Page 80 of Kiwi Gold
Trevor pulled something out from inside his jacket. It was a faded buff envelope with a clasp, which he carefully undid with unsteady fingers before shaking out the thing inside and setting it on the table.
It wasn’t much. A square of white pasteboard, maybe fifteen centimeters on a side, with a set of footprints on it. Baby footprints, impossibly tiny.
Oh, no.
Trevor raised his head slowly and looked at Laila, and her hand came out to clasp his. She said, “This is your baby.”
“Yes.” He was holding his face together with a kind of desperate resolution. “That’s our Theodore. He was a twin. His sister was bigger. Stronger. Our Rosie, who’s got two of her own now, and a grandson as well. All of them over in Aussie, though, so we don’t see them nearly enough. Theodore …” He touched the edges of the pasteboard square carefully, as if he didn’t want to smudge it, and I wondered how often he’d handled it just like this. “It was nearly fifty years ago. They couldn’t save them so well back then, you see. He lived nearly nineteen days, though, because he was a wee fighter. One thing after another, and he came through them all, so we … hoped. But the last one … he didn’t come through that.”
“I’m so sorry,” Laila said. “I’m so terribly sorry.”
“It’s fifty years ago,” Trevor repeated. “Silly, that it still hurts. You’d think I’d have forgotten by now. I don’t talk about it, normally. Violet can’t bear it, you see.”
Laila’s eyes were glistening, and I may have had a lump in my throat myself. She said, “I’m glad you told me. Thank you. I understand, now.”
“When I saw that photo you did,” Trevor said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “Of the twins. I don’t know how much it costs to have something like that done, but I’ve got a bit put by. For emergencies, eh. I thought maybe there was something you could do with this. Something we could … have. To look at. But this is all we have.”
“Yes,” Laila said. “There is, and I’d love to do it. I can do a photo of yours and Violet’s hands, holding Theodore’s footprints. I can frame it, and you can hang it if you like. You’re right that it can help to see it, and to see the love you both still feel for him, too. Feeling the sadness can be healing, and nobody should have to forget their baby. And of course there’s no charge. Of course not. Come on Sunday morning. We’ll do the photo then.”
“I couldn’t let you do it for nothing,” Trevor said. “The laborer is worthy of his hire, eh. I haven’t asked Violet yet, either. She may not want it.”
“If she doesn’t,” Laila said, “I’ll do it with just you. And of course I’ll do it for nothing. I already do. I photograph the babies who don’t survive, at the hospital, for the parents. I did it tonight, in fact. It’s a regular program, and there’s never a charge for it.”
“Still,” Trevor said. “I wouldn’t want to ask it of you. Not after Violet was short with you. It’s the babies, you see. That way they cry.” He looked down at the table. “Theodore was too small to cry, of course. Didn’t have the strength.” He pulled out a pocket handkerchief and blew his nose. “Besides, you’ll need the money, being a widow yourself, with the kids.”
“I want to tell you something,” Laila said. “I had a mother, growing up. She passed away when I was a girl, but she was the wisest and the kindest person I’ve ever known. She had many proverbs, too. Many Muslim proverbs.” She put that out there, but Trevor didn’t react, and she went on, “My favorite was, ‘Every person starts his day as a vendor of his soul, either freeing it or causing its ruin.’ When I photograph a stillborn baby, or one lost in the NICU, like Theodore, it hurts, and it’s a blessing.Myblessing. I don’t just do it for the parents. I do it for my mother, and I do it for my soul. My gifts are humble, but I offer them freely. And I’d be …” She was tearing up for real now, and some of those tears were falling as she gripped the old man’s hand tight and said, “I’d be proud to offer them to you. I’d be proud.”
What did you do with a woman like that? What could you do, except love her?
35
THE BLIND LEAD THE BLIND
Laila
It was after twelve-thirty on Friday, I had that sort of dragging fatigue you get when sleep has been too long in coming and too broken when it does, and half of my brain had kept escaping my grasp all morning, scampering away to last night, thinking about how Lachlan had kissed me goodnight and all the things he’d said to me.
“I keep thinking,” he’d told me, running his hand down my back as I curled into him at my back door, one hand on his shoulder and the other one at the back of his neck, because it was such a lovely strong spot, “that you have no defenses.” When I’d stiffened, he’d said, “But I realized tonight that I’m wrong. Your kindness—that’s your defense, because that’s powerful. It’s like the compass that keeps you oriented, at least that’s how it feels to me. Or the pole you revolve around, maybe.” A smile, then. “Which makes you sound like a stripper. Sorry. I was trying to go for a more elevated tone.”
I smiled myself. Against his chest, as that was where my cheek was. “I’m not feeling very … oriented at the moment.”
He was touching my face, and then, when I looked up, bending to kiss me again. “Yeh,” he said. “Maybe I’m not, either. We’ll sleep on it, eh.”
“Come tomorrow night, if you like,” I said. “Come for dinner. It’s always hard to cook the night before you take a trip, when you’re trying to get ready.” I didn’t know that from me, of course, as I took really astonishingly few trips. I knew it from Kegan, but I still knew it. “You can bring a salad,” I tried to joke.
“Nah,” he said. “I’ll get a takeaway. Everybody gets a break on Friday night, eh.”
“Another non-date,” I said. “This is pretty romantic, this thing we’re doing.”
“Yeh,” he said. “It is. And I told you—it counts.”
So that had been very nice, and very distracting, but now, Oriana was looking jumpy. Expectant, or more like … nervous. Like somebody who was about to quit, but was sorry to make your life difficult.
Please, no. Not today. This morning’s baby had been a preemie, released from hospital not even a week ago, and babies like that required so much breath-holding care, like holding a butterfly within your cupped palms. I’d done what I always did—stayed calm, and made the studio a calm space, too, for me and everybody else. But as with photographing the lost babies, the tension had to go somewhere. Which was why, forty-five minutes later, after Oriana and I had eaten our lunch and were now cleaning up in preparation for the afternoon’s client, I still had the same soothing underwater mixture of whale sounds and thunder playing over the speakers, interspersed with the bell-like chimes of a xylophone. Serenity was getting ever-harder to come by, what with one thing and another, and I needed all the help I could get. Thank goodness for whales.
Wouldn’t you think that life would geteasieronce you started following your dreams? Or at least less confusing?
Oriana looked at me again, opened her mouth, shut it, then discarded the steam-mop cover into the washing basket that hid under the posing table, set the mop in its cupboard, began to wipe down the client furniture with Dettol, and asked, “Can I speak with you a minute?”
