5. Appointment With Life
Roman
She was as cold as if she’d been in a deep freeze, and shaking. Still wearing her raincoat, but it wasn’t doing her any good, especially as her long hair was soaked and she was wearing short shorts and sandals. I started rubbing her icy, mud-covered thigh, and she pulled away and said, “S-stop. Don’t … touch me.”
I glared at her. “I’m getting you warm, not desperately aroused by drowned rats. Could you shut up and let me help?”
“Oh.” She did shut up, but she wasn’t what you’d call “relaxed.” I was glad when another nurse, a dark, slight woman with an air of competence, arrived with another wheelchair.
“You can come back with her,” the nurse told me when she’d got the girl into the wheelchair.
“No,” the girl said.
“Yes,” I said. “Somebody’s got to give them details, and get the cops in, too, and you’re in no shape to do it.”
“I can?—”
“Shut up,” I said again. “Let’s go,” I told the nurse.
“Are you two in a relationship?” Her gaze was steely despite her size. The scarier kind of nurse. Daisy Tamatoa, her name badge said. She didn’t look much like a Daisy, and she didn’t look Samoan, either. Much too small.
“No,” I said. “Don’t know the woman from Adam. Pulled the other girl out of a car, that’s all.”
“If you don’t want him to come,” the nurse told the girl, “tell me.”
The girl said, “He should … come. He’s right.”
“First sensible thing I’ve heard you say,” I said, which was, yes, ungenerous of me, but here I was, doing nothing but helping and getting stick for it. I should sit here in my chair, wait to make sure they were both going to survive, because that was the decent thing to do, give the girl my mobile number once she was able to comprehend I was doing it, then drive back to the Purakaunui Valley one more time, arrange for her van to be winched up my hillside and taken to the wrecker’s, collect what there was to salvage for her, and go on with my life. There you go. Clear, simple plan. It wasn’t like I didn’t have enough to do.
“White knight and thinking you’re a dark one, which is even worse,” I could almost hear Clarissa, my latest ex-wife, say. “Rushing in to save the day because you’re the only one who knows how, but you’re not. Just because you’re good at business, that doesn’t mean you’re good at relationships. There’s no boss in a relationship, and no, it doesn’t matter if he’s a good boss. It’s an inferiority complex, is what it is. Chip on your shoulder from growing up illegitimate and skint and not knowing who your dad is. You aren’t going to change that, so what’s the point?”
Right. I’d learned my lesson. I wasn’t rushing in. I wasn’t fixing it. I also wasn’t sharing my feelings with women anymore. You want to talk about mistakes? That’s a mistake.
And yet I came along anyway. I couldn’t just leave them there, not knowing how badly injured they were or if they had anyone to help them. I was a Kiwi, after all. It was practically my national duty.
Summer
I didn’t cry while the nurse started an IV and cleaned my cuts and grazes, picking the gravel out of my skin, or when the doctor stitched my palm and some more places on my legs that I hadn’t realized I’d cut that badly. Maybe that was because of the man sitting next to the bed, or maybe it was because I was cried out, or more likely, in the Numb Zone, everything in me that could still feel focused on Delilah.
I did, unfortunately, cry when the doctor told me she’d be all right. I burst into tears, in fact, like a little girl. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. I just—I need to go see her.”
“Not as unsteady as you still are,” the nurse said, “and not with an IV in you, you don’t.” She was one of those take-charge nurses. I’ll bet she longed for the days when she’d have worn a starched white cap and white stockings and swept into rooms with her bosom swelling indignantly under her uniform dress, terrifying doctors and orderlies alike. It wasn’t that large a bosom, but I had faith in her.
“I’ll go see her if you like,” the man in the chair offered. Maybe he felt guilty about how many times he’d told me to shut up, but I doubted it. He didn’t seem like the type to feel guilty.
I kept mopping up tears and other assorted attractive secretions and said, “O-OK. But you should tell me your … name.”
“Roman.”
“Roman?” I forgot to cry and stared at him. “Was your mom a romance reader, by any chance?” He was that kind of guy. Dark hair with some wave to it—it might be black; you couldn’t really tell, since it was wet—dark skin, five o’clock shadow, and eyes of … weirdly, of jade green. Startling, against his olive skin. Those eyes could be described as “piercing,” if you were that kind of writer. Tough, was how he looked, because he was also big and broad.
Good. The last thing I wanted around me was any kind of big, tough, physical guy. If there ever was a next time, I was going for one of those thin, quiet, sensitive types.
Which was childish of me. He wasn’t asking me to like him. I’d torn up his trees! I should be nicer to him. Maybe he’d give me a discount. “What’s your last name?” I asked.
“My surname? D’Angelo.”
I laughed. I tried to pretend it was a cough, or a sob, putting the tissue to my face again, but I didn’t think he was convinced, because his jaw sort of twitched and he said, “Don’t blame me. I didn’t choose it.”
“Roman D’Angelo,” the nurse said flatly. “You may want to provide Summer here with some ID. Predators everywhere,” she told me. “Passing themselves off as something they’re not.”
What? I was so confused. Also—Delilah. I said to Roman—seriously? Roman?—“Please go check on Delilah. I need to know how she’s doing, and she might be worried about me, too. When can we get out of here?” I asked the nurse.
“As soon as doctor says you can,” she answered. Not exactly helpful.
“Also, I think I have to … do things,” I said. “Tell the police, I guess. Uh … I think I’d better call the British consulate. Is there a consulate? There must be. My passport. My bank cards. I don’t have … I don’t have anything. You’ll need things from us, too. The hospital will, I mean. Passports. Money. I don’t have—I don’t even have my phone.” I was getting overwhelmed again. Breathless. Faint, sweating, and prickly all over, like I was going to throw up.
Oh, no. That would be the worst thing, if I threw up in front of Roman d’Angelo. The guy clearly hated weakness. I wouldn’t have cared what he hated, but … those trees.
“I’ll ring the cops after I check on Delilah,” Roman said. “Your passport and wallet and all will be on the hillside somewhere, or still in the van. I’ll look for them in the morning. And it was an accident. You’ll have ACC cover.”
I had no idea what that meant. “But I can’t … I don’t have …” I trailed off, the full realization of my situation hitting me. I wanted the numb place back again, please. The prickly feeling came back instead, and I told the nurse, “I think I might be sick.”
She grabbed a bag and handed it to me. Roman stood up and said, “Stop worrying. No disasters here, beyond the campervan. I’ll go find Delilah,” and left the room. Thank goodness, because I was, yes, being sick. I didn’t have much in my stomach, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but still. It was bad enough.
Men would always do things for you if you were pretty enough. Charming enough. Appreciative enough. The problem was—I wasn’t pretty or charming right now, and I didn’t want a man to do things for me. I wished there were another option. And what did he mean, “beyond the campervan?” Wasn’t that enough of a disaster?
“Is there somebody you can ring up?” the nurse asked, possibly because she could tell.
“No.” The word hung there, but what else was there to say? People in New Zealand had been more than kind to Delilah and me since we’d been working here, but they’d been friendly acquaintances. Coworkers. Bosses. Nobody I could call and ask for a free room or, God forbid, a loan. I could call some of my former friends, I guessed, in the UK, but were they even friends anymore? My phone hadn’t exactly been ringing off the hook before I’d left, and everything in me shrank from confessing to this kind of need. To how far I’d fallen.
“When you speak to the police,” the nurse said, “you can ask them for help. Could take a while with everything happening out there tonight, but they’ll get to you.” Well, that was comforting. “Don’t accept help from mysterious strangers,” she went on. “Not when they haven’t proven themselves. A man can say anything to a desperate woman, and he generally will.”
“Thanks,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. And I’d thought I was a cynic. “He did help me rescue my cousin, though, and he drove us here.”
“Maybe, then,” she said. “But ask for that ID. Would you like another warm blanket?”
“I would kill,” I said, “for another warm blanket.”
That got a smile from her. “I’ll be back,” she said, disposing of my disgusting bag on her way out the door and leaving me alone, trapped by my IV, every inch of me except the ones she’d cleaned off sticky, damp, and filthy. I was pretty sure she was wrong, and Roman was going to wash his hands of Delilah and me as fast as he possibly could. I wasn’t exactly tempting.
The consulate, that was the ticket. They did something for stranded travelers, right? Well, I was as stranded as it was possible to get. The British consulate for me, and the American one for Delilah. It was night now, though. Worse, Friday night, with the weekend ahead. Surely they helped you in emergencies, though. Surely. If I had a phone.
Borrow a phone, like the nurse said, I thought, when I was under my warm blanket and thinking a little better. You can wait in the … in the hospital lobby until you get help. Or ask the cops to put Delilah and me in jail, possibly. Vagrancy, that would be it. We’d get a bed and meals, anyway. I wanted to laugh, suppressed it, then thought, Why not? and laughed out loud at the thought of us happily snuggled into bunk beds in our cell after a dinner of fast-food hamburgers. They had showers in jail, right? And orange jumpsuits! We’d be clean! For free! I laughed some more.
All right. Now I just sounded crazy. Which was, of course, when Roman came back through the door. He looked pretty startled. No wonder.
“Never mind,” I said, still wanting to giggle. Either I was hysterical, or I already had blood poisoning. “Just contemplating my dire situation.”
“And it makes you laugh.” He sat down in his chair again. “Interesting sense of humor.”
“Ha,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “How’s Delilah? What did she say? How did she seem? Is she?—”
He didn’t answer right away. He reached into the back pocket of his pants—they’d been dress pants once, the close-fitting Kiwi kind, tailored to his muscular shape and made of charcoal-gray fabric, at least I thought so. Right now, they were mostly made of dried mud. He pulled out a slim black leather wallet, extracted something from it, and handed it to me. “Driving license.”
“Oh … kay.” I looked at it. It said Roman d’Angelo, all right, with an address in Dunedin. I handed it back. “Does this mean something to me? And—Delilah?”
“The nurse seemed to think it should. It’s possible she rates me higher than I do myself, though some people would tell you that’s not possible. Delilah’s doing well. Worried about you, but I said you were OK. Her head hurts, and she’s got some bruises on her shoulder and upper arm from where the van hit the tree that won’t feel too flash. Kids heal fast, though. A day or two in bed, a week or two taking it easy, and she’ll be apples.”
Wait. What? “She’s not exactly a kid,” I said. “And we both need to work. How can we?—”
“You’re putting her to work? After that? She can’t be more than fifteen.” He was frowning now. See? All he’d done was give us a ride—well, and rescue Delilah—and he already thought he had a say in our lives!
“Eighteen,” I said. “You’re a terrible judge of age. How old am I, in your dream world? Is that why you picked me up out there, because you think I’m a teenager?” Again, antagonizing the only person who’d shown any desire to help me. I couldn’t help it, though. He rubbed me the wrong way. So bossy. So sure he knew the answer. I might only know that I didn’t know the answer, but at least I knew that!
“No,” he said with exaggerated patience that set my teeth on edge again. Maybe irritability went along with whatever I’d had. Hypothermia or whatever. “Twenty-one, I’d say. Twenty-two. You’re cousins, eh. Explains why you don’t look alike. At least I think you don’t. Can’t really tell how you look at the moment, other than drowned.”
“I’m thirty. Seriously? Twenty-one? No wonder you think I’m incompetent.” I couldn’t stop. “And I need to borrow your phone.” He raised a dark eyebrow. “Oh. Whoops. May I please borrow your phone? I need to call the consulate, like I said. I hope somebody answers.” Another flash of panic. If they didn’t answer, it was going to be the jail idea. Did you have to actually commit a crime? I wasn’t going to rob anybody, but maybe shoplifting would be enough. Maybe if I stole a whole lot of stuff. Hospitals had gift shops, right? If I went in and just started grabbing everything off the shelves …
Roman sighed again, and I said, “If I’m annoying you, you can leave.”
“I should be able to,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s not working. I’ll collect your things for you in the morning, like I said.”
“Excuse me. Where am I going to be in the morning, in your scenario?”
“In a hotel, I assume.”
“And they’re going to give me a room because …”
“Because I’ll pay for it.”
“Oh.” I digested that. “You’ll loan me the money?”
“For one night in a hotel room? I reckon I can just about manage that.”
“Oh.” What about after one night? Not his problem. Mine. In the morning, I’d think of something. The consulate idea. That was the lifeline. And I could always leave the country. We’d needed return tickets to get in. We could use them and …
And go where?
The nurse came in again and said, “Doctor says you can leave, so let’s get that IV out. No police yet, I see. You reported your accident, though?”
“I did,” Roman said, “but as I didn’t have the plate number and so forth, it’s not official. Never mind, she can ring them again once she’s got herself sorted.” He looked at his watch. “It’s likely to be tomorrow by the time we get her settled.”
“You’re taking them, are you?” the nurse asked. “Just like that?” And studied him before she ripped the tape off the back of my hand and started taking out the IV. It hurt, but not more than anything else.
I tried not to be tired at the thought of trying to manage a hotel room. Wash our clothes in the sink and put them on damp in the morning? Unappealing, but better than being covered in mud. Or maybe the place would have a washer and dryer. It would have a shower, anyway. That would have to do.
“Yeh, I’m taking them,” Roman said, “unless you’d like to. The van’s on my property.”
The nurse looked at me some more, seemed to come to a conclusion, and told me, “If you need a place to stay for a couple of nights, my husband and I have a caravan on our section.”
“I could ask who’s a dodgy character now, offering help,” Roman said.
“I’m a nurse,” the woman—Daisy—said. “Automatically trustworthy. And we’re used to refugees.”
“Odd,” Roman said.
She put a wad of cotton and some tape over the IV site and asked me, “Did you ask him for his ID?”
“Uh …” I said. “He showed it to me, yes.” Well, if Delilah and I ended up dead, she had his name, right? Wait, why wasn’t I saying yes to the nurse? That made so much more sense. Maybe because I didn’t want to be in somebody’s house, or on their land. Beholden. I could pay back money. I couldn’t pay back that kind of favor. “So you’ll bring my stuff to me in the hotel?” I asked Roman. “It would have to be a nearby hotel, or that’s a lot of driving. Is there a hotel—a motel—anywhere near your house? In O— O-whatever, maybe? There must be, I guess, if it’s any kind of holiday spot. I’m going to need a washing machine, too.”
A stitched hand. Delilah, with her concussion. We hadn’t had dinner, or anything for lunch except a few mandarins and half a packet of store-brand gingernut biscuits, as my stomach and my lightheadedness were reminding me, and then there was breakfast. What about the hospital’s charges, for that matter? I’d be covered by the New Zealand health scheme, because I had a UK passport and the two countries had a reciprocal system, but what about Delilah? How was I going to pay for that?
Stop panicking. Swallow your pride and ask to borrow money for food. As for the hospital, what can they do to you, hold you here until you pay? If they did, they’d have to feed you.
Roman said, “I’ll think of something.”
“You’re hating this, though,” I said. “Don’t pretend you’re not.” I told Daisy, “Maybe the caravan would be better. Sorry, I didn’t even say thanks. I just—” My face started to get rubbery, and I did my best to control it. “It’s just—my van’s there, and all my things, and …”
She said, “No worries. I’m giving you my number, though. If you do get desperate, ring me.” She grabbed a pen and scribbled her name and number on my discharge instructions.
Well, this was a first. Kiwis were friendly and helpful, but surely there was a limit. Unless she really did think Roman was sketchy. Wait, I thought he was … well, annoying, anyway. Didn’t I? What should I do here?
Roman grinned, the first time I’d seen him smile. It changed his whole face, made him look younger, less … well, less scary. His eyes slanted down a little at the outside corners, which gave his face a sort of sadness. Soulfulness. Something at odds with the hardness and decisiveness that seemed to be his go-to. They probably were his go-to, and his true self, because your personality couldn’t possibly show in the shape of your eyes! When he smiled, though, multiple crinkles formed around those jade eyes like a collection of parentheses, and the sadness changed to something almost … well, almost charming.
“Can’t decide why I’m still offering,” he said. “Except that ‘If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. That is very serious!’ Thich Nhat Hanh.”
“Whatever.” It was what Delilah would have said, but too bad.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go collect Delilah and get out of here.”
Bossy again.
Unfortunately, I needed him. Or more exactly, I needed transport back to my van. My things. My life.
It was one night, and we’d be gone. I could handle one night.