Kiwi Rules (New Zealand Ever After Book 1) Page 15

  “Wetsuits, helmets, and harnesses on,” Nathan said, and we started to suit up. I got the wetsuit on fast, then sat on the rocks and began to slide the waterproof boot over my left leg, pumping out the air when I was done to create a vacuum seal. Karen was going more slowly than I expected, wincing a little as she pulled the resistant, rubbery material over her knee, and I asked, “All right?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  I handed over a tube of the stuff I used to lubricate the sleeve over my stump and said, “It’ll chafe less with this,” and for once, she didn’t argue, just applied it.

  “Scared?” I asked.

  “No. It looks so cool. I can’t wait.” For all that, she winced a little more as she got the wetsuit over her elbow. I zipped up the back for her, got a strap on my specs and my helmet on, then stepped into my webbing harness, tightened it up, and helped her with hers, during which she put her hand on my shoulder again and I tried not to notice how close she was. We were first done, so I hauled out my water bottle, handed it to her, and said, “Keep it.” She’d drunk all her own.

  “Your glasses are going to do you no good at all while we’re swimming,” she told me once she’d taken a drink. “You’re going to basically be blind. I guess I get why you don’t wear contacts—I’m sure that’s awkward out on a combat mission, when you’re about to shoot somebody, but you get dust in your eye so you get shot instead—but I’m surprised you haven’t had Lasik.”

  I said, “I haven’t wanted to.”

  Did she drop it? Of course not. “Really?” she asked instead. “Why not? I had it. Both eyes, when I was still a teenager. It was totally cool. Your eyes are sore for maybe a day, and that’s literally all. After that? You’re not blind anymore. It was miraculous. You should do it. It’s great for swimming, especially snorkeling.”

  Everybody was listening. This was wonderful. “I don’t enjoy things touching my eyeball,” I said. “And my eyesight’s not that bad.” Stiffly, I was sure.

  Another perfect chance to tactfully drop it. Instead, she laughed. “Seriously? You’re scared of something touching your eyeball? Jax. You’re an explosives expert. You’re a beast.”

  “Really?” the kid, Andrew, said, a little shyly. He’d been too awed by Margarete, the German girl, to say much so far. Or too afraid to have anybody look at him, because I was sure he’d had an erection for so long by now, it was hurting, and that he couldn’t wait to start rappelling so nobody would see. Something that made me extremely glad not to be fifteen anymore. “That’s what you do?” he asked. “Is that how you lost your leg and all? That’s so dope.”

  I grinned. He was so wrong, and he was so exactly what I’d been. “Yeh, mate,” I said, “the job’s pretty cool.”

  Karen said, “You won’t get Lasik because you don’t want your eye touched? You won’t even get contacts? Jax. You have a phobia.” She sounded delighted. “That’s such a weird one, too, not like snakes or heights or public speaking, or something normal.”

  “I don’t have a phobia,” I said. “I have a preference. And I prefer not to have my eye held forcibly open whilst somebody cuts my eyeball.”

  “They put your head in a holder, too,” she saw fit to inform me, “and the guy holds your head just in case. But it doesn’t hurt.”

  I did not shudder. “Maybe they could put you under,” she suggested. “It takes about thirty seconds per eye, but maybe for you, being a hero and all, they’d do general anesthesia for three hours or whatever.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Are we finished?” I asked Nathan.

  He was smiling, finally. He’d reached his Impassive Limit, and I was the one who’d done it. “Yeh, mate,” he said. “Gather round, everybody. We’ll do a karanga first. A prayer, eh, to set us off right.”

  We stood in a circle, Nathan chanted a few Maori phrases, the vowel-intensive syllables lyrical to the ear, and powerful, too, even if you didn’t know their meaning. It was the way they merged with the air, and the way you remembered that you were rooted to this ground. It was possible that I noticed that because of the way Karen looked out at the canyon below, heaved a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

  She was such a contradiction, or she was a woman who’d stuffed down half of herself in order to get where she needed to go. I couldn’t quite tell. Once we’d started on the rock scramble at the side of the waterfall that was the first part of the descent, I asked her, “How long since you started coming here? To En Zed?”

  “Since I was sixteen,” she said, putting a hand onto a rock and hopping down, so her knee couldn’t be that sore. “When Hope and Hemi got engaged.”

  I wanted to ask her more, find out how deep her connection ran to the old man and to her not-cousins, but that was all we had time for. The scrambling got more serious, and then turned into wading across a rock-bottomed plunge pool at the base of that first part of the falls, during which my balance was tested and Karen’s wasn’t. After that, we were looking over a drop of thirty meters or so, and Nathan was saying, “Right. This is the short one, ease you into it. Remember—Kiwi rules. Be honest about how you’re going and what you’re up for, help your mate, and if you get into trouble, sing out so we can come help you. We’ll send Sheila down first, and Jax, you go after her, as you’ve done it before. Watch how both of them use their legs,” he told the others. “You’re not letting yourself twist and bash into the rock. You’re kicking off, then swinging back and kicking off again as you get close, keeping your body facing the rock the whole way. Easy as.” That didn’t sound like he was pandering to my injury, and made me unreasonably, if quietly, satisfied.

  There’s nothing quite like the sound of the water in your head, the spray around you, the rainbows in the air as you descend an actual waterfall, or the soaring feeling of zipping down through all that space. There’s nothing at all like finding you can still do it, when you’ve worried that the ability is gone forever. Exhilaration, that was the word. And when Karen got down and joined me, because she’d come next, the Border Collie needing to get in amongst it with every fiber of her being, she was laughing. Her whiskey eyes were bright, her smile enormous, as if she’d laughed the whole way down, and my heart flew a little bit higher.

  “Oh, wow,” she said, once she’d rid herself of the rope and swum across the deep plunge pool to me, and we were surrounded by rock and waterfall and bush, looking at a double rainbow that arched across the mist. “Wow. It’s like being a bird. Or something better. A water bird, so you’re soaring one minute, and swimming the next, part of all the worlds. Tell me we get to go hang-gliding next.”

  I had to laugh myself. “Can’t believe nobody’s taken you on an adventure like this before, keen as you are.”

  She was still smiling. “My sister’s chicken. She won’t even ski, and Hemi does what she likes. I haven’t tagged along for a while anyway. And on my own? Adventure travel costs money. Anyway, I’ve worked pretty hard since I started college.”

  “Holidays?” I suggested.

  “What are those? Never mind,” she hastened to say, as if that had revealed too much. “I’m making up for it now.”

  Meaning a week or two in, what? Twelve years? Really? All I knew was, she went down the longest abseil of the day, the eighty-meter one that came next, first in line, because she so clearly couldn’t wait, and plunged into the water afterwards with just as much jubilation. When we got to the next bit, a fifteen-meter slide on her back straight down a chute into another pool, she was nearly jumping up and down in her haste to get stuck into it, and she shouted all the way down like a kid on a roller coaster. And needless to say, when she was offered the choice of jumping fourteen meters into the water or doing another abseil instead, she didn’t just jump. She did a flip in the air, went in with a splash, treaded water, and waved at me, while behind me, Margarete said, “I cannot do this one, I think. Perhaps I have a phobia as well.”

  Nathan said, “No worries. Whoever wants to jump can go on and jump, and we’ll help any
body else abseil down.”

  The kid, Andrew, said, “I’ll jump,” and did, and Karen beckoned him to the other side of the pool, where he’d be out of the way. As for me, I hadn’t decided. I wasn’t sure how my prosthesis would do with that kind of impact, much as I hated having to consider it.

  Margarete said quietly, as Andrew’s dad jumped in with a whoop and an enormous splash, “It is very attractive to you, I think, this fearlessness.”

  “Yeh,” I said, because why not say it? “It is.”

  She nodded once and looked away, and here I was, hurting somebody again. When I’d been that other bloke, the one I’d told Karen about, I’d barely tried not to hurt people, and yet I’d swear I’d done it less, or noticed it less, than I was doing now. Which was why I went on to say, “You’re basically jumping off the roof of a four-story building, though. There’s no shame in not wanting to do that. Probably more like good sense.”

  “Nah,” Megan said with a laugh. “There’s shame in it. Look around you. Everybody else is going. Kiwi rules, eh. You don’t want to be that girl who won’t try. And I’m off.” She took the leap, and Margarete watched her go with a look on her face too much like hurt.

  This wasn’t anything to do with me. Despite the seriously curvy body and the seriously tiny shorts, Margarete had hiked up the track and done the rest of this so far without any dramas, and she certainly hadn’t looked like she cared what I thought about it. All she’d actually done, when I thought back, was put sunblock on when she’d been getting burnt. It wasn’t her fault that we’d all wanted to watch her doing it. I was also doubting that she’d meant anything by asking me to put some on her back. I’d overestimated my appeal, or maybe I’d forgotten that everybody you met was starring in their own movie. They weren’t just extras in yours.

  I said, “I’ve liked women who couldn’t have done any of this, so I’m not sure how much any one . . . characteristic matters. It just has to be a match at the time, eh.”

  “A meeting of minds, you are thinking,” Margarete said. “Or a meeting of hearts.” She watched Megan swim across the plunge pool, but didn’t say anything else.

  Nathan cleared his throat, about to say, “Let’s go, then, if you’re not jumping.” He could wait thirty seconds.

  “Probably,” I told Margarete. “A meeting of something, anyway.” She’d come to New Zealand and lost her own heart, I was guessing, and was in that spot where you didn’t know whether it would land in safe hands or be thrown to the ground like it was worthless. When you were so scared to find out, but you couldn’t stand not to find out. I’d seen it before, but always in blokes. In a soldier who’d poured out his feelings in an email, when the thought of death had come too close, and had heard the wrong thing back, or, even worse, hadn’t heard back at all. They never said much more than Margarete was saying now, mostly just went quiet. But when a fella handed you the photo he’d been carrying in his breast pocket for months and said, “You know how I said to let her know I loved her, if something happens to me? Fuck that,” and climbed into the armored vehicle taking him into harm’s way with nothing in his pocket anymore, you got to know the sound of hurt.

  When I was younger, I’d probably tossed a fair few of those hearts to the ground myself. No “probably” about it, in fact. I’d told myself it wasn’t my doing and wasn’t my problem, but if you knew your feelings were that unequal and you went ahead anyway, it was your doing. Not a comfortable recollection.

  Margarete nodded once, decisively, and said, “I am frightened, but I am jumping.” Then she took a deep breath and leapt off the edge into space, not shrieking and not shouting with joy, because she was too scared for either. She hit the water, went down for long seconds, came up spluttering, and swam to join Megan.

  I thought, Good on ya. Hope it works, and may have got a lump in my throat. After that? I jumped in myself. Bugger the prosthesis. I’d never find out if it could handle this if I didn’t try.

  I may have lost my leg. I may have lost my job. I didn’t have to lose my courage.

  Karen

  The guides started a barbecue once we were on the canyon floor again, and seven hours after we’d started out from Thames, we were sitting on boulders drinking specialty coffee and waiting for our hamburgers. Only in New Zealand would a freshly brewed cappuccino be part of your adventure outing in the woods, and I was glad of it. The clouds had moved in even as we’d moved down the canyon, and they were up there now, big and puffy, looking like “summer rain squalls tonight.” We’d swum through more than ten plunge pools, and I cupped my hands around the warm drink in its metal cup, shivered some, and wished for sun. My scraped forearm was itching and my bruised knee was hurting, but I didn’t really care. It had been worth it.

  Beside me, Jax had stripped off his waterproofing boot and then his wetsuit and was inspecting his leg, and I forgot about my own knee. “Is it all right?” I asked him.

  “Think so.”

  “It’s pretty incredible that it’s rated for fifty-foot jumps,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. “But is it?” I must have looked astonished, because he grinned. “Say that I took a chance. Worth it, eh.”

  Once again, it was exactly what I’d been thinking. I wondered if he’d felt whole again, discovering how strong he still was, and suspected the answer was “yes,” or at least “partly.” I didn’t say anything about it, though. I might not be the most tactful person on the planet, but even I’d noticed that it was a sensitive issue, and it wasn’t the time or place. Instead, I said, “That was possibly the most awesome experience of my life. Thanks for taking me to do it. And taking the chance on your leg.”

  He said, “No worries. Could be that’s the real Kiwi Rules, eh. When in doubt, jump.”

  He looked glad, I thought, although subdued. Tired, maybe, except that I didn’t think he got tired easily, or that he succumbed to pain easily, either. I didn’t myself, normally, but I was tired now. And cold. And when Megan came over and started chatting to Jax again in a cheerful, Kiwi kind of way, when Margarete shifted over to join her, and everybody else gravitated over to where Jax was and started taking selfies, I may have gotten even colder.

  The hamburgers helped, but when we finally got back to our campsite, after a trip down the river valley in the van and back up it again in the car, I was more than ready to be done. I was still shivering, despite my sweatshirt and Jax turning on the heated seats in the car, and then the heat, without even asking, but when I saw Debbie, I had to pick him up and give him a cuddle. He was so happy to see us, he started peeping and giving his raspy quacks like crazy, and he did his best to hop over his fence to get to us faster. I stroked his fluffy white feathers and said, “Hey, boy. Did you miss us? Huh? Did you?” and he opened his round eyes at me and peeped in a way that said, “Yes, I did.” I may have kissed his round little head, too. It may have happened.

  While I was getting reacquainted with my duck, Jax dumped the water from the dishpan and bowl down my toilet and refilled them, then started scooping up the shavings from the pen with his expandable survival-bowl and putting them into a paper bag. I said, “You don’t have to do that. I’ll get it in a minute.”

  “Nah,” he said. “I’m good. Sit down and have a rest.”

  I said, “I really want to. Rest, I mean. And here I was just thinking that I’m lousy at letting somebody be a hero.” I sat down, though, grabbed the outdoor blanket that this absolutely perfect not-quite-campsite offered to make your experience even better, wrapped up in it, and watched him.

  I liked his smile so much. He didn’t do it often around other people, I’d noticed, but he sure did it for me. “Yeh,” he said, still scooping smelly duck litter. “Noticed that, didn’t I. Could be you were thinking about it because you saw that I like to do it. Not be a hero for losing a leg,” he said, like I needed the explanation, “but for changing the shavings in your duck pen? I’ll take that. Cheers for not going all damsel-in-distress on me today, though, when you wanted to b
e brave instead. Honesty’s good. I’ll take honesty as well.”

  He finished with the pen, then went and got Debbie’s box and emptied and refilled it, too, and I said, “I could talk about that, but I think I need to warm up first, if I’m being honest. This was such a great day, but I may need one of those wearable blankets with sleeves right now, the ones they advertise in infomercials, that always look both seriously comfortable, and also like an embarrassment you’d never erase from your memory banks if anybody saw you in one.”

  He laughed, then came over and crouched down beside my chair. My heart picked up the pace, I lost my breath, and I thought, in the same moment, Calm down. He’s petting Debbie.

  He didn’t. Instead, he put his arm around my shoulder and kissed my cheek, then moved his lips over it and kissed me again, near my ear. His lips were warm, the stubble on his jaw was rough against my skin, and his hand on my shoulder pulled me in, but gently. Like he was so strong, he didn’t need to prove it.

  I just about dropped the duck. My skin heated up like I’d lowered myself into the bathtub, my brain went numb, and I tried to come up with something to say and couldn’t. He said, his voice low and warm, “You’ve got guts and no mistake. Time for a hot shower, though, I think. Or a bath, maybe.” He stayed where he was, but he didn’t kiss me again.

  “And a beer,” I said, doing my best to be normal and knowing I was absolutely failing. He made me lose my cool. He made me lose my words. “How . . . how about you?”

  He stood up, and I was sorry, and I was glad, because I wasn’t handling this well at all. “Definitely,” he said. “I’ll go take my own shower, but I’ll be back. You can rug up, and we’ll sit here one more time while the sun sets and have that beer. Could be we’ll even go wild and have two. You never know.”