by Bill Clegg
Suddenly, they were brawling. Shoving and grunting and throwing punches, which mostly did not land. Peter and Bart shot up and each grabbed one of Floyd’s arms to pull him off Oscar whose face was red not only with rash now, but with blood from his nose. Floyd wriggled free and was grappling with Peter when Bart grabbed the camera strap from behind him and began to pull tightly. His grip on the strap was firm and though Floyd at one point spun him on his back to shake him loose it only managed to expel his energy and before long he collapsed. Lupita screamed and ran toward the men but by that point Floyd was unconscious. What did you do?, she hollered as Bart pulled the camera from around his neck and put it on the ground. Relax, I’m in medical school, he said as he felt Floyd’s neck and wrist and guided his head toward a place on the pine-needled ground. He’ll be fine. Just going to be asleep a little while. Is he a friend of yours? Swell chap.
Lupita backed away from where Floyd lay and sat down against the cabin. From there, she could see his chest rise and fall and so she knew he was alive, like Bart said. The blue door then burst open and Dana rushed at Peter, demanding he explain what had happened. Lupita watched as she raised her arm and stabbed a finger at him, the sun’s last light dancing on her bracelets and watch, the rest of her in shadow. She remembered the silk dragon, its haughty shine as it scowled from Dana’s back just a few hours before. The day that followed flashed in the twitching fire: the steep climb up the hill, Dana’s excusing herself as soon as they arrived, Floyd appearing behind the cabin, as if on cue, asking if she was ok, her violent reaction when he touched her, the view from the ledge, and now Dana, emerging from the cabin. Wear something festive, she’d instructed on the phone last night, and this morning teased again about their car ride two years ago, the one when she insisted on knowing every detail of every minute she’d spent with Floyd. He’d mentioned that Dana had asked him to help carry things up the hill, but Lupita knew that by then there was nothing left in the car she couldn’t have easily carried on her own.
As she watched Dana interrogate Peter and snap at Bart to stop interrupting her, something flashed in her peripheral vision. Past the others, toward the trailhead, she saw Peter’s girlfriend, Louise. She was moving slowly and from her neck hung Floyd’s camera. At first it looked like she was fleeing the scene, but when she stopped and fiddled with the lens, and then raised the Kodak to her eye, it was clear she wanted to record it. She pointed the black and silver device toward Floyd’s collapsed body, past the fire, to the cabin. Lupita tipped her face to the ground and pretended to disappear. Thief, she mouthed, as the shutter clicked.
Soon after, Dana convinced Lupita to come inside the cabin to clean off her blouse. They dabbed the cotton with damp towels and as Lupita stood to go outside again she was seized by a wave of nausea. She retreated to one of the bedrooms to lie down until it passed and without intending to, she fell asleep. At some point later, she woke to find everyone inside the cabin, drinking and carrying on. When she didn’t see Floyd, she rushed outside, but there was no sign of him. When she asked the others, they had no idea when or where he’d gone. She couldn’t believe he’d been left alone—unconscious, in the dark, no one bothering to check on him. She paced the perimeter of the clearing looking for any sign and insisted that Peter and the others look, too. No one budged.
Enraged, Lupita gathered their picnic gear and shot toward the trailhead. He’s already home, safe and sound, Dana called as she hurried behind her into the woods, sounding shaky despite her forced cheer and attempt to regain authority. Slowly, they made their way down the hill—Dana shining a flashlight, Lupita carrying a wicker basket clunky with soiled plates and napkins and good silver from the kitchen at Edgeweather. And with it, Floyd’s Kodak.
It would take Lupita more than three years to develop the film in Floyd’s camera. When she did she was relieved there were no photographs of Jackie or their daughter. It must have been a new roll that Floyd or Jackie had put in the camera expressly to photograph their July Fourth picnic. Most of the photographs were blurry and poorly lit images of Peter and the others drinking and horsing around inside the cabin. There was only one that Lupita didn’t immediately throw away. In it, the late-day light obscured Peter, Bart, and Dana’s faces as they stood to the left of the campfire, arguing. On the other side of the fire lay Floyd, with close-cropped hair, wearing a light blue short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. His thick arms limp at his sides, his hands still clenched. There was something wrong about the angle of his torso in relation to the rest of his body, the way his head and face flopped onto the pine-needled ground. Behind him stood the log cabin with its red metal roof and dark blue door, half-open. Against the cabin, Lupita crouched, her face buried in her arms, crossed above her knees—one hand, the one with a bandaged thumb, held her elbow, the other at her shoulder, grabbed the exposed flesh there as tightly as Floyd squeezed his fingers into white-knuckled fists.
Lupita looked at the photograph only a few times before ripping it to pieces. It evoked too potent a mix of conflicting feelings to keep around. Besides the life she lived in Kauai, it was the only physical evidence she had of that strange night born of Dana’s mischief—a night that had inadvertently given her what she needed most at that time: a way out.
Lupita waited as long as she could before calling Dana at school. A girl she’d overheard in the bathroom at St. Margaret’s said that it was common knowledge that it took at least six weeks to know that you were pregnant. For Lupita, it had taken four, but she knew that when she called Dana there could be no room for doubt. She didn’t know how Dana could help, or even if she would, but if there was any chance at all, Lupita knew that she needed to be believed. She was.
When Dana drove her to the airport in Philadelphia from Lee’s farm, she’d asked her where she wanted to go. Kauai was Lupita’s answer. She didn’t know anything about the place beyond what she’d once heard one of the nuns at St. Margaret’s say: that it was the farthest place one could go and still be in the United States. After Dana bought her ticket at the TWA counter, it took three flights and two days to get to Lihue Airport. This was the first time Lupita had flown. When she felt the engines move the plane with increasing force down the runway and shove it into the sky, she experienced her first moment of relief since the morning in Dana’s bedroom before Mr. Goss appeared. She knew the boy was safe now, with someone who could love him; and she was beyond her family’s reach, untouched by their judgment and punishments. She’d left them a note the morning Dana drove her to Lee’s farm in Pennsylvania. It was on a piece of spiral bound notebook paper from school, folded in half and left on the kitchen table. There was nothing she could say to make it right, so she wrote, Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I am sorry. Love, Lupita.
On the plane, she imagined the physical distance widening between her and the life she was leaving—Wells, her family, St. Margaret’s, her college scholarship, Edgeweather, Floyd. She pushed the button on her armrest and tilted her seat back, the rattling fuselage, the velocity, the miracle of breaking from the earth’s surface—all of it together like a long-awaited narcotic flooding her veins. She had no idea what lay ahead, and for the first time in nine months, she did not care.
When she arrived in Lihue, she had seven thousand dollars in cash tucked behind the lining of her suitcase. Before she’d left for the airport, Lee had come to her door and handed her a pale pink cosmetics bag with a copper-colored zipper. This should get you started, wherever you go. My advice is to get a job immediately and stay away from men for a while. When you know where you want to be, use the money to help buy yourself a place to live. Somewhere that is yours, no one else’s, and that you can afford without too much struggle.
When Lupita came to the farm, she had at first avoided Lee. She was Mr. Goss’s sister, and she feared she’d call him and he’d turn up without warning. Nothing frightened her more. Not even her father. Each night on the farm, she checked and double-checked that the front and back doors, and the windows, of t
he small cottage she slept in were locked. She trusted no one, especially Lee. The lengths to which she’d gone to make her comfortable, and the adoption she’d arranged, Lupita dismissed initially as pressure from her niece and, later, as actions she was taking on behalf of her friend, Alice, to make sure she had a child. But when Lee came to her cottage the morning Dana drove her to the airport, there was something in her tone of voice and in the way she looked at her that suggested that she somehow knew the truth of how she’d become pregnant. It made no sense, but looking into Lee’s face for just a few quick moments before she left, she’d felt like someone had recognized her.
Lupita did not have the words to thank her that day, but she found them eleven years later, after she’d secured a mortgage for the cottage on Weke Road with a combination of what Lee had given her and money she’d saved. She mailed a photograph of the house she’d taken with a Polaroid camera. On the back she wrote, Dear Mrs. Beach, I did what you told me to do. Thank you.
She also followed Lee’s advice about work, getting jobs cleaning rooms at hotels initially, and after a while driving a taxi at night, too. Eventually, she bought her own car and left cleaning behind. At the time, there weren’t many women driving taxis on the island and the hotel manager she’d been working for, a kind old pothead whose wife had been friendly to Lupita in her first year on the island, frequently cautioned her that it wasn’t a safe line of work for a young woman. But in a car, driving, even on the job, was where Lupita was happiest, where she felt most in control. When she quit her job, he and his wife made her supper and promised to give out her card and send her work from the hotel, which they did, and after a slow start, she built up a steady business.
She was almost forty when a woman she’d cleaned with at the hotel asked her for a job. She was leaving her husband and needed extra money to afford an apartment. No one had ever asked Lupita for help before and though her first instinct was to say no, she remembered Lee, and Alice, even Dana, and how she was able to leave Wells and start a new life. So she helped the woman get her taxi driver’s license and she leased another van. Over time, she hired more women—some she knew from around the island and others who’d heard she had jobs—and by the time she turned fifty-five she had seven vans, a garage, and a dispatcher.
As the taxi service grew, Lupita gradually became friends with a few of the women who worked for her. Some she let stay in the other bedroom in her cottage if they needed a place, others she lent money to and encouraged to go to school. When she turned sixty, a group of them—many who’d moved on to other jobs and marriages, and some who still worked for her—took her to dinner to celebrate. One of the women who’d driven for her for more than twenty-five years, whose daughter had recently started working for Lupita as a part-time dispatcher, gave a toast. She thanked Lupita for being a good boss, a great friend, and the mother many of us needed.
As for men, she kept to herself in the first jarring months, too frightened to speak to anyone before or after work. But she was new and young on the island, and she’d attracted a number of guys who were willing to keep her company and show her around. By the end of her first year, she began to get to know a few of them. Mostly they were employees at the hotel she worked in, a mix of local boys and men, runaways and transplants who worked as porters and lifeguards and assistant managers. Later, when she began to drive a taxi, they were mechanics and drivers and dispatchers. These were the people she knew, the ones she’d meet up with at the local restaurants and backyard barbecues. It was the quieter ones she gravitated toward. The guys who hadn’t been overtly flirtatious, who didn’t make passes right away. They were the ones she would occasionally develop feelings for, who seemed to sense exactly the right moment to make a move, and often she would not deflect. What happened after tended to follow a pattern: a cold shoulder, a friendly but distant wave or nod across parking lots and hotel lobbies, and then presumptuous late-night phone calls from bars. It surprised and hurt her the first few times, but then she calculated that these losses—familiar acquaintances and colleagues, not exactly friends—were ones she was willing to accept in exchange for an occasional connection that involved both affection and physical desire. This went on for years. But her energy for these encounters depleted and she became less willing to forfeit the relationships in order to have them. As a result, by her sixties she’d gathered a considerable group of men her age and younger who called her for her opinion on mechanical problems, advice with their girlfriends or wives, and whom she could reach out to for help, if needed. These were not intimates so much as friendly comrades who, over time, treated Lupita as one of the guys and not the token female they may have once been biding their time to have sex with.
The diminished frequency of late-night calls from bars also coincided with Lupita’s attending evening classes at Kauai Community College in Lihue. After having her old transcripts from St. Margaret’s faxed to the admissions office, she took her first class, statistics, the only one that worked with her schedule, in the fall of her forty-first year. The other students in the evening classes were mostly younger, but they had kids and jobs and some of them she knew from the hotels and the airport, and a few of them were women who worked for her.
After completing her associate’s degree in Liberal Arts, which was the highest degree given at the college, she enrolled again, this time taking classes toward an associate’s in Hawaiian Studies. These were the classes that excited her the most. It embarrassed her to realize she’d been living in Hawaii for more than three decades without knowing much about its language, ecology or history. Its history especially. She was upset by the conflicting accounts—many she found outside the curriculum—of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in the late 1800s by a couple of American businessmen. She became fixated on Queen Liliuokalani and the circumstances of her arrest and abdication, as well as her failed attempts to recapture what had been taken. As Lupita learned more, she began to understand the resentments and outrage she’d seen and heard in Kauai through the years. Her new awareness coincided with what seemed like a surge of local fury around that history, agitated by a century-late official apology by the US government to native Hawaiians. She went to some of the rallies and town halls to understand better and even lend a voice. Because of the color of her hair and skin, some people assumed she was at least part native Hawaiian, but instead of making her feel welcome, she felt like an imposter, so she chose to root quietly from the sidelines.
When she received her second degree, Lupita framed it and put it on her kitchen wall next to the first. It was not the bachelor’s degree she would have had at Albertus Magnus, but when she saw the two degrees hanging together she felt that something she’d lost had been reclaimed. She was sixty-two years old then, nearly the age she imagined Lee Beach would have been when Lupita had stayed on her farm. She knew that there was no possibility Lee was still alive, but it didn’t stop her from wishing that there was some way she could know she’d graduated from college. Alice, too, who would appreciate what it meant to do something no one in her family had done before. But Lupita would never initiate contact with her. She would not risk disrupting the life of the boy who was now a man, and who was not hers.
* * *
The ocean has dulled to gray under the shadow of storm clouds. Above Lupita, they have streaked from mist, twisted and bloomed in the late-morning sun, gathered at the headlands and crowded the sky. After hours of treading water, floating, and pushing her arms through ragged half-strokes, she has come back through a break in the reef without cuts. She is safe in the shallows but can only see the smudge of open ocean, not the shore behind her that is only a few kicks and a tumble in the breaking waves away. Her lips are blistered and dry, her eyes on fire. Her arms drift down, her body bobs, and a wave curls above her, tucks her into the crook of its swirl and drags her under as it collapses. She plunges, rolls, is thrown. Her oldest memory of water returns, a stranger’s legs swoosh through a current beneath her, and from somewhere in the terribl
e dark her mother whispers to stay silent.
Sand is the last thing she expects, but suddenly it’s everywhere. Damp and granular in her fists, needling her shoulders, roughing her heels. A gentle wave slaps against the back of her neck like polite congratulations. She attempts to lift her torso, but when another, more forceful wave shoves her from behind, her elbows buckle and she topples forward. She panics in water that is only a few inches deep, her knees and legs scraping against broken shells and branches twined with seaweed. The water retreats and for the first time in hours her body is not submerged. She claws the grainy shore, brings it to her face to make sure it is real.
Lupita tries to stand but before she is up the world swerves and she drops back down on all fours, closes her eyes and does not move. Gradually, she crawls from damp to dry beach until she’s stopped by the hard mass of a fallen tree. Here, she collapses, rolls onto her back and stretches her arms and legs as wide as they will reach. She inhales, deeply, and smells the air around her—briny and damp, musky with life and rot. She looks up into the dark, chalky sky and sees what she thinks are sea birds circling there, as if in slow motion. Gradually, on legs she can scarcely feel, she tries again to stand. A surge of blood rushes to her head and she stumbles, her joints flare with new pain. She steadies, and with eyes still stinging with the sea’s salt, she registers the blurry world: the short beach, the dense copse of trees at its edge, the dark sky above it all. Rain taps her head and face, speckles her arms and hands. She does not know this beach, but she knows there is a path to the road somewhere. The tourists have found everything, invaded every untouched corner of the island by now, and this place is too perfect to be left alone. She cannot see the evidence but she knows it’s there; the garbage she’s seen wash ashore more and more with each decade: the soggy, sun-bleached cigarette carton, the half-full bottle of shampoo, the fouled diaper, the jagged glass from smashed beer bottles that will be swept out by the tide, destined to someday wash ashore, far from here, smoothed by time and ocean into something unrecognizable, beautiful.