“Wow,” she said. “The green apple makes it.”
“Not just green apple,” the guy said. “Granny Smith.”
She raised her glass. “You are a prince among men.”
“Kâmau,” the guy said.
“‘Kâmau’?”
“Ancient Hawaiian toast,” he said. “In context, roughly, You go, girl.”
Rebecca laughed appreciatively, and he gave her a grin and moved off to get back to making mai tais for the accumulating cocktail hour crowd. The sunset was in progress and the outside patio was filling up fast.
Rebecca sipped her drink tentatively, not quite sure how drunk she wanted to get with Mike AWOL. Her impulse was to damn the torpedoes and charge without delay toward a maudlin stupor, but she suspected that was just the power of cliché talking. What she really wanted was for everything to be all right again between her and Mike as soon as possible, before things got any crazier.
From her stool she could just see the volcano across the bay, with the sun easing toward it and the first pinks starting to come out on the clouds. The light glittered on the water and birds swirled in the fragrant air. Almost everyone at the bar was outside enjoying the scene. There was one younger couple at a table by the near wall who looked like they had only gotten out of bed long enough to eat and might not stay through the end of the salad course, and a lovely older couple in their sixties, sitting contentedly at a table with a view out the door, holding hands.
It took her some time to notice that there was one other guy inside the bar, at a dim table in the farthest corner. Rebecca actually had to look twice to realize it was Mike. He was sitting beneath an unlit tiki torch contemplating a bottle of Budweiser, oblivious to everything else. He looked almost comically like Humphrey Bogart with his gin in Casablanca: All the honeymoon hotels on all the tropical islands in all the world, and she walks into mine.
Rebecca got the bartender’s attention on his next pass and said, “I want to send a drink to that guy in the corner.”
“Is that the Husband, or are you cutting your losses and branching out?”
“I’m going to give him one more chance.”
“Done,” the guy said, and reached for the martini shaker.
“No, no, just a beer,” Rebecca said. “He drinks Bud.”
The bartender just gave her a look, like, Give me a break, and continued making the apple martini. Rebecca surrendered herself to the apparently inevitable and settled back to watch what went into the drink, trying to memorize the recipe in case this turned out to be some kind of magic formula. Lemon squeeze, lime squeeze, a generous dose of Stoly, some sour apple schnapps, and a touch of Midori melon liqueur. Her parents, martini purists, would have been horrified. The bartender poured the drink off into the chilled glass with his usual flourish, sliced a perfect slab of Granny Smith apple and floated it niftily, then flagged a waitress, nodding toward Mike. Rebecca waited a beat to give her a head start, then rose to follow. She figured she’d arrive on the heels of the drink, for maximum effect.
“I’m here for you if it doesn’t work out,” the bartender said.
Rebecca paused to give him an amused glance. He was, she reckoned, about six percent serious, maybe eight.
“I’m flattered, you sweet young thing,” she said. “Your tip will be enormous.”
He smiled. “In that case, the drinks are free.”
She started across the room, feeling heartened by that exchange. It seemed like a sign that maybe things had really bottomed out.
As she approached the table, the waitress was taking the opportunity to relight the tiki torch above Mike’s head. The woman seemed a little put out and rolled her eyes slightly at Rebecca as she came up, a girl thing, as if to say, Okay, now he’s your problem. Rebecca realized that Mike had probably extinguished the thing somehow, in the service of his gloom. For some reason, that made her love him more.
Mike waited until the waitress had moved off, then met Rebecca’s eyes and said, a trifle ruefully, “Hello, Mrs. Christopher.”
His eyes in the lamplight were rich, warm brown, deeper and sweeter than the darkest chocolate. How you could forget something as fundamental and crucial as the flavor and feeling of your lover’s eyes? Saying “brown” to yourself in his absence, as if that meant something. When all that really meant anything was being with him.
“Hello, Mr. Christopher,” Rebecca said, and sat down beside him.
Mike took her hand at once, delicately, holding just the first two fingers, his thumb testing the knuckle of her index finger as if it were important to assess any interim changes; and then he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.
“How’s the car?” he said.
Rebecca smiled. “I think it will still run.”
“How’s the wall?”
She laughed. “The wall won, honey. The wall’s fine.” And, as he continued to look chagrined, “If it’s any consolation, it looked to me like you weren’t the first one to have hit it.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, not about the car. About us. About me.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry too.”
They were silent a moment. He was still holding her hand by the fingers, and Rebecca looped her thumb up to cover his. It seemed to her that she was breathing again, that she hadn’t breathed in about six hours.
Mike was looking at the drink, as if noticing it for the first time. “What is this?”
“Apple martini.”
He laughed. “An apple martini?”
“It wasn’t me, I swear, it was the bartender. I ordered you a beer.”
“That’s what Eve said, I think.”
“Nobody’s making you drink it. Which is also what Eve said.”
He gave her a smile and pointedly took the apple slice out of the drink to take a bite. “Whoa,” he said. “That’s not gin.”
“That’s what Adam said.”
“Well, then, we’d better start looking for some fig leaves, I guess.” He raised his glass. “To…the loss of innocence?”
“Kâmau,” Rebecca seconded.
“‘Kâmau’?”
“I got it from the bartender. It means something like, You go.”
“I thought the bartender was Satan.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she said. “If this doesn’t work out, actually, I think I’ve got a shot with him.”
The next day, their last on the island, they went to see the volcano. They’d been told that Kilauea was in a phase of eruption, actual lava flow, and that it was a unique opportunity and so forth, but they almost stayed in bed all day anyway. They had a room service breakfast delivered midmorning and were actually considering a room service lunch by the time they finally decided to rouse themselves for a final act of tourism.
They had been told that the walk to see the place where the lava flow met the sea was quite long, and so they didn’t linger in the visitor’s center over the postcards and trinkets and educational displays on the science of the earth’s tectonic plates; nor did they pause long at the edge of the awesome Kilauea crater. The drive down to the sea wound through stretches of recent lava flows, entire districts buried beneath fresh black rock, like the scorched landscape of a planet too close to the sun. They had wondered how they would know when it was time to walk, but it was quite clear when they arrived at their takeoff point: a recent flow had crossed the road, and the highway stopped without ceremony at the edge of a plain of new stone.
They parked beside the road with the dozens of other rental cars that the promise of spectacle had drawn. A big sign warned them of the danger of toxic gas, heat vents, and collapsing shelves, absolved the relevant entities of any and all responsibility in the event that they should die a terrible flaming death, and advised them to wear sturdy shoes.
They set out across the pathless rock, walking tentatively at first: the ground felt so freshly made that it was likely still hot. Within moment
s they were out of sight of the road and there was nothing but the pillowy crumplings of the recently hardened lava and the ocean to their right, the usually idyllic flavor of its blue-green made primeval somehow by the rawness of the new coast. Rebecca found her mind trying to wrap itself around the extraordinary nature of the place and finally surrendering. It was like nothing else, a place without history, without births and deaths, without soil, even. There was nothing for the mind here but fear and awe. It could have been any moment in the last four billion years, or the next four billion. This was just how the earth looked, newly born.
They used up their exclamations quickly, and after that they walked in silence, holding hands when they could, releasing each other briefly to scramble up little rises and down sharp slopes. It was quiet and hot, a baking heat completely different from the usual mild wet Hawaiian warmth.
After about half a mile they spotted a cluster of people up ahead. They slowed as they approached; there was something odd about the group, something Rebecca couldn’t quite place at first. And then she realized that no one was talking. Almost two dozen tourists armed with cameras and the usual platitudes, and none of them saying a word. They were rapt, reverent, and silent.
Mike and Rebecca made their way to an open spot along the edge of the little cliff where everyone had stopped. Below them was an amazingly normal looking beach of pale sand, overhung with the miniature massif of the accumulated stone. A single lumpen boulder at the waterline seemed the furthest advance of the lava; as Rebecca watched, a wave broke, ran up to the boulder, and exploded into steam. A moment later, from the overhang above the rock, a languid dollop of sluggish stone—red, she realized, glowing live red—oozed into prominence, stretched itself into a drop, and fell, splattering on the boulder in a fresh spray of steam.
A murmur ran through the gathered tourists. New earth, Rebecca thought, as new as it could be, right there. The planet making itself. What seemed most amazing to her at that moment was how slow it was, the measured, relatively minuscule bit of that liquid stone that had made its molten way from somewhere toward the center of the planet, emerging for its instant of exposure and assuming its surface nature as the substance of the earth. She looked at Mike and he met her eyes and she thought, We will always remember this.
They stayed for almost half an hour without saying a word. Other people came and went; some even arrived chattering, in several different languages, but the group never lost its quiet air of spontaneous awe. By the time they left, the stone on the beach had almost doubled in size.
As Mike and Rebecca made their way back toward the car, she could feel the prayer in his silence, and for once she felt in sync with it, beyond the superfluities and the nonsense, able to relate. She took his hand, and he gave her a smile, raised her fingers to his lips, and kissed them, and she felt that as a kind of prayer as well.
Chapter Five
Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
LUKE 2:48–49
It was one of the days when things were not entirely clear. Rory had driven them to the airport, but Phoebe wasn’t sure why. She didn’t want to ask, because she was afraid it would reveal the degree of her confusion, which would only upset everyone. She decided to just wait it out and see what developed. Some of the planes carried the living, and some carried the dead: arrivals and departures. She thought perhaps it was her time to go, and thank God for that if it was so. But maybe it was Rory’s. He had death written all over him now, but she could not say that. God did not work that way. Her words weighed nothing anymore. She had died already, and her speech was the speech of the dead. She had done her three days in the grave, and the Lord had called her back for reasons she could not really understand at all.
They didn’t teach that at church. No one had mentioned this phase at all. She had been trying to find out more about Lazarus, who had been in the grave so long he stank when Jesus called him back. But nobody knew anything about Lazarus. It was the miracle that mattered to them, the miracle, apparently, that was the point. Or maybe Jesus had just done it to make the sisters happy. Phoebe wondered how long Lazarus had had to hang around after that, and whether he had ever said anything to anyone about all the other stuff, and if anyone had written it down. It didn’t seem like it. And what good would it do anyway? Dead was dead, even if you were still walking around. No one alive could hear her unless she spoke the language of the alive. But all the truth she knew now seemed to come out in the language of the dead.
They were walking, and it was endless. There were people everywhere, it was a circle of hell, and the damned stood in lines that were endless to go nowhere. But Rory seemed to know where they were going. Phoebe just held Mary Martha’s hand. Mary Martha was one of the clear places. With Mary Martha it was possible to remember and her head was quiet. Rory’s girlfriend was with them, and the new baby, but those were not clear places or places of quiet. Rory was not stoned, and so he was not a clear place either. That was part of the sadness. This was not hell, it was an airport. That was part of the sadness too. Because airports were worse. At least in hell you burned in God. This burning just went round and round like a wheel. It was a burning in a hurry.
Now they were somewhere, because they had stopped. It’s me or you, Rory, Phoebe thought, and I just hope it’s me. But it was an arrival, Rebecca, with flowers around her neck, and Mike with her. Rebecca, lit with happiness. And Mike, who was the clearest place. He met Phoebe’s eye, the way no one did anymore, and winked. He spoke the language of the dead like her, she knew. And he too had learned to keep his big mouth shut.
You just never know, Phoebe thought, hugging her daughter, using the English airport words that came so easily from somewhere that seemed to always know exactly what to say to the living. I really should stop trying to figure it out. But this brain of hers, it just went on and on, like a coffee grinder. The body too, surprise, surprise. And what a pain that was.
I guess the honeymoon is over, Rebecca thought. Not that she hadn’t known that it would be—eventually, inevitably, and probably quickly. But she really hadn’t expected the end to be quite so immediate and emphatic.
The banner stretched across the rupture in the kitchen wall read “Welcome Home Mommy and Mike,” with each letter a different color, and clearly Mary Martha had put almost as much work into it as Rory had into destroying the wall. Beyond the ragged gap, Phoebe, Bonnie and Bob Schofield, and a dozen other friends stood in the weird new immediacy of the dining room amid the debris, tools, and construction materials, with champagne glasses raised and big Queen-for-a-Day This-Is-Your-Life-Rebecca grins on their faces, except for Phoebe, who looked uneasy enough to suggest that she understood what was actually going on.
“Surprise!” Mary Martha sang out. It really had been brilliant on Rory’s part to get her so deeply involved, and to have so many witnesses present. It was going to be awkward, at best, to kill him now.
“My, my, my,” Rebecca said, to buy some time.
“Obviously there’s still some work left to be done,” Rory said modestly. “But you get the basic idea already.”
“I sure do.” Rebecca accepted a flute of champagne from Bonnie. “I’m speechless,” she said to the assembled guests, who cheered and, mercifully, started drinking and chattering. Rebecca stood just inside the kitchen accepting greetings and welcomes and congratulations, unable to move yet from the spot where she had first glimpsed the new decor. Fortunately, everyone seemed so happy with the situation that there didn’t seem to be much required on her part except to not begin screaming at her ex-husband. She concentrated on that.
After the first wave of attention had passed, Mike took the opportunity to sidle up to her and murmur, in a tone that indicated he was trying hard to be supportive but had his doubts, “Did I miss something?”
“No more than me,” Rebecca said.
“You asked him to do this?”
“Eight years ago.” It had been during Rory’s last attempt at bei
ng a good citizen. They had just moved into the house, and Rebecca was pregnant with Mary Martha. Briefly sobered by their impending parenthood, Rory had gotten an actual job, doing something with insulation, and for a month and a half he had thrown himself into a normality so determined, spectacular, and self-conscious that it had a note of parody. The kitchen expansion project then had symbolized the new, responsible, constructive Rory, but by the time Mary Martha had been born, he’d already lost the insulation job and was spending ten hours a day in the ocean, ostensibly training for the West Coast surfing championships, and the kitchen wall remained undisturbed.
“I’m going to go have a cigarette,” Mike said. “Or two. Or three. Let me know when the party’s over.”
“Coward.”
“Yup,” he said, and slipped out the back door. A flawless escape; it barely made a ripple in the party. Rebecca had long since noted how good Mike was at that sort of social disappearance. Obviously one reason he had lasted so long in the monastery was that he really didn’t like crowds.
“Is he okay?” Bonnie asked, coming up with a fresh glass of champagne for Rebecca. Being Bonnie, she was the only one who had noticed the getaway.
Rebecca shrugged. “He’s Mike. He just wants things to quiet down so that he can do his vespers meditation and get in bed.”
“This is really sort of for the two of you.” Bonnie’s tone had a trace of disapproval. For all her general tolerance and support, she had distinct ideas about proper marital behavior.
“I think he feels like he paid his dues already by showing up at the church instead of staying out there in the woods in his hut.”
As if on cue, to illustrate a good husband doing his social duty, Bob joined them just then, also with a fresh glass of champagne for Rebecca. “Oops,” he said, seeing that she already had one.
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