Rachel slid a chair closer to the bed and sat down. “She’s everything I could have hoped for in a daughter, Catherine. Everything we could have hoped for. And her children—I still can’t believe I’m a tūtū, a grandmother!”
“We were both so young when we came here.” With a resurgence of her youthful excitement she added, “Oh, Rachel, you should see Bishop Home today! There are no more children there, only young women. There are so few children being sent to Kalaupapa at all these days, thanks to the sulfa drugs. What would Mother Marianne say if she could see this?”
“Amen,” Rachel answered, and Catherine laughed.
The laughter turned into a cough, and the cough became a struggle to catch her breath. Rachel was on the verge of calling a nurse when the sister found her voice: “Are you—going back to California this year?”
Rachel nodded. “Next month.” Her friend’s erratic breathing continued to alarm her. “Catherine, are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m just … tired,” she said. “I tire very easily.” Indeed, the rush of happiness that had buoyed her upon seeing Rachel now was ebbing as quickly as the years had ebbed away. “How long will you be here, Rachel?”
“As long as you need me to be.”
Catherine smiled faintly. “Thank you.” Her eyes closed.
Rachel remained by her side. When a nursing sister came later with Catherine’s dinner—little of which she ate—she brought food for Rachel as well. Catherine chatted as she picked at her meal, reminiscing about Rachel’s auntie, Haleola, and her father, Henry. “Such good people. Such good souls.”
Catherine soon nodded off again. When Dr. Kam made his rounds, Rachel asked if she could spend the night in the empty bed beside Catherine’s. “Of course,” he said. “From what the sisters tell me, you’re 'ohana.”
She thanked him and, exhausted by the trip and the strain of seeing Catherine in this state, fell into a dead sleep by ten o’clock.
In the middle of the night she was awakened by:
“Rachel?”
She opened her eyes and saw Catherine gazing at her.
“Thank you,” the sister said softly. “For being here.”
“Where else would I be?”
“Do you remember the last time we were together like this?”
“Yes.” Rachel didn’t elaborate.
But Catherine did. “That night we spent in the dispensary,” she said. “The day I … jumped into the sea. Tried to … kill myself.”
She had not spoken these words aloud for many years, and hearing them now, they did not seem as frightening as she imagined they would.
“You told me God would understand my pain and forgive me, as He forgave my parents their own pain and … sins.”
“I still believe that,” Rachel said.
Catherine hesitated, then confided, “Two nights ago I saw my father. Sitting in that chair you were sitting in today.”
“Were you happy to see him?”
Meekly Catherine admitted, “Honestly? It scared the hell out of me.”
Rachel laughed. “Well—did he seem happy?”
“Yes. Oddly enough, he did. He was smiling at me. Happy to see me.”
Rachel asked, “Do unforgiven souls smile, Sister?”
A thin crescent of a smile lit Catherine’s face.
“No,” she conceded, “I suppose they don’t.”
As her eyes shut, she said tenderly, “I love you, Rachel.”
“I love you too, Catherine.”
Rachel lay there for an hour, listening to Catherine’s shallow breaths like sighs in the darkness, before she finally drifted into a restless sleep.
The next morning Catherine continued to recall bygone days at Kalaupapa, but she was awake and alert for a shorter period of time. Her pain increased, and the sisters upped the dosage of her morphine. The following day she spoke even less, before falling into a deep slumber.
The day after that she did not awaken at all.
Rachel kept vigil for another three days, holding Catherine’s hand, talking to her in hopes that she could hear; but Catherine never regained consciousness. A priest administered the last rites. Dr. Kam or the nurses checked her vitals frequently, but other than this brief activity, there was a calm surrounding Catherine that was like a mouo, one of those lulls on the ocean when Rachel would float in the water without a wave in sight. Rachel prayed Catherine was feeling that kind of peace. When she finally stopped breathing it was almost unnoticeable, the passage between life and death barely a flutter; all that separated them was the single beat of a heart.
Rachel held Catherine’s lifeless hand and stayed there for some time, weeping for her friend, her last connection to her youth at Kalaupapa.
Two days later, the Sisters of St. Francis held a Requiem Mass in St. Elizabeth’s Convent for their cherished colleague:
May Christ receive thee who has called thee, and may the Angels lead thee into Abraham’s bosom … Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her.
Sister Mary Catherine Voorhies’s casket was taken to the Catholic cemetery, where according to her wishes she was laid to rest alongside the scores of girls and young women who had blossomed under her care only to die after a few short seasons. In a long life marked by grace, compassion, dedication, grief, and courage, Catherine had loved them all.
* * *
A month later, as Rachel’s plane landed in San Francisco, she resolved to keep her mood sunny and make no mention of the death of her old friend. She wanted to enjoy this trip, not have people feeling sorry for her. And in fact Ruth greeted her in such high spirits that Rachel couldn’t help having her own uplifted. In the car, Ruth revealed why she was in such a good mood:
“I have a job!”
Rachel was startled. “I didn’t know you were thinking of getting one.”
“I hadn’t, not for a while,” Ruth said. “After the war I was just so relieved that life was normal again, I was content to be a mother and a homemaker—content to have a home, and a normal life.”
“And now?”
“I got over it.” Ruth laughed. “I woke up one day realizing my entire life consisted of cooking, cleaning, packing lunches, doing laundry, getting the kids up in the morning, and getting them to bed at night.”
Rachel would have given anything to have lived a life like that, but she heard Ruth’s frustration and nodded her understanding.
“I’d see ads on TV—all these happy white women wearing pearls and pleated skirts as they scrubbed down the kitchen—and I’d think, well damn it, if these hakujin hausfraus can do it, so can I. Except whenever I’d go to see Helen Russell, she was as bored and restless as I was and we’d sit drinking vodka gimlets at eleven A.M., wondering why we weren’t happy too.
“Then I’d think about how it was before the war, when I was helping Frank run the diner, and I realized: I was happy then. I had the kids, I had Frank, but I also had something new to challenge me each day. Normal, I decided, is highly overrated. Is it normal to drink vodka gimlets at eleven A.M.?”
“No,” Rachel agreed. “So where are you working?”
“Bill’s Shanghai Restaurant. I have Okāsan to thank for it. She’s friends with Mr. Dobashi of Dobashi Market, who was putting up a new building on Jackson Street. He told her he’d asked Bill Dair, a leader in the Chinese community and the owner of a Chinese grocery, if he’d be interested in opening up a restaurant in the building.”
“I was wondering who the ‘Bill’ in ‘Bill’s Shanghai Restaurant’ was.”
“A very nice man—he even gave me time off while you’re in town. So before anyone else could submit a résumé, I applied for a job. I’m doing what I did at Frank’s Diner—bookkeeping, managing inventory. I work from nine A.M. to three P.M. and have time to get home and cook dinner too.”
“I take it Frank approved?”
“His exact words were ‘Good, we can use the extra money.’” She laughed. “Always practical.”
When they arrived home, Donnie and Peggy—now thirteen and eleven, respectively—came rocketing out the front door and into Rachel’s arms, filling her with renewed wonder that she was holding mo'opuna—grandchildren—of her very own.