Page 12 of Just Come Over
Too late now.
The foster home was well south of the central city, and it took a good forty minutes to get there. They drove past boarded-up shops, over cracked asphalt, past mounds of gray snow piled up in the gutters and bare trees whose limbs shook in the wind like old bones. Depressing as hell.
Some of his whanau may not have had any more money than this, but at least it was New Zealand. You saw some green, you could grow your own veggies, and there was always an uncle ready to take you out on the boat, for the price of some fish-gutting. It also wasn’t covered by gray snow.
It wasn’t like he’d never been cold before. He’d played his rugby in Christchurch. It froze in winter there, from time to time, but it was never like this.
The church had hell all wrong, he’d always thought. Hell wasn’t heat. Heat was the off-season, long summer days spent on the boat fishing, clearing your mind of rugby and your body of ten months’ worth of niggles and knocks. Or, even better, under the water, spearfishing for snapper or collecting paua, that most delectable and hard-won of kai moana—seafood. Heat was sitting on the beach afterwards, having a beer with your mates, with nowhere to go and all week to get there. Heat was a girl in a bikini and no makeup, brushing her wet hair back and smiling at you as she stepped out of the sea.
However hot it got, heat wasn’t horrible. Horrible was darkness and cold, the bone-chilling, skin-burning freeze that killed everything green and alive and relaxed in the world.
That last winter, when he and Dylan had been living with their mum in Invercargill—that was his own definition of hell. He could still remember seeing his breath inside the house, on the day the electric company had shut off the power. He’d had to bring Dylan into his bed and pile both their blankets on top that winter, telling him what a nuisance he was the entire time.
“Why do you have to be such a baby?” he’d asked his brother one night, the coldest one yet, as he’d got out of bed, savage with fury and shivering in the freezing night, to find them each another pair of socks and to rearrange their jackets over them. “You’re bloody useless. If you don’t stop crying, I’m not going to take you with me when I get rich and get out of here. I’m going to leave you alone.”
The next day, he’d rung up their Nan and asked her to come get them. He’d stood on the cracked yellow lino of the kitchen floor, the icy fingers of cold whistling in from around the window frames, held the chilly, hard piece of plastic to his ear, and waited to see if she’d answer. When he’d listened to it ring, watched a roach crawling over a stack of dirty plates, waving its antennae, and wondered if she’d pick up—that moment was still the coldest he’d ever been. Except maybe for the days afterwards, when he hadn’t known whether she would come. And the night he’d told his three-year-old brother he’d leave him alone, and Dylan had cried like his heart was breaking.
It was hard to pick a winner. All those times had sucked.
He’d never been back to Invercargill since. When he’d been offered a coaching job in Leicester, in the north of England, after his two-year stint in Japan, he hadn’t taken it. Leicester was the better club, no question, but he’d taken Toulon instead, on the Riviera. He’d told himself he could make more impact there. It had been true, but that wasn’t the reason he’d done it. He’d done it because it was warmer.
He also still hated cockroaches. And disorder. And unwashed dishes. Possibly also tears, especially if they were his own. Tears were giving up, and he didn’t give up.
They turned onto another street, and the neighborhood got a bit better. The house, when they pulled up to it, was small and white, not too unlike his Nan’s house in Nelson. Nothing flash, but trying its best.
He followed Jada up the walk. She said, “You need a better coat. Also gloves and a hat.”
“Nah,” he said. “If I ignore it, it doesn’t exist, that’s the idea. Besides, I’m flying out tonight.”
“You could lose your fingers to frostbite by then.” She laughed. That was her version of humor, apparently. She rang the bell, and Rhys stood beside her on the concrete porch and focused on the way his breath emerged in icy puffs. The peephole on the front of the door darkened, and after a rattle of chains, the door opened. A smell of overheated floral air freshener wafted out, and the woman behind it, who was holding a curly-haired baby on her hip, said, “Hi. You must be here for Casey.”
“Yes,” Jada said.
The woman pushed the door open a little more with one hand. “Come on in.” She held out a hand, the one that wasn’t holding the baby, to Rhys. “Tiana Hooper.”
The girl was sitting on the couch, a green-flowered thing with a crocheted blanket draped over it. To either side, little tables were covered by doilies, and the coffee table had a glass top. With a crocheted doily-thing underneath it. The carpet was pink, and above the couch, glass shelves held a collection of porcelain birds that would have rained down in a shower of splinters the first time there was an earthquake.
The girl sat rigid, wearing jeans, trainers, and a blue T-shirt, printed with a flying horse with gold sparkles in its mane and tail and the word “Magical” written underneath, a shirt that looked much too insubstantial for the weather. On her lap, she held a backpack and a doll, one hand clutching each, and there were two white rubbish bags at her feet and a navy-blue puffer jacket beside her. Her hair was loose, not in a ponytail or even fastened with the clips, or whatever you called them, that she’d worn in the school photo. The clips had had bows on.
Somebody had brushed her thick, wavy hair today, but that was all. Rhys got a flash of how he and Dylan had used to look, their impossible hair always too long and too tangled. When you went to school looking like that, it sent a message that didn’t help you a bit. How much worse would it be for a girl?
Casey’s mum had known that, clearly. That had been the reason for the bows on the hair clips, and the neat ponytail.
“This is Casey,” Tiana said, joggling the toddler. “And this is your dad, Casey, here to take you home.”
“Hi,” Rhys said.You can do this,he told himself.This is not a mistake. This is the only solution.
Casey studied him, but she didn’t get up. “Are you going to take me back to my house in your car?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “I don’t have a car here, and we’re going to my house.”
She said, “I want to go back to my house instead, please. You can call an Uber, if you don’t have a car. That’s what my mommy does, if she’s late and she has to go to work and she doesn’t have time to go on the El. It’s a school day. I could go back to my school for the afternoon part. My lunchbox is still in my cubby, because I forgot it. It has a sandwich in it, and cookies. I could eat lunch there.”
He’d been here sixty seconds, and he was already in trouble. “We can’t do that,” he said. No point in lying to her. “I don’t live here. I live in New Zealand, so that’s where we need to go.” Surely somebody had told her that. Hadn’t they? What were these people thinking?
“I never heard of that,” she said. “Is it on the north side?”
“No. It’s a different country. We’re going to fly there.”
