Page 37 of Just Come Over
“Oh,” she said. “What if Iamscared, though?”
“Then you tell me, and we’ll make a plan, like we just did. We’ll strategize, eh. Because, again, I’m the dad. That’s my job, to help you when you’re scared.”
She looked more dubious than ever. “It is?”
“Yeh. It is.” At least it should be. He was in guessing territory here, because he’d never had much of a dad himself until he was a teenager, and there hadn’t been heaps of sharing of feelings going on. Well, other than anger. His dad had been good at that one. “Come on. Let’s get you into the bath.”
One thing at a time, mate.He didn’t have to wash her hair tonight, or if hedidhave to, he was pretending he didn’t know that. Four more things, then. Shower. PJs. Plait hair. Put sheets on bed. Ten minutes, and he’d be done. He got her into the shower, stuffed her dirty things into the washing machine and started it, then found the PJs in one of Zora’s carrier bags and the Thursday undies—pink with white stripes—in Casey’s suitcase, and took them into the bathroom. He could at least make sure she had the right undies.
See?he told himself.You don’t know how to do it, but you’re doing it anyway. Parenting.More or less. Not too unlike sharing a hotel room with a nineteen-year-old kid when you were thirty-two, and letting him watch you and follow your example, except that Casey was younger. And a girl. And his daughter.
But other than that.
She was standing directly under the tap, her eyes screwed shut and her hair and face soaking wet. He poked his head around the glass partition and asked, “What are you doing? You weren’t meant to wash your hair.”
“I couldn’t help it,” she said. “The water comes from on the top. It’s getting in my mouth. I don’t think showers are very nice.”
He turned the tap off, getting fairly wet himself in the process, grabbed the towel again, rubbed it over her face and hair, and said, “You keep your head out. You don’t stand directly under it.” He thought about what she’d looked like when he’d turned the tap on and told her to get in. Hesitant, he’d call that. “Have you taken a shower before?”
She shook her head. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll show you how.” He was over the am-I-supposed-to-see-her-naked part of the question, at least. Clearly, there was no choice.
He’d be fixing her hair again tonight after all. Which was fine. They were fine. Two-a-day trainings were normal.
By the time she’d got herself dressed, he had her clothes put away from the various boxes and bags and was getting the sheets on the bed. “See?” he told her when she came in from the bathroom. “They have flowers on. Nice and girly. I’m going downstairs and getting a blanket for you now.” From off of his bed, since everything else was still in boxes. “And then we’ll comb your hair and I’ll practice my new plaiting skills.” After that, he could get to bed himself. His eyelids felt lined with sandpaper, his muscles felt like he was dragging them along, and his focus kept wavering, which was what happened when you’d managed maybe six hours of sleep out of the past forty-eight.
“OK,” Casey said. “Maybe I could go with you.”
He was almost out the door. “I’ll be back in a second.”
She stood planted there, her damp hair already frizzing around her face and Mickey and Minnie dancing on her PJ top, all of her looking tiny against the too-large bed. There wasn’t even a carpet in here, and he hadn’t asked the decorator to hang any art on the walls. For good reason, he’d thought. Decorator-chosen art was always something rubbish—a mass of intertwined driftwood fastened, for some unknown reason, to an open wood frame, or a red “X” covering a sloppily painted white background. If somebody had painted your shed as messily as that, you’d have refused to pay him, but if they did it on a painting, you paid extra. Go figure. He’d had both of those in his house in France, and had never been able to work out why. The driftwood had looked like a giant spider crouching on the wall, especially in the dusk. Casey’s walls might be bare, but at least they wouldn’t give a person nightmares. So why did she look like she’d be having nightmares anyway?
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He crouched down beside her again. “What?”
“It’s kind of scary in your house. Because it’s a jungle outside of it, likeJumanji.Are there wild animals?”
He held out his hand. “Come on, then. We’ll go get the blanket together. No wild animals. Nothing but birds. It’s New Zealand. Very safe place. We’ll have a look around in the morning, and I’ll show you. It’s called, ‘Prime hillside property, your own slice of heaven, set amongst native bush.’ Means there are trees, that’s all, and that you pay extra for them.”
“Jungly trees. Like in dinosaur times.”
“Fern trees and palms, but no dinosaurs, and nothing else scary, either.”
Which was all fine. But when she was in bed at last, and he was standing by the door, about to turn off the light and wondering whether he’d manage to get his own clothes off or just fall in a heap across his bed, she clutched Moana closer and asked, “Could you leave all the lights on?”
“You can’t sleep like that, surely.”
“But if it gets very scary, I could find where you were. Your bedroom is a very far ways away, and your steps have holes in them. My mommy’s bedroom is next door, so if I have a bad dream, I can go find her.”
“Right,” he said. “I’ll read you a story from the dinosaur book for the bad dreams. After that, I’ll turn your bedroom light off, but I’ll leave the door open and the light in the passage on. If it gets very scary, youcancome find where I am.” She had to be at least as tired as he was. Surely she wouldn’t wake up.
Also, what were the builders thinking, putting a floating staircase into a house where people might have kids? The steps looked flash enough, each riser carved out of pale-gray wood, the bottoms shaped like waves. The acrylic panel was more secure than your average railing, too, even if it didn’t look it, but Casey was right. There was open space between every riser. You might not actually be able to fall through, but you’dfeellike you could. It was a stupid design.
“OK,” she said. “But maybe I could sleep on the couch instead, so it wouldn’t be so far and there wouldn’t be holes, and I could find you.”
When he finally allowed his eyes to close, at a point where he couldn’t have held them open five more minutes, he was wrapped in his duvet on the floor beside her bed, with her arm hanging over the side and the tips of her fingers brushing his hair. Making sure he was still there, that he hadn’t left her.
