* * *
Nori found Leia in the kitchen, a half-strung lei hanging from her arm. Tall and amicable, Leia had a quiet strength most missed but Nori held dear. Hadn’t she been the older sister who always protected her? She was a younger version of Mama, a nurturer, and had inherited her lei stringing skills. Mama Natua was once celebrated as the best lei maker in Hilo town, creating beautiful garlands from the island’s natural bounty, and was well known for weaving traditional open-ended ti leaf leis coveted by hula dancers from all the islands. The locals always joked that “Mama Natua could make a beautiful lei made out of tin cans!” Nori loved watching Mama Natua’s hands in constant motion, while the Natua porch and kitchen always resembled the outdoors—baskets of flowers, ti leaves, fern fronds, seashells, even seeds piled high on the table—the air thick with sea salt, or smelling sweetly of everything from pine to pikake when Nori walked in, her bare feet sliding across traces of sand on the wood floor. It was no different now.
“How is she doing?” Nori asked.
“She has no idea Mauna Loa has erupted,” Leia answered.
“Better that way, yeah.”
Leia nodded, and peeked into the basket Nori carried to see a banana bread and ono butter mochi. “Thank you for this,” she said, and led Nori into Mama’s dark, warm bedroom, which smelled stale and medicinal. “Lately, she doesn’t like the room too bright,” Leia whispered.
Nori nodded. When her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she saw white-haired Mama sitting in an old armchair.
Over the years, Mama had stubbornly refused to see a dentist or a medical doctor. She didn’t trust modern medicine. She believed that all the medicine she needed came from the plants that grew all around her. Nori hoped she might consider letting Daniel examine her since she’d known him since birth.
Once majestic, Mama was now a shrunken and wrinkled version of herself sitting in the chair. Her hands still moved in front of her as if she were stringing together the leis that had been worn by everyone from well-known hula dancers to the movie star Shirley Temple to Queen Lili’uokalani. It was believed that pure Hawaiian blood flowed through Mama’s veins too, even if it had been thinned by generations of outside marriages. She’d always been their closest connection to the old Hawaiian ways.
Mama Natua looked up. “You come home, Noelani?”
“Mama, it’s not Noelani. It’s Nori. You remember Nori,” Leia said.
Mama Natua looked from her daughter to Nori. “You change your hair, yeah?”
Nori instinctively touched the back of her hair, peppered with gray. “No, it’s the same, Mama.”
“Where your bangs?”
Nori smiled. “Mama, I haven’t had bangs since I was seven years old.”
Mama Natua watched her suspiciously. “I don’t know you,” she said, turning away.
“Of course you do, Mama,” Leia said. “It’s your favorite, Nori. Little Nori from up the street. You’ve known her all of her life.”
A look of bewilderment washed over Mama Natua’s face.
“Look what I brought you,” Nori said, hoping to bring her back. She took out the bag of salty dry plums. “I know it’s your favorite.” She opened the bag and put one in the palm of her hand.
“Nori such a smart girl, yeah,” Mama said, slipping the dry plum between her lips and sucking noisily on it. “Sometimes she looked so sad. Broke my heart.”
Nori looked at Leia.
“Good days and bad,” Leia said softly. “She comes and goes.”
“You know my younger daughter, Noelani? She’s away in Honolulu for secretarial school. First one in the family to leave the island, yeah,” the old woman said, as she sucked on the dry plum and smiled.
“Mama, that was a long time ago,” Leia explained. “Noelani’s home now and working at the Kailua Plantation. She’ll be by later to see you.”
“Why you cut your hair? Makes you look old,” Mama Natua said.
“Mama,” Leia pleaded.
“I won’t cut it so short next time,” Nori said, appeasing.
It didn’t matter what Mama said now, Nori thought. I am getting older. She would be forty-nine in a few months. Would she one day forget everyone and everything, her mind a blank canvas? Nori shook the thought away. Instead, she smiled, pulled a chair over, and sat down next to the woman who had saved her childhood. She glanced at a photo of Mama and Uncle Nestor by her bedside, taken just after they married, both so young and beautiful. Nori reached for Mama Natua’s hand, her fingers tracing the deep grooves along Mama’s open palm before she placed another dried plum in it.
Mama stared at her for a moment. “I know you,” she said, her eyes brightening.
10
Fire and Ice
Daniel stayed mostly indoors during the first two days of the eruption, getting reacquainted with his surroundings while the volcanic fog blanketed him in a sleepy haze that slowed time. As soon as the air cleared, Daniel was outside walking along the outskirts of downtown, quiet streets lined with small, single-story clapboard houses with rusted corrugated roofs and sun-bleached walls, both foreign and familiar at the same time.
He used to walk home this way every day from school, but now everything appeared much smaller than he remembered. His old high school and the baseball field looked faded and run-down, and the bleachers where he sat with Maile, his high school girlfriend, sagged in the distance. All those weekends spent with her at the beach or Wailuku River, along with Wilson, Mano, and other high school friends, smoking and drinking whatever could be pilfered from their parents without getting caught. Daniel tried not to think of Maile when he was in Chicago, but here, she was everywhere. She’d been the only girl for him back then. The last he’d heard from her was a card she’d sent after his mother passed away. She was living in Honolulu and engaged to be married. All at once, his mother was gone and so was Maile. He had no right to hope for anything from her, but he’d still felt grief-stricken.
Daniel picked up his pace. After so many years living in Chicago, his body still hummed with the traffic and noise bouncing off the tall buildings. A part of him had been apprehensive about returning to Hilo, anxious that he wouldn’t be able to adjust to the unhurried island quiet, only to arrive in the midst of a different kind of turmoil and chaos with Mauna Loa’s eruption. He was quickly reminded that the island was just as volatile and unpredictable as anything a big city could offer.
What Daniel didn’t miss about Chicago was the cold. He still felt the icy wind against his cheeks, chapped raw and red, his fingers so cold he could barely get his key in the door. He had shivered through so many frigid winters dreaming of warm Hilo mornings that smelled sweetly of papaya and guava, pikake and ginger flowers. It was what he longed for most when he walked along the shore of Lake Michigan bundled up like an Eskimo during the long, dark winters that felt like a scentless, icy purgatory. His first winter there, he couldn’t imagine how people lived in such cold.
Instead, Daniel had returned to a gray veiled sky of smoke and ash and the scent of sulfur that was finally being carried away by the warm trade winds. Still, he felt calmer to be home, away from Chicago and the turbulence of the hospital, the knot in his stomach loosening. Daniel walked toward downtown, along ghostly streets that were once lined with new markets and small restaurants opened by the influx of workers coming for the plantation work.