Moloka'i

by Alan Brennert

  When she’d finished Rachel closed the door, wiped her mouth and said, “You don’t charge enough for this trip.”

  The driver laughed and continued on.

  They drove for close to an hour, encountering only one other vehicle, a truck for which the cab had to back up two hundred feet and squeeze itself into a narrow turn-out as the truck passed. Rachel provided lunch for the fishes a few more times. Then, sometime after the car passed a sugar mill at Olowalu, scattered houses began to appear on either side of the road.

  “Lahaina,” the driver announced. “What was that address again?”

  In minutes they were pulling up in front of a small white bungalow standing in the green shade of a banyan tree, its garden aflame with helliconia and anthuriums. Rachel gave the driver a nice tip—“Combat pay,” she said—and asked hesitantly if he would wait here a minute. “I might need a ride back sooner than I’d like.” He asked no questions, just said “Sure.” Rachel worked up her courage and walked up the narrow footpath to the little house. She took the porch steps slowly, trying to extend the moment as long as possible . . . then stepped up and knocked on the door.

  Thirty seconds later the door opened and a woman in her sixties, wearing a bright floral sundress, looked at her pleasantly and said, “Yes?”

  Rachel stared at Sarah, completely recognizable even beneath a patina of age and distance.

  “Sarah,” she said softly.

  One word, and Sarah’s whole body jerked as if shot. One word and she knew.

  She whispered, “Rachel?”

  Before Rachel could respond, Sarah’s eyes rolled up in her head like a snapped windowshade, her knees gave out—and she fainted, collapsing in a heap on her own doorstep.

  Oh, God! Rachel thought, dropping to her knees. I killed her! “Sarah! Sarah!” She cradled Sarah’s head with her bad hand and fanned her face furiously with the good one. “Don’t you dare go and die on me, Sarah Kalama!” she cried. “Oh, this is so like you!”

  The cabbie had gotten out of his car and was hurrying to join Rachel, but now Sarah’s eyes fluttered open and she found herself staring up into Rachel’s panicked face.

  Her eyes registered shock, then disbelief. She whispered again, “Rachel?”

  Suddenly unable to speak, Rachel nodded.

  In a hushed voice Sarah said, “You’re alive.”

  Exploding into sudden laughter, Sarah reached up and looped her arms around Rachel’s neck. “My God! Rachel! You’re alive!”

  She squeezed Rachel in a bear hug, her laughter now joined by tears of obvious joy. And all the tension, all the fear that had been building in Rachel since seeing Aunt Florence—all of it melted in a moment’s laughter, and she returned Sarah’s embrace just as fiercely.

  “Sarah,” she said, tears flowing down her own cheeks. “Oh, God, Sarah.” She held fast to the warmth of her sister’s body, and realized happily that she might not be taking that five o’clock flight to Honolulu.

  The cab driver had figured this out as well, and with a smile and a wave he returned to his car and drove off. Rachel and Sarah laughed and cried another minute, maybe two; then Sarah drew back to take in Rachel’s face.

  “But how is this possible?” she said softly.

  “They found a cure.”

  Sarah said, “But I thought you were dead! When I saw you just now, I thought at first you were a ghost!”

  “Maybe I am,” Rachel laughed. She had more trouble getting up than Sarah, who offered her a hand and found herself holding the question mark at the end of Rachel’s right arm. Sarah said nothing, but her eyes reflected a compassion Rachel had never glimpsed in them as a child.

  “Come on,” she said happily, “come in.”

  Inside the cottage, late morning sun streamed through a lattice of green foliage—the banyan tree on one side, the feathery branches of a date palm on the other—dotting the living room with a bright speckling of sunlight. The furniture was simple rattan but with striking wood-carved tables and burnished calabashes decorating the hardwood floor. “Sarah, this is beautiful. What are these floors made of? Koa?”

  “No, it’s monkeypod, like the calabashes. My husband did the woodworking.”

  “Is he home?”

  Sarah said sadly, “Not for a while. He passed away two years ago.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. My husband’s gone too.” Hopefully: “Is Mama—”

  But Sarah’s sober look told the tale. “Fifteen years ago. I’m sorry.”

  Rachel had half expected as much, but it still hurt.

  “She’s buried not far from here,” Sarah said. “We can go there later.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “I have a million questions for you! Would you like some tea?”

  Rachel said that she would, and as Sarah puttered around in the kitchen Rachel wandered about the living room. “How long have you been out? Of Kalaupapa?” Sarah called to her.

  “A few weeks. I’ve got a room in Honolulu.” She paused in front of a wooden bench plumped with big inviting pillows; atop the back of the bench were a dozen framed photographs of children at various ages and a handsome, smiling man in his fifties. “Is this John?”

  “Yes, how did you know his name?”

  “It’s how I found you. Your marriage license.” She picked up one of the photos, smiled. “And this must be—don’t tell me—Charlie, Miriam, and Gertie?”

  Sarah entered with a tea tray. “Who?”

  “Your children. Papa told me their names—Charlie, Miriam, Gertrude. Or am I misremembering them?”

  Sarah put down the tray, looked at her sister oddly. “Papa told you,” she repeated.

  “Yes, not long before he died.”

  “Their names are Eleanor, Dorothy, Jack, and . . . Rachel.”

  Surprised and touched, Rachel couldn’t help a grin. “Does this mean you finally forgave me for what I did to your yellow felt hat?”

  “You would bring that up. I’d just gotten over it.” She poured Rachel’s tea. “What about you? Do you have chil—”

  She stopped, suddenly aware of what she was saying, but Rachel just nodded. “One daughter. I’m trying to find her.” She looked at Sarah with delight and amazement. “I still can’t believe I found you. I went looking for Kimo at McInerny’s, where he used to work, but no luck; Ben too, I couldn’t find either of them in the phone book—”

  Rachel suddenly noticed that Sarah’s face had gone ashen. “What?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  Sarah said slowly, “Ben’s living near Hna, but . . . what do you mean, Kimo working at McInerny’s?”

  “That’s what Papa told me.”

  Sarah hesitated a moment, then said quietly, “Kimo never worked at McInerny’s. He never worked anywhere.”

  “But Papa said so. ‘Kimo’s selling shoes at McInerny’s,’ and I laughed because he always hated wearing ’em, and now to be—”

  She broke off when she saw the sad, somber look on her sister’s face. Sarah said, “Papa . . . either told you what he thought you’d want to hear, to spare you, or . . . maybe he didn’t know himself.”

  “Know what?”

  Sarah looked away, avoiding Rachel’s eyes as she seemed to gird herself. “You know that Mama and Papa separated,” she said finally.

  “Yes.”

  “She blamed Papa and Uncle Pono for your getting sick. She was kind of pupule about it.” Sarah met Rachel’s gaze again. “Then less than a year after you were sent to Kalaupapa . . . Kimo started showing the same symptoms.”

  Rachel cried out. A wordless, inchoate cry, like that of an animal in pain.

  “Small rosy spots on his skin,” Sarah said quietly, “insensitive to pain . . . the same as you.” She shook her head. “Mama was numb at first. We all were. But after she’d had time to accept it, Mama knew one thing for certain. She told us, ‘I won’t send another child to Moloka'i. Not like my baby Rachel.’

  “So she quickly sold the house to a land developer, and p
acked us all off to Maui. She had cousins here, and they told her there were places upcountry, near Kula, where people had hidden other lepers and nobody ever found out.”

  Sarah took a sip of her tea, then blanched as if it had turned bitter. “Mama left Ben and me with her cousins here in Lahaina. We wanted to go with her but she wouldn’t allow it, wouldn’t risk us getting leprosy too. She found a little house outside Kula, far away from the nearest neighbor. It was a pretty place, she said, on the edge of a guava grove; and there was a stream nearby. A good place for a boy to play.

  “Mama would go into Kula to buy food and to take in work as a seamstress, but she never brought Kimo into town; no one there even knew she had a son. And for the next year she took care of him”—her voice broke and her eyes filled with tears—“as he got sicker and sicker. Sores opened up all over his body and she cleaned them, rubbed in ointment, applied fresh bandages each day. She watched his face swell up, but kissed his cheek every night when he went to bed. She played with him when she felt like crying, told him stories when he was too weak to play—”

  For a moment she couldn’t continue, and Rachel took Sarah’s hand in hers.

  “And then a bad cold turned to pneumonia,” Sarah finished sadly, “and Mama buried him on the edge of the forest. She came back for me and Ben, and we settled in Lahaina. Neither Ben nor I ever came down with leprosy. Or Mama, for that matter. Isn’t it odd, how some members of a family get it, but others don’t? Isn’t that—”

  She broke down tearfully, in her face an anguished contrition. “We thought you were dead, Rachel! Because it took Kimo so quickly, we thought surely you were gone as well. I’m so sorry, Rachel, please forgive me!”

  Rachel wrapped her arms around her sister and wept along with her. When Rachel was able to speak again she managed to ask, “Papa never knew?”

  “We never saw him again after we moved to Maui. Maybe Mama wrote and told him, but I doubt it. I tried to find him after I’d grown up; I wrote to him in care of every steamship company in Honolulu but I never got an answer.”

  Rachel sat there, battered by a welter of emotions. She grieved not just for Kimo but for Papa too, alone all those years except for his daughter, a world away over the horizon. But before she could-think of anything else to say Sarah said, “I’d like to show you something,” and Rachel, too numb to think, nodded her acquiescence.

  I

  t was a little red clay cemetery at the southernmost tip of K'anapali, a few yards in from one of the loveliest white sand beaches Rachel had ever seen; and it looked out on a view no less spectacular, a vista that took in the long curve of the Maui coastline to the south, the cloud-topped island of Lna'i in the middle distance, and the hazy silhouette of Moloka'i to the north.

  Rachel gazed down at the granite marker on her mother’s grave as Sarah said, “She asked to be buried here. She told me, ‘When I die I want to see to Moloka'i. I want to see my baby Rachel every day.’ ” Sarah smiled. “To the day she died, she never stopped thinking about you.”

  Rachel knelt at the foot of the grave, but the tears that came to her were only partly tears of grief. After all the years of anger and abandonment, now she knew the truth. Now she knew: her mama loved her. She didn’t forget her; didn’t reject her. She loved her. Rachel leaned forward and placed her hands on the warm red earth of her mother’s grave, the closest she could come to an embrace, and said happily, “I love you, too, Mama.” The ache she’d felt for fifty years was gone and she could feel again what life was like without it: sweet, like a slice of cake from Love’s Bakery, or a cold glass of Tahiti lemonade on a hot day.

  Chapter 22

  L

  ahaina was a long dream, a leisurely ramble through a landscape both new and familiar. With its wooden storefronts shaded by broad awnings from the “cruel sun” that gave the town its name, it had the charm and intimacy of Old Honolulu—Front Street could easily have been Nu'uanu Avenue in 1893, each merchant greeting Sarah by name as Mr. Tinker and Ah Leong had once greeted Mama. Sarah had grown up to be a decathlon shopper, and the first event was a stop at Gladys’s Beauty Salon, where over Rachel’s protests Sarah treated her to an expensive hair styling. After this a little browsing at Emura’s Jewelry Store, then a visit to Sarah’s dressmaker, Mrs. Nakai, where they each tried on half a dozen outfits—laughing like little girls playing dress-up—and Rachel purchased a new Sunday dress to wear at her court hearing.

  After lunch at the Liberty Restaurant, they strolled down Front Street, several boarded-up shops testimony to the effects of the tidal wave two years before. Rachel asked Sarah if Lahaina got hit hard by the tsunami.

  “A lot of property damage, but thank heaven only one fatality. Hna got the worst of it—twelve people died, Ben almost lost his home. We were blessed here in Lahaina. God was looking out for us.”

  The shops on the makai side of the street gave way to a low sea wall; beyond it was a rocky slope of shoreline and a magnificent view of the Lahaina Roadstead, a thriving port back in whaling days but far sleepier today. A Kona wind played with Rachel’s newly cut hair, much as Kenji used to twist and turn it in idle caress, and Rachel recalled how Haleola had spoken fondly of these tradewinds off Lahaina. They had an abundance of names depending on direction and mood: the gentle Ma'a'a, the destructive Kaua'ula . . . if a soft breeze blew at night it was called the Uluoa and it was kapu to go onto the beach for fear of encountering the marchers of the night.

  And now Rachel remembered something else Haleola had told her, something that made her quicken her pace as they approached the big plantationstyle Pioneer Hotel. “Sarah, over here! Let me show you something!”

  “Show me what? You’ve never been here before!”

  Rachel hurried past the Pioneer, found the end of the low stone wall fronting the harbor and peered down the rocky slope. A rock formation glistened blue-black in the lapping waves; it looked something like a chair, with a low shelf backing a smooth, worn hollow, even a smaller rock serving as a kind of footrest. “Do you know what this is?”

  Sarah ventured, “A rock?”

  “A sacred rock! Legend has it that in the old days, in order to protect a young girl named Hauola from her enemies, the gods turned her to stone.”

  “Sounds awfully drastic,” Sarah said lightly. “Couldn’t they have just hidden her somewhere instead?”

  “For centuries kahunas brought sick patients here, sat them down with their legs dangling in the water, and the patients were supposed to be cured of whatever ailed them.”

  With a touch of the old Sarah her sister said archly, “Oh, you mean like leprosy?”

  Rachel frowned. “Well I didn’t say it always worked.”

  Sarah regarded her sister dubiously. “You know if Mama could hear all this pagan superstition coming out of your mouth she’d tan your hide, but good.”

  Rachel suspected no amount of persuasion would convince her devout sister that this wasn’t idolatry, it was history; so she shrugged and let it go. They stopped at Kawaguchi’s Fish Market, picked up some fresh ulua for dinner, and spoke no more of kahunas and mystic stones.

  When not shopping or sightseeing, Rachel was content to sit outside in the lee of the West Maui Mountains, so close they seemed almost to be in Sarah’s backyard. Though not as tall as Kalaupapa’s pali, they were their equal in beauty: jagged green peaks, graced by clouds, rising above sloping cane fields. Rachel heard the distant whistle of the Pioneer Mill’s locomotive and breathed in the bittersweet scent of a cane fire. There was something serenely comforting about these mountains; Rachel couldn’t imagine ever growing tired of the view. In the old days, according to Haleola, Lahaina had been a “city of refuge,” a place where those who’d broken kapus could come to find sanctuary. Now Rachel found refuge as well, the corruptions and kapus of her disease seeming to melt away, dissolved by the “cruel sun” that was actually quite kind.

  Then the serene silence was broken by a burst of tinny music and a voice announcing the star
t of Sarah’s favorite radio show, Queen for a Day, and Rachel had to plug her ears to keep from hearing the bathetic life stories of contestants vying for a new washing machine or Frigidaire. Had these haoles no shame?

  She stayed on Maui for ten days, long enough to meet Sarah’s grown children and to make the long twisting drive to Hna to see Ben—forty pounds heavier and as happy and amazed to see his baby sister as Sarah had been. Staying overnight in Hna, Rachel saw in Ben’s children and grandchildren not merely the faces of their parents but those of their grandparents as well: a ten-year-old’s smile that seemed an echo of Henry’s; a toddler’s scowl that for all the world looked like Dorothy in a bad mood. And gazing at cranky, two-year-old Betty, Rachel felt the loss of Mama a little less.

  The next day, on the long drive back along the Hna Road, Sarah broke a comfortable silence. “Rachel? Why don’t you stay?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to wear out my welcome. You know what they say, ulua and visitors stink after a week.”

  “No,” Sarah laughed, “what I mean is, why don’t you move here, to Maui? Move in with me?”

  Rachel was surprised—and touched. “That’s a lovely offer, Sarah, thank you,” she said wonderingly.

  “It’s a selfish offer. I could use the company; so could you. Two widowed sisters sharing a house and bickering over religion, doesn’t that sound grand?”

  They both laughed.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Rachel said. “Everything’s happened so fast. And I have this hearing coming up—”

  “Yes, of course. Just something to think about.” She paused, then added, “I’m only sorry I wasn’t a better sister to you when we were little.”

  “Well, I did ruin your yellow felt hat.”

  “Will you stop about the hat?” Rachel laughed, but Sarah went on soberly, “I was always a little jealous of you. I wanted Papa to love me like he loved you.”

  “Sarah, Papa loved you! He loved all of us.”

  “I know. He just loved you in a different way . . . maybe because you two were so alike, because you both loved the same things . . . and I was jealous of that. I’m sorry.”