One Heartbeat Read online

  Robert cringed and shook his head. “My poor wee girl.”

  “I know it’s a mess,” Hana said with honesty. “It got infected and reopened itself, but I didn’t want to go back into hospital. I couldn’t bear to be away from my baby any longer. I believed I would die when he snatched me from the car park and I thought for a long time afterwards if I took my eyes off her, she’d disappear.”

  Hana looked into her father’s eyes and read his fears there, comprehending what it was like for him. Perhaps he was afraid if he took his eyes off her that she might disappear again forever. Hana closed her eyes and fought light-headedness. She sipped at her cooling coffee and tried to control the numbness that wanted to fog out her brain. Suddenly her father leaned towards her. “Hana, would you be willing to see your brother?”

  Hana’s brow knitted and she closed her eyes, not able to give him a straight answer. “I honestly don’t know, Dada,” she admitted. “Maybe. But only if Logan’s there. Can I think about it? I’m not quite ready to play Happy Families yet.”

  Robert nodded, satisfied. He seemed more content in his dotage. Hana asked about his career and if it was strange for him, being headmaster at the primary school she and Mark had both attended. He entertained her with funny stories, surprising her as he told how he lived in the little cottage next to the village school. Hana’s eyes widened. “We used to think that place was haunted,” she laughed. “Didn’t some old lady live there and shout at us when tennis balls went over the wall into her garden?”

  Robert laughed uproariously and it was a wonderful sound, a Scotsman’s mirth. “That’s right,” he said, “but it was Mrs O’Rourke. Her husband used to be the school caretaker when you were at school. Do you know how old she was?”

  Hana thought for a moment. “She was easily a hundred!” she said, wide-eyed.

  Her father laughed again, so hard he had to wipe tears away with a patterned hanky from his breast pocket. “She was your age now!” he chortled, “She was forty six!”

  Hana pulled a face and felt disgruntled. It got her worrying about what the boys at school thought of her. “She was definitely a hundred,” she grumbled.

  Tama picked that moment to wheel the pram through the doorway into the resident’s lounge, bumping it into the door and grimacing at Hana. “Sorry, Ma,” he said, looking guilty, “but I didn’t bring a coat.” He put his cold hand on her cheek and she jumped and slapped him.

  “Ugh, get off, silly boy!”

  He laughed and plopped himself in the seat opposite, keeping the sleeping baby moving with his hand on the bar of the pram. Robert looked longingly into the blankets. “The child’s stunning,” he breathed. “She has a look of her father; it’s the long, black lashes and clear, olive skin.” He wondered if her eyes were the same penetrating grey as Logan’s. Robert found Hana’s husband distinctly unnerving.

  Phoenix twisted her head from side to side in her sleep, opening and shutting her mouth. Hana reached forward and released a little hand from the blankets and she popped her thumb between her tiny lips and settled. Robert shifted his gaze to his daughter, forcing down the dreadful ache which snapped at his fractured heart as he saw his beloved Judith in every facet of her. The emerald green eyes and curly red hair seemed to cause him physical pain. She looked so like her mother. He wondered if she knew and if the fact brought comfort or agony during the intervening years.

  Just then Robert’s wife entered the lounge and searched it with her eyes, looking for him. He gave a small wave with his fragile hand and she smiled and made her way over. She carried groceries for their lunch but seeing Hana and Tama, her footsteps slowed. Robert sensed his wife’s anxiety and rose to his feet as she approached. Hana instinctively looked behind her, the look of shock crossing her pretty features. “Aunty Elaine?”

  The arrival of her mother’s sister seemed to Tama, to be too much for Hana. The pleasant meeting degenerated into long silences as Hana struggled. Her mind fought the notion of her father replacing her beautiful mother with a severe woman who never had anything good to say about the family. The word according to Elaine was that Mark was too bright for his own good and Hana too stupid for hers. ‘Poor disabled Judith,’ who managed perfectly when Elaine wasn’t around, was a pitiful object of everything wrong with those less fortunate. She was a blight on the McIntyre home and no-one was sorry to see her head back to Belfast on the plane. Hana’s deaf mother once signed to Hana that she felt her sister was jealous and that her green eyes flashed with something of ‘the monster’. Hana laughed and found it funny, but she wondered later if Judith was right.

  Elaine’s eyes were green like Hana’s, but there the similarity ended. She had straight dark hair and severe features, a throwback to the harsh Irish clan of the early sepia family photographs on Hana’s grandmother’s wall. Her visits were tinged with criticism and antagonism as the ever patient Judith bore her sister’s continual interference with grace and good nature. “No, Judith,” Elaine would spit, “you should do it like this. No, Judith, it would be much better like that.”

  Pretty auburn-haired Judith lip read and smiled sweetly, but the moment her sister left, would return her home to its previous good state, dusting her palms together as though brushing the woman’s influence from her life. But once, Hana caught her mother crying. Judith waved away her daughter’s attempts to probe, but Hana felt sure her recently departed aunt had tried to take over more than just the household routines. Judith’s tear streaked face looked fearful, as though the officious woman had made a stab at possessing something far more precious. Hana resented her aunt’s worship of Robert McIntyre and how she hung on his every word. That last visit, her adoration was embarrassing. Hana tried to talk to Mark about it but he laughed it off with a cruel cackle as he did most of his little sister’s fancies. Following that visit, Aunt Elaine was never an overnight guest at the vicarage and left the McIntyre family in peace.

  Robert adored Judith with a fierceness she saw reflected in Logan often and Hana concluded Elaine’s infatuation was one sided. He was both proud and amazed at his wife’s achievements, at the incredible paintings she produced in her spare time, at how she managed in her work as a librarian at the local secondary school. She was an inspiration to him and there was no wonder her death robbed the strong man of his faith for a time.

  Hana observed Elaine cuddling up to her father on the leatherette bench seat and felt nauseous. In her mind’s eye, her mother’s tearful face watched them down the years, unbelievably sad. Hana couldn’t bear it. She stood up, surprising Tama and knocking the pram in her efforts to get away. Making hollow excuses, Hana thanked her father for the coffee and pushed her baby from the lounge, leaving Tama forced to run to catch up.

  Outside she looked ashen and the young man regretted his willingness to betray Logan, recognising his uncle’s wisdom in biding his time. He put his arm protectively around Hana. “I’m sorry, Ma. I’ve stuffed up. We should have waited for Uncle Logan.”

  Hana shook her head. “I need to go. Please can we leave now?” She looked pitiful, her green eyes huge in her pale face and her teeth worrying at her bottom lip. Tama nodded, transferring the sleeping Phoenix into her car seat and dismantling the pram.

  “I’m so sorry. Logan’s gonna kill me.” His misery was partly for her but mainly for himself.

  “I’m not telling him,” Hana said with a wobble in her voice. “I think today’s best forgotten.”

  A chill wind nipped at Tama’s shirt sleeves and snatched at his jeans, reducing the temperature to little above zero. Tama blew on his hands and jumped into the driver’s seat. Hana climbed in next to him, eerily quiet. He started the engine and turned right out of the motel, crossing the four lane road carefully with his precious cargo. Boundary Bridge seemed calm after the earlier traffic jam and within minutes, they crossed the river, heading towards the school site.

  “Are you staying with us?” Hana asked, “Or do you want to go back to Culver’s Cottage and get your ute?”r />
  Tama shrugged. “Can I stay with you, if that’s ok? I’ll talk to Uncle Logan and then go back to the hotel. Jack lets me use his guest room and I can work for free while I sort out the fire brigade stuff.”

  “You know Alfred lives with Jack now, don’t you?” Hana asked. “That won’t be a problem will it?”

  Tama shook his head and thought about his family tree. It sometimes resembled a case of bindweed. He gave a soulless laugh. “Do you mean Alfred who was my great uncle, before he was promoted to grandfather, because my uncle is really my father? That Alfred?”

  Hana sighed and nodded. “The very same.”

  “Na, it’s ok.” Tama reached across and captured Hana’s writhing fingers in his left hand. “Alfred’s always been kind to me, even though his son wasn’t interested.”

  “I’m sorry Michael was such an arse,” Hana said, clasping her fingers through Tama’s. “You deserved better in a father.”

  “The truth is, I don’t actually like Michael. He’s clever and superior, definitely has our handsome Du Rose genes, but he’s a total idiot with none of the dark mystery Uncle Logan harnesses. None of the moral scruples either, from what I’ve heard.” Tama snorted with laughter. “You know what? Someone told me recently that Michael and Aroha are dating again; my parents are giving it a go after almost nineteen years. It makes me sick!”

  Hana eyed him sideways in sympathy. “Parents hey? Who’d have ‘em?”

  Tama shuddered and nodded. “My Poppa Reuben was father and mother to me in his own way. He discovered early on that Kane was as vicious a father as he was a human being and sheltered me from some of it. He was a good man; I wish Logan got to know him before he died.” Tama wrinkled his nose in sadness.

  “So, you haven’t seen your mother recently?” Hana asked.

  He shook his head. “Don’t wanna. She left me when I was a baby and Poppa Reuben wouldn’t let her have me when she came back.”

  “At least she did come back for you,” Hana said softly. “It shows she cared.”

  “Maybe. Not enough though.”

  “How do you know?” Hana’s heart ached for a woman she’d never met, sympathising in a compassion which came from her soul.

  “She never came back, did she?” Tama said. “She could’ve seen me outside their control. Why didn’t she come to sports days and school plays? Kane and Poppa couldn’t have stopped her doing that. But she didn’t.”

  Hana stilled her wagging tongue, recognising a desperate need to make his life better now she’d discovered she couldn’t heal her own. Tama shook himself to clear his head and Hana reached forward and turned the heat up, thinking he was cold. He was; but it was a chilling of the soul that afflicted Tama and not the spiteful wind which blew off Antarctica.

  “You might not want to be there when I tell Uncle Logan about dropping out of college,” Tama mused as they turned into the long road leading to the school. “I once saw him take out two guys without breaking a sweat. He used to tell me it’s how you hit, not how hard.”

  Hana pulled a face and shook her head. “Don’t be silly, we’re all in this together. Logan wouldn’t hit you. He didn’t before when you gave him cause. You have a plan and that will ease any anxiety he has over your decision. He just wants to see you settled and happy that’s all. It’s all we ever want for our children, to know when we die, they’re equipped to go on without us.”

  Hana thought about her mother, Judith, dying without knowing if her daughter was equipped to go on without her. “I wasn’t,” Hana muttered. “I wasn’t equipped at all.” Hana’s anger was irrational, aimed at her mother because Judith still went, as though the poor woman could have halted the heart attack or delayed fate. Hana turned to stare at her baby’s car seat. By the time her daughter was testing her wings, Hana would be in her sixties. What if she couldn’t stay around for her? It was a sobering thought and the dawning reality of the claustrophobic two bedroom staff unit, with Tama squashed on the sofa, did nothing to ease her maudlin thoughts.

  There was an unusual queue of traffic at the gate to St Bart’s and cars moved one at a time. Some were refused entry and sent back up the street past the waiting vehicles. Tama strummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I dunno what’s going on.” He tried to see ahead, noticing the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle blocking the entrance. He glanced at Hana but she was clambering into the back seat to check on her daughter properly. “Nice bum,” he commented, fluffing his fringe in the rear view mirror.

  “Shut up,” Hana replied. “I can’t wait until she can face forwards. I never know whether to sit with her or stay in the front.”

  “She was fine, Ma,” Tama complained. “Don’t fiddle with her; it took ages to get her to sleep.”

  “I couldn’t see properly but I can now. She’s fine.” Hana smiled, a proud, maternal beam.

  Tama eyed Hana nervously, knowing she’d panic when she saw the emergency lights and assume something had happened to Logan. It was an instinctive reaction, hardly surprising after the knock on her front door nine years ago, which destroyed her world with a few short words. ‘We’re sorry, Mrs Johal, but your husband died this afternoon.’

  Hana looked up and caught the flash of blue and red reflecting off the windows of the car in front. Her eyes widened and her face paled instantly. She looked at Tama and he saw the panic pass across her face. He knew even before she grappled with the door handle that she wouldn’t sit next to him and wait. “Stay in the car, Hana!” he barked, activating the central locking and knowing the child locks were on in the back. “Stop it!” He sounded angry, his command cutting through her fear like a knife. Her body heaved gulps of air as she froze, but her hand stayed on the door handle. “They won’t let you in, Ma. You need to sit here and let them deal with the cars. They’re letting staff through look, but turning away visitors.” He pointed at a vehicle further up as it moved through the blockade. “Here,” he offered, digging around in his jeans front pocket and handing her his cell phone. “Ring him.”

  Hana stared at the phone and then at Tama, her heart thudding blood through her brain. She glanced at her baby, hearing the little ‘click, click’ sound as she sucked her tiny thumb. Then she looked at the phone again, her eyes showing panic as Tama slipped it back into his pocket. “Look,” he began, his tone reasonable, “if Uncle Logan hurt himself there’d only be an ambulance. This is massive. There are cops everywhere.”

  The traffic stilled again as an outgoing vehicle slipped through the barricade, its sleek black tinted windows masking its purpose. Tama watched it slide past and shook his head. “That’s the undertaker, Hana. Someone’s died.” He reached behind and grasped both her shaking hands in his large left one. “Uncle Logan’s fine, otherwise Mr Blair would have rung one of us by now. It takes ages to process a body – you’d have heard if it was anything to do with us.”

  “How do you know this stuff?” she asked, her voice husky and fearful.

  “I just do. Once they find a body there’s heaps that goes on and it takes hours. It’s not Logan.” Tama withdrew his hand. “Do me a favour? Put your seatbelt back on please, otherwise this cop at the gate will waste time telling you off!”

  Hana obeyed, quickly inserting the plug and clicking it shut. The little red seatbelt light on the dashboard stopped blinking and went back to sleep. A young woman at the gate wore her smart police uniform and anti-stab vest as though it was a fashion statement. She was a stunner, her dark hair pulled back into a neat ponytail and the deepest blue eyes Tama had ever seen on a hot girl. He tried to concentrate on what she was saying and kept his eyes strictly on her face with its peachy skin, flushed from the cold winter air and biting wind.

  She smiled. “Can I ask your business on the site, please, sir?”

  She leaned in the window, noticing Hana in the back seat. Tama tried not to breathe in the scent of her hair shampoo and alluring perfume. She made no attempt to entice him but it made it worse somehow. He held his breath and conc
entrated on the distant school buildings and tried to think about something nasty, horse crap, cow afterbirth, the smell of feet and unwashed boy in the PE sheds as they all got changed...

  Tama was so intent on his repertoire of disgusting distractions he realised too late that the girl-cop was looking at him strangely. Hana fitted her purse back into her handbag and eyed him sideways with an amused look on her face. “Driver’s licence please, sir,” the cop said again. Tama dragged himself back from his alternate universe and pushed his fingers into his back pocket, a look of dismay drifting across his olive face.

  “Oh, no!” Tama exclaimed. He got stopped a year ago by a motorway patrolman who gave him a warning for not carrying it on a routine stop. The guy was decent and hadn’t fined him and so Tama made a point of always carrying it. His jeans were too tight and his face flushed as he realised where it was.

  “Erm...can I get out a minute?” he asked, his face beetroot red despite his tanned complexion. The cop stood back and Tama unwound his tall body from the driver’s seat and pushed himself out. He was taller than the girl by a head and she stared at the buttons of his checked shirt as he dug around in his other front jeans pocket. Her eyes flickered with amusement as he finally produced the small plastic card she required. He handed it over, keeping his grey eyes fixed on her face as she examined it. Her eyes flicked up once as she checked the photo against the man. Then she handed it back and smiled again, betraying nothing in her face.