We load up the family and head out first thing in the morning. Leo is annoyed at first, because he’d been hoping to spend the day with a friend with a sailboat, but Simon quashes his rebellion with a sentence. “There will be other days to sail, mate,” he said, “but you’ll never get another chance to join the family for the big reveal.”
Leo snorts and play punches his dad in the stomach. Simon play doubles over.
We make a morning of it, stopping first at a café in Mount Eden for a decadent breakfast. Sarah is animated and cheerful—but then, it’s a weekend, and she won’t have to go to school for two days. Leo sits next to me, talking a mile a minute about his mates and swimming and sport and mountaineering, which is his new obsession. He’s been reading about Sir Edmund Hillary, a local hero and the first to climb Mount Everest.
“How long did it take you to climb the Golden Hinde, Mom?” he asks, chomping on a piece of bacon.
I’m lost in imagining the climb up Everest and the continual need people feel to do it, and I answer offhandedly. I don’t honestly remember which mountain it is, only that it’s on Vancouver Island, where I supposedly grew up. “I don’t know. A day, I guess.”
“Not the Hinde,” Simon says with a frown. “Takes a couple to ascend that one, eh?”
My heart is racing, making a noise in my ears, and I’m sure that my skin has gone bright red. “Of course!” I cry, slapping my hands to my cheeks. “Oh my goodness, I’m so embarrassed.”
Simon bumps me with his shoulder. “It’s all good, sweetheart. We won’t put you in the home yet, will we, kids?”
Sarah says, very seriously, “I’ll never put you in a home, Mum. Ever.”
I reach over the table and squeeze her hand. “Thank you, baby. I love you too.”
“We aren’t going to put Grandpa in a home, are we?”
“Oh, no! No way.” I squeeze her hand more tightly. “Your grandpa is just fine.”
But I happen to look up at Simon and, as wives can do, pick up the subtlest twist of his lips. I touch his thigh beneath the table. He covers my hand with his.
At Sapphire House, we forget all that, and I make a dramatic moment of our entry. “You know, children, that I have loved this house ever since I came here, right? It sits so high above everything—”
“Like a palace!” Leo cries.
“Yes, like a palace. And so when your daddy found out it was up for sale, he bought it for us to live in.”
“I want to see the greenhouse,” Sarah says.
“In a bit, love.” I give Simon a smile. “First, let’s take a look at the inside of the house and the balconies and all the great things there are here.” I fling open the door and say, “Ta-da!”
They both dash in and pause. “Whoa!” Leo cries, spinning a circle as he looks in every direction at once.
Sarah is more moderate. She walks in like a girl in a storybook, taking in the setting for her new chapter. She peers up the staircase, and runs her fingers over the wall, and lets the wide bank of windows in the back call her to the view over the sea. “Mummy, look! You can see the cyclone!”
She’s been taking measurements and gleefully following a weather site she loves over news of the cyclone, which has been blowing our way for a couple of days. While the sky is sunny, she’s right—you can see the dark storm gathering in a line along the horizon.
“Let’s go out and look at it,” I suggest, opening one of the French doors.
The view is utterly gorgeous, the deep aquamarine of the water, the navy-blue mountains in the distance, the emerald grass between us and the water, the bright-blue sky, and that slim, faraway line of eggplant cloud. The layers and layers and layers of blue against green against blue against green is ever dazzling, impossible to get used to. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I ask, my hand on her back. “We can have a table out here. Some chairs.”
She leans on me unexpectedly. “Won’t cyclones hit us here?”
“I don’t know, baby, but the house has been here for eighty years. I’m sure there’ve been some big cyclones in that time.” I stroke her curly hair. “Are you afraid of cyclones?”
“No. Strong ones are rare.”
“That’s true. So you needn’t worry.”
“I don’t want to move, really. I like our house. And how’ll I move all my experiments?”
“I’m sure we can figure that out, sweetheart. Your grandfather will have good ideas.”
I remember the old-school telephone. “I have something to show you, and then we can go upstairs and look at bedrooms.”
“All right.”
She follows me into the house, and we head for the alcove. “Do you know what this is?”
“Of course. It’s a telephone.”
I’m deflated slightly, but there’s more. I pick up the earpiece, listen, and offer it to her. “Do you know what that is?”
“No. Why does it make a noise?”
“It’s called a dial tone. This is a landline, which means it’s connected to the wall with a wire, and the wire is what connects it to other phones. You lift up the receiver for the dial tone to make sure it works, and then you use the ring to dial the numbers.” I illustrate by dialing my own phone number, and it rings in my hand.
Sarah nods. But she’s turning away, heading for the stairs. “I want to see the bedrooms.”
Leo is already up there. “Mom, you’ve gotta see this! This room has its own little bathroom, and there are tiles all over it! Can I have this room?”
“You don’t get to choose before I even see!” Sarah protests, and runs past him into the bedroom.
I follow more slowly, because four of the six bedrooms have their own bathrooms, and all of them are tiled magnificently. Leo runs into the one I knew he’d love, with its row of windows like a captain’s quarters in the prow of a ship. They overlook the driveway and the city.
The children dash around, pulling open drawers and doors to peer inside. Most of it is empty. I haven’t spent time in the secondary bedrooms yet. This one looks weary, with a faded mural along the top of the walls and curtains of no distinction. From my bag, I take out a notebook and scribble a few notes to myself, using a fountain pen I picked up yesterday and filled with a bright-magenta ink. The reds and yellows were always my shades, while Kit loved turquoise, violet, green. Dylan liked brush calligraphy in a Chinese style, using the darkest, blackest ink he could find. I always thought Kit seemed like a person who’d want more serious ink, the heavy blacks or browns, but no. She loved vivid shades in her colors and favored a fine tip for her precise handwriting. As I make note of the curtains, the wallpaper, I’m pleased by the elegance the stubbed tip lends even my scribbled notes.
“What about me?” Sarah says. “Which room do I get?”
“Come here.” I tuck pen and book back in my bag and take her across the hall to a room very similar to the others. The walls are a faded, awful shade of grimy yellow, and the bookshelves are sagging, but all that is cosmetic. The best feature is the one Sarah narrows in on immediately: a trio of porthole windows that looks to the sea. She dashes toward them, stands on her toes to look out. On either side of the portholes are two windows that open outward, and I crank one energetically to let nature in. “Listen,” I say, putting a hand to my ear.