Auntie Reno pressed her lips together. “Mmm-hmm,” she said. “I tink we seen enough.” She turned to go, but my mother continued to stand there, her eyes intense and far away, as if she were listening to something carried on the air.
“Can you hear it, Beccah?” my mother whispered as she moved down the steps and into the yard. She forded through the grass, the wedelia, and the banana patch, all the way up to the rusty chicken-wire fence that marked the boundary.
“Mommy?” I ran after her, brushing from my face and hair the mist of fruit flies that sucked on the rotting sweet bananas. “Do you hear Saja? Is he coming to get us?”
“Hush,” my mother told me. She bowed her head, resting her forehead against the fence. Loops of wire pressed octagons into her face, just below the hairline, imprinting a headdress of chains.
Auntie Reno, trampling a banana sapling as she clambered up to the fence next to us, asked, her face sweaty and excited, “Is the girl right—you see spirits here?”
“Shh,” my mother told Reno without looking up. “Listen.”
Auntie Reno and I scowled at each other, but we quieted, trying to hear what my mother heard, trying to catch the wails of the restless dead carried by the wind.
“There! Do you hear that?” my mother whispered. “The song of the river?”
Although I was wrong in thinking that Saja the Soldier of Death would not find us in that clean-smelling house, I am glad that my mother did not die in our damp and dark apartment in The Shacks before she could know what it was like to live in a house with shiny wood floors and walls instead of mildewed carpet and peeling plastic wall paneling. Before she could forget about washing clothes by hand in a rust-stained bathtub and hanging laundry to dry out of windows that sucked in the sound and soot of street traffic. In the Manoa home, she marveled at the luxury of throwing laundry into an automatic washing machine and hanging it on a clothesline in the backyard to catch the smell of the sun among the banana trees and heliconia, the ‘uki ’uki and hibiscus.
My mother loved the expanse of her yard, her wild garden; except for weeding and pruning the wedelia and nut grass whenever they threatened to choke the other plants, she let things grow how and where they would. In the late mornings, when the traffic died down, my mother would set up a lawn chair in that jungle and listen. She said that on quiet days she could hear the Manoa River and would dream of riding it to the ocean.
When I walked into her room, shaking the bag of doughnuts, I thought she was sleeping off a trance. After a two-week trance, my mother would sleep for days; even after a brief spell, she would sleep so deeply I’d have to pinch her nose to make her wake up.
“Hey, Mom,” I said. “Got maple bars.” She lay on her stomach, tangled in sheets, eyes closed and mouth open. I walked to her bed to fix her covers, planning to let her sleep, but when I saw her face, I knew she was dead. My mother was an expressive sleeper, quick to frown or smile in her dreams. When I found her body, its face was empty.
I am both terrified and comforted whenever I remember this emptiness. Because of it, I can hope that my mother did not die caught in a dream as binding as Saja’s arms, gasping and afraid, unable to wake up.
People tell me it’s a blessing she died in her sleep, at peace. But these are the things said by people who do not dream.
My mother said she would watch me sleep at night when I was very young, afraid that I would suddenly stop breathing. The rhythm of my sleep was odd, she explained, unsteady as the steps of an old man. The long nights of my infancy were, for my mother, measured by my breaths.
Later, after my mother tried to drown herself the second time, I realized that our roles had reversed. Even at ten, I knew that I had become the guardian of her life and she the tenuous sleeper. I trained myself to wake at abrupt snorts, unusual breathing patterns. Part of me was aware of each time she turned over in bed, dreaming dreams like mini-trances where she traveled into worlds and times I could not follow to protect her. The most I could do was wait, holding the thin blue thread of her life while her spirit tunneled into the darkness of the earth to swim the dark red river toward hell. Each night, I went to bed praying that I would not let go in my own sleep. And in the morning, before I even opened my eyes, I’d jerk my still clenched, aching hand to my chest, yanking my mother back to me.
The part of me that watched my mother sleep, the part of me that still lives within my dreams, believes that if I had been home with my mother, holding on to her life with my bare hands, she would not have died. I would have been able to save her. Even now I wonder why I didn’t know my mother was dying; after so many years of training myself to listen, why didn’t I hear that she had stopped breathing?
And then I realize I was with Sanford that night.
The last time I sat with my mother in her garden, she told me she wanted to wait to die but wasn’t sure she could. She said something about bathing in blessed water and rolling in ashes, preparing for the final transition. Something about how when she lay down to die, her body marked and open for Saja, she felt my hands pulling at her feet, holding her back. As she spoke, I squatted next to her and watched her prune the vines of the wedelia. I watched the sharp tugs of her hands ripping and tearing the reaching fingers of the plant, and, watching, I lost her voice. Now the only thing about her death talk that I can recall with clarity is the image of the sickle curve of her back bending toward the earth. And the way her bare hands tore at the wedelia, then massaged the black ground, as if she cared for it, as if she loved it.
Patting the earth, caressing the leaves of the plants she had worked on—saying “goodbye” and “thank you” for the day—my mother announced, “I been waiting a long time to see you settle down.” She brushed a small wedelia flower against the side of her face, dabbing yellow pollen on the underside of her chin. “You need a good man to give you babies. Someone to take care of you.”
I remember thinking how ironic and how convenient that my mother thought of taking care of me only when I was a grown woman. And even then, to delegate the responsibility of that care. But accustomed to nurturing my mother’s bouts of coherency, I drowned the memories of myself as a child that rose to the surface: huddling under the bridge at the Ala Wai, waiting for a fish to take me to an underwater kingdom where I would find my true mother, a mother who would make me dinner so I wouldn’t have to buy Ho Hos and cheese nachos at the 7-Eleven; forging my mother’s signature on school report cards filled with E’s for excellence that she never saw because she was looking into another world; rocking my mother, cradling her head and upper body in my lap, her legs dangling over the bed, when she cried out for my father, for Saja the Death Soldier, for the spirits that teased her with their cacklings, for anyone who cared, to kill her.