Page 62 of Kiwi Gold
She passed a hand over her still-neat hair, sighed, and said, “Fine. Thank you. Sit down.” So I did. On a dining chair, in fact, because there was no place else to sit, not back here. Whatever money she’d had, she’d clearly spent it on the client side.
And she’d paid her half of our dinner anyway.
* * *
Laila
I didn’t look at him, even though half of me still wondered why on earth he was here. I focused on the girls instead.
“Your dad was a very good climber,” I said. “A very good skier.” And thought,Now what?
“I know,” Yasmin said. She was still crying. “He wasgood.He was! He was very strong, too. He was stronger than anybody!”
“People can do bad things,” I said. “Even if they’re good people to their families. Sometimes, your dad cared too much about climbing, because he got carried away, and he didn’t always care enough about … about other people. On the day he died, he made a very bad choice like that. He didn’t help somebody, and he should have helped.”
“Itoldyou,” Amira said to her sister.
Yasmin didn’t say anything. She just launched herself at Amira, lunging straight across my body, her elbow knocking into my chin, and I cried out, the sudden pain taking me by surprise.
Lachlan was, somehow, right there. He scooped Yasmin into his arms and said, “Come sit with me. These are hard feelings. You can hold my hand, if you like, to hear them, and that will help.”
Yasmin didn’t say much, maybe because she was still crying. She just said, “He’s not bad. He’snot,”in a moaning little voice that hurt my heart, and then she curled into him, on his lap, and she did hold his hand.
When Kegan had come home from a trip, she’d crawl into his lap just like that, and stay there until he got restless and jumped up again. After he’d died, she’d done it with me. I’d tried to give her the cuddling time she craved, but there’d never been enough time to sit in those days, enough time to be quiet together.
“People said some bad things about your dad because of that,” I said, because there was no choice but to go on. “They probably will later, too, when you say his name, because heaps of people knew his name. But maybe they’ll also remember the good things he did. The mountains he climbed, and the skiing he did, and the medals he won, and the time he saved his friend. They won’t know about him being a dad to you, but you’ll know. You can remember that.” I tried to think of something else good to say about him, and blanked. How sad was that?
“But what did he do?” Amira asked. “He died skiing down a mountain, but what did hedo?What was the bad thing?”
I glanced at Lachlan. I couldn’t help it. His dark-blue eyes met mine, sober and assessing. He didn’t offer anything but support, and that hand around Yasmin’s, but support was something, wasn’t it?
All you could do was your best. So that was what I did. I told them.
* * *
The humiliation,the pain—they were right there again. The dragging length of those days, and the way the blows had fallen,bang, bang, bang,one after another. When you think you can’t take any more, and you have no choice but to take the next thing, too, because there’s nobody but you to do it, and you’re the mother.
That first night, the night it had happened, I’d been sitting on the couch with the girls, staring at the shifting curves of white, the gray of rock, and hearing the sound of Kegan’s breathing as he skied. The view he was seeing, caught by his helmet-mounted camera as he made his smooth, sharp, impossibly rapid turns, finding his route.
I hadn’t wanted to watch, because I never wanted to watch. It made me more than nervous, but how could I not? So here we were, eight-thirty at night in the shonky little house in Mangere, with those climbing holds screwed to boards on the walls and ceiling, the shelves filled with climbing equipment that had spilled over from the garage, all of it worth more than anything else we owned, including the car. The girls, too, staying up “to watch Daddy.” His audience, all of us. Always.
The swish of skis cutting through deep snow, and then a roar like a freight train approaching, louder and louder.
The swing of the camera as Kegan turned his head. A mass of cloud. Whitewater rapids. That was what it looked like, but it wasn’t what I thought. I knew exactly what it was. The thing every climber was always watching for.
Avalanche.
“Fuck.”Kegan’s familiar voice, then the snow racing by as he pointed his skis straight downhill, trying to outrun the deadly mass of snow and ice. A second or two, and then the image had tilted crazily, filled with flying whiteness, until there was nothing.
I’d known what it meant, and I’d known what was happening now. I knew he was suffocating under the snow, struggling to make an air pocket and knowing it wouldn’t matter. I could see him there, even as my mind tried to rewind those seconds and start playing the film again so that this time, somehow, it wouldn’t be true. As if it really were a movie, but it wasn’t a movie. It was real, and my frozen body knew it.
The cold pierced my heart in that moment, the Himalayan snow and ice burying me the same way they’d buried him. I sat there, watching a blank screen, then seeing it shift to an advert, and was numb, still thinking, somehow, that there would be some way out. That Kegan would’ve been skiing with Colin Hampton, his best mate. Of course he would’ve. “My wingman,” Kegan had always called him. Kegan would’ve been wearing his avalanche beacon, set to “Send,” as you did. If Colin were there, if he hadn’t been caught by the avalanche himself, he’d be switching his own beacon to “Receive.” He’d be finding the spot, and then he’d be digging.
Of course Colin wouldn’t be caught. He’d be far behind Kegan, cautiously following his tracks but unable to keep up. One of them was fast. One of them was the star. That meant Colin would arrive much too late, even if he knew what had happened. You had ten minutes, if you were very lucky and had managed to clear an air pocket for yourself as you were buried. At fifteen minutes in, survival was twenty percent, and at twenty minutes, it was zero. I knew the risks. I’d seen the chart.
But maybe Colin was there right now. Maybe he was digging with his tiny shovel, shifting the meters of heavy snow. And maybe Kegan wasn’t buried that deep. Maybe the avalanche hadn’t been as big as it had looked.
All of that in the space of a few seconds, then Amira’s voice, asking, “Where did Daddy go?” and my phone starting to ring. My body starting to shake, and Yasmin crying, even though she didn’t know what was happening. She’d felt the truth in my body.
