Where Sea Meets Sky (17 page)

“No,” she snaps. She sighs and rubs her other hand down her face. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I just mean, it’s fine. I’m not cold. My hand just shakes sometimes.”

I sit back down. “Just the left one?”

“Yeah,” she says softly.

“I don’t mean to get personal,” I say, even though that’s exactly what I want, “but why?”

I can barely see through the dark but I can feel it. She’s giving me a look that says,
None of your damn business
. But it doesn’t scare me off. I stare right back at her.

“What happened?” I press on.

She exhales slowly. The waves continue to crash. There’s a sound in the bushes, rustling, but then it stops.

“It’s not a big deal,” she says in a warning tone. “I hurt it a long time ago. In an accident. It was crushed and I had a bunch of operations on it but it’s fine now. It just shakes once in a while. I was left-handed, but now I have to write with my right. It’s steadier, though it’s not the same.”

I have so many questions but I’m not sure how far I’ll get. “But your hand is okay for the most part. Obviously you can lift weights, throw a punch, drive a stick.”

“And give a hand job,” she says. “Yes, it’s fine.”

“So you can handle big things,” I tell her, grinning to myself.

“Yes, if you want to think about it that way. But when it comes to the smaller things, stuff that takes precision, I can’t.” Her voice falters at the end.

“What was the accident?”

I sense her freezing up. I should apologize, tell her I don’t need to know. But I don’t. I want to know.

“You know, you’re very nosy,” she says.

“I’m just interested,” I tell her. “Remember what you said in the caves. I could get to know you. This is me getting to know you. But I want the real you, the one you hide deep down. Not the you that everyone else sees. Not the you that Nick sees.”

“Don’t bring him into this,” she says.

“But he
is
in this. You know it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then tell me. Tell me something. Tell me about your accident.”

“Persistent bastard,” she mumbles to herself as she shakes her head.

“That’s true,” I admit. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

A few beats roll by, thick as the night, then she says, “Fine. If you must know, when my dad died, I was with him. I was fifteen and coming back from an art exhibit in Hastings. Our family winery is about half an hour away and my dad had a small showing that night. My mom had gone earlier but left because of a headache, and I stayed behind with my dad for company and other stuff.”

I can already tell this is going to be bad, and I’m sorry for being such a nosy son-of-a-bitch.

“My dad only had two glasses of wine that night and he had a pretty high tolerance since he operated a vineyard when he wasn’t painting. So he was fine to drive. They later said it wasn’t his fault. We were about fifteen minutes outside of town when a truck came around the corner too fast and in our lane. It hit us head on. Most of the impact was on my father’s side of the car, but then we spun out and went crashing into a tree. My arm was pinned beneath the steel. My dad was alive for a few moments. He called my name and I told him I was scared and I loved him, and then he stopped breathing. When the ambulance came, it was too late. We both had to be removed with the jaws of life. “

I am shocked. Horrified. I can’t even breathe. I can’t even tell her how sorry I am. My heart feels like it’s drowning at the bottom of the sea.

She goes on, her voice harder now. “So, they pulled me out and my hand and arm were broken in a bunch of places, and so was my ankle. My ankle and arm healed up the easiest though, but my hand was a real problem. I had a lot of operations on it.”

Suddenly she picks up my hand with her right one and guides my fingers over her open palm. It’s warm and soft and there are a few raised lines inside that I hadn’t paid attention to before. I feel like I’m reading her past, the real her.

“I was in physiotherapy for a long time. I’ll never be as good as I used to be. But I’m okay.”

“Gemma,” I whisper softly. Before I know what I’m doing, I’m raising her palm to my lips and kissing along her scar. She smells so good, feels even better.

She lets me do it for a moment then she awkwardly clears her throat.

Don’t make me let go
, I think.
Please don’t make me let go.

The rustle in the bushes is back again. Gemma jerks her hand away, as if we’re about to be caught by Nick the Peeping Tom, as if we’re doing something wrong.

Are we doing something wrong?

Suddenly the air around us fills with squeals, and the rustling increases. The nearest bush to us at the base of the yard, near the fence, starts to move back and forth.

I stand up out of my chair to get a better look and see what looks to be little creatures waddling out of the bushes and heading for the side of the house. Once they hit a patch of light coming from the house, I can see what they are.

Little blue penguins.

“What the fuck?” I say softly, feeling like my mind has just imploded. “What the hell are those?”

“Little blue penguins,” she says proudly.

I turn to her in disbelief. “Are you serious?” I thought I was making that up. In my head.

She nods. “Yup. Little blue penguins.”

And she’s right. They’re about a foot high, miniature versions of the ones I’ve seen on TV, and they’re entirely blue in color. I thought it was just the darkness playing tricks on me but no, once they hit the light, you can see the color on their oily feathers.

“I don’t get it,” I say, watching as the last of their group quickly scampers out of sight. That might have been the cutest and weirdest thing I have ever seen.

“You never head of them?” she asks. “They probably have a burrow under the house. It’s actually quite common for beach houses.”

“Look, I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t do a whole lot of research about the country.”

“I can see that,” she says. “Well, how about that, then.”

“How about that,” I say, sitting back down. The penguins’ magical appearance has somehow taken Gemma’s heartbreaking story to another place, and she’s quick to jump on the transition. She tells me all about the interesting birdlife in New Zealand, from yellow-eyed penguins on the Otago Peninsula down south, to the k ea—cheeky green parrots that live in the snow-covered Alps. She’s animated as she tells me all she knows, and I absorb it like a sponge. I drink my beer and she goes back to drinking hers, and before Nick, Amber, and the Irish show up all sloshed, she’s painted a beautiful picture of what’s to come. I can only hope I’ll continue to be part of the picture.

“So how is the art coming along?” Vera asks me, her voice sounding so crazy clear over the cell phone. It’s nuts to think that not only is it eight p.m. where she is—yesterday—and eight a.m. here, she’s literally halfway across the world. Yet I’m able to talk to her like she’s right beside me.

“It’s picking up,” I tell her. “I didn’t start sketching until we were in Abel Tasman Park, but it was like I couldn’t stop myself. I wish I brought more than my watercolor pencils though.”

I breathe in the fresh mountain air and look around me. If we weren’t leaving in ten minutes, I’d be trying to paint this place as well. We’re in Makarora on the South Island, a place by an area called Haast Pass, sort of the halfway point between the resort towns of Wanaka and Queensland and the Wild West Coast that we were just on. There’s nothing to Makarora except maybe the holiday park we stayed at and farms scattered about, bastions of civilization trying to survive among the encroaching wilderness. But shit, is this place ever beautiful.

I’m sitting on top of a picnic table, the air sweet with morning dew while the sun slowly starts to heat up. I’m still amazed at how strong it is down here and how quickly you can burn. I learned that all too well during a kayak trip, though the burn on my upper body has turned into a deep tan.

Everywhere you look are mountains—big, ridiculously hefty mountains, like someone has placed sugar-dusted anvils at the sides of the valley. What I like most about them is how bare they are. Though the valley floor is green, green, green, with grassy fields of sharp-bladed flax and palmlike cabbage trees, the foliage peters off halfway up the mountains, leaving their upper halves bare. They’re brown and tan and nude, covered in what Gemma calls tussock grass, and because of this you can see every little cranny and crevice. It’s like looking at living velvet, and I can literally just stare at them for hours.

Vera clears her throat. “And is that the only thing picking up since we last talked?” she asks, trying to hide her curiosity.

I last talked to her the morning after Paekakariki and the little blue penguins. I bought a calling card at the ferry terminal to the South Island and spent the majority of the rough and wild voyage across Cook Strait filling her in on the trip so far.

That was ten days ago. Everything since then passed by in a dreamy, hazy, blur. Sometimes it felt like a good dream. Other times it was a nightmare.

“Well,” I say hesitantly before launching into it.

After we left the North Island, Nick and Gemma’s relationship became a bit strained. Normally, that would have made me happy—I wanted nothing more than for them to break up. But it only made things awkward and Gemma miserable.

Somewhere during our Abel Tasman trip, though, things went back to normal. At least it seemed that way. That’s when the dream got nightmarish again. If anything, they seemed closer, more affectionate.

By day I was sharing a double kayak with Amber and slowly paddling through pale turquoise waters occasionally peppered with dolphins and, yes, little blue penguins. The sun was hot and heavy and we were navigating ourselves through the shallow coves of what looked like a tropical paradise.

By night, we were hauling our kayaks up onto soft, golden sand beaches and camping out between the sea and the forest. Gemma and Nick had picked up an extra tent in the eclectic city of Nelson, a place I wouldn’t have minded spending a few days in, which meant I had to share with Amber.

At first this wasn’t a problem. But by the third night, Nick and Gemma were back to their horrifically loud fucking, and Amber started to get ideas of her own.

Naturally, being a hot-blooded male, I didn’t quite have the energy to fend her off. Not that she was doing anything more than snuggling against me as we fell asleep, but I started to fear that if she
did
start getting horny, I would be powerless to stop her. Powerless, as in, I was getting pretty fucking horny, too, but not for the reasons she’d want.

After our tramping and kayaking trip was over, we gladly piled back into Mr. Orange, filling him with sand and the smell of salt water. We made our way to a place called Nelson Lakes for a few nights, a place of sublime alpine scenery and a lake so still you’d swear it was holding its breath. It reminded me of back home a lot, particularly the area around Lake Okanagan, and for the first time I felt a twinge of homesickness. I sketched and painted my way out of it.

Next we hit the Wild West Coast, which was this prehistoric mashup of ferns and native palm trees and rivers flowing down lush green mountains, and walked along dark beaches strewn with driftwood, beaten by the raging azure sea, a blue so brilliant it hurt my eyes. There’s not much to do there but take in the sights, so we looked at strange rock formations called the “pancake rocks,” ate something called whitebait (it tastes better than it sounds), and watched as a dumpy weka bird waddled up to Amber and stole her sandwich.

The highlight, though, was yesterday when we went glacier hiking. I had to put up with all the snarky questions, like, “But you’re from Canada, don’t you have to glacier-hike to get to work?” to which I said it rarely snows where I live. (Hello, don’t you remember the Vancouver Olympics when we had to truck in snow for our mountains?) But aside from that, it was a fucking trip.

We had to get up at the ass-crack of dawn and make our way to the glacial center in the middle of the small but touristy village of Franz Josef. Nick really wanted to do the helicopter tour version but none of us could really spare the expense, so he went off and did that on his own while we did the cheaper version. I could tell Gemma was pretty pissed off about that.

The tour was pretty straightforward. Walk for what seemed like forever across the alluvial plain, crisscrossed with streams of melting glacial water (hey, geography was my best subject in high school after art), the imposing face of Franz Josef glacier slowly getting closer and closer. On either side, waterfalls spilled down in thin ribbons from forested cliffs and the clouds clung to the edges, obscuring the peaks in mist.

Finally we were up close to the giant wall of blue and gray ice towering above us, and the only way through was up. You have to climb up steps your guide carves out of the snow, everyone in single file, with only metal-spiked hiking poles for stability.

I brought up the rear of the group, with Gemma in front of me, and I had this incredible view of everyone walking along the ice like a row of ants. We walked across planks over aqua-tinged crevices that seemed to cut straight into the earth, made our way through caves and holes cut right through the ice, and moved up and down passageways that were so high on either side that the glacier was the only thing we could see. It was pretty unbelievable, and at one point I had to stop and take it all in with my eyes. I knew my photos wouldn’t even do it justice.