off, and Nyree got into her car. She had to drive slowly, because Marko was in front of her. Which was annoying, because she wanted to go fast. Preferably with the wind in her face.
She rolled the window down and wished she had a convertible. Nobody in New Zealand had a convertible, for the obvious reason that if you did, there you’d be, rolling along enjoying your carefree lifestyle, when the sky would randomly decide to dump bucketsful of rain on you as punishment for the hubris of thinking you could have a convertible. At which point you’d have a smash, and your convertible would be gone.
When she reached the house, she went into the kitchen and started working on that toastie. When Marko came in holding Cat, who’d accosted him as usual the second he’d walked in the door, she told him, “I decided to make a couple of these for us as well. If you don’t want yours because it’s not on the match day leadup diet plan, we’ll put it in the fridge and Ella can eat it later.”
“I want it,” he said. “A chicken and veggie toastie isn’t pizza. Not quite, anyway.”
“Sadly,” she said. “I guess we know why Ella’s been eating so much, anyway. Twins. Who would’ve thought? Awesome job on the tech, by the way.”
“Yeh, well. There are times when it helps to be an intimidating fella.” He smiled, then. Sweetly.
“What’slaztana?”she asked.
“’Darling,’ I guess you’d say, in Basque. Seemed right.” He looked at the door, and Nyree could tell he was restraining himself from going outside to wait for Ella. But hedidrestrain himself.
After a minute, when she’d laid the sandwich halves carefully into two pans with plenty of butter, she said, “I’d worry about her walking home, being alone with all that on her mind, but I think she’s wiser than she knows. Young, but not a fool, and not a coward. And sometimes, you need to walk. For ages, preferably. For me? Along the beach. Something about the sound of the waves and that ozone filling your head. Being able to let it all go.”
He leaned against the cabinet, his ankles crossed, and gave her a look of frowning intensity, all black eyebrows and broken nose. When he spoke though, what he said was, “It’s the mountains for me. Running on a track only wide enough for one, with the kilometers rolling away behind you. Looking out on open space and no people, and the wind.”
“Colder than the beach.”
“It is that.”
When Ella came in, she barely spoke, just fell on the toastie like a starving dog, then ate half of Nyree’s with a glass of milk. Finally, she sat back, sighed, and said, “I get so hungry that it wears me out. Even after I eat, I’m still tired just from being so hungry before. Guess that’s twins.”
Marko said, keeping it calm, “Reckon it is. A bit like me as a teenager, too. Eating six thousand calories a day or more, and still so hungry that waiting for lunch was agony. We may need to talk to your school about you getting snacks. What do you think about calling your mum?”
Ella stuck a fingertip into the crumbs left on her plate and put it in her mouth, and Nyree went to the pantry, pulled out a bag of crisps, Ella’s favorite snack, and handed it to her. There was a time for nutrition, and there was a time for comfort. “I guess I should,” Ella said after dumping out a pile and crunching a crisp between her teeth. “I texted Caro on the way home.”
“Helpful?” Marko asked.
Ella grimaced. “Not so much. Heaps of ‘Oh, my God’ and ‘I can’t believe it.’ Neither can I. But it doesn’t tell me what todo.”She sighed and pulled her phone out of her bag. “It definitely won’t help to talk to Mum. But I guess I have to.”
“Put her on speaker,” Marko suggested.
Ella did, and Nyree had the dubious pleasure of listening to escalation in action. Jakinda did her share of “Oh, my God” as well, following it up with, “You can’t. Absolutely not. You won’t be able to handle that.”
