Page 165 of Just One Look
A Water Sign
Luka spentthe next four months rehabbing. Not talking about his professional future anymore, because right now, there was rehab, and he was doing it. And when the All Blacks were halfway through their Northern Tour in October, and their starting No. 8 went down injured, Luka flew over to replace him for the last two games, because he was fit again. He’d told Elizabeth at the airport, when he was waiting to go through Security and she was biting her tongue on the “Be careful” that was trying so hard to escape her, “If I can play, I have to do it, and I can play.”
He’d played the second half of that first game, against Ireland, with a determination and a ferocity that took her breath away, pushing as hard in the last minute he was out there as he had in the first, because that was how intense his preparation for those minutes had been. Not just in the past six months. In the past thirty-three years. They’d won that game, and the look on Luka’s face had been transcendent. That he’d battled his way back. That they’d won. That he’d helped.
And three-quarters of the way through the final game, a brutal battle against the French, he went down.
He was running with the ball, nearly to the tryline, when it happened. Five meters out, then four, covering nearly a meter with each stride, moving like there was no stopping him. The tackler was coming at him hard, and he didn’t sidestep. He pushed through him, or he tried to. The man caught him low, though, and completely wrong, and Luka was lifted off his feet, twisting in the air, upended over the tackler’s back, and finally crashing down onto the point of his left shoulder.
Elizabeth had been sitting bolt upright on Nyree’s couch, but now, she was up, her hands at her mouth, her heart slamming in her chest. Nyree was up, too, shouting, “Spear tackle! And that’s a try!”
Elizabeth barely heard her. The referee had his hand up over his head, was blowing the whistle, because Nyree was right. Luka had landed with his right arm above his head and had, somehow, touched the ball down across the tryline, because even upside-down, he’d known where it was. He’d placed that ball instead of trying to protect himself, and it was a try. Players were doing some jumping, some celebrating, and the official was signaling again for the penalty that could put the All Blacks ten points up, and the red card that was throwing the tackler out of the game.
Hugh, the captain, wasn’t paying attention to that. He’d run to Luka, still on his back, as soon as that tackle had happened, and now, he turned to signal to the sideline.
He didn’t need to signal. The trainer was already running out.
After that, they brought out the gurney.
She didn’t know, afterwards, how she’d breathed while she waited. Sitting there on Nyree’s couch, her steepled hands at her mouth, as thirty minutes turned to sixty, waiting.
She’d always been able to compartmentalize. Through college. Through med school. Through ten years of surgery, shaking off the bad things and the good things alike and going on to the next class, the next heartache, the next procedure, tucking the feelings into their compartment to be dealt with later. Or to be dealt with never.
She couldn’t do it, not anymore. Not for this. She could sit frozen on this couch with Nyree and wait, helpless as any husband, any wife, any parent waiting for the outcome of surgery, and that was all. And when she heard Luka’s voice on the phone at last, she cried.
* * *
Two days later,and another bright, sunny morning in Auckland, the springtime breeze pushing white-bellied sailboats across the sparkling blue waters of Waitemata Harbour, the puffy clouds blowing across the sky. There might be a rain shower or two later, but right now, the sun was shining.
She wasn’t feeling that sun, though. She was at the airport, in an International Arrivals area crowded with women and babies and kids, watching for the players to come out of the gate, her eyes glued to the screen that would provide the first sight of them before they rounded the corner.
Beside her, Arielle kicked her feet in the pushchair and started to twist and complain. “No worries,” Nyree told her baby girl. “Dad’ll be here soon.” The tension clearly running high in her, as it was in all of them. The tension, and the happiness. The end of the rugby season, and the return of their man.
The coaches around the corner first, and the tension winding higher in the crowd. Players starting to straggle through the doors, pushing their luggage trolleys ahead of them, smiling and tired and looking for home.Hugh Latimer gathering two toddlers into his arms, giving Josie a kiss, laughing out loud.
That game against France had been Hugh’s last in the black jersey. He’d jogged off the field at minute seventy-five, after he’d been substituted out in order to receive his full tribute, and had clapped his hands over his head at the crowd who’d stood and applauded as he’d gone. He’d applauded for them, because that was part of the All Blacks legend, and part of their mana, too. That they were grateful, and they were humble. They weren’t special. They were just rugby players, carrying the mantle of that jersey for a little while and then passing it on. Proud to be a part of it, but not owning it, because it was bigger than them. It was part of the beating heart of New Zealand, like the silver fern and the haka, the golden beaches of the Far North and the snow-covered Southern Alps, and it mattered.
You didn’t have to be the special one, the famous one, for your life and your work to matter. You just had to be part of something important, and to do your part with everything in you. To lend your shoulder to the scrum, or to teach a resident how to move with delicacy through the fragile tissues of the brain. To help your mate across the line in whatever way you could do it, because life was an individual effort, and it was a team sport, too.
Maybe her dad was right that you had to be tough in this world, but you also had to have a heart. You had to have a soul, or what was the point?
Marko, now, with his trolley, and Arielle somehow spotting him, squirming, trying to get out of the restraining seatbelt. Marko unfastening her with deft hands and cuddling her close, his pirate’s face split by a purely sweet grin, then lifting Nyree with his other arm, swinging her around, and kissing her. And Nyree, who’d painted the tour away in a frenzy of missing him, with her hands on his face and then her head on his chest, like she could breathe him in, and she wanted to.
Luka was nearly the last one out. In his blue-checked white shirt and blue trousers, one more uniform out of the many he’d worn for thirteen years, and none of them more coveted than the one that was all black. Luka, with that gray at his temples and his chin shadowed by more than a day’s worth of beard after the round-the-clock flight, and something shadowed about his eyes, too. Holding himself stiffly, because he hurt.
He didn’t look around. He came straight to her, pulled her in with his good right arm, held her tight, and didn’t say anything. She held him just as close, her hands around his head as if she could hold him safe there, protecting him from the pain. And finally, he said, against her hair, “It’s over.”
The tears rose, and she let them. She said, “I know. And I’m sorry.”
He blew out a breath. Long and slow and controlled. “I made the choice to try. I tried, and I don’t regret it. And now it’s time to move on.” He kissed her, then, finally, brushed the tears away from her cheeks with his thumb, smiled crookedly, and said, “No worries, baby. She’ll be right.”
* * *
He’d thoughtit might be hard to see her, that it would all come crashing down on him. It didn’t. He sat back twenty minutes later in the passenger seat of her new cherry-red BMW, the car she’d bought to replace the used white Toyota that she’d left behind in the States, “because why shouldn’t I be colorful? Colorful doesn’t have to mean arrogant. It can just mean …”
“Confident,” he’d said. “Alive.” She was, and so was he. He thought about those injections he’d be getting tomorrow and realized that he was grateful they’d probably be his last. Now that he knew it was over, he could feel the relief of putting down the burden he’d carried. He’d let rugby hold everything precious and valuable about his life, and that load was heavy. If Elle needed a life? So did he. And he was going to get it.
He said, “I want to get married before Christmas. What d’you reckon?”
