“Velma.”
“What did she call you, Ruth?”
Ruth looked down and said quietly, “Hapa. She called me hapa.”
Louisa laughed with relief. “Ruth, that isn’t a bad word. It’s just a Hawaiian word. It means half.”
“Half?”
“Yes. Like if I gave you a cookie, then split it into two pieces and took away one piece, you’d have half of what I gave you.”
Ruth’s face wrinkled in confusion. “She called me a cookie?”
“Well, your papa was Japanese and your mama was Hawaiian, and so you’re half Japanese and half Hawaiian. Hapa. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the word.”
Ruth wasn’t so sure. It still sounded like Velma was calling her half a cookie, which anyone knew wasn’t as a good as a whole cookie.
“Sister Lu?”
“Yes, Ruth?”
“Can I meet my papa? And my mama?”
Louisa said softly, “I don’t know, Ruth. Maybe someday.”
Ruth considered that. “Sister Lu?”
“Yes, child?”
“Can I have a pet worm?”
Louisa did her best to reply with the same gravity as Ruth’s question. “Well, you see, worms live underground. So if you wanted to have a pet worm, you’d have to live underground too. It’s dark and cold and wet down there. I really don’t think you’d like it.”
“Oh.”
The sister tenderly straightened Ruth’s hair and said, “Let’s go to the playroom, all right?”
* * *
Due to public fear and prejudice, children of leprous parents were banned from attending public or private schools. But the Board of Education did, at least, provide the sisters with schoolroom equipment, and the Free Kindergarten and Children’s Aid Association had years ago established a kindergarten at Kapi'olani Home and assisted the order in its operation. Girls from six to fifteen were taught by Sister Valeria Gerdes, who gave lessons in arithmetic and English.
After classes, the older girls sewed shirts and dresses for inmates at Kalaupapa—some of them, perhaps unwittingly, for their own parents.
Saturdays were housekeeping days and Sundays were for Mass and Benediction, but they were holy in another way: they were visiting days for friends and family—'ohana, a word Ruth knew, even if she had no use for it.
Ruth would listen as a brass bell rang, announcing the arrival of a visitor, and young Sister Praxedes would enter the dormitory to inform Maile that her uncle had come to see her, or Freda that her cousins from Wai'anae had arrived, or Addie that her friends from Kaimukī were here. The girls would jump off their beds, thrilled, and rush out of the room.
No bell ever rang for Ruth.
Until, one day, it did.
Sister Praxedes came in unexpectedly that afternoon and told her, “Ruth, there’s a nice gentleman and lady here who want to meet you!”
Ruth, who knew no one outside the Home, could only think of one thing. She asked hopefully, “Are they my mama and papa?”
“They might be. They’re looking for a little girl to adopt. To make part of their family.”
“Really?” Ruth said excitedly.
Most of the time, when a resident girl was adopted, she was taken by relatives or friends in what was called a hānai adoption. But occasionally a couple with no relation to anyone in the Home would come seeking a girl to adopt. Usually these were Native Hawaiians, who were less afraid of leprosy and less mindful of the stigma that attached itself to children of lepers.
Ruth had watched as other girls were chosen to meet potential parents, but now, for the first time, she was taken to the Home’s library where she was introduced to a man and woman, both Hawaiian. Ruth’s heart raced with a new feeling—hope—as the man smiled warmly at her.
“Such a pretty little wahine. What’s your name, keiki?” he asked, using the Hawaiian word for “child.”
“Ruth,” she answered, seeing kindness in his eyes.
“How old are you, Ruth?” the lady asked.
Ruth counted off three fingers on her hand. “T’ree?” she said uncertainly.
“Very good, Ruth,” Sister Praxedes said, then, to the couple: “Ruth is a very bright little girl.”
“Do you want a real home, Ruth, with a mama and a papa?” he asked.
“Oh yes!” Ruth cried out. “I do!”
The nice couple laughed and smiled, asked her a few more questions, then told her she was very sweet and thanked her for seeing them. Sister Praxedes escorted Ruth back to her dormitory and Ruth excitedly began wondering what her new home would be like, would she have brothers and sisters, would they have pets? She started planning which of her scant belongings she would pack first, until Sister Praxedes returned to tell her regretfully, “I’m so sorry, Ruth. They chose another girl.”
Crushed by the weight of her hopes, Ruth asked, “Din’t they like me?”
“They liked you fine, Ruth, it’s just—”
“’Cause I’m hapa?” she asked, forlorn.
“No no, not at all. These things are hard to understand, Ruth.”
She left, and Freda, a world-wise nine-year-old, said, “Same t’ing wen happen to me too. Sometimes they don’t choose nobody at all. Don’t let it get you down, yeah?”
Ruth nodded gratefully but felt no better.
Later, before lights out, Sister Lu came into the dorm, gave Ruth a hug, and assured her she would be chosen by someone, someday. “And meanwhile you have a home here and someone who loves you very much.”
The warmth of Sister’s embrace cast out the chill of rejection … for now.
Over the course of the next year, three more couples would ask to see Ruth. With each request her heart soared like a kite and after each rejection she was dashed to earth, convinced there was something lacking in her. She was hapa, half, incomplete. Half a cookie; who would want that? And eventually she learned a valuable lesson: she learned not to hope.
* * *
On Sunday evenings the parish priest would preside over the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and as the older girls sang prayers and devotions in the chapel, the youngest sat in a classroom, supervised by an older girl whose job was to read Bible stories to them. On the last Sunday night of October 1920—which also happened to be All Hallow’s Eve—that girl was Maile, who extinguished all the lights in the room save for a lone candle and regaled the little girls with a less devout tale about an obake that resided inside a koa tree. When the tree was cut down for lumber, the things made from it—a spear, a calabash, the handle of a knife—all contained a piece of the ghost, which was not at all happy at being dismembered and set about doing the same thing to everyone who owned a piece of that koa wood.
Ruth—now four years old—grew bored and quietly left the room. At first she intended to return to bed, but as she stood in the corridor she heard something that sounded like … whimpering? But not a human whimpering.
Curious, Ruth went into an empty classroom, stood on tiptoe at a window, and looked out.
It was dark and cloudy and the only light on the grounds came from the flicker of candles in the chapel. Ruth managed to push open the window an inch or two. Now she could tell that the whimpering was clearly coming from the side of the road—Meyers Street—bordering the convent.
Then she saw a shadow detach itself from the dark contours of a noni, mulberry, bush. It shuffled on four legs, low to the ground, until its hindquarters dropped and it sat there in the dimness.
It was a dog!
Ruth had seen dogs before—some of the local farmers owned them, and she even got to pet one once. Thrilled, she raced out of the classroom and out the back door. As she rounded the Home, she saw the dog sitting on the side of the road, whining plaintively.
She slowed down and approached it.
“Hi, dog,” she said softly. “Hi.”
It turned its head to her and its black eyes, ringed in amber, shone in the darkness.