“ You were gone?” He hadn’t noticed she’d been away.
“ I went away just as you were going to sleep. I remember the police were still over in the motel room when you closed your eyes. When I opened mine, I was back in my body. And I was on a boat.”
At the mention of the police, memories of last night came flooding back. From his hiding place in the bushes he’d been able to see into the room he’d fled. The two men who’d entered were not the kind of people Jim wanted to cross sides with. Both big, wearing black woolen sweaters and seaman’s caps. They’d looked like a body building advertisement.
He’d watched as they came to the window and looked out. It seemed as if they’d been looking right at him and he’d been tempted to get up and run, but he knew they couldn’t see him through the dark and the bushes. When they turned away from the window he had half expected them to come around the motel and look for him. Instead, they’d left.
He’d hidden in the bushes, shivering for another fifteen or twenty minutes and, seeing no activity, decided to crawl back in the window and get his things. He was halfway across the park, when the front door opened and the police came in. He’d turned, darted back into the bushes. They were still there an hour later when he’d drifted off to a cold, fitful sleep.
Now awake, with a wheezing cough that seemed to be getting worse, no money for a doctor or even breakfast, he was fast running out of ideas and the asthma attack had sapped his strength.
“ We could go by my brother’s, he’ll help,” Donna thought.
“ Do you know how to get there?” He thought. Any idea was better than no idea.
“ No, but I know the address. 1737 Norfolk Street and I remember from one of his letters, he said it was a two minute walk from the center of town. So it can’t be far.”
He stopped a jogger and asked directions to Norfolk Street. Five minutes later he was standing on the front porch of a small home with a trimmed lawn, surrounded by a white picket fence. He could have been in any small town in America forty years ago.
He rang the bell and doubled over, coughing and gasping for air.
“ Can I help you?” Jim heard a soft woman’s voice, but couldn’t straighten up to see the face.
“ In a second.” He waited for the spasm to finish.
“ Come in.” She took him by the hand. “What is it? Asthma?” The concern in her voice was real and he was impressed that she would invite a stranger into her home. Not in America, he thought. Not anymore.
“ I think so, hasn’t affected me since I was a teenager.” It was a struggle to force the words out.
“ You’re American?” She led him to a sofa.
“ Yes.” He looked into her deep brown eyes, clear, wide and honest. Then he bent forward and coughed his way through another attack.
“ Here, this will help.” She put a blue inhaler to his lips. “It’ll relax your bronchial tubes and let you breathe.”
He inhaled the medicine as she released it and within seconds he was breathing.
“ Now this,” she said, handing him a brown inhaler, “the blue one helps to stop it once it has started and the brown one contains a steroid that helps keep it from starting.”
He took three puffs from the brown inhaler and handed it back to her, feeling better.
“ It’s my mother,” Donna thought. “What’s she doing here? Ask if Daddy is here?”
“ Is Daddy, excuse me,” he mumbled, “I mean is Mr. Tuhiwai here?”
“ What did you say?” The woman looked him in the eye.
“ I asked if Mr. Tuhiwai was here?”
“ You called him Daddy. Only Donna calls him that. Do you know where she is?” She was speaking in a rapid staccato and her eyelids hooded over. She balled her tiny hands into fists, bit into her lower lip, then shouted, “Mohi, come in here!”
“ What is it?” A short, well built man answered her call. He looked like a bantam weight ready to fight.
“ I think this man knows something about Donna.”
“ Just a minute.” Jim coughed, but not as badly as before, the medicine was starting to work. They waited, glaring. When he was able to breathe, he said, “I don’t know where she is. I’m trying to find her and I need help. I came here looking for her brother.”
“ He’s dead,” Mohi Tuhiwai said.
“ Oh no.” Donna’s thought was filled with despair.
“ How?” Jim asked.
“ Why should we tell you? We don’t even know who you are,” Mohi Tuhiwai said.
“ Because something very bad is going to happen to your daughter, Sunday at midnight, unless I can find her and stop it. And right now I’m sick, hungry, tired, out of money, my passport and clothes are gone, some bad men want me dead and the police want me for murder, both here and in America. I need help. Donna told me to come here.”
“ Then you know where she is?”
“ No. Only that she’s on a boat, she doesn’t know where it is.”
“ I don’t understand,” Mohi Tuhiwai said.
“ I don’t have much time and I need you to believe me. It’ll be a lot easier to explain if you each ask me a question. Something that only you and your daughter would know.”
“ If you’re trying to pull something-”
“ Please, sir, there isn’t much time. Just do it.”
“ Donna was bit by our neighbor’s dog when she was four years old. Where did it bite her?” Mrs. Tuhiwai asked.
“ The dog’s name was Phoenix, it belonged to Mr. Hoeta and it bite me behind the left knee, I still remember how much it hurt.”
“ Behind the left knee, its name was Phoenix, she still remembers how much it hurt.” He paused for a second. “Now you sir.”
“ I don’t know what you’re playing at.” His face was flushing red as he advanced on Jim.
“ Ngaarara has her,” Jim said.
“ Stop, Mohi,” Donna’s mother said, her voice quiet, but commanding. Mohi stopped.
They stared at him and electric tension filled the room.
“ I need your help,” Jim said, breaking the silence. “I’ve seen it. It tried to kill me. It’s killed people I love. I want to help Donna and I want to kill it.”
“ How can you know this?” Mrs. Tuhiwai sat next to him on the sofa.
“ She came into my head four days ago, in California. My life hasn’t been the same since.” And he told them everything. When he finished he lay his head back and closed his eyes.
When he opened them he was in a small wooden room. He felt the gentle rocking and he knew at once he was with Donna, on a boat.
They roved their eyes around the room. Knotty pine paneling covered the walls and ceiling. It seemed out of character. Boat makers usually used hard woods, like teak or oak. The knotty pine would quickly swell and warp in an ocean environment. The cabin was comfortably warm, on a warm day it would be hot and on a hot day, a sweat box.
Cheap pine cabinets, with cheap pine doors, still smelling of fresh sawdust, adorned the wall at the foot of the bed. Those doors, once exposed to humidity, would cease to function. No boat builder was responsible for this.
They turned her head to the bulkhead at the left side of the bed. It was covered with a large mirror, giving the room an illusion of being larger than it was. The mirror was held in place by cheap plastic brackets, the kind made for a small bathroom mirror. It would come crashing down at the first hint of high seas.
A young woman stared back at him from inside the mirror. She was naked. Her breasts grabbed his eyes and held them in their grasp, firm, with perfect amber nipples.
“ Take your eyes off my tits and look at me,” she ordered, and he moved his gaze. She had the kind of face that could start a war. Smooth bronze skin, silky dark hair, full eyebrows and lashes, high cheek bones. And her perfect face was set on a body that would turn the head of even the most senile. She was every man’s dream woman, radiating that strange mixture of childlike innocence and sexual desire.
She was a girl in a woman’s body. Dark amber eyes, matching her nipples, shined at him and drew him into her very being. He allowed them to swallow his soul and in them he saw his life race by and he knew that his life was nothing without this girl-woman.