Erin saw the bay, though most of the ships were obscured.
“It was the best of both worlds. Right here. And just the nicest people in the world serving up whatever you wanted for tea.”
Erin whispered: “Jade, what happened?”
“You’re joking, right? The earthquakes? The two quakes that destroyed everything?” Jade climbed out of the pit and led Erin back toward the car. “In September of 2010 and February of 2011, two huge earthquakes shook Christchurch to its core. Half of downtown Lyttelton fell. Thousands of people were rendered homeless. Huge buildings toppled in Christchurch’s CBD, including the cathedral, which was just …. It was our best thing.”
It sounded like science fiction.
Jade enumerated the buildings destroyed by those quakes. “There are quakes all the time. That’s why we had a drill first week of term. You get used to quakes, but those two were different. Art museum, gone. Medical center, gone. Cafés and churches and houses, gone, gone, gone.”
Each new thing was a punch to the gut, and matter-of-fact Jade quieted. She started the car. “A hundred and eighty-five people died.”
In earthquakes. Right here.
Five minutes after Jade’s admission that two earthquakes had destroyed half of Christchurch, two minutes after she’d said Erin would get used to it, Jade drove into a tunnel.
Heavy, unstable mountains in the Ring of Fire, prone to earthquakes. Erin was not particularly interested in getting used to earthquakes yet.
She could have died right there.
“Faster? Faster, Jade?”
Erin wanted to hold her breath but her body had other ideas. By the time they emerged from the tunnel, completely unscathed, Erin was practically hyperventilating.
“All right, Erin?”
“Fine,” she lied.
She was desperate for answers. How was Christchurch rebuilding? How was everyone who didn’t die? What was destroyed? And, most importantly, why the hell hadn’t kiwis moved out of the Ring of Fire?
THIRTY-FIVE
Back at the house, Erin pulled out her phone to discover several missed calls from Claire and a single voice mail:
Erin, it feels like you’re avoiding me. I’ve just read through our recent texts, and it seems like an awful lot of hanging out and not much work finding your unique factor. Sweetie, I love you. I need you to focus. We’re in the final stretches here. We are so close. Don’t lose sight of our goal.
After promising Claire via email she was focused intently and her next essay would be amazing, Erin spent hours plummeting into the earthquake rabbit hole. Wikipedia said the September 2010 quake had been powerful and damaging enough to topple hundreds of Christchurch’s buildings.
A second massively destructive quake in February 2011 was so substantial, seismologists considered the September quake a mere foreshock.
Every year, New Zealand experienced 15,000 earthquakes, 100 to 150 of which were large enough to be felt.
That’s one every three days.
Japan felt 2,000 quakes a year. The United States had maybe 40, mostly on the west coast.
Turned out New Zealand was nearly the exact size and contained a population comparable to Colorado. Four and a half million people opted to live in the Ring of Fire.
Erin filtered New Zealand’s quakes by magnitude and absorbed the data: kiwis had felt five earthquakes in Christchurch since Erin’s July arrival.
She hadn’t felt a thing, including one her first Tuesday in New Zealand.
She’d traveled to a wrecked Christchurch knowing nothing about its history. Yes, 185 people died, but more than 6,600 others were treated for injuries at hospitals. Immediately after the quakes, kiwis were anxious and scared, but now those emotions had given way to anger. Thousands of downtown buildings must be demolished for safety reasons. People complained about insurance. People begged for retrofitting. Kiwis were irate about inefficiency.
Why wasn’t the family discussing this every night?
The big quakes had been years ago. Why had Lyttelton—and Christchurch’s business district—not yet risen from the ashes?
Hamish worked in construction; why wasn’t he laser focused on rebuilding his city? Erin reserved her questions for dinner, when the whole family would be around the table.
THIRTY-SIX
After Pippa’s guitar lesson, Hank stayed for dinner.
The previous hours had done little to douse Erin’s anger, so she charged ahead anyway. “I want to talk about the big earthquakes.”
Felicity reached for Pippa, who had frozen with her fork halfway to her mouth. “You okay, Pippa?”
Pippa ate her peas. “I’m okay, Mum.”
Felicity said, “Some days we don’t talk about it.”
“It’s okay, Mum.”
Felicity straightened her flatware and leaned back. “They were devastating. It’s going to take us decades to rebuild, but it will never be the same. Half of the Central Business District is still closed.”
Pippa pushed food around her plate but didn’t take another bite.
“What about your business, Hamish?” Erin asked. “What if, instead of building houses, you started rebuilding the city?”
“We’re trying.”
“Right, but could you start working on the downtown? Everyone uses it. It’s the district that made Christchurch Christchurch. I saw photos of cute shopping districts. Could you rebuild the cathedral? Everyone is bummed about the cathedral.”
Hamish dug into his dinner.
Felicity laid her hand over Erin’s. “He’s working, Erin. Every day. There’s too much work to be done. They can’t rebuild the city yet. We have to break it down before we can really rebuild.”
Hamish said, “To start with, houses are easier to repair. Neighborhood infrastructure wasn’t destroyed completely. Houses are further apart. Houses can be repaired. It’s easy to raze a house, haul away the debris, and start over. It’s a lot harder when you’re dealing with a whole city. I’m working all the time. Everyone is working all the time. Bringing people here from overseas to get the construction and infrastructure underway. But it takes time. A lot of time.”
“In Wheaton, they built our new middle school—a huge school. Brick. In exactly one summer. You could
