The Heart Begins Here

by Jacqueline Dumas

  8.

  AT THE AIRPORT, TRISH REASSURED ME that she would check the house every couple of days. She said not to worry about a thing, and to call if I needed anything, even if it was just to talk. She gave me a hug, held me at arm’s-length, and looked me directly in the eyes.

  “I mean it, Sara. Reverse the charges if you want, but call.”

  In the airplane, I was glad to have the window seat, anticipating the view of the Rockies from above. But banks of clouds obscured the snowy peaks, and I was left to imagine them as best I could.

  The change of planes in Vancouver is a blur, but once in the air for the final leg I distracted myself with a stripped mass-market copy of Sneaky Pie Brown, taking juvenile pleasure in tearing off each page as I finished reading it and stuffing it into the seat pocket in front. Eventually, my eyes tired, and I clicked through the staticky radio stations and managed to doze off. Wanda had taken a Gravol and had been asleep for hours.

  Midmorning, we were roused by the pilot’s twangy voice announcing the final descent into Kahului. Below, the plane’s shadow rolled across emerald valleys and white beaches curving into the surf-edged sea.

  In the terminal, the fumes from the hot tarmac mingled with the scent of plumeria and pikake. The soft sea air embraced us like a silken body glove. We had entered paradise.

  To our surprise, the rental car was ready and waiting. Wanda slid behind the wheel and easily navigated us through the neck of sugar cane fields to the hotel in Kihei—close to the beach as promised, and a second-storey room with lanai—also as promised.

  We set off to explore the beach close to the hotel, only to encounter a twenty-foot-high seawall. Some property owner had staked a private claim on a public portion of the beach, bringing our hike to an abrupt halt. The wall jutted too far out into the ocean to even consider trying to circumvent it, and the cliff anchoring the seawall was too steep and precarious to climb. We retreated out of the now burning sun back to our room.

  Later, on the walk back from an early fish-and-chip dinner, we experienced our first Hawaiian sunset. The red sun rolled into Maalaea Bay and vanished, as if in response to the mournful, whale-like pleas of a conch being blown farther up the beach. The sun disappeared, a surprising flash of green, and we lingered for some time in the sudden darkness. The stars seemed closer here, and warmer, like bits of chalk against a charcoal sky. Early to bed, I was lulled to sleep by the surf lapping up on shore.

  But next morning, I awoke before sunrise, filled with as much anxiety as ever. I slipped out of bed and tiptoed out onto the lanai.

  Across the courtyard, a window flickered arrhythmically. Another recent arrival on mainland time was up and watching TV. A rooster crowed in the distance, and in the darkness below, a man hacked and spat, perhaps assuming there was no one to hear him (or perhaps not). The hotel’s automatic sprinklers swished on, chasing the hacker back into his room.

  The rooster crowed on as if to command the sun to rise up now, this instant, and not a second later. Then the sky above the rooftops lightened, absorbing the paling stars, and the palm trees stretched up into the yellowed sky like pastel shadows of themselves. The trees soaked up their morning hues of greens and browns, the flowering bushes their reds and pinks and oranges, and the sky over Haleakala turned a cheerful blue. Daylight had arrived as quickly as had the night before it. And suddenly the world belonged to the birds as they chirped and tweeted and whistled the return of colour, their celebratory chorus almost drowning out the now wildly excited rooster who had predicted it all in the first place. In that moment, all was as it should be, and I forgot my worries.

  When I went back in, Wanda was fully dressed and ready for breakfast.

  Downstairs, Rick the desk clerk suggested we drive up Haleakala. “The mountain is not always this clear,” he said, “and you’ll want to head up there right away to get the great views. The peak clouds up as the day progresses.” He also suggested a luau on the beach later that evening.

  “Too touristy, too expensive,” said Wanda.

  “You want cheap, go to Mexico,” was his reply.

  We dawdled over breakfast and took a spontaneous detour en route, so that by the time we wound our way to the top of the mountain it was early afternoon, and the clouds below had already gathered, piling up like the mounds of snow back home. We gazed down on the false crater of Haleakala, created by wind not lava. I suggested a hike down one of the paths winding through the crater, but as I spoke, a gust of wind whipped up the red dust. At midday the crater must be dry and hot, with no refuge from the sun; at night, dry and bitter cold. A person without water could die down there.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Wanda. “The wind reminds me of Winnipeg.”

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Rick the enthusiastic desk clerk sent us to Little Beach.

  “It’s the local nude beach,” he said.

  He tugged on his earlobe and winked knowingly at Wanda’s triangle earring. “You two will love it.”

  Little Beach was kind of secluded. We were to park at Makena, otherwise known as Big Beach, and climb over the rocks at the end of the beach.

  At Little Beach, semi-tumescent men with sun-bleached hairdos paraded before the breakers. Some men stretched out on the sand, obvious regulars whose bodies revealed no tan lines, with even their penises the same dark shade as their arms and legs. Others, obvious tourists not quite believing their luck, eagerly slipped out of their swim trunks and did their best to look cool, as if they did this all the time. Their white buttocks gave them away.

  “That’s certainly not for our benefit,” observed Wanda.

  “I wonder where the women are,” I said. “Rick seemed to imply there’d be some.”

  “Never mind,” said Wanda. “Let’s find a place where there’s no dicks wagging in our faces.”

  I followed her to a spot above the shoreline and away from the action. As we settled onto our mats and slathered each other with sun block, I could hardly wait to shed my own suit and dash into the warm sea, Wanda’s hand in mine. I had dreamed of such an experience for years, ever since hearing about Vancouver’s Wreck Beach in the sixties.

  Wanda shook her head. “No way,” she said.

  “What? It’s not like any of these guys is going to notice or care.”

  “I just don’t feel like it, okay?”

  “Oh, come on, Wand. How many chances will we get to be naked together in the ocean? And in broad daylight, to boot?”

  “Don’t let me stop you. Go ahead and strip if you’re so keen.”

  “I don’t want to go in alone. How about a swim wearing bathing suits?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, Sara, if you want to risk life and limb, you’re on your own. I’m going for a walk.”

  I watched in dismay as she scrambled back over the rocks out of sight.

  To hell with her, then. I would have my swim regardless.

  At the water’s edge, I dug in my heels against the retreating surf and nervously tried to work out the pattern of waves as they broke not far from shore. They looked bigger and more powerful than they had from higher up.

  But damn it, after coming all this way, I was going to enjoy myself. I waded in, trying to ignore the pull of the ocean on my calves. I gauged the opportune moment to dive in, paused, then high-stepped into an approaching swell.

  I had hesitated too long. The breaker crested above and crashed down on my head just as the outgoing tide pulled my feet out from under me. Then the sea, like a monster washing machine, churned me about for what seemed minutes on end before spitting me back to where it had picked me up. The water receded, and I lay on my back, stunned and spread-eagled in the foam, my mouth and sinuses clogged with sand and salt.

  Terrified, I managed to roll over and crawl out before the next breaker hit. I coughed and sneezed out the wet sand and sat facing the sea, trying to absorb what had happened. Th
e entire incident couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds. Once I caught my breath and ascertained that nothing was broken, I looked around to see who might have witnessed the mortifying episode.

  I needn’t have worried. The few people bobbing about in the water beyond the breakers were in no position to have seen anything. And the men on the beach were too busy checking each other out, oblivious to everything but themselves.

  I could’ve drowned out there, and not a single soul would’ve noticed.

  Wanda, of course, had not gone up the road to take pictures. She later confessed that she had driven to a payphone to call Cindy.

  But Cindy had not answered the phone. Probably on her morning run in the river valley, thought Wanda.

  She wanted time to think, so she had driven to a snorkelling beach we had passed earlier, having noticed there were no people on it. She parked the car on the deserted beach. A red flag was posted near the water, and a sign warned swimmers to stay out because of a recent shark sighting. And as she sat there, she told me later, she was brought back to another time on another deserted beach thirty years before. Thirty years, but it could’ve been yesterday.

  Until she told me the story, she had never divulged to another soul what happened that day so long ago, and it’s unlikely she would ever have told me the story if not for what later happened to Cindy.

  9.

  WANDA HAD JUST FINISHED UNIVERSITY. Like so many in that innocent, affordable student time, she flew to Europe during summer vacation. The plan was to zip from city to city, country to country on a Eurail pass, a few days here, a few days there, sitting up all night on trains to save money on hotels.

  One morning, she tumbled off the train in Geneva and set out in search of a pension some California backpackers had told her about. The pension was supposedly a couple of blocks from the station, but after an hour of going around in circles, she gave up and asked a policeman for directions. He walked her to the pension and invited her out for a drink. Wanda was feeling lonely, and he seemed nice enough and even spoke English. In fact, he was so chatty she thought he might be gay. So, she agreed to meet him later at a backpacker hangout across from the station. They shared a bottle of house red, and on the walk back to the pension, it became obvious that the policeman was not gay and was after more than friendship. When he asked her out again, she turned him down.

  He was hovering near the café the next day. Wanda left as soon as she thought the coast was clear, but he showed up out of the blue and insisted on accompanying her to the pension. At the door, he grabbed her and kissed her so hard on the lips it hurt. She managed to push him away and flee inside. When she spotted him the next morning across the street from the café, out of uniform, she asked a couple of Australian backpackers to walk her back and resolved to avoid that particular café in the future. That same evening, the landlady knocked on her door and announced, nervously, that she had a visitor. Wanda went down to the drawing room to find her visitor was the policeman, this time in uniform.

  He told her how he had caught a couple of Australian backpackers stealing from a vegetable stall and that they were now in jail. Wanda would be wise to watch the company she kept. He was at her service and would be pleased to act as her protector.

  “You must be hungry,” he said. “Come, get ready. I’ll wait.”

  Wanda agreed to go but said she had a few things to do first. She wanted to shower and get a letter ready to post to her mother in the morning, so how about she meet him at the café?

  At this point, the landlady entered the room and offered refreshments. The policeman bowed and thanked the landlady and said he’d be back in an hour or so.

  No sooner was he out the door than Wanda had paid the landlady, stuffed her clothes in her backpack, and taken a circuitous route to the train station. She hopped on the next train headed out of the country, which happened to be the all-nighter to Rome. She searched the cars for a compartment where she wouldn’t have to spend the night fending off some asshole’s wandering hands and was pleased to find one with a single girl in it, a couple of shopping bags on the seat beside her. Wanda sat on the seat facing the girl and placed her own backpack beside her to discourage anyone else from entering the compartment.

  She half-expected the fucking cop to turn up and drag her off the train on some pretext or other, so when the train finally pulled out of the station, she exhaled a deep breath of relief.

  Still unsettled, but with Geneva miles behind, Wanda began to leaf through a German magazine that had been stuffed down the side of the seat. After a while, she sensed the other girl looking at her. Wanda glanced up. She hadn’t really noticed the girl at first, how beautiful she was. The girl smiled, kind of impishly. This happened several times until finally Wanda laughed and put down the magazine.

  The girl addressed Wanda in German, because of the magazine, she supposed, but when their clumsy conversation established that the girl was Italian and Wanda, Canadian, the girl immediately switched to French, assuming like many Europeans that all Canadians are bilingual. But Wanda’s grasp of French was as poor then as it is now, and the two eventually settled on English, the girl’s schoolbook English being far more advanced than Wanda’s baby-talk Italian. By this time, Wanda was used to people’s English being better than whatever other language she was attempting.

  The gorgeous Italian girl insisted on sharing her prosciutto panino (Wanda hadn’t had time to even think about packing food) and before you knew it, the two were joking and laughing like two kids on a picnic. The girl’s name was Angelica…. Angelica Vestini…. And by the time they reached Rome, she had invited Wanda to stay with her family.

  Angelica lived with her mother and two older brothers in a small apartment not far from the Colosseum. The brothers shared a bedroom, and Angelica and her mother the other one. It was understood that Wanda would sleep with Angelica in her single bed.

  I felt absurdly jealous when Wanda told me about that first night in the little bed, a night of heavenly torture with Angelica’s breasts pressed into her back and one divine leg cinching her hip. She tried to ignore the fact that Angelica’s mother was in the next bed, so close that Wanda could almost feel the mother’s breath on her cheek.

  Wanda had always known she was different. Ever since she was a little girl she’d known. And since her university days, she’d been no innocent. But what about Angelica? Was her physical expressiveness cultural? Wanda knew how touchy-feely Italian girls could be, hugging and kissing their friends and relatives without inhibition.

  She suffered through several long nights of anguish before Angelica made it clear that she desired the same thing Wanda did, and soon, they were spending feverish mornings in bed, eyes closed in delicious torment while they waited for the others to leave for work. Angelica waited tables in a local café and didn’t start until late afternoon.

  They had been naïve, of course, to think that they could keep hidden their surreptitious touching, especially in such intimate quarters, and suffused with the indestructible, carefree feeling you get when you’re young and falling in love, they became less and less cautious, until the inevitable happened.

  It was Angelica’s older brother Dante who discovered them. He had become suspicious, and one morning, doubled back after allegedly leaving for work.

  To this day, Wanda could see him hulking in the doorway, fists clenched, biceps quivering, face flushed, the veins in his neck throbbing. He ordered Wanda to get the fuck out now, subito, and to make sure that his poor mother never saw her ugly face ever again. He said it in a low controlled voice that was disturbingly different from his normal singsong voice, and as he talked, telling Angelica she was vergognosa and calling Wanda puttana, he stared at Wanda’s naked breasts. Never had she felt more intimidated or humiliated.

  She dressed under Dante’s demeaning gaze and stuffed the rest of her belongings into her backpack. Then, as Wanda was heading to the door
, Angelica announced that she was leaving too. She had dressed without Dante or Wanda noticing.

  At first, Wanda thought Dante was going to punch his sister or at least hold her back, but the moment passed. He settled on spitting in her face. “And don’t you dare show your whorish face here again,” he threatened, then stepped aside.

  The two young women ended up at the train station, Wanda couldn’t remember how. They fled first to Paris, then the French Riviera, and finally to Spain, to the Costa Brava, where they decided to stay because it was cheaper than anywhere else they had been. Wanda had saved money while in Rome and Angelica had been paid a few days before they left, so they figured they had enough to survive for a couple of months. And as each day passed, they became more and more determined to stay together. It was the two of them against the world. They discovered a beautiful little cove, which they dubbed their paradiso segreto, because except for Sundays, they had it pretty much to themselves. And by spending their days at the beach, their financial needs were minimal.

  But the day came when reality set in. Wanda had a job that started in eight weeks time and a return ticket to Canada, and if Angelica was going to return with her, they needed money for another ticket. Angelica was confident that her Spanish was good enough to find a job waiting tables, and Wanda thought she might find one teaching English. Although hardly anyone in Spain seemed to actually speak English, there didn’t seem to be a shortage of people who professed a desire to learn it. But before going out job-hunting, they would enjoy one more uninterrupted day at their paradiso segreto.

  Although it was Sunday, the cove was empty. The sea was hazardous that day, Wanda later found out. She and Angelica had somehow missed the red warning flag at the entrance to the cove. They spread their yellow blanket on the sand, delighted to find themselves alone. Angelica couldn’t wait to get in for a swim. She grasped Wanda’s hand, and tried to entice her into the ocean.

  Wanda resisted. Angelica persisted, teasing, tickling until Wanda chased her through the golden sand. Wanda straddled Angelica in the foam at the water’s edge. “Stay with me my sweet angel,” she begged, kissing her. “Please stay.”