Moloka'i

  Rachel said queasily, “Can you put me to sleep now?”

  Goodhue complied and administered the anesthetic. Rachel took a deep breath of it and the world went away.

  When she awoke, hours later, the doctor was at her bedside, assuring her that all had come off without a hitch. The tumor was completely gone, and in its place Rachel bore a bandage which would remain on for some weeks.

  Rachel looked down at the bandage and thought: goodbye, sore. Goodbye, leprosy. Someday I’m sending you into exile, like you sent me.

  She leaned back in the bed and smiled, feeling excited at the prospect; feeling hope.

  T

  he recuperation from surgery necessitated a brief sabbatical from surfing, but she was able to participate in most other activities—including the weekly ritual of Steamer Day. If she couldn’t actually be in the ocean, at least she could get close to it by greeting the newest ship on the Moloka'i run, the SS Likelike.

  The assistant superintendent, J. K. Waiamau, met each new arrival much as the now-retired Ambrose Hutchison once had—taking down names and ages, arranging for lodging. As the passengers in the last rowboat came ashore, Rachel couldn’t help noticing a tall, slim, strikingly attractive young woman, a little older perhaps than Rachel, climbing up the ladder and onto the concrete breakwater. Her skin was honey-brown, her features delicate; her black hair was piled beneath a straw hat adorned with plumeria blossoms; she wore a tailored blouse, colorful scarf, and long dark skirt, belt cinching a tiny waist. Why, she looks like the Gibson girl! Rachel thought, recalling the fashionable lady whose picture she’d seen in magazines. The newcomer smiled a dazzling smile at the man who’d given her a hand up, then with a confident stride that belied any need for help, she approached Mr. Waiamau, who seemed to take extra pleasure in his job today as he inquired what her name might be.

  “Leilani Napana,” she answered, seeming to enjoy his barely concealed admiration.

  “Age?”

  “Let’s just say, somewhere between fifteen and fifty.”

  Waiamau laughed. “It’s not me asking. It’s Mr. Roosevelt.”

  “Well, if he wants to know that badly, Teddy can come ask me himself,” Leilani said with a wink.

  Waiamau sighed. “Place of residence?”

  “Here, I would think.”

  “Pardon me. Former residence?”

  “Honolulu.”

  “Do you have friends or relatives with whom to stay in Kalaupapa?” Waiamau asked.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “In that case you need to talk with the sisters at Bishop Home. They provide lodging for many unattached women in the settlement.”

  Leilani frowned. “Um, I don’t think so. I’d prefer to live on my own.”

  “Unless you can tell me for a fact that you’re over eighteen,” Waiamau said with a twinkle of mischief, “regulations require that you go talk to the sisters.”

  She thought about that, then muttered, “Well, it never hurts to talk,” and started for Bishop Home, her retreat keenly observed by every man within a hundred yards.

  Later that day, Rachel was startled to see the same woman moving into a vacant cottage. A boy from Baldwin Home, strangely, carried her suitcases inside; she rewarded him with a dime, then removed her hat and hairpins, allowing her long black hair to tumble down her back.

  Rachel thought this very odd. There was usually great pressure on newly arrived single men and women to live in one of the large group homes; if they wouldn’t, they either had to share houses with roommates or pay to construct their own homes, as Haleola had. But here was this woman, this Leilani Napana, settling into a house all her own!

  Her stares brought the young woman out onto her lnai, where she smiled and greeted Rachel. “Hello.”

  Embarrassed, Rachel shyly returned the greeting.

  The woman came down the porch steps and extended a hand; she seemed so poised and worldly that Rachel felt like a country bumpkin beside her. But her smile was warm and open. “I’m Leilani.”

  “I know,” Rachel said.

  “You do?”

  “I was at the dock when you came in. I’m Rachel.” She peered into the roomy cottage and said, “I, uh, guess you must be at least eighteen after all or Mother Marianne wouldn’t have let you get away.”

  “Oh, let’s just say . . . somewhere between—”

  “Eighteen and eighty?” Rachel smiled and Leilani laughed, a rich warm laugh: “I’m becoming predictable. I apologize.” As if to show she wasn’t really as vain as she let on, she added, “I’m twenty-two.” She was as tall as Rachel, but where Rachel’s face was round Leilani’s was long and narrow, her features more refined. “You have beautiful hair,” Rachel said with a trace of envy.

  “Oh, thank you. But it takes so long to dry I’m thinking of cutting it—maybe to here.” She held two long tapered fingers halfway up her chest. “Yours is lovely too. Have you ever thought of braiding it?”

  “I wouldn’t know how.”

  “Oh, I can show you!” Rachel was swept inside, where Leilani—after emptying one bag of a dizzying assortment of combs, pins, and brushes—began skillfully braiding Rachel’s hair as Rachel watched what she was doing in a small hand mirror. “So how long have you been here?” Leilani asked. “In Kalaupapa?”

  “Ten years. And a year before that in Kalihi.”

  “I was in Kalihi for two years, off and on.” When Rachel looked puzzled, Leilani explained, “I tried not to let incarceration interfere with my social life.”

  Rachel laughed and quizzed her about what Honolulu was like these days; and after Rachel’s hair was twirled and teased into a series of long braided locks they both decided it looked better before, then spent another hour undoing what they’d just created. Rachel learned that Leilani had grown up in a small town on the north shore of O'ahu, but moved to Honolulu when she was seventeen. When Rachel asked how she made a living Leilani mentioned something about having male “sponsors,” and a flustered Rachel decided against further exploration of that subject.

  “So how did they catch you?” she asked instead. The question brought a hard glint of pain to Leilani’s eyes.

  “One of my . . . benefactors . . . became jealous,” she said quietly, “and demanded I see him and him alone. When I refused, he told the authorities I had the ma'i pk.”

  “That’s awful,” Rachel said, realizing as she spoke them how inadequate the words sounded.

  “I have terrible taste in men,” Lani admitted. “But how do you make yourself want vanilla or strawberry when you really don’t have a taste for anything but chocolate?”

  Rachel helped her unpack the rest of her bags and was staggered by the sheer volume of dresses Leilani owned—at least twenty, everything from bright floral mu'umu'us to the latest French fashions, all of which she claimed to have made herself. She offered to do the same for Rachel. “I enjoy it. I like starting with nothing, just a piece of cloth, and making something smart and saucy.”

  Within a month she had fashioned Rachel a colorful frock from a bolt of fabric ordered from Honolulu. And because Rachel and Leilani shared similarly slim, boyish figures, they discovered they could also share clothes.

  Leilani introduced her to other new things as well. Whereas before a beach trip meant one thing—surfing—now she and Lani would sit on the sand, sizing up the male surfers and the contours of their wet bathing suits. “That one there,” Lani would point out, “has a huge ule.”

  “Oh, that’s Nahoa. He’s kind of sweet on me.”

  “He’s very handsome.”

  Rachel shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Has he asked you out?”

  “I don’t have time,” Rachel replied without really replying. “I have to take care of my aunt.”

  Leilani studied her, then said, “You’re still—?” She didn’t need to finish; Rachel blushed her affirmation.

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Rachel admitted after a moment, “if I’m waiting too long.”
>
  “And what is it you’re waiting for?”

  Rachel considered that.

  “I want someone to look at me like my Papa used to look at my Mama,” she said at last. “The way they used to love each other, that’s what I want.”

  Lani said, “Then it’s worth waiting for, isn’t it?” and the subject never came up again.

  Leilani herself was in great demand among Kalaupapa’s bachelors, who considerably outnumbered females. And though she spent many evenings with Rachel, Lani spent many another dancing with handsome young men at the weekly socials. She enjoyed another kind of dancing too, the hula, as Rachel discovered the first time she had Leilani over for dinner.

  Haleola watched with fascination as Lani scooped up some small stones from the back yard, cupped them in her hands and artfully shook music from them, performing a traditional Hawaiian “pebble dance.” Haleola was impressed that anyone of Leilani’s age knew the hula; the missionaries’ prohibition had driven it underground for many years. Leilani had learned it, she said, at one such secret school, run by her aunt. Haleola nodded slowly, as though something were falling into place in her mind. “You do the dances proud,” she said, and Leilani bowed her head in happy acknowledgment of the compliment.

  That weekend Leilani succeeded in dragging a reluctant Rachel to a party at the home of a young man Lani had just met, but only after Haleola insisted, “Am I going to break into a thousand little pieces while you’re gone? Go!” Rachel went, though not happily. The man’s house, on the outskirts of town, was a slightly run-down cottage filled partly with couples dancing and kissing, and partly with men getting very drunk on “swipe” beer. People had been drinking at the Kaunakakai party too, but this was different. It seemed these people were drinking not to celebrate, but to forget. There was a sullen desperation in their faces that made Rachel nervous, even more so when, after Leilani’s first dance, she was whisked away by a handsome young man with the stocky frame of a fireplug. When another nice-looking boy asked Rachel to dance she accepted, and tried to lose herself in the sweet sound of the ukelele.

  Halfway through the dance she heard a sudden, piercing cry—coming, it seemed, from outside.

  She asked her dance partner, “Did you hear that?”

  He hadn’t, and now Rachel noted—faintly, over the sounds of music and chit-chat—another, definitely feminine, cry.

  Rachel ran outside, into the back yard. There Leilani’s stocky suitor was savagely battering her in the face—blood pouring from her nose as she kneeled on the ground, as if in violent prayer. Each time she struggled to stand up his fist drove itself into her face as he shouted curses at her. In the dark the blood spotting her dress looked black, like ink stains from a careless pen.

  Rachel ran up and grabbed the man from behind, clawing at his cheeks. “Leave her alone!”

  He threw her off easily, onto the stony stubble of the ground. Rachel cried out as a rock tore at her bandage and gouged the already-tender tissues of her surgical incision.

  The fireplug of a man returned his attentions to Leilani, who had had time to scoop up a handful of pebbles, and now hurled them with surprising force into his face.

  He screamed, clawing at the dirt and stones, trying to clear his eyes. Leilani got shakily to her feet.

  Rachel got to her knees, ignoring the pain in her leg as she searched the ground for a suitable weapon. She lifted up a heavy rock, and just as Leilani’s attacker was able to see again Rachel sent the stone crashing down onto his head with a loud, disturbing crack, his legs folding under him.

  Incredibly enough, he was still conscious. As he attempted to rise, Rachel rushed to Leilani’s side. “Can you walk?”

  Leilani’s lovely face was bruised and bleeding. “Hell, I can run,” she said, voice husky with pain.

  They hurried through an open meadow and across Waihnu Stream, glancing behind them constantly, at last reaching the hoped-for sanctuary of Haleola’s house. Rachel’s auntie took one look at them and sprang to her feet. “Some sonofabitch beat the hell out of her,” Rachel explained breathlessly. Leilani’s knees buckled and Rachel caught her. “Bring her to my bed,” Haleola directed, and between the two of them they were able to get her into Haleola’s bedroom and onto her straw pallet.

  Haleola examined the bruises on Leilani’s face, then, noting a patch of blood soaking through Leilani’s dress, said, “I’ll have to take this off.” Leilani looked terror-stricken but Haleola had already lifted up the torn skirt.

  Leilani had a nasty gash along her ribcage that was bleeding copiously, and livid bruises to match the leprous sores on her legs, but Rachel saw none of these; all she could see was what dangled between Leilani’s legs.

  In a shocked whisper Rachel said, “You got an ule!”

  Lani winced, half in pain and half in embarrassment.

  “Yes,” she sighed, “I’m afraid I do.”

  Rachel was so stupefied she couldn’t speak. Then she noticed that Haleola, who was pressing a clean cloth against the gash on Leilani’s side, did not seem in the least surprised.

  “You knew?” Rachel accused her.

  Haleola shrugged. “The role of mhs in preserving the hula is well known.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me!”

  Haleola said simply, “It was not mine to tell.”

  Rachel’s face was flush with anger, betrayal. “You’re a lie,” she accused Leilani, “a big fat lie!”

  Leilani seemed in greater pain than when she was attacked. “No,” she said softly, “that thing down there is the lie.”

  Good God, Rachel thought; am I so naive or stupid, not to have realized? She felt furious, ashamed. “Some joke,” she said coldly. “Just a big joke on me!”

  “Rachel . . .” But Rachel was already storming out of the bedroom and the house. Lani tried to rise, but Haleola pushed her down: “Don’t.”

  “She hates me,” Leilani said miserably.

  “Can you blame her?”

  Leilani allowed as she could not.

  R

  achel drifted aimlessly through Kalaupapa’s quiet streets, many of them named for thoroughfares in Honolulu—Beretania, Kapi'olani, School Streets, all of which seemed to mock her as Leilani had mocked her, not a damn one of them what they pretended to be. She couldn’t believe the extent of her own gullibility. Had she really lived so cloistered a life that she couldn’t have seen the truth? You grew up in a convent, you blockhead, how much more cloistered does it get? And yet all those men who ogled Leilani—they’d been fooled, too. No, wait, they’d slept with her—him—so they had to know. Maybe they just didn’t care. She was shocked at the idea, and shocked that she was shocked! Stupid naive little convent girl!

  But the man who’d assaulted her had been fooled, and he sure as hell cared. So maybe Rachel could give herself the benefit of the doubt.

  She wound up sitting on Papaloa Beach, watching the tide come in, and when her concern for Leilani’s injuries had finally eclipsed her anger, she returned home, where Haleola was dusting Leilani’s cuts with powdered herbs.

  Rachel stood in the doorway a moment and asked her aunt, “Is she all right?”

  My God, Rachel wondered, why do I still think of her as a she? Haleola nodded. Leilani smiled gratefully. “Your aunt is a talented healer.”

  Rachel took a step inside. “So I guess this is why Bishop Home didn’t take you.”

  “Brother Dutton at Baldwin Home wasn’t too thrilled to meet me either,” Leilani admitted with a bruised smile. “Poor man was rather tongue-tied. Mr. McVeigh was called in, and he thought it best I had my own quarters.”

  Haleola dressed the last cut and Leilani gingerly slipped her dress back on. She thanked Haleola, offered to pay, but Haleola wouldn’t hear of it. After an awkward pause, Leilani said, “Well . . . I’d better get on home.”

  Rachel said, “I’ll walk you.” Leilani looked surprised. “In case your friend comes back.”

  “If he comes back you call for the cons
tables,” Haleola cautioned.

  Rachel promised that she would, but the streets she and Leilani traveled were nearly empty, with not a sign of Leilani’s angry suitor. Maybe they’d killed him, but she doubted it. He looked too mean to die.

  They walked in silence until Rachel said, “I never heard that word before. Mh.”

  “You mean there are some things a Catholic education still doesn’t teach you?” Leilani smiled. “They say that in the old days in Hawai'i, mhs were accepted as part of everyday life here—like a third sex.”

  Rachel walked another step or two, then asked timidly, “How do you . . . I mean, two . . . men, how do you—”

  She didn’t finish. Leilani told her, and despite herself Rachel looked a little queasy.

  “That doesn’t sound very sanitary,” she observed.

  Leilani laughed.

  “We can’t all be lucky enough to have a kohe, like you. So we make do with what we have.” Lani paused, then added quietly, “Since as long as I can remember, I knew I was meant to be a girl. I played dolls with my sister and wanted desperately to wear the pretty mu'umu'us she did. A few years later, I got into a fight with a boy in my neighborhood, we were wrestling on the ground—and, my goodness, my ule suddenly stood up and took notice!” She laughed. “He was quite taken aback by it! Though eventually we did become, um, better friends.

  “Every night of my life ’til I was sixteen I’d pray to God, asking Him to please make me a wahine.” She shrugged. “He made me a leper instead.”

  Now, as they neared her house, Leilani said, “I’m sorry, Rachel. I should have told you. But it was so . . . nice . . . being accepted as a woman, by a woman.”

  As they stood for a moment in front of Leilani’s cottage, Rachel suggested, “Maybe I should stay a while. You think he’ll come back for you?”

  “That kind is usually too embarrassed to admit they were taken in by someone like me. I wouldn’t worry.”

  Rachel nodded. “So, you . . . want to go to the beach tomorrow?”

  Leilani looked pleased. “Yes. Sure.”

  Rachel turned and started back the way they’d come; then suddenly turned, walking backwards as she called out, “If that sonofabitch comes back, we’ll show him he can’t get away with hitting wahines!”