She wandered in on Thursday morning looking very wan, and climbed into her bed. I sat on the edge and stroked her back.
There was a photo of her that I propped up on the bedside table, taken when she was just a few weeks old, lying tucked up in her crib and looking to the right with a poised smile. I looked at the 17-year-old in her bed and then at the baby in her crib, and back again, and again, one facing right and the other, older one facing left, and I couldn’t really tell the difference – both were fragile and small, my only child in a chamber of bedsheets.
She said, “Can you bring the three deer to the airport?” She meant the little porcelain figurines on her dressing table. I thought long and hard about this request. I wanted the three deer to stay exactly where they were, at peace in a schoolgirl’s bedroom. Why should they have to travel to a distant city and relocate to a university student’s bedroom? I had every right to hold on to them. My house, my deer.
She came down with a bad flu, but rallied quickly, and we took her out for a birthday dinner on Friday night. A pre-birthday dinner: she would turn 18 in a week. We talked about the magical properties of 18. It sounded definitely adult. “You know,” I said. “R18 and that.” No more getting into bars and clubs with her friend Iris’s ID. But actually Iris had already left town for another university. All over New Zealand, a great annual migration was pouring out of households, creating empty nests – the flight of the First Years. I wept into my chicken at her farewell birthday dinner.
She met her oldest and closest friend Abie afterwards for an ice cream. They met on her first day at school. Dear old loyal Abie, who I used to scare with stories of Candyman – say his name three times in a mirror, and he would appear behind you with a bloodied hook. Her mum phoned up and said, “Can you tell her it’s just a story? Not real?” They were about 6 or 7. Ten years later, a final ice cream, and Abie presented her with a photo journal of pictures of them together, along with gift vouchers for such necessary services as the Chemist Warehouse and Uber Eats. Dear old adorable Abie. The true history of New Zealand is friendships.
She looked fresh and clean and very tall at the airport on Saturday morning. I was dreading every last second of it but tried to reason it out and see it as a tremendously happy occasion, that her life was about to turn into an exciting adventure. There was a long queue through security. “Look,” I whispered. “Mums and their mini-mes going to university, everywhere you look!” She said, “Keep your voice down! You’re shouting!” I said, “No, I’m not! I can hardly hear myself!” She said, “That’s the problem! You’re a deaf old fool!” I kept my mouth shut and gazed silently at the mothers and daughters, those other migrants heading to the terrors of the departure gate.
She said, “I love you, Dad.” And then she was gone. I sat down. A kind woman in the next seat said she understood. She had been through it herself and was a total wreck. I took the escalator and a robot said, “Please be careful stepping off.” Later that afternoon, I tidied up her bedroom. There was a space where the three little deer had rested together all those lovely years.
Steve Braunias also writes for The New Zealand Herald and Newsroom.
