Eden Burning (9 page)

But that particular glory was in the future. Today the jacaranda branches were naked of leaves and gleaming in the moist air. The trees were smooth-barked and had a dancer’s grace. At the tip of every twig, buds were swelling almost secretly against the sun-washed sky.

Once, when she was much younger, Nicole had thought of herself like that: a bud swelling in silence, waiting only for the right conditions to bloom. Once, but not for a long time. She had learned that, for her, the sensual flowering was simply an aching dream.

For her, the years from thirteen to seventeen had been a nightmare. Other girls had budded and bloomed all around her, while she had simply grown tall and then taller still, with no more curves than a slat fence. She hadn’t been pretty in the way of other girls, petite, blond, and blue-eyed or dark-haired and curvy with mystery lurking in even darker eyes. The final insult had been delivered by the whims of fashion. Her light golden-brown eyes, pale skin, and fiery hair didn’t blend at all with the pastels that were popular with the popular girls.

Other girls had boyfriends and admiring glances and bathing suits that revealed an intriguing feminine flowering. Nicole had simply kept on growing taller and taller, until she felt like a redheaded clown on stilts.

Then her body had begun to change in a wild rush, as though it realized that the blooming season was almost over. She was far too intelligent not to understand the connection between her increasing bra size and the increasing male attention.

Unfortunately, boys were no more interested in her as a person than they had been before her breasts grew. After the novelty of attracting whistles wore off, she decided that having a well-filled bra was as bad as being flat. Either way, she felt like an unwelcome passenger in her own body. The boys who noticed her breasts weren’t interested in anything about her but how it would feel to get their hands under her clothes. When she refused to wrestle in the backseat of a car—or the front—they called her a tease. And that was the polite name.

Cynicism had come early to Nicole. It had stayed. She learned to fend off blunt male advances with the same breezy humor that she had previously used to hide her hurt at being ignored by the opposite sex.

Then she had met Ted. He didn’t act like a starving octopus. He kept his hands to himself. He seemed interested in her thoughts and dreams. Later she realized it was her family’s money that had attracted Ted, not herself. But that was later. In the beginning she had been thrilled that such a handsome, popular man would notice her, much less pursue her and beg her to marry him.

Dazzled, she had agreed. He wasn’t a gentle lover. Her virginity had been an unhappy surprise. He had dumped a few state-of-the-art sex manuals in her lap and told her to study up on what men liked—there would be a test later.

She failed that test, and all the others he gave her.

Sixteen months into the marriage, her father went bankrupt. Ted cast an accountant’s eye over the financial disaster, concluded that the money was gone and wouldn’t ever come back, and walked out on his wife. To prevent the professional and personal contacts he had made since his marriage from seeing him as the cold fortune hunter he was, he announced that the marriage had failed because his so-called wife was a closet lesbian who refused even to have children.

That was the worst insult of all. She had wanted children. He had been the one who insisted there was plenty of time, they should grab what they could while they were young enough to enjoy it.

Nicole hadn’t hung around California to see who believed her husband’s lies and who didn’t; everybody, even her own father, thought Ted was a warm, charming, loving man. So she had fled as far as she could, as fast as she could, leaving behind her girlish dreams and a broken marriage.

She knew flight was cowardly. She didn’t care. There was nothing to stick around for but more of the bitter taste of humiliation and failure.

The instant she had stepped off the plane at Hilo, she felt a sense of homecoming that staggered her. It was as if the island itself had reached out to wrap her in a warm, welcoming hug. The island didn’t care that she was too tall to be really feminine or that she was too cold to respond to a man sexually. Hawaii simply pulled her into its fragrance and warmth, asking nothing in return.

“Sad?”

The soft word slipped through Nicole’s unhappy thoughts about the past. She blinked and realized that she was standing with her sketch pad tucked under her arm, staring at nothing. Automatically her free hand went out to stroke the smooth hair of the child who stood beside her.

“Mainland sad,” she said huskily. “But I’m in Hawaii now.”

Hawaii, where a stranger had kissed her and made her believe that maybe, just maybe, there was hope for her as a woman.

“Always-always?” Benny asked quickly, repeating himself for emphasis in the Hawaiian style.

“I’ll stay in Hawaii always-always,” Nicole said, reassuring both of them.

Nicole settled lotus-style onto an oversize chaise longue that waited beneath the jacaranda trees. That was her signal to Benny that it was time to be quiet.

A weathered wood table stood within arm’s reach to one side of the big chair. The furniture had appeared beneath the jacarandas the day after Grandmother had discovered Nicole propped awkwardly against a tree trunk, spare pencils clamped between her teeth, frowning and sketching madly before the incoming afternoon rains veiled the trees in mist.

At first she had tried to sit on the ground to draw, but even the lush carpet of ferns couldn’t blunt the edges of the lava beneath the green cloak of plants. In her typical generous fashion, Grandmother had quietly made sure that the new family member wouldn’t have to stand in order to work her magic with pencil and paper.

Making no more fuss than a falling leaf, Benny settled just behind Nicole on the well-padded chaise. He positioned his own sketch pad and began to draw.

It was quiet but for the gentle, rhythmic surf and the sweet, erratic music of birds calling from the ohia’s highest branches. Nicole heard the sounds only as a background to her concentration. Working quickly, cleanly, she sketched her favorite jacaranda. Though the tree was taller than all the others, it was beautifully proportioned, graceful in its strength, and somehow essentially feminine.

Every time she saw that tree, she thought of the ancient legends about women who were turned into trees to keep them safe from the sexual appetites of men.

Today her favorite jacaranda had been reduced by its natural cycle to pure, naked lines. No halo of amethyst flowers blurred the stately strength of the tree. No sighing, delicate, fernlike leaves distracted from the endurance of the trunk itself.

In this pause between rest and becoming, the tree called to Nicole’s intelligence as well as to her senses, reminding her that the jacaranda’s lush flowering was possible only because of the strength and resilience of the trunk itself. Without that silent, enduring power as a support, the buds pushing tightly from branch tips would never know the instant of blooming.

With an intent frown she went to work trying to capture all that she felt and thought about the jacaranda, femininity, life, and risk. At the edge of her concentration, she was aware of Benny coming and going as quietly as a breeze. He sketched with her for a time, then roamed a bit, then came back and sketched some more. At ten, he had learned the kind of patience some adults went a lifetime without finding.

When she thought to look away from her sketch pad again, she saw from the sun’s position that she had been working for at least two hours. Her stomach was growling unhappily. The cup of coffee she had grabbed for breakfast just wasn’t enough.

“Eat?”

The soft question came from the direction of a wildly overgrown path that eventually ended up at the big house.

“Eat,” she agreed. “Hungry-hungry.”

“Soon-soon.”

There was a rustle of foliage, then the soft, uneven sounds of Benny running up one of the shortcuts only he knew about. Soon he would be back, lugging a basket of food that would feed five people.

The first few times he had appeared with food, Nicole had gone to the big house and protested that it wasn’t necessary, she could certainly get her own lunch. Grandmother had simply smiled and continued sending huge piles of food down to the beach whenever her favorite grandson appeared with a hopeful grin and an empty basket.

In time Nicole finally understood that the Kamehameha family had adopted her. They treated her just like the daughters, nieces, aunts, and mothers who came and went from the estate in laughing waves. The Kamehamehas refused to take money for rent or for any of the other less obvious things they did for Nicole. She repaid the family in the only way they would accept.

She became one of them.

She taught their children ancient and modern dances, showed them basic drawing techniques, and gave her own drawings to any family member who looked at a sketch more than once. And she danced in the Kipuka Club, bringing to its small stage the incandescent sensual yearnings that Tahitian dances expressed so vividly.

“Picnic,” Benny announced proudly.

Carrying a big basket, he popped out of what looked like a solid wall of ferns and bushes. He had an uncanny way of finding paths in even the most tangled, rugged places. His grandmother’s big estate was like his very own playground.

Nicole laughed at the boy’s smug grin. The clever Benny had managed to wangle that most prized of things—a solo picnic with the redheaded haole. The children’s very own goddess.

Despite Nicole’s denials, the island children half believed she actually was Pele reborn. She had given up trying to talk them out of it, just as she had given up trying to pay rent to Grandmother.

“Picnic,” Nicole agreed.

Without any care for his own sketches scattered on the end of the chaise, Benny started to unload the basket of food.

“Wait!” She snatched up the sheets of paper. “You’ll ruin your sketches.”

The boy’s thin shoulders moved in a shrug. “Bad,” he said, meaning his sketches.

“Good,” she countered firmly.

He shrugged again and started laying out food.

On her half of the chaise Nicole spread out the sketches Benny had made of the jacaranda trees. With each new page she saw, she felt tiny, ghostly fingertips brush up her spine.

As always, there was something in each of Benny’s sketches that made the landscapes surreal. Sometimes it was a subtly oversize blossom. Sometimes it was a tree whose leaves were upside down. Sometimes it was the suggestion of a face in the clouds. Often it was something that couldn’t be defined, something as unique as the thin-faced boy who was now dividing fruit, bread, and smoked chicken between two plates.

Ignoring the sketches, Benny began to eat. Nicole joined him, consuming food quickly, but she couldn’t stop looking at the boy’s work. One sketch in particular was stunning. The drawing had an eerie, extraordinary sense of having caught the precise moment when a group of maidens quivered on the edge of taking root and becoming something they couldn’t imagine.

Like Nicole, Benny had sensed that the jacarandas were fundamentally feminine. Unlike her, he was able to translate his intuition into a unique vision of a time and a place where myth, woman, and nature were one and the same.

“Good-good-
good,
” she said, catching the boy’s chin in her hand. She held him that way until his big black eyes slowly met hers. “You have a wonderful gift, Benny. You see what no one else can, and then you capture what you see on paper.”

“It’s not like your trees.”

The fact that he was taking the trouble to speak in a complete sentence told Nicole how important drawing was to the boy.

“Do you look like me?” she asked.

He laughed and gave her a glance that said he was very much Bobby’s son. “No-no-
no.
”

“Then why should your art look like mine?”

He looked from his sketch to the tree, then from her sketch to the tree. “Different.”

“Of course. That’s how they should be. Different. I love your drawings, Benny. They make me see back into time. Paradise. Eden before the snake.” She grinned suddenly. “Hawaii before haoles. No one else can make me see that. Only you.”

The boy gave her a sudden, brilliant smile.

She kissed his shiny hair and ruffled it with her hand. Her watch face gleamed against his black mop. She was running late.

Again.

“Oops. Gotta go.” Quickly she gathered up her sketches of the jacaranda tree and the straining buds. “Lead me back to my cabin by the shortest way you know. I have to drop something off at the lab before Dr. Vic leaves for lunch.”

“Ate,” he said.

“Yes, we did. But they’re on a different schedule at the lab. Haole time. They eat lunch at noon rather than ten.”

“Sure?”

“Sure-sure.”

He thought quickly, couldn’t come up with a way to keep the beautiful Pele to himself any longer, sighed, and took her hand. “Sure-sure.” As he ducked into the greenery, he muttered, “Haoles dumb.”

Nicole snickered and bent double to follow him.