a little in the unfamiliar clothes and the frigid air, so much colder when you weren’t moving around, and after five minutes or so, I went out and got some magazines.
“Here,” I told them. “Cultural literacy. I learned most of what I knew about Outside, early on, when I was still scared to really look at people, from magazines and TV. How people talked. How they dressed, though they don’t dress nearly as well in real life as they do on TV, at least not in Dunedin, so no worries. At the library, you can read all the magazines you like for free. I know that, because I did it.”
They didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t think of anything either, so I pulled a notebook and pen from my purse and started making a list, starting with Phone and Passports and Car. Car was a project all its own. I was on the second page and trying to feel more cheerful about it when the door opened.
“Hi, Fruitful,” Matiu said, and put out a hand to her. “I’m Matiu Te Mana. I’m the doctor, and a friend of your sister’s.”
Fruitful took one quick glance at his beautiful face, and then she was looking down. I said, “You can shake his hand, love. It’s OK,” and felt two things. Pity. And rage.
Matiu was brief and businesslike, which was as much of a relief to Fruitful as it was to me. She’d been dreading an interrogation, I was sure. When you got out of Mount Zion, it felt like everybody was standing around you in a circle, shrieking and pointing. Like you were as much a pariah Outside as you now were at home, where your name would never be spoken again, where you were excommunicated, damned to eternal torment in the fires of Hell.
It was so hard not to believe in those fires. You’d heard about them all your life. It was even harder to believe that Outside, people could be kind.
Cognitive dissonance, they call it, when your observation is telling you the opposite of what you’ve always believed. People will go to any extent to rationalize those beliefs, until they can’t anymore. It’s an uncomfortable, lonely journey, though, to let go of the old ideas and work out new ones for yourself.
Now, Matiu palpated the ankle, asked the questions, said, “I don’t think it’s broken, but let’s check to make sure,” and sent us to Radiology, all exactly as I’d expected. I let Obedience push the wheelchair, and when we got there, I told her, “Stay with her. If you finish, come back to Emergency. I need a few minutes,” and headed back to find Matiu.
He was at a standing desk, charting, but he looked up when he saw me and stopped typing. He didn’t say anything, though. He just waited.
Matiu was patient. He was kind. And he was the best-looking man I’d ever seen in person. My sometime running partner, and my surfing partner, too, and he looked just as good in togs as you could imagine an absolutely fit Maori doctor with a tattoo down his arm, skin like burnished gold, and amusement in his eyes possibly could look.
You know what he actually was, though? He was a tolerant, glamorous older brother, that was what. That was why my heart had never fluttered.
Also, he’d never wanted me, and he was now as married as a man could be, so there was that.
I said, “I grew up in Mount Zion.”
“Ah,” he said. “I wondered.”
“I got them out of there two nights ago,” I said. “Fruitful and Obedience. Two of my sisters. I have eleven siblings. I’m the eldest. My twin brother left with me twelve years ago, and now I’ve got these two. Fruitful hurt her ankle running, because we had to run.”
“Are they safe?” he asked. Immediately. That was Matiu, too.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Not if they find us. There’s this wrinkle, you see. Her husband was my husband, before. When I was there. He married both of us when we turned sixteen. I got it dissolved, though, after I left. So—not polygamy.” I didn’t say, It just feels like it. “But,” I added, “it may be extra motivation. For him. I think so. Doubly defied, you see.”
The thought made me tremble a little inside. I recognized that feeling, and I hated it. It was fear.
He digested that for a minute, then asked, “Would you like me to examine her for other issues?”
“No,” I said.