Page 67 of Just Say Christmas
33
Lucky
Friday,December 18
MARKO
Marko drove Nyree home at eight-thirty, after she’d fallen asleep against his shoulder again. She didn’t even wake up when he pulled into the garage. He put his arm around her to help her inside, then gave up and swept her up into his arms.
She woke up a bit when he did it and said, “Oh. Are we going to have sex?” And he had to laugh.
“No,” he said. “We’re going to bed.” By the time he’d climbed the stairs and laid her on the bed, she was fast asleep again. He got her clothes off down to the undies, noting that she’d somehow managed to get paint on her bra, and she didn’t even shift.
Her feet were swollen. That was no surprise, since she’d been on them about twelve hours today. He tucked a pillow under them and pulled the duvet over her, and she rolled to her side, reached out a hand, groped around until she’d found his thigh, said, “Lie down with me for a minute,” and sighed. “It was good, eh. My mural.”
“Yeh,” he said, then climbed onto the bed and got his arm around her. About one minute later, she was asleep again.
Twelve hours after that, he stood holding his phone on St. Heliers Beach in shorts and trainers, his ten kilometers well and truly interrupted, and tried to get his thoughts together. Finally, he gave up, said, “Thanks, Mum. I’ll ring you back,” stuck the phone into his pocket, and headed up a long flight of wooden steps from the beach, down them again, and back up, then repeated it four times more, focusing on keeping his footsteps light and quick. He organized himself better on a worked-out body and brain, so he worked them out. A few rounds of press-ups after the last run up the steps, his breath still coming hard, until his arms and chest were starting to feel some fatigue, and he jumped to his feet for the sprint home. Fast as he could all the way there, then a shower, and he’d cope.
It was all about priorities, right? Once you got your priorities clear, the answer would be obvious.
The house was quiet when he headed inside, other than Cat, who gave a startlingly loud, rasping meow for a cat of her not-very-impressive size, leaped onto his shoulder from her leopard-print cat gym, and kept on complaining. He gave her sleek gray back an absent stroke and said, “Waiting for me all this time, eh. You need to get some hobbies.” In answer, she meowed some more. He headed into the laundry room, set her onto the benchtop, stripped off his sweat-soaked clothes and tossed them into the washer, and told her, “I’m taking a shower. You don’t like this part.” She stuck with him, though, all the way into the stall of the downstairs bath, at least until he turned on the water, when she leaped about a meter into the air, then dashed out of the stall like she was on fire.
Ten minutes later, he had a cup of herbal tea in his hand and a towel around his waist, and Cat was following him upstairs and into the bedroom, where the blinds were still down and Nyree was still a lump under the duvet. She opened one eye when he set the tea down beside her, spat out the lock of hair in her mouth, and said, “No. I refuse. It’s the middle of the night.”
“I’d tell you to sleep until noon,” he said, going over to his side, “but something’s happened.”
She shoved herself up to sit, alarm on her face. “Marko. What? Oh, bloody hell. I have to pee. Wait.” A dash to the bathroom, and she came back, pulling on a black singlet along the way. It happened to be one of his, since none of hers fit over her belly anymore.
That was all good, and life happened, right? He’d sort it out. He’d . . .
“Right,” she said, climbing back into bed and sitting cross-legged to face him. “Tell me. Is it bad?”
Cat was kneading her paws into his towel, purring like an idling truck, and Nyree was right there beside him. Everything was right in his world, except that it wasn’t. And once he said it out loud, it would get more real. He said, “Amona’s pretty ill.”
“Oh, no.” Nyree’s hand found his. “How bad?”
“Not in hospital, but it’s pneumonia. Mum says they won’t put her in hospital unless they have to, because she could get sicker there. Get another infection. They had her there yesterday, though, to get an IV drip of antibiotics and some oxygen. Other than that, she hasn’t got out of bed for the past three days, and I don’t know when that last happened. She’s pretty crook. So obviously, Mum can’t come up, and I’m not sure about Dad. Which is a bit . . . I’m a bit . . . stuck.”
“Shouldn’t we go down there, then?” Nyree asked. “And why didn’t we know?”
He hesitated. He didn’t normally hesitate. “She says no. That’s why we didn’t know, too. She didn’t want Mum to tell me.”
“Who says no? Amona, or your mum?”
“Mum says that’s what Amona says. Actually, she says she waved her hand and said, “Tell him . . . don’t come. Get married. Go on and live.” That part was hard to say. His dark, nearly silent grandmother, with her wise eyes and her busy hands, was at the foundation of him. She always had been.
He knew that people died. He did. When they died aged over seventy, it wasn’t a tragedy. So why did it feel so much like it?
“Oh, Marko.” Nyree had turned so she was holding him. Cat complained and jumped off the bed, Marko’s throat was closing, and he had a hand in Nyree’s soft hair.
When he didn’t say anything else, she sat back and said, “We can’t do that. That’s a no. We’ll put the wedding off.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve spent the last half hour or so trying to get my priorities clear. I’ve waited this long to marry you, and it’s long enough. And it’s your day, too. Everything’s been planned for more than a year. It’s your . . .” He sketched a circle with his hand. “Ceremony. Party. All of that. Your disappointment.”
Her dark brows were drawn together in concentration. “Are you worried about the expense? Is that it? ThatWoman’s Worldisn’t going to pay up for a wedding that doesn’t happen?”
“I hadn’t even thought about that,” he admitted. Why not? “There’s that, I guess, but—no. Or maybe I just haven’t thought it through yet.”
