House of Many Gods (26 page)

Reluctantly, she opened it. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

“I’m not here to sleep.”

She saw her daughter’s utter fatigue, the nearness of her facial bones. The dearth of flesh. Her baldness.

She took Ana in her arms and held her. “I wish to God it had been me. It
should
have been me.”

Ana felt momentary confusion, as if she had been given something promised to her mother.

Without the strength to resist her, Ana allowed her mother into her life, but only a few hours every day. And she was meticulous, keeping her at a distance so that they did not hug again. They hardly touched.

Alone, Anahola thought of Max and how in the moment she understood that he was dying, a fuller knowledge of her love for him had surfaced. She felt that now for Ana, but this love was deeper, more visceral and complex.

When she looked at her grown daughter, she saw her younger self, the lifelong bitterness, the feeling of never having felt essential to her mother. She suspected Ana felt it too: that they were more alike than they could acknowledge, they were nearly identical—so blood-deep and rooted, so inextricably entwined, no one would ever understand them as they understood each other.

And finally Anahola grasped how the death of one’s child was so against the order of nature, so incomprehensible, that the mere possibility of it left her seized and shaken. Each night she knelt and prayed. She bargained. She broke down and begged. And she accepted with manifest certitude that if her daughter died, she would too.

T
HE DOGS WERE VOMITING AGAIN
.

“Could be from rotting goat,” Rosie said. “Who knows anymore.” She asked how things were going.

“We know the codes. What to avoid.” Ana played with the phone cord. “Sometimes I find her interesting … but when she’s gone I just don’t think about her.”

Stitching up patients in ER, Ana felt she herself was held together by stitches. Her spirit and her corporeal self. Her skin was coming off in patches, her eyes still had a yellow cast from drugs and radiation. She felt soiled and hazardous, suspected she might be dying, and that no one had the nerve to tell her.

On breaks, she stood out in the ambulance bay, staring at palm trees twenty feet high, leaves slapping each other like mad, green arms. Maybe they were another form of human, screaming. Maybe this was what awaited her in the afterlife. She slid into depression, the aftermath when everything was over—surgery, treatments. Now there was nothing left to fight with. She was even too depressed to fend off her mother, watching listlessly as Anahola cooked her meals, laundering and cleaning, lingering over her soaps and toiletries, trying to discover the woman Ana had become.

She took Ana out driving, forcing her to talk, which Ana resisted. “You didn’t say there’d be conversation.”

Her mother laughed. “By the way, it’s been proven that after humans converse, there’s a marked increase in their muscle tone.”

“I don’t believe that. Most conversations are mindless secretions that actually
keep
us from thinking.”

“Well, Ana, maybe that’s the point.”

One day on Nimitz Highway, they drove near the piers where ocean liners docked.

Ana glanced at her. “Let’s stop here and take a walk.”

They stood beside Aloha Tower, from which cruise ships still arrived and departed. No scheduled ships that day, the place was empty. As they leaned at the railing, looking out at the harbor, Ana felt a stirring, childlike and perverse. The need to be hurt. To know.

“What was it like? The day you left.”

Her mother stiffened. “I … don’t really remember.”

“Of course you do.”

“I just remember running. Afraid I would turn back. Afraid the ship would sail without me.”

“Were there crowds seeing the ship off?”

“Oh, it was packed. I struggled up the gangway terrified, then stood alone. Everyone on deck looked rich. And when we pulled away … you can imagine, clouds of streamers drifting down, families waving, the band playing ‘Aloha ‘Oe.’ ”

She fell silent then, remembering the cardboard suitcase in her hand, something to hold on to.

“I shared a cabin with three women. Two I think were prostitutes. At night I listened to them talk and understood that in a way, we were all outcasts. On the run, no tribes, no rules. But they were kind to me.”

Ana stared at her mother’s profile, taking in her beauty. The high forehead, small flat nose, lush lips like a girl’s. Skin just slightly golden that, in sunlight, went brown.

“Did you tell them you’d left a kid behind?”

She slowly shook her head. “I don’t think it would have fazed them. They’d probably left their lives behind a dozen times. I’ve seen hundreds of women like that. They pass through life in full armor.”

“I wonder how women like that end up.”

Anahola looked at her. “You know how they end up. ER. The morgue. Or in trailer parks in front of black-and-white TVs.”

“You didn’t.”

“My life isn’t over yet.” She tapped her cigarette, the world still her ashtray.

Ana hesitated. “I always wondered … where you got the money for that trip.”

“An uncle named Keo. A well-known trumpet player. Those are his records Noah plays. He died a few years later, of sorrow I believe. He had lost his sweetheart and their child in World War II. I was named for the child.
Anahola
. Hourglass.”

“God, I don’t believe the stories in this family.”

“Why? We’re just like any family. Ordinary people that extraordinary things happen to.”

They fell silent, inhaling the smell of creosote, an acrid toying in the nostrils.

“I know what you’re wondering,” her mother said. “Did I ever regret it. The running away. No, I didn’t regret it. But I missed Pidgin, the language of my childhood. I felt like my tongue had been cut out. And I missed Nanakuli magic. Boar-hounds singing up jade mountains. Peacocks sobbing in trees. Folks who knew me, my history. That’s the thing about family, there’s nothing to explain. You sit together silent and just
be
.”

She faltered, then caught herself. “And I missed you. When you were born, you were so beautiful, at first I thought things would be all right. You would make everything all right. I thought I could be a mother. I just … didn’t know how.”

Ana straightened up from the railing, needing air. A different air. They walked to the car in silence.

“You’re wearying of me,” her mother said. “You’re now more bored than angry. That’s good. It means you’re getting well.”

She started the engine, the needles leapt.

“I want to show you something, see if you remember.”

She drove for almost an hour along the east coast of the island, out past Diamond Head, then Kōkō Head. Near Makapu‘u Point, she turned down a narrow dirt road and stopped near a deserted place in rocky cliffs. They climbed and slowly crawled, and half slid down until they reached the sea where water was captured in lava pools as waves washed in and then receded.

Her mother knelt, peering into the pools. “Do you remember?”

Images floated to her then. A little girl in slippers, squatting, as her mother taught her how to draw salt from seawater. How to scoop it from lava-rock pools and sprinkle it in moist little mounds to dry in the sun. She remembered her mother humming, both of them in sun hats whose shadows cooled their faces.

She remembered her mother smoothing her arms and legs with
kukui
oil, teaching her how the word
kukui
meant “light.” How ancestors had
used
kukui
nut oil for torches. And she remembered long periods of sitting there quiet, watching water evaporate, leaving behind mounds of gleaming sea salt. Clean and full of bite.

“I remember I thought I would die waiting for salt to appear.”

“Did you ever figure out what I was really trying to teach you?”

“It wasn’t about making salt. You were trying to teach me patience.”

For years she had wondered why, in those days, her mother had driven halfway round the island. There were salt pools along almost every rocky coast. Then she realized that Makapu‘u Point was the farthest her mother could get from Nanakuli; she had already begun to leave.

O
NE DAY THEY DROVE ROUND THE ISLAND TO THE NORTH SHORE
, passing dense settlements near Kāne‘ohe Bay, then little towns with cloven streets where no one seemed to live. Tiny hand-hewn churches painted blue. A bloodred Buddhist temple set against black, fluted cliffs. They stopped for
dim sum
and crisp duck, then circled back toward Honolulu on the Pali Highway, and ended up parked near the top of Mt. Tantalus. A break in the forest showed Honolulu and Waikiki glittering below in the distance.

Ana folded her arms, knowing her mother was leading up to something. Her farewell speech.

“I always loved it up here.” Anahola breathed in deeply. “Pine. Eucalyptus. The air like autumn.”

Late afternoon now, sunlight pierced the trees like broken glass.

“Up here I always found perspective. It’s where, one day, I understood I had to leave. I didn’t have enough nerve to stay. I had nothing to offer this island, it had nothing to give me in return. But you, Ana, have nerve, and drive. You’ll do important things here.”

She pointed to the land below, waving her hand slowly from left to right. “Look at the size of it, so small you can hold it in your palm.”

Then she pointed farther out, to sea. “But look where we came from. Ancestors crossed that ocean without maps, using only the stars and wave motions. Think of it! That kind of courage is swimming in our genes. If they could survive that ocean,
we
can survive anything. Nothing out there in the world is as scary, as potentially destructive.”

Now comes the punch line
. Ana waited.

“That’s all I have to say. I know you’ve focused on your studies. I know you’ve never traveled, never even seen the outer islands. Don’t deprive
yourself of that. If you’re curious, Ana, see what’s out there. You will always come home. This is where you’re meant to be. But if you ever want, or need, to see something of the world, don’t be afraid.”

On the drive back down the mountain, Ana smiled. She had expected some form of cheap theatrics from her mother, a plea for forgiveness. But all she had gotten was a pep talk. Out of sheer relief, she reached down, retrieving her mother’s sunglasses where they had tumbled to the floor. But later she reflected on how it was true, she had never been off-island.

Rosie had encouraged her to travel. “See what med schools are doing on the mainland. Compare training hospitals to what we got in Honolulu.”

Ana knew she never would. She would spend her life with her feet firmly planted on the ground, staying close to home. Her reluctance was based on perversity, a determination to point her life in the exact opposite direction from the one her mother chose. But now and then she wondered,
Is it perversity? Or just plain fear?

She thought of her first lover, Tommy Two-Gods. He went out into the world and it had swallowed him. No one heard from him again. A neighbor’s son went off to dental school in Philadelphia. Two years later his parents received a snapshot of him in some tributary of the Amazon, his native bride beside him wearing only a monkey-fur apron and a dinner plate inside her bottom lip. What about Will Chong, her lovely intern? Not even a postcard all these years. What happened to people in the outside world? What quick-witted beast attracted, then consumed, them? Only her mother had returned. Vain, and unrepentant.

T
HE WEEK BEFORE HER MOTHER LEFT FOR
S
AN
F
RANCISCO, THEY
drove back to Nanakuli, where Ana ignored her, resuming a cold and unforgiving air. One day, Lopaka took her arm and walked her up into a field. Affectionately, he brushed his hand across her head where soft down was growing in.

“You look good, Ana. Still a little thin, but …” He tapped his heart. “In here I’m proud of you. The way you fought, and beat it.”

“Time will tell. If I’m alive five years from now, then we can say I beat it.”

He glanced down at his feet, scraping the dirt with the tip of his crutch. “Look, I want to ask you a favor. Please … try to cut your mama some slack.”

She pulled away from him.

“I see what you’re doing. Ana, she never forgot you all these years. She wrote you every week. She called.”

“Yes. A real long-distance mother.”

His voice was soft but firm. “You have any idea what she has done? For this whole family?”

“What are you talking about?”

“How do you think I got through law school? Just on the GI Bill? On scholarship? You know how few Hawaiians get scholarships. Who paid for my extra therapy and leg brace? How you think Tito paid for his new electric wheelchair?”

He opened his mouth, tapped his perfect teeth. “Who paid for my caps, for Makali‘i’s dental work? Who paid the lease on my office space when I set up my practice? Who do you think paid for your college education, undergrad and med school? The parts not covered by your scholarship?”