Sleeping Beauties (27 page)

“I wonder what a Human Reactor looks like?” Emma called gaily to Clio.

Clio looked at her, surprised by her sudden anger at Emma. She wondered for a moment if she were jealous. Perhaps she did not wish to share Henry, the presence of Henry, even with Emma. But she knew that it was not jealousy. It was Emma’s change of heart. It was an insult to Clio, who had lived in her service for years. She believes that all the time in the world is ahead of her, thought Clio, and I believe that all time is behind me.

“I used to shoot deer on Kaho‘olawe,” Emma said, shouting over the sound of the outboard and the sound of the sea.

Henry nodded. “It was good hunting there.”

The two of them! Clio thought.

Another boat came alongside. An old Hawaiian charter captain was at the wheel, a Kona fisherman named Pupule.

He waved to Henry.

Henry waved back at him.

In the front of Pupule’s boat stood a small Japanese man in a yellow slicker and black gloves. He, too, waved.

Emma looked at him, then turned to Clio, smiling in amusement. “Do you think he wears that oilskin to contain his rays?”

Clio smiled and nodded, distracted. She had been watching the cutter, suddenly near enough to be either purposeful or careless. Henry, too, had noticed the closeness of the boat. She wondered if the Coast Guard were preparing to lower sailors into their boat. Perhaps they were going to be arrested.

And then the Coast Guard boat rammed them from behind.

With a startled smile, Emma stumbled against the rail.
She turned to Clio, and put out her hand, and fell into the sea.

Henry grabbed a rope from the deck, and a life preserver, and, pointing off the bow, pushed the line and the vest into Clio’s outstretched hands.

Clio could see driftwood and seaweed, foam and wrack, all with sudden clarity, but she could not see Emma.

The boat rolled from side to side. Henry idled the engine, fearful of hitting Emma, or the other boats, rocking, too, in confusion. He turned the boat in small, slow circles. On the other boat, Pupule climbed to the fishing tower. His boat swayed so wildly that his outrigger poles seemed to touch the sea. The man in the yellow coat huddled in the cabin.

A rescue boat was lowered from the cutter. It, too, rolled in the rough sea, and the helmsman raced the engine, trying to outrun a swell, making a sudden deep wake that rushed upon the smaller boats. A wave washed over them, and Clio was swept into the sea.

The waves broke without regret, without pleasure. Salt burned in her nose and throat. She lay on her back and tried to breathe, tried to find the bright sky and black Kaho‘olawe. The sea lifted her high, and dropped her with a roar.

Someone called her name.

It is my grandfather, she thought. My grandfather who drowned one winter evening of rapture of the deep.

But it was not her grandfather.

It is Kimo Danforth, my mother’s husband, who fell to the bottom of the canyon, the flowers for my mother clutched in his fist. It is Miss Stant, with her broken heart and her straw bag full of stolen shirts. It is Uncle McCully, who drowned in a tidal wave looking for Mamie.

But it was none of them.

She could hear the women and the unheeding children and the reckless warriors and fishermen, lost at sea, all of them calling to her.

But she was wrong. It was none of these. It was Henry. It was Henry, calling her name.

She fought hard against the water god. When the sailors tried to pull her into their boat, she resisted with such ferocity that she broke her collarbone in the struggle. She thought that she was bodysurfing with the Hawaiian boys at Makapu‘u Point. “Where is my fin?” she asked. “I’ve lost my fin.” The young sailors finally lied to her, telling her they had her fin in the boat. Only then did Clio stop struggling and allow them to lift her from the lamenting sea.

Emma was taken by the god, as she had known she would be were he ever given the chance, and her body, because of this, was never recovered.

In her generosity and wisdom, Emma bequeathed all of her treasure to Mamie Clarke and Frank Harimoto to dispose of as they saw fit in the furtherance of educating the young of Hawai‘i in the ways of the people.

Wisteria House was, despite Emma’s wishes, not hers to compel, as the city, a few weeks after her disappearance at sea, claimed the land for the new sports arena, which they announced would be named the Fitzroy Aloha Center in honor of her extravagant gift.

To Clio, Emma gave the house called Hale Moku and her charts and genealogies and books. She also gave to Clio the guardianship of her mother, Miss Mabel Clarke.

Clio had to sell some of the rarer of Emma’s papers at auction, and the two feather capes that had once belonged to Ka‘ahumanu, the queen who changed the islands forever when she refused to obey the
kapu
that forbade her eating
with her favorite chieftains. Clio tried to ask Mabel’s permission before selling the capes, but Mabel had waved her away.

She insisted that Clio sleep on a futon at the foot of her bed. Clio lay on the mat and watched the lizards on the ceiling; her
‘aumakua
, Emma’s
‘aumakua
.

She listened to the lizards and wondered if she had become a listener out of sympathy with her grandmother. But Clio knew that she had been listening all of her life. It was what she did best. She had listened to the ceaseless, glancing stream; and to the clicking of her mother’s white suede high heels as she left Hale Moku. She had listened to the deer on the mountain; and she had listened to Emma, most of all she had listened to Emma: “Two steep and wild mountain ranges called
palis
embrace the lovely valley known as Nu‘uanu. It was from Nu‘uanu, the first resting place of the gods, that life spread throughout these islands, Clio. The
‘e‘epa
people, the gnomes, lived there. The
menehune
constructed a temple, a
heiau
, not far from your mother’s house, for the children adopted by the gods. I like to think that we are descended from those children.”

Clio wondered if Emma were right, if they were the descendants of those first blessed orphans, endowed with their powers of magic. Clio had once tried to open a breadfruit tree like the sorceress Papa to hide at the heart of the tree, but the tree had refused to open for her. Emma had said that the tree did not obey because Clio had not fully learned the words to the tree-opening chant. Clio learned them and tried again, and when the tree still did not open, she did not tell Emma.

“We must put up a stone for Emma, who has no grave,” Mabel said one night.

Mabel continued to suffer from
kadami no yoru
, a darkness of the heart. She worried that her grief would cause
her transubstantiation to be postponed, at least until she could achieve a Buddhist state of egolessness.

“Emma wanted to be buried near a
pua kenikeni
tree,” Clio said, watching a lizard eat a termite. “She said so many times.” She turned on her side to ease the ache of her shoulder.

“Is there still a
pua kenikeni
grove near the mill?”

“There is one, I know, near Hau’ula.”

Clio wondered if Emma’s body had floated, like the blue glass balls that came to shore, from warm current to cold and back again, from the livid, dense waters of their islands to the cold, gray waters of Japan.

“Too built up,” Mabel said. “We will make one here. We will have everyone to stay. We will open the house again and consecrate the land and plant a grove of
pua kenikeni
. Frank Harimoto and Mamie will come, and Claire and Dix, and all of our friends.”

“Claire and Dix are in Los Angeles.”

“Fine.”

Clio heard Tadashi leave her bed in the next room. The wooden floorboards moaned at the lightest touch, and day and night Clio listened to Tadashi’s restless movements as she moved through the house.

“Have you Emma’s genealogies and name-chants with you?” Mabel asked fretfully. “Do you have them?”

“Yes,” Clio said.

Mabel sighed and turned heavily in her bed.

Clio longed to sleep. She had not been able to sleep more than a few hours each night. Although her shoulder no longer gave her great pain, it was difficult to rest.

“She worked so hard on them,” Mabel whispered. “It was her gift to me. She thought I’d given up my own life for the past. That is why she would not go with her husband when he asked her to leave. To go would mean that I had been wrong not to go.”

Clio listened as a branch of the big monkeypod tree rubbed up and down the rain gutter. It sounded as if the house were being cut open with a dull knife. Maybe that is why Emma didn’t go to Tahiti, Clio thought. Maybe.

“Do you think you will continue her work?”

Clio did not answer.

“You think it is too late?”

Clio did think that it was too late.

“To save it? To save the past? Too late for me?”

Clio hesitated. “For you?”

“For me to help you,” Mabel said timidly.

Clio was so tired, so exhausted by all of them, that she could not answer.

“Is it too ironic?” Mabel asked.

“A little,” Clio said. Tears ran into her hair and into her mouth.

“There is a line in one of Hitomaro’s love poems that torments me:
How can I find my girl, wandering on ways I do not know
?”

Clio listened as Tadashi moved haltingly down the dark hall, her hand trailing tentatively along the wainscotting so that she would not slip and fall. Tadashi’s tiny feet, safe within their cloven socks, slid over the wooden floor.

Clio rose from her mat.

“Clio? Child?” Mabel whispered. “Where are you?”

She went to his room, the room that her mother had lived in as a girl. He was reading, and he looked up at her.

“We could swim,” he said quietly.

“No,” she said. “Not swim. I don’t want to swim yet.”

They went lightly through the rooms, not hurrying, finding their way through the house. She could smell the dust of Hale Moku in his hair. He did not let go of her
hand, lest she stumble over a calabash, or a root, or a rock on the beach.

He undressed her at the water’s edge. The waves leapt at her feet. He does not undress me, she thought, as he undressed me when they pulled me from the sea. He is no longer mindful of my pain and my grief. He is touching me without sorrow, at last.

The ocean was invisible. Clio could hear it tossing restlessly in the darkness. The black branches of the palm trees brushed against the black sky, sweeping the pallid stars, making her dizzy. He held her, out of the path of stars, out of the current, and, for a little while, she stopped listening.

I myself have seen it.