Page 1 of The Geography of Happiness

CHAPTER ONE

Terry

“Dad, look! There’s Miller Station!”Hannah’s excited voice blasted through the headset, making me wince.

I leaned across to try and catch a glimpse but all I saw was a sea of tussock and a milky blue river. “Where?”

“There!” She pointed to the far end of the valley where a tiny spot of red marked the roof of a building.

“You’ve got good eyes.” The chopper pilot shot Hannah a crooked smile. With his choppy blond locks and bright blue eyes, Luke Nichols had kept my daughter entertained the entire flight, spinning yarns about the Mackenzie Basin and the people who lived there, all perfectly gauged to grab the interest of an excited fourteen-year-old girl.

Hannah beamed at the praise while her service mobility dog, Gabby, who’d been ignored most of the flight, nudged her leg as if to say,Hey, don’t forget about me.I’d been quietly worried how well the four-year-old golden retriever would handle her first time in a helicopter, but she’d been pretty chill. However, she did have a tendency to sulk if Hannah’s attention rested elsewhere for any length of time, somehow managing to pushher doggy bottom lip forward in as good a likeness of petulant annoyance as you could possibly get.

“Gabby’s pouting again,” I informed Hannah, and she immediately turned and kissed the end of Gabby’s nose.

“Aw, you know I love you best,” she reassured the dog, then returned her attention to the window where it had been fixed from the moment we’d left Christchurch Airport. Her distraction had allowed me to relinquish my dad hat and work on settling the herd of butterflies circling my belly. Left to me, Hannah and I would be finishing a lazy Sunday lunch back in Painted Bay while planning our regular Sunday afternoon movie-fest. We wouldnotbe perilously gallivanting far too high above the Canterbury plains.

Hannah spun and grabbed my hand, tugging me across to the middle seat. “You can see from here.” She pointed to a cluster of buildings far in the distance at the head of the narrow glacial valley. “That’s it.”

“Okay, okay.” I leaned over her shoulder and just... wow. My breath caught in my chest. After a few seconds, I blew out a low whistle. “Okay, I admit that’s pretty impressive.”

“See.” Hannah’s chest puffed. “I told you this was a great idea.”

“You did.” I pinched her waist and she jumped. “But I’m sure it would be just as impressive from a car... not to mention a lot easier on my heart.”

Luke snorted, and I was reminded that whatever was said into the headsets was heard by everyone.

“Even if our pilot is excellent,” I quickly added.

Luke glanced over his shoulder with a smile. “Not a fan of flying?”

“Planes are fine,” I countered. “Flying in a tiny, noisy tin can with nothing but a sliver of metal between me and certain death? That’s a hell no.”

Luke laughed and Hannah rolled her eyes in that way teenage girls did, which told you exactly how hopeless you were. None of which meant I was wrong.

The whole idea for the helicopter transfer from Christchurch to Miller Station had been the unfortunate brainchild of my adventure-seeking parents who always tried to give Hannah an exciting new experience for her birthday. As usual, they’d called it right, and Hannah had loved every terrifying second of it.

She leaned back against me. “It’s so pretty, isn’t it?”

“You’ve got that right.” I kissed her hair, inhaling the familiar scent of vanilla from the shampoo she’d been favouring for a while now. In a time when it seemed the future of our little family was slowly slipping out of my control, one determined teenage heartbeat at a time, that enduring fragrance was oddly reassuring.

This too will pass. My mother’s favourite saying played in my ears but brought little comfort. Hannah was growing up, gradually slipping out of my protective arms and into her own skin. It was inevitable and was even to be encouraged, I knew that. But that didn’t mean I had to like it. Not one little bit.

Some days when I looked at my daughter, I could only shake my head. We were different in too many ways to count, not least that Hannah possessed more courage in the tip of her little finger than I or her birth mother could ever aspire to in a lifetime. Hannah was much more like my parents in that regard. Or my older brother Kelvin, who’d summited Everest before the age of thirty-five, married a world-renowned climbing guide he’d met on said expedition, and was currently working through the legalities of converting part of our parents’ old dairy farm into an organic medicinal marijuana growing facility.

Don’t get me started.

Whereas I, on the other hand, was the eminentlylessdaring product of my parents’ union, and I’m sure they looked at me thesame way I did with Hannah, puzzling over the genetic anomaly. When we met for family dinners and the conversation turned to what we were up to in our lives, I was the odd one out by a galaxy or two. Branching out to stock a new range of tools in my small hardware store was never gonna cut it.

Hannah, for all her physical challenges, and possibly even because of them, fit in with the others like the proverbial glove. Whatever mobility assistance she needed for her juvenile idiopathic arthritis at the time—canes, elbow crutches, or wheelchair—didn’t matter one jot to her. She danced, rode horses, and was even learning to sit-ski and planning scuba lessons for the following summer.

I wasn’t complaining, not really. The go-get-’em and don’t-let-anyone-stop-you culture of the O’Connor clan meant they were the perfect family to have your back when life threw a ton of shit your way. And for that, I’d always be grateful. No one planned to be a parent at the tender age of sixteen, let alone a solo parent by twenty, when Hannah was first diagnosed and her mother bailed. But my family was there for the whole ride, and Hannah’s steadfast belief in what she could achieve regardless of her debilitating condition had a lot to do with that same annoying O’Connor mantra.

Even if I didn’t really buy into it for myself.

My whole family, including Hannah, lived for the next challenge life threw at them. Me? Not so much. Give me a small town, a comfy couch, and a great television series to binge, with a bowl of popcorn and my daughter at my side, and I was a happy man.

“The homestead has been here since the Mackenzie was first settled,” Luke offered some background to the station. “It’s been added to and renovated over the years, but its foundation remains the same. The place feels like a warm hug, but you can also sense the struggle those first pioneers went through tryingto farm this land. The Mackenzie is unforgiving. The landscape and weather, brutal at times. And make no mistake, if you wander the hills and get lost, it can be lethal as well.”

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