Page 11 of Just Say Christmas
He cleared his throat and kept painting doggedly. “Because it’s meant to wear under a T-shirt, so you don’t notice it. Not lace, like. Smooth. I have sisters,” he explained to Victoria.
“Ding-ding-ding,” Nyree said. “We have a winner. Tom, give her your shirt to paint in. I know you have another one in the car.”
Now, he looked startled, just because she’d deduced that. It made her think that she should put a witch in the painting. Or two witches. A bad witch, and a good one, the kind who knew things and could cast spells. A wise witch. Marko’s mum Olivia, with her silver hair and her serenity? She’d be a perfect witch. She mightbea witch, in fact, she saw so much.
Tom asked, “How do you know I have another shirt in the car?”
She needed to answer him, and to figure out why on earth Victoria was taking off her clothes as if she’d developed a drug habit. She also needed to get rid of all these people if she were going to get this job done. You could say it was the wedding getting in the way, or the complicated rest of her life, but really, it was just the concentration you needed in order to paint, and the distracting colors of the other people in the room.
The colors had been coming through more strongly lately, her visual palette saturated with light, like she’d been given Technicolor spectacles. It was energizing, but it was distracting, too. So much to notice.
Right now, though, she needed to focus on the other people in the room, so she said, “Because you’re going to the airport to collect Ella, and you’re nervous about it. Of course you have a clean shirt in the car. Doyouhave an Instagram account?”
“Yeh,” he said, “but I don’t post much on it.”
He’d set down his brush, and now, he stripped his T-shirt obligingly over his head, which was a very long way. Rugby players tended to have a lot of body to pull shirts off of. Nyree had noticed that a long time ago.
When he was halfway there, a voice Nyree would have known if she were a thousand kilometers from home, or fathoms deep into the most wonderful painting there ever was, said, “I could ask. Matter of fact, Iwillask. What the hell? And why?”
Nyree’s heart lifted in her chest like a helium balloon, she thought,Oh, how I want you, boy,and she stopped painting her fairy.
Getting married was a little bit wonderful. Or maybe that was knowing you got to marry Marko Sendoa.
* * *
MARKO
Marko had been having the oddest sensations lately. Physical sensations, but then, he was a physical fella.
When he’d got on the plane for the World Cup over three months ago, for example, everything in him had wanted to be there with the team, and he also hadn’t wanted to go. It had felt as if there were a band around him, holding him to the ground.
Maybe that was because of the week before. He’d taken Nyree to Tekapo and his family during the early-September break between the last Bledisloe Cup match against Australia and the flight to France for the Rugby World Cup, a two-month absence. A considerate man would have asked if she preferred that they go visit her family first, but he wasn’t a considerate man. Also, he happened to know that she didn’t like Dunedin, where her mother and stepfather lived with her half-sister, andshehappened to know that he didn’t like her stepfather, his former coach, and that the feeling was mutual. Whereas they both liked his parents and grandmother, so there you were.
Or maybe he just liked having his own way. Could also be. At any rate, there they were, or rather, therehewas. Sitting up in bed, listening to the wind blow the winter rain against the windows, thinking about being out with his dad, the dogs, and the sheep in the early hours of tomorrow morning, with snow falling higher up in the mountains, and then how good it would feel to come inside again, shower away the cold and dirt, and sit in the warm kitchen eating breakfast and drinking tea with Nyree.
Who wasn’there.How long had she been in the bathroom? And why? Getting pretty, maybe, except that he didn’t care if she was perfumed or wearing lotion or lingerie or whatever it was. He cared that she was here, and that she was naked. He finally decided to do something about it.
His mum hadn’t texted him his Tarot card of the day today. Only because she’d been there to tell him at breakfast instead.
“The Wheel of Fortune,” she’d said. “So interesting, baby. What a wonderful new challenge for you. Opening your mind and heart to the universe, growing into the changes, and letting life unfold. What will come next, I wonder?”
“Not sure Marko’s so interested in letting life unfold,” his dad had said. “More about taking life by the horns, isn’t he.”
“That’s the beauty of it.” His mum again. “If it isn’t hard, it probably isn’t growth, wouldn’t you say, Mary?”
His grandmother, his Amona, paused a moment, then said, “Marko will be all right, and so will Nyree. The right path for them is already there, inside.”
Which was all cryptic as you please, and so was the look on his grandmother’s weathered brown face. She looked more ninety than seventy, and he got a pang of fear, which wasn’t a challenge he wanted, universe-expanding or not. He said, “As long as I’ve got the people I need, I’m all good,” then shut up. What would happen would happen. He could choose his reaction.
“I think you will,” Amona said again, and thensheshut up. His grandmother kept most of her wisdom in her hands, not her words, a bit like his dad. A bit like Marko himself, except when Nyree said they had to talk it over. He’d opened to the universe that much, hadn’t he? He talked it over, and what was harder, he listened whileshetalked it over. He wasn’t perfect at it, but then, when did the universe unfold perfectly, Wheel of Fortune or not?
Now, he decided to take his future into his own hands. Bugger the universe. He set Cat aside where she’d been sleeping curled up in his lap, and she protested, sounding nearly human, and looked at him reproachfully. He said, “You were always going to have to move. I don’t love you best, no matter what you think,” headed out the door and down the passage, then realized that he should probably put something on. Undies, anyway. He went back into the bedroom and pulled on a pair, then made his way through the quiet house to the bath, the old floorboards creaking under his feet. Cat padded along behind him, but then, she usually did.
A light under the bathroom door, and quiet behind it. He knocked.
“One second,” Nyree said. “Or maybe one minute. Sorry. Give me a sec.”
She sounded . . . something, and the hair rose on the backs of his arms. He asked, “Nyree? All right?” That was the chill of dread, maybe, and he didn’t do dread. He was the master of his fate, no matter what card he drew, and he didn’t borrow trouble where none existed.
