Page 137 of Catch a Kiwi
Love like longing. Love like pain.
Murimuri aroha.
When he was done and was sitting, wiping his hand over his nose, breathing hard, I went for the tissues and handed them to him, and he said, “Thanks,” wiped up, and didn’t look at me.
I said, “Come on. Let’s lie down. I need to hold you.”
“I don’t need—” he began.
“But I do,” I said. “I hurt, and you hurt, and this is what love is. This moment right now. I need to be with you.”
For the first time, I went to bed with him and we didn’t make love. I undressed him, and he undressed me, and then we held each other close under the covers for a long, long time. I smelled his scent, the cedar and spice of him, but most of all, Ifelthim. I put my hand on his beating heart, I kissed his chest, and I felt the boy he’d been, too strong too soon. And the man he was now. His strength was his sword and his shield, but sometimes, you have to lay down your weapons. Sometimes, you can’t protect yourself anymore. That was all right, though, because I was here.
They say the skin is the largest organ in the body. Maybe your skin sends the message to your heart, I thought hazily as I hovered with him there, between waking and sleep. Maybe it’s not your brain at all. Maybe it’s your … skin that sends the light to somebody … else. Maybe it’s your skin that really …
Knows.
62
MORNING STAR
Roman
My first time on a Maori marae was for my grandfather’s tangi.
I hadn’t thought about going. I hadn’t expected to go. It was Hemi who’d invited me, when he rang to tell me about the old man’s death on that Saturday morning. “I didn’t want it to come from Daniel,” he said. “Better that it’s from your brother.”
That one stopped me. “I appreciate that. But I don’t want to cause drama.”
“No more drama than there would be otherwise. Daniel will be Daniel, and so will Ana. Come anyway. It’ll be three days, as usual. If you can’t come for all of them?—”
“If I come,” I said, “I’ll come for all of them. Respect, eh.”
“It’s what Koro would’ve wanted,” Hemi said. “Good for you, too, to know you’re part of things, even without him. Whanau matters. What he said that last day, through me—he believed that.” He paused. “And so do I.”
“How’re you going?” I asked. “With all this.”
Another pause before he said, “It’s rough. It’ll be a different world without Koro in it. So, bro—come.”
I asked Summer, somewhere in the reaches of the night, to come with me. In the aftermath of lovemaking, it was, because when I’d woken and reached for her, she’d come to me like a butterfly landing on my shoulder. Or a golden bird. Like hope. Kissing me, touching me. Love in her hands and her lips and her body, and when I’d buried myself in her at last, it washed me clean.
Love couldn’t do all this, surely. But it did anyway, and when I said, “The tangi—the funeral—is next weekend. Starts on Friday, and the burial will be at dawn on Sunday. It’s a thing, a Maori tangi. I’ve never been to one, but I know that. It’s—different. Not an hour and some tears,” she answered, “Of course I’ll come.”
“I’ll go up Thursday night,” I said. “You’ll have to take a day off work.”
She said, “Somehow, in New Zealand, I think that’ll be allowed. Anyway, it feels … necessary.” She kissed my shoulder, there in the dark, ran her fingers over my collarbone. “I can’t shake this feeling of … of something momentous.”
I said, “Kua hinga te totara o Te Waonui a Tane.”
“That’s Maori,” she said.
“It is. I know just about that much. It means, ‘A totara has fallen in the forest of Tane.’ A great man. A wise man. A totara isn’t just tall and beautiful and significant. It’s a tree you carve out to make a mighty waka, a canoe. To make the carvings in the wharenui, the meeting house.”
“If you felt that way …” she said, and hesitated.
I tightened my hold on her. “If I felt that way, I should’ve gone back to see him. I should’ve got over myself. He’d have been glad, I think, and I’d have learned something. But I didn’t, and it’s too late. It’s not too late for this, though. Respect should be paid.”
“Is it all right for me to come?” she asked. “As I’m not part of the family?”
