I made a face, although she couldn’t see it, and left the shop with the map she’d sold me and the bitter taste in my mouth she’d thrown in free.
As I hurried back to the ship, I thought of a question I hadn’t asked. Just past the docks, the wharf rats were lounging on the esplanade, and I stopped in front of one of the half-grown boys. “Want a nickel?”
He stood up straight and held out his hand. It was plump, and his fingernails were exceptionally clean. Half a world away in London, a street urchin his age would be black with soot or muck from head to toe from scraping a living picking rags. These boys might dive for pennies tossed into the Pacific, but the sea was full of fish and the mountains were full of fruit. I smiled at him. “What does hapai mean?”
His eyes got big, and the other boys tittered. He looked at them for help, and one of his compatriots stood, crossing his arms over his skinny chest. “It’s delicate,” he said, waggling his eyebrows, but I looked at him blankly. “You know,” he continued, standing up and sauntering toward me. “Expecting? Swelling? Poisoned?” He held out his own hand.
I took a nickel from my bag and held it up so it caught the afternoon light. He opened his mouth, paused, then spoke the taboo word. “Pregnant!” He snatched the nickel and ran, ducking his head and laughing.
Victorians. The first boy was blushing so deeply I fished another nickel out of my bag for the poor thing, then beat it back up the dock, only a few minutes late to relieve Bee of the watch.
I sat in my hammock, facing the wharf. There wasn’t much activity this late in the afternoon: a boatswain tarring the deck of the Tropic Bird three ships over, a couple of fishermen off-loading their catch, a lazy cat watching them from the shade of a piling. The sweet breeze strummed the rigging, and the waves rocked my hammock as gently as a cradle.
Hapai Hale. The very first hint of my existence was marked on the page. I was written into that map as a landmark. Before I’d even known it, I’d been a part of this place, and it was increasingly hard to pretend that it wasn’t a part of me. Something of it lived under my skin, indelible as a tattoo.
It was the home that might have been, and for the first time, I felt the loss of it—the world where my mother lived and my father stayed in Hawaii and I grew up within the boundaries formed by the golden line of sand encircling the island. But who would I have been in that version of reality? Me, or not me?
I felt close to my other self, and I dreaded meeting the conspirators against the crown. Treason felt like a personal betrayal, and I even avoided Kashmir when he returned at night after a day spent plotting. Although I was confined to the ship, I drank in the rhythm of life on the island as time’s current drew the night of the ball closer.
On Saturday, the Zealandia came into port from San Francisco, bringing mail and news and goods and guests from the world beyond Oahu’s shores. Her approach was announced by the semaphore at Telegraph Hill, and shortly thereafter by cannon fire and the ringing of the bells. Soon the dock was mobbed in a Boat Day celebration, the crowd at least triple the size of the one that had greeted our arrival. Local men and women swarmed aboard the ship, laughing, talking, some even serenading the small group of passengers who seemed dazed, like the unsuspecting dead awakening in Elysium.
The oily smell of the docks was erased by the honey-sweet scent of a thousand flowers strung on hundreds of leis, thrown over the visitors’ heads and scattered like confetti on the waves. Locals greeted strangers like long-lost family, with smiles and kisses. Platters of fresh fruit were paraded by, tempting those long at sea; a covey of ladies, underdressed and over-rouged, did the same, calling out to the sailors from a corner of the pier. For a moment, I thought I saw Blake in the crowd, his head bent as he wrote something in a book, but then the man lifted his chin; he was twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier.
The mail was unloaded along with the sailors, and there was much drinking and gambling in town that night. Or perhaps it was brawling; it was so hard to tell the difference until you were much too close. Whatever it was, it petered out as morning dawned on Sunday, the day of Princess Pauahi’s funeral. The contrast was sharp between the bright laughter of the carnival of Boat Day and the eerie, incessant wailing of mourning voices, drifting on the breeze like banshees through the streets.
A few of yesterday’s leis came drifting back in on the afternoon tide, limp with salt, beside mangrove seeds and coconuts that had been floating who knows how long in search of a favorable shore on which to set down roots. The few locals in the streets were somber, burdened by a shared loss, respect for which quieted even us sailors in port. I contemplated it all from my hammock, apart from it, and not a part of it, as the sun rose and then fell, replaced by the moon waxing full.