Chapter 33 #2
“You realize,” she felt compelled to point out, “that I know how to drive.”
“I do,” he said, not rattled at all. “I also know that two heads are better than one. I’ll drive, and you can keep track of the route, as we’ll likely have to detour.”
“Our car’s better for that,” Zane’s dad said.
His name was Etana. That meant “solid,” or she thought so, and that was how he looked, too.
Exactly like Zane. “It’s got four-wheel drive,” he added, “and a high clearance. Best take that.” He reached into his pocket and tossed the keys across the table, and Zane plucked them out of the air.
“Can I come?” George asked. “It might be scary for Forrest, but it’s not as scary with two.”
Skylar hesitated, and Scarlett said, “I want to come too. I want to see what it looks like outside.”
“Me too,” Finlay said. “We’ll probably never be in an earthquake again, so this is our chance to see.”
“It’s not a TV program,” Skylar said. “You realize that, right? That people died?”
“Well, obviously,” Scarlett said. “But maybe it helps us cope to know. Aren’t teachers always saying that children need to be given enough information to understand their world? Well, I want to understand my world, and my world is this.”
Finlay, though, didn’t answer right away.
He hesitated, then said, “It didn’t seem exactly real last night.
The earthquake seemed real, but it was too dark to really see the tsunami waves, and then when we were outside, it was so dark that we couldn’t see anything.
So maybe Scarlett’s right. Maybe we need to understand our world.
As we’re older than the others and more mature. ”
“I don’t want to go,” Olive said. “I saw on Granddad’s phone, and I saw yesterday, too. I don’t want to see any more. Especially if there are dead bodies.”
“I don’t want to see dead bodies either,” Duncan said. “Or maybe I do, but I also don’t.”
“Fine,” Scarlett said. “Finlay and I will go.”
“Pity, then,” Zane said, “that the car’s only got five seats. We’ll take George with us to keep Forrest company. You lot will be seeing the damage soon enough.”
“That’s not fair,” Scarlett said, predictably. “We’re the oldest!”
“Fair or not,” Zane said, “that’s the decision. Let’s get you back to your mum, Forrest. She’ll be waiting for you.”
Those ten kilometers took them thirty minutes. Zane took a zig-zagging route, veering every time they came to a street blocked by rubble or, worse, by muddy sand.
“Liquefaction,” Zane said, as they passed a little group wielding spades, digging out. “What a mess.”
The streetlights were still out, and cars were thin on the ground, mostly creeping along, the same as last night. Drivers stopping at every light, waving each other through, their politeness exaggerated. Trying to make a reasonable world out of this. A world that made sense.
Skylar could have done the driving. She was glad all the same that she didn’t have to. Zane didn’t seem to need her help looking out for hazards, either, or any help from the GPS. Following his nose again, she guessed. It was impressive.
Did she spend the journey wondering how to talk to him about the night before? No. She spent it, more and more the closer they got, hoping fiercely that Forrest’s mum was safe. And that Fiona was there with her.
Please, please, let that mum not get such terrible news. Please let that not happen.
Praying didn’t help, and she knew it. Fiona would be … whatever Fiona was. She prayed anyway.
The apartment house was nothing flash. The concrete steps in front were cracked, whether from the earthquake or that way to begin with, she couldn’t tell. An older woman was outside, sweeping broken glass from the pavement. That was good, then. The place was probably habitable.
Harden up, she thought, as Zane found a carpark.
How odd to be in the midst of all this disruption and destruction and still have to look for a carpark.
She climbed out of the car, and Forrest and George clambered out after her.
Zane came around the car, took her hand, and asked, “Ready?” As if he knew her dread, or as if he felt it.
But then, he’d had a daughter nearly killed. He probably did feel it.
“Ready,” she said.
Forrest said, “I don’t have a key. My sister has the key.”
“OK, then,” Skylar said, keeping it cheerful, “we’ll ring the bell. Number 9, eh. Here we are.”
A press of the right button, and after a long, long minute, a woman’s voice. “Hello?” Scratchy. Fearful.
“Hi, mum!” Forrest called out. “It’s me!”
A catch of breath. A sob. And the loud buzz of the lock releasing.
The apartment was on the second floor, and again, they were climbing stairs.
They hadn’t even got to the first floor when the woman came flying down the stairs.
Still in her house shoes, her hair tangled, her face white.
She grabbed Forrest, held him tight, rocked side to side with him the way she’d have done when he was a baby.
And cried. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, thank God. Thank God.”
They stood there on the stairs and waited. Forrest emerged at last, rumpled and probably confused, and the woman seemed to take them in for the first time. “What happened?” she asked. “What happened?”
“Can we come up?” Skylar asked. She longed to ask about Fiona, but how could she?
“Of course,” the woman said. “Where are my manners? Come up. Please.” Still crying, and laughing. Trying to wipe her nose, her face.
Skylar handed her a tissue from her purse—Year One supplies again—and said, “We don’t have to if you’d rather not, but you may want to hear the story.”
“Yes,” the woman said. “Yes. Please.”
More feet on the stairs. A teenage girl, maybe sixteen, with long fair hair, and it was the cuddles all over again. The cuddles, and the tears.
Fiona. Who’d made it home.
Skylar wanted to cry herself.
In the flat, then. The woman, whose name was Sarah, saying, “I don’t have tea, because the electric’s out still. A biscuit, though. Fiona, bring a plate of biscuits.”
“Mum,” Fiona said, “those are the last ones.”
“I don’t care if they’re our last meal,” Sarah said. “Bring them anyway.”
“I was just saying,” Fiona said, and headed off to get them.
“Please sit,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry for the state of the flat. It just— I was just—” She waved an arm, then waved it some more, as if she’d forgotten it was out there.
“Never mind,” Zane said firmly, and sat on the couch. Skylar sat beside him, then pulled George down to sit, too. Forrest said, though, “D’you want to see my room?”
“Yes, please,” George said, and off they went.
Skylar smiled and said, “Kids, eh.”
“Please,” Sarah said, “tell me everything. Fiona said they got separated. I couldn’t work out how, though.
She said they left the museum, but—but the tsunami, and …
” She broke off and waved the arm again, then hugged herself, leaned over, and rocked.
“I was so scared. So scared. Fiona came home barely an hour after. Walked all the way, she said. But how—”
Fiona, Skylar noticed, hadn’t emerged from the kitchen. Small wonder. What was best to say here? But Forrest would tell his mum where he’d been when the quake had hit, wouldn’t he?
While she was still trying to work that out, Zane said, “Fiona buggered off before the quake, sounds like.” Well, nothing like putting it out there.
“What?” Sarah stared. “She didn’t—she wouldn’t—”
“All I really know,” Skylar said, “is that Forrest was in the Quake House with us when the quake happened. He didn’t have anybody there with him, so we took him with us.
With my kids, and Zane’s. Six of them. We stayed in Te Papa until they said we had to leave, and then we …
well, we went home. To Zane’s, that is.”
Sarah seemed to take them in for the first time. “You’re Zane Mahuta,” she said. “They had you on the news. Or they talked about you and showed your photo. Rescuing people, they said. But you weren’t here, not right in Wellington. On the coast road, they said. How were you—”
“Skylar did most of it,” Zane said. “Cared for the kids. She had them in the museum, and then they headed toward the house. I ran into the CBD with some of the other boys whose families weren’t accounted for, met up with Skylar and the kids, and we walked home, simple as that.
No dramas, except that wee Forrest will have had a good bit of exercise last night.
” He stood up. “That’s about all there is to it, so Skylar and I will collect George and get back home. ”
“But—” Sarah said. “But a biscuit. You haven’t even had a biscuit!”
“No worries,” Zane said. “I happen to know they’re your last. We’ll leave them for you. And maybe don’t be too hard on Fiona. She has to have had the night from hell, thinking she’d lost her brother. We all did things we shouldn’t have at that age, eh.”
“But ask about the boyfriend,” Skylar decided she needed to say.
Sarah blinked. “She doesn’t have a—”
“If she left her little brother,” Skylar said, “it was probably to meet a boy. She would’ve had her girlfriends come meet her at the museum, so I reckon it was probably a boy.”
Not exactly the sweet, hot day-after Zane would’ve hoped for.
A bit of time with the kids, and when he needed to get back to the training center that afternoon, his parents said they’d drive him.
How could he have asked Skylar to do that anyway?
To skirt around obstacles again and find another way home when the roadway was blocked? By herself? No.
She suggested it, of course, because Skylar’d never got the “surely somebody else will do it” memo.
And he said, “Absolutely not.” Upon which she looked hurt and he tried to explain, and her face closed down and she said, “Of course it’s better for your mum and dad to drive you, and to start back to Hawke’s Bay while it’s still light.
The owners want to get back into the house as soon as possible, too.
We don’t have enough food for that many people or any hot water, and it looks like the airport will reopen tomorrow so we can go back home and eat actual hot food.
” She’d said all that matter-of-factly, since she probably couldn’t manage “breezily.”
He said, “Come talk to me outside a minute.” She hesitated a bit, but she did it, so that was a win.
They sat on the steps in the front, since the kids were playing in the back.
Why could they never be alone? It was maddening.
He took her hand, threaded his fingers through hers, and said, “It’ll be better when we’re home again, you’re right.
” He tried to think of something else to say, but couldn’t come up with anything. Off his game.
She said, “We’ll see, I guess. You have so much going on, and so do I. The match this week in Auckland, for one thing.”
“Which you’ll come to, I hope,” he said. “You and the kids. And maybe we can … Dunno. See each other afterwards.” Get a hotel room, he wanted to say. Tell your granddad to take care of the kids for once so we can actually be together someplace where it’s just us.
“Maybe,” she said, and that was all. Regretting this, obviously. “But it’s still problematic, you realize.”
“I’ll ring you,” he said, trying one more time. “Tomorrow. Make sure you made it home OK.”
“That’d be good,” she said. “And to know how the rest of the team is, too. Your brother and all. It’ll be good for you to see him tonight.”
Zane’s dad poked his head out of the door at that moment and said, “Mum and I are set to go. Better get our skates on. No telling how long it’ll take us to get up there.” And that was that.
He should’ve done something else. Said something else. But what?