Fire Prayer

by Deborah Turrell Atkinson

  “People around here. Everybody talks, you know? They say he has a chemical imbalance.” Delia had her face back in the mirror, this time gouging a piece of fruit peel from her front teeth.

  The young woman managed to keep the van between the curving lane lines, but it had to be by some non-visual sense. Storm put a hand on the dashboard. “Chemical imbalance? Depending who you talk to, that could be anything from a cold to schizophrenia.”

  “I guess.” Delia took a half-minute to mull over the question. “I’ve seen him, you know. He talks to himself, or talks like someone’s with him. When there isn’t.” She rolled her eyes in Storm’s direction. “I’ve also seen him when he said good morning just like anyone else in town.”

  “Do people say he takes drugs?”

  Delia reached for the bag of spicy seed. “You think he might have a crystal meth lab or something? He used to work for a drug company, you know.”

  “No, I just wondered what the rumors are.” The last thing Storm wanted was to start any more.

  “No one’s said anything about Tanner using coke or ice, nothing like that. Not like some other people I’ve heard about.” Delia chewed, rolled the seed around in her mouth. “One of my friends says he’s manic. He’s supposed to take medication for it.”

  Storm’s stomach dropped. She hadn’t heard the term “manic” for a while, in part because people who knew her well avoided it. Storm’s mother had suffered from bipolar disease, and committed suicide when Storm was twelve. Storm’s adolescence had been a rough road. It was part of the reason she’d ended up on O‘ahu as a teenager.

  “Manic?” Storm repeated.

  Delia heard the uneasiness in Storm’s voice and shot her a glance. “Yeah, there’s a term for it. Bi-something. You know, manic-depressive. Brilliant people often have it.”

  Storm swallowed. Delia made a sharp right turn into the Lodge’s parking lot and Storm was glad for the excuse to hold on to her seat. “Bipolar,” she murmured.

  “That’s it.” Delia pulled to a stop in front of the Lodge. “You all right?”

  “Sure.” Storm opened the door and climbed out of the van. “Hey, thanks for the ride.”

  Storm waved to Delia and headed directly for the winding walk to her room, glad she didn’t have to go through the lobby. She wanted to be alone, think about the news she’d heard. It rang true, and it had resonated on a level she hadn’t expected.

  Chapter Six

  Tanner stuck to residential streets and open lots on his way to Maunaloa Highway. It was only a half mile or so, and it would be easy to hitch a ride once he reached the highway, but he wasn’t ready to see anyone yet. He needed to think, and walking helped, even if he sometimes had to go a long way. He’d been dealing with this problem a long time, and he figured he knew best how to take care of himself.

  His thoughts and emotions sometimes tangled like long, snarled fishing lines. Clumps and masses of thoughts and beliefs, which he had to sort through. Something else went on, too—elation and adrenaline in an electrifying blend. It felt good, but was a sensation he’d come to realize didn’t work if he was around other people.

  He needed to be alone to pick among the electrical impulses ricocheting inside his skull. Time and energy was required to release and separate the strands, get rid of the scrambled knots of sensation: the pounding pulse, burgeoning ideas, rampant desire mixed with paranoia, jealousy—and anger. It was his burden in life; easier than some people’s, harder than others’.

  He looked down at his feet in his comfortable, but muddy sneakers. They were his outside shoes, the ones he used to hike the path back to his cabin. He’d have to clean them. No, maybe leather shoes would be better when he went to visit people. Too late now, but next trip. A new shirt, too. One for himself and one for Luke. And the haircut, he’d drop by Skelly’s for that.

  Connor might be there, though. That’s okay. He’d deal with him. Plus, Connor was growing up.

  Jenny would at least know that he tried. Tried to be a good father. He was still trying, and wanted to do it better—and more often. Christ.

  Take a deep breath, swing his arms into the walk. Look around, the setting sun turning the ocean to a plate of molten steel. If he went down to the pier, he’d see the boats unloading their fresh catch. Muscular tuna, glittering mahi mahi. But not now. He had other things to do.

  Tanner checked his pulse. He didn’t have to put his fingers on his wrist or neck to do this; he could monitor it by thought. His brain working again. His breathing was deeper and easier now. He’d covered at least a mile and was calmer. He could stand still. It was one of the little tests he gave himself. Next test was to stand on one leg. If this worked, he would do one of the yoga moves he’d been learning from the new teacher in Kaunakakai, the Tree Pose, Vrksasana. If he could do that one, he was ready to interact with people without disturbing them. Tools to integrate mind and body, like the yoga instructor said. It wasn’t magic, but it helped.

  He stuck out his thumb, but the car, which looked like a rental, flew by. That was okay. Someone who recognized him would come by and pick him up.

  It was a little over ten miles to Kamalo, where the Richards brothers had their EcoTours business. The shop was in a great location for the service they provided. On the ocean, near Kamahuehue fish pond. Skelly didn’t live in the little apartment adjacent to the office any more, but he left a hidden key and let Tanner know he was welcome to use it. Tanner could shower and shave, and if Skelly was there, he’d not only help with a haircut, but give advice about Luke. Connor occasionally used the apartment when he wasn’t shacking up with his latest girlfriend, but Tanner looked for signs he was there and tried to avoid any conflict.

  Skelly had had his wild days, along with his brother, but he’d been married for three years now to Helene, a good woman, and he was father to eight-year-old Amy, Helene’s daughter from her first marriage. Luke called Skelly Uncle, and Skelly not only filled the role, but furthered it by acting like the brother Tanner never had. It was Skelly who got Luke interested in baseball, which was a source of pride and self-respect for the undersized eleven-year-old.

  Tanner made a mental note to talk to Storm about Skelly and Luke. If anything happened to him, he wanted some kind of legal document so that someone could take Luke in. Either Skelly or David Niwa. Niwa had also been a childhood friend, and his daughter was a friend of Luke’s.

  That was the way friends worked, wasn’t it? Skelly knew he could count on Tanner, too. Every week or so, when the weather was calm, Tanner would take a group out for Hawai‘i EcoTours. He never took money for it. Instead, he convinced Skelly that he enjoyed taking out the mainland groups. Funny thing was, he did—he took real pleasure in it. Consequently, he’d turned into the brothers’ most popular guide.

  Tanner watched another tourist car go by. C’mon, it was getting time for the locals to head home for dinner.

  His own stomach growled, but he ignored it and thought about tourists and smiled. Even his psychiatrist worried at first that herding a half-dozen affluent visitors from Michigan or New York through the wilds for several days would make him crazy, though Dr. Campbell used the words “distract” or “unnerve.” Tanner liked to say crazy, or lolo. It’s what it was.

  The first group he’d taken out was when Skelly was desperate—he had two groups scheduled, Connor had taken off suddenly for O‘ahu, and Skelly’s other employee had the stomach flu. Tanner did it because Skelly had no one else to turn to, and neither of them had been sure if the trip would work out.

  The excursions brought Tanner satisfaction not only from the experience of camping under stars thick as frost on a mountaintop, but also from interacting with the clients. The groups visited isolated beaches and tide pools, where if they saw anyone, it was a shore fisherman who waved a greeting to Tanner and continued with his own activities. Tanner gave lectures on unique examples of flora and fauna, plus he got the chance to look for rare seaweeds and other pla
nt life.

  He’d already found several edible seaweeds in varying water depths and was especially searching for Bryopsis plumosa, a source of kahalalide F, a possible treatment for a handful of serious diseases, including AIDS. Visitors were invariably fascinated with his work and some had intelligent and useful suggestions. He’d even made a serendipitous acquaintance, a Ph.D. at UCLA named Alex, who had taken his two sons kayaking for the weekend to celebrate the younger one’s birthday. Alex was very interested in Tanner’s work.

  Tanner wished Jenny would let him take Luke along on some of the expeditions, especially if children his age were along. But Jenny clung to her bitter righteousness like ‘opihi to their wave-battered rocks.

  He and Jenny had once shared so much. Tanner made a noise that sounded like someone had jumped on his chest. Herein lay one of his quandaries: if he took his pills, they insulated him from the cutting pangs of loneliness, the knowledge of how much he missed living with Luke and Jenny. But the pills had the same effect on his brain that dropping milk into water had; they blurred the clarity of his thoughts along with his emotions.

  He and Jenny once shared synergy; they had been greater than the sum of their parts, especially when Luke came into the picture. Tanner knew his family was far bigger than he was alone. He felt as if it was an entity that protected, sustained, and even imparted life force. With a start, he realized why Jenny looked stringy and pale. She had to come up with the energy to keep going on her own, and it was sucking the juice out of her. But so were her habits and negativity, he reminded himself.

  The sight of a big blue and white sedan cruising down the road pulled Tanner from his ruminations. He waved at the familiar vehicle. Enough of Jenny-thoughts, it’s not healthy to keep playing the same loop over and over. What he needed to deal with now was the fact that her fear and anger were keeping Luke from him.

  The police car pulled to a stop without bothering to pull to the side of the empty road. “Hey, Tanner,” Sergeant David Niwa said, “where you going?”

  “Skelly’s place. You headed that way?”

  “Sure, I’m on the way home. Hop in.”

  Tanner got in the front seat, next to Niwa, whom he’d known since they were in grammar school. Niwa lived about a mile from Skelly’s and Helene’s house, and the EcoTour office was on the way to both their homes.

  “Howzit?” Niwa asked.

  “Okay.” Tanner knew right away the answer betrayed his frustration.

  Niwa drove one-handed and glanced over at him. “You been up at your old place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You get to see Luke?”

  “A little.”

  “Jenny okay?”

  “I guess.”

  Niwa shook his head sympathetically. “Divorce with kids sucks.”

  “No kiddin’.”

  “Luke’s got a big game tomorrow, doesn’t he?”

  Goddamn, if he’d known, he’d forgotten, and Jenny hadn’t reminded him. But he could have asked Luke, too, instead of jumping right into an argument with her.

  Niwa was watching him, and he was very good at watching people.

  “What time’s the game?” Tanner asked.

  “Five-thirty,” Niwa said. “Haley’s pitching.”

  “That’s great.” Haley had been competing with one of the other kids for the position. “She deserves it.”

  “We’ll see,” Niwa said. He twisted his mouth. “Next year, she has to play softball.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Yeah, I’d have to agree. How’s Luke doing?”

  “Okay.” Tanner paused, then decided to voice a concern. “He told me Jenny stayed out all night a week or ten days ago.”

  One of Niwa’s eyebrows rose. “Was he frightened?”

  “Worried about his mom. He worries about me, too. Doesn’t seem fair.”

  “She wasn’t working a shift at the hospital, I gather.”

  “No.” Tanner clasped and unclasped his hands. “Seems like she’s been drinking a bit, too.”

  Niwa turned into the drive for Hawai‘i EcoTours. “I’ll keep my ears and eyes open for you. Luke’s more mature than most eleven-year-olds. He’ll be okay.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Niwa peered at the office through the darkening foliage. “Don’t see any lights on in there. You want a ride someplace else?”

  “I’ve got a key.”

  “Okay then. See you tomorrow at the game?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  Tanner made his way along the round stepping-stones that paralleled the tangled and drooping hala trees to the paved walk, which was lined with herb pots. One of Helene’s hobbies, and one that everyone who knew her appreciated. She was an excellent cook and generous with whatever she had on hand. She declared the plants grew better at the office than on their too-shady home lot, which was a couple of miles inland. Tanner looked around to make sure he wasn’t observed, then made his way to a rosemary bush and tipped the pot just enough to pull a key from underneath.

  He clattered around opening the door, went back to replace the key under the pot, then stepped inside. The office was dark, shaded by the thick hala grove outside the window and the low angle of the setting sun. A bank of light switches was right next to the door, he knew, and he ran his hand along the wall and hummed a song that had been buzzing through his head.

  But before he found the light switch, a hurtling weight flattened him against the wall. Stunned, his breath rushed from his lungs in a grunt and the strength left his legs. It was all he could do to gasp like a speared ono before he collapsed to the rough carpeting.

  Chapter Seven

  Storm opened the door to the hotel room and closed it carefully behind her. “Hamlin?”

  No answer. He must still be at the barn. She walked into the room, flicked on the lights, and sat down on the bed to pull on her boots. Instead, she flopped backward and stared up at the ceiling.

  Luke was eleven, very close to the age she’d been when her mother died of the same affliction Tanner apparently suffered. One day, she’d come home from the seventh grade and found her home full of people. Concerned people, who didn’t know how to tell an emotional and confused twelve-year-old girl what was wrong.

  It had been Aunt Maile who’d grabbed the flustered adolescent and taken her outside to the peace of the garden. Under the shade of a mango tree in the front yard—Storm still associated the over-ripe smell of fallen mangoes with loss—Maile told Storm that her mother had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Yes, that meant she had died. Her spirit had joined the ancestors. Yes, she was now with pueo, the owl, her totem, her ‘aumakua. Apparently she’d taken the pills not long after Storm left for school in the morning. No, there was nothing Storm could have done to stop her. She was sick, my dear one, you couldn’t have known. You couldn’t have known.

  Storm had spent months looking for owls, her mother’s spirit animal. In trees, under the eaves of neighbors’ homes, storage sheds, whatever shadowy lair tugged her eyes and hopes. Owls came to her in dreams, singing in her mother’s rich mezzo-soprano. These days, Storm didn’t see them often, but they still captured her attention and she always sent a mental greeting to the animal. Sometimes she asked the winged creatures why.

  Storm felt a bond with Luke. One of the difficult aspects of having a parent with bipolar disorder or mental imbalance was that not everyone viewed mental illness as a disease. To some, it was a weakness. And some scrutinized the sufferer’s children. These things could be inherited, couldn’t they?

  Through much of her youth, Storm alternated between the concern that she might have inherited the disease and angst over her own self-absorption. She was alive, wasn’t she? She also had Aunt Maile and Uncle Keone, who had stuck with her through the ordeal of losing her mother and then through the more ordinary adolescent ordeals.

  Storm remembered drawing comfort from Aunt Maile’s story of how Storm’s
mother had chosen the owl ‘aumakua from their mother’s side of the family, whereas Maile and Storm had chosen pua‘a, the pig, from their father’s side. It gave Storm some distance from her mother’s choices, yet still connected her to the strong framework of the family.

  She knew she had always been lucky to have loving family and friends. When her father died of kidney disease, she’d been sixteen and a rebel. Not a particularly likeable person, yet they’d all stood by her.

  Who did Luke have? Jenny looked haggard and worn, and Storm had seen her with a beer at four in the afternoon. An early cocktail after a fight with the ex might be an exception, but Storm had a hunch it wasn’t. The woman didn’t exude an aura of happiness.

  She needed to keep Tanner’s request in mind, though it had become more complicated. The gossip from Moloka‘i’s coconut wireless needed to be verified. Luke’s best interests were tied not only to Jenny’s parenting skills, but to Tanner’s.

  Storm sat up and pulled on her boots. She had a nice long weekend to sort through Luke’s situation. A scrap of paper peeked from her jeans pocket and she pulled it out. And then there was Jenny’s note, another surprise. Skelly Richards, 567-3208.

  Hamlin was going to find this coincidence and Delia’s reaction to Brock Liu very interesting. Storm rose to her feet with a surge of anticipation. For a few hours, she could put aside her empathetic yet gloomy thoughts on Luke’s welfare and enjoy herself. Her loved ones, horses, and a new baby foal were only minutes away.

  Chapter Eight

  “Get off.” Tanner’s plea was muffled by the rough indoor/outdoor carpet. Imbedded sand made it more abrasive and his assailant knew it.

  “The fuck you doin’ here?” The words were borne on breath like burning rubber. The attacker made a phlegmy chuckling noise and rolled up from Tanner’s head and neck, but sat with his full weight in the small of Tanner’s back. Now Tanner could hardly breathe.