Page 26 of Kiwi Gold
“Yeh,” I said, “since I reckon I need to tell you as well. And believe it or not, I’ve explained the facts of life to little girls before. Wait. I take that back. Sounds creepy.”
She said, “I’m getting the picture. Go on, then.”
I slewed myself around halfway and said, “A sperm donation is when a woman needs a man to help her make a baby, because it takes both people. Maybe she doesn’t have a partner, or her partner can’t do his part, which is giving her sperm to get the baby started. So another man gives the sperm, but the first man, her partner, is still the dad who takes care of the kids, even though he didn’t do the making part.”
Yasmin said, “You mean if his penis can’t go in her vagina? Because that’s how you make babies.”
Laila made a sort of “eep” noise, and Amira said, “It is not!”
Yasmin said, “Itis.I saw on the Internet! They both get naked, and then the man lies on top of her and puts his penis—”
I may have choked a little. Also, another little girl, one with strawberry blonde hair and a determined look on her face, was pulling on the door handle, then trying to scramble inside. Difficult, with two booster seats.
“This is Olivia, Lachlan,” Laila said, with admirable serenity under the circumstances. “Poppy and Matiu’s girl.”
“But Uncle Matiu isn’t her real dad,” Amira said. “Somebody else is her real dad, from when she was born. Not like our dad, who was our dad all the time until he died. So does that mean that Uncle Matiu couldn’t put his—”
“All right!” Laila said brightly. “Let’s save this discussion for later and go to this party, shall we? Heaps of kids here. Why don’t you go play with Olivia, girls?”
I waited until they’d run off, we were out of the car, and I was handing Laila’s covered plate to her before I said, “So that didn’t go exactly the way I intended.”
“No?” she asked. She was losing the battle, because she was giggling. “Yourface.I shouldn’t laugh. It’s shock, probably. I had no idea that Yasmin knew, ah, the mechanics. She reads. And then she looks thingsup.I’d better lock out the porn sites, you reckon? Otherwise, she’s going to think that babies get started by repairmen come to fix the washing machine.”
I shouted with laughter, and then I was leaning on the bumper, my bowl of fruit salad on the bonnet and my hand over my face. “Oh, my God. Save me from little girls. Sorry about that.”
“No worries.” She was still laughing herself, leaning up beside me exactly like the night before, when we’d had our backs to the wall in that dusty passage near the back door. “We need to have a talk with diagrams, clearly, and age-appropriate explanation—whatisage-appropriate? How does anybody even know?—and an explanation about the proper time and place for these discussions, too. I didn’t realize it would happen at six. I think I wasten.And when Ididfind out, I was horrified.How about you?”
I looked at her, and she said, “Obviously not ten.”
“No,” I said. “But then, I’m a bloke, and boys are dogs. Also, conception was a topic in my family. Pretty sure I was the one doing the inappropriate sharing.”
“Because your sisters were conceived with a sperm donor,” she said. “But you weren’t.”
“No. Or I was, but the traditional kind, that does the deed and buggers off. When my mum was nineteen, that was. She met Peter when I was five and married him, but they found out, after some trying and testing and drama, that he couldn’t have kids, and she had some issues as well. So eventually—off to the States they went. Shortly after which,Peterbuggered off. Quads, eh. It’s an adjustment.”
“Why to the States?”
She was making no move to get up and join the party, so I didn’t, either. She was all the party I wanted anyway. Chocolate brown and apricot and the flash of honey-colored skin through lace. Slim, toned arms, and the heavy knot of dark hair at the back of her nearly fragile neck, with that suggestion of copper gleaming like she’d been kissed by the sun, all of it warm and rich and frankly … delicious. And, as I’d noticed since I’d first stood in her doorway to take her to the barbecue, the subtle floral scent she wore, the same one she’d worn last night. Pretty, and gentle. Like her.
She was a lady. That was what it was. An odd word to use. Anachronistic, and probably sexist as hell, but there you were. She was it.
“Selling sperm’s illegal in New Zealand,” I said, which was a fail on the “talking to a lady” front, but here we were. “And blokes who do donate have to attach their name to their contribution. In other words—who’d do it? Unless you were a truly massive tool and thought your genetic material was superior and everybody ought to have access to it. Whereas in the States, there’s good money in it. Medical students are highly featured, it seems. Combination of temporary poverty and brains.”
“Expensive journey, from New Zealand,” she said. “Expensive procedure.”
“Yeh, well, my mum was doing pretty well at her job at the time, my stepdad wasn’t doing badly himself, and my mum wanted it. That last bit’s the important part.”
“So they wereallfrom that? Your sisters? The one sperm donation?”
“Yeh. They were. It was an adjustment, like I said.”
I didn’t say anything else, possibly because I didn’t want to think too much about this latest can of worms, and eventually, she said, “I grew up in the States myself. At the beginning, anyway.”
“Really. Why? American parents?” I almost said,That’s where the ethnic mix comes from, then, not Maori or Indian or … whatever?I didn’t say it, though, even though I’d been wondering since the night before. Wait, she’d said her mum was Kuwaiti, which made sense, because she wasn’t purely Pakeha, any more than I was myself. There was an otherness about her, not in her looks so much as the essence of her. She didn’t look Maori to me, though, and I was part Maori myself, or so my mum said, through the absent dad. Maori without an iwi, without a mountain or a river, so it wasn’t like there was a connection, but—still. I was, I guess. Her reserve, the suggestion of fragility, looked like that kind of loss, like she wondered where she fit.
Responsible,she’d said.In charge. Because I have to be.
Like our dad was our dad all the time until he died.
