“I wanna go to a playground,” Zach informed her.
That was no surprise. Only four years old, Zachary wasn’t big on museums, art galleries, and guided tours. Zach was big on swings and slides and “roundy-rounds.” Jean felt locked up and closed in and wanted to spend the day outside anyway.
“Right, mate,” she said, mimicking an Australian accent and making her little boy laugh.
“Right, mate!” Zach shouted, and off they went, holding hands.
The main entrance to the famous Wellington Botanic Gardens lay directly across from their hotel, but Jean followed the advice of a tour book and hired a taxi to drive them to the entrance at the top of the park.
“It’s a long and beautiful walk down,” the book said, “but a long and exhausting walk up. In the middle, exactly where adults will want to sit down and take a breather, there’s a charming playground the little ones will love.”
The guidebook was right on all counts.
“Two slides!” Zachary squealed when he saw the playground.
“Wow. Go for it, Sweetpea. I’ll be on that bench under that big tree over there.”
He raced at breakneck speed down the path toward the playground equipment while Jean held her breath, watching him. When he reached the first slide safely, without falling to his chubby bare knees, Jean walked over to the wooden bench and sat down.
Big tree, she thought, mocking herself. She peered up into its branches. Some botanist I’d make. Big green tree Maybe it’s labeled. She looked down at its roots, where a label did indeed inform her it was a Metrosideros umbellata (myrtle) (rata). Rata was probably the Maori word for it, she guessed. The Maoris, Jean knew from her reading if not from ever actually having seen one, were the Polynesians who still inhabited New Zealand after more than a thousand years.
She dug out of her purse the paperback history of New Zealand she had brought with her to read while Zach played. Opening it, she glanced up again through the branches of the myrtle (big green) tree at the clear and sunny New Zealand sky. She sighed happily and then looked down and thumbed to the page where she had last stopped reading about the Maoris: “… tribe and family were all-important Every aspect of life was bound together and ruled by principles such as tapu (sacredness), mana (spiritual authority), and mekutu (sorcery).…”
“Mommy! Look at me, Mommy!”
Zachary waved to her from atop the tallest slide. Jean, who had been thirty-eight years old when she had him, her first and only child, felt her heart lurch at the sight of him, so high. But she only smiled and mouthed up at her son: “Wow.” He waved furiously, all wrist action, then swooshed down, landing with a thump on his bottom instead of on his feet. Jean watched him decide whether to cry and run back to her, or to laugh and run back to the ladder. When he laughed, she relaxed and returned to her reading.
“‘… the Maori,’ wrote Captain James Cook in his journal, ‘have some arts among them which they execute with great judgement (sic) and unwearied patience.…”
“Look at me, Mommy!”
“I’m looking!”
She also looked around her at the other mothers and children. The women, in their sleeveless cotton blouses and their flowered cotton skirts that clung to their slim legs, were almost uniformly pretty and blond, but it was the New Zealand children who took Jean’s breath away. So blond, so tanned in this summer month, so blue-eyed and milk-fed and gorgeously healthy looking. Pakehas. From her book Jean had learned that was the Maori word for the invading Europeans. Maori, on the other hand, meant “normal.” She decided she’d never seen so many beautiful children all in one place. And the prettiest one of all was a little blond beauty swinging by herself.
Jean stared, unable to take her eyes from the child, who looked about Zach’s age, and whose deeply tanned skin dramatically set off the blue of her almond eyes and her curly blond hair. When the beauty hopped down from the swing and ran toward the slide where Zachary played, Jean continued to stare.
“Angle!”
The little girl named Angie turned toward the woman calling her. At the sudden sight of the other side of the child’s face, Jean gasped and then tried to hide her shock by coughing and looking quickly away. An appalling scar ran down the left side of that exquisite face. As the little girl ran toward the woman who had called to her, Jean glanced at her again, not wanting to stare but unable to look away.
The scar bisected the child’s left cheek.
It started just below the outer edge of her left eye, curved under the eyeball, then cut back through the middle of the cheek, finally curving down and under her chin, below the outer edge of her mouth. The scar was deep and as startlingly pink as the hibiscus flowers in the park.
“Oddly enough,” Jean told Lyle that night at dinner, “the scar didn’t detract from her beauty. I know this sounds strange, but the poignancy of it, the, I don’t know, the sadness of it, somehow enhanced her beauty. At least, for me.”
“Car accident, do you think?”
“I hope so,” Jean said.
Her husband looked startled. “What?”
“I mean, at least that might be an innocent explanation of how she got it.”
“Oh, you mean, maybe it was-”
With a sharp nod of her head toward Zachary, Jean stopped Lyle from actually saying the words “child abuse,” although that was what she herself feared. Still, Wellington wasn’t Chicago, and New Zealand wasn’t the United States. Her guidebooks called it a family-oriented country, for both pakeha and Maori.
As Jean ate her lamb chops and browned potatoes, she thought about the woman who had called the girl away from her play. Who was she to the girl? An older mother, like Jean herself? An aunt? A baby-sitter, perhaps, or maybe even a grandmother?
At the park, the woman, the only one there who had looked as old as Jean, had taken the child’s hand and together they had walked away from the playground, heading back up the hill toward the top of the park. Jean had stared after them, feeling like weeping. She had glanced back toward the slide and was surprised to see that Zachary, too, was staring after the beautiful, scarred little girl.
Over dessert, she teased, “You liked her, didn’t you, Zach?”
“I love her,” the little boy said solemnly.
Lyle’s sulk deepened at breakfast the next morning, mainly, it seemed to Jean, because he couldn’t abide the British custom of serving cooked tomatoes along with the fried eggs. And the bacon wasn’t real bacon at all, he complained, it was ham. And didn’t the New Zealand newspapers realize there were other parts of the world besides the South Pacific?
“Zach wants to go to the park again,” Jean said.
“Swings, Daddy!”
Lyle managed a smile for his son and then a rueful version of it for his wife, one that told her he knew he was being a gramp but that he couldn’t help it. “Have fun.” He coughed a couple of times. “I’m going back to bed. This damned hotel’s so expensive, I don’t want to miss a minute of it.”
“You might feel better if you got out.”
“I’ll feel better when I get out of New Zealand.”
But he softened the cynicism by winking at his son.
The beautiful little girl with the scar was at the park again that day. Jean watched the child and her own son-the two outsiders-tentatively greet each other and then happily play together.
“I’m Zachary David Williams.”
“I’m Angela Susan Jones.”
“What happened to your face?”
“How come you talk so funny?”
“I’m a United States for American!”