A Woman’s Eye

THE SCAR by Nancy Pickard

A winner of the Anthony, Macavity, and American Mystery awards, NANCY PICKARD is a native midwesterner, residing in Fairway, Kansas. Her Jenny Cain novels, including I.O.U., Bum Steer, Dead Crazy, Generous Death, Say No to Murder, and Marriage Is Murder, have made her one of the fastest rising stars in the mystery field.

The reason Jean Williams took her son to the Botanic Gardens every day they were in Wellington, New Zealand, was that her husband was in such a lousy mood that she wanted to get out of the hotel and far away from him.

“I’m taking Zach to the park,” Jean announced on the second morning of Lyle’s sulk. Lyle had acquired an upper respiratory infection while they were up north in Auckland, and that accounted for some of his mood. But the truth was that coming to New Zealand on this vacation was Jean’s dream, not his; Lyle wanted to visit only Australia, and it would be another ten days before they flew there. New Zealand, he complained, was too expensive and too cold, and he hated driving on the “wrong” side of the road. “But it’s so beautiful,” Jean said. “So is Alaska,” he griped, “and we wouldn’t have to spend a fortune to get there.”

Well, if he was going to pout, Jean decided, she’d take Zach and they’d explore on their own. There was no point in ruining the trip for all of them. So she said, with more enthusiasm than she really felt, “Let’s go, Zach!”

“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!”

“Race you to the slide, Zachary!”

Several times Jean tried to catch the eye of the woman who accompanied Angie, but she never succeeded in doing it. The woman, short, stouter, older, and more solemn-looking than the other mothers, kept her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on her charge. After a while Jean gave up the effort of making a friend for herself and pulled her book on the history of New Zealand out of her purse. Skipping the chapter on Maori art, in which she wasn’t particularly interested, she turned quickly past pictures of wood carvings that looked like Alaskan totems and thumbed to the chapters about modern-day New Zealand.

“… Greek and Italian restaurants are enormously popular.…”

She was happy that Zachary had found a pal. It was still an effort not to stare at Angie’s face, but Jean noticed that the other people in the park rarely did, as if they were used to seeing the child there. Soon, lost in photographs of spectacular scenery, lulled by the music of her own child’s screams and giggles, Jean nearly forgot about it herself.

“Mom,”

She looked up into Zach’s face.

“I’m cold, Mommy.”

“Well, no wonder, look at the time! I’ve been lost in my book. Where’d your little friend go?”

“Angie went home.”

Jean smiled tenderly to see the expression of loss in his eyes. “You have really made a good friend, all this long way from our own home, haven’t you?”

“Come back tomorrow, Mommy?”

“Yes, I promise.”

And they did return to the park every day they remained in Wellington, until it was time to leave for the fjords and glaciers of the south island.

But when they had to say good-bye to Angela for the last time, Zachary and his little friend couldn’t seem to grasp that they would never see each other again. Jean knelt down on the ground beside them and explained over and over that Zachary and his mom and dad had to leave, and they wouldn’t be able to come back to the park.

But Zach said, “We come tomorrow, Angie!”

“No, darling, we won’t be able to do that.”

“Yes!” He shouted at his mother. “Park! Yes!”

“Shh, Zachy, here’s what we’ll do.” Jean grabbed her purse and took out a scrap of paper and a pen. “I’ll write down our name and address and give it to Angie, so maybe someday she can write to you, okay?”

“We come to park,” Zach said stubbornly.

Jean gave the scrap of paper to Angela, who grabbed it and stuffed it into the pocket of her little skirt. “Good-bye, Angie.” Jean ached to kiss the child’s scarred cheek; instead, she touched her fingers gently to the curly blond hair and then to the other, perfect, cheek. When Angie smiled, her wide, pretty mouth and her haunting almond eyes turned up sweetly at the corners.

“Angie!”

From her park bench, the woman called.

Angie hugged her friend, and then ran off, waving and shouting, “See you! See you tomorrow, Zach!”

Zach argued with his mother about anything and everything all the way down the path to the hotel. Finally his fury turned to tears. Then he cried so inconsolably, and for so long, that Jean began to worry and to feel grateful they were leaving so the separation of the two little friends wouldn’t be any harder than it already was.

“Honestly, Lyle,” Jean whispered to her husband that night in bed. Zach was asleep, and breathing noisily through his tear-clogged nose, in the single bed across the room from their double. “You’d think this was that Maori legend I read about, the one where Rangi and Papa were separated by Tane.”

“Do I know these people?” Lyle whispered back.

“Rangi was sky father, Papa was earth mother, and Tane was their son, and they were all together in the primordial darkness. But Tane was also the god of the forests, and so he had to push his parents away from him in order to create night and day so that his forests could grow. The story was that Rangi the sky father was so grief stricken at being separated from Papa the earth mother that his tears filled her with oceans and lakes.”

“So it’s old Rangi’s fault that we couldn’t drive down here from Chicago?”

“I feel so sorry for Zach! I’ll swear, trying to explain why he won’t ever see Angie again is like trying to explain death to a four-year-old. He doesn’t understand that it’s permanent, and that she’s gone forever from his life.”

“I need that Tane fellow,” Lyle muttered into his pillow, “to separate me permanently from New Zealand before this hotel separates me permanently from my money.” “Oh, good night, you!”

But Jean was wrong-the separation wasn’t permanent.

When Zachary was ten, he received a postcard from Angela Susan Jones in Wellington, New Zealand. The front of the card had a photograph of the playground in the Botanic Gardens, and she’d circled the tallest slide with a red, indelible marker.

“Do you remember?” it said on the back. “I put your address in a secret place and saved it all these years. Will you please, please, please write back to me?”

She had signed it, “I still love you. Angle,” and printed her address.

Zachary wrote back.

When Zachary was twenty-four and in the second year of medical school at the University of Chicago, he announced to his parents the specialty he intended to pursue.

“I’ll be a plastic surgeon,” he said.

“Good, maybe you can take a few tucks in my wallet,” his father joked. “It’s feeling loose and flabby after putting you through med school.”

But Jean, who had never before heard her son mention any special interest in plastic surgery, was surprised and a little puzzled by his decision.

During the last year of Zachary’s medical residency, he told Lyle and Jean that “the little girl from Wellington” was coming to Chicago to stay with him for a visit.

“Do you remember her, Mom?”

“You’ve written to Angie all these years, honey?”

“Yeah, didn’t I ever tell you?”

“No, but I should have guessed.”

A day later, she called her son back.

“Zach, are you hoping to fix Angie’s scar? Is that why she’s coming? Is that why you decided to be a plastic surgeon?”

“Sure,” he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion. “I’m going to take a look at it, and see what I can do.”

“Does Angie know this?”

“Of course, Mom, we planned this together a long time ago. We’ve always known she’d come up here, and I’d become a doctor, and we’d fix her face.”

“Zach, what caused that scar?”

“I don’t know,” he said matter-of-factly, “because Angie doesn’t know. Her mother told her it happened when she was a baby, before she was adopted. She doesn’t have any memory of it.”

“Angie’s adopted?”

An image flitted through Jean’s mind, a memory of a silent woman of about Jean’s age, sitting alone on a park bench, her hands folded in her lap, watching the little girl.

“You don’t care, do you, Mom?”

“Of course not, honey.”

But as Jean hung up the phone from talking to her son, she felt chilled and frightened by something she couldn’t identify at first. And then she realized that it was this… obsession… there was no other word for it… this obsession of his that unnerved her, this fixation on a little girl he’d met twenty-five years earlier. No, she corrected herself, this obsession of theirs, Zach’s and Angie’s, too.

“Since they were four years old!” she exclaimed to Lyle.

“So? It’s romantic” he said. “I think it’s nice.”

“You do?”

“Sure. At least it’s one good thing to come out of that awful trip to New Zealand. Relax.”

But in spite of all of his newly acquired skill and the help of more experienced surgeons, Zachary was not able entirely to erase Angle’s scar, and so at their wedding the guests whispered to one another about the faint disfiguring mark on her left cheek,

“She’s beautiful anyway,” most of them agreed, and she was. Angie was lovely, and so was the baby boy that was born to her several years later.

When Justin Jones-Williams was six months old, Angie called Jean and Lyle to say, “We’re going home! Zach’s taking time off! We want to go back to Wellington to see my family and show off Justin! Will you come, too?”

“Us? Go, too?” At seventy-five and seventy-four, Lyle and Jean were still quite healthy and active, but Jean was startled and a little frightened by this invitation. Could they possibly manage such a trip? “Oh,” she said, stalling as she smiled into the phone, “you just want us to come along as babysitters.”

“Of course we do!” Angie’s laugh was so light and happy that it flooded Jean with memories of the first time she’d ever heard it making music with her own son’s laughter. “Please, Jean?”

And so she went along, too, but without Lyle this time.

“I hated New Zealand,” he said at the airport.

“No kidding,” Jean murmured, and kissed him good-bye.

Through the endless flights, from Chicago to San Francisco, from Honolulu to Auckland, and then on down to Wellington, Jean took turns holding Justin, feeding him, playing with him, walking him in the aisles, cuddling him when he slept. And all the while she was filled with a terrible terror: What if Angie longed to remain with her family, what if Zachary decided to look for a medical post in New Zealand, what if the other grandparents wanted their share of the baby, what if she had to go home without them? Once, having those awful thoughts somewhere in the air between Honolulu and Auckland, when she was half-nutty with fatigue, Jean felt hysterical giggles bubble in her throat! And wouldn’t that just confirm Lyle’s worst opinions of New Zealand. She buried her lips in the baby’s neck to hide her trembling mouth.

The house where Angie grew up and where her parents still lived was only a front yard away from the taxi stop where Jean and little Zach had been dropped off at the Botanic Gardens.

Well, of course, Jean thought, when she saw that. It was fate, it was always fate.

Rather than amusing her, however, the thought tired her. After two days on airplanes, Jean felt as if fate was wearing her out.

The Joneses’ home was a two-story cottage built on a precipitous slope. It had a garage at street level but required walking a long flight of stairs down to reach the front door. The woman who answered their knock was the same short, stout, dark-haired woman of Jean’s age who had accompanied Angie to the playground all those years ago. She turned out to be Miriam Jones, Angie’s adoptive mother; her father was Malcolm Jones, a tall, blond, bandy-legged man who was a retired government worker. Jean was weary enough to be nonplussed at the sight of the lines around Miriam’s mouth and the age freckles on Miriam’s hands; it was one of those moments when Jean was caught off guard by the shock of the passing of her own years.

“What a lovely boy,” Miriam and Malcolm said of their grandson. But neither of them took him-or Angie-into their arms to welcome them home. At her first glimpse of her daughter’s mended cheek, Miriam Jones murmured, “Well, I see they didn’t get it all, did they?” And Malcolm looked at his son-in-law and then said to his wife, “Thought she was fine as she was, didn’t we?”

Tears sprang to Jean’s eyes in defense of her son and out of hurt for Angie, but she also felt a rush of joy of which she was mightily ashamed. These were not warm, affectionate parents to whom a daughter might long to return.

Fools, Jean thought, and smiled happily at them.

That evening after Miriam served lamb stew, cooked carrots, and mashed potatoes, she offered coffee to the Americans, along with a meringue and fruit dessert called a pavlova. Jean accepted a glass of sweet sherry, instead, and proceeded nearly to drop off to sleep in a rocking chair, cradling Justin. She could barely hold her jet-lagged eyes open; it was all she could do to pick up snatches of the conversation, and even they seemed only dialogue in a funny kind of surrealistic dream…

“… While I’m here, don’t want to hurt you or Father… find my birth parents…”

“… Can’t imagine why you…”

“… Never knew, did we, Malcolm? Except what the social welfare people said…”

“… What’s the good, really…”

“In the U.S., you’d write to the…”

“Now that we have Justin, I think we ought to know…”

“… Not always good to know…”

“Why? Why not?”

Jean’s eyes flew open at the uncharacteristically sharp sound of her daughter-in-law’s voice. She was disturbed to see that Angie’s face was flushed, making her scar more pinkly visible. Jean tried to shift a bit, to ease her stiffness without waking the baby, but when the rocking chair creaked loudly, drawing the others’ attention, she settled back quietly, if uncomfortably. What was going on here? What had she missed by dozing off? Why was Zachary looking at Angie with such a worried expression?

“Tell me what you remember,” Angie half pleaded, half demanded of her parents. “If you don’t, I shall have to make inquiries that will take such time and trouble, and…”

“All right!” Miriam Jones raised both of her hands in an exasperated gesture of surrender. “But there’s so little we can tell you! The names of your biological parents were kept secret, but I do think the social worker told us you were born in Te Kapura,”

Angie touched her cheek. “Did they tell you about this?”

“No.” The mother looked straightforwardly at her daughter. “Except to say that you had not received any medical care at the time it happened, so it had never even been stitched by a doctor. When we got you, the wound was still raw, but healing.” Jean wondered if she only imagined that Miriam’s glance slid away from her daughter for a moment as she added, “They didn’t tell us anything else about you. And we didn’t ask. We were older than most adoptive parents, and you were hard to place.” Jean flinched inwardly, for Angie’s sake. But then her heart warmed to Miriam when the other woman looked up at her adopted daughter and said with a formal but moving simplicity, “We wanted you so. We have never regretted our decision to take you. We hope you don’t regret it either.”

“Mother.” Angie looked as if she longed to rush to Miriam’s side, but her mother’s reserve kept the daughter pinned to her chair. “Of course I don’t. I’m so grateful.” Angie, who was so easily and openly demonstrative with her American family, cleared her throat and said awkwardly, “I love you both.”

Malcolm shifted his weight on the sofa.

“Well, now you’d best forget all about it,” he advised.

“Yes, it’s done now, isn’t it?” his wife agreed.

But if they thought they would deflect their daughter and son-in-law with a taste of the truth, they misjudged the young couple. Jean thought they should have known better than to underestimate Angle’s and Zach’s tenacity when those two became obsessed about something!

“What town did you say?” Angie asked.

Her mother sighed. “Te Kapura.”

“Do you want to go tomorrow?” Zach asked Angie.

“Yes.” She turned to her mother-in-law. “You, too, Jean?”

“No,” Jean said, feeling they needed time alone. “I’ll stay here and baby-sit with Justin.” Jean smiled at her son. “Maybe I’ll take him to the playground, and he’ll meet his future wife.”

“I think we ought to take him with us,” Zach said.

“Yes, let’s,” his wife said.

Jean saw Miriam and Malcolm exchange glances. They noticed her observing them and for a moment all three grandparents were united in a strange bond that felt to Jean like complicity. Was she voicing a shared fear, Jean wondered, when she said, attempting a light tone:

“Well, do bring our baby back.”

But Jean did go, because Justin-who was spoiled by the airline flights where the adults gave him anything he wanted just to keep him happy-wailed at being dragged from her arms after she gave him his bottle the next morning.

“You’d better come, Mom,” Zach said.

“Please,” Angie pleaded. “I don’t think I can cope with this day and with him, too.”

Jean pretended to give in gracefully, as if she were sacrificing a perfectly lovely day on her own in Wellington, but she’d go with them if they insisted.

“Well, all right,” she said happily.

Although she said nothing about it to anyone, she felt a sense of relief at going along with them that wasn’t altogether connected to her joy at spending the day with her grandson.

Te Kapura, they learned from a map, was twenty-five miles inland, north of Wellington along winding country roads. Angie drove, as she was the only one of them who was accustomed to the British way, while Jean sat in the front narrating the trip from the same old paperback history book that she’d brought to New Zealand the first time, and Zach played with Justin in the back. Jean finally gave up the reading, however, when it became impossible to make herself heard over the squeals and giggles.

“Angie,” she said to her daughter-in-law. “How are you going to go about this search?”

“Well,” Angie said, “I suppose we’ll just knock on doors, won’t we?” Only twenty-four hours back in New Zealand and Angie’s accent was already stronger, Jean noticed; she had also retrieved the British habit of turning statements into interrogatories. “If the town’s as tiny as most of these villages are, they’ll surely remember a baby with this, won’t they?” She twitched her own scarred cheek.

“I’m afraid it’s a needle in a haystack,” Jean warned.

But Angie, pretty, persistent Angie, only smiled. “You forget, New Zealand is a very small haystack, small enough to examine every straw, if we have to.”

Jean reached over her seat to pat the baby, and sighed. “And knowing your mother and father, Justin, no doubt they’ll do just that.”

Zach and Angie, who had heard her, both burst out laughing.

Te Kapura was a tiny haystack, indeed.

Five little houses along a sunny mountain road.

Nobody was home at the first two. At the third one, they found a woman with three babies, but she was too young and too new to the village to remember. But at the fourth house, an old man was waiting for them as they walked up to his front door.

He had the same blond, thin, bandy-legged look as Angie’s father, Malcolm, but there was a furtive amusement in this old man’s smile, as if he knew a private, rather nasty joke.

“You’ll be looking for someone, won’t you?” he said in a wheezy, whispery voice. “Three strangers and a baby walking up our road, they must be looking for something.”

“I’m looking for my parents,” Angie said, and then she told him she’d been born here, and the year. “Did you live here then? I have this scar… do you see it… so there may have been an accident of some sort. Do you remember anything at all? Can you help me to find my birth family?”

The bony old man leaned toward her to examine the scar, and a sly look came into his eyes. He started to touch it, but Angie drew back sharply from his finger. That only seemed to amuse him more. “You’ll be wanting to inquire across the way at the widow’s house, won’t you?” he said. “That’ll be the ticket, now won’t it?”

He cackled as if at a joke they didn’t get.

Angie, Zach, Jean, and even the baby turned their heads to look at the tiny blue house that stood by itself across the road.

“Who lives there?” Zach asked.

“The widow,” he said.

“What’s her name?” Angie asked.

He didn’t reply, but only stared openly at Angie’s cheek.

“Good day,” Angie murmured to him. “Thank you,”

“Good day, is it?” he cackled. “Thank me, will you? We’ll see about that, won’t we?” His eerie laughter sent shivers down Jean’s spine, but it made the baby laugh. They started walking across the road. The more Justin laughed, the louder the old man cackled, and then the more the baby screamed with delight, until the air of Te Kapura was filled with the loud, strange sound of their duet. Angie, with a desperate glance, implored Jean to quiet the baby. She tried, bouncing him and trying to distract him, until he just as suddenly burst into tears.

“Oh, dear,” Angie said, looking near tears herself. Clearly, this return to her native country, to her adoptive parents, and maybe-today-even to her roots, was beginning to take a heavy emotional toll on her. She lifted her son from Jean’s arms, and said, seemingly as much for herself as for the boy, “Poor baby, please, please, please, poor baby, it’s all right, Mama’s here…”

Fate, Jean thought later, of course it was fate, and of course the widow would open the door to the little blue house just at the moment that Angie said those words.

Mama’s here.

The woman standing in the doorway looked even older than the cracked old man across the street. She had beautiful silver hair that hung to her waist and plump brown features and the stillest face that Jean had ever seen, a face that looked as if it had been carved from a native tree and then aged for generations. As if by some unspoken accord, Zach took Justin back from Angie, and he and Jean hung back, while Angie walked slowly, and then ever more quickly forward until she was nearly running up to the old woman in the door. Breathless, the lovely young blond pakeha woman stood before the old brown Maori one.

Angie lifted her hair off her scarred cheek.

The old woman raised both of her hands to touch the scar.

“I am Te Po,” she said. “I am your grandmother.”

A beautiful and bored Maori girl named Te Anamarie, from the village of Te Kapura. Who met a lost and wandering, beautiful pakeha boy named Joseph. A baby girl. A tragic accident, only dimly remembered, in the birthing. And Joseph, the father, stole his baby from Te Anamarie and from her mother Te Po, and the villagers of Te Kapura never saw the father or the child again.

That was the haunting story the old woman told.

“He turned me over for adoption,” Angie said.

“My child,” the old woman said.

“I’m here,” Angie whispered to her grandmother. “What was my Maori name?”

But the old woman shrugged off the question, as if she didn’t remember, or it didn’t matter now.

“Please,” the old grandmother said, “let me play with my great-grandson for a while alone. Let me imagine that you were never taken from us, that he will always be able to visit me. Let me feed him once, and change him, and play with him. Let me sing the old Maori songs to my great-grandson, this once, let me tell him of his ancestors and his gods. Please, my granddaughter, give me this small favor to make up for all the tears of all these many years. I will tell him of the canoes that brought us, of the flax that clothed us and the fish that fed us. I will sing to him of maru and tapu and the beginning of time. Let me tell him of the land we shared, of the feasts, of the wars, even of the eating of the flesh of one another. I will tell him of your mother, who did not outlive her grief, of his grandmother, and my mother before us all, and her mother before. All of his life he will live among pakehas, it is the way of the world, but for this small moment in never-ending time, let me sing to him of his other world. Go in your car and drive. I am his great-grandmother who values him above all others. He is my beloved child whom I will never see again, and I must have this time alone with my great-grandson before I die. Please. I ask you in the name of your mother who never held you. Leave us. Go.”

“Did I do the right thing?” Angie asked the others anxiously, a few minutes later, outside the blue house. “How could I say no to her?”

“Of course you couldn’t,” Jean assured her.

“No way,” Zach agreed, though Jean noticed that he kept glancing back at the tiny blue house. “She’s your grandmother, after all. He’ll be fine. But what’ll we do now to kill an hour?”

“Let’s take a walk,” Angie said. “And let me get used to the wonderful, incredible idea of being part Maori. This is what my parents were afraid I’d discover! As if I could ever be ashamed of it! My mother was Maori! My curly hair…”

“The shape of your eyes…”

“And I’m not as fair as most New Zealand women.”

“You two go on without me,” Jean suddenly said as the young couple started walking down the side of the road. “I’ll stay here, maybe find a rock to sit upon. You need time to be together, and I need time… to be alone, I think.”

Jean saw that it relieved her son to hear her say that she would stay behind. The old woman was Angie’s blood relative, yes, but she was still a stranger to them.

Jean waved them off with a kiss.

Across the road, the old man was still out on his porch, hanging on to a railing, and staring across at the little blue house almost as if he were waiting for something to happen. He noticed Jean, and waved her toward him.

She shook her head, and walked in the opposite direction.

The rock she finally found was a boulder in the ditch beside the road. There, in the sun, she pulled out of her purse the old history book she had been reading aloud to the kids, and turned to the section on Maori culture.

“… a tribal society,” she read, “that nearly became extinct in the 1800s, following the depredations of the white man’s diseases, of the introduction of his animals, particularly the rabbit that became the scourge of the native agriculture…”

The sun was so warm, and Jean was seventy-four years old, and exhausted by this incredible, emotional journey into her daughter-in-law’s past and all of their hearts. She tried mightily to keep her eyes open against the glare, wanting to learn more about the Maoris, out of respect for the old woman and love for Angie and Justin.

“… after near decimation, resurgence of Maori population and a shift by the younger generation to the urban centers… harder on the older generation to whom the loss of their ancient ways was a bitter pill to swallow…”

So sleepy, so warm, and her eyes were closing. Besides, she remembered, vaguely, having read this same chapter more than thirty years before. She turned the page to a chapter about Maori art, which she suspected she had skipped the first time.

“… effort to renew Maori crafts and customs, including wood carving…”

A monstrous face stared out at her from the page, a face with its huge tongue stuck out, a face on which ceremonial lines were deeply etched, “Boo,” Jean said to the scary face, and then she laughed to herself.

“… the custom of tattooing in which a straightedge blade is used to carve the lines deeper into the face and breasts of women, the face and buttocks of men, thereby to inject the die more deeply and to give the design more the look of carving than of the tattooing to which Western eyes are more accustomed…”

Something about that paragraph, Jean thought. Read that paragraph again. Tattooing. Straightedge blade. Deep grooves. Her glance shifted to the carved wooden face on the other page. Some of the carved lines-meant to represent tattooing?-started below the figure’s eyes and then curved back, bisecting the cheek, and running down below the chin…

Jean screamed and leaped to her feet.

And then the wailing started, a loud, dirgelike wailing, a woman’s voice coming from the tiny blue house. And the old man across the way began to cackle again and to watch Jean running down the road from the rock. Oh, but she wasn’t young enough, she wasn’t forty-two now, she was seventy-four, and her breath was coming hard and painfully, and she was so frightened, so frightened, and she wanted to scream and scream, to cry out for Justin to crawl away, to crawl down the dirt road to her… Justin, Justin, baby, baby… And the old man called to her, “It’s the call of mourning for the dead, which only the women can sing, and she will put on her black dress of mourning.” He cackled and cackled, a crazy old pakeha watching Jean stumble down the road toward the tiny blue house. “Te Po, her name, means the endless night before the birth of the Gods, did you know that, did you know that?”

Her heart was beating so unmercifully, oh, dear God, she would have a heart attack, she would die on this road before she reached the baby and the other old woman, the old woman like a carving, like a carving, like a tattooed carving…

“No…!”

Jean flung herself into the blue house. Blinded by the sudden plunge into dimness, she began to sob helplessly. No, no, no, no, no. Then she could see the old woman, Te Po, dressed all in black as the old man had predicted, a straightedge knife raised over the naked baby boy who lay crying on the floor.

Jean threw herself at Te Po.

Both old women fell to the floor near the baby.

The knife sliced through soft, soft skin, carving its ancient tattoo.

In nearly thirty years, the myrtle tree (Metrosideros umbellata, rata) beside the bench in the playground had grown magnificently.

“Hello, tree,” Jean murmured to it. “Big green tree.”

Seated there in its shade, Jean watched Zachary put Justin on his lap at the top of the tallest slide.

“Mom!” Zach called out to her. “Watch us!”

“I’m watching!”

They whooshed down from the top of the tallest slide, down to the bottom, where Angie waited with open arms to embrace them both.

Jean smiled and turned her left arm over to expose her wound to the healing warmth of the sun.