Phoenix was difficult, refusing to take off the riding hat but unable to see properly to walk upstairs in it either. Hana ended up carrying her up the back spiral staircase to the middle floor and then up the next level to Alfred and Leslie’s apartment over the west wing of the house.
“What have we here?” Alfred said with a good-natured smile as Phoenix make a drunk looking beeline towards him and Hana stood at the top of the stairs and detonated. “Leslie!” he shouted in panic, as Hana put both hands over her eyes and heard her own sobs dragging themselves from her chest in sickening, ragged breaths.
Strong arms surrounded her body as Leslie’s heavy but surprisingly nimble footsteps reached her and she heard the woman say, “Bastard,” as she buried Hana’s wet face in her ample bosom and confirmed her very worst fears.
Hana cried pathetically until there was nothing left except a ringing in her ears and a bone weary exhaustion. Alfred occupied Phoenix in the lounge while Leslie comforted her mother in the large master bedroom overlooking the boundary fence from its high vantage point. “Oh God,” Hana wept, “what’s wrong with me? Not again.”
“Hush child,” Leslie’s anger was open and filled with violence. “Don’t say that. You don’t deserve none of this!”
When Hana reached a point of utter numbness and even the waterfall of tears had finished, Leslie went to make her a cup of tea. Hana laid on her side on the wide bed, watching the bush through the long French windows which in summer, led onto a tiny balcony. Hana wondered absently if this was Miriam’s bed, or if Alfred and Leslie had bought another, preferring to start again rather than lay on an adulteress’ mattress. What did it matter? They were in their seventies. Perhaps it was no longer important.
It wasn’t Leslie who brought the drink, but Alfred. He laid it on the bedside table but to Hana’s surprise, he didn’t leave. He set his rangy frame down gently on the bed next to Hana’s prone body and stroked her hair with gnarled, work-worn hands. “Leslie told me,” he said without preamble. “Apparently she turned up last night looking for him. They had dinner in the restaurant and talked until late. Then he came back to see her this morning.”
“He ate in the restaurant?” Hana sat up and turned towards her father-in-law. She heard Leslie sigh from the doorway.
“I wasn’t gonna tell her that part,” she chastised her husband. “She cooked for the good-for-nothing...” She tutted instead of adding the colourful swearword on the tip of her tongue. “I don’t know what that stupid man’s playing at, risking everything for some English gold-digger who turns up like that. He needs a good slap!” Leslie looked pointedly at Alfred.
Hana rubbed at her puffy, swollen eyes. She had been here before and the taste felt bitter on her tongue. “So, she’s staying here then?” Both adults were silent and Hana looked from one to the other. “Where is she staying?”
Leslie looked away and it was Alfred who answered her, “Downstairs. In his old room.”
Hana felt bile rise up into her throat and wasn’t sure she could prevent its escape. Logan had installed the woman in the room they used when they stayed over at the hotel. She was sleeping in their bed, in full view of the hotel staff, possibly even with him. She worried at her thumb nail and tried to take it all in. It had all happened so fast that she struggled to process the differences between yesterday and today. “Where’s Phoe?” She remembered her daughter with a fresh injection of guilt.
“She’s fallen asleep on the hearth rug,” Leslie reassured her.
“She saw the woman all over Logan.” A tear trickled down Hana’s cheek and dived onto the bedspread, surprising her as she thought they were all gone. “She was hanging off him and...kissing him and it freaked Phoe out.” Hana struggled for composure and felt a wave of gratitude at Leslie’s obvious fury on her behalf.
The old lady pursed her lips so hard that they disappeared and her jaw worked frantically through the skin of her cheeks. The woman’s brown eyes flashed with latent danger. “Why don’t you and the mokopuna stay here with us?” she offered.
Hana was shocked by the sarcastic laugh that escaped from her body. “What and have to see them coming out of our bedroom together and going down for breakfast hand in hand? No thanks. I don’t know where I’m going but I am not staying here.”
“You’re not leaving!” Logan’s voice was harsh and raised, making everyone in the room jump. He stood in the doorway flexing his fingers angrily and his grey eyes flashed hard as granite.
Hana felt the fight return in a welcome wave and she turned her face determinedly away from her husband.
“You’re going nowhere,” Logan said again, irritated by the silence. He took two long strides into the room, his body rigid. Hana sensed an incredible calm descend on her and was grateful for the peace that accompanied it. She said nothing, keeping her gaze fixed on the track that Miriam had worn along the side of the property - the old boundary. They always thought it was the stock, tramping a well-worn track to higher grazing, but for forty years it had been Logan’s unfaithful mother, wearing a path to her brother-in-law’s bed. Hana smiled a serene, Madonna-like smile and felt her soul link with Alfred’s, the husband who had been second-best. Like me. Only I’ve been second-best twice, Hana thought, refusing to allow depression to gather any more of her soul into its black bosom.
“Get out!” Leslie broke the silence first, issuing her order with authority and mana.
Logan sneered at her. “This is my house. You forget yourself, woman!”
Hana felt the bed shake as Alfred rose from it. He was wiry and spare, a tall strong man stripped bare by life and circumstance. He raised his bent body to its full, impressive height and stared his wife’s bastard eye to eye. “If you want it,” he waved his arm to take in the long wing, the rooms bisected by dividing walls that didn’t reach the apex roof and the old-fashioned, worn out decor. “Take it. We can be gone by tomorrow.”
Logan took a step forward. “I don’t want that. I don’t want you to go...Dad. I don’t want anyone to go.” He looked imploringly at Hana but it was Alfred who spoke and his words cut the younger man like a kitchen blade.
“Don’t call me Dad, please. You’re no son of mine. I tried so hard with you, Logan. I wanted you to understand what faithfulness was, whakapono. Despite it all, I tried to do right by you and your mother. She ground my face in the dirt anyway and now I see you following in her slutty footsteps. You’re nothing to me now. You’re no better than her or your father. They’ll rot in hell for what they did and now...well, you’re bound there too it seems. Take it all, Logan Du Rose. Take it all. I hope it makes you happy, because it never did me. Now get out of my home, while I can still call it that. We can be out as soon as you want.”
“No,” Logan flailed, “you don’t understand! None of you do.” He tried to reach Hana in an act of desperation and she saw fear behind the bravado as he faced the loss of absolutely everything he held dear. But she was surprisingly well protected, not just by the ample body of Leslie but by Alfred too.
“Get out!” Alfred said and his tone held an ancient authority. The mana his mother believed he didn’t have, rose out of him and shrouded him in influence and superiority.
Logan shook his head and tried again to reach for his stricken wife. Alfred’s punch when it came was practiced and well-timed. Reuben Du Rose taught his son guitar, masquerading as a guitar teacher to get near him, but Hana realised that Alfred was his boxing master. It was a boxer’s hit and Logan staggered back in shock. Alfred rubbed the arthritic fingers of his right hand and flexed them gingerly. Then he looked up at the shocked man in front of him, already rubbing at his bruised eye. “I said, get out!”
“She had a child and I didn’t know. I’ve got a son!” Logan’s words sounded agonised, torn from the depths of him.
Hana felt a curious tension build in her forehead, a stress headache spreading out across her face. Her chest tightened and her breath came in short rasps. Hana fought to fill her lungs, wondering if her heart struggled to beat. She tensed, waiting for the pacemaker to kick in and administer the promised electric shock. She dreaded it daily. They told her it wasn’t so bad, like a punch to the chest - not as bad as dying anyway.
Her feet found the floorboards through her socks as time seemed to halt for her. The world spun horribly and she kept her right hand clutched to her left collarbone to protect her from the inevitable shock. Logan’s anguished face danced around her in a fast circle, too fast to be real and Hana saw the bedside table come up to meet her face at a terrific speed. Then nothing. She saw nothing, heard nothing and felt nothing. Except her child. She sensed the tiny being keenly in a linking of souls. It was as though in this strange, surreal world there were just the two of them together. It moved sluggishly in her belly and she felt it, understanding as the blood pumped too quickly through the umbilical cord that it struggled, just like her.