I nod. It’s as good a place to start as any.
She’s right. It’s not hard to find. The building sits on a corner. Police tape ropes off access on three sides. Smoke marks climb the building to the roofline, black and grim, and I pause for a moment to steady myself.
Then I walk around the corner and see the memorial, a pile of stuffed animals and candles and flowers, some fresh, some turning brown after a few days. There’s a smell in the air I associate with burn patients, scorched fabric and hair and blistered skin. Never good.
I’d done some reading on the fire before I arrived, but nothing particularly set it apart. It wasn’t terrorism—not an issue in New Zealand, hard as that is to fathom—just a wretched accident, an overcrowded club, a blocked exit, and a malfunctioning sprinkler system. The perfect storm. It only made the news in the US for its drama.
Disasters are always worse when they involve bunches of young people, and this crowd was very young indeed. I walk slowly past the photos that have been taped and tied and paper-clipped to the fence keeping everyone out. Mostly Asian, not a soul past thirty, their eyes still twinkling with everything ahead and nothing too terrible behind. Now they’ll be frozen there forever.
The vast losses thud in my gut. The parents who love them, the friends, the siblings, the shopkeepers who enjoyed their jokes. I think about it all the time in the ER, when it’s been more ghastly than usual—idiotic car accidents, domestic violence, and bar fights and shootings. Lives wrecked. Stopped. Nothing to be done about it.
It’s been getting to me. I’ve always hated losing patients, of course, but I loved the rush of saving them, being there at the moment of acute trauma and terror and helping bring them back from the brink, like the girl in the ER the night I saw Josie on the news, a bullet wound to the gut. Her boyfriend carried her in, and his hands were covered with blood from keeping the wound compressed. It saved her.
But it’s all the lost ones who haunt me lately. The mother who’d slammed her car into a tree, the boy who’d been attacked by a dog, the sweet, sweet face of the little boy who’d shot himself with his mother’s pistol.
I shove their faces away and focus on bearing witness to the collection of photos here in front of me, taking the time to look at each one. The girl with purple streaks in her hair and a crooked front tooth. The diva with red lips and a knowing expression. The boy laughing with a dog.
How many of their families will have the satisfaction of actual identification? A scene like this, with so many victims and physical damage, can be challenging.
The car that took the main blast on the train that supposedly killed Josie was in pieces, melted and evaporated, and so were the humans within. They found her backpack and the remains of one of her travel companions, a guy she’d mentioned once or twice in emails she sent home from the odd internet café, and we knew she’d been traveling with the group.
The phone call came in on my cell when I was on my way home to get some sleep after a grueling thirty-six hours of an obstetrics rotation at SF General, walking up the hill to the apartment I shared with four other residents, none of us home enough for it to matter that it was so crowded. The place was a pit, but none of us cared about that either. Food was all takeout, the environment be damned, and a local coffee shop downstairs in the building provided the caffeine. I’d been dreaming of a long, hot shower and washing my hair, then sleeping for a few hours by myself in the house, since I’d left all my roommates back at the hospital.
The phone rang, and it was my mother, howling. I’d only ever heard that sound one other time, after the earthquake, and it is carved into my bones. “Mom. What is it?”
She told me. Josie was dead. Killed in a terrorist bomb that demolished a train in France a few days before.
The weeks after were a blur. When I wasn’t on the phone with my mother or the funeral home or the authorities, I worked. Often I took calls between patient visits, ducking into a storage closet to get some privacy. I was too exhausted and overwhelmed to cry. That came later.
Next to me on the street in Auckland is a young woman, weeping, and I move away to give her privacy, wishing to make her path easier, knowing there is only one way to walk that road: step by bloody step.
I’m suddenly so deeply, vividly angry that my hands shake. I have to stop to take a breath, looking up at the building. “What the hell, Josie?” I say aloud. “How could you do that to us? How could you?” Even from my self-centered, surfer-loser sister, it’s hard to fathom.
It’s appropriate that we’re in Auckland, the land of volcanoes, because my middle feels like it’s turned to magma, burning hot and impossible to calm.
When I find her, I don’t know what I’ll do. Hit her? Spit on her? Hug her?
I have no idea.
Chapter Four
Mari
Simon and I arrange to meet Sarah’s teacher before class. We drive separately so that we can head out on our own afterward, me to Sapphire House to start taking notes, him to his empire of gyms.
I’m in the best possible mood, thanks to dawn sex with my fit and vigorous husband, which made me so cheerful I whipped up blueberry muffins for breakfast, which even Sarah ate with alacrity, after picking at her food the past few days. I peer at her in the rearview, and she’s gazing out the window, her dark hair swept back from her freckled face. She’s so unlike me that it’s a little strange. You’d think your own child would have some resemblance to you, but she’s my father and my sister, all in one.
Perhaps a fitting punishment for my sins, though I try not to dwell on it. Accept the things you cannot change and all that.
What I do know is that Sarah will hate it when the other girls stop growing and she keeps on, just as my sister did. Already she has bigger hands and feet than the other girls and a solidness that is nothing close to fat, but she’ll see it that way if we don’t stay at it, countering the bullshit that she hears day in, day out.
“Swim club today, sweetheart?”
“Yes,” she says, her accent so very New Zealand, yis. “I beat Mara yesterday.”
Her nemesis. “That’s fantastic. You’re stronger than she is, by far.”
She shrugs, then meets my eyes in the mirror. “You don’t have to go to the school, you know.”
“I don’t have to,” I agree mildly. “But you don’t seem very happy lately, and your dad and I want to make sure everything is okay.”
“My teachers don’t know anything.” Her tone is not scornful, only matter-of-fact.
The traffic is thick, and I have to pay attention to the road for a few moments. At the next stoplight, I say, “What don’t they know?”
Her wide mouth flattens into an expression of resignation. She just shakes her head.
“Sarah, it will be a lot easier to help you if you let me in on what’s going on.”
She doesn’t reply. I pull into the school lot. Simon’s Infiniti is not yet here, so I turn off the car, unbuckle my belt, and turn around, sorting through the ten thousand possible responses for the one that will help unlock the secret here. “Are you having trouble with a friend?”
“No.”
“I’m not sure why you won’t just tell me. You know you can trust me.”
“I can trust you, but if I tell you, everything just gets worse, and no one will like me at all.”
“What will get worse?”
She shouts, “I don’t want to tell you! Don’t you understand?”
Reaching through the seats, I wrap my hand around her ankle and just sit there, willing myself to believe her secret is not as dire as mine was when I was just a little older. She’s a well-tended, well-observed child. “All right. There’s your dad. I’ll just pop into the school.”
I meet Simon at the door, and he takes my hand. Our unified front.
The teacher is young and pretty, and she blushes when Simon shakes her hand. “Good morning, Ms. Kanawa.”
“Good morning, Mr. Edwards. Mrs. Edwards. Sit down, won’t you?” She folds her hands on the desk. “How can I help?”
We outline the problem—that Sarah wants to be homeschooled suddenly, and it seems there might be something going on. Ms. Kanawa mulls it over. She says, “You know, I wonder if there might be some bullying. One of the girls is quite the queen bee, you know, and all the other girls listen to her as if she’s a royal.”
“Is it Emma Reed?” I guess. She’s a milk-and-peaches child with ribbons of spun-gold hair and enormous blue eyes—all hiding the instincts of a barracuda.
Ms. Kanawa nods. “She and Sarah have never got on.”
“Why’s that?” Simon asks.
“They’re both”—she pauses, chooses her words carefully—“willful girls. And there is some understanding that they are the children of popular parents.”
“Popular?” I echo.
“Well-known. Emma’s mother is a broadcaster, of course, on TVNZ, and you, Mr. Edwards, are so visible because of the clubs.” He’s the spokesman for his own gyms, the genial host inviting everyone to visit and experience the health of good exercise. He also conducts fund-raisers every year for the Auckland Safeswim Initiative, a drive to make sure every child in the city knows how to swim.