MIRACLE ON KAIMOTU ISLAND/ALWAYS THE HERO (15 page)

‘Yeah, she’s a competent woman and a fine doctor,’ Ben managed through his pain. ‘But the lady has demons. I thought I’d slayed enough of them to break through, but something tells me Henry and I have conjured up a whole lot more.’

* * *

She drove carefully back into town, filling her mind with plans, figuring how she needed to get the house inspected and repaired, get the manager’s residence liveable for Henry, persuade Henry to stay, get her and Button back to the vineyard.

Her list was vast, and she concentrated on it fiercely, because if she didn’t concentrate, fears broke in. As well as that, the voices flooded back, accusing, and it was too hard to cope with.

She’d had a whole lifetime of not being good enough, and she was weary to the bone.

‘I am good enough,’ she said out loud, finally cracking and letting the voices hold sway. Trying to defend herself by facing them down. ‘I will look after Button. I will.’

‘And that’s all,’ she added in a less fierce voice, a voice that was an acknowledgment that she couldn’t fight failure on more than one front. ‘That’s all I’m focussing on. I might love Ben. I might even love medicine, but I stuff things up and I won’t risk it any further. I’ll help Ben with emergency medicine until he finds someone else but that’s all. It’s Button and the vineyard and nothing else.’

CHAPTER TEN

A
WEEK
 
LATER
 
Ben went out to the vineyard to find her. When he arrived Ginny was hammering boards onto the veranda of the vineyard manager’s residence. Button had a hammer as well and was banging everything in sight. Ginny paused in her hammering as the car approached, but Button kept right on going.

His mother had driven him up from the town. She paused at the gate—there seemed to be unstable ground along the driveway and she wasn’t risking driving further—and looked at the woman and child in front of them.

‘You sure you want to do this? Do you want me to wait?’ she asked.

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Ginny will drive me back.’

‘You might have trouble getting her out of here,’ Ailsa said worriedly. ‘Okay, it’s not the shaky ground I’m worried about. I know you can go cross-country. But she’s wounded and retreating, Ben. More wounded even than you are.’

‘What, worse than a ruptured spleen?’

‘You don’t have a spleen any more and Ginny still has her wounds,’ Ailsa said sternly. ‘Her father was a bully and a thug, and her mother was appalling. I know you love her but even when she was a kid I could see her shadows. From what I hear, her marriage has just meant longer ones.’

‘I can cope with shadows,’ Ben said, but uneasily because he wasn’t sure that he could.

‘Good luck,’ his mother said, and leaned across and kissed him before he climbed out of the truck, carrying his grandfather’s old walking cane for support. His ruptured spleen had been removed by laparoscopic surgery, he was recovering nicely but he’d been bruised just about everywhere it was possible for a man to be bruised. His mother had been fussing, and maybe she had cause.

‘Give me a ring if you don’t get anywhere,’ she said now, and glanced ahead at Ginny. ‘You might need more than a walking stick to get through this pain.’

‘If I travelled by helicopter to Auckland with a ruptured spleen, I can get through anything,’ Ben said, but Ailsa still looked doubtful as she drove away.

Ginny had seen him arrive. She’d started walking towards them, pausing to fetch Button. It seemed Button wasn’t to be allowed out of her sight.

She stopped coming towards him when Ailsa drove away.

‘H-hi,’ she managed, and then the doctor part of her took over. ‘Surely you shouldn’t be out here, walking. I... Can I get you a chair?’

‘I’m fine,’ Ben said, and then they both looked at the walking stick. ‘And I’m tough,’ he said, like he was convincing himself. He managed a grin. ‘Chairs are for wusses. Thanks for the flowers.’

‘They were...the least I could do.’

‘And you always do the least you can do? That’s Hannah’s line, not yours.’

They were twenty yards apart. It was slow going with his walking stick—he had a corked thigh that was still giving him hell a week after the event—and Ginny had stopped and wasn’t coming any closer. ‘I thought you might visit,’ he said. ‘I sort of hoped.’

‘I phoned.’

‘To enquire. And then didn’t ask to be put through. Coward.’

‘On the card I said I was sorry,’ Ginny managed. ‘There didn’t seem anything else to say. I
am
sorry, Ben. I can’t say more than that. So why would you want to see me?’

‘To ask you to marry me.’

Marry...

The word was huge. The word was impossible, Ben thought as he watched all the colour drain from her face. Maybe his plan to put it all out there hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

‘Ben...’

‘What happened wasn’t your fault,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s your fault. You’re my Ginny and I’m your Ben. Bad things happen but whenever they do, we face them together.’

‘You wouldn’t want to share...my bad things.’

‘Ginny...’

‘I always get it wrong,’ she blurted out. ‘I try and try but it never turns out right. Even Button...I’m so scared of caring for Button. I know she has no choice. I know she needs me, but she’d be so much better with someone who can love without messing things up.’

‘That sounds...’ He sorted his words carefully, fighting for the right ones. ‘As if you’re seriously thinking of stepping away.’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not from Button.’

‘And from me?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘From you.’ It was a bald, harsh statement, and he thought suddenly of the harsh things Ginny had said to him when she’d been seventeen, and how he’d believed her and had let her go.

It’d be easier to be a caveman, he thought suddenly. It’d be over the shoulder, a bit of manly exercise lugging her back to his lair and he’d have her for the rest of her life. But now...he had to make her see sense.

‘Do you love me?’ He asked it like it was the most natural question in the world, like it was totally reasonable for a guy who ought to be in bed to lean on his walking stick in the midday sun and wait for an answer to a question of such import that it took his breath away.

But there’d never be a better time to say it, he thought.

Maybe there’d never be a good time to say it.

He watched the doubts flash across her face, the fear, and he drove his advantage.

‘Yes, my first question was marriage,’ he conceded. ‘That didn’t get me anywhere, so let’s try this from a different angle. No lies, Ginny. Do you love me?’

‘Too...too much,’ she whispered.

He nodded. ‘As a matter of interest, did you love me when I was seventeen?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘So what Henry told me was true. We shared a ward in Auckland and he told me. You tossed me over because your old man made threatening noises about my career.’

‘He shouldn’t have told—’

‘Henry shouldn’t have told me?’

‘No.’

It was too much, he thought. He was aching all over. She was standing there in her faded jeans, dirty from pruning grapes, holding Button’s hand, and she was just as unattainable as she’d been at seventeen. Dammit, did she really expect him to walk away?

‘Henry shouldn’t have told?’ Suddenly he was practically shouting—okay, he was shouting, and he might frighten Button but Button looked interested rather than scared. ‘Henry shouldn’t have told? What about you? Why didn’t you say it like it was and we could have faced it down together? You don’t need to fight shadows yourself. Think about the immorality of your father’s threats. Think about the sheer cowardly bullying of your husband, the guy who’s making you shrink now and look like a scared rabbit because somehow you think it’s all your fault that I’m angry. Do you love me, Ginny?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Then that’s all I need right now,’ he said grimly. ‘Go take a shower. We’re going to a funeral.’

‘Ben...’

‘If you think I’m letting you lock yourself away all over again, you have another think coming,’ he snapped. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m incapable of driving. I’m walking wounded standing in your driveway and I promised Squid that I’d speak at his funeral.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘In forty minutes from now. So Hannah’s meeting us at the church to take care of Button and you’re going to get yourself into something a wee bit cleaner and then you’re driving me to the funeral. And then you’re coming in with me, Ginny, like it or not. You’re part of this island. I need you, Ginny.’

And then he softened as he saw her face. She looked like a deer trapped in headlights, but he wouldn’t—he couldn’t—let her walk away.

‘I can’t do this alone, Ginny,’ he said, and he held out his hand. ‘One step at a time. I won’t talk marriage. I won’t even push the love bit, but I will push belonging. Squid knew you as an islander, as do I. You were with us when we needed you most. This is to say farewell to one of us. Ginny, come with me, just for now.’

‘You mean you come with me,’ she said with an attempt at humour. ‘I appear to have the only set of wheels here.’

‘That’s why I need you, Ginny, love,’ he said. ‘That and about fifty other reasons and a lot more besides. Come on, love, it’s a date you can’t refuse. Let’s go and say goodbye to Squid.’

* * *

She sat in a pew at the back of the crowded church. Ailsa squashed in with her and gave her a swift hug.

‘Ben’s been asked to do the eulogy,’ she said. ‘He and Squid were friends. He’s feeling it.’

And she fell silent as if she was feeling it, too, and Ginny was left with her own thoughts.

Love? Marriage?

She’d just hurt him, as she’d hurt him already.

That had been her cowardice talking. That had been the shades of her parents and James.

But to hurt someone else...to expose Ben to mistakes she’d inevitably make? How could she do that?

Ailsa’s hand gripped hers.

‘He loves you with all his heart,’ she whispered. ‘Go on, Ginny, love, jump.’

Was she so obvious? She dredged up a half-hearted smile as they rose for the first hymn.

Jump? And that was all she had to do. Jump, dragging Ben with her. And what was at the base of that leap?

The hymn ended. Ben was in front of the congregation, in front of the plain, wooden coffin, holding a sheet of paper before him. ‘Squid asked me to speak today,’ he said, and her heart turned over. ‘And everyone here knows Squid. He liked to predict what would happen so he made sure. He wrote this just before the earthquake, just in case, telling me exactly what to say.’

There was a ripple of laughter, and then the room fell silent. Squid had been an ancient fisherman, a constant presence on the waterfront since childhood, and the island would be the poorer for his going. Besides, who would predict disaster now?

‘It wasn’t my fault.’

Ben’s first words—Squid’s first words—hauled Ginny from nostalgia and regret. They were her words, she thought in confusion—or maybe they weren’t.

She’d spent a childhood trying to desperately defend herself with those words—
it wasn’t my fault
—only to learn it was easier to appease and accept.

It was my fault.

‘“Me heart’s been giving me trouble for a couple of years now”,’ Ben read, following faithfully the script on the page. Unconsciously, his voice even sounded a little like Squid’s. ‘“Doc’s been telling me I ought to go to mainland to get one of those valve replacement thingies but, sheesh, I’m ninety-seven—I might be even older when you hear this—and who wants stuff inside you that don’t belong.

‘“So I’m sitting on the wharf enjoying me last days in the sun and I’m starting to tell all you fellas there’s a big ’un coming. An earthquake. Be good if it did, I’m thinking, only to prove me right, but I sort of hope I’m wrong. Only then I’m reading in the papers there’s two scientist fellas somewhere who are in jail because they didn’t predict an earthquake and I reckon the world’s gone mad. If I’m wrong then it’s my fault? If I’m right is it my fault ’cos I didn’t yell at you louder? Fault. Like Doc telling me I need a new valve. Is it his fault I’m lying in this damned coffin?”’

There was a ripple of uneasy laughter through the church. Ginny had heard the island whispers, and sometimes the voices had risen higher than whispers. ‘Someone should have warned us. Who can we sue?’

She thought of James, apoplectic with fury because she’d tried to inject a drug he’d needed and had had trouble finding a vein. Lashing out at her. ‘It’s your fault I’m in this mess.’

It was totally irrational, but blame was a powerful tool. When all else failed, find someone to blame.

‘“You want me to cop it so you’ll all feel better?”’ Squid—Ben—said from the pulpit. ‘“No way. That’s what I want to say here. That’s the reason I didn’t ask to get wrapped in a tarp and tipped over the side of me fishing boat out at sea before I’d had this nice little ceremony. I reckon if I’m right about the quake and it sets me ticker off—and I know it might—you might be sitting here shaking your fist at me coffin, saying the mad old coot caused this mess.

‘“So I just wanted to say stuff it, no one causes earthquakes so don’t dare stop drinking beer at me wake if it’s happened. I want a decent wake and I want you to pour a bit of beer over me coffin and then toss me out to sea with no regrets and say I’m done. Great life. Great times. Great island. Merv Larkin, notes on me snapper spot are written on the back of the calendar of me dunny. That’s it, then. There’s me legacy. See you.”’

Ben paused then. There were more ripples of laughter but Ginny still heard the odd murmur. There had been blame. Ben was watching calmly as islanders elbowed each other.

She knew the mutterings. ‘If Squid knew, why didn’t he say just how bad it’d be? Why didn’t he talk to the mainland scientists, shove it down their throats, get official warnings out?’

‘He really didn’t know.’ It was Ben now, Ben speaking his own words, and suddenly he was looking at Ginny. Straight at Ginny. He was smiling faintly, and suddenly she knew that his smile was meant only for her.

‘A hundred years of living, and you know what Squid knew for sure?’ Ben said. ‘That no one knows a sausage. We can make guesses and we make them all the time. I’ll cross this road because chances are a meteor’s not going to drop on my head. That’s a guess. It’s a pretty good guess, and Squid’s earthquake prediction was a pretty good guess, too, backed up by a hundred years of Squid’s grandpa telling him the signs. But, still, unless Squid got underground and heaved, it wasn’t his fault.

‘Meteors are sitting over everyone’s head and one day they’ll drop, nothing surer, and we just need to accept it. Anyway that’s all I need to say except we were blessed to have Squid. We should have no regrets except that even though he’s left his snapper spots, his best crayfish spots die with him. We loved him, he drove us nuts and we’ll miss him. That’s pretty much all we need to say, except he left enough money for everyone to have a beer or a whisky on him. Bless him.’

There was laughter, but this time it wasn’t uncomfortable. There was the odd sniff and the organist belted out a mighty rendition of what must surely be the island’s favourite hymn by the strength of the island voices raised in farewell.

And then six weathered fishermen led by a limping Ben carried the coffin from the church, the hearse carried the coffin down to the wharf because after all this he would be buried at sea—and then the island proceeded to the pub.