House of Many Gods (27 page)

He rolled out expenditures like a great, thick carpet. She said something and he laughed.

“You thought what? Our uncles’ pensions paid for all that? Oh, Ana. Their pensions couldn’t buy new tires for the truck. Your summer jobs, they hardly bought you shoes.”

She tried to move. Her legs felt dead. “You’re lying. I threw her checks away.”

He leaned in closer. “You know I never lie. Well, now and then a lie overcomes me. But, swear to God, it’s true. Rosie picked those checks out of the trash and banked them. And a hundred other checks you never saw.”

He reached out and laid his hand against her cheek. She saw the inside of his forearm, his veins jacaranda blue.

“Let go, sweetheart. Before that rage becomes another carcinoma.”

She turned and walked away from him, out of the field and up the road, until she was exhausted. Then she lay down in tall grasses. A
poi
dog trotted up; her sobs impressed him. He sat on his haunches, watching her cry.

Hours later when she returned, they were seated at dinner, her mother in the midst of them, like a vastly superior child. Folks looked up. They put their forks down. Ana passed through the room like a phantom. She heard their coughs, heard their talk resume. The scrape of platters being passed.

She sat on her bed, hearing the long procession of their meal. Then
she lay back thinking how for over twenty years they had arranged their lives to deceive her. She was a woman created out of their deceit.

When she woke it was after midnight, the house dark and silent. Her arms were cold, her flesh felt blue as if she were an invalid again. She lay still, trying to figure out exactly what she felt.
She has bought the family off, bought their forgiveness
. In fact, no one but Ana had ever condemned her mother. They had only been in awe of her, a woman brave enough to run. All they had done was love her child, and accept her generosity, allowing a measure of dignity to come into their lives.

She thought of her splendid uncles, men who came home from combat and were swept aside. Disabled. Unemployable. Tito, Ben, silent Noah. Men who spent their empty days and years and decades wondering what it was they had so valiantly fought for. Then, Lopaka, disabled but soldiering on.

She thought of Rosie, who had sacrificed her meager dreams to hold the family together. She had physically held the house together when, in pouring rains, a wall collapsed. Ana remembered her pregnant, dragging lumber and tarp, driving rusty nails into wood with a homemade hammer. Then one day carpenters came and built a new wall for the house. Probably it would still be half-collapsed without her mother’s checks. She thought of Rosie pushing her to achieve, to go to university. Rosie tending her after her surgery.

They had not always eaten well. There had been small-kid years of surplus cheese and food stamps. Years when the rice bag was only one knuckle full, when Ben bartered his whale-tooth toast rack and old canoe paddles for fresh meat. She remembered Aunty Pua carefully lifting meat from her plate and giving it to Ana. Later she saw the woman in the kitchen, licking juices from the empty plate. She remembered quiet Aunty Ginger going forth to borrow fire, weaving through fields with a neighbor’s torch when there was no money for electric bills, when they couldn’t even afford matches. And she remembered Noah giving her a quarter for shave-ice while he rolled “cigarettes” of mango leaves.

She remembered that their lives had changed when her mother started writing letters home. Over twenty years of letters, inside of which were folded checks that had bought milk and protein, school clothes, sturdy shoes. Everyone had known but Ana, who never picked her eyes up from her books. Hungry or not, they had loved her unconditionally, had fed and even spoiled her. So how, she wondered, had the family betrayed her? How had they lied to her? What exactly was betrayal? And how did one define a lie?

One thing she had learned in medicine: after a major illness, patients were never the same. The best of them were humble, cherishing each breath. The word
mortality
entered their syntax. Ana touched her chest, wondering what her illness had taught her. Maybe cancer was the
cure
. The thing that struck her down, shook her like a rag, shocked her into letting go, letting it all go. Perhaps that’s what cancer did: gave people permission to stop keeping track.

After a while she moved through the house and out to the
lānai
. She stepped down to the yard and stood before the clothesline. She stared at it a long, hard time, and at the end poles shining in moonlight. Then she went back into the house and pulled the big sheet from her bed. She pulled the curtains from the windows. In the dining room she pulled the tablecloth from the table, and pulled down those curtains, too. She went to Noah’s room where he sat sleepless at his window, a towel wrapped round his head like a swami.

“Uncle. What’s wrong with your head?”

He tapped the towel. “Had one good dream. Like keep it warm, maybe it come back again.”

She pulled the big sheet from his bed, then closed the bathroom door and filled the tub. She picked up a bar of soap and a scrub board and knelt beside the tub, and scrubbed each sheet and curtain and the tablecloth. Sometimes she paused, imagining them clean and billowing. She scrubbed for hours until the flesh of her palms were wrinkled like
cone sushi
.

She scrubbed till dawn, then laboriously wrung each thing out. She filled the tub again and slowly rinsed them, wringing and rinsing until she was exhausted. She leaned against the tub and dozed. Then a final rinse before she placed them like great, twisted loaves into a basket, and dragged it to the yard.

Sun coming up, she stood with clothes pins in her mouth, snapping the sheets to spread them evenly, watching them billow out like spinnakers. She snapped and shook and spread each thing, hanging it carefully, meticulously, until they took up all of two clotheslines.

One by one, the family woke and stood stretching at their windows. Seeing her, they paused. Rosie stepped out onto the
lānai
, watching Ana move up and down the line, straightening the sheets as they surged and bellied out. Then she leaned her weight against a pole, shoving it deeper into the ground so that the sagging line pulled taut. Almost cautiously, Rosie stepped down to the yard. Ana turned and put her arm round her cousin’s waist.

“I never would have dreamed it,” Rosie said.

Big Ben looked out the kitchen window, then called back to Tito. “Ey! Try look! First time dat girl evah hang laundry in her life. First time she
evah
go near dat clothesline.”

She and Rosie stood arm in arm, shouting as sheets ballooned into flying tunnels.

T
HEY WERE A CARAVAN, HEADING TO THE AIRPORT
. T
WO CARS
, three trucks, even Uncle Noah. At the terminal, the men checked her baggage and shuffled back and forth, doing male things so as not to show emotion. Through security, then she stood at the boarding gate, half-buried in fragrant
lei
, looking beautiful and wrecked as they embraced her.

Finally, she put her lips to Rosie’s ear. “Take care of her for me.”

Then the family moved aside. There was only Ana. She stood very still, not knowing what to do, and stared at this woman who had given herself a second chance. Re-created herself. A woman always in transition. Ana saw the power that independence gave her, the sense of being accountable only to herself.

Still, she wanted to ask why.
I know you loved me. But you loved you more. Tell me why it still seems wrong. Why it seems unnatural
.

Her mother was talking now, her voice soft. “…  have it in you to change people’s lives … very, very proud of you.”

Ana just stood there.

“Remember, it’s only a five-hour flight to San Francisco. Should you ever want to visit …”

She stepped forward, drawing Ana close. “I hope you find love … I hope you let love in. Live, Ana. Live!”

She watched her mother move into the passageway, legs slim and gleaming like a colt. She watched her turn and wave, a woman stepping from a frame.

M
ONTHS PASSED
. D
AYS SEEMED BLEACHED A PROTOPLASMIC GRAY
, nights mere hours of lidded peace. Only the patients before her were real—the bleeding ulcer, the fibrillating heart. One night at the EMS loading dock, she delivered a premature baby, a tiny, wrinkled thing like a small balloon deflated. It lay silent, still as death, then opened its eyes and screamed. It waved its arms in ecstatic little circles. It was not her first delivery, but in that moment Ana felt an almost unbearable intensification of her senses, a connection to this brand-new life. She leaned down and kissed the newborn, then kissed the paramedic.

Days later, the medical director of the ER called her in. When he asked how she was feeling she said she was having second thoughts about ER.

“That is … I’ve been thinking of switching to OB-GYN. It’s not as crucial as breaking open someone’s chest and clamping their heart back together, but since my surgery I think I want a branch of medicine that deals in birth, beginnings, that sort of thing.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “At the risk of sounding sexist, ER is no place for a female. Even orderlies are burned out in two years.”

He paused, and looked down at his desk. “Ana, when you first arrived you were a ball of fire. We had pegged you for a future chief resident. But, with your surgery and follow-up treatments, you’ve missed important lectures, unit rotations. I want to make a recommendation …”

She leaned forward earnestly.

“…  that you repeat this year of residency. You should have top evaluations and skills when you complete this program. Right now evaluations only place you in the upper half of your year. I want you to establish that level of excellence again.”

“I think I’ve been expecting this.”

“And you might just want to do general practice for a while. Instead of jumping into three more years of grinding out a specialty.”

“You don’t think I’d make a good OB-GYN?”

“I think you’d be brilliant at it. It’s just you’ve been through a lot. You should think hard about how much stress you want in the next five years.”

“Well … what’s life without stress.”

“It’s longer.”

S
HE SAT AT THE
H
UMU
H
UMU
L
OUNGE WITH
G
ENA
M
ELE.
“H
E
made me feel like a terminal case in brief remission.”

“Ana, he’s giving you a second chance. You bear down next year, you could call your own shots.”

She sipped her beer, fighting mild depression. “My God, will this training never end?”

“Remember, we volunteered for this. Nobody drafted us.”

A year earlier, Gena had passed her bar exams and joined Lopaka’s small firm out on the coast. Though she was hired as his associate, he kept her in the background, researching briefs and doing paperwork.

“I’m smart. I’m aggressive. He feels threatened and treats me like an intern.”

“Then quit. Fight back. Why be his lackey?”

Gena smiled. “If he asked me to clean his john, I would. Something in me wants to give that man everything I’ve got.”

Ana put her glass down. “I can’t bear to hear this. Women like us are supposed to be breaking the mold, not kowtowing to the old ways.”

“Well, wait till
you
fall in love. Logic goes out the window.”

One night Ana had pulled up to his office unannounced. The lights were dim when she entered, calling his name. They didn’t hear her, but she saw them through a door in the records room. Near-naked, on a makeshift couch. Lopaka down on his knees like he was waxing Gena’s floors, sobbing and thrusting inside her, shouting magnificent things, that he was hers, hers unconditionally. Ana had stood there paralyzed,
watching Gena’s legs flailing round his shoulders, watching him wait until she came before he allowed himself to come. Then he collapsed as if she had reached inside and wrung his heart. They never heard Ana leave. Now she stared at the girl, clinical and detached.

“That catchall word again. Do you know that hearing the word ‘love’ can actually slow a patient’s bleeding? It constricts blood vessels. In operating theaters in the war, when morphine was short, it proved to be an anesthetic.”

Gena studied her. “Is that all you think of when you think of love?”

“I think it’s the oldest delusion in the world. Folks use it to free themselves from common sense.”

“Ana, sometimes you make me feel real sad. You seem determined to go through life without experiencing certain human emotions.”

She toyed with beads of condensation on her glass. “Well, now, maybe that’s the point. Maybe what counts at the end of a life is not who loved us, or who we loved. But who did
not
love us … and who we did not love.”

“You mean how someone without it learns to cope? How not being loved builds character?”

Ana hesitated, feeling the conversation had swerved, that somehow they were discussing her.