Prologue
Geckos on a Hot Ceramic Roof
June 2nd, 1995
“Get it, Kalama! Get it!” Ewa screamed, as her older sister reached for the gecko climbing up the siding of their house.
Kalama might have shouted back down to her sister, but at the moment, she was too busy trying to keep her balance. The tricky thing about going after geckos was that their feet could stick to anything. They could climb up the walls, under the cabinets, even hang from the ceiling. They were also very fast when they ran and scared really easily. So if you wanted to catch one, you yourself had to be fast, but also be completely fluid in your movement, make absolutely no sudden jerks. Especially when you had climb up to the-
“KALAMA ANNE JAMESON, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?”
Kalama froze and glanced to the side. Down on the ground was her father, his facial expression a combination of fury and pure shock. An expression that only appeared on his face whenever he caught his older daughter climbing on the roof, just like she was doing today.
Kalama turned her vision straight ahead, sighing as she watched the gecko skid across the gutter and down the drainpipe. Those geckos were smart. They knew that if they got into the drainpipe, then she couldn’t get to them. Better yet, when her father started yelling, they knew they were safe for the rest of the night.
“Kalama,” her dad began again, “I am not going to stand down here and yell for all of Honolulu to hear. You get down from there this instant!”
Very, very reluctantly, Kalama made her way to the drainpipe, moving the same way she did as when she tried to catch the geckos, so as not to scare her father. She hooked her ankles around warm metal, grabbed the top of the pipe tightly, and slid down like a firefighter. Of course, firefighters normally received a much warmer greeting than she did.
Almost as soon as her feet touched the ground, the lecturing started. There was a time in her life when this would have gotten to her, but after of lifetime of ‘don’t climb on the roof’, ‘that’s not a toy’, and ‘don’t eat off the floor’, she had heard all there was to hear at the ripe old age of ten. As her dad’s voice buzzed on, all she could think about was how her prey had managed to slip through her fingers, and was probably off regaling its friends of the tale of his escape. Now she was more than likely grounded, her hands and knees both were burnt bright red from the hot tile roof, and all for nothing.
Glancing behind her father, she could see her mother, still sitting in the car. The weary expression on her face had become a constant in these past few months, right along with the doctor visits, the silk scarf wrapped around her head, and the line of pill bottles spread across the kitchen counter.
It wasn’t just the doctor’s visits that had changed life for the two young girls. Normally, their mother would simply brush these minor infractions off as no big deal. Although ever since her mother had gotten sick, even the smallest difficulty seemed to be a trial.
So Kalama and her sister didn’t get away with anything these days, even with things they had never gotten in trouble with before.
“Are you listening to me, young lady?”
Kalama was jolted back to the here and now by her father’s shouts, much sharper than she had been used to in the past. When she looked up, she saw her father’s face had turned a deep shade of purplish red, his eyes bulged, his nostrils flared. If Kalama had not known what it was she were in trouble for, she might think she were about to be accused of murdering a preacher.
“Kalama, what were you thinking?” her father began again, grabbing her by the shoulders. “I’d thought you’d be smart enough to know how badly you’d get hurt climbing up the side of the house!”
“But I never get hurt!” Kalama justified.
It was true, this was not the first time Kalama had climbed up the roof. In fact, it was a rarity when her father actually did catch her. Usually she wasn’t climbing up after geckos, but simply sitting on the roof, watching the city pass by in that slow way that it did. Watching the smoke from Honolulu sink down into their neighborhood like it did every evening, watching children play in the street, watching teenagers fix their rusted heaps called cars. Listening to the endless chatter that, by now, had given way to it’s own rhythm: the Rhythm of the Lower Valley. There were times when Kalama even found herself swaying her head along with it.
But now, she watch her father glace around her to the porch, the railing for which he had ripped out by the nails the first time he caught Kalama on the roof.
“How did you even get up there?” he asked, his anger melting into confusion.
“I climbed,” Kalama answered, as though her father had just asked the simplest question on earth.
“You mean you climbed up the drain pipe the way you slid down it?” he asked, trying to make sense of what his daughter was telling him.
“No, I climbed after the gecko,” she explained, slowing the slightest bit of exasperation in her voice. “I though if I could beat the gecko up to the roof, I could catch him.”
Kalama watched the purple drain from father’s face and shift through different shades of pale. It was all she could do to keep from sighing and shaking her head in bored frustration. People never wanted to hear the truth. The truth about tooth fairies, menehune, or ugly dresses. People seemed so much happier when you allowed them to exist inside their own little dream world. Kalama felt as though she were one of the few people on earth who lived to know the truth; the whole truth.
Looking up with an expression of expectance, Kalama watched her dad’s face turn that funny shade of yellow-white that it always did when the truth was something that he didn’t like. He had been getting that look a lot lately whenever he asked Kalama for an explanation. Like why every water pipe in her school happened to burst the day of her math test a month ago, or how the car had been turned upside down the day she was supposed to go into the doctor for a shot. Especially the time after Easter when Ewa couldn’t speak for a week after Kalama had screamed at her to shut up.
“Why don’t you go help your mom get out of the car?” her dad finally said, without really making eye contact with her.
That was the last thing her father said to her before he made his way up the porch steps and shut the door behind him as he entered the house. Ewa flinched with the sound of the slamming door, and turned her gaze towards her sister, biting on her bottom lip and kicking at the pebbles around her feet. Even when it wasn’t even her who was trouble, Ewa would spend the time after every argument slinking around like a whipped puppy.
Suddenly remembering her mother, who was still waiting in the car, Kalama dashed to the door, pulling it open. Upon meeting eyes with Kalama, her mother cast her with a look of severe disappointment. The newly developed lines in her face creased deeply around her eyes and her mouth, and the heavy weight of her stare forced Kalama to cast her eyes downward.
Allowing her mother to take her hand, Kalama helped her step out of the car, steadying her mom as she stumbled slightly.
“Mama, I-”
“Not now, Kalama,” her mom answered, in a tired tone that had also become a constant in the past few months. “I’m just too tired to hear it.”
Kalama bit the inside of her cheek as she lead her mother up the stairs. Those two short sentences cut deeper into her than any amount of yelling her father could have inflicted on her. Right now, life revolved around making sure that her mom was comfortable, that she was happy, that she was healthy. After opening the front door, Kalama watched her mother brush past her and make her way towards the bedroom, just like she did after every visit to the doctor. Ewa nibbled on her pinkie nail, shifting from her left foot to her right. She still hadn’t moved from her spot she had been in ever since their parents had gotten home.
Not ready to go into the house, Kalama plopped down on the porch steps with her head in her hands. Knowing that her mother was disappointed in her was worse than any mere punishment for breaking the rules.
“Here, Ewa,” Kalama sighed, passing a damp serving plate into her sister’s waiting hands. “This is the last one.”
Later that night, the previous chaos had died down. Dinner was long over, the leftovers put away, the table wiped clean. The two sisters were standing on identical stools as the worked their way through the pile of dirty dishes. Even though they were just about done, steam still rose from the sudsy water, fogging up the windows and making the tiny kitchen even nearly as humid as it was outside.
She and Ewa weren’t being punished. The two have then had been doing the dishes every night since their mother “got sick”. Now that she didn’t have to clean up after dinner anymore, their mom usually spent her evening sitting on the porch; watching the clouds string through the mountains, and the colors of the sky change with the passage of the day. It was a small thing for them to do for their mother, but it was something that the children could actually do for her.
“All done!” Ewa smiled, setting the last plate off to the side before leaping to the floor. “Can I go over to Jessica’s house?”
“Did you finish cleaning your room?” Kalama asked, holding her damp hands up in front of her as she searched for the dishtowel.
“Can’t I finish in the morning?”
A snide remark came to Kalama’s mind, but she bit at her tongue to keep the words from forming. As much as Ewa had been helping out around the house, she still wasn’t used to taking orders from her older sister. It was almost as though admitting that Kalama had any real authority over her would be like admitting that things were going to be changing soon. Something Kalama knew that her sister would probably never be able to admit to herself, no matter how much evidence was piled up in front of her.
“I guess,” she sighed as she resigned herself to wiping her hands on the material of her dress. “Just tell Dad where you’re going.”
With a triumphant little smile, Ewa skipped out of the kitchen, stopping by the refrigerator to slip on her discarded sandals. Kalama pulled the plug from the drain and watched the water swirl away.
She was soon distracted, however, from the sound of the screen door slamming shut. Dad was in the garage, so there was no way Ewa had asked for permission to leave. So, of course, now Kalama would be the one to go and break the news to him...
Racing out of the kitchen, Kalama made her way for the front porch. If she hurried, she might still be able to catch Ewa before she was too far gone. Skidding across the wood floors of the hallway and leaping over the collection of shoes piled in front of the door, Kalama threw the screen door open and shouted her sister’s name loud enough so she was sure that all of Oahu heard it.
“Ewa’s already gone, sweetie,” she heard a gentle but exhausted voice say from the porch swing. “I told her it was alright.”
Turning to her right, she saw her mother relaxing on the swing, her foot pushing herself back and forth. She seemed so much calmer now, serene even; but after what had happened earlier that afternoon, Kalama wasn’t quite sure what the tone of this conversation was going to be.
“Kalama,” her mother sighed, as she smiled and beckoned her daughter towards her. “Come here, sit with Mama, okay?”
Confident that she was not being lured into another lecture, Kalama made her way to the porch swing, and leaned against her mother. The western sky was just beginning to change with the setting sun, and Kalama sighed as the colors shifted with it. One hand reached around Kalama’s shoulder, pulling her closer, while the other took her hands and held them in her lap. Kalama’s hands still smelled like dish soap.
A gecko scurried across the porch and climbed up the wall, stopping just at eye level with Kalama. It stopped for a moment, glancing her way, as though to taunt her. Then, first flicking its tongue across both its eyes, it continued on its way up to the roof.
“They know if I go up after them, I’ll get in trouble,” Kalama muttered, more to herself than her mother. “They’re mocking me!”
Her mom laughed, but the sound almost sounded far away. As though her mind was not truly on the geckos crawling all over the house, and there was another reason for asking her daughter to sit with her.
“Kalama, you know how I have always told you about how you’re different from Ewa?”
Kalama nodded. She and her mother had had this talk many times before. It always started with how her father was not her actual father, and how she and Ewa were only half-sisters. Then, it would go on to talk about Joseph: the man who was her father and whom Kalama didn’t even remember. Sometimes the talk would also include how her mother and Joseph had gotten married barefoot on the beach when they were little more than children. Others would be about how he knew more about cooking mahi-mahi than anyone else, or that when Kalama was little more than three months old, he insisted that she could say the word “gimme”. In the sadder stories, she would talk about how he had gone to drive on the coast one windy night and two solemn faced police officers had arrived at their door later to tell them that Joseph was never coming back.
And then, there were the…“stranger” stories that her mom would tell about her father…
Most children were told stories about their dead parents to make them seem real. But hearing about what her father was, what he could do, just made him seem more like a fairy tale than if she had never heard a thing about him.
“You know how I’ve told you about how Joseph was not like me or your dad; that he was a wizard,” her mom continued on. “And you know because he was a wizard, that means you’re a witch.”
Kalama nodded. That was why she never used to get in trouble for some of the weird things that would happen around her. Sighing, she leaned against her mother’s shoulder and waited to hear something new.
One of the reasons that this talk was never the same was that her mother would always pick different parts of the story to burst into tears. In fact, this was the only actual constant in these talks: Kalama, confused; her mother, her heart torn open all over again.
“What’s in the newspaper today?” Kalama asked, hoping to change the subject before the tears started, gesturing towards the paper resting off to her mother’s side.
Kalama’s mother never read the Honolulu paper, or any other paper known to the general public. It was yet another thing she had learned from her marriage to Joseph. And she continued to get it every week, and to read stories that she barely understood. Stories where the pictures moved…
“A boy was killed in England,” her mother told her, picking the paper up and turning it over to the front page: a photograph of a crying crowd in robes took up half the page, “During the Tri-Wizard Tournament.”
“Hmm?” Kalama wondered; her mother would often forget Kalama had been raised among those without magic, and knew next to nothing about the people or the world in her mother’s newspapers.
But Kalama’s mother kept on, as though she had not even heard her. She wasn’t even looking at her daughter. Her gaze seemed fixed on the ridges of the valley, but her eyes somewhere much further away.
“The officials are saying it was some sort of accident,” she continued, “but they have a quote from one of the other competitors saying it was murder. That he was killed by a Dark wizard.”
This was defiantly a new portion of the talk. Normally, it would be restricted to cutesy stories from the past, or, at worst, stories from after Joseph’s funeral.
“If what he’s saying is true, it means there are going to be some dark days ahead of us. Some dark days for you.”
Kalama nodded, hoping that if she just kept agreeing with her, her mother would stop the story sooner.
“Joseph told me about the man they claim committed this murder. That the last time he was at large, his world was at war,” her mother muttered as she nearly glared down at the paper. “So if he truly has come back, that may mean that another war is not far away.
“You know, Kalama,” she said, turning back to her daughter. “This is probably the exact kind of thing I would have turned to your father for advice for. Not that I don’t already know exactly what he would say…”
“What would he say, Mama?” Kalama asked. She had never been included in ‘the conversation’ before, save for a few minor roles. This time, it seemed to revolve completely around her, and only her; and the words her mother spoke would also only be known by her.
“Do you think you’d be able to follow your father’s advice?” her mother asked, tugging insistently at her daughter’s shoulders. “Do you think you could promise me that?”
The sky to the west had begun to turn a brilliant scarlet with the setting of the sun, more so to the south than to the north.
“Yeah, Mama,” Kalama agreed with her mother’s terms. “I promise.”
“That’s my girl,” she whispered as her hand smoothed through her daughter’s hair. “That’s Joseph’s girl…”
War Torn by OliveOil_Med
Chapter Notes: Things are changing in the Jameson household, and Kalama, for the first time, see her family split into two different concepts.
Major thanks go out to my beta, Anna; and to thank her, I will include this culture note she was so insistant on.
Menehune are like little Hawaiian gnomes. They build these little canoes and late at night, the row out and beat sharks over the heads with the ores. The people of Hawaii believe that the menehune are very real. In fact, I once read a story by a teacher who canceled class for the day so her children could go on a menehune hunt after their playground had been vandalized.