Stone Cold Kiwi (New Zealand Ever After Book 2) Read online

  “I hope you haven’t got my temper,” I told my daughter. “That’d be bloody inconvenient.” So far, only Olivia did, but one was enough.

  When my mum came back, she was alone. “Rough time, eh,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking my hand. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here, darling. I’m so sorry you were alone.”

  I burst into tears.

  6

  Glamour Central

  Poppy

  They let me out the next day. My dad hadn’t taken the roses away with him after all, because life seemed intent on showing me that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted. Which was feeling sorry for myself, but if you couldn’t feel sorry for yourself on the day you’d given birth on wet grass in front of a crowd of interested spectators, had your placenta ripped out of you by handfuls by a doctor so impossibly handsome, he should’ve been on a TV soap, while he massaged your flabby postpartum belly, and heard your husband call for another woman as your gurney rolled past, when could you?

  I’d hauled the flowers to the nurse’s station, in the end. If my life wasn’t giving me what I wanted, I guessed I’d have to change it, and at that moment, what I’d wanted most was to get rid of those scentless, thornless, last-forever roses. If they’d been any more genetically engineered, they’d have been plastic.

  Actually, I’d wanted to shove them stem-first into a sensitive spot. With thorns. Not on me. On Max. He thought a broken collarbone hurt? The redhead in my TV soap didn’t have to be the funny, quirky best friend all the time. She got to be the bad girl, too. She got to be dangerous.

  The next day, my mum waited while I changed Isobel into her going-home clothes. A white onesie printed with black cow spots and a pink udder in front that I’d chosen with the kids, something that had made us all giggle. White socks, little white hat, and a blue cotton snap-front cardigan that I’d used for both Hamish and Olivia, because I wasn’t a soap star. I was a sensible mum who recycled her maternity clothes and was currently wearing yet another pair of black leggings and a gray tunic, because they fit. The nurse’s aide rolled in with the wheelchair and Mum handed Isobel to me, then picked up my tote and glanced at the two things still on the table.

  Item one. The tiny card from Max, printed in the corner with, yes, red roses, that said, Thank you for my daughter. We can try harder. Nine words, and surely, you’d have to agree that every one of them was exactly, horribly, ludicrously wrong. If I hadn’t chucked out the card, that was probably because I’d needed to look at it every, oh, four minutes or so, to convince myself that I was justified in this, no matter what anybody else thought. That I wasn’t making a terrible mistake.

  Beside the neatly written note was a scrap of brown paper with a grease stain on it. I knew what that one said, too. Written in scrawled doctor-handwriting in blue ink, it was a phone number, then Matiu Te Mana. And below that,

  Ring me.

  My mum picked up both pieces of paper and asked, “Do you want these?”

  Who got handed attractive men’s numbers in hospital after giving birth? Amal Clooney, probably. Scarlett Johansson. Meghan Markle—excuse me, the Duchess of Sussex. Women who wore stilettos in the ninth month and never had spit-up stains on their shoulders, and who were passionately, blissfully married to men who couldn’t believe they’d got so lucky. Those women would’ve tossed the number in the rubbish in front of the giver, no doubt, whilst laughing in his face in a hypnotically confident manner.

  It didn’t happen to writers of children’s books, let’s just say. Ones who tended to realize at five P.M., in the queue at the supermarket, that they’d forgotten to put on makeup again this morning, and that they hadn’t combed their hair since then, either, but oh, well, they’d been busy, and nobody really looked at them anyway, so what did it matter?

  If your life isn’t giving you what you want, change your life.

  Easier said than done, but maybe you did it one tiny step at a time.

  I said, “I want the brown one. Bring that.”

  When Mum’s car was nosing up the steep driveway to the house I loved, and I didn’t see Max’s car there? That was a relief, until I remembered that his car would be in a panelbeater’s shop somewhere, and my heart rate picked up again.

  When the front door opened, though, Max wasn’t there. Hamish was out first, Olivia just behind him, and my grandparents brought up the rear.

  Olivia got to me first and threw her arms around my legs. “Pick me up,” she demanded.

  Time for deflection. I said, “Let’s go inside, and we’ll cuddle on the Mummy bed, all together. Did you have a good time with Nana Bethany and Grandad Charlie?”

  “Yes,” Olivia said. “But you weren’t at home, and I wanted you to be at home, and I was very, very sad.”

  “Because Mummy was having the baby,” Hamish said. “I told you. Is that her?” he asked me. “She’s very little. She’s sort of squashed, too. She kind of looks like an alien.”

  “I thought it would be a doggie,” Olivia said. “I wished and wished it would be a baby doggie. I don’t think we need a baby person. We have enough people at our house.”

  “She is little,” I said, not addressing the “alien” part. Or the “doggie” part. “Just like both of you were after you were born. It’s a good thing she has a big brother and sister to help care for her, isn’t it? She can’t do many things yet, and I’ll need heaps of help from both of you. Her name is Isobel Rose. Isn’t that pretty?”

  “No,” Olivia said. “I wanted a doggie instead, and his name would be Spot.”

  I abandoned my quest for Mummy Perfection and said, “Well, too bad, because it looks like we’ve got a human baby instead. She’s still a mammal, though, so there’s that.” And felt much better. My mum took the baby carrier from me, I put a hand out for each of my older kids, we headed into the house, and I had that feeling you get when you’ve been away and you get to come home. Relief, and no tinge to it this time. No bracing against what Max would say, no hauling on my cheerfulness, no shoving-down of the bad feelings.

  So—extra relief.

  Until the next day, when he came home.

  At least I wasn’t on the toilet for the confrontation, spraying warm water from a squeeze bottle onto my stitches, or stepping out of the shower, still looking five months pregnant, only with more bleeding. Something to cling to. Thanks to my lovely Grandad taking Hamish and Olivia to the park, the house was quiet, and thanks to my equally lovely Nan having taken the baby into their room overnight and bringing her to me, clean and hungry, for her feedings, I’d even had some good sleep. My hair was neat, too, or nearly. I didn’t have on makeup, and I wasn’t wearing a silk negligee, but you can’t have everything.

  I’d been asleep, but my eyes flew open at the sound of feet on the stairs. When he came in the door, he had more flowers. Wrapped in a paper cone, with a ribbon tied around the stems, the way he always did it. He laid the flowers down on the bed beside me, leaned over, and kissed my mouth. “Hey,” he said, smiling down at me, stroking my hair back. “How ya goin’? Doing all right?”

  It took me a second. It felt so ... normal, and it was so tempting to let it go, to turn back from the chasm that had opened up in front of me and retrace my steps to where the scenery was familiar, if not beautiful. Instead, I said, “I told you to pack. I told you to move.”

  He kept smiling and sat down on his side of the bed, and that was normal, too. His eye socket was badly bruised, the eye closed, his arm still in its sling, and I asked, “Is your head all right?” because I couldn’t help it.

  “Yeh,” he said. “Not too bad. I was lucky. Car’s buggered, that’s all. I’m driving a loaner.” No mention of Violet. Sweeping her under the rug, in the way a toddler hid her face and thought that if she couldn’t see you, you couldn’t see her.

  “Good,” I said. “You’ll be able to pack your things, then.”

  He said, “You didn’t mean that, surely.” His eyes—eye—searched mine. Still impossibly blue, and
his hair still impossibly perfect, falling into its almost-casual wave over his beautifully shaped skull. I’d thought when I’d met him that he looked like David Beckham, and to be honest, he still did. Charm and confidence were necessary qualities when your profession involved making obstacles go away, across cultural barriers, in any way that worked.

  I said, “I did mean it. I mean it now, too. We can file a separation agreement, or I’ll file a ... an application myself.” How did you get somebody to leave, if they didn’t want to go? I had no idea.

  I couldn’t even think about the other thing. That dissolution of our marriage was two years away, and there was no speeding it up, because that was the law. That this was the first step on a long, twisting road that I couldn’t bear to walk, but what was the alternative? My home had been on fire, and I hadn’t even seen it. You couldn’t run back into a burning house.

  I should have rung a lawyer today. Why hadn’t I done it? In answer, my uterus gave an almighty throb, and I winced.

  Max said, “Poppy—darling girl. No. Let’s not do this.” He touched my face again, then glanced at Isobel in her Moses basket, and I wasn’t sure if I was weakening. I hoped not.

  “Wait a bit, at least,” he said, clearly seeing the weakening. “I’ll take the week off, the way we planned. We’ll talk it over, spend some time with the kids. I’ll even do that counseling you wanted, as many sessions as it takes to get back to where we were. Can’t say fairer than that.”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “You can. Like not cheating. It’s too late, Max. It’s over. Maybe it was always going to be too late, because you’d already walked away, and I just didn’t know it. I can’t turn back. I can’t unring this bell. If you want Violet ...” I wasn’t going to cry again. “You can have her,” I said instead, controlling my voice with the effort of a lifetime. “You’re free.” I didn’t say the other things. That I didn’t want to fight, and I didn’t want to scream. I just wanted to be done with this.

  “The kids,” he said. Isobel stirred as if she’d heard him talking about her, and he reached into the basket and picked her up. I wanted to tell him not to do that, because I needed her to sleep some more, but he was her dad, and this was the first time he’d seen her. At least I thought it was. I didn’t even know. He hadn’t signed the birth certificate yet, and I didn’t know how that happened. The lawyer will know, I told myself when I started panicking, because breathing into my cupped hands would probably be taken as a sign of weakness.

  “She’s a pretty one, eh,” he said, stroking a hand over her perfect, round little head, and I thought, Why can’t you just be horrible? This would be so much easier if you were horrible.

  Of course it was better that he wasn’t horrible. Better for the kids, anyway. Even though, now, Isobel did wake up and make some sounds that meant, “Crying imminent.” Upon which Max handed her to me like she was on fire, so I could hate him a little more after all.

  I thought, I’ll check her nappy after I feed her, because there were two ways this situation could get worse. If I (A) hauled myself out of bed in my ancient pink-flannel maternity PJs to change a dirty nappy and felt, if possible, like even more of a different species from glamorous Violet Leung with her tiny bum and her sheets of shiny hair, or (B) snapped at Max about how he could at least do one thing to help. I didn’t want to do that anymore. That was the whole point. Instead, I unbuttoned the pink flannel and put the baby to my breast, and Max watched.

  I’d never known how he really felt about my post-pregnancy body, or my pregnancy body, for that matter. During this latest pregnancy, he hadn’t exactly been eager, and I’d assumed it was because I’d been sick for half of it, and maybe because of the way my pregnancy body had changed between One and Three. Maybe it hadn’t just been my physical loathsomeness, though. That could be a cheering thought, possibly. Later.

  I breathed in and out, thought that if I got too upset, Isobel wouldn’t feed, and felt myself getting upset anyway. I said, “Please go. Don’t make it harder. I won’t keep the kids from you. We can get a mediator and work out a schedule. The money. All of it. But I need you to go now. It hurts ...” My hands shook on Isobel, and this time, there was no competent, calm doctor with kind eyes to step in. “It hurts too much.” It was a whisper. It was pitiful, and I didn’t want to be pitiful. I wanted to be strong and sure, but not a bitch. Why couldn’t you ever be that? It was so easy in movies. I needed somebody to write my lines, because real life was too hard.

  “If I told you my flirting with Violet meant nothing,” Max said. “If I told you it was just me trying to hold on to a different time, a different life, when I didn’t have so much responsibility. When I wasn’t a dad with a house in the suburbs, when you weren’t asking me to cut the grass or barbecue the sausages. Would that help?”

  “No.” Saying the word felt like ripping a piece of silk straight down the middle. Like ripping apart the wedding gown I still had hanging in the back of my wardrobe, covered in a muslin bag. Why did you hang onto your wedding dress? Not like you were going to wear it again. What was the point? Holding onto the dream, maybe. Holding onto the hope.

  Now, I couldn’t do it anymore. If hope was a bird, my bird was grounded. I said, “I can’t stand you wanting a different time. I can’t stand you wanting a different life. I can’t live like this anymore, knowing you don’t want me enough, trying to pretend it isn’t killing me.”

  I knew my mouth was turning down in what Max had called my “sad-clown face,” back when he’d loved me. I knew my nose and cheeks were turning a blotchy red, too, because that’s how gingers cry.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t care how I looked. I cared. It was that I couldn’t help it.

  Max said, “I’m sorry,” and I thought, That should matter more.

  Then he said, “I hope you’ll change your mind. I hope you’ll try harder for us,” and I thought, And that’s why it doesn’t matter at all.

  7

  Year One

  Poppy

  Three weeks later, Hamish stood, his forehead, nose, and palms pressed against the glass of the lounge, looking not out at the sea beyond the house, but at the circular driveway below.

  I put my hand on his head, smoothed over his hair, cut so short now that you could barely see the curl, and said, “Time to go, darling.”

  “Maybe he’s nearly here,” Hamish said, without turning his head. “Maybe there was road construction. He’s probably driving very fast right now so he gets here on time.”

  I thought, What would you have the mum say if this were in a book? After that, I dropped to my knees, put my arm around my boy, and said, “It’s very disappointing for you. I’m disappointed, too. I texted him. If he’s just running a bit late, he may be able to meet us there.” And thought, I will kill you, Max. How could you do this to your son?

  “He may not remember where the school is, though,” Hamish said. “I wanted to show him my uniform, and my new backpack. He wants to see. He said.”

  “When we get to school,” I promised, “we’ll take another photo and send it to Daddy, so he can see. Just in case there is road construction, and he can’t get there in time.”

  Hamish had worried, the night before, that he’d forget something important, so we’d laid it all out on a chair in his bedroom, naming it off piece by piece. Navy trousers, navy-and-red polo shirt and fleece, navy socks, floppy navy hat, uniform shoes. The Grants Braes school uniform. Grandad had taken him for a haircut two days earlier, too. “So you’ll be smart for your first day, eh. You’ve got more to cut than me, though, so yours will take twice as long.” Hamish had giggled, Grandad had winked at me, and I’d thought, It’s all right. It’s new, that’s all.

  It didn’t feel all right anymore.

  “Maybe he slept too long,” Hamish said. “Maybe he doesn’t have an alarm clock in his new house.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “We’ll start walking and see what happens. But we need to go, because Ian and his mum will be waiting at the ki
ndy, and I know Ian wants to walk with you for the last bit.”

  “Because he’s scared about school,” Hamish said, turning away at last. “But if we go together, he won’t be scared, because I’m his best friend.”

  “That’s right,” I said, and my heart broke some more for my boy.

  Nan and Grandad were already rugged up and waiting at the front door. Isobel was in the top basket of the pushchair, and Olivia wasn’t riding below her, because she’d refused. When Hamish and I joined them, Olivia announced, “I want to walk with Hamish. I’m big.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Hold hands, please.” After that, I took the handle of the pushchair and got everybody out of the house.

  Nan asked, “All right?” Quietly.

  “Fine,” I said. I didn’t look at her, or at Grandad, because I was going to lose control of my face. Instead, I locked the door behind us, and we started down the drive.

  Nine hundred meters. Fifteen minutes. Celebration. Happiness. I could do this.

  Matiu

  Six-thirty had come early this morning, when I’d got home after one, but twelve kilometers of fast running up the hills of the Otago Peninsula and through the native bush around Tomahawk Lagoon had been worth the push. The clouds had glowed pink and orange in the dawn, the air had been crisp and cold and had smelled like all the fertile green things in the world, and the breeze had rustled the flax and the spiky leaves of cabbage trees. The sun had lit the pearly early-spring clouds from behind like a religious painting, and my lungs and heart and brain had expanded to take it all in, and had stayed that way. My version of peace, all the stronger and more welcome for coming to me after a hard night. Pushing the Reset button once again. Doing what worked.