Ross spent the first couple of days at his parents’ house in San Diego helping Matt and Mia try to keep track of their new aunts, uncles and cousins. His mother had asked the rest of the family to wait until Pat’s children were comfortable with the immediate family before second, third and fourth cousins descended, but Ross knew it was like trying to hold back the tide, and it was only a matter of time before they began to arrive on the doorstep bearing gifts, hugs and painful cheek pinches.
‘Two things to remember,’ he advised Matt and Mia. ‘As soon as Aunt Lucia hugs you, duck and run, otherwise she’ll pinch you on the cheek and she’s got a grip like a Rottweiler. The other thing is to never ever let Cousin Bruno get you in a headlock and rub his knuckles on the top of your head; he’s got hands like concrete. And don’t play cards with your cousins Brad and Raul, because they cheat.’
His parents and sisters were charmed by Mia and Matt’s accents. Ross was proud of them; they had beautiful manners, and were just shy enough to make them appealing instead of awkward. Breda burst into tears when she saw Matt, and Vito blew loudly into his handkerchief.
‘Don’t they like me?’ Matt whispered anxiously to Ross.
‘They’re crying because you look so much like your father,’ he explained.
‘Oh. That’s OK, then.’
Mia clung to Ross. She crept from her bedroom and spent each night with him in his old childhood bed, curled against his back. Matt slept in the same room, in Pat’s old bed.
Ross kept replaying the horrible things he’d said to Danny. During the day he put on a brave face and hid the anguish he was feeling. But at night the feeling that something was wrong with Danny grew. He felt the same way he had in London when he’d instinctively known something important was happening to her. It was like having a gremlin sitting on his shoulder, taunting him.
‘Damn,’ he muttered into the darkness, taking care not to wake Matt and Mia. ‘I’ve turned into Danny’s twin.’
He explained to his family that Danny hadn’t been able to come because she had to work, and everybody agreed that it was a shame because they wanted to meet her. Ross phoned and left a message to say they’d arrived safely, but after that he only dialled the number for Matt and Mia when they wanted to speak to her.
His sisters were amazed by the way he took care of Matt and Mia, as if he’d been doing it for years, and to be honest that was the way it felt.
Ross couldn’t imagine life without them; it was as if they had always been there. Mia found her way onto his knee when the sight of too many new faces overwhelmed her, and Matt looked to him for reassurance and approval.
‘I can’t believe what I’m seeing,’ Carmel told Aoife. ‘It’s like they’re his.’
‘Yeah,’ Aoife smiled maliciously. ‘Pat would be so pissed.’
The following day when Ross discovered Mia playing in the garage with several of her older cousins, he whisked her away and steered her firmly in the direction of the back yard. ‘It’s not a good idea to play in the garage with your bigger cousins, Mia.’
Ross knew all about what took place out in the garage. When he was ten, he’d had his first look at a pair of naked breasts in there, courtesy of his thirteen-year-old cousin Lucrezia. He took Mia inside and handed her over to Carmel with a brief explanation of where he’d found her. Carmel plonked Kevin in Mia’s lap and said, ‘Here, honey, cuddle him—he’s safe enough for another few years.’
‘Ross, go tell your father to hurry up with that wine, lunch is nearly ready,’ Breda ordered, as he tried to slip through the kitchen to the quiet of the den. He reluctantly retraced his steps through a wall of humanity which included several aunts and female cousins and Deirdre. How did his mother manage to cook anything with no room and so much noise? He’d almost made it to the door leading to Vito’s wine cellar when Aunt Lucia popped up and grabbed him.
‘So handsome!’ She pinched his cheek between her thumb and fingers and waggled his head from side to side. ‘So clever! So rich! Why is this one not married yet, Breda?’
Breda whacked the long-handled spoon she was using to stir cake batter hard against the side of the mixing bowl. ‘Don’t get me started, Lucia. It’s a painful subject.’
Deirdre sniggered.
‘Yeah, Aunt Lucia,’ Ross tried to ease away. ‘Don’t get her started about why Deirdre and I aren’t married yet.’
Deirdre scowled.
Whack! Whack! went their mother’s spoon.
Lucia hauled Ross back down. ‘What’s the matter? Are you gay?’
Ross struggled free.
‘He’s not gay!’ Breda exclaimed indignantly.
‘He’s got a phobia about commitment, you know—like those guys you see on Jerry Springer,’ Deirdre said through a mouthful of roasted nuts.
‘Ahhh!’ Lucia and several of his cousins nodded understandingly.
He wrenched open the door to the cellar, muttering ‘For chrissakes.’
‘Ross Fabello! Do not blaspheme!’ Breda shouted as the door closed behind him.
Vito stood in the cellar with a bottle of wine in each hand and his glasses perched on the end of his nose, studying the labels. The cool, shadowy room was an oasis of calm after the chaos in the kitchen. Vito looked at Ross over his glasses. ‘Lucia got you.’
Ross sank onto a seat that he’d made in woodwork class when he was eleven. The legs were uneven and it wobbled. He rubbed his abused cheek. ‘Twice, first she grabbed my cheek, and then she asked if I was still single because I’m gay. Deirdre joined in and said I had a phobia about commitment. They’re worse than a coven of witches.’
‘You don’t look too bothered about it,’ his father observed.
Ross shrugged. ‘Of course not.’
Vito nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’ve changed since you went to New Zealand.’ He set about opening a bottle of red wine. ‘You used to be a big bundle of anger and impatience, something was always wrong with you. Your mother and I worried, but when you came to visit when you were doing the movie stuff we noticed a big difference. You looked a lot happier.’
Ross didn’t answer. He watched his father open the bottle of wine. Vito treated it like a religious experience. He could tell by the aroma or the look of a wine whether it had grown on the sunny or the shady side of a hill. He not only sniffed the cork, but checked the size and how porous it was. He liked to taste it with a variety of foods, first bread, then bread with salt, and finally bread with cheese.
‘When you come home this time, you no longer look so happy. Instead, you look sad—very sad and very troubled.’ Vito sniffed the wine, sipped it, rolled it around in his mouth and swallowed. ‘I think about it, and I know the reason why you’re unhappy.’ He pulled another wineglass from a rack mounted on the wall and filled it halfway. ‘You love Danny and you had a fight with her.’
Ross took the glass and nodded. ‘Promise me you won’t tell Ma.’
Vito tipped back his head and tried to identify the flavours in the after-taste left by the wine. Blackcurrant, plum and spice. ‘OK.’
Ross bought time by sniffing, sipping and rolling the liquid. ‘We had a fight, a bad one. I said some terrible things, and then she pretty much kicked me out of the house. She said she couldn’t come with us because she had to work.’
‘You believe her?’
‘No.’
Vito removed his glasses and put them in the pocket of the plum-coloured sweater that Breda had knitted him the Christmas before. ‘You don’t know what’s wrong between you and Danny?’
‘I don’t have a clue. I’ve never met a woman who’s so damned difficult and unreasonable and…’ he trailed away shaking his head.
‘Sounds like your mother.’
If that wasn’t a good enough reason to stay away from Danny, then what was? Ross propped his elbows on his knees and rubbed his neck. ‘I just keep feeling there’s something wrong, that I shouldn’t have left her alone or that I missed something.’
‘Then you’ve got to go back to New Zealand.’
Ross stopped rubbing. ‘You think so?’
Vito nodded. ‘If you got a voice inside you saying something is wrong, you mustn’t ignore it. If I’d done that the day your mother had the twins, they all would have died.’
Ross had heard the story about how Vito had suddenly got a feeling that something was wrong at home. At the risk of being fired, he’d walked out of work and come home to find Breda in early labour and haemorrhaging.
‘Imagine what would have happened if I’d ignored that feeling?’
There was a sound of feet thumping down the wooden stairs, and Matt appeared with Ross’s cellphone in his hand. ‘It rang, but I didn’t get to it in time. The caller ID said it was Auntie Danny. She left a message.’ He held the phone out to Ross.
Ross and Vito exchanged looks.
Ross punched the keypad to access his voicemail, and heard Danny say, ‘Ross, it’s…it’s Danny.’ She sounded nervous and upset. ‘I…I wondered if you…’ Her voice broke: ‘Ross, please come home…I need you.’
Ross enlisted Deirdre and his brother-in-law Tom’s help in finding the earliest flight to Auckland, while Carmel and his mother packed his bag. He took Matt and Mia aside and told them he needed to talk to Auntie Danny about something really important, and he couldn’t do it over the telephone. Matt looked worried.
‘Are you going to ask her to marry you?’ Mia asked.
Ross was momentarily speechless. Fortunately, his fertile imagination came to his rescue. ‘Auntie Danny beat me to it. She asked me the first day I met her.’ Or at least, that was how he chose to interpret Danny’s suggestion he get knotted.
Mia’s eyes widened. ‘She did?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told her I’d think about it.’
Ross could tell that Matt wasn’t buying it.
‘That’s good,’ Mia said. ‘If you’re going to keep doing that sex thing with each other, Deryl said you should get married.’
‘Mia!’ Breda reproved. She, Lucia and the cousins were unashamedly eavesdropping from the kitchen.
‘Sorry, Granny Breda.’
‘That’s alright, darlin”. Breda swept her away from Ross, adding, ‘It’s not your fault.’ She nudged Lucia. ‘See? I told you he wasn’t gay.’
‘What about his phobia?’ Lucia asked.
‘He got over it,’ Breda retorted and hustled Mia away.
Aoife and Annie arrived with their husbands, Pete and Joe, and their kids, and wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Vito told them about Ross’s feeling that something was wrong with Danny and her message.
‘Oh!’ Annie breathed. ‘Who’d have thought Ross would turn into a sensitive New Age guy?’
Joe looked at Pete, who looked at Tom.
‘None of us, that’s for sure,’ Tom said.
‘Sensitive New Age guy, my ass,’ Aoife snorted. ‘He’s turned into Danny’s twin.’
‘I’ll never make that fucking flight at this rate!’ The sensitive New Age guy yelled from upstairs.
‘Ross Igor Padraig Oreste Fabello, mind your language!’ Breda shouted back. ‘You’re setting a bad example for your children!’
‘I bet you each a twenty that Danny fluffs his names during the wedding service,’ Joe told Tom and Pete, but neither of them took his bet: it was a given that anybody marrying a Fabello would make a mess of that part of the ceremony, because the kids all had four names apiece, and they were a mixture of Italian and Irish.
Ross hurried downstairs carrying a small holdall and shrugging into his black leather jacket. ‘I’ll never make it.’
Pete dangled a set of car keys. ‘Sure you will. We’ll take the squad car.’
Ross arrived in Auckland at 5.30 a.m. local time, two days before Christmas. The face staring back at him from the mirror in the airplane toilet was haggard, red-eyed and sported thick, black stubble—he’d gone way past five o’clock shadow somewhere over Hawaii. He looked like a serial killer.
First and Business Class were full, so he’d had to suffer the indignity and discomfort of travelling Economy. He hadn’t slept, and pushed away the airline meals. The flight seemed to take forever: if Ross could’ve got out and pushed the plane, he would have.
It took ages to clear Customs, so he caught the early morning traffic heading into Auckland and didn’t arrive at the house until after nine o’clock. Danny wasn’t home and her car was missing from the garage. Next to the phone in the kitchen was a sheet of paper with a blue logo and Danny’s name, date of birth, address and hospital number printed in the top left-hand corner. Beneath that was an appointment for a biopsy for a lump in her left breast.
Ross sagged against the counter.
Danny had a lump in her breast. And she was having a biopsy…
Right about now.
A receptionist sat behind a sleek white counter tapping away on her computer. She looked up at Ross, and her professional smile of welcome faltered as six foot one of tired, anxious combustible Irish/Italian male loomed over her. She took in his rumpled clothes, bloodshot eyes and stubbled chin, and the way his black curls stuck up in two points like the Devil’s horns, and shuddered.
‘I’m here to see Daneka Lawton,’ Ross told her hoarsely. ‘Can you show me where she is?’ He gave her his name.
‘If you’d just like to take a seat, sir, I’ll find out if we have anybody by that name.’ The receptionist scurried away.
Ross looked around the waiting room. Several women who were waiting to be called for their appointment watched him warily from behind their magazines. Fear and impatience oozed from his pores like sweat.
Minutes passed and the phone rang and still the receptionist didn’t return. Ross gave up waiting and leaned across the desk to check the computer screen. Daneka Lawton was in Consulting Room 6—he saw a sign saying Consulting Rooms and followed it.
The receptionist met him in the corridor outside the rooms. ‘You’re not allowed down here!’ she cried. Ross counted the numbers on the closed doors and apologized to two women sitting in an alcove wearing pale-pink hospital gowns and not much else. ‘I’m Danny Lawton’s fiancé.’ He reached Consulting Room 6, grasped the door handle, and hoped he hadn’t gotten it wrong.
She was sitting sideways on an examination table wearing one of the pink gowns, looking small and lost and unbearably sad. Her eyes widened when she saw him. ‘Ross!’
Ross crossed the room and gathered her into his arms, hugging her so tightly it was a wonder he didn’t break a rib.
‘I…can’t…breathe…’ Danny gasped.
‘Sorry.’ He let go and cupped her face between his hands. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
She gulped and swiped at the tears running down her cheeks. ‘I did.’
‘I mean, why didn’t you tell me sooner? You knew before I went away, didn’t you?’
‘I didn’t want to be a bother.’
‘For an intelligent woman, you can be really stupid.’
Danny put her arms around his waist beneath the leather jacket and rested her cheek against his chest. She sighed and closed her eyes. ‘I know.’
The door burst open and the receptionist and a security guard rushed in.
‘That’s him!’ the receptionist cried. ‘He looked at my computer!’ She turned to Danny. ‘Are you alright?’
The guard looked at Ross, and Danny snuggled in his arms. She didn’t look like a woman in need of protection.
The receptionist was feeling braver now that she had the guard in tow. ‘He said he’s your fiancé,’ she told Danny.
Danny didn’t care what Ross had said.
‘You’ll have to make him leave,’ the receptionist told the guard.
Danny clung to Ross. ‘But I need him!’
‘Is this man your fiancé?’ the guard asked.
‘Yes,’ she said.
The receptionist wasn’t convinced. ‘Where’s the ring?’ she demanded suspiciously.
Danny could tell Ross was getting angry, so spoke up quickly before he said something that would get him thrown out. ‘Do you think I’m going to let him choose it? I want something nice and big. Despite the way he looks, he’ll go for small and tasteful.’
If anybody thought it was strange that a woman waiting to have part of her breast removed was quibbling over the size of her engagement ring, nobody thought to mention it. The receptionist had seen stranger things, and as for Danny—just having Ross with her made everything better. With him beside her, she could weather any storm.
‘Oh.’ The receptionist looked disappointed. It would have been nice to have something exciting happen for a change. ‘Well, the radiographer will be along in a moment to collect Ms Lawton, and then you’ll have to sit in the waiting room.’
Not in a million years, Ross thought, but forced a smile for Danny’s sake.
The moment the door closed behind them, he stopped smiling. ‘I’m sorry I said those terrible things to you when we fought. You’re not emotionally…’ He couldn’t finish.
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve said worse to you.’ She stroked his stubble. ‘You look like a serial killer.’
‘Thank you.’
Danny clutched the edges of her gown. ‘I’ve got a lump.’
‘I know. I saw the letter on the kitchen counter back at the house, and figured you’d left it there for me to see.’ Ross covered her hands with his and gently prised the edges of the gown apart. He looked at Danny’s small, beautiful breasts and up into her vulnerable, tear-filled eyes. ‘Where?’ he asked quietly.
She pressed her fingers against the side of her left breast.
He laid his big hand over her hand and breast so tenderly that Danny started crying again. ‘I’ll probably have to have a mastectomy. I wish I could have them both removed rather than sit around waiting for the cancer to get me.’
He couldn’t speak, only nod.
‘It wouldn’t bother you?’ She cupped his hand. ‘Not having these?’
Ross covered both her breasts with his palms. ‘These I can do without.’ He pressed a hand against her heart. ‘This I can’t.’
Tears slid down Danny’s cheeks, and her nose ran. ‘You glibtongued serial killer, you,’ she sobbed. ‘I love you.’
‘Thank you, sweetheart. I love you, too. Do you know your nose is running?’
She laughed and buried her face against his chest and let him hold her while she waited for the radiographer. He wouldn’t wallow in pity and pussyfoot around. He’d kick her in the butt and help her fight.
‘What made you change your mind and call me?’ Ross asked.
Danny thought about it. ‘I grew up,’ she said simply.
A young woman in navy blue trousers and a white tunic stepped into the consulting room. Her jaw dropped at the sight of her patient sitting on the examination table with a big, dark, dishevelled-looking man holding her naked breasts.
‘It’s alright,’ Danny explained, ‘he’s my fiancé.’
Ross wouldn’t leave. He stayed and held Danny’s hand while they did the biopsy. Danny didn’t even flinch, but Ross felt as if he was going to pass out.
The doctor saw them afterwards in her office. She explained the results would be delayed due to the Christmas break.
‘Whatever the results show, Danny, we’ve caught this early. In the meantime, try and get some rest. Stay home from work.’ She looked at Ross. ‘Can you make sure she does that?’
‘Yes, even if I have to tie her to the bed.’
On their way out, the receptionist stopped them. Some of the patients sitting in the waiting room had alerted her to just who Ross was and who Danny must be.
‘Tell me, are you who I think you are?’ she asked.
‘Not now,’ Ross said curtly. But she was looking at Danny, not him.
‘You’re Danny! That writer bloke’s sister-in-law.’
Danny nodded.
The writer bloke scowled.
‘This is him,’ she said. ‘The writer bloke: RF O’Rourke.’
The receptionist still hadn’t forgiven Ross for looking at her computer. ‘Never heard of him.’ She smiled at Danny. ‘Get plenty of rest won’t you, dear? We’ll contact you the moment we get the results.’
They spent the week waiting for the biopsy results driving slowly northwards to the Bay of Islands. Ross was amazed at how strong and cheerful Danny was, and wished he had her strength and optimism. He was humbled when Danny told him that her positive attitude was largely due to him.
‘You made me see that this isn’t the worst thing that could happen. If the results are positive and it’s cancer, I’ll have treatment; and if they’re negative, I’ll count my blessings.’
The Bay of Islands was a magical place with its pale jade waters, pretty islands and golden beaches fringed by pohutukawa trees with their scarlet blooms. Danny warned they might have trouble finding somewhere to stay at this time of year, because the whole of New Zealand went on holiday to the beach, and the country shut down for almost a month.
They got lucky and found a little bach with an outdoor toilet and shower. Possums ran across the roof at night, and moreporks called in the trees. It was idyllic and provided just the kind of rest the doctor had ordered. They called Matt and Mia on the speaker phone in Ross’s car on Christmas Day to wish them a Merry Christmas.
‘I opened your present from Auntie Danny, Uncle Ross,’ Mia told him.
Danny protested. ‘Mia! You shouldn’t open other people’s presents.’
‘What did Auntie Danny give me, Mia?’ Ross asked.
‘A whole lot of socks—and none of them match.’
‘Uncle Ross said you asked him to marry you,’ Matt said.
‘No, I didn’t,’ Danny replied.
‘Yes, you did,’ Ross insisted. ‘How could you forget something that important?’
‘Because I never asked you, that’s how!’
‘Yes, you did: you told me to get knotted.’
‘That doesn’t mean—’
Ross kissed her to shut her up. He looked into Danny’s startled golden eyes and murmured against her mouth, ‘I’ll think about it.’
Three days later, Danny received the news. She didn’t have cancer.