“Let me go!” she screeched. “What, you want all the neighbors to come running out thinking I’m being attacked?”
“Well, stop screaming and none of the neighbors will come out!” The ludicrousness of the statement hit him: there were no neighbors around here, only kudzu.
She was panting, glancing about furtively.
“I just . . .” he said. “All I did was ask you a question. Marcus, he told me nothing. I’m here to bury her. I just want to know how she died. That’s all.”
“A car accident,” she said, rubbing her arms and shivering. “That’s all I know.”
“You don’t know anything either?”
She shook her head, but was still looking at her feet. “No, I don’t.”
“And what about you. You remember your accident?”
Their eyes met, but then she looked away. “I don’t remember. I probably swerved to miss one of those damn squirrels.”
He could sense it all over her, that she was lying, and it irritated him. He was just done with it, done with the caginess, done with being stuck in the middle of this creepy kudzu. He wondered why he was even walking this girl home. Why should he? “Fine.” He started walking back in the direction of his car.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to my car and doing what I should’ve done: call the police.”
“No, no, you can’t!”
He felt her touch on him, and it sent waves of . . . shock, pleasure? He wasn’t sure . . . up his arm.
“Please don’t, I—I need you to come with me.” Her eyes were pleading. “My parents—they’ll kill me—”
“You’re a little old to be worried about what your parents think, aren’t you?”
“You don’t understand; if they find out—”
“Find out what. What? What are you hiding?”
She was silent for a moment. The kudzu rustled in a sudden breeze. Then she said, “You don’t understand.”
“Then talk to me,” he said. “All I want to know is what really happened to Cyn, and I’ll walk you home, and our quality time’ll be through.”
“She . . . I talked to her a few hours before the accident.”
Will took a step toward her. “And?”
“And she was . . . she was very agitated. She said she was going for a drive. There was no one in the car with her, I know that. She just went for a drive and took that corner a little too fast. She hit the pole just a few yards from where I hit, actually.”
Will eyed her suspiciously.
“That’s it. That’s all there is. Please, will you come with me now?”
He nodded despite himself. It wasn’t an answer for him, not enough of one, but he knew what he had to do: walk her to the edge of her drive—that was it, he wasn’t going to get involved in a let’s-have-dinner-with-the-parents-affair—hike on back to his car, call Officer Marcus, stay in the next town’s hotel overnight, and deal with everything in the morning. He’d dig for more answers from some of the other townsfolk.
“And yes,” she said. “I will miss Cyn. Many times, she was the only person I had to talk to.” She’d stopped at the edge of the road. “We’re here.”
Will was confused; all he saw was another thick jungle of kudzu in the threatening shapes of giant, hairy walking men. A tunnel of the stuff ended at a large lump.
A large lump with a chimney.
She pointed. “That’s my house.”
Will felt like a rock had lodged in his throat. It was a house, like the one that Cyn had begged him to go into that day. An unknown. Someplace dark, someplace scary, someplace where things were lurking. He took a deep breath. “Well,” he said. “If you’re sure you’re fine now, I’ll be heading on my way.”
“You really should come down. My parents will be so grateful.”
“I got you home,” he said. “I have to go back, and call Officer Marcus, and deal with the cars—”
“No, really, you have to!”
Her eyes were like his sister’s then, and for a moment he thought it was her, Cyn, and he flashed back to a long-forgotten day, a day when he’d left her there, alone, at the doorstep of the first completely kudzu-covered house in town: Mrs. O’Dell’s. He was eighteen and trying to figure out what he was going to do with himself after high school; she was twenty-four, and the kudzu fascinated her to the point where she’d enrolled in the county community college’s summer botany program.
She was at first enthralled with the kudzu’s magenta flowers, the ones with yellow tubes thrusting out of them like wicked tongues, the ones that smelled a little bit like hot honey and strawberries. Cyn began venturing from the road into the deep woods to pull them out and weave them into the braids of her long, chocolate hair.
Soon, she grew bored. She wanted variety.
“Someone told me about a place where there’s white flowers!” she said. “We learned in class that white flowers are really, really rare. So I’m going.”
“Only if your brother goes with you,” Mom had said. “They may be just plants, but I don’t see the point in wandering off into them by yourself. You could get hurt.”
Even at eighteen, the prospect struck fear into him—but he’d never say no to Cyn or his mother. In the end, he failed them both anyway, because the memory of Creepmore Manor had never been exorcised, and he’d stood there in front of Mrs. O’Dell’s abandoned kudzu-covered house, sweating in panic, temples throbbing—and then legs pumping as he ran, as fast as he could, stumbling over the kudzu that seemed to rise up and hook itself around his boots.
He had left Cyn behind.
She’d come home hours later, not quite right. It was like she was always someplace else after that, there but not. What if his abandonment had changed her life? What if she wouldn’t be dead now if he’d made a different decision?
“Please,” Helene said now. “Please.”
He swallowed. “I’ll walk you as far as the door.”
They made their way through the dense stuff, all the while Will growing colder, though he didn’t know why. And there was something else, too: he almost felt as though the kudzu whispered around him, goading him, urging him to go farther—
Helene stopped walking. “We’re at the steps,” she said, though to him nothing looked much different from the forest floor. She put one foot on a stair and then another, and slowly, Will made out the pattern of three steps leading to a porch. “Come on,” she said. “My parents really would like to meet you. They knew your sister pretty well, you know.”
He followed her up the first step. He took a deep breath. Second step. Deep breath. Third step. The porch. The door. He thought he heard movement from inside the dwelling—the creaking of a chair, the soft thump of heavy footsteps.
He wanted to run.
Then he remembered his sister again.
He squeezed his eyes shut and slipped his hand through the kudzu, and it pricked and tickled, sending a shudder up his spine.
He found the handle. It was cold and clammy. He gripped it and began to turn, using his full weight to get the door open.
The smell of stale beer, rotting baloney and cow dung wafted from inside, and another smell, like hot honey and strawberries—
He turned, and he ran. All the while, he felt the kudzu, closing in, breathing in his ear, reaching out, scratching his face.
The car. He knew it wasn’t going to start, and it was a mile from here, but he had this amazing urge to get to it, to force it to start, he didn’t know how, to get out of this town, get out and never come back. Screw the house, he was sure it was like all the others, covered in kudzu, people huddled up inside, living their darkened, tomblike lives as day in, day out, the vines spread . . .
He reached the road, stood in the lane. Which way was out of town? To the left. Yes, his car was to the left. He’d been heading out of town before the accident, and Helene’s house had been back toward town. They’d come a mile toward town—
—he thought about the position of her
car.
She’d been heading out of town.
He recalled what Helene had screamed when she’d first come to: Let me go. Their conversation: She was very agitated . . . She hit the pole just a few yards from where I hit, actually. His conversation with Officer Marcus: Did they check out the car? Yup. Did they find anything? Nope. Helene: I probably swerved to miss one of those damn squirrels. Creepmore Manor: I’ll never let you out of here!
He felt sick.
Cyn had been trying to leave town.
Helene had been trying to leave town.
Something had stopped them.
Wind rousted the kudzu animals around him and he thought again of the giant sloths. It was a mile, he knew, to his car, another four miles, he knew, to the town line. He stood in the middle of the road, dreading every step he had to take, trying to ignore the smell of hot honey and strawberries as daylight faded.
MUJINA
I find the painting at a tag sale, and know I have to have it. It’s a lush watercolor of a deadly curve on the Hana Highway on the other side of the island, a curve I navigated twice a day on my commute to Kihei, a curve just beyond the home we had to leave because of the injuries I sustained in the accident.
The waist-high canvas rests against a dilapidated bamboo chair. An ozone-laden breeze tells me if I’m going to buy this painting, I’d better do it soon—gray clouds bloom above the big mountain; lightning strikes pound the summit, and there are distant rumbles of thunder.
Across the Manilagrass under the palms, a plump, aging woman in a yellow blouse and turquoise earrings sits on a low stool. She shakes her head as she dickers over a jeweled box with a woman in a white pantsuit.
A raindrop.
I rest my weight on my cane, and with my free hand lean the painting toward me. Despite its resting against the damp cushion stuffing cauliflowering through a rip, the canvas’s brown paper backing is pristine, marred only by a fluorescent orange sticker which indicates she’s asking a hundred dollars.
“Gala?” asks Lani. She works at our art gallery and insisted on being my driver once I was released from the hospital. She appears beside me and tucks a strand of her long coffee hair behind her ear. “You really like this?”
I’m not sure whether like is the right word, so I’m slow to answer. “I do.”
“Well the strokes are exquisite, but . . . are you sure? I mean, wouldn’t this . . . bring back bad memories?”
I can’t remember anything from the night of the accident; my last memory is of drinking a glass of wine by our pool. “Maybe that’s what I need.”
Lani protests, but I’m already hobbling across the grass to Yellow Blouse, the blades pricking my bare ankles. She is Japanese. Her face is round and wrinkled; I can see that those wrinkles aren’t necessarily from age or even from the Hawaiian sun.
Another raindrop.
“The painting over there.” I motion with my head.
The woman rises on wobbly knees. “What painting?”
“The one against the chair.”
She hobbles too. I wonder what, because of my damaged leg, my gait will be like when I get to be that age. I’ve already put on twenty pounds due to lack of mobility.
“Mama, where are you going?” A young woman in a red shift and a carved wooden hair ornament rushes to Yellow Blouse’s side. “I told you I would handle anything like this.”
“Paintings.” Yellow Blouse’s brow is creased and her mouth is smashed into a grimace. “I told you not to put out any of her paintings!”
“I know you did, but we . . . we have more than we can fit on the walls, Mama.”
Despite the uneven ground I beat Yellow Blouse to the painting and wedge myself between them. “I’ll give you one fifty.”
“It’s not for sale,” the woman spits.
“Mama,” Red Shift says.
“It. Is. Not.” Yellow Blouse scrutinizes me with hard eyes.
“I’ll give you double.”
Red Shift’s eyes grow wide. “Nariko would be so excited. She’d want to see her art sell.”
Now it’s clearer than ever that I must convince them—they know the artist.
Yellow Blouse turns to her daughter, and the two argue in one of the forms of pidgin spoken all over the islands. A whisper in my ear whisks my attention to the painting, and I swear I see a frond of foliage move as though it were real. I reach to touch the canvas.
“Don’t.” Red Shift seizes my arm. “Mama says she’s changed her mind; you can have the painting.”
Relief washes over me.
She holds out her hand. “I’ll take the money.”
I rummage in my straw handbag and pull out a wallet fat with cash intended for a long day, but I’m sure now this is our final stop. “Who’s the artist?”
“My sister.” She looks down at her feet. “She passed away.”
Yellow Blouse shouts something angry at her daughter, throws up her hands, and waddles away.
“Mama wants me to tell you Nariko was killed by a mujina,” she says. “A woman without a face.”
I’m about to ask for more detail, but there’s another raindrop, then two. I signal Lani, who is paging through a rack of dresses, that we’re leaving.
“That’s why she’s changed her mind,” Red Shift says. “She thinks you are a very kind person. You seem gentle and responsible, like you would never do something like hide from the consequences of your actions.”
I’m confused. “What does that mean?”
“Did you buy it?” Lani interrupts.
I nod.
“Have a nice day.” Red Shift makes a stiff exit.
Lani carries the painting to her Nissan and pops open the hatchback. “What was all that about?”
“Nothing.” I make my way around to the passenger side door. “Listen, I . . . I’m tired. How about we grab lunch and head home?”
~~**~~
I have my husband Michael hang the painting over the teak buffet in our Kihei apartment. It’s a far cry from the sprawling, multileveled Polynesian-inspired home off the Hana Highway we sold for the sake of medical expenses and my health. We still have a distant view of the Pacific, but it just isn’t the same; the new canvas, therefore, becomes more of a comfort than I thought.
“Why would you want that?”
I’m surprised he isn’t as thrilled about the purchase; it’s something that as curator at our gallery he probably would have snagged for one of his annual exhibits on local artists. “It reminds me of home.”
He kisses my neck. “You are home.”
“You know what I mean.”
He pulls away from me. “Yes, well.”
I shouldn’t give him such a hard time. He’s stuck by me, even when I woke up from the accident and couldn’t remember—at least at first—who he was. Even as I’m facing a future devoid of everything that made me who I was: his right hand, the do-it-all wife, my job as the gallery’s first lady who handled all the volunteer coordination and fundraising activities.
“How about some lunch?”
He rummages in the cabinets as I sit on our orchid-patterned couch and admire the canvas; my thoughts turn to Nariko. Did this particular stretch of the Hana have meaning to her? Like me, did she travel it every day, know it as well as her own skin? I can almost feel the breeze on my face, smell the coconut palm and kahili ginger; the road is a place of wonder, a place where the thought this is what heaven must be like is not uncommon—but so is watch your driving. On occasion, someone never arrives at his destination, and inevitably the car is found crumpled at the base of a cliff.
I hear the pounding of footsteps and a shadow flits past.
It scares the hell out of me.
Michael appears at the threshold of the kitchen. “You okay?”
I limp as fast as I’m able to the sliding doors to the balcony, but I know there’s no way anyone could’ve run by because it’s simply not that wide. “I saw something black just—rush by me.”
“May
be it’s your eyes getting worse. When’s your next appointment?”
“Next week.” While part of my peripheral field of vision is damaged—and sometimes I’d swear I’m seeing something dark move in the corner of my eye—I know that I saw this. “But this is different.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. It was really there.”
There’s a long silence. Then he says, “How about grilled cheese and onion on pineapple bread?”
Maybe, I think, it was just a large bird.
~~**~~
Michael is at work. I’m sunk into the living room sofa, my back resting against one of a dozen orchid-spattered throw pillows. The sliding door is open, and the breeze fills the room with the scents of salt water and palm. It’s not as strong as it was at the Door of Faith Road house, but it brings me back to my last memory—my glass of wine by the pool the night of the accident. It always ends there.
I hear the footsteps again, that frantic running I heard yesterday. I put my book down and sit forward, cocking an ear, thinking it’s just people tromping about in one of the surrounding condos, but then I see it down the end of the hall.
A short, human-shaped shadow.
My breath catches, because I know what I’m looking at—I’ve seen those shows about haunted objects. Mama wants me to tell you Nariko was killed by a mujina. A woman without a face.
I’m fascinated and terrified.
“Who are you?”
It doesn’t move or make a sound.
What feels like a cold fist clutches my heart. “Who are you?” Fear twists my gut. “Are you Nariko?”
There is no response.
Without taking my eyes off the figure, I fumble for my cane. “I’m not going to hurt you, I—”
The footsteps pound as the black thing streams toward me, sails through the air, and hurls itself into the painting.
I scream.
Silence, save for the heaving of my own breath and the tittering of the canvas against the wall. The painting’s image roils like the surface of a pond, then stills.
Shaking, I clamber for the cell phone and dial Lani’s number.
It rings a few times before answering Aloha! You’ve found Lani, but if you get this message I’m probably . . .
The Shadows Behind Page 14