Page 44 of Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire)
That wasn’t quite true. I’d taken her and Hope to San Francisco for the weekend once, and Karen had brought her school backpack and that same little duffel. I’d thought she didn’t care about clothes, but that wasn’t it. She didn’thaveclothes.
Her chin was up, exactly like Hope’s when her pride was on the line, and she said, “Which is no big deal.” And then her expressive face shifted. “But I think you should talk to Hope. I think she’s freaking out. It’s cool to move and all, but it’s…it’s weird. I almost called you, but then I thought…you had work. Anyway, we did it.” She swung her rubbish bag. “I’ll go put these away, I guess.”
“You do that,” I said, then headed to the master bedroom. Hope had laid the clothes on the bed and opened the suitcase, and now, she was pulling something out of it.
Something absolutely, positively hideous.
“Is there a spot in the living room for this?” she asked. “Maybe in a basket by the couch or something?”
“No,” I said. “You can’t want that. I have a mohair throw out there, and an alpaca one for winter.” Knit into chevrons of natural light and dark gray, to be precise. Tasteful. Elegant. Not a series of…starbursts, or flowers, or however you’d describe that—my designer’s mind balked at even attempting to find a word—thatthingthat assaulted my eyes and stabbed every finer feeling to death.
“I want this,” Hope said, her face settling into stubborn lines. “It can be in a basket. It can be in abox.But I want this one.”
“You can’t want it,” I said. “You have taste, and that’s awful.”
“I know it’s awful, but it’s mine.” She was hugging the hundred-percent-acrylic monstrosity to her as if it were a baby. “My great-grandmother made it for my mother while she was pregnant with me. It’s been on my couch my whole life, and Karen’s whole life, too. It’s been…it’s been…it’s ours.”
I opened my mouth to tell her no. To tell her absolutely not. To tell her I wasn’t having anything that horrible in my house. And then I realized.
My house.
I closed my mouth, sat on the bed beside Hope’s heap of cheap clothes on their wire hangers, and said, “Tell me.”
Her face worked, her mouth moved, and nothing came out.
“What?’ I asked.
“My…my apartment.” Her voice was so hesitant, and it pierced me all the more for that. “It’s the only place I’ve ever lived, you know? It’s the only place Karen’s ever lived. I know it’s awful, but it’s like this afghan. It’s like this vase I brought that you’re going to hate, but—Hemi, I need to put flowers in that vase and put it on the kitchen counter, even though it doesn’t go and it’s all wrong. It’s…it’s my mom, and it’s us.” The tears were shining in her eyes now. “You’re going to think that’s stupid. Why wouldn’t we want to leave that place and move in here? But mymomwas there, in that apartment. It was the last place she was. And when we locked the door behind us and I thought, this is the last time…it was…like…” A single crystal tear escaped and traced a slow path down her cheek. “Like losing her all over again. I was saying goodbye, but this time, it’s forever.”
“Aw, sweetheart,” I said helplessly, then put my thumb out and wiped that tear away. Her throat worked, a few more tears escaped, and I wiped those away, too. And then I took her in my arms and finally felt the convulsive heave of a sob.
She was crying, and I wasglad.Glad she had a safe place to do that. Glad that I was here, and that she was. Glad I had her.
“You can have your horrible throw,” I said against her hair. “You can have your vase. You can have whatever you want.”
“I won’t…” She sat up and wiped the heels of her hands across her cheeks, and I got up and found her the box of tissues. “Thanks,” she said, and blew her nose. I tried to remember when, before Hope, a woman had blown her nose in front of me. Not for a long time, I knew that. “I won’t put itonthe couch,” she said. “I know it’s ugly, but Karen and I need to have something that’s ours, something from our life. And nothing from our life was anything very special.”
“Except your mother.” People say,his heart hurt.That was what was happening now. My chest literally ached. “Your mother was special.”
Hope shook her head so violently that her blonde curls swung. “No, she wasn’t. That’s the point. She was ordinary. She worked in an office, and she made bad choices about men. She was like a million other women, just like I am. But she loved us. She thoughtwewere special. We…when she was alive, we mattered. And she mattered to us.”
I sat a minute, then said, “Thatisspecial, then. That’s everything, isn’t it? Do you want to know about my parents?” I didn’t know why I wanted to tell her, suddenly, but I did.
She gave her nose a final wipe. “Yes. Please.”
I took her hand in mine, threaded my fingers through hers, took a breath, and told her what I’d told nobody since Anika. The things that weakened me, that hurt me. I made myself vulnerable in a way I never did, because it was stupid, and it was pointless, and it was dangerous. I told her the truth. I said, “My mum and dad both drank too much. Or call it what it was. They were—theyare—alcoholics. You said your mum and Karen’s dad had flaming rows. Well, that was my house as well. Chaos. A state house—you’d call it public housing—in South Auckland, full of rubbish and cigarette smoke and worse, and the kinds of words you can’t take back. The two of them getting warnings for causing a disruption, then having more rows about that. And nothing that was ours. Nothing to hold on to.”
“Which is why you like things so orderly now,” she said. “Why you need control and quiet.”
I looked into her clear eyes and saw the waters of Manukau Harbour, heard the lonely calls of the seabirds wheeling over the mudflats on days when I’d ride my bike out there after school, needing the space and the peace. “Yes. And I had a younger sister, too, though I didn’t look after her the way you did Karen.”
She had her palm against my cheek now, and I put my own hand over hers to hold it there. I felt the healing in that touch, and I wanted to give her the same thing. “My mum left. She moved to Aussie for a new fella when I was twelve, and she took my sister with her. She left me with my dad. I didn’t blame her for leaving. I blamed her for not taking me.”
“Oh, Hemi.”
“Yeh. After a few years, my Koro took me in. But I had a heart full of anger by then, no doubt about that. I got it under control, and then I got it more that way. But all that’s to say—I understand missing people. Leaving Koro and Anika and coming here alone was the hardest thing I’d ever done, and they were still alive.”
“But not leaving your parents.”
