Just Not Mine (33 page)

“Really?” Charlie asked.

“Really,” Hugh promised. “I’m ready.”

Maybe he was, and maybe he wasn’t. B
ut he was going to do it anyway.

The cyclone had threatened, the wind had blown, the r
ain had come in fits and starts all through Boxing Day, and now, on the twenty-seventh, it was here in force. The rain streamed down the windscreen of the big bus, forcing the wipers to work in frantic rhythm to keep it clear enough for the driver to see. Traffic on the motorway was so slow it was crawling, and Josie felt as if she were stuck in a dream, trying desperately to reach her destination, one obstacle after another in her way, never able to make it, never able to quite get there.

She’d
come back from her walk in the bush the day before, her thoughts still whirling, sure of only one thing, that she needed to talk to Hugh again and tell him how she felt, find out what he had to say. She’d walked up the steep path for nearly an hour, sorting it through, had reached her decision and turned around, and by the time she’d got back to the road, she’d been running, because she was too far away.

But when she’d made it back down the drive, his car had been gone. She’d pounded on
the caravan door, but had received no answer, had opened it and found they were gone. She’d run the rest of the way to the house, and known all along it was useless.

“They
left?”
she panted, standing sweaty in shorts and T-shirt and bare feet in the kitchen.

Her mother continued sorting the was
hing into the machine. “About a half-hour ago.”

“But
… I can’t get back,” she realized. “I don’t have a car. And I need to go too. How could he just
leave?”

Her dad looked up at her from his spot at the table, where he’d been going through paperwork. “How could he have stayed?” he asked her quietly.

“Oh.” She sank down into a chair opposite him, and her mum poured her a glass of water, set it in front of her. “Mum told you.”

“She did.”

Josie popped up again, unable to be still. “Then I need to go after him. Right now. But I don’t have a car. Can I borrow your car, Mum?”

“No, darling,” her mother said, shoving the soap dispenser
into place and slamming the machine shut, twisting the dial. “Sorry. Better to give Hugh some time, anyway. Wasn’t that the idea?”

“The bus,” Josie
said, because she wasn’t listening. “I can take the bus. That’s what I’ll do. When does the bus leave?”

Except
it had turned out that she couldn’t, because the bus had been booked solid during the rush of Boxing Day, the car hire firms closed for the holiday, and it wasn’t until an interminable twenty-four hours later that she climbed on board for the frustratingly, grindingly slow journey back to Auckland.

She
descended at last at the Sky Tower, pulled her wheelie bag down Queen Street through the late-afternoon crowds, her parka an insufficient shield against the blowing rain, her hair quickly growing soaked, and found she had just missed the ferry to Devonport.

Another twenty-five minutes on a bench looking at the gray chop of the Harbour, the boats rolling and bouncing in the swell, another queue to board, a
stomach-churning ride across the narrow channel with holidaymakers who had decided, for some obscure reason, to sample the delights of village life on a day wholly unsuited for it, and she was on the other side at last. Through the terminal building, down the path past the play structure, and then along the waterfront, the waves crashing, the wind buffeting her, moving as fast as she could pull the little suitcase, and it was nearly two full days now since she’d talked to Hugh, and she should have rung him after all, because it was too long to wait, and what if he’d changed his mind?

S
he saw his car in the drive, the glow of light in the house, left her bag there at the bottom of the steps to get wet—to get wetter—and climbed up to ring the bell. Then stood there, her heart pounding, her entire body shaking, and waited.

The door opened, and it was Hugh. Hugh,
looking down at her in apparent shock, and she couldn’t tell. She couldn’t
tell.

“Josie,” he said. “W
hat … what happened?”

Her teeth were chattering, her hair streaming wet, her clothes dripping around her. “I came
… I came …” she tried to say.

Charlie and Amelia
were there now, staring at her from behind Hugh, and he reached for her, pulled her into the entryway. “Come inside. You’re freezing. You’re soaked.”

“The bus,” she said. “I was on the bus, and then the ferry, and then it was raining, and I
…” She wasn’t coherent, and this wasn’t at all the speech she had intended to make.

“Why didn’t you call
me?” he demanded. “I’d have come and got you.”

“I didn’t
… I didn’t know if you … if you would,” she tried to tell him.

He was smiling, and still frowning, all at the same time. “Of course I would. Don’t you kno
w that by now?”

“
I came to tell you,” she said, “let me try again. Let me try to say, I know it was asking too much. I was too … too hasty. I came to ask … to tell you …”

“You really need somebody to write your lines for you
this time, sweetheart,” he said, and he was pulling her into his arms, not caring how wet he got, and she was hanging onto him as if her life depended on it, and she couldn’t tell what was tears and what was rain.

“Come on,” he told her. “Let’s take you over to your place, and get you warm and dry, and then you can tell me, and I can tell you too.”

“Josie came in the rain,” Charlie said. “She came in the rain, Amelia.”

“I know,” his sister said. “And I was right. It
is
romantic. It
is.”

She was still trying to tell him, trying to think of the right way, but he wasn’t listening. He was helping her pull off her wet things, and she was shivering with cold, and nerves, and exhaustion from two sleepless nights, and he had turned on the shower and shoved her into it.

“Stay in there,” he told her. “Stay in there until you warm up.”

She cried a little more in the shower, because she’d stuffed up utterly, and all she’d been was pathetic, and she’d never know how he really felt now, because how could a man be honest with a woman who was clearly too distraught, too needy to hear the truth?

She climbed out at last
because she had to, her head feeling dull and stuffed but her body no longer shaking, toweled herself off and pulled on a warm dressing gown, combed her hair out and left it hanging, long and wet, and went out into the lounge to find him.

H
e was sitting on the couch, but he smiled at the sight of her, stood up and put out a hand to draw her down with him.

“I even made tea,” he said. “
Sit here with me and drink it, and listen, because I have a few things to tell you.”

“I want to tell you too, though,” she said.

He shook his head. “I promise, from now on, you can go first. But right now, you need to listen to me. You’ve known what was right all along, and I haven’t, so I have more to say.”

“But I
haven’t,”
she protested, and her chest was filling, her throat tightening, and she could hardly dare to breathe, but with joy this time. With hope.

“Me first,” he said. “
Please, because I’ve been waiting so long to tell you. I thought about the phone, but I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear it, and I thought, better to wait until I was with you again. I thought I had a better chance,” he said with a little laugh that didn’t sound very steady, “if I could hold your hand while I said it.” He took it lightly in his own, ran his fingers over the backs of hers. “This is my speech. It’s a bit corny, maybe, but it’s the best I’ve got.”

He took a deep breath and began. “There
are these things you say in sport. People think they’re clichés, and I guess they are, but you say them so often, for so long, they sink in all the same.”

He paused,
and she waited, her eyes on his face. “One of them is,” he said, “you play what’s in front of you. What it means is, yeh, you’ve got a game plan. You train, you study the other team during the week, you do your very best not to leave anything to chance. But then you turn up on the night, and you play what’s in front of you, whether it’s what you planned or not. Somebody gets injured, you’ve got a man in the bin, doesn’t matter. You don’t get to stop and ask the ref to start again because you didn’t plan for this. You just keep playing. You may win, and you may lose. But if you stop playing, if you stop trying, you’re sure to lose, aren’t you? So you don’t stop trying, not until the ref blows the whistle. Because even if you lose the game, you didn’t lose …” He stopped.

“Your self-respect,” she
suggested.

He shook his head. “I guess
… yourself. And your team. You don’t lose them, you don’t lose each other. Next time, you know they’ll be there. You know they’ll front up, be there all eighty minutes for you, the same way you will be for them. And if it’s hard, well, it’s always hard. Anyway, you’d think you’d want the easy game, and maybe you should, but you don’t. You want the tough ones. Those are the ones you want to play, the ones you want to win. That’s why you play, to put yourself to the test, see what you’re made of.”

“And that’s what this is,” she said. “With you and the kids. Since your dad and stepmum died. You’ve been playing what’s in front of you.”

Another shake of the head. “No. I haven’t been. That’s what this is.”

“But you
have,”
she insisted
.
“Of course you have. I see that now. When your father and stepmother died, you told me you were here the next day. You flew all night to get to your brother and sister. And you’ve been with them ever since, as much as you could be.”

“Helping,” he said. “I always thought I was helping. Paying the bills, being there—when I was able to. But not fronting up, not really. Somebody needed to step up.”

“And you
did.”

“I’d say that Aunt Cora and I each took a half step up. That’s not fronting. Not even close.
You were right. I’m not good enough, I know it, but I’m what they’ve got. So it wasn’t the game plan. So I have to readjust. Doesn’t matter. It’s what’s here. It’s what they need. It’s what
I
need. Because I’ve realized, in the past couple days, what if Aunt Cora had rung to say that she wanted the kids with her in the UK? What if she’d said, put them on the plane, and I’ll meet them, and I’ll love them, and you’re done? I thought about that, and I realized I’d have said no. I’d have fought to keep them. I realized—that I could love them, I guess. Both of them. That I may not be their dad, but in a way … I am, now.”

“Of course you are,” she told him, and she couldn’t believe she had ever doubted it.

“I’m the closest thing they’ve got, anyway,” he said, “and even if Aunt Cora came back, it wouldn’t matter. They need one person who puts them first. That person’s going to be me. Because that’s what’s in front of me, and because that’s what I want. To take care of my family.”

“I know it’s going to be hard, though,” she said, “half the time away.”

“The other boys do it. I can find out how. There must be a way. A nanny, or whatever. But also—give them what they’ve been missing. A brother who’s willing to step up and be a dad. Whatever that means, and however rubbish I am at it at first. I can get better, and that’s what I mean to do.”

He looked at her again. “And you know the othe
r thing I realized, all this time I’ve been thinking?”

“No,” she said, and her heart was pounding now. “What?”

“I realized that I want you, too. That if this isn’t what loving someone is, I can’t imagine what more it’d be, because what it is—it’s knowing that I’d do anything I could to keep you from hurting, but if you are, I want to be there to soften the blow. I want to know that I’m there for you, and I want you to know it too. I need you to trust that if you need me to come pick you up because it’s raining, I’ll do it, no matter what, no matter how angry you are with me, no matter how angry you think I am with you. And if that isn’t love,” he repeated, “I guess it’s close enough for me. I hope it’s close enough for you.”