And the arm that was barely visible through it. The arm on the floor. That wasn’t moving.
Hemi
I’d come home from the airport on Tuesday night just because I hadn’t been able to think of anything else to do. I’d wanted to go after Hope, and I’d known I couldn’t.
When I got there, Karen came out from the living room so fast she nearly cannoned into me.
“Did you get her?” she demanded.
“No.” I took off my shoes and followed her into the living room, and had to blink. Papers and magazines were scattered across the coffee table, Karen’s sandals and a long-sleeved shirt lay strewn on the carpet, the TV was blaring, and it looked like an entire family had eaten a Chinese banquet and then fled the premises.
“What have you been doing?” I asked her. I picked up a remote, turned off the TV, and pressed the button to slide the hardwood panel over the screen for good measure. “Who’s been here?”
Her gaze slid away from mine. “Nobody.” And when I kept looking at her, she said, “Well, just Noah, for a little while.”
“What?” I’d been gone . . . barely two hours. Well, three. It was nearly eleven. “Noah the Buddhist? Unattached Noah? Male Noah?”
“I was upset. Hope was gone, and you were gone, and I didn’t know what to do! I didn’t know if you were going to go to New Zealand or coming home with Hope or what. And Mandy couldn’t come over, because it was late, and I knew you’d freak out if I took the subway over there, because you’re so overprotective and everything, so Noah came over to hang out.” All that last part came out in a rush, her voice rising as she spoke. “And I thought you were bringing her back. You let her go? Why?”
“One minute.” The Maori in me had risen, and it had to go somewhere. Seemed it was going here. “There is no boy in this house when nobody’s home, and you’re not to go to any boy’s house alone, either. Period. And clean this up, please. You leave it for Hope. You leave it for me. You leave it for Inez. It’s nobody’s job to tidy up after you, and nobody else is going to do it. You are.”
Her hands were on her slim hips now. She was wearing only a ribbed yellow tank top and short brown shorts, and I looked at her and knew exactly what Noah had seen.
I hadn’t met him. I needed to. Pity I hated him already.
She began to stack plates, her movements rough and abrupt, and said, “OK. Geez. I should have gone with Hope. She at least wants me. At least she doesn’t yell at me. And why can’t I have a friend who’s a guy? Why can’t I be a normal person?”
When she turned around, I took a better look and said, “That would be why.” Her hair was still only a couple inches long, kept short after her head had been shaved for her surgery, and there was no hiding the considerable love bite on her neck. Which would be why the cushions on the couch were disarranged as well. If I’d had a back door, I’d have guessed that Noah had made his escape out of it while I’d been on the way in.
Hope would have blushed and put her hand to her neck. Karen squared off to me again, dirty plates and all, and said, “So I’ve got a hickey. So what? People kiss. You are such a hypocrite! Why is it all right for you and not for me?” She was waving the dishes around forcefully enough that a knife and fork slid off and headed toward my bare feet, forcing me to take a jump back to avoid them.
I kept my voice level with a major effort. “Because I’m not sixteen? Barely?”
“No. Because you’re male. I’ll bet you’d had sex by the time you were sixteen. Probably when you were twelve. And I’ll bet the girl wasn’t eighteen, either. Or the girls. That was fine, but it’s not fine if I do it? What about the girls you did it with? Why am I better than them? That’s being a hypocrite, and it’s slut shaming. Women are sexual beings, and we should be just as free to express our sexuality as men are.”
I couldn’t deal with this. The mess. The noise. The . . . the hormones. I was stuck, and I was so frustrated, I wanted to growl. Instead, I took a deep breath, let it out, and said, “Hope will talk to you about it.” A weasel response, and I knew it, so I went back to firmer ground and said, “But no. Absolutely not. Noah is not here when Inez or I aren’t, and you aren’t at Noah’s when nobody else is home, and you’re to tell Inez or me where you’re going when you leave, and who you’re going with, and we’ll be . . . we’ll be checking.”
How? How were you meant to check? I had no clue. When I’d been sixteen, I’d been living with a dad who’d been heaps more interested in what was in the bottle than what I was doing or who I was doing it with. And, yes, I’d been having sex every chance I got, or anything close to it I could manage. Mostly on the beach—the Kiwi teenager’s second bedroom—or snatched moments in the back of a cinema or a party, or, best case of all, in a car. Never enough time, and always the risk of discovery, the thrill of the forbidden to lend spice to the encounter.
Why? Because most of those girls had had a dad. A dad who’d probably felt exactly the same way about his little girl and about blokes like me as I was feeling now, because he’d known what they were thinking and what they wanted to do, just like I did. And if Karen were doing the things those girls had done with me in the back seats of cars or behind a dune . . .
How had Hope coped with all this? I needed to talk to Inez. I needed to talk to Charles, too. How was I meant to approach that conversation?
I was still trying to sort it out when Karen marched past me, all but flung the dishes into the kitchen, then came back and began to throw things about in a fashion that, if it was “tidying,” wasn’t the kind I knew.
“You didn’t bring her,” she said, her back to me. “I thought she’d be coming home. I thought she’d be back. And now I’m in purdah.”
“I reckon she needed to be alone for a while. And you’re not in purdah. You can see all the boys you want. Just not alone.”
“I thought you were going to try to get her back. I thought that was the whole point.” She was tossing cushions about in a random fashion as if that made it better, and I resisted the urge to step in and fold the rumpled throw tossed across the arm of the couch, to pick up papers and stow remotes. Karen bent down, grabbed the knife and fork she’d dropped onto the rug and said, “She wanted to stay. I know she did. She came to see you, and you weren’t even here. How come you guys keep wrecking it? Why can’t you just love each other? You said you were going to fix it. What did you say? You were supposed to tell her you loved her. That’s what she wanted to hear. You should have told her you’d take her for a walk, or to the art museum or a show or something. All those flirting things you used to do. You know, old-timey dating. She loved that.”
“Yeh,” I said, abandoning any shreds of pride that remained. Even Karen knew what I’d done wrong. “Got that, didn’t I. I’ll be doing it from now on, no worries.” I should tell her that Hope was pregnant. But how could I, if Hope hadn’t? I needed to talk to Hope first. I needed to see Hope.
My entire life was upside down. My meticulously ordered apartment was chaos. I kept finding myself shutting Karen’s bedroom door when I walked by, because otherwise, the clothes on the floor seemed like they would actually roll out into the hallway and stage a coup. The woman who should be my wife, the mother of my child, was flying away from me at nine hundred kilometers an hour. Meanwhile, the woman who was my wife was trying to take away most of what I owned, I had whole buildings full of nervous employees and some very anxious bankers, and just when I needed a clear head to deal with all of it, I was more rattled than I could remember being for years. For fifteen years, in fact. Since I’d been married to Anika.