“I loved her too,” Peggy said.
Ruth hung up and took a long, shaky breath. Frank came up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders. “You okay?”
She nodded, taking strength from his touch. Then she went to the dresser, opened a drawer, and took out the envelope Rachel had given her. Inside was a piece of brittle old writing paper filled with careful penmanship—written when Rachel was still a young woman, before the disease robbed her of her right hand—and Ruth read aloud the first line in halting Hawaiian:
“Lawa, Pualani, 'eia mai kou kaikamahine, Haleola…”
Ruth continued, paraphrasing:
“Henry, Dorothy, 'eia mai kou kaikamahine, Rachel…”
Tears fell from her eyes, but she continued to read. She would get through this. She owed that much—and so much more—to her mother.
Epilogue
There were 155 residents living, by their own choice, at Kalaupapa, and nearly all of them were now gathered around an open grave in the Japanese cemetery along the coast. It was a bright, clear day, the tradewinds brisk, the surf lapping up nearby Papaloa Beach, where, Ruth knew, her mother had spent many happy hours riding the waves. It truly was beautiful here, and yet the green pali was just as forbidding as the Sierra Nevada, and this necklace of cemeteries along the coastline—like a lei strung not with flowers but with gravestones—was an abiding reminder of Kalaupapa’s tragic past. She stood beside Peggy as they listened to a Buddhist priest chant a sūtra and, toward the end of the ceremony, when the time came for eulogies, of which there were many, Ruth chose to speak last. She was more nervous than she let on as she stepped forward to address the crowd.
“My mother Rachel was a remarkable woman,” she told them, her voice quaking a bit, “but you’ve all known that even longer than I. I’ve been privileged, these past twenty years, to discover just how remarkable. I’m lucky, you see: I had two mothers. One gave life to me; one raised me. But they both loved me. You know, some people don’t even get that once.”
She smiled as she recalled, “It took me a while to say the words ‘I love you’ to my makuahine. It was a different kind of love than I felt for my okāsan, but founded on the same things. I cherished my adoptive parents for the home, the love, and the past we shared. I cherished Rachel for the love she showed me, the past she opened up to me, and the home I never knew: this place. The people she cared for. All of you.
“There’s only one disadvantage, really, to having two mothers. You know twice the love … but you grieve twice as much.”
She took out the old slip of writing paper and glanced down into her mother’s casket. Death had mercifully drained the fluids from Rachel’s face and, though scored by time, it appeared as beautiful as ever to Ruth. She began to read:
“Pono, Haleola, 'eia mai kou keiki hanauna, Rachel!”
Some of the mourners were puzzled, but one old-timer recognized the words and repeated the call to ancestors: “Pono, Haleola,” he said, his aged treble sounding quite clear and strong, “'eia mai kou keiki hanauna, Rachel!”
Now Peggy spoke, her voice as resonant and proud as her mother’s: “Henry, Dorothy, 'eia mai kou kaikamahine, Rachel! Henry, Dorothy, here is your daughter, Rachel!”
A few more mourners picked up the chant, some in Hawaiian and some in English.
“Kenji-san, 'eia mai kou wahine male, Rachel,” Ruth said. “Kenji, here is your wife, Rachel.” She struggled with the next words: “O Rachel, here you are departing! Aloha wale, e Rachel, kaua, auwē! Boundless love, O Rachel, between us, alas!”
As the mourners repeated that last word, Ruth heard for the first time the resonant Hawaiian wail of “Auwē! Auwē!”—“Alas, alas!”—which sprang from every heart at once.
Peggy handed Ruth a small dish of poi, the dress Rachel had worn on the day they met at the Hotel Saint Claire, and the cloth doll in its kapa skirt that Henry Kalama had made for his little girl seventy-six years ago. Ruth tucked them all in the casket beside her mother.
“Here is food, clothing, and something you loved,” she said. “Go; but if you have a mind to return, come back.”
She leaned over her mother, tenderly kissed her forehead as she had Etsuko’s, and told her again that she loved her. Peggy did the same, bidding aloha to her Grandma Rachel before she was overcome by tears. The casket was closed and lowered; within twenty minutes an earthen blanket had covered it, and Rachel Aouli Kalama Utagawa slept again beside her beloved Kenji.
* * *
After thanking each guest individually for coming and listening to their fond memories of both Rachel and Kenji, Ruth and Peggy spent a few private minutes at their graves and then on the beach, sitting and gazing out to sea. Earlier that day, their escort, Hokea, had given them a tour of the settlement, but now Ruth realized that there was still one place at Kalaupapa she wanted to see.
Hokea led them to an empty, closed-up cottage, its chipped paint bleached by the sun, on Goodhue Street. “Your mama shared this with her friend Leilani at first,” he said, taking them up the steps to the front porch. “After Leilani died, Rachel lived here alone until she met your papa, and after they married they lived here together.”
They entered a large front room with three windows. It was musty and layered in dust, but Ruth could imagine it once being charming and cozy.
“This was originally a two-bedroom cottage,” Hokea explained, “but Rachel and Kenji made the second bedroom into their living room. It was remodeled in 1930 after Lawrence Judd became governor and poured a lotta money into modernizing and renovating the settlement. He really cared about us.”
Ruth glanced into the kitchen, which led into the bedroom, which also had three windows. She tried to imagine the bed that had once been there, the curtains on the windows, the dresser where Rachel said she had placed Ruth’s annual birthday gifts—and what happened here on a day a little more than fifty-four years ago.
“This is where I was born,” Ruth said in wonderment. “Right here. In the middle of the night. Mother told me how the midwife delivered me and how they had only a few precious hours alone with me before they had to hand me over to the settlement nursery.”
Ruth stood there, trying to absorb all the detail she could, filling a hole in her life with images of Rachel and Kenji on that night, holding and loving their only child in these brief, stolen moments. She could almost see their faces looking down at her, smiling, as dawn’s light sifted between drawn curtains, heralding the end of their time with her.
Finally she said, “This is all I wanted to see. Mahalo, Hokea.”
Back at the visitors’ quarters, Ruth and Peggy went through a pile of documents, photographs, and letters that Rachel had kept over the decades. On top was a letter in familiar handwriting: the one Etsuko had written to Sister Mary Louisa, assuring her that Ruth and her new family were all comfortably settled in Florin. She smiled to see her okāsan’s careful signature and, below that, their old address in Florin. But there was another address, at the head of the letter, which piqued Ruth’s interest even more:
Sister Mary Louisa Hughes
The Kapiolani Home for Girls
1650 Meyers Street
Honolulu, T.H.
Ruth put the letter in her purse and asked Peggy, “Do you mind flying back to San Francisco on your own? I just realized I have some business to attend to in Honolulu. I’ll catch a later flight back.”
“Well … sure,” Peggy said. “What kind of business?”
“Unfinished.”
* * *