A Trip to the Stars (38 page)

“You’re hysterical,” he said with a harder edge. He didn’t appreciate that last reference.

“You’re right. Here I thought there were lots of girls. And it’s just one! Now, get out of my way,” I shouted.

He stepped toward me, and I thought he was going to hit me.

“Get another playmate to mind-fuck,” I continued to shout, shoving him again.

But he didn’t hit me. He had no intention of hitting me. In fact, I never knew him to strike any woman. He dealt in violence, all right, he got off big-time on inflicting pain, but he didn’t do it with his fists.

“Stop shouting, Mala.” There was a trace of mockery in his voice.

I swung my hand up as fast as I could, to slap him, but he caught my wrist. Immediately he let go of it, and smiled, as if he wanted me to do it again. In my rage and drunkenness I had forgotten that this sort of torment was what he really thrived on: he liked to provoke anger and then soak it back up, as fuel.

When I took another swipe at him, I missed and fell down hard, and he tried to help me up.

“Let go of me, you bastard,” I said through my teeth.

Gripping me firmly around the waist, in his best doctor’s voice he said, “I’m taking you home.”

“Gonna fuck me when I pass out?”

He was half-dragging me to a sports car convertible parked under the banyan trees. I really was too drunk to drive, and needed to go home, but not with him. As we reached the car, I tried to pull free one last time. “This isn’t your car.”

“It’s my wife’s,” he said in his flattest voice.

“Even better! Bet you
love
to screw in it—anyone but her.”

“Come on.”

The car was Campari-red like the shirt he was wearing. As he leaned over, pushing me into the passenger seat, I smelled for the first time how much booze there was on
his
breath. His speech didn’t change when he drank, so you couldn’t tell from that.

“Hey,” I said, groping for the door handle, realizing just how bad an idea this was. But it was too late. He had already turned the key in the ignition, and, throwing the stick shift into reverse, he made a hard U-turn out of the yard, past a long line of parked cars.

Suddenly we were hurtling down the winding, muddy road through the forest where the fog itself was thick as mud. It was a mile to the main road and Francis was driving very fast. Trees and bushes flew by, and the rays of the headlights splintered wildly in the fog. Crushed mosquitoes streaked the windshield. Stones kicked up
sharply under the rear fenders, clattering in my ears. Already dazed, I felt as if the entire world had been turned upside down.

“Slow down!” I shouted.

Francis opened the throttle another notch. As we skidded around every curve now, I was sure we would spin out in that mud. I slumped down and closed my eyes until, with a thud of the chassis and a grinding of gears, we veered onto the two-lane blacktop of the main road and Francis gunned the engine and accelerated even harder. Like a long runway the road was dotted blue and orange down the double line as plastic reflectors picked up our lights. Francis had always been a show-off, in both his car and his speedboat, skirting the coral reefs at full throttle, but this was different.

“What the fuck are you doing, Francis?” I shouted as the needle inched up to 95, then 100.

He turned to me, and though his expression never changed, in the green glow of the dashboard lights his eyes flashed, wide and blank in a way I had never seen them before, even during sex when he was at his most strung out and frenzied.

“I’m taking you home,” he said, gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles whitened. He passed a car on the right, on the narrow shoulder, then several others on a steep hill, barely edging back into our lane against oncoming traffic.

“You’re trying to kill us!” I screamed over the wail of car horns.

He began to pass a bus, and suddenly we were staring into the high-beam lights of a truck bearing down on us.

“Francis!” I shrieked. The bus’s tires hissed a few feet from my head and gasoline fumes burned my eyes.

The truck was closing fast on us. Teeth bared, his face gleaming with sweat, Francis jammed his foot to the floor. The wind whipped his sandy hair flat against his skull. The truck’s Klaxon horn was deafening, and its blinding lights flooded us.

We swerved hard to the right and I felt an enormous, sickening rush of steel—tons of it, like a freight train—as the truck flew past us and the bellow of the bus’s horn, close on our tail, blasted my ears before we pulled away.

Francis never really regained control of the car, and several seconds later we had sped off the straightaway and were descending into the
Hanalei Valley. All the way down the long snaking road, the car zigzagged back and forth across the double line, inches from the wooden railing. Everything was spinning on me, and as I tried to brace myself, my hand closed on my seat belt buckle. Fumbling frantically, I managed to fasten it.

Moments later we skidded around the last curve, onto the one-lane bridge over the Hanalei River where Francis lost control of the car once and for all. The brakes screeched, the tires squealed, and there was a crash of lights and a ripping sound as if the air itself had been torn like a curtain, to swallow me up. After that, I remember nothing.

My next memory is of another sound: the wind blowing through a window, ruffling curtains. A wind redolent with the scent of plumeria, the graveyard flower. Then I heard those words from Revelation I had read in the hotel in Manila, not in my voice but in Cassiel’s:

I was lying between cool smooth sheets. The top sheet was taut over my toes and my hands were flat at my sides. I opened my eyes and could see nothing but blackness.

Maybe I’m dead, I thought.

Then, off to my right, I heard a glass clink onto a tabletop and a rustling, as of clothing. But so light as to be nearly inaudible.

“Who’s there?” I said as the rustling approached me. My voice was rough and small, as if I hadn’t spoken for some time. But I did still have a voice.

The rustling stopped and I could feel someone leaning toward me.

“Who are you?” I said.

“I am Wind,” a woman replied in a soft faraway voice.

For several seconds I was certain I had indeed died and somehow ended up in a kind of heaven, a chamber beyond the clouds where the wind was distilled into musical notes. A heaven where, however, I was blind.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Wind,” the voice repeated, a kind voice.

“And where am I?”

“In your bed in your house,” she said.

“My house …”

“In Haena.” She softened the
n
as only native Hawaiian speakers did.

“I can’t see.”

A warm hand with long thin fingers touched my shoulder. “You will see again,” the voice said, then paused. “You were in a terrible accident.”

I remembered: Francis, the red convertible, the bridge.

“Oh,” I said, feeling as if a heavy weight had shifted in my chest. “When was that?”

“Two weeks ago. They sent you home from the hospital the day before last when you regained consciousness. You don’t remember that?”

“No.”

“I have been looking after you. I fed you last night, and this morning.”

“I don’t remember that. How do you know I will see?”

“They did tests,” she said simply.

I thought about this. “Are you a nurse?”

“No. I work for your friend Estes Shaula.”

And then it struck me who she was.

“Yes, I am his housekeeper,” she said. “He sent me down from Waimea to take care of you. I will stay until you can see again.”

I cleared my throat. “And what happened to Francis?”

“Dr. Beliar? I’m sorry.”

“He was killed, then.”

“They found his body last week.”

“What do you mean?”

“It disappeared, then washed up on Niihau. That is where I am from.”

That evening, when he came with Seth to visit me, Estes related to me the details of the accident and I listened almost as if I had not been in it myself. Sober for once—he drank three cups of black tea during his visit—he sat at the foot of my bed and told me that the car had hit one of the bridge posts. I had been knocked unconscious. The right side
of my head was still tender to the touch. I also had severe abrasions and contusions up my right leg, a gash on my right arm, still stitched, a broken finger, and two cracked ribs, which I had felt when I tried to turn on my side. And I had lost my power of sight, of course.

“It’s a miracle you weren’t killed,” Estes concluded softly, laying his hand on my ankle.

“From the X rays,” Seth put in, “we know there was no neural or retinal damage to your eyes. Everything points to temporary blindness—from shock.”

“When will I see again?”

“Maybe next week, maybe in a couple of months. We had Dr. Takasa come in from Honolulu General. He’s their top ophthalmologist. He has no doubts you’ll regain your sight as the constricted blood vessels reopen.”

“And I’ll see as before?”

“Yes. He said you may need reading glasses at first.”

“Oh, I’m sure I’ll be doing a lot of reading,” I said drily, after which there was a long silence. “And Francis?”

Seth coughed nervously.

“All of it, please,” I said. “Estes, you tell me.”

They had found me covered with blood and vomit. I was alone, buckled into the passenger seat. The right front fender and wheel of the car protruded through the bridge’s supports and dangled over the river. At first, the police thought the driver had fled the accident, or staggered away for help, or maybe crawled from the car and collapsed in the tall river grass. But seeing how I was so banged up, they couldn’t understand why there was no sign of blood in the driver’s seat or anywhere on his side of the car, which had borne the brunt of the crash. My head had cracked the windshield, but over the steering wheel the glass was intact. And there was no blood outside the car, not on the bridge and not in the muddy ground on either side of it, where there were also no footprints. After I was rushed to Wilcox Memorial by ambulance, they searched for several hours around the bridge and in the taro fields at that end of the valley. Then, near sunrise, about the time I was being x-rayed on my own X-ray table, the police chief directing the search suddenly arrived at the solution, which at the time seemed improbable even to him: at impact, Francis was thrown clear of the car, over the railing, into the swift currents of the Hanalei River.
My forward velocity had been severe, but because of the seat belt, I had at least remained in the car.

Two police boats dredged the river, joined by several fishing vessels. All day they dragged nets along the bottom, from the bridge to the mouth of the river a mile away at Hanalei Bay. The next day, they brought the Coast Guard cutters up from Lihue and began searching the bay. Just in case he was wrong, and Francis was either a delirious missing person or a fugitive from the scene of an accident, the chief issued an all-points bulletin. But after three days, the police were even more convinced he had drowned and been carried out to sea after floating down the river. When they found his body on the ninth day, this proved to be what had happened, but not exactly the way they first thought. For one thing, the autopsy revealed that Francis broke his neck the moment he hit the river, and that’s what killed him. Also, he was carried to sea, but only as far as another island; the strong currents in the Kaulakahi Channel had deposited him on a beach of shattered coral on the eastern shore of Niihau, the Forbidden Island. Bloated, with writhing barnacles attached to his scalp and back, he was found by a teenage couple, out for a midnight swim, who ran home claiming they had seen one of the lizard-men, a demon whose hair had a life of its own and who stared at them without eyes and smiled without lips.

I didn’t shed any tears, and I had a lot of bitter feelings just then. “I’m sorry for his wife and daughters,” I said, “though I’m sure they’re not too sorry for me.” Then I turned to where I had last heard Seth’s voice. “And what happened at the hospital?” I asked.

“You mean—”

“You know what I mean.”

He sighed. “It’s caused quite a scandal. A lot of people were at that party. And the search for his body was in the newspaper every day. It even made the
Advertiser
in Honolulu.”

“Go on.”

“The day they released you from the hospital as a patient, you were also put on suspension. Dr. Prion is fighting it.”

“But I’m still going to lose my job.”

He hesitated. “I’m afraid so. When they brought you in, Mala, there was a lot of alcohol in your blood.”

“No kidding. It’s good that’s all they tested for.”

“You can fight the suspension.”

“We’ll help you,” Estes said.

I shook my head. “I don’t have the energy for that. Anyway, I have a lot of thinking to do.”

And I had plenty of time to do it now. I went for twenty-two more days—thirty-six in all—before regaining my sight. It was Pliny who calls the eyes windows to our souls. But—less well known—he also observes that the eyes, to him the most invaluable part of the body, distinguish life from death by the use they make of daylight. Without our vision, he says, in the sightless universe that borders the realm of the dead, we become as dead men, despite our other senses. And does that mean when the eyes no longer function, when blindness blackens them, the windows of the soul are closed suddenly? If so, that was all right with me, because the injuries I had inflicted on my soul would take far longer to heal than the ones I had suffered in the car accident. In the previous six months, with the likes of Francis, I had truly been among the dead, trying to kill myself off a piece at a time, despite the fact it hadn’t displaced my pain or my loneliness—and it certainly hadn’t gotten me any closer to Cassiel.

After reviewing the weeks leading up to the accident for the hundredth time, I resolved that I would keep my legs closed, my mouth shut, and my eyes open—when they were returned to the use of daylight, that is. And for the first time since I had recovered consciousness, I felt something give in me—something sharp, like a sliver of ice, that melted in my chest, until finally I began to cry—tears so frigid they stung my cheeks. After that, each day I was sure I moved a little further from the realm of the dead. One morning, for the first time in seven months, I put on Cassiel’s bracelet and then the tears, hot and copious now, flowed for hours.