The moment she saw Ngaire freeze, her shoulders tense and her hands unmoving, Kate knew that something important had happened. With glacial slowness, Ngaire turned to look out towards the darkened beach, now empty of light and life. But Kate couldn’t figure out why Ngaire had reacted like this. And she didn’t want to know. In her experience it usually meant she’d done something wrong and was likely going to have to stay in her room for reasons she didn’t understand. So she edged towards the kitchen door, figuring a quiet retreat to her bedroom might be easier for everyone.
‘When was this?’ Ngaire’s voice wasn’t her usual forceful, clear tones, but lowered and fractured.
Kate remembered that the man had told her to pass the message on straight away and she instinctively knew she’d done something wrong. She didn’t want her beloved grandmother to be angry with her.
So she shrugged. ‘Oh… ages ago. He’s gone now.’
‘Oh.’
Kate had felt suddenly awkward.
‘Did he say anything to you?’
Kate frowned as she fingered the different buttons. ‘Yes.’
‘What did he say?’ Ngaire’s voice had an intensity to it which Kate instinctively knew required an answer.
‘He asked me what you were singing and I told him. He said I was good at speaking Maori.’
‘You are. Anything else?’
‘I told him that you had to bake a really big cake for mum’s birthday to put all twenty candles on it.’
‘And did he say anything?’
Kate suddenly remembered a detail. Hopefully that would be enough to satisfy her grandmother.
‘He said Hope was his sister’s name but she’d died in the war.’
Apparently it was enough because Ngaire looked away and didn’t look back at her. So when her mother called, Kate was only too happy to run off.
Later still — when Ngaire didn’t come in for supper, when she sat alone on the bench in the dark night — Kate hadn’t thought it was anything to do with the stranger. She’d only heard Hope wondering aloud why her mother was sitting in the cold.
Kate blinked as the memory released her.
The wind tugged at her shawl. She swallowed hard.
Yes. Johnnie Kowalski had been to MacLeod’s Cove three times.
Twice that history recorded. And once that only she remembered.
Strangely, Kate remembered the date because the reason she’d been in the garden was because she was keeping out of sight of the rest of her family who were crying and grieving over the death of a relative. And she felt slightly put out because it was Christmas Eve. But she’d received her doll’s house because she was five years old and wouldn’t destroy it.
Which meant that Johnnie Kowalski had stood in her grandmother’s garden on Christmas Eve, 1966.
When she recalled his words now—I won’t be here long—and the trembling of his hand, she understood what had once confused her.
John Kowalski had died in 1967; Augi had given her a copy of the death certificate. He’d had Parkinson’s disease.
He had come to say goodbye to Ngaire and, in the end, he hadn’t been able to.
He’d heard Ngaire singing happily, and Kate had told him how happy Ngaire was. Kate guessed that he’d known he had nothing to offer her except memories, disruption and sorrow. And none of these tipped the balance.
But he had gone away with something which had changed things. Knowledge that, in the brief visit early in 1946, he and Ngaire had made a baby. A daughter, who’d just turned 20 when he last visited.
And he’d returned to the US and changed his will, amending it so that, after Ngaire passed, the house would be inherited by his ‘closest relative’, knowing that he had a little grand-daughter on the other side of the world who would one day live and love in that house. But he couldn’t state her name or relationship because it would destroy Ngaire’s carefully constructed, happy life.
What Kate hated most was that she’d never passed on his full message to Ngaire because she’d forgotten. But she hadn’t forgotten completely. The words had lodged somewhere in her, not understood, until now. And now she understood all too well.
