by Heidi Heilig
The boards beneath me creaked as I shifted on my feet. He never, ever spoke about her.
“I can see her now.” His eyes slid shut, and he smiled crookedly. “God, she was beautiful. And she knew it too.”
I only stared at him. He had no pictures of her, of course. I used to look in the mirror when I was younger, picking apart my own face—trying to recognize what was his, so I could discover what might have been hers.
“I offered her anything,” he went on. “Do you know that? I told her I could take her anywhere, give her whatever she wanted. She only ever asked for one thing.” His eyes snapped open and cut to the box beside him. With sudden violence, he grabbed it and threw it across the room—it hit the wall and I jumped back, my shoulders hitting the door as the contents scattered. A syringe rolled under the bed; the steel spoon clattered on the floorboards. I groped behind me for the doorknob, but the captain hung his head, slumping, all the fire gone out. “I was a better person with her.”
My heart fluttered in my throat like a bird, but my feet were rooted to the floor. He focused on the map again, tracing a road from the harbor to the mountains with one calloused finger. “I wanted to buy her a house. That’s why I left. Somewhere up in Nu’uanu Valley. Something expensive, with a big garden and room for kids.” He didn’t look at me when he said it, but I felt the implication—for me. He left because of me.
He put the map aside and lay back, staring up at the ceiling in a fragile silence. It took all of my willpower not to take the map myself, to try to see what he had seen, but I didn’t move—I barely breathed—afraid he wouldn’t say anymore.
“I thought this was it, Nixie,” he said finally. “I really did. I hadn’t been this close to her in fifteen years.”
Neither have I. Still, I said nothing.
His head lolled to the side. “You would have loved your other life,” he said, and in that moment, I believed him. I could almost see it, the place he’d described, as clear as if he’d drawn me a map.
“You were right, you know,” he went on. “It was a fairy tale. A beautiful country, a faraway kingdom, true love.” He closed his eyes to better see the past. “A world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in . . . in . . . what’s that line?”
“A wild flower,” I said, my voice hoarse.
“Yes.” He sighed. “And I had infinity in the palm of my hand.” He was quiet again; soon, his breathing evened out. Still I lingered, hopeful, but he said nothing else, and so I shifted, slowly, carefully. The doorknob clicked as it turned, and he stirred. “I wish I could show you.” His breath made the corner of the map tremble. “I wish you could see what it was like.”
I stepped quickly across the threshold and took a deep draft of the cool night air, trying to relieve the sudden ache in my chest. Then I eased the door shut behind me, and as the latch clicked, I whispered so softly even I barely heard it: “Me too.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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There was something charming about waking to the sound of a rooster.
Even if that rooster was so ancient he creaked more than crowed. And even if it came before the dawn was more than a twinkle in the horizon’s eye.
The air was mild and I was comfortable, still half in a dream I couldn’t remember, but did not want to leave. I shut my eyes again and listened to the world awaken.
“Cock-a-daaaaaaaack! Cock-a-daaaaaaaaack!”
First the rooster, along with the quiet chime, rhythmic and close by, of metal against metal, maybe the wind moving a rope with a brass clip back and forth. Then pots clanging against pans: someone had started breakfast in the galley of the frigate beside ours. The far-off sound of a horse’s hooves, and the rattling of a cart coming down the road with early morning deliveries. And, sudden and loud over the water, a shouted curse from someone in the schooner on our other side.
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and sat up, making my hammock sway. Farmers may rise to roosters, but sailors rise to swearing.
The sun was rising too, turning the clouds in the east the color of cream. The ship felt quiet. I didn’t think anyone else was awake yet. Last night Kash had snuck ashore, and he hadn’t come back by the time I’d fallen asleep, and I’d heard Bee and Rotgut murmuring over their worn game board into the early hours, playing Go and taking each other’s stones. And of course the captain wouldn’t be awake, not for some time—not after last night.
The rocking of my hammock stilled. I raised my eyes from the harbor, over the town to the valleys above: deep wrinkles in the thick green velvet of the mountains. Which one hid the house with the big garden and the many rooms?
I shook the thought of out my head. It was a good time to do chores; the day was still cool, and I needed busy work so I didn’t start imagining memories I’d never had.
“Cockadaaaaaack!”
I slid out of my hammock on bare feet and stopped in my tracks. It hadn’t been a rooster after all; there, perched on the rail, sat the caladrius, peering at me with its pebble-black eyes.
A quick check of my pockets yielded a linty piece of hardtack. I tossed the biscuit toward the bird. She cocked her head, skeptical at first, but my offering was accepted when I stood out of reach. I was pleased to see her eat; it was good to know she was safe.
But she wasn’t the only hungry creature aboard. Giving the bird wide berth, I went belowdecks and grabbed the jar of bee pollen I’d bought at Whole Foods. Starting at the hold, I visited each lantern on the ship to feed the sky herring swimming inside. The shining little fish were straight out of a Nordic myth explaining the aurora borealis, and their mouths opened and closed like winking eyes as I sprinkled pollen into the smoked-glass globes.
We’d caught them during a wintery week in a mythological version of Scandinavia—Scandia, it was called on the map—sailing under the shimmering lights of the flashing fish schooling in the sky. Slate and I had flown two kites in tandem, with a net strung between them. It had been the first and only time I’d ever flown a kite with my father, and his laughing eyes had been luminous under the northern lights.
It had also been the first map I’d ever pulled for the captain. He hadn’t known anything about Scandia—I don’t think he’d even known he had it in his collection—but I’d been studying the maps since before I could read and I knew the legends of that mythical country. I told him all about it and asked him to take us there, and he actually had listened to me. Moments like that, I’d felt like I could go anywhere I wanted.
And occasionally, we had. With the maps, my growing expertise, and the captain at the helm, we’d managed to fit out the ship with a handful of mythological conveniences. Not only the sky herring; we had some fire salamanders from 1800s French folklore in the cookstove. We also had a bottomless bag from seventeenth-century Wales, which came in very handy despite all the trouble we took to get it.
That map had been the oldest Slate had ever been able to use, and the Irish Sea had fought us like we were intruders, sending sharp gusts to rip at our sails and icy waves that clawed at the deck. I had been trying to shorten the mainsail against the ferocious wind when the mast split and the boom fell, and I was trapped facedown beneath it. I’d nearly drowned in an inch of water and ended up with a broken arm . . . but we’d found the bag.
I grinned at the memory; I’d worn my sling like a winner’s sash. I had really wanted that bag. Bailing the bilge had always been my least favorite chore.
The only convenience I hadn’t figured out was fresh water. Water was tricky, bulky to store, of course, but sometimes dangerous to pick up in port. There was a myth about a cauldron with an endless supply of stew, and of course there was the pitcher of wine that never ran dry, but nothing so simple for water.
Still, I’d tried my best. My first attempt was a Mayan Chaac ax, known to split the clouds when thrown, but that only worked the once; it might have been more useful i
f it had been a boomerang. There was Tiddalik, the aboriginal water frog who held a river’s worth of water in his belly and could be induced, with some prodding, to release it—all of it—which completely swamped the bilge with frog water. The bottomless bag was extremely helpful that day.
And I made the mistake of telling Kashmir about the Paparuda, a Roman rain dance, where a girl would traipse through the streets—or in this case, the ship—stopping at each cabin so the resident could pour water on her head. For three weeks he was begging me to try it, and keeping a pitcher of water ready for the day I came dancing by. There was just no replacing our rather prosaic distiller.
Still, everywhere on the ship, there were souvenirs of all the places I’d been. I even had something from Honolulu, though it wasn’t anything special; just the old tattered quilt my father had wrapped me in when he’d taken me from Joss’s opium den. It was on the floor in my cabin. I didn’t know why I still had it. I suppose I simply hadn’t gotten around to throwing it away.
I laughed at myself under my breath. Perhaps if I’d said that to a stranger, they might almost have believed me.
I dusted pollen over the fish in the last lantern, the one on the bowsprit, and wiped my fingers on my trousers. It was still early, the sun barely clearing the mountains, gilding their peaks and washing the island with soft golden light. No one would be looking for me, not for a few hours at least, and my other chores weren’t pressing.
By the time I admitted to myself I was going ashore, I was already heading below for a change of clothes.
My cabin was the first one at the forecastle, the narrow wedge of space behind the bow, where you’d be most likely to be bounced and jostled in bad weather. I used to have a bigger room—the one Kashmir lived in now—but I’d given it to him when he’d come aboard. I was happy with my hammock; all I owned were clothes and books, scattered haphazardly on the floor. I cleaned my father’s cabin more often than I cleaned mine.
I kicked a path through a pile of dirty laundry and opened the large cedar chest in the corner, the one that held my map of Carthage and all of my clean things. I pawed through the trunk, pushing aside a beaded cape, cotton petticoats, a Renaissance sack gown, an I ♥ NY T-shirt. We only had a few rules when Navigating, but one of them was proper dress. When I was younger and we visited the nineteenth century, I used to tuck my hair up in a cap and let everyone believe I was a boy, but that disguise had become less believable in the past few years. Since we’d stayed near the dock, I’d been able to get away with trousers in Calcutta, but if I dressed too poorly when visiting shops here, I’d likely get kicked out . . . or propositioned.
I unearthed a black dress with a white lace collar; it was the right era, but it was wool. I thought back to the small crowd at the docks: light colors, loose dresses, no corsets or jackets. This was the tropics. I dropped the dress and shook out a striped cotton pinafore I hadn’t remembered owning. It was three inches too short and so tight across the chest I had to leave it open in the back; still, after Calcutta, I’d rather be messy than sweaty.
In for a penny, in for a pound. I passed over my black Victorian boots in favor of shapeless leather flats, comfortable and hideous. They still had yellow mud from India in the seams. Then I scrutinized my reflection in the big mirror tacked to the wall. Everything was a little off.
I was more tan than the fashion for the era, but being out on the water, that was unavoidable. My hair—coffee streaked with copper and whipped into waves by the wind and the salt—was never properly Victorian, but in this era, my mixed heritage stood out more than anything else. Although perhaps less so in Hawaii. Whenever we visited nineteenth-century England, though, I got sideways looks when I was out with Slate. Then again, so did he.
However, there was much I had inherited that I couldn’t change. Nothing gave me away outright, and I was fairly comfortable in the vernacular of the era; that was another rule, of course, one should never speak to the franca unless you used their lingua. I did, however, throw a shawl around my shoulders, which didn’t match, but it hid the open back of my pinafore. I slapped a brooch on it in a futile attempt to pull the outfit together. Then I gave up. It would have to do.
The caladrius had flown the ship. I was about to do the same when a voice stopped me.
“Nice shoes. Tres belle.”
“Dammit, Kash.” He was in my hammock, grinning like a rake. I narrowed my eyes. “You aren’t looking too flash yourself. Is that the same shirt you were wearing last night?”
“God, I hope so.” He extended his foot lazily to push off against the rail. The hammock rocked gently. “Where are you going?”
“Out. Like you.”
He raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t press for more information. “One should always make one’s own mistakes, instead of the mistakes of others, amira.”
“Out like me, then.”
“Dressed like that?”
“And what’s wrong with it?”
“It looks like you chose the pieces by throwing darts. Besides, it’s much too short.” He pointed vaguely toward my ankles and winked. “The whole world can see the top of your foot. You look like a hussy.”
I grabbed my skirt and flashed him my knees. He pretended to swoon. “Don’t worry. This is late Victorian, not early. More permissive.”
“If you say so. Just try to steer clear of the saloons and the dens of iniquity. I can tell you where they all are if you want to plan your route.”
I laughed. “More fun to find them myself.”
He called me back as I was halfway down the gangplank.
“Amira!”
“What?” I turned to face him; something was coming at me. I grabbed for it and wobbled on the slender board, only barely catching my balance as my fingers closed around the leather bag. It clinked, and I swore.
“Khahesh mikonam,” he said, giving me a little salute.
“I didn’t say thank you.”
“Bad manners. You’re welcome anyway.”
“Didn’t we just have this argument?”
“I won that money fair and square. Or do you disapprove of gambling too?”
I weighed the purse in my hand. “Yes . . . but not enough to give it back.”
His laughter followed me onto the wooden timbers of the dock. The streets ahead were empty in the thin light of morning. I stood there on the wharf between ship and shore; the mermaid at the prow leaned in like a conspirator, encouraging me.
This was old Honolulu, before tourism began in earnest, before skyscrapers and seaside hotels. There would still be locals speaking the native tongue, telling native stories; their culture was fading but not yet gone. Waikiki would still be a swamp, and there was nothing taller than three stories downtown, except, here and there, the steeples of churches, rising above the bars and brothels.
This is where I would have lived, if my mother hadn’t died.
I stepped off the dock and onto the packed earthen road.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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Only halfway up the short street between the dock and the town proper, the smell of fish and coal was overpowered by the scent of “spirituous liquors,” both new and used. Nu’uanu Avenue, or FID STREET, as some sailor had scratched into a wooden signpost, was aptly lined with grog shops. There were puddles in the street, although it hadn’t rained yesterday, and the rats barely bothered to get out of my way. I made a face as I stepped over a pile of manure. Paradise indeed.
Still, I kept my eyes wide open, waiting, hoping to find . . . something. Anything. Although I’d never walked this path, the memory of the map was clear in my mind’s eye, and the story my father had told me echoed between my temples. These were the streets where my parents had walked, arm in arm; perhaps even now I was passing by the front door of their flat. When I reached King Street, the wide avenue running past the palace along the curve of the harbor
, I took a left into Chinatown without even making the decision.
A mere block from the stately stone and stucco of downtown Honolulu, it was as though I’d wandered into another city. Here, a multitude of shops and shanties lined the street, mostly wooden and roughly built, each one squeezed against the next, with additional stories and extensions built out from the original structures, as tightly packed as a colony of oysters. It was very clear why the fire coming in 1886 would destroy it so completely.
The streets weren’t empty here. On a corner, a woman sat on blanket along with her wares: a dozen coconut half shells filled with fresh butter. A skinny boy walked by, carrying an impossibly large basket of greens down an alley, right past a pile of rotting wood from under which a mother cat glared at me, nursing her kittens. I stepped carefully over a foul gutter, already red with blood; halfway up the block I heard the shocked mutter of chickens as the butchers did their work. Farther down the street, two men in battered straw caps were unloading bags of flour from a mule cart and in through a doorway. The hand-painted sign above the wide street-front counter featured beautiful Chinese calligraphy, and, unsteadily, in English, MR. YOUNG’S BAKERY.
I dodged around the delivery men and pressed against the counter, breathing deep the smell of sugar glaze and butter. Steamed buns marked with lucky red dye sat warm and plump in baskets next to rows of moon cakes stamped with the symbol for fortune. The baker was old and his eyes were kind; had he ever smiled at my mother as she stood in his shop, inhaling? I opened the purse and was careful not to gasp in front of Mr. Young; Kashmir had given me much more than I’d expected.
Wandering north with two pork buns in my hands, I saw a sleepy little beagle who raised her head from the dirt as I approached. “I bet you’d like a bun.” The dog answered by giving the street a lazy thump with her tail, and I tossed her a pinch of dough that disappeared in a single sniff. I crouched down briefly beside the creature and patted the brown-and-white flank, raising a puff of dust into the air. When I stood, the beagle did too. “Rooooo!” she said. “Roooooooo!”