Eden Burning

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Always-always?” Benny asked quickly, repeating himself for emphasis in the Hawaiian style.

  “I’ll stay in Hawaii always-always,” Nicole said, reassuring both of them.

  Nicole settled lotus-style onto an oversize chaise longue that waited beneath the jacaranda trees. That was her signal to Benny that it was time to be quiet.

  A weathered wood table stood within arm’s reach to one side of the big chair. The furniture had appeared beneath the jacarandas the day after Grandmother had discovered Nicole propped awkwardly against a tree trunk, spare pencils clamped between her teeth, frowning and sketching madly before the incoming afternoon rains veiled the trees in mist.

  At first she had tried to sit on the ground to draw, but even the lush carpet of ferns couldn’t blunt the edges of the lava beneath the green cloak of plants. In her typical generous fashion, Grandmother had quietly made sure that the new family member wouldn’t have to stand in order to work her magic with pencil and paper.

  Making no more fuss than a falling leaf, Benny settled just behind Nicole on the well-padded chaise. He positioned his own sketch pad and began to draw.

  It was quiet but for the gentle, rhythmic surf and the sweet, erratic music of birds calling from the ohia’s highest branches. Nicole heard the sounds only as a background to her concentration. Working quickly, cleanly, she sketched her favorite jacaranda. Though the tree was taller than all the others, it was beautifully proportioned, graceful in its strength, and somehow essentially feminine.

  Every time she saw that tree, she thought of the ancient legends about women who were turned into trees to keep them safe from the sexual appetites of men.

  Today her favorite jacaranda had been reduced by its natural cycle to pure, naked lines. No halo of amethyst flowers blurred the stately strength of the tree. No sighing, delicate, fernlike leaves distracted from the endurance of the trunk itself.

  In this pause between rest and becoming, the tree called to Nicole’s intelligence as well as to her senses, reminding her that the jacaranda’s lush flowering was possible only because of the strength and resilience of the trunk itself. Without that silent, enduring power as a support, the buds pushing tightly from branch tips would never know the instant of blooming.

  With an intent frown she went to work trying to capture all that she felt and thought about the jacaranda, femininity, life, and risk. At the edge of her concentration, she was aware of Benny coming and going as quietly as a breeze. He sketched with her for a time, then roamed a bit, then came back and sketched some more. At ten, he had learned the kind of patience some adults went a lifetime without finding.

  When she thought to look away from her sketch pad again, she saw from the sun’s position that she had been working for at least two hours. Her stomach was growling unhappily. The cup of coffee she had grabbed for breakfast just wasn’t enough.

  “Eat?”

  The soft question came from the direction of a wildly overgrown path that eventually ended up at the big house.

  “Eat,” she agreed. “Hungry-hungry.”

  “Soon-soon.”

  There was a rustle of foliage, then the soft, uneven sounds of Benny running up one of the shortcuts only he knew about. Soon he would be back, lugging a basket of food that would feed five people.

  The first few times he had appeared with food, Nicole had gone to the big house and protested that it wasn’t necessary, she could certainly get her own lunch. Grandmother had simply smiled and continued sending huge piles of food down to the beach whenever her favorite grandson appeared with a hopeful grin and an empty basket.

  In time Nicole finally understood that the Kamehameha family had adopted her. They treated her just like the daughters, nieces, aunts, and mothers who came and went from the estate in laughing waves. The Kamehamehas refused to take money for rent or for any of the other less obvious things they did for Nicole. She repaid the family in the only way they would accept.

  She became one of them.

  She taught their children ancient and modern dances, showed them basic drawing techniques, and gave her own drawings to any family member who looked at a sketch more than once. And she danced in the Kipuka Club, bringing to its small stage the incandescent sensual yearnings that Tahitian dances expressed so vividly.

  “Picnic,” Benny announced proudly.

  Carrying a big basket, he popped out of what looked like a solid wall of ferns and bushes. He had an uncanny way of finding paths in even the most tangled, rugged places. His grandmother’s big estate was like his very own playground.

  Nicole laughed at the boy’s smug grin. The clever Benny had managed to wangle that most prized of things—a solo picnic with the redheaded haole. The children’s very own goddess.

  Despite Nicole’s denials, the island children half believed she actually was Pele reborn. She had given up trying to talk them out of it, just as she had given up trying to pay rent to Grandmother.

  “Picnic,” Nicole agreed.

  Without any care for his own sketches scattered on the end of the chaise, Benny started to unload the basket of food.

  “Wait!” She snatched up the sheets of paper. “You’ll ruin your sketches.”

  The boy’s thin shoulders moved in a shrug. “Bad,” he said, meaning his sketches.

  “Good,” she countered firmly.

  He shrugged again and started laying out food.

  On her half of the chaise Nicole spread out the sketches Benny had made of the jacaranda trees. With each new page she saw, she felt tiny, ghostly fingertips brush up her spine.

  As always, there was something in each of Benny’s sketches that made the landscapes surreal. Sometimes it was a subtly oversize blossom. Sometimes it was a tree whose leaves were upside down. Sometimes it was the suggestion of a face in the clouds. Often it was something that couldn’t be defined, something as unique as the thin-faced boy who was now dividing fruit, bread, and smoked chicken between two plates.

  Ignoring the sketches, Benny began to eat. Nicole joined him, consuming food quickly, but she couldn’t stop looking at the boy’s work. One sketch in particular was stunning. The drawing had an eerie, extraordinary sense of having caught the precise moment when a group of maidens quivered on the edge of taking root and becoming something they couldn’t imagine.

  Like Nicole, Benny had sensed that the jacarandas were fundamentally feminine. Unlike her, he was able to translate his intuition into a unique vision of a time and a place where myth, woman, and nature were one and the same.

  “Good-good-good,” she said, catching the boy’s chin in her hand. She held him that way until his big black eyes slowly met hers. “You have a wonderful gift, Benny. You see what no one else can, and then you capture what you see on paper.”

  “It’s not like your trees.”

  The fact that he was taking the trouble to speak in a complete sentence told Nicole how important drawing was to the boy.

  “Do you look like me?” she asked.

  He laughed and gave her a glance that said he was very much Bobby’s son. “No-no-no.”

  “Then why should your art look like mine?”

  He looked from his sketch to the tree, then from her sketch to the tree. “Different.”

  “Of course. That’s how they should be. Different. I love your drawings, Benny. They make me see back into time. Paradise. Eden before the snake.” She grinned suddenly. “Hawaii before haoles. No one else can make me see that. Only you.”

  The boy gave her a sudden, brilliant smile.

  She kissed his shiny hair and ruffled it with her hand. Her watch face gleamed against his black mop. She was running late.

  Again.

  “Oops. Gotta go.” Quickly she gathered up her sketches of the jacaranda tree and the straining buds. “Lead me back to my cabin by the shortest way you know. I have to drop something off at the lab before Dr. Vic leaves for lunch.”

  “Ate,” he said.

  “Yes, we did. But they’re on a diff
erent schedule at the lab. Haole time. They eat lunch at noon rather than ten.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure-sure.”

  He thought quickly, couldn’t come up with a way to keep the beautiful Pele to himself any longer, sighed, and took her hand. “Sure-sure.” As he ducked into the greenery, he muttered, “Haoles dumb.”

  Nicole snickered and bent double to follow him.

  By the time the Hilo bus finally arrived at the rim of the volcano, Nicole was sure she would miss Dr. Vic. Then she spotted him hurrying toward his car like a man with a mission.

  “Dr. Vic! Wait!”

  Carrying a big envelope, she ran across the parking lot toward the small, white-haired man who was one of her favorite people in Hawaii. He ran the lab with a quiet iron fist that kept the scientific prima donnas from turning the place upside down, yet he always made time to answer any questions she had. If he confused her more often than not with the depth and detail of his answers, she would just ask a different, related question until she understood.

  “I have a drawing for you to look at,” she said as she came up to him. “For your wife’s birthday.”

  “Excellent.” He smiled up at Nicole like a happy leprechaun. “I was afraid I’d missed you.”

  Unlike most men, Dr. Vic didn’t care if Nicole was inches taller than he was. He just liked having someone to talk to besides scientists who were interested in only three things: volcanoes, sports, and sex, not necessarily in that order.

  “So was I,” she admitted. “I was drawing, and I forgot the time.”

  “Let’s see,” he said eagerly, standing on tiptoe as she eased the sheet from the stiff envelope.

  Against a backdrop of misty blue, a jacaranda lifted its arms to the sun. The tree’s bark was clean, smooth, as sensuous as the sunlight bathing its tightly budded branches.

  “Oh, my.” Dr. Vic touched the edge of the sheet with a hesitant fingertip. “Exquisite. Simply exquisite. Ettie will be thrilled.”

  Nicole smiled almost shyly as she slid the sketch back into its protective envelope. “I’m glad. A fortieth wedding anniversary should have a special gift. If you like, I’ll frame it for you.”

  “No, no. I’ve imposed on you quite enough. How much do I owe you?”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s just a sketch and you’ve spent hours explaining—”

  “Nonsense,” he interrupted, reaching into his shirt pocket for the check he had written earlier. “I thought this might happen, so I went to the gift shop at the national park and priced your drawings that are for sale there. Here you are.”

  “But—”

  He gave her a smacking kiss on her chin, pressed the check into her hand, and took the envelope. “Thank you, my dear. Oh, before I forget it—Dr. Chase Wilcox was looking for you a minute ago. Something about a kipuka project.” He smiled slyly. “I understand you met him last night. Wish I’d seen it. Must have set the stage on fire.”

  “She sure did.”

  Nicole spun around at the sound of Chase’s voice. For an instant his eyes were cold with something like contempt. Then he smiled at Dr. Vic.

  “I’m asking for a rematch tonight,” Chase said. “Come to the club and see for yourself.”

  “I’ll bring Ettie. She loves the way Nicole dances.” He gave Nicole a pat on her arm. “Thanks again, dear.”

  Chase watched the little man hurry to his car and wondered at the effect Nicole had on anything with a Y chromosome, no matter what age. He hadn’t missed the swift, smacking kiss and the check changing hands. He even knew how much it was, because he had been at Dr. Vic’s desk while he wrote it.

  He had to take off his hat to the hula dancer—she wasn’t afraid to ask a good price for her services.

  With quick, sideways glances, Nicole measured Chase’s tight stance. She half expected him to reach for her and finish what they had started last night. When he didn’t do more than give her mouth the kind of look that raised her heartbeat, she was grateful.

  At least the part of her that believed in logic, rationality, and such things was relieved. The rest of her simply yearned. But she kept her hands by her side. She needed some sign from him that he felt the same sense of rightness she did when they were together, a rightness that was based on far more than just physical attraction.

  She needed to know more about Chase in a rational way as well as in the instinctive, almost overwhelming way that only he had ever made her experience.

  “Anyone else waiting around in the lab to kiss and pat you?” Chase asked in a tone that wasn’t quite humorous.

  She blinked. “Er, no. It was just that Dr. Vic needed a present for his wife, and I—”

  “Needed the money.” Angrily Chase wondered what else she had done to earn the nine-hundred-dollar check that was dangling from her fingers. “Going to fix your car now?” Or are you going to keep on flashing those golden eyes at Dane and offering rides?

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to take it up with my bank balance.”

  Chase changed the subject before he lost his temper and set back the seduction he had planned. “Do you have a few hours free now? I’d like to see some of the kipukas Dane said you knew how to find. Sounds like at least one of them might be perfect for the Islands of Life project.”

  Relief and eagerness gave Nicole’s smile unusual brilliance. Exploring the kipukas would give them the time they needed to learn about each other. Time alone with Chase would let them talk about anything and everything, to ask questions, to answer them.

  She needed to reassure herself that his interest in her was real, that she hadn’t dreamed him up from the depths of her own need, that he wanted to know her on as many levels as she wanted to know him.

  “I have as many hours as you need,” she said quickly, “as long as I get back to Hilo in time to get ready for work tonight.”

  “Work?”

  “Dancing at the club. It’s as close as the Kamehamehas come to allowing me to pay rent.”

  Remembering the casual intimacy of Bobby’s kiss last night, Chase doubted that dancing was all she did for the handsome giant. But thinking about it wouldn’t do anything for his already raw temper. “Great. Let’s go kipuka crawling. Do we start here or do we need the car?”

  She looked at what he was wearing—shorts, hiking boots that looked new despite some gouges here and there, and a short-sleeved shirt. “If you’re sure that’s what you want to do. The kipuka I’m thinking of is kind of a hike. Lots of aa.”

  “How do you think these boots got scarred?”

  About every five minutes Nicole glanced over her shoulder to reassure herself that Chase wasn’t having any trouble keeping up with her. The trail she had chosen was little more than a series of twists and turns and small cairns set out across a piece of Kilauea’s stony side. While the trail could be quite rough, the volcano itself rose very gently, almost secretly, from sea to summit.

  As with all of Hawaii’s volcanoes, Kilauea was shaped like a slightly curved battle shield. It was very different from the steep-sided, cone-shaped volcanoes of California, Italy, Mexico, or Japan. Hawaii’s volcanoes were created by gentle, repeated lava flows, especially of the thicker aa lava, which lay like massive, carelessly thrown ropes across the Hawaiian landscape. Chunks of lava that once had floated on liquid rivers of stone like ice floes on the sea now were frozen in place. Jagged edges of aa stuck out like knives, ready to slash any careless hiker.

  Not much grew on the part of the trail Nicole and Chase were walking over at the moment. The lava flow was largely pahoehoe. Its smooth, bright surface was easy on hiking shoes, but it broke down into soil very slowly. Seeds and roots just didn’t have anywhere to take hold. Because of that, the trail was little more than a slightly scuffed thread twisting over the shiny surface of the land. The lava itself was black, smooth, and reflected the tropical sunlight almost like a mirror, redoubling the tropical heat.

  Sweat gathered on Nicole’s forehead, down her spine, and in the shado
wed valley between her breasts. The hot slide of drops didn’t bother her. Between Tahitian dancing and all the hours she spent climbing lava slopes, she was very much at home with the result of physical effort. As far as she was concerned, sweat wasn’t a big deal. It was just the way bodies tried to cool themselves in the humid, wraparound heat on the wet side of the Big Island.

  Chase wasn’t bothered by sweat either, and for much the same reason—he was used to it. At the moment he was more interested in watching the deceptively slim legs ahead of him than in worrying about his increasingly wet shirt. Nicole’s legs might be slender, but they were strong. She was hiking over the rough land at a pace that would have left a lot of men gasping and looking for a place to sit in the shade.

  At first Chase had thought she was trying to walk him into the ground, and he had smiled to himself at the thought of disappointing her. But as the hike continued, she didn’t give any of the subtle signals of a woman challenging a man. Then he had wondered if she was simply showing off her own well-conditioned body. Again, none of the signals were present. She glanced back to check on him from time to time, but she didn’t linger or pose, inviting his approval.

  Finally he decided that the brisk pace was her normal one. It showed in the regularity of her breathing and the grace of her stride. That got him to thinking about some other ways to test a woman’s endurance and flexibility and balance. His breath quickened as he pictured the sensual possibilities.

  How the hell can a woman look sexy in sawed-off hiking shoes, ragged khaki shorts, and a faded halter top with frayed ties? he asked himself half whimsically, half angrily.

  The only answer was the elegant swaying of her hips as she walked up the trail.

  With a mental kick to his own butt, Chase brought his attention back to the faint trail. As a vulcanologist he was accustomed to rough-country hiking, but Kilauea’s slopes had some rather special traps for a careless walker. Sometimes ground that looked literally rock solid turned out to be a thin roof left by a fast-moving stream of molten lava long ago. Sometimes the ground underfoot was an even thinner bubble of cooled lava with nothing but air inside the fragile, now-cold shell. If a foot broke through the top of the bubble, the hiker stood a good chance of getting everything from a few cuts to a broken ankle.