He’d said he was a builder. Not a panelbeater, and not a landscaper. Well, obviously, a builder made sense. I should have guessed a builder. You didn’t own a house like that—in Wanaka—unless you were doing very well indeed. A second house. How had he done all that, though, and got that car ten years ago—new, too, which nobody did in New Zealand that I knew—if he’d only built the yurt a couple years before? He’d said he’d worked for a builder. You didn’t get rich working for a builder, and anyway, he didn’t act rich. He acted like somebody who was work boots and jeans all the way down to his bones. Like the men I’d grown up with.
I set it aside, because we were at the lift. Obedience asked, “How do you use it?”
“You punch the button,” I said.
“Can I do it?”
“Yeh. It’s the bottom button, because you’re going down. If you’re going up, you push the top one.”
She pressed it, as excited as a kid, then listened as the mechanism whirred.
When the doors opened, there was a teenaged kid in there, his arm in a sling, with his dad. Seventeen, maybe, with blond hair that was curlier and longer than it ever would have been allowed to be at Mount Zion. He was wearing a basketball singlet. That would be a shock to the girls. Male arms.
The kid checked the girls out fast, looking, then looking away, and the dad said, “Afternoon.”
Obedience looked down, and Fruitful ducked her head, then brought it back up with what I could tell was an effort. A frozen second, and I said, “Come on. Help me get her in.” The two men moved to the back of the car, and I told Obedience, “Turn around and face the front.”
She whirled around and turned red, tugging at the short sleeves of her shirt as if she could make it cover her arms, twisting one foot over the other. The dress came almost to her knees, but she still felt naked. I got it. I pushed the “G” button without explanation, and felt the surprised jolt in both girls at the unfamiliar lurch of the car descending, and the second lurch when it stopped. The doors opened, the men stirred behind us, and Obedience jumped aside. I said, “Come on,” and she helped me get Fruitful out.
“This way,” I told them, and we headed to Emergency. I told them in a low voice, “Men generally step back and wait for you to get out of the lift first. It’s polite. And everybody stands facing forward in a lift. Don’t ask me why. Gives you the illusion of polite distance, maybe, and keeps you from staring at each other, since you’re standing so close.”
My everyday life. A foreign land.
I’d rung ahead, borrowing Gray’s phone one last time before he’d left for work, to make sure things weren’t too busy and to talk to Matiu. In fact, there was nobody waiting. The triage nurse, my friend Ruby, said, “Hi, Daisy. This is the ankle?”
“Yeh,” I said. “Still got time for it?”
“Should do,” she said. “Do you have your ID with you?” she asked Fruitful.
I said, “I have it,” and pulled out a copy of her birth certificate. Uncle Aaron had got them for me back when we’d arranged the escape, which was good, because it was rough establishing your identity without them. I should know.
Ruby looked at the name, and then she looked at me. “Your sister,” she said. “Fruitful Worthy.”
Ruby’s hands stilled on her keyboard, and she looked at Fruitful, then at me, and then, after a moment, started typing again. “Right, then,” she said. “Just a minute.” She didn’t ask me for a photo ID, though she should have. That was a favor, and I knew it. It was why I’d brought them here. I mentally added Passports to the list. Driving licenses would have to wait until I got a car of my own, one old enough to risk the bang and bumps as they learned.
Ruby typed a bit more, and eventually, Gloria, a nurse I didn’t know well, came out to get us.
Time to do our first round of explaining. Good job it was Matiu.
At least I hoped it would be Matiu. Because this wasn’t just explaining about Fruitful. It was explaining about me.
After Gloria got Fruitful settled and left us, we waited. The girls seemed stunned into silence, fidgeting