The Shattering (32 page)

Sione nodded, and let her hold a straw to his cracked lips. The thing in his arm was an iv drip, and it turned out there was a big hole where two of his back teeth had been. He tongued the gap. ‘How bad do I look?'

Keri managed a small smile. ‘Pretty bad. Your parents and half your family are downstairs talking to the doctors. Want me to get them?'

‘I thought that was a dream! How long was I asleep?'

‘Four days, but you kept coming out and sliding back in again. The doctors said it was pretty normal, with head trauma. Your scans all came back clean. They're not too worried. But if you're really awake this time, you'll have to do a bunch of tests.'

Sione stared at her. Four
days
? ‘What . . . what are we telling them?'

‘Rafferty's mostly telling them. People
listen
to him. He tells everyone we were very brave, to go running in there to save those people. But that you must have fallen and hit your head on the way in.' She tried that peculiar half smile again. ‘I don't know whether your mum wants to yell at you or hug you more. She's kind of scary, your mum.'

Great. So even the lies that disguised what really happened made him out to be a dumb kid who fell over his own feet and had to be rescued while rescuing others.

Keri shrugged, and he realised he'd said that out loud.

‘But
we
know the truth,' Janna said from the corner. She yawned and stretched before padding over to drop a careless kiss on his forehead. One of her feet was bandaged up, and she was wearing a black ballet slipper on the other. She looked a lot smaller without thick soles or high heels. ‘Sione Felise, hero.'

‘I was wondering when you'd wake up,' Keri said. ‘Sione, tell her to stop treating the hospital like a hotel.'

Janna grinned at her. ‘Sione, tell her to stop moaning like an old woman.'

‘Both of you help me sit up,' Sione told them, and discovered that smiling hurt when they both moved at once to obey. ‘You broke the crown, Keri?'

‘It exploded everywhere,' Janna said, sounding proud. ‘Knocked Keri out. Aroha and me had to carry her downstairs. Let me tell you, she's heavier than she looks.'

Keri looked grim at the mention of the crown but pointed at Janna. ‘And Stardust saved Takeshi.'

Janna shook her head. ‘I told you, I'm sticking with Janna.' She didn't sound angry, but she was firm, and Keri nodded an apology.

Obviously he had missed out on a lot. That was okay. There would be time to catch up on everything after he got out of here; whole long lifetimes for them to be friends.

‘And Takeshi saved me,' he said, and just sat there for a moment. ‘Wow. We did it. We really did it.'

‘Proud of yourselves, aren't you?' came a new voice from the door, and both Keri and Janna stiffened.

The woman was white, dark-haired and middle-aged, and she tugged at something in Sione's memory like a fishhook.

The woman stepped into the room, and Janna stepped around the bed, joining Keri to effectively block the woman from getting to him. Sione didn't feel off ended; he was definitely in no state to defend himself from any attack. ‘You killed her,' she said. ‘You killed my daughter. I hope you're bloody happy.'

‘You killed my brother,' Janna told her. ‘You taught him English for four years, and you killed him. Are
you
happy?'

Oh, hell.
This was the teacher, the other one who'd survived. He'd only seen her through pain and smoke, but the agony in her eyes was familiar to him. He'd seen it in his own parents' faces.

‘I didn't know,' insisted Mrs Rackard.

‘I don't give a shit whether you knew or not,' Keri said. ‘Those boys are still dead. We didn't kill Emily. She was killed by the ghosts of the boys
you
murdered. If you want someone to blame, think about that.'

Mrs Rackard let out a cry and stepped forward, and the girls braced, but a big figure came through the door and grabbed the woman around the waist, easily hauling her backward. ‘That's enough, Gloria,' Sergeant Rafferty rumbled. ‘You said you were going to apologise.'

‘I didn't know! I didn't know what she was doing!'

‘Jesus, you really think that lets us off the hook? I'm sorry, kids,' he muttered, looking at everything in the room but their eyes. ‘You won't see either of us again. I'll make sure of it.'

‘Good,' Keri said in a voice that cut like broken glass.

Janna folded her arms and stared.

Rafferty hesitated for a moment and then hustled the sobbing woman out of the room.

The girls went back to their places on either side of him as if nothing had happened, sharing only one glance.

‘Bitch,' Janna muttered.

But Sione had an urgent question he needed to ask before his parents came in and the privacy ended. ‘I thought . . . were they really there, our brothers? Did they come?'

‘I'll go get your mum and dad,' Keri said, and abruptly turned away.

Sione blinked at the sound of her firm steps down the hallway and then looked at Janna, trying to ignore the momentary dizziness. Everything hurt, and even that tiny motion had reminded him how exhausted he was.

‘Matthew and Schuyler were there,' Janna said soft ly. ‘But Jake wasn't.'

‘Oh,' Sione said, and felt the last piece of the pattern click into place.
Of course.
Jake had always been anomalous — the second in a year, the second in a single place.

Not a murder at all. ‘Oh, man. Poor Keri. How's she doing?'

‘She'll be okay,' Janna said, but she didn't sound too sure.

‘She will,' Sione insisted. ‘She's got us now.' For a second he was worried — now that his usefulness was over, would either girl want to see him again? Waste her time talking to a loser? Then he pushed the feeling away, sure of them, and of himself.

And Janna nodded and brushed his forehead again. ‘Yes,' she agreed, sounding more certain. ‘She does.'

‘Sione!' his mother said from the door, and Janna stepped away. Sione hardly noticed her leaving. His mum and dad were there, hugging him as though they were holding him together, and before the yelling started, he relaxed into their arms. This was another place he belonged.

Over his mother's shaking shoulder, he saw a flash of coppery hair and a pale, freckled face.

‘Mum,' he said, grinning as wide as his broken face could stand. ‘Have you met my girlfriend, Aroha?'

ONE YEAR LATER

KERI

That would have been a good place to end the story.

But the thing about life is that there's only one ending to it. Mostly, life keeps going, and unless you make the choice Jake did, you have to keep going, too.

The people who take care of terrible things after they happen patched Sione up and sent him home with his parents. They investigated the fifire and listened to Sergeant Rafferty's lies and decided it was a tragic accident: careless use of candles, a faulty sprinkler system, too many accelerants on hand — literally lining the walls. And Summerton summers were so dry and warm. Ideal fire conditions.

It was amazing, they said, that it hadn't happened earlier.

Rafferty and Gloria Rackard left town to go who knows and who cares where.

Aroha and Takeshi went back to Auckland, and then Takeshi went back to Japan.

And my life kept going, straight downhill.

My normal bitchiness turned into squalls of rage and then into a blankness punctuated by long crying spells that I thought I was hiding. My cast came off, and I didn't bother to go back to my paper run or my training routine. I didn't feel like doing much of anything again, ever. What was the point? Horrible things could happen at any time, and you just couldn't be prepared.

But Mum and Dad, even in the middle of their own grief, saw that mine was getting dangerous. At the inquest, a verdict of suicide was returned, and everything came over me at once, how badly what Jake had done had hurt us all. I slept for three days, and then stopped sleeping altogether. That was it. I was sent to Nanny Hinekura with a backpack and my old teddy bear, and she spent a week moving me out of bed and around the house and making me eat even when I couldn't be bothered, like a plump sparrow scolding a fledgling into flight. I
felt
like a fledgling, all tender and new and unprotected, but it wasn't as bad as I'd expected. With just Nanny Hinekura and Auntie Huria and me, there wasn't the usual holiday bunch of family to remind me of what I'd lost, no conspicuous gap in a crowd of familiar faces.

While I was away, Mum talked to Janna, who talked to Sione, who talked to his mother. Two days later, I had an appointment with one of the suicide counsellors I'd rejected talking to right after it'd happened. Then I got, in quick succession, a referral to a psychiatrist, a prescription for antidepressants, and more professional support than I could throw a stick at, which was oft en a tempting thought. Sione's mother did complicated bureaucratic things and called in favours, and got me the sessions for free after the government-funded ones ran out, but my parents had to drive me to Nelson every two weeks. They did it without complaint. Seven hours there and back — plenty of time to stare out the window and think of how fragile the world was, and how easy it could be to lose everything, unprotected from things that went bump in the night.

It was like the voice that had told me to hate Sione and Janna, except, this time, there was no easy solution, no statue to smash. It was all coming from inside.

It took a long time, and a lot of work, but I got better.

I would never be okay with what Jake had done, and I would never stop being angry and sad about his missing out on the rest of his life — and mine, too. I knew there would still be bad grief periods, maybe for the rest of my life, and it was hard talking to my therapist, Ms Wirihana, when there were some things I couldn't tell her without probably getting mistakenly labelled as delusional. But the pain was less overwhelming, and I was getting better at other things. I still planned for possibilities, but it was easier to recognise the planning as part of the anxiety and not being about real things that might really happen.

And I survived being outed. I managed to tell Mum and Dad after Sione went home, before they could hear it from anyone else. Janna sat beside me on the couch, giving me the support that Jake couldn't.

Mum cried. Dad went quiet.

Then they both hugged me and told me how much they loved me and that they would never stop. It wasn't quite an endorsement of being gay, but it was support for being me.

As I'd feared, not everyone was that okay with it.

One of my dad's sisters is in a church that hates queer people. Her little daughters aren't allowed to play with me anymore, and she says she's praying for me. Imagine being
her
gay daughter. Dad stopped talking to her for three months, until I told him I didn't want him to lose more family. Nanny Hinekura knows I'm gay, but she won't talk about it — around her, we're all just supposed to pretend it's not there.

I caught some minor shit at school, but Mum and Dad were on top of that, too. I don't know what the principal said to everyone while I was away, but it must have been effective. The rugby team closed ranks around me, though some of the girls got changed in the toilets now instead of the locker rooms. I tried not to let that bother me; it was their problem, not mine, and I wasn't even attracted to any of them. A few people whispered behind my back, and since Janna and I were friends again, they whispered about her, too. A couple of teachers looked at me funny, and hardly anyone seemed able to stop saying, ‘That's so
gay
.' None of that was good, especially when I was already depressed, but it could have been much worse. Most of the time I could cope.

Besides, in Summerton, people had other things to worry about.

People lost jobs, people I knew and liked. And Sandra-Claire, too; I don't really hate her anymore, but we're never going to be friends. She moved to Nelson, and Mum said she's training as a hairdresser; I reckon she'll be good at that, after all the crap she's done to her own hair.

The schools got an inspection they hadn't had for ten years, and the number of students didn't match the amount of resources given out. One of the primary schools is going to close, and the one that's left is going to merge with the high school. The hospital was downgraded, in line with reforms that should have taken place half a decade ago. These were all normal misfortunes that hit isolated country towns all the time, but they seemed more tragic in contrast to Summerton's good luck, which we'd all taken for granted for so long.

A lot of people moved out of Summerton over the past year, including Janna's mum, who lost her job at the hospital. She went to Christchurch in August. Janna and her sisters went with her.

I was sorry for everyone affected, and really sorry Janna had to leave, but I couldn't be sorry about the real reason why. I had plenty of happy memories of Summerton in its glory days, but they were all tainted, overlaid with the knowledge of who had paid for its success. Let it become a normal West Coast town, as ordinary and beautiful as any other.