WE SPENT ANOTHER WEEK together after we camped in Haleakalā, staying in the spare room of a tin roofed, one-storey house on a back street in Lahaina; one of those gravel streets under bedraggled coco palms, poi dogs asleep under cars, a corrugated tin wall around the yard you’d throw your laundry on to dry, after you’d washed it by hand in the empty lion-clawed bathtub that sat in the centre of the yard. I asked you why you didn’t just take it to the coin wash, and you said you hated laundromats; the reason being you used to go to the post office in Kaunakakai, years before when you lived on Moloka’i in the Hālawa Valley, to get your mail and read it while the laundry spun but nobody in your family wrote to you anymore, none of your friends back home in Canada, where we were both from. And so now laundromats reminded you of not having mail, of your abandonment.
The house belonged to a new acquaintance; you met Michael at May’s and an hour later anyone watching the two of you talk would’ve thought you were the oldest of friends. Michael was hardly ever home, and gave us the room happily and for free, or else you offered a little work in exchange. You had nothing either but you knew how to trade. Because of this he respected you. Just like May, or is that Mei—the Chinese woman in the restaurant who gave us free food because you’d repaired her door.
It was in the fancy Lahaina bars that people sneered at your bare dirty feet although lots of people in there had plenty worse. Maybe those waitresses wanted to sleep with you and you wouldn’t, and if that was the case I couldn’t really blame them.
You’d come in on a sailboat days before, up from Tahiti. Your friends were taking their boat from Lahaina to a dry dock in a hick town on the ‘Iao side to do necessary repairs to the hull; unlike sailing from Midway, they could do it two-handed. Why didn’t you and I hike through the crater, you’d meet your friends after, I could come along if I wanted, re-caulk the boat with the three of you; it was up to me.
Michael was half Portuguese, half Hawai’ian. He had a fishing boat, but he didn’t go out every day, and made the other half of his living by odd-jobbing and barter. In his yard he had a pomelo tree and an avocado tree, and he didn’t eat from either of them. We went to the park and collected fallen mangoes. Michael laughed. “Mangoes for the pigs, avocados for the dogs.” He had a friend across the road who used to take them to feed his animals. One night he came home with fresh mahi-mahi; you sliced it up sashimi-style and mixed wasabi for it, and I made a big bowl of guacamole out of Michael’s avos, first going to the store and buying tortilla chips and tomato and garlic. I’d meant to buy lemons too, but found fallen limes in front of a tree on the way. A Chinese woman came out of the house and I felt bad, but she said, “Take them all, they’ll just rot,” and was only a little bit condescending.
We drank Primo and smoked local pakalolo that Michael had. We felt lucky: usually people smoked imported Mexican; the Hawai’ian was so costly most of it went to the mainland or else you couldn’t afford it. Mexican was cheaper. I hated Primo and went back to the store for Kirin, using up almost all of the rest of the money I’d made working on the poultry farm with Lulu, but it was a celebration, although I’m not sure what we were celebrating. I suppose because we could. So quickly afterwards, celebration was no longer possible. Almost certainly, you knew. After we’d smoked I sliced up the sweetest mangoes and even Michael liked them, and after that he ate pomelo and avocado every day.
“You have to eat the healthy food,” you said to him, “not the junk food,” and I wondered if you weren’t being a bit patronizing.
When Michael was home with his girl we’d go out to Mei’s restaurant. She had a back room for people like us, or at least, people like me. Mei understood immediately that you were different. I wonder how she did that? Maybe it was just her age—she was over forty and could read people as I couldn’t. All the young backpackers would chat and gossip in the back room; Lulu had discovered the place.
It was all a game to me, an As If. I wasn’t really living my life. But it’s as though I left a part of myself in that time, waiting for the moment when I could become a part of a community, have a sense of belonging. And that time is now. But I’m afraid of failing again, just like I did then, at the difficult task of being human.
I’d tried, of course, thinking, “This is just like high school…” and ordered tea and enormous almond cookies like everybody else, and maybe, I think now, I was more successful than I thought, coming at the difficult problem of being human. In that room, before I left, I reached across the table and took the hand of the dark-haired girl you’d slept with even though we were ostensibly together, and smiled.
I’m grateful; you were witness to the brittleness of my youth. How vulnerable I was, wearing my solitude and harmed quality on my sleeve in place of a heart. That you got to see that side of me I will never be able to forgive you. It is better to have the distance, to write to you. It is so easy to idolize the past, but perhaps all I say here is true.
I’m on holiday with our old friend Lulu, on my first island, Kaua’i, and not Maui, where you and I spent time together. Still, just being in Hawai’i reminds me of you so much I feel compelled to write. Hawai’i has changed, much of its wildness paved over by indistinguishable malls and hotels, even on the outer islands. The old Japanese men no longer sit in the beach parks, playing hanafuda. I wonder where they are now? Remember we sat with them once and asked them to teach us how to play? We got the basics that afternoon, under the tattered palms, sitting at the name-and-fire scored picnic table. But the nuances were endless. They finally got rid of us by threatening to play the next game for money, and we ran off, needing what few bills we had for takeout tempura and Kirin beer.
I unfold the page, look at your drawing I’ve kept all these years. The mouse is still so lifelike, but it doesn’t move. I’ll keep it forever. I’m already forgetting what you look like, except that your forehead was broad and tanned and high, and your big knotted hands much gentler than my father’s.
Before she left for her solitary hike through the Alaka’i swamp, Lulu looked at me. “Did you call?”
I shook my head. “I have to write, try and sort it out one more time.”
“Don’t write too long,” Lulu said. “You know what the verdict was, not so bad.”
“That doesn’t mean he was innocent; his lawyer might’ve just been good.”
“Tomorrow is his release date. If you don’t call today he might be gone. There’s no harm in it. If he’s not what you thought, you can change your mind.”
I do not know how to tell this story. Hence I will try writing it as if it were a story, in third person, with made-up names. For write it I must. If I don’t, I won’t be able to decide.
sss
His brown eyes met hers across the yard, across the fairy tale crowd at the free temple dinner. She had gone inside to help in the kitchen, but just as she looked towards the door she saw him coming out. He was deeply tanned and wore a white cotton shirt, loose and unironed. She noticed him immediately. They passed each other, but he only glanced at her. In the temple kitchen she arranged fruit on platters: lemons, apples, papaya, mango, pomelo, liliko’i. Apple bananas, each banana the size of a thumb so that a bunch of bananas, a hand as they are called here, really does look like a hand, being almost exactly the same size. Guavas. Small as tennis balls, they fit in your hand, brown on the outside, green and slushy on the inside. Strawberry guavas that are smaller, perhaps the size of huge farm grown strawberries, scarlet and smooth-skinned. She took the platters out and set them on the table and looked for him but he was gone.
After the dishes were done she caught her ride back to Baldwin Park, where, as most nights, there was a fire and drumming as Scorpio appeared in the sky. She watched the fire and then him, standing directly across the flames, noticed how his forehead was so smooth and large and his hands were large too, but very gentle as he took an offered drum.
He came to her campsite that night, a secret campsite Lulu knew, under ironwood trees a quarter mile from the park.
“Hello,” she said.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes.”
She turned on her flashlight. He had come through the woods without one. She was glad. She didn’t want anyone knowing where she was camped.
He showed her a drawing he had made, of a mouse.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I just sort of knew.”
His mouse was very mousy. It had soft brown hair and jumped off the page and under the covers with them. They made love right away, in silent relief. Afterwards they went to the Chinese restaurant to eat, walking across the cane fields to get to town, because it was shorter than taking the road. She didn’t even wonder how Mei’s restaurant, which was usually in Lahaina, was now in Pa’ia. Or perhaps they’d walked the dirt tracks through moonlit cane fields for hours, and it only felt like minutes. Maybe it was because the mouse came too. The mouse was a very good supper companion, making them like each other and feel good without saying very many words. They ate in the shadow of the mountain.
Hitchhiking up the mountain the next day, they walked between rides, along an unpaved road, a gravel track really, covered in yellow crescent shaped leaves; neither of them knew what the tree was called. She walked beside Jim. She didn’t know him very well although they were new lovers; the leaves were like the fingernail clippings of a family of giants. She wanted to say something important to Jim, something that would make him remember her. She hadn’t eaten any mushrooms herself. It began to rain. They were hungry and, passing through a village, went into a café to eat. The proprietor scowled at Jim, more than at her, but served them coffee and fried egg sandwiches nonetheless.
She’d feel this peculiar chagrin in restaurants with Jim. It was the only time they were ever in public together. The Chinese one in either Lahaina or Pa’ia was the exception. Was he barefoot? Did he smell? She didn’t much care, but it was tiresome and she didn’t understand it. In Mei’s restaurant, the mouse had tea with them; in other restaurants it stayed in his pocket. It’s always a tea party when you have a mouse along, even if you’re not wearing your mad hat. Jim talked about nothing and she talked about nothing, both careful to obscure their pasts, to cloud their trail. But that wasn’t it; it was as if they really didn’t have pasts. On Maui, she often found herself telling people she was from Kaua’i, and realizing, in a shocked kind of way that it was true. She’d been on Kaua’i for eight months and then met Lulu; they’d come here together. She’d been in Hawai’i almost a year altogether. When you’re so young that’s a long time, and each experience in that year so vivid her father paled behind it, grew ghostlike. But not entirely.
She realized, years later with Lulu in Koke’e that she’d loved Jim, even though she hadn’t known it at the time. She’d liked him a lot, the sex had been great, and she’d felt like they’d known each other, which almost never happened to Tanya. Somehow, though, she hadn’t put this together as love.
sss
“Every time I bend over I have this major realization,” she said, pulling her head back out of the waterfall. On a stone lay their toothbrushes, the expensive health food store shampoo. Her one luxury.
“Like what?” Jim had made a camp fire and she was drying her hair after swimming. They were going to eat breadfruit and coconut, both of which Tanya had found. Tanya could tell by looking at a coconut what stage it was inside, milky or hard, or the puddingy in-between stage called spoon meat that some people loved.
They’d done their hike through Haleakala, and now, on the way back out, they’d left the trail and were camping on parkland, or maybe it was private land. They didn’t know; it was such a vast tract that nobody could possibly find them. Waterfall after waterfall came splashing down the mountain like a stairway from heaven; mist and rainbows crowning the treetops of the rainforest like damp halos. They had been there for three days; the crater hike itself had been another three.
“What if he kills me?” she wondered aimlessly, and reached up onto the cliff ledge and took down the rubber cervix-covering item and put it in.
“Never say how long you were anywhere. It breaks the spell, the way an alteration of memory can redeem everything,” Tanya said, and Jim smiled. She took off her sandals she’d wet getting out of the pool. They were leather huaraches; she put them by the fire to dry. She had nothing on. She dried her hair; which was long and thin and brown, with the blue towel and then sat down at the fire and took over cleaning the seeds out of the dope, some kind of Maui Wowie given to her by one of her young Hawai’ian buddies. She had impressed Jim with this, that she knew how to score local dope from locals, although he’d pulled off the same trick, meeting Michael within days of his arrival from Midway. He’d explained he’d once lived on Moloka’i; most of his friends there had been Hawai’ian.
They made love and lay in the sun and baked and swam in the pools beneath waterfalls and occasionally Tanya wondered, when, as it must, it would end, and vaguely, whether he would kill her, although he had never given any indication. Perhaps she’d just seen too many horror movies as a child, horror movies on television and the other kind, the kind she hid in the laundry room to escape from. Now, here, it was only at this moment that they passed through her skin, her outer membrane, that they made her truly fearful. The terror she’d had to suppress at the time.
What if he kills me?
Yet even still she missed her father a little.
Jim gave her enough pleasure to match the pain, an equal and opposite force, until she was filled. Then the pleasure ousted the pain. You have to be filled with something. It’s one or the other. Nature abhors a vacuum.
They collected avocados on a rainy day. Jim climbing high up into the tree and shaking the limbs, and Tanya standing underneath to catch them so that they fell, one after another, plump and somehow obscene, green and huge, fleshy and woman-shaped, into her hands.
The sky came down and settled on her shoulders and she cried. They went back through the forest to their camp.
Jim asked what was wrong. “Hey babe, you haven’t missed your period, have you?”
She almost punched him. Anyway, it wasn’t logical. They’d just met. And she never hid her birth control from him. She didn’t point any of this out.
She looked at Jim’s hands, so much larger than her own, large and strong and hairy and yet oddly gentle and she thought, they are like my father’s hands.
She didn’t tell him. It seemed like a terrible thing to tell him as if it was some awful secret, and he would be mortally offended, and he rolled another joint and then she couldn’t talk anymore even though it sat in her throat like a fat white dove struggling to break free: your hands are like my father’s.
And they were. She’d always dated young men before, barely out of high school. Jim was in his late twenties and had sailed from Tahiti with his friends, who, he always assured her, they would go meet soon. He had a sailor’s hands, rough and knotted as, well, knotted ropes.
She cried. It was obvious to think of the waterfalls, pooling in pools and then hurrying in streams to rattle down cliffs and eventually empty into the sea but she thought of it anyway.
“After we’ve finished patching the boat we have to go,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“B.C. The Queen Charlottes maybe. You’ll love it. You’ll learn how to sail well enough to crew anywhere.” Maybe there didn’t have to be an ending. But she liked the way he left it open-ended, too. After you spend this time with me, you’ll be able to go anywhere, for free.
“Your friends won’t like me,” she said, knowing perfectly well what she meant was: I won’t like your friends.
At last her father’s voice when it came was an exception, rarely interjecting. It was a place he couldn’t easily come, a place she was inviolate. For she’d always belonged to him; he was always in her head, telling her she just that. That was Jim’s gift to her: to almost silence her father’s voice so that she felt for the first time in her life free of him, and could be herself instead. Whatever herself was. A friend of Mouse.
Jim poked the fire with a stick. He took her face in his hands and kissed her, apologizing for his lack of tact, her tears that had prompted him to ask the one question his own fear had demanded of him. He read his book, Mark Twain or Tom Robbins or someone; he rolled another joint, he tried to make love to her. Finally he went for a walk up the valley by himself to get oranges, Valencias, he said, that legend had it some Mexican paniolo had planted at the turn of the century. Or was it Spanish? She loved those stories everyone was always telling in Hawai’i, about history, even if only half of them were true.
She realized her father was always there with them, just as the Mouse was. And what her father said was this: he isn’t good enough for you. And, astonishingly, this was just what her father had told her, when, in spite of everything, she’d begun dating, the year before both she and her mother had left, setting off in opposite directions. Two years ago precisely. Her mother was living in the Peg.
Tanya herself had drifted around Canada and then come here. Someone had told her the living was easy, but more importantly, it was geographically as far a distance from her father as it was possible to get. She kept hearing him say it, over and over and over again, a hoarse yet insistent whisper, so that finally she got up and followed Jim up the pig trail to the orange tree. At last she motioned him down and climbed the tree herself, thinking this effort would silence her father’s voice; and, throwing oranges like little suns down into Jim’s waiting hands, big as baseball gloves, she wondered, what can my father possibly mean, what can be better than this? And then she wondered again whether Jim might kill her. They were camped in such a remote spot no one would ever know. Perhaps that was what her father meant. Over roast breadfruit she forgot her irrational fear. Mouse helped feed the fire, and she lay on her back, staring at the stars peeping out between the gaps in the canopy. Nothing of this would be possible without Mouse along. Mouse washed the dishes, he sewed, repaired her jeans she tore tree climbing. The next morning after her swim, she sat at the edge of the stream, watching her reflection in the clear water, her image streaming away, carried by the currents and eddies like the many tiny yellow leaves. She sat with no clothes on, just the piece of blue cloth wrapped around her hips, while her shirt she tore climbing a food tree was being mended. While she was being mended.
“My mother wants me to go Winnipeg and live with her, you know. Finish high school and so on.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Do you want to?” Jim asked.
“Want what?”
“To live with your mom.”
“No. But I feel sorry for her all the same.”
Jim didn’t pry, said only, “Don’t let your compassion get in the way of your wisdom.”
She looked down at her body. It was very brown, graceful, very young. She looked at it in a kind of fascination, as though she couldn’t believe something so beautiful could be hers. She wore their only towel, the blue one, as a sarong. She remembered how she found it in the bushes at Seven Pools, gave it to Lulu to take back to the laundromat in Pa’ia when they got back. She and Jim made love on it that night they met, spreading it on the ground over the prickly layer of ironwood needles, soft as a bed, everything fine except for the palmetto bugs, huge tropical cockroaches scurrying over and sometimes into her sleeping bags; hence the big towel only. She hated the cockroaches, although in the forest they seemed almost benign, living in a relationship less parasitical to humans; no longer an indicator of their own failures: to be clean, to keep their lives in order, to hope for the future. In Hawai’i they were just beetles.
On the hike back down towards Hana she quailed from the sudden heat. They were unsure of the streams because of pack horses using the main trail sometimes. Jim gathered liliko’i, a type of passion fruit. They were perfectly spherical, their bright yellow skins the consistency of plastic. She’d always found them disgusting, their insides, while sweet, were also almost impossibly acidic, and resembled in appearance and texture, tapioca. That day she ate seven.
sss
Later, hitchhiking up the ranch side of the mountain again, after the scene at the courthouse, the landscape itself seemed buttoned by the same buttons that closed her soul, made it seem foreign even to herself. Except for the blooming jacarandas. How could anything be that purple?
“When will he kill me?” she remembered thinking. After he was gone it seemed funny. Yet those thoughts had occupied a space in her, space that had left no room for him after a time. Now, having thought them so often, they fluttered away, little bats. Too bad it was too late.
As before, Tanya was alone. Her natural state. Except they hadn’t left yet. She could still go find him, agree to sail to Vancouver, whether his friends proved irksome or not. She ought to turn back. It was ridiculous to hike through the crater again so soon, and alone, although that wasn’t the part that scared Tanya. What if he sailed away before she got back? She crossed the highway, faced the opposite direction.
She stuck out her thumb as the first car appeared. In her mind’s eye Jim was wearing the red paisley shirt she didn’t have the money to buy him, the one in the window of the store in Lahaina, so expensive it was frequented by visiting rock stars. He wouldn’t have killed her, she thought. It would be as impossible for him to hurt her, as it would be for Mouse to do so.
After their camping trip, Jim went to visit his sailor friends at the dry dock up island. Again, he invited her to come meet them, but Lulu was at Baldwin Park, and so Tanya hung around there for a few days. Already Lulu felt like an old dear friend. A sober young American woman, twenty-one years old, her buddy. The one she would turn to if she was in trouble. The one she talked to about what was really going on. Sometimes the irony of it struck her; for a best friend she had a woman she’d known three months to talk about a lover she’d had ten days. It heightened her sense of strength, and also fragility. There was no one in her present life who knew her from the previous years, years in which she had been known always by the same others: her parents, her siblings. Her old friends too: if they hadn’t known her for years, they’d known someone who’d known her for years.
“We are a composite picture which is passed on to and entered into by any new person we meet, who may change the image but only in infinitesimal ways,” she’d told Jim under the waterfall. He’d smiled. Anyway, here all of that broke off with a snap. And she didn’t know herself anymore, who she was. She could say anything, and no one would think it out of character. She was Kaolani, from Kaua’i.
“Don’t think you know me,” Jim had said, an edge to his voice, after he’d finished smiling. The only time there had ever been even the slightest edge. I wonder when he’ll kill me, Tanya had thought in reply.
Try and kill me was better. It wasn’t as if she didn’t intend to fight back.
There was no one like Lulu for doing her laundry. It was Tanya who didn’t mind still wearing her grubby camping clothes even after her return. At last Lulu lent her a clean dress and took Tanya’s as well as her own; they caught a ride from the park into Pa’ia. Tanya left her friend in the laundromat. Instead of helping she looked for Mei’s restaurant, hoping to find Jim. She didn’t find it; maybe it was in Lahaina that day. She went and sat on the courthouse steps and cried. Jim walked by then and looked at her, as though she was someone he didn’t know very well, and finally, after some hesitation, came and sat down beside her on the stone steps. He put his hand over hers, tentatively, almost shyly, as if their hands didn’t know each other so well.
“I wish I could help you,” he said. “What is wrong?”
She could only shake her head mutely: no no no, no no no. I cannot speak it; it cannot be spoken.
My father my father my father. And even if she had spoken what would she have said? It is he who has cut out my tongue.
“I’m hungry,” Jim said. “Let’s go eat, and then we can talk.”
“I’m hungry too.” But she started to cry again, and pushed Jim away, physically too, until at last he got up and walked away.
She assumed he’d gone to his friends again and the next day hitchhiked up the mountain alone, then changed her mind and turned back. Two days later in the rich kids’ Lahaina bar with Lulu he appeared. “I have a house for us,” he said, and even though the bouncer was trying to kick him out for some reason Tanya didn’t understand, Lulu had smiled encouragingly and so Tanya had gone to Michael’s house with him.
Tanya and Jim couldn’t make it together in town life, were both too conscious of being with someone weird, an outsider to the human flock. You need at least one who swims with the school, who has the right protective colouring, Tanya thought later. They were both from the UFO, problem was. It all fell apart after the party; they’d slept together in Michael’s spare room. She’d thought they’d make love but they hadn’t, and it had been her turn to ask what was wrong.
“I have something I have to tell you.”
Her heart had begun hammering, for no reason at all.
She didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell her. At some point, they found itchy uncomfortable sleep. Just before she drifted off, Tanya thought, there’s no stitching it back together.
The day after she was back on the courthouse steps, crying again. It had shown promise, she had to admit. Lulu had come to the party too, and slept on the couch. They’d all almost felt like a family. That night Tanya had even changed her name back to Tanya from Kaolani, because Michael’s lady really was Hawai’ian and it seemed dumb.
No matter how long she sat on the stairs crying no one passed by: not Lulu, not Jim, not even Michael or Plumeria, which wasn’t Michael’s girl’s real name either, but it suited her long black hair.
She hitchhiked back to Baldwin Park alone, before dark. She didn’t mind hitchhiking alone, but not at night.
At her old campsite under the ironwood trees she found a little note, again with the same drawing of a mouse. “I’m sorry you’re sad, little sister. I wish I could help you but I don’t know how.”
Had he seen her crying on the courthouse stairs again, and, feeling helpless, not spoken to her this time? What else could the note mean? Or had it been here since before they’d moved into Michael’s? Tanya didn’t know.
After you spend this time with me, you’ll be able to go anywhere, for free.
She was barking up the wrong ironwood tree. Maybe there was still time.
sss
Three days later they were drinking coffee and eating almond cookies in the back room of the Chinese restaurant in Pa’ia. Lulu paid. Tanya was out of money and thinking of applying for food stamps. Most of the restaurants took them. She needed very little; the food stamps would feel like wealth.
“Do you know where that dry dock is? I know he told me the name but I can’t remember. No one I’ve asked knows. It’s not the kind of thing people like us know. I should ask Michael, or Kai.” Kai was her pakalolo connection; he lived in Makawao, where a lot of Hawai’ians lived.
Lulu didn’t hear. Passed her the front page of the Honolulu paper. “Isn’t that him?”
There was a full-page photograph of a man diving off a pier. To one side, she saw ‘Iao needle. She remembered they’d thought of going there; no one hiked on mysterious ‘Iao. They’d be cooler than everyone else.
But it was him.
Tanya passed the paper back. “You read it,” she said. “I can’t. What’s it say?”
“They stole a fancy sailboat on Midway. They killed the owners, probably. They caught his friends, but he got away. The Ala Wai in Honolulu was the boat’s home marina. What were his friends like?”
“I never met them. I never even saw the boat. He invited me, but after we went camping, I hung out with you instead of going with him. Remember?”
Lulu narrowed her eyes for a moment, and then kept reading.
“It was an unusual looking boat, kind of like a little galleon, wooden hulled, double masted. I guess they thought if they did their repairs here, the boat wouldn’t be recognized. But as it happens, a friend of the owners had the same idea. Take their boat out of the water at the little dry dock, ‘Iao side, way cheaper than O’ahu. No radio contact since Midway, six weeks ago. No SOS, nothing. Too fishy, so the guy called the cops before even going on deck to see what was up.”
“He told me he sailed from Tahiti with friends. He said his friends were working on the boat and he had to go help them. But, until we came back from camping, he kept putting it off.”
“To be with you.”
“He did go for a few days to help after we got back from the crater, but then he came back and we moved into Michael’s house for a few days. Remember?” She didn’t mention the scene at the courthouse in Lahaina.
Lulu nodded. “The party was nice. It felt like we were a family. I’ve hardly ever felt that, and I’ve been travelling for years.”
“If he’d helped them full-time they might’ve been done before now.”
Lulu folded the paper shut, glanced around the restaurant, lowered her voice. “Let’s finish this conversation somewhere else.”
On the beach Lulu said, “Imagine getting away from cops by diving off a dock and swimming.” She laughed a little. “Who else could pull that off?”
“Everyone knows what he looks like now,” Tanya said.
“He’s at large. He might come looking for you. What will you do if he does?”
“It won’t work. Even if he goes to the airport he’ll be recognized now. He can’t go to Mei’s, anywhere.”
“You don’t know Mei. She’s slippery. You could ask her.”
“No. It’s the same. Everyone saw us together. They all know I was with him. I have to leave.”
“Why not wait and see if he makes contact?”
“No.” Tanya took the folded up piece of paper out of her pocket, unfolded it, showed it to Lulu. “The mouse is back on the page. I knew the moment I saw it, everything was over.”
She and Lulu lay low at Baldwin Park, expecting the police to appear at any moment. But they didn’t. Probably because, two days later, Jim was apprehended, boarding a boat in Lahaina, as the owners prepared to leave for San Francisco. Offering to crew for nothing.
Just as Tanya had thought, everyone in the restaurant stared and whispered. Mei gave them a corner table, said softly, “They were watching. They knew he was a sailor, could crew for other people. That it would be how he’d try to avoid airports.”
She offered no judgement either way. Tanya was grateful, ate enormous almond cookies and sipped green tea. When they tried to pay Mei waved their money away. “The police won’t bother you now. Also, you don’t know. See how the trial goes. They say they didn’t kill the owners, that they found the boat abandoned on Midway, the dinghy overturned on the beach.”
“It doesn’t make sense. They should’ve radioed the harbour master in Honolulu. The boat’s papers would’ve said the owner’s names, their home marina.”
Mei nodded. “They said they were too afraid. Their own boat was damaged; they barely made it from Tahiti. They were afraid to tell anyone, wanted to get here first.”
Tanya nodded. “It’s stupid for them to say so much before the trial.”
But perhaps that meant they weren’t real criminals.
Just inept thieves and murderers.
“It’s not true,” she told Lulu when they got to the beach. “If that was true they would’ve sailed her into the Ala Wai. He told me once the repairs were done they’d go to northern British Columbia.”
“I don’t want to know these things,” Lulu said. And then, “Do you wish it had gone another way? If all of you had worked on the boat you might’ve been done and gone and in BC by now.”
Tanya nodded. “The Queen Charlottes or somewhere even more remote.”
“You didn’t answer.”
“We’d have gotten a few months, is all.”
“Maybe years.”
“Why are you and Mei both speaking in his defence?”
“You were a different person after your time with Jim. You were so obviously fucked up before, everyone noticed. Now you’re kind of all right.”
“Maybe I was his penance. Maybe after what they did on Midway, he knew he needed to help someone. Buy his life back from God. He wasn’t a killer, in spite of his record.”
“What was it for?” Tanya had been reading the papers too.
“Possession. Grand theft auto.”
“A logical progression from there to grand theft boat.”
“Am I supposed to laugh?”
“Do you good. What say you we blow this pop stand, fly to Seattle? I can borrow the money. I have a friend with a restaurant there; we can work. Even you, if I ask nicely. Unless you want to wait, see how the trial turns out. Visit him in jail. Where is he?”
“Honolulu. No bail. Trial’s not for months.”
“Maybe his friends killed them, not Jim.”
“Maybe.”
It was possible. But she remembered again all the times under the waterfall when she’d wondered if he’d kill her. Maybe she was picking up on the boat owners’ fear, their last thoughts clinging to him, ever since that rainy night on Midway when they’d lost everything.
“You know when we were camping and we got high I always worried he’d kill me, even though he seemed like a kind man right from the moment I met him.”
“Where’d you meet him? You never said.”
“At the temple feast. We didn’t talk even though I noticed him right away. And then I got back to the park after and there was the usual fire. I was staring into the flames and then when I looked up, there was his face. I thought I was imagining things,” Tanya laughed. “Anyways, like I said, maybe what I heard was their feelings coming off him, their fear of him, the couple who owned the boat. I always thought I could tell a killer, they’d give off a vibe. The thing is, even though we broke up, you’re right, he was good to me. He got through to me like no one ever has, not even you, Lulu. I feel so much more myself than I did before. And no matter what he did on Midway, you can’t take that away.”
Tanya remembered now, how just before he’d walked away from her when she’d sat on the courthouse steps crying, he’d reached into his pocket, come out with Mouse, offered her the little animal. “You take him,” she’d said.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“He’s not the seafaring sort.” He’d kissed her on the forehead. “Perhaps it’s better this way.” What did he mean? She hadn’t asked. “No matter what happens, don’t think too badly of me. I’ll remember you always.”
She remembered how complete strangers so often seemed to hate him. It wasn’t just that he was unkempt and wore torn clothes; lots of people did that. Maybe they could smell it on him, what she couldn’t. Grand theft boat. Murder. Almost all had looked at him this way, as if he weren’t fit for human company. Except for Mei, and Michael, and Lulu, and Plumeria. But he’d had a chance to charm them, as he had her. Or else they’d been part of his penance too, part of his desire to take a new tack at this difficult problem of being human.
After their talk Lulu had gone into town again, back to the laundromat to fold, first telling her not to run away, but it was silly, really. Where was there to go? Tanya left the beach for the fire pit in its scraggly patch of lawn, started the night’s bonfire. The backpackers would be arriving from their day trips soon, and those who knew who she was would want to ask her questions. She got the drums out of their hiding places in the bushes. Tonight, she’d drum so loud she wouldn’t hear a thing.
sss
The door bangs; it’s Lulu, returned from her hike. She looks at me, questioning. I put down this pen, pick up our room phone. Koke’e Lodge has room phones now, as it didn’t back then. The mouse jumps off the page while I wait for someone to pick up. Or we could go there together. It’s not too late to learn how to sail.