House of Many Gods (24 page)

“Ana, this book the only truth. ‘He
po uhe’e I ka wawa he nuku
 … It is night gliding through the passage of an opening.’ That’s how we began, so simple. All came from P?, the night.”

She took Ana’s hand in hers. “You will never, never be alone. More than a hundred gods stay all around you. Look like they tested you, pushed you into
Hikawainui
, the strong near-drowning current, to see how brave you are. Then they carried you into
Hikawaina
, the calm current, to let you rest and catch your breath. You swam the current well! Now you are mending and at peace, and nothing left to fear.”

Some nights Pua dipped into a bowl of fish eyes while she read from the KUMULIPO. “
‘Hānau ka ‘uku oko‘ako‘al Hānau Kana, He ako‘ako‘a Puka
 … Born the coral polyp/ Born of him a coral colony emerged … ’ ”

She savored each fish eye like a delicacy, rolling it round on her tongue. Then her head began to droop, the book sliding from her lap. Sometimes in sleep her jaw dropped. Ana watched an eye slip slowly from her mouth.

A
ND THERE WAS ONE WHO CAME QUIETLY LIKE A SHADOW
. H
E
came at the end of a pain-filled day, when she was sleepless and exhausted. He sat beside her bed, and took her hand in his big hand and held it like a little stone.

“
Ei nei
. How are you? I thought you might like to know that it is evening.”

“Lopaka. I think I must look awful.”

Through her nightgown he saw the golden marimba of her ribs.

“A little thin. But you are always beautiful to me.”

Her teeth felt caulked with medications. She struggled to sit up and smooth her hair. He eased onto the edge of her bed and when he spoke his voice was soft and low, threatening to break down all resistance. The trick for her was not to cry.

“I ever tell you how I carried your letters all through ’Nam? I sat in trenches full of blood, picturing you flying kites the way I taught you. My Ana, standing in a field.”

He moved closer and she smelled his skin, his hair, his maleness. She studied his brown shoulders and his arms, knowing that any other man who came into her life would be measured against him.

Now he spoke as he had when she was a child. Their secret language, a kind of code. He told her how ever since her childhood, she had given fullness to his life. In dark moments, she had made him want to live. While he talked, she felt her lungs open, felt herself move back inside a young girl’s skin.

“It seems to me I ought to beg your pardon for the years I messed up after ‘Nam. Drinking, drugging, running with a gang.”

He touched the tattoo just below his eye. The shape of a teardrop—a gang symbol for one who had killed, or maimed, or been to prison.

“After combat, I was just so full of death. Sometimes I sat in the dark and laughed. I understood that things would
never
be all right again. I knew you were waiting for me, Ana. I didn’t come to you because I was ashamed. You had outgrown me.”

“I never outgrew you,” she whispered. “But I have always wondered … how did you finally pull yourself together?”

He hesitated, then slowly rolled up his pant leg, carefully unstrapped his leg brace, and showed her what was left. She had never seen the leg without the brace. Now she stared openmouthed at what looked like a ferociously scarred and pitted, badly dented log. It looked like an artifact.

“One day I came out of a weeklong drunk and this leg was cold and gray. No circulation. I thought of gangrene, how they would have to take it off. For a while after my discharge, I
wanted
amputation. I couldn’t stand to look at it. But now I realized it was still my leg. It just looked different. I went back into physical therapy. Stopped drinking and drugging. I got so wrapped up in healing myself, I just kept going. Books. Law school. Who knows why we decide to live again?”

Now he patted the leg. “I’m learning to respect it. Even love it.”

He looked down at the leg, and suddenly he sobbed, his big hands covering his face. She had never seen him cry. Had never heard such sounds. Now she reached out to him and held him, and he wept a long hard time. She wept, too, for his lost innocence, for the years after combat when he just stood and stared. And she wept for herself, for things she had lost that she had not had time to value.

Afterwards, they sat back empty and exhausted, heads hanging like they were sharing the same low-grade fever. She dropped her head against his chest. He stroked her thin, damp arms.

“I will be here for you,” he said. “I will help you get your bearings.”

“I think it will take awhile.”

Then he lifted her face and smiled. “Ana, you remember the last time I held you like this? Your face and arms so wet, I wiped them down with cool, wet cloths. Your body so exhausted, I lifted you and held you. I had watched you for hours, thinking it was you, not Rosie, giving birth.”

She looked up at him, astonished. “I never knew it was you …”

He touched his finger to her lips. “One can know, and not know.”

Exhaustion moved aside then. She felt that thing within her. She saw in his eyes he felt it, too. What they could not speak of, did not want to speak of, would never need to speak of. Finally, he got up from the bed and strapped on his leg brace, then stood and smoothed his pants and seemed his old, assured self again.

He leaned over carefully and kissed her forehead. “
Ei nei
, the aku are running. Get well soon, so I can take you fishing.”

S
OME NIGHTS IN THE SUFFOCATING HEAT, SHE WAS AFRAID TO LIE
flat, or to turn on her side, afraid she would pull at the stitches, that they
would form keloids, compounding the already awful. In fact, she was afraid to sleep, afraid of the wrench of parting with consciousness. When she dozed off, her dreams had fangs, they hooked into her chest. She slept sitting up facing the fan, wretched and exhausted.

But there were mornings when she was wakened by a skittish breeze and looked up thinking how startling it was to sleep and wake, and be alive all over again. She stood at her window inhaling deeply, watching how dust lay furtive in the fields, turning the light clandestine. How trees and grass hung limp and parched, until the slightest wind brought nature to its feet. Then everything responded. Trees swayed like old showgirls, young green grass exclaimed. Light accumulated in a leaf, and in a bird’s wing. All became spectacle.

Ana thought how she had taken it for granted, the light and the rhythms and the motion. The scents and colors, and proportions. The way shadows made plain things interesting, the way space met in empty corners, creating a place for the eyes to rest. She wanted to dwell on these things again. To slow down and understand their “thingness.” She understood this would take time; there would be periods of backtracking.

Finally the rains came, thrumming on the roof, on broad banana leaves like huge hands slapping pelts. Ana turned carefully on her side, finding great comfort in the sound. It rained all night, deep as canoes, so the world lay still and listened. In time, her body’s internal music and the rain found their right rhythms, and seemed to drum out Ana’s individual song, recalling her geneaology, each footprint of her forebears, her name, and the name of each of her organs, her prehistory and her future. A song of rebirth, that went on and on.

She slept for two days and nights and when she woke, her mind felt pure, rinsed clear of everything, allowing only small and simple thoughts, to parse out the large and awful ones.

She had been home several weeks when one evening, carrying a small parcel wrapped in ti leaves, she and Rosie hiked deep into the valley, beyond where chain-link fences barred them from the mountains. They buried her breast beneath a young
kiawe
tree while Ana knelt, relinquishing that blood, those cells. Rosie lifted her arms and chanted softly,
Ē Ala Ē! Ē Ala Ē!
Awake. Rise up. Blessing her flesh so it could rest and recompose, begin to nourish the soil.

S
HE SAT WITH
N
OAH, LETTING HIM CRY, A WAY OF EXPRESSING
what he could not say. Finally, cried out, he pressed a knuckle to his nostril,
snorting a thick stream of mucus into the dirt, the impact raising a little fleur-de-lis of dust. And then the other nostril. She leaned at his window like in the old days, and they listened while his record player scratched out an old half-warped Puccini,
Madama Butterfly
. Ana liked how it thundered out across the yard and up into the fields, where horses slowed midcanter, turning their heads to listen. Even roosters paused, their bright red combs like ears erect.

Slipping out of her pain and into sound, she talked to him for hours. Noah’s silence gave her freedom to confess. She talked of the harrowing years of med school. The terror and loneliness. The lovely men who, one way or the other, always left. She talked of her illness, her surgery. And how death was an all right thing if one were ready, if one had lived a good, long life. She talked of the father she never knew. Of the woman who had been her mother.

When she was silent and talked out, Noah reached into his closet, pulling out a mildewed box he had discovered. Inside, a crumbling snapshot of her mother. A slip the color of old peach skin. Rusty hairpins to which her perfume clung. Somewhere Ana’s father had been measured for a hat. Her mother had kept that piece of paper with his name inside the box. That’s all she was sure of. Her mother’s slip size. Her father’s head measurements.

That night while everyone slept, she spread the slip out on the grass, then lay beside it as if they were two females looking at the stars. Carefully, she turned on her side and laid her arm across the slip as if it were a woman’s waist. She imagined that woman slipping her arm round Ana’s shoulders. She lay like that for hours.

And she began to dream again. One night, moonlight crept across her face. Someone stood outside her window.

Ana sat up, thinking she was dreaming. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me. I’ve come.”

She called out, half-awake. “Who’s that? Who’s come?”

“…  It’s your mother, silly girl.”

F
OR DAYS THEY AVOIDED EACH OTHER, THEY EVEN ATE IN SEPARATE
rooms. One night she knocked, and opened Ana’s door.

Ana looked up frantically. “What do you want?”

“I’m here for you. What do you need?”

“I need you to go back to San Francisco.”

Her mother puffed a cigarette and slowly exhaled. “Ana, I didn’t come to watch you suffer. I want you to get well. More than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.”

“And why is that?” Ana asked.

She looked at the cigarette and stabbed it out. “I’m your mother. I love you.”

Ana’s voice was low and calm. “Perhaps you’re here because you want to feel remorse. You’re afraid it’s an emotion you’ve missed out on.”

Anahola moved into the room, making the air feel lethal. She sat on the windowsill, gazing out. “I know you resent me. Possibly you hate me. I also know the best thing I ever did for you was leave.”

In spite of herself she was struck by her mother’s enduring beauty. At forty-eight she was still fit in that full-bodied way men called voluptuous. Except for tiny squint lines, her face was unlined. A pampered face, not a mother’s.

“Please. Go away. I don’t have the strength to deal with you.”

“Don’t talk to me like that. I’m still your mother.”

“Well, yes. You gave birth to me.”

That was how it started. The woman showing up, shocking and then
intimidating her, so that Ana struck back. Neither realizing that their arguing might be a way of trying to connect.

Unconsciously, her mother lit another cigarette. “You know, when you were a child …”

“What do you know about my childhood? Folks say you couldn’t even change my diaper.”

“That’s true. Wet diapers always had the smell of death to me. But I taught you everything I knew. God, you were an active child, but sensitive, alert. One glance from me would calm you down. Like those dogs that herd sheep by eye contact.”

Ana studied her. “Did it ever occur to you that the sheep are terrified of those dogs? Look … I want to say something that might help you. I didn’t get cancer because you abandoned me. It’s not something a mother could have taught me to outsmart.”

Her voice shook. Normal conversation with this woman was something she could not seem to master.

“So you don’t need to feel guilty. My life is in my own hands now. I’m the only one responsible for me. They say this knowledge comes when women hit their forties. But cancer speeds things up, you get smarter fast.”

Her mother answered softly. “I see you have a clever tongue. That’s good. But don’t kid yourself, Ana. You want your childhood back. We all do.”

She jumped to her feet, her hands on her hips. “Who in hell … do you think you are? Strolling back into my life like this. You are so incredibly ignorant of who I am. Who I have become.”

“No, I’m not. I know you better than you think.”

“How? By keeping up with me through Ben and Rosie? You should have had the nerve to walk away completely. Instead you cheapened both of us with your random visits, your pathetic checks.”