“What is it?” Carissa tried to adjust her eyes to the vast, shadowy field all around them.
“Look up.” Kai said it as a command, and she obeyed.
Above them shimmered an astounding display of all the twinkling starry hosts. There were more stars than Carissa had ever seen before in a night sky. Just behind one of the towering palm trees floated the moon. Tonight it was more than half a moon, fuller and brighter than it had appeared the other night above the cottage.
She blinked and tried to draw in the night’s beauty. If Kai hadn’t brought her out, away from the light, she would have missed this.
“Come on.” Kai turned the flashlight back on. “You have to see the moon on the water. There’s a path over this way.”
Without hesitating, she followed him onto a narrow footpath that was hidden in the tall grass. It crossed her mind that this might not be a wise choice. But she ignored that thought and kept going.
12
“Mai hopo ‘oe i na ‘O nou,
Ke kia’i nei Ke Akua
Malalo o Kona mau ‘eheu,
ana e ho’omalu mai.”
“Jesus will answer
Whenever you call;
He will take care of you,
Trust him for all.”
WITH CHILDLIKE TRUST, CARISSA followed the flashlight’s bobbing beam as Kai held it above his head and lit the way for both of them through the rustling grass. The moon rose to the side of them, and as they neared the cliff, the enormous boulders that gathered along the coastline came into silhouetted view. Beyond the rugged outcropping of boulders was the ocean. A ribbon of moonlight stretched out before them, trembling on the surface of the deep.
“It looks like a path, doesn’t it?” Kai asked.
“It does.” Carissa stood several feet away from Kai. She had crossed her arms in front of her stomach, as if she needed to hold all her feelings inside and not let any of them tumble out of her gut to go prancing off on the ribbon of moonlight. Her mind played with the intriguing thought of starting over. What would it be like to fall in love with someone new?
She knew she shouldn’t think such things, especially in the wake of Richard’s sincere apology earlier that day. If he was expressing willingness to start fresh with their marriage, why was she resisting?
Somehow the thought of taking control of her life and starting over held stronger appeal at the moment. A crazy image flashed through her mind. It was a picture of three-hundred-pound Ka’ahumanu in the driver’s seat of the carriage charging through downtown Honolulu with her husband in the back.
I’m not doing that. I’m not her. That’s crazy. I just wonder what it would be like to fall in love with a man like Kai. Would he ever be attracted to someone like me? He’s so different from Richard. Would Kai be a good husband? A good lover?
An unexpected tha-thump echoed in Carissa’s chest. She couldn’t remember ever imagining herself being with another man. She probably had. She was human. But it was never like this before. This time the thought filled her with a rush of adrenaline, and with the adrenaline came a strange sort of desperation to hold on to the fantasy, embellish it, and carry it out to its exciting, forbidden conclusion.
“Would you jump in?” Kai’s question came to her in the depths of her private thoughts and startled her.
“Excuse me?”
“Like Ka’ahumanu. Would you do it? Would you jump in the ocean on a night like this and swim five miles through the shark-infested water to be with the man you love?”
“No.” Her answer came out fast and firm.
Kai laughed. “You sure didn’t hesitate on that one.”
“I’m not a good swimmer. I could never stay afloat for five miles; so I’d be shark bait long before I arrived. What would I have accomplished?”
“I see your point.”
“Would you do it? Would you jump in for the woman you loved?”
His answer came out as quickly as Carissa’s and carried what sounded like deep conviction. “Yes. Absolutely. If that’s what it would have taken to keep Bekah, I would’ve done it.”
Bekah.
The single word doused the gathering of coals that Carissa’s imagination had been fanning into a fire.
“Was she your wife?” Carissa asked the question before pausing to evaluate if she should.
“Yes.”
Carissa didn’t know what to say next. These were the sorts of stories Richard listened to all the time. She could hear in Kai’s voice all the hurt and brokenness.
“What about you?” Kai asked. “How long were you married?”
“I …I still am married. My husband is giving a lecture in Denver this week so that’s why he’s not here.”
“Sorry. I got the idea you were divorced.”
“No, we’re married.” Defending her marital status was giving her an unexpected sense of conviction about her status. “We’re going on twenty-four years.”
Kai pulled back. “Twenty-four years? You must have married when you were a child. Like Ka’ahumanu.”
“Not exactly a child. But I was only nineteen.”
“Bekah and I married when we were twenty.”
A pause lingered between them before Kai handed over a bit more information. “We lasted only six years, though. Not twenty-four, like you.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’m sorry, too. It was rough. She’s remarried now and back on the mainland. I think she’s happy. I’m glad for that, I guess. Life doesn’t always go the way you think it should, does it?”
“No, it definitely doesn’t go the way you think it should.”
“We should go back,” Kai said quietly. They stood together in a shared silence, both staring at the moon. His voice carried a hint of depression.
As Carissa followed, Kai led the way with the flashlight overhead once again.
Why did I allow myself to entertain thoughts of being with Kai? He certainly wasn’t thinking of me as we were standing there. He was thinking about swimming with sharks to be with his ex-wife. I have a husband. A strong-hearted, loyal husband. Why am I thinking all these wayward thoughts?
At the campsite, Irene had bedded down for the night. The plan was for Carissa to share Irene’s tent, and everything had been set up for her in the sufficiently spacious dome.
“Do you need anything?” Kai asked, as he handed back the flashlight.
“No. Thanks. I’m ready to try out the air mattress. Thanks for letting me use it.”
“No problem. Sleep well.”
“Thanks. You, too.”
She unzipped the tent and stepped inside. Her folding cot with the much-celebrated air mattress awaited her. Irene didn’t say anything when Carissa entered so she guessed Irene was asleep.
Doing her best to get comfortable on the air mattress, Carissa pulled the lightweight blanket up to her chin. The appeal of leaving her marriage was still in her thoughts. She knew what was right. Staying with Richard was right. She had made a vow. A commitment. And yet …
Her sleep was rough. Not because of the mattress but because of the thoughts that crawled in on top of the air mattress and stayed with her all night.
Morning arrived before Carissa was ready to greet it. She rolled over and saw that her tent mate was up and gone. Unzipping the tent’s opening, Carissa drew in a deep breath of the fresh morning air and watched Irene greet the day. She stood about 100 yards away in the open area under a bending palm tree. Facing the rising sun with her arms in the air, her words tiptoed on the breeze like a subtle whispering of the earth itself.
“Ke Akua Hemolele, ua piha ka honua i kou nani a ke ho’omaika’i nei ia ’oe.”
Carissa stretched. She desperately needed to brush her teeth. Slipping into her flip-flops, which waited by the tent’s door, she made her way to the picnic table area in search of bottled water.
“Morning.”
Carissa jumped. She hadn’t noticed Joel sitting in a folding chair off to the side. “Hi. I
just need to find some water.”
“You don’t need to whisper. Everyone else is up. Kai went to the pools. Tony’s in the tent, and Irene …” Joel nodded in her direction. “You know, I remember watching her do that when I was a kid when we first camped here with the group. There were three of them. Three aunties. They all stood together like that and offered up morning worship. It’s a sight you never forget.”
Carissa looked across the open space at Irene. She stood with both arms raised as she watched the sun inch over the Big Island and light the green world around them.
“Do you know what she is saying?”
“No. You’ll have to ask her. It’s a prayer. In Hawaiian, of course.”
Tony emerged from one of the tents. “I could use some coffee. Anyone else want some?”
“Sure. Is there an espresso drive-through anywhere around here?” Carissa asked it with a subtle smile, but Tony seemed to take her seriously.
“I don’t know. They might have espresso at the place across from Hasegawa’s General Store in Hana. I know they have great ice cream. But it’s about a twenty-minute drive from here.”
“I was only kidding.”
Tony pointed at her and grinned. “You got me there. That was a good one. I was going to start up the fire and boil some water. Irene has a French press around here somewhere.”
Carissa set aside her teeth brushing need and helped Tony hunt for the French press. He started the fire, and soon the fragrance of ground coffee beans mixed with the smell of the wood smoke. Joel sliced up one of the round watermelons from Dan’s garden and pulled a box of cereal out of the back of the car.
“That’s my contribution. Grape-Nuts.”
“Well, here comes mine.” Tony held the camping pot with both hands and carefully poured the boiling water into the French press.
Carissa could understand why some people liked camping. This was good stuff. Fresh air. Fresh coffee. No schedule.
Carefully sipping the steaming brew, Carissa took a seat at the picnic table. Irene rested her cane beside her reclining La-Z-Boy-style lounge chair.
“Hey, auntie,” Joel said. “Carissa wanted to know what your prayer meant.”
“It’s a simple line of praise. Ke Akua Hemolele, ua piha ka honua i kou nani a ke ho’omaika’i nei ia ’oe. It means, ‘Holy God, the earth is full of your glory and so we worship you.’”
Irene’s hair was a glad tangle of unreliable strands. Her shorts and cotton shirt were terminally crumpled, and her bare legs bore the evidence of a lifetime of bumps, bruises, and raised blue veins. But her face bore a child’s expression, trusting, sweet, and eager to share a secret.
Carissa sipped her coffee and thought how lovely and unpretentious Irene’s ritual was. She was worshipping the Creator, not the creation, as Carissa had first supposed.
“I picked up a few guavas for us, there on the table.” Irene tapped the side of the picnic table with her cane. “And I’ve got my eye on a papaya for us. It looks about as ripe as it’s going to get. How about it, Carissa? Would you mind being the one to gather our food from afar?”
“Sure. That will be my contribution to breakfast. Where is it?”
“Right there.” Irene lifted her cane and pointed to a tall, skinny tree at the far end of the guava grove. Carissa could see the cluster of green, teardrop-shaped fruit clumped together at the very top under leaves that reminded her of large clovers. One of the papayas was plump and sunflower-yellow.
She laughed. “I don’t think I’m quite tall enough to pick that papaya for you.”
“You don’t pick it. You shake the tree until it comes to you.”
“Okay.” Taking one final sip of her coffee, Carissa hopped up from the picnic table and strode over to the tree while the others watched.
“Give it a good rattle,” Tony called out.
Carissa wrapped both hands around the slim trunk of the papaya tree and gave it a shake. Nothing fell.
“You’ve gotta give it more than that! We know you have it in you. Shake that papaya down!”
Playing along, Carissa pretended to spit in both her palms before rubbing them together and grasping the trunk with a more purposeful grip. Then she shook it. And shook it. On the third momentous tremor, her efforts were rewarded. The ripe papaya succumbed to gravity.
“Catch it!” Joel yelled.
She wasn’t quick enough. The tender fruit fell to the ground and split open on impact. Carissa bent down to examine the broken fruit. Dozens of slick, round, tiny black seeds like opulent caviar tumbled out. Even in its battered state it looked beautiful.
“Should I leave it?” she asked the others.
“No!” they responded as a chorus.
“Bring it here,” Irene said.
Carissa carried over the two halves of the bruised fruit and offered it to Irene. “Is it okay?”
“Yes, of course. Everything is redeemable.”
Irene’s response struck Carissa as poignant and went deep inside, which felt strange at this particular moment. It was a piece of fruit, after all. She decided her emotions were far too out of whack to pay attention to anything she felt.
Tony took over cutting up the inner soft, orange part of the fruit and putting the irregular-sized chunks in a bowl, which they passed around, eating the warm, sweet papaya with their fingers. It was another one of the Maui moments on Carissa’s growing list of things she loved about this place.
Kai strode back into camp with a beach towel over his shoulder. “The pools are perfect this morning. The water is just right.”
“I’m on my way,” Tony said.
“Me, too,” Joel said. Turning to Carissa and Irene he said, “Aunties? Do either of you want to come?”
So now I’m an auntie. I guess that’s a good thing.
Irene smiled. “I’m content to stay right here. What about you, Carissa?”
“Sure, I’ll go.”
Kai stayed at the campsite with his mom as the three of them took off. Joel and Tony started out at a quick stride, leaving Carissa behind. She hurried to catch up and hoped she wouldn’t regret wearing flip-flops, as they tromped along the dirt trail cut through the tall, thick grass.
They stopped to examine a huge spiderweb. Near the center of the web was the spider’s tightly wrapped larder, filled with what looked to be a pudgy feast. Joel, the most eco-friendly of the bunch, studied the back of the spider that clung to the upper edge.
“Friendly,” he declared.
Carissa smiled. She had never met anyone who knew enough about spiders to make an on-the-spot call on their sociability. She found all of this fascinating. Not only the curious bits of nature in the beautiful surroundings, but also the relationships between the people she was with.
“How far is it to the waterfalls?”
“Not far.”
Joel pointed out the trees as they approached the spot where the narrow path connected with the well-trod, wider path from the parking lot. The trees were shorter than palm trees and had wider trunks. The long, narrow fronds were pointed on the ends like palm fronds.
“We call those the ‘walking trees’ because the roots come out of the trunk and look like a bunch of legs. The Hawaiian name for them is lauhala. You’ll see them everywhere around here. The fronds are used for weaving baskets or making mats,” Joel told her.
They came to a wide, open space that caused Carissa to stop walking and catch her breath. To their right, a grassy hillside curved down to the ocean that spread out in the morning sun like a shimmering blanket of rippled blue.
Directly in front of them the hill sloped to an abrupt, rounded curl that kept going down a cliff. The volcanic flow that shaped the cliff continued over the side and formed a garden of ominous boulders and irregular-shaped tide pools in a rugged cove. White ocean spray shot into the air as the waves rushed into the cove, and the salt water met the freshwater that tumbled from waterfalls Carissa could just see to her left.
“This is unbelievable.”
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“Wait until you see the pools.” Tony led the way down the trail to stairs that had been securely set in the petrified lava flow and flanked by steady metal handrails.
At the end of the steps they walked a few feet across the smooth, black boulders before Tony and Joel stopped. A large, shallow-looking pool stretched out and met with a rounded pool farther up. Into that rounded pool cascaded a twenty-foot waterfall encased in the black obsidian of ancient lava flow. Above that waterfall another pool appeared and high above, surrounded by trailing vines and tropical foliage, was a bridge.
“Not bad, is it?” Joel asked.
“I can’t believe places like this really exist.”
“Believe it. Hey, we’re going to the upper pools. You staying here?”
For a minute Carissa felt like she wanted to follow the boys and check out the upper pools. But something told her they wouldn’t want to be responsible for her if she slipped on the wet rocks in her flip-flops.
“I’ll stay here. I can find my way back to camp, too; so when I’m ready, I’ll just go back.”
Tony gave her the “hang loose” hand sign with his thumb and finger extended.
“Shaka,” Carissa replied.
“Hey, you remembered.”
The two of them took off like mountain goats. They had no difficulty forging a trail where none existed along the side of the hill. Carissa made her way to one of the rounded boulders and sat down to take it all in.
She lingered for a long while, simply thinking. Thinking and breathing. It seemed to her as if time itself had tiptoed into this sacred pool and knelt to take lush, lingering sips of life, and now Carissa wanted to do the same. Her deep draughts of air were laced with mist and hints of ferns and fronds, a subtle scent of all things green and tropical.
The dream that had washed over her as she fell asleep in the backyard hammock at home now came to her. She remembered the image of floating on a wide ocean, heading for an inviting cove. An island cove, such as this one.
How could I have dreamed about an ocean and floating to a cove when I didn’t know anything about this? I thought my job was secure that night. I thought my marriage was stable. I had no idea I was coming here.