She turned back toward our apartment slowly, humming what I think was the river song, the only song my mother ever taught me. I waited, watching as she refastened the locks on the door, her greasy fingers slipping over the brass. She wiped her hands on her nightgown, said, “Well, that’s that,” and then I knew that she was still in this world, still with me.
“If that was Saja bothering you,” she said, “though I don’t think it was, he should have been fooled into thinking that was you I sacrificed to him.” My mother walked into the kitchen, closed the refrigerator door, turned on the water faucet. As she washed her hands, she explained, “Saja may be handsome, but he’s not too smart.”
My picture of Saja was correct only in the fact that he was a glutton. And though he craved the human spirit above all other foods, he could be fooled or placated with offerings of chicken or pork, heap ings of barley and rice, oranges and whiskey.
According to my mother, Saja was neither old nor ugly, but young and handsome, a dark soldier, alluring and virile. When she told me this, I then imagined Saja looked like my father, the hand- somest man I could imagine.
Though his picture showed someone tall and thin, with brownish-gray hair receding sharply from the steep bank of his forehead, I thought my father, because he was haole, looked like Robert Redford. At times I would hold the picture up to the mirror, trying to find my father’s parts in my face, in my high, straight nose, perhaps, or my mouth with its protruding teeth. Not in my tilting eyes or my hair, a sheet of relentless black like my mother’s.
If I imagined Saja looked like my father, it helped me understand why my mother flirted with death. She, too, must have thought my father was handsome above all other men, at least when they were newly married. I could see them when they first met, looking into each other’s eyes, stunned with love, humming “Some Enchanted Evening,” as their features melt into those of Liat’s and Lieutenant Joe Cable’s in South Pacific. Later, when I believed myself in love for the first time, it was this image I tried to call upon, but the only character I could see clearly was Bloody Mary, Liat’s mother. Her body, materializing in lucid majesty between them, dwarfed the minuscule lovers who clamored over and around her, pitiful in their attempts to speak or to kiss.
When my mother entered into her trances and began to dance, she would cajole the soldier of death, tease him, beg him to take her with him. She would dance, holding in her arms raw meat—chicken, or pig’s feet, or a pig’s head—calling, “Saja, Saja,” in a singsong voice. When I’d hear her call his name, as if she were summoning a favorite pet or a lover, I would cry out, “Mommy, what about me?” and throw myself across her body in order to keep her from floating away. Mother would step over me and continue waltzing with the pig’s head, daring Saja to cut in.
Tired of waiting, my mother twice tried to meet the Death Messenger on her own terms. The first time, she almost drowned in the bathtub. Apparently, after toasting Saja with a bottle of Crown Royal, she tried to take a shower and passed out. Sweet Mary, mad as hell when the relentless clanking of the water pipes woke her up before noon, called the police, as she had threatened to do so many times before. When they broke into our apartment, they found my mother dreaming under a thin layer of water, her nose pressed to the sluggish water drain.
The second time, like the first, no one could say for certain she had been trying to commit suicide. The doctors gave her the benefit of the doubt and said that she had fallen into the Ala Wai Canal by accident; she shouldn’t have walked so close to the edge when she couldn’t swim.
Only I knew she went swimming to try to catch death.
My mother was like that cat who could never catch the tail of happiness because she never stopped chasing it; despite all her begging and threats and wishes, she was snubbed by death until she stopped wanting it.
After the doctors pumped the yellow waters of the Ala Wai from my mother’s body, I spent even more time by the canal, watching the water trudge by my space underneath the bridge. I spent hours on the bank, sitting cross-legged on the foot of the bridge’s concrete support, trying to see what my mother saw in the brackish, polluted water. If I hung my feet over the ledge of the support, I would have been able to touch the water. But afraid of the stinging jellyfish that shimmered, ghostlike, underneath the surface, I never even tried.
I did, however, ask my mother what she saw in the water, why she tried to drown herself in the canal. Actually, I think I asked her why she wanted to leave me when she said I was the only thing she loved.
“Beccah,” she told me, touching my hair, “it’s not a matter of leaving you, but of retrieving something that I lost.”
My mother looked so sad then that I wanted to take back my words, words I said without thinking, just because I felt them. “Mommy,” I said, “I could help you look for it, if you told me what you lost.”
Back then, I thought I was good at finding lost objects. “Remember?” I told her. “Remember when you lost the jade frog Auntie Reno gave you for good luck? And I found it under the bed, under all those old boxes? Remember the Wishing Bowl money you thought we lost, that I found in Auntie Reno’s trunk?”
I named the specific things I’d found for her over the years, from ever since I could remember, but I was really asking her to remember me, her daughter, and how much I could help her. I was her finder, and she needed me. I wanted to remind her that she was bound to me.
Instead of telling me what she was looking for, my mother told the story of Princess Pari. She pulled me down next to her on the couch, partially cradling me as if I were a much younger child. When I tried to ask my questions, her fingers fluttered over my mouth in a gesture so soft and fleeting that even then I was not sure if she’d actually touched me.
“Once on a time, many, many years ago…,” my mother began as soon as I had wriggled into a comfortable space. With my knees tucked close to my body, I sat with my back nestled into my mother’s bosom. As she spoke, I could feel her words tickle the back of my head. “… A king and queen with no sons had yet another daughter, their seventh. Full of despair, not knowing what else to do to turn away their bad luck, the royal couple offered this girl to the Birth Grandmother spirit.”
My mother spoke often of the Birth Grandmother, the spirit assigned to protect and nurture the children of the world. Every year on my birthday, my mother would place an offering of sweet rice cake on our shrine, thanking Birth Grandmother for the blessing of my birth. I was taught to pray to her, calling her by name—Induk—if ever I was in trouble or frightened.
“Did you offer me to the Birth Grandmother?” I interrupted my mother.
My mother tapped me on the head. “Listen,” she said.
“When Princess Pari’s parents died without any sons, Saja the Death Messenger carried them to hell. The daughter felt sorry for her parents and dived through the skies, into the earth, and across the deep, dark river that flowed past Kasi Mun, the Thornwood Gate, which is the entrance to hell. At the gate, the princess threw handfuls of barley and rice, she rolled oranges and poured whiskey through the bars, until Saja, greedy for the offerings, opened the gate.
“Saja was so distracted by the feast, the princess was able to slip into hell and, once there, searched for her parents. She swam through schools of human souls trapped in fish bodies until she heard a song she recognized as the song her mother had sung when she was still in the womb. ‘Mama!’ she cried, and caught her parents with strips of long cloth that she tied around her waist. Quickly, before Saja could belch and close the gate, she dragged them back through the gates of hell, through the earth, through the skies, and into the Lotus Paradise, where they were reborn as angels.”