Page 79 of Just Come Over
“I need her,” Dylan said. The words were halting. “I can’t do this without her. I can’t do it if she leaves me.”
“Then tell her so,” Rhys said, “and hope she cares.”
That was then. This was now. It couldn’t be happening again. It wasn’t possible. But why else would Zora sound like that? He tried to think of something else. Money, the house, her van, something with the kids at school, but none of that could be as bad as she’d sounded.
Pregnancy.
A leap at his heart, then a dive, like his heart had fallen into his belly. He knew the sound of “bad news coming.”
He was going to make it better, though. He was going to make it as good as it could possibly be. That was his job.
He knew bad news when he saw it, too, so he reckoned he’d know straight away, once he saw her. He couldn’t even have told you how, except that it was the difference between the team in the sheds after the game, these last two weeks, and how they’d looked the week before. He could have watched a video of any one of his players unlacing his boots and unwinding the tape and have said whether he’d won or lost.
He held the anxiety at bay on match day, compartmentalized with all the skill of twenty-three years in the professional game, and punched his way through it. When everybody else was sleeping their way across the Pacific, though, exhausted by the battle in a way he didn’t get to be anymore, he watched the game film once, then watched it again, making his notes and letting the strategies form, on his third beer now and feeling nothing, and knew sleep was still off in the distance, refusing to come close.Peace is for other people,it taunted him.Not for you.
Finally, when the images blurred on the screen and his pen faltered on the notebook page, he put his computer away, pushed the button to make his seat into a bed, and pulled the duvet over himself. He lay in the dark, opened his phone, and forced his eyes to work a few minutes longer, to read the thing he’d downloaded weeks earlier. The Song of Solomon. He read the words, then repeated them in his mind, the fatigue robbing him of his defences and his distance. The cadence and the imagery flowed through him like a Maori waiata sung in the marae, when your voice blended with all the others until they were one, your greenstone lay warm against your skin, and the blood of your ancestors coursed through your veins like you were the mountain and the river, and the mountain and the river were you.
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
He read it through once, then again, and thought,You may drown trying to swim across, but you can’t feel the water when you’re standing on the riverbank. You’re going to be there with her all the way to the other side this time, even if all you can be is her strong arm.
The chevrons and whorls of his moko seemed to pulse against his skin. Whatever this was, however bad it got, she was going to know he was there.
He came past the barrier with Finn, both of them pushing their trolleys toward the group of wives, girlfriends, and kids, the same way they’d done thousands of times. This time, though, one of the little figures was for him. Somebody in a unicorn T-shirt and sparkly shoes who charged straight for him. His heart lifted and soared, and he scooped her up into his arms, felt her own monkey arms wrap around him, and thought,This part’s all right. This one, I can hold safe.
“I missed you very, very much,” Casey said. “You were gone forforever.And Zora has a new roof on her house. It looks the same as the old roof, but she doesn’t have to have a bucket anymore.”
“Good news,” he said. “I missed you, too, monkey. How are the bunnies? Getting bigger?”
“They’re grownup,”she said with a sigh. “Itoldyou. They’relittle,that’s all.”
“Oh. I forgot.”
“They hardly ever poop on the rug,” she said, and he thought,Wonderful.
They got to the others, and he set Casey down and put his hand on Isaiah’s head, then thought,What the hell, mate,crouched down, and gave him a one-armed cuddle instead. Baby steps. Isaiah stiffened for a second, then cuddled back, tentative as you can imagine, and Rhys’s heart grew another size.Progress,he thought. And then, finally, he stood up and looked at Zora.
Nothing there. Blank.
She said, “Ready to go?”
“Yeh. Back to my place?”
“Isaiah and I already moved our things home. You can drop us.”
He’d planned to go to the gym, as usual, when he got home, to get himself right. Instead, he pulled out his phone. “What’s Hayden’s number?”
“Pardon?”
“Hayden. What’s his number?”
She gave it to him, and he dialed. “Hey, mate,” he said when Hayden answered. “Rhys here. Could I get you to do some emergency child-minding? My place?”
“First,” Hayden said, “you’d need to tell me where your place is. Zora hasn’t clued me in yet.”
“Rhys,” Zora was saying. “No.”
