“You must come back across running water,” Induk said, exhaling, dispersing my ashes like pollen into the night air.
When I woke the next morning, my mother said, “You must return across running water.” She pulled one of her white ceremonial gowns over my head and yanked my arms. “Come on.”
I rubbed my stomach. “I don’t feel so good,” I whined, hoping she would leave me alone.
“I know,” she said. “That’s why we have to do this.”
“No,” I said, scrambling to the other side of the bed. “I have to go to school.”
My mother ran to block the door to her room. “I already called, said you were too sick. That we have to go to the doctor.”
“Oh,” I said, pulling off my mother’s gown. “Why didn’t you say that’s where we’re going?”
My mother sighed, then spoke slowly: “Because we’re not. I only told them something they could understand.”
She lifted the white gown from the bed where I had thrown it, and handed it back to me. I put it on, and when the hem dropped to my ankles, I realized I had grown to my mother’s height. “Come on,” she said as she walked out the glass doors and into her garden.
I followed her to the back of our lot. When we reached the chicken wire enclosing our property, my mother raised her hands and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, stepped through the fence. I reached the spot where my mother had crossed over, expecting to see some kind of gate worked into the fence, but I couldn’t see an opening of any kind. My mother waited. I slipped my fingers through the loops and shook. The fence rattled.
“Here,” my mother said. “Look here.” She grasped at the barrier between us and gently eased the wire apart. Creaking, the fence split wide enough for me to insert my body, then snapped shut behind me.
I followed where my mother led, watching the muscles of her legs flex as she scrambled over the thirsty tongues of tree roots and loose rocks scattered like broken teeth. I felt my body move like my mother‘s, bend and dip with hers, as if I lived within her skin. We climbed a skinny path among dank mulch and dying leaves, weaving our bodies through squares of sunlight that wavered and burst like overripe liliko’i as we stepped on them. And each step was accompanied by the music of the river, a white noise I became aware of only when we jumped over a small finger of water.
“She has crossed the dangerous stream in search of the spirit,” my mother called out into the moist air.
“Dance,” she said to me. “Free your spirit, Beccah-chan, let it loose.” She leaped into the air, twirling and pivoting in a space of her own, dancing and singing a song with no words.
“Mom, stop!” I cried, looking about, afraid that—even here in the middle of nowhere, next to a small, unmarked runoff from the Manoa Stream—someone would see my mother as I saw her: flying unanchored to reality, her own dark waters soaking through her tunic until the lines of her used woman’s body—the sloping shoulder bones jutting like wings out of her back, the sacs of her breasts swinging from her concave chest, the upturned bowl of her stomach—sharpened under the wet clothes.
“Please not now,” I yelled, to both my mother and the spirits she danced with. I vowed that if she went into a trance, I would leave her here in the woods, making my own way back into sanity.
Spinning toward me, she grabbed one of my hands. “Dance with me, Beccah,” she said. “Don’t you hear the singing?”
She pulled and I jumped, hopping from one foot to the other. “That’s it,” she told me. “Let the river speak to you. Listen to what it has to say, to what you have to hear.”
Her dance slowed. Still holding my hand, she slipped her fingers into the waistband of her tunic pants, pulled out a small pocket knife, and slashed the tip of my middle finger.
I yelled, then popped my finger into my mouth.
“Wait, not yet,” my mother said, drawing my finger from my mouth. “Wash it first.”
When I dipped my hand into the shallow water of the stream, my mother yelled, “Spirit, fly with the river, then follow it back home.” She tapped me on the shoulder. “Okay,” she said to me. “Now drink it.”
I cupped some of the running water into my hands, brought it to my mouth. I tasted the metal of blood.
“Now you share the river’s body,” my mother said. “Its blood is your blood, and when you are ready to let your spirit fly, it will always follow the water back to its source.”
Like the river in my blood, my mother waited for me to fly to her, waited for me to tell her I was ready to hear what she had to say. I never asked, but maybe she was telling me all the time and I wasn’t listening.
Wanting to hear her voice once more, I unpacked the “Beccah” tape—my mother’s last message, last gift to me—I had carried back from the Manoa house. But just as when I was a child listening in on my mother’s sessions with her clients, just as when I listened to that one tape many years ago, I heard, when I first began playing my mother’s tape in the apartment I had chosen for myself, only senseless wails, a high-pitched keening relieved by the occasional gunshot of drums. Still, I listened, but only when I stopped concentrating did I realize my mother was singing words, calling out names, telling a story. I turned the volume knob on the stereo until my mother’s voice shivered up the walls, as if the louder the words, the easier I would be able to understand the story.
Kok: I howl into the night air, emptying my grief into the homes of my neighbors, announcing my loss and my love.
As the tape wound on, I rummaged through the kitchen cabinets for paper and pen, wanting to write down my mother’s song. I scribbled words I recognized—kok, han, chesa, chudang, Saja, poji—words connected to blood and death. After filling several notebook pages with black scrawl, I stopped the recorder. The scraps of paper seemed inadequate, small and disjointed. Needing a bigger canvas, I stripped the sheet from my bed, laid-it on the living room floor in front of the speakers, pressed Play on the recorder, and caught my mother’s words.
Yom: Preparing your body for its final transition, I lay it down, stretched long against the mat in the main room. I boil ginger root, and with the cooled scented water, I bathe you for a fznal time. I massage your stiffening limbs, then tuck them close against your body. I wash your intimate places, pull your white hairs, and cut your nails. The loose trimmings I wrap in cloth to bury under you. And through it all I sing.
I sing Hanul, Pada, Ch-onji, sa-nam gwa irum, calling on Heaven, Sea, the four directions of Earth, and I sing your name. I mark the place where you are buried so that you will always find your way.
Abugi. Omoni. Kun Aniya. Mul Ajumoni. I sing the names by which I have known you, all of you, so that you will remember. So that I will remember. So that those who come after me will know. Induk. Miyoko. Kimiko. Hanako. Akiko. Soon Hi. Soon Mi. Soon Ja. Soon Hyo.
So many true names unknown, dead in the heart. So many bodies left unprepared, lost in the river.
Not once did my mother sing my name. And though primarily in English, this tape was not for me, was addressed not to me but to her mother, a final description of her mother’s death and feast. Faithful in performing the death anniversary chesa, my mother proved to be dutiful and dependable as a daughter in a way she never was as a mother.
When the first side of the tape hissed to a stop, I realized that what I had thought were drums accenting my mother’s lament was actually a dismal rapping at my door, incessant but faint. Flipping the tape over, I pressed Play and, with my mother’s words wrapped around me, drifted to the door. Through the eye of the peephole, I saw the apartment manager leaning against the door, thumping listlessly with flattened hand, his bowed head a balloon on the string of his body.