“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 lastones.”
“I don’t care if they’re our last meal,” Sarah said. “Bring them anyway.”
“I was justsaying,”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. Soscared.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.
