Dante sat at one of three picnic tables under a corrugated plastic awning of a burger stand midway between the airport and Avarua, Cook Islands’ national capital. Trusting fate seemed to be working out so far. According to a local woman on the clockwise traveling bus, the capital would be the best place to hire a one-way boat ride to East Pukapuka. When he’d asked about the clockwise bus, she’d explained there was another bus somewhere out on the same highway, called the anti-clockwise bus. It made the same ninety kilometer loop around the island perimeter, traveling in the opposite direction.
Written across the four dollar, one-way ticket Dante held folded in his hand were the words, “Please smile.”
The driver announced “breakfast time” and pulled the bus to a stop along the Ara Tapu, the unnamed main road circling the island. The milling travelers either waited in line for food or sat watching the light morning traffic zoom by. Noisy motor scooters and small cars raced along the paved Polynesian highway, chased by low clouds trapped by the hills and then pushed parallel to the coast.
“First time to Raro?” one of the passengers sitting across the picnic table from Dante asked.
“I think so.” Dante was starving but tired. His leg muscles were burning from all the standing around. The line to the burger window wasn’t moving, so he decided his stomach could wait. The unbearable humidity had plastered his polo shirt and khaki pants to his skin. From the center of the table, Dante snatched a few paper napkins being held down with a rock. As he swept the napkin across his forehead, fat drops of sweat caught in his eyelashes, stinging his eyes.
“Here for a holiday?” a woman asked. A small child wearing only a diaper—perhaps her granddaughter?—lay curled on her wide lap. She stroked the long black hair of the two-or-three-year-old who nuzzled into the blue checkerboard pattern of her dress.
“I’m passing through, heading back home.”
“Where’s home for you?”
“Do you know East Pukapuka?”
“You don’t look like anyone I’ve ever seen from East Pukapuka.” The woman raised her eyebrows. “Only brown people lived on East Pukapuka.”
“Lived?”
“Yes, the big wave.” The woman looked down and wrinkled her nose, lifting the diaper waistband to check for the source of the odor.
“What do you mean by big wave?”
“The big wave washed everything away.” The woman again stroked the child’s hair, having apparently found nothing in the diaper. “Everybody knows about the big wave. Lots of pictures in the newspapers, but maybe not back where you’re comin’ from, right?”
“No, wait, there was a tsunami?” Dante tried not to panic. He’d watched an hour-long show on channel sixty-three about the devastation of tsunamis. Entire cultures were wiped out, and once-bustling villages were left looking like trash dumps. “You’re certain it hit East Pukapuka?”
“Yes, of course I’m certain. Rescuers had nothing to do but bury the dead that were left. Fishing boat found one body way, way out at sea beyond the island, maybe forty kilometers. It was a terrible thing.” The woman shook her head. “It was a really big wave.”
“Everyone is dead? The entire village was killed?” Dante pictured the travel channel images of children’s faces, of the handsome men and women who populated his dreams. But now they were dead? Dante tried to recall the voice of the sobbing girl he’d heard as he’d climbed from the dark water on the leeward side of the island following each night’s swim. He knew she was lost and calling out a person’s name, but the name was nonsense, another piece of gibberish from his screwed up brain. The dream always ended before he had a chance to look for the girl and help her search.
“No worries, everybody’s okay,” the woman said, but her eyes were filled with tears. “They’ve all gone on to Happa Now. It’s okay to miss them, but the people are in a good, good place.”
“When did this happen?” Dante knew the woman meant the people had gone to some form of Heaven. His stomach had begun to churn at the smell of onions and frying meat. He wasn’t sure how to react, how news of this catastrophe should make him feel. It was as if a long lost twin had died in a car crash while coming to meet him for the first time. Dante watched the cars zip past, feeling guilty that the entire event was beginning to seem less horrible. After all, there were no other people on East Pukapuka he’d come to know; they were nothing but images from a collection of snapshots or exotic postcards. Complete strangers, except for the unseen child whose plaintive voice called out the name of a long-dead writer from thousands of miles away.
“It’s been maybe a couple weeks, now. You had people there? East Pukapuka was really your home?”
Dante struggled to answer the Raro woman, just as he had struggled to respond to his therapist. At the care center he’d been pressed again and again, until his brain physically hurt. To be absolutely certain something was true when faced with indisputable evidence it was not caused actual physical pain.
“Leave me alone,” had been the answer he had given his therapist when confronted with facts refuting what he knew to be true. But that surely wasn’t an acceptable answer for this woman holding a baby in her lap at a roadside food stand. Dante was forced to respond honestly by the innocence of the woman’s question and the fact that he’d come into her life by boarding her clockwise traveling bus. Dante decided to keep trusting in fate.
“I had an accident.” Dante looked directly into the woman’s brown eyes. “They told me I suffered a traumatic brain injury that put me into a long coma. Now I’m here, trying to get home to a place I’ve never been. I know it’s crazy.”
“I’m sorry for your injury.” The woman paused, stroking the baby’s hair. “But maybe it’s not crazier than a sea god who sends a wave to kill a hundred people.”
“My memory was erased. Everything was gone except for this path I kept following each evening, just before sunset. It led to the edge of the water. I’d swim far out, until I could barely see the tree tops.”
“This path was on East Pukapuka?” the woman asked in a hushed voice, turning the baby over in her lap to rub small circles on its naked back.
“Yes, my home.”
“The people are all gone from the island,” she said in a gentle voice. “They moved on, far away to Happa Now. No comin’ back.”
“I’d hear a little girl’s voice when I climbed back out of the water. She was crying and calling out for someone, trying to find her family, I suppose.”
“So you dreamed a girl survived the big wave?”
“My therapist insisted it was a dream.” Dante paused, watching the traffic. “But I know it couldn’t have been a dream. I felt the coral scrape my knees when I swam across the reef, and the texture of the thick mat of seaweed I had to push out of my way closer to the shore. It all happened, night after night. I tasted the salt water, felt the broken shells on my palms. The little girl’s voice …”
“She was calling out somebody’s name?” The woman’s eyes narrowed. “What name did she call?”
Dante hesitated, embarrassed by how nonsensical this memory was, how his mind mocked him, turning language and chunks of words into gibberish. The name he’d clearly heard, night after night, had to be a mistake, a misfiring of his wounded, jumbled brain function. What he heard were the cries of a brokenhearted little girl on a South Pacific island, the sole survivor of a disastrous tsunami. Dante knew she had suffered the loss of her entire family, her home, and was now crying out for a famous English biologist—dead for more than a century and featured regularly on cable channel science and travel shows.
“She was sobbing,” Dante finally said, once again feeling like the dimwitted fool unable to convey a simple request for a salt shaker, “and she was crying out for Charles Darwin.”
The woman’s eyes widened as she scooped the sleeping child up in her arms and hugged her tightly. “Charles Darwin was a very, very nice lady. She was my cousin on your island.”