Page 115 of Just One Look
“That’s the one. He could be heading toward the billion-dollar mark.”
“No. Seriously?”
“Yeh. South Island boy, came up the hard way. Still working, but also does good works now. Funds things to do with kids, young people, helping them get ahead after a rough start. Got a house on Waiheke, has he? One in Queenstown as well, because I’ve seen a photo, and it’s pretty bloody spectacular. She’s landed on her feet, then.”
“Yes, but they really do love each other. She’s so happy, she glows. With my dad, she was alwaystryingto be happy. Cheerful, you know, in that Kiwi way. Now, she actually is. And it’s not the money, at least it doesn’t seem like it to me. It’s him.”
He said, “That’s good news, then. Sounds like they made you feel welcome. What was the disastrous detonation?”
She sighed and laid her head against his shoulder, and he put his arm around her. This was nice. He could get used to this. She said, “I had to tell Lauren about you.”
“Oh.” He let that sink in. “She didn’t know already?”
“No. Piper hadn’t told her. It was so awkward. I felt …” She held her thumb and forefinger a couple of centimeters apart. “About this high. I may not have much of a life, but at least I’ve always had the moral high ground. It’s cold comfort, but I’ve had it. Now, I’m down here wallowing in the swamp with the gators.”
He said, “Tell me.”
* * *
There’d beensilence after she’d dropped that bomb. The reverberations of the detonation, you could call that. Piper had looked away, out the expanse of black windows at nothing, and Lauren had just looked shocked.
No choice but to go on, now that she’d brought it up. “I didn’t know who he was when I first ran into him.Literallyran into him. He caught my dog—my foster dog, temporary dog—when he ran away from me, my first day in the country. He hurt his neck more doing it, too. The neck he’s just had surgery on. He wasn’t too thrilled with me, but he invited me for coffee. He didn’t know who I was, of course, and I didn’t get his name or know whohewas. Not until the next day.”
Wait. This wasn’t “Tell the story of your romance.” It was explanation time. Probably apology time, though that was trickier. If she were sorry enough to apologize, she’d be sorry enough not to do it, and let’s face it, she wasn’t. “The next day,” she went on, “he came into the hospital for steroid injections for his disc rupture, and obviously, I recognized him from the day before, and I recognized his name, too. So I knew, but he didn’t.”
“And you didn’t tell him,” Lauren said. “Why not?” Not accusingly, just asking, but her eyes were watchful.
It wasn’t like Elizabeth hadn’t thought about that one. She’d thought about it plenty. She just hadn’t come up with a great response. “I don’t think,” she said slowly, “that the answer to that reflects very well on me.”
“Because you hated me, still,” Piper said. That had come out of a throat almost closed with emotion, because her voice was tight. There was a faint tremble in her body, too, and Elizabeth wished she could run over to the other couch and hug her, the way Maddy had done. That she could access that easy affection, that warmth and sweetness, in the way all three generations of women in this house could. “I tried so hard,” Piper went on, her voice just above a whisper. “I tried so hard to make you like me. And you hated me anyway.” Her voice broke, and the slow tears began to roll down her cheeks. She was still beautiful, because she could never be anything else, but for once, Elizabeth didn’t have mixed feelings about that. Being beautiful didn’t matter when you were hurting this much.
She couldn’t hug her, but she could slip to her knees in front of the couch where Piper sat huddled, take her hand, and say, “No. I didn’t hate you. I hated myself. For my envy, and my coldness. I tried not to be that way, and I just … couldn’t. Because everybody loved you, and love felt to me like a zero-sum game. When you have as much love in you as you and your mum do, you can … you can share it. When you don’t have enough, you feel like you have to hoard it. Holding it back feels like the only power you have.”
“You did have somebody to love you, though,” Piper said. “Your dad thought you were perfect. He was always asking you about your schoolwork, and talking to you about it. Saying how brilliant your mind was, and your future.”
“Excuse me?” Elizabeth said. “I was never enough for my dad. Never. I’m still not. And perfect? No. That was exactly it. In surgery, you’re always going for perfection. You won’t achieve it, because people aren’t perfect, but that’s your standard. When you’re raising a kid, though? Expecting perfection,demandingperfection—it freezes them. How can you try something new if you have to be perfect just to be acceptable? Just to beloved?How can you take a risk? That’s what I was. That’swhoI was. I was frozen in my fear and my envy and my misery and my horribleawkwardness,and you seemed to have everything I didn’t. You were beautiful and charming and so socially … graceful, and I just exactly wasn’t. That’s why. It wasn’t you, ever. It was me.”
She was still there, still holding Piper’s hand, and Piper wasn’t crying anymore. She was wiping the tears from her cheeks, her mouth still trembling, but a smile appearing anyway, saying, “I was so jealous ofyou. You fit there, in that house, in that life, and I was always just visiting.”
“We were both wrong,” Elizabeth said. “Or maybe we just couldn’t see. We can see now, though. What I am, the good and the bad—it doesn’t make you less, and it’s the same for you. We don’t have to compare anymore, do we? Please, Piper. I’ve always been so ashamed of the way I was to you. To both of you. Please give me a chance.” Her own voice was shaking now, and the hand holding Piper’s was shaking, too. She said, “I’ve always thought I didn’t have enough emotions. Ever since I came to New Zealand, though, I’ve had nothingbutemotions, and honestly? I hate it. It’s like being battered by a …”
“A cyclone.” That was Lauren’s voice, coming quietly from the other couch.
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t even have the excuse that I didn’t know what love is, because my mom loved me like that, and so did Memaw.” Her voice cracked, and she tried to laugh and said, “See? More emotion. You asked me about Luka. That was the thing, with Luka. The emotion. I kept thinking, this won’t work, and not wanting to tell him who I was—who I was to you—because I thought it would wreck it, and I couldn’t stand that. And at the same time, I knew I had to tell him, and every day I didn’t, I made it worse. And then I had a sort of … breakdown, to do with my mom. With how she …” Another heaving-in of breath. “How she died. And he was wonderful. I’m sorry, Piper. I am. But he just keeps on being wonderful, and I can’t …”
“You can’t leave him alone,” Piper said. “Because he matters more than I do. Of course he does. No, really. It makes sense.” She took her hand out of Elizabeth’s, leaving Elizabeth in the extremely awkward position of kneeling in front of somebody who hated her.
Right, then. Back on her own couch, trying to get her bearings, as dizzy as if she were on a ship at sea in the middle of a storm. See, this was the thing about excess emotion. It was somessy.Itwreckedyou.
Lauren said, “Darling. Is that fair?”
“No,” Piper said. “It’s what Birdie—what Elizabeth said. She’s got everything now. She’s got a brilliant career, because she had discipline and focus and brains and all of that, and I don’t have any of it. I’m still living with my mum and a stepdad, just like when I was sixteen, and it’s nobody’s fault but mine. I thought I had it at last. I had the big white wedding, had the pretty apartment with the sea view, had the baby. But I didn’t have it after all. I know that none of that is her fault, but I can’t help it. Because it’s Luka, too. Luka was the best thing in my life. He was my shelter, and then he wasn’t, and that was my fault, too. He had to know how much this would hurt me, though, and he did it anyway. They both did. So I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
After that? She left.
* * *
Luka was sore.He was tired. He was groggy. Mostly, though, he was furious.
“And then,” Elizabeth finished, “I had a couple of extremely awkward cups of tea with Lauren and Angus while we waited for the helicopter. Never have an emotional confrontation on an island, because there is no escape. Lauren told me to give Piper time, but, see? What did I do when I got back to Auckland? Drove straight here to see you, that’s what, and that’s not going to help. Well, first I took the ticket off my windshield. Sixty dollars. On the one hand, I got a helicopter ride over the Gulf and the city, and it was all extremely beautiful. On the other hand, I came face-to-face with all my inadequacies, and apparently I’m still inadequate.”
Luka said, “How the hell are you inadequate?” Not exactly therapy-speak, probably, but that was what he had. Fury.
“I don’t love her enough,” Elizabeth said. “Ididn’tlove her enough. I grew up not being loved enough, and I know how much it hurts, but here I am anyway.”
“You grew up,” Luka said, “not believing you deserved anything. And now you know you do. That’s why you came to see me. Why do we not deserve to be happy? And that part about me—that’s rubbish. I’m doing this to hurt her? It’s thirteen years ago! Did she tell you why we broke up?”
“No,” she said. “But clearly, it just about destroyed her.”
“Maybe it should have,” he said. “Because she just about destroyed me.”
