Page 13 of Just Come Over
“I can’t fly.”
What? Why? Did she have some condition he didn’t know about? He glanced at Jada. She shrugged. Very helpful.
“Why can’t you fly?” he asked when nothing else was forthcoming.
Casey looked at him like he was stupid. “Because I don’t have wings.”
He laughed, and she didn’t. Oh. It hadn’t been a joke. “We’re going on a plane. The plane flies, not us. You must have seen that in... in cartoons.” That was wherehe’dfirst seen it. He hadn’t been on a plane until he’d made the First XV at seventeen. He’d known what they were, though, hadn’t he, at six? He couldn’t remember.
“Is my mommy coming too?” she asked.
His heart did something odd, like a sponge that somebody was squeezing out. And nobody else was saying anything. How was he meant to cope with this? Surely, somebody had told her. He was going to operate on that assumption, anyway.
“No,” he decided to say, and sat down beside her, next to the puffy coat. He wasn’t a good liar, and anyway, she looked to him like she didn’t appreciate lying. Or he told himself that, because he had no clue, otherwise. “Your mum’s gone. She died, remember? That happens sometimes. I had to leave my mum when I was a couple years older than you. My Nan—my grandma—took my brother and me in. We went to a new house, and I went to a new school. Good as gold.”
Not exactly, but close enough. Besides, he wasn’t a worn-out sixty-five-year-old with an addict for a daughter. He was a forty-year-old rugby coach, he was tough, he had a grand total of one child to look after, and he had the means to do it properly.
Casey looked at him measuringly. “If my mommy isn’t going to be there,” she announced, “I don’t want to go.”
What did he say now? “Where are you planning to go instead?” he asked.
She wasn’t solid, not really. She was slim, like her mother. And her father. But when she set her jaw, shelookedsolid. She said, “I’m going to stay here and wait for my mommy. She said she would never leave. Shepromised.If I go away from here, she won’t know where I am. She has to know where I am, so she can come get me.”
He was about to tear up. He could feel it coming, and that wouldn’t do anybody any good, least of all him.
He was still trying to work out how to answer her when Tiana said, “I’m afraid you can’t stay here, Casey. I’m your foster mother. I told you that. ‘Foster’ means, ‘for a little while, until there’s another place for you to go.’ Now, there’s another place. Your mommy’s in Heaven now, like we talked about, with the angels, but you have a daddy, and he’s going to take you home, to a brand-new house. Isn’t that exciting?”
Casey looked Rhys over. “No,” she said.
Thishadn’t occurred to him. People generally did what he said. Correction—peoplealwaysdid what he said. He considered shouting, “I’m the rescuer here, damn it! Let’s go, and smartly.” He didn’t think it would work, though. He cast about for something—anything—to say, and finally lit on the backpack in her lap. It was blue, printed with Hawaiian flowers, and featured a Polynesian girl with her hand on her hip and a confident smile on her face. At the top, the word was spelled out.Moana.
That was the doll from the film, too, he realized, that she was holding. He may have been under a rock in terms of popular culture, but he recognized this.
If you couldn’t break the line, you found another way. You sidestepped. He touched the backpack lightly and said, “Moana, eh.”
Tiana shifted position. She and the social worker were still standing, and the baby was starting to fuss. He looked up at them and said, “Maybe you could give us ten minutes.”
Jada looked at her watch. He told her, “If you need to leave, go on. I’ll find my own way back.”
“I have a few minutes,” she said.
“Come have a cup of coffee,” Tiana said. She asked Rhys, “Would you like one?”
It would be served in a cup and saucer, he had no doubt. Possibly on a doily. It would also be weak. Chicago coffee was rubbish. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m good.” He might be in the Twilight Zone, but he was working on a plan. After that, he stopped paying attention to them and asked Casey, “Do you know what this is?” He touched the silvery disk on the doll’s necklace.
“It’s a necklace,” she said flatly. Her expression said,Obviously,and he had to smile.
“It’s a paua shell,” he said. “Or it’s meant to be. Moana’s traveling from the homeland, across the seas, with Maui’s help.” Which covered everything he knew about the film. “She’s going to New Zealand. She’s going to become a Maori.”
She wasn’t looking at him like he was stupid anymore, anyway. She was just looking at him like he was crazy. “That’s not in the movie.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s something you know in your heart if you’re Maori. I’ll bet you knew it already.” He reached inside his own shirt and pulled out the pounamu pendant on its black braided cord. “Just like I do. See, I have the hei matau. The fish hook pendant, for the sea and for determination. Mine has a muri paraoa as well, a whale tail, on the other end, for speed and strength and protectiveness. That’s all the important things. This was carved from a jade boulder that came from Tasman Bay, which is where I come from as well. It touches my skin and roots me to my family, to the ancestors, to our mountain and our river. Moana has a pendant, too. It reminds her where she came from, and who her people are.”
There you were. Logic. Rationality. And a bit of magic as well, maybe. You could need magic, if your mum had died. That might be the reason for the T-shirt.
Casey’s eyes had flecks of gold amidst the green and were as extravagantly dark-lashed as Dylan’s had been. Right now, they were fixed on his, like nobody had ever told her to look down, to look away, and she wouldn’t have listened if they had. There was as much intensity in her slim form as in any player about to run out onto the field, too, when she said, “My mommy said that. She said I was Maori, like Moana, and someday, Maui would come across the ocean for us and take us home. Nobody else said that, though.”
“Except me,” he said. “That’s because I’m your dad. You see how that works?” First time he’d said the D-word.
