He stares at me with kind eyes. “Are you going to be all right? It’s getting late, I’m about to close the car park.”
I shake my head, too tired to feel embarrassed. “I don’t know if I’ll be all right. But I’ll be on my way.”
I take the windblown path back to Mr. Orange, and as I sit in the driver’s seat I’m demolished by the emptiness inside. His stuff is gone. His sketchbook remains on the backseat where I put it.
I want to curl up inside my body to find warmth. I’m so cold.
Mr. Orange starts with a rough purr. The sound echoes across the empty bus, emphasizing how alone I am. I turn on the heaters full blast, and with a deep breath pull the bus out of the car park, the D.O.C. officer waving at me as I go.
I drive south, through desolate villages and past darkening trees. The night is coming and I want to escape. But there’s nowhere to go.
It’s late when I end up at my grandfather’s place. I wanted to make it to Auckland, but I knew I couldn’t bear to be alone in the house with my roommate out, probably working. My whānau is what I need. I pull Mr. Orange to a stop and sit for a few moments, the engine ticking down, sounding hollow.
Eventually the front door opens and I see Auntie Shelley coming out, a shawl wrapped around her and billowing in the breeze. It seems the clouds and wind have chased me down here.
She comes to the window, peering in at me. “What are you doing here?” She looks in the back. “Where’s Josh?”
I close my eyes and the tears start again. I’m afraid I’m compromised now, the wall destroyed, the damage too deep.
I feel everything. Every little horrible thing.
Auntie Shelley opens the door and I practically fall into her arms. She leads me into the warm house and sits me down on the couch. I can’t stop shivering so she wraps me in blankets and bustles off to the kitchen to make tea.
My grandfather is staring at me but I avoid his eyes. I could tell he liked Josh. He’s going to be mad at me for ruining things.
But he doesn’t say anything. No one has asked anything because everyone knows. I’m crying. Josh is gone. That’s the whole story.
When I start to warm up a bit, the hot tea coursing through my veins, Pops switches off the telly.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks. He’s neither inquisitive nor curious, just courteous.
My instincts tell me they wouldn’t understand, to keep it bottled up inside, rebuild the wall. This would be the first step, the first brick. But my instincts aren’t my own. They are of the person I told myself to be. They are conditioned reflexes. They don’t come from my heart.
I take in a long, shaky breath. I tell them everything, from our start in Vancouver (leaving out the sordid details, of course) to him appearing in Auckland, to traveling with him and Nick and Amber, to the way he got under my skin, to Christmastime, to finally painting at East Cape, to getting tattoos and jumping out of airplanes, to New Year’s Eve when he told me he loved me, and to the Cape Reinga, where he told me he would stay and I told him he should go.
It’s been a crazy seven weeks, and when I’m done speaking I’m utterly exhausted and feeling brittle to the bone. We had gone through so much and I had just thrown it on the fire.
The whole time Pops just listened. Only now he nods slowly, studying me, thinking. I fear what he’s going to say; I respect him so much that if he tells me I’m a terrible, irredeemable person, I will believe it.
“I think you were right in telling him to leave,” he says finally, and the sentence drops between us like a bomb.
My jaw comes unhinged. “What? I thought you liked him.”
“From what I saw of him, yes. I liked him very much. I think he’s very good for you. And I think you have been good for him. You have pushed his boundaries and made him brave. He would have never come here, seen all that he saw, if he hadn’t met you.”
“Then why do you think it’s good he left?”
A wisp of a smile traces his lips. “You were right in thinking you would hurt him. You would have. Not because you mean to. You’re a good girl, Gemma. You have a good heart. But it’s all you know how to do: push people away.”
I stare at the ground, knowing how right he is.
He continues, “He would have stayed here for you, just for you, and there would’ve been a lot of pressure from that. New relationships shouldn’t have that kind of weight on their shoulders. If you weren’t stable enough, open enough, selfless enough to shoulder that weight with him, you would crumble.”
“So we were doomed from the start,” I say wearily.
“No,” he says quickly. “You aren’t doomed. This is a blessing, for both of you. If he hadn’t left, you wouldn’t be here, opening up like you never have before. At least not to me. Sometimes you have to bulldoze something to the ground before you can rebuild. Do you know what I mean?”