The headaches began in early April.

“Like a little man has moved into my skull with a cordless drill,” was how Chesa described it. Suddenly engaged in combat with her own body, she guzzled warm water with lemon from an insulated glass bottle, from the bottom of which jagged a purple stone, jutting straight up like a stalagmite. All noise became excessive to her. I no longer heard the chatter of a Flora Lichtman podcast or the chime of synth-pop coming through the windows as she Pelotoned. Instead I found her out on the lanai, tilted back in her zero gravity lounger, a compress over her eyes, which she dipped compulsively into a metal bowl of ice water. When she sensed I was nearby, she would occasionally call out, ask me to refresh her ice. 

Inside, the flowers withered in their vases. Whenever the compress came off, the sunglasses went on, all the time, even in the house. After a week of this I went down to Uncle’s for `awa, walking it over to the main house in a half-gallon Ball jar. This too went into the insulated bottle, my murky liquid cuddling her amethyst. She drank it all, and then I brought her more. The pain seemed to crash in daily but at random intervals, and when the waves left her, Chesa emerged from the house squinting and pale, as if unsure where she was.

I’d been there for six months at that point, had settled in, walking the acre at sunrise, collecting slugs in a milk jug sawed in half, pinching their bodies from the ground with long metal tongs. When I’d covered the full perimeter and then of course the vegetable garden, I would empty the slug jug into the jungle, resisting the urge to feed them to the chickens, craving the satisfaction of their eager, greedy gobble. 

Before the headaches began we often spent afternoons on her lanai, evading the thickest heat of the day just talking story, which of course meant Chesa asking questions about what it was like to be born here, grown here, on what she called “a living thing,” her hands swooping excitedly, as if the island’s vitality was a novel idea that she herself had stumbled upon. I found this  difficult to answer because what she was really asking was, how is it to be raised in a place so different, and how could I answer that, when the place was not different to me at all?

“Okay but like, let’s say you’re sixteen, it’s two-thirty, school is out, where do you go, what do you do.” She stared directly at me in the way she does, eyes like two dark sucking mouths attempting to swallow me.

“Same shit you probably did. Mess around. Cruise Pohoiki.”

“Cruise Pohoiki.” She made an ironic sort of half smile, took a pull from a handroll filled with herb and lavender. Her hair was unwashed, damp with oil at the scalp. “And do what?”

“Grind, swim, talk story. Or Kahi would surf.” 

“God,” said Chesa. “How wholesome. I was like, getting wasted in someone’s apartment before their parents came home. I had to walk something like sixteen blocks just to be near trees.”

I hugged my knees. I wore a soft pink sweater that had once belonged to Chesa. I didn’t bother to tell her it wasn’t always wholesome. That incidents occurred here, just like anywhere else.

She’d moved to the island my Junior year of college, when Pele was coming down the mountain and flowing right into the ocean, going for so long that Kahi’s brothers went to Walmart, bought twenty-four off-road bikes, set up down where tourists walked out, rented them for $20 each, and made enough in a two-year period to bank four years tuition for Pinkie at HCC. But then she stopped, no more molten estuary. Tourism dropped and real estate prices rose, because the only people who bought when the lava was flowing were folks who could afford to lose their properties, or folks who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. 

On these afternoons, Chesa told stories about her life before, about the apartment they still kept in New York, how it scared her to be on the thirty-second floor, because if the grid went down, “and eventually, it will go down,” so would the elevators, “and fuck all those stairs.” She had no interest in going back for more than a couple weeks at a time. “The spirit of New York is still alive, the history, and of course the people, but the place, the actual physical place, is dead. Slipping into the ocean. Overrun with rats the size of house cats.”

“Those are here, too.”

“Yeah but here, here the world is getting bigger, not smaller. The ground is literally fucking breathing.”

—

Things about me that surprised Chesa: My disinterest in the great American French fry. How blades of shy grass shrunk from your fingers then opened back up when they felt alone. The way I could interpret the needs of my bees from six feet away. My English degree, both in its general existence, the fact that I had chosen it, and also that I now chose “not to use it.” Of course, the idea of not using an English degree was ridiculous. Unlike Kahi who mostly employed his education in the lab or field, I used mine every single moment of every single day. What is a degree in literature, in the ability to responsibly understand a narrative, if not a simple skill for interpreting the world around you, your place inside it, and your ability to influence. 

She called me Lauren because I introduced myself this way, as I often did to anyone who might struggle to pronounce my name and then become uncomfortable. It wasn’t that I minded making people uncomfortable. It was that uncomfortable people tended not to hire me.

Chesa had received my contact from the woman with land on Opihikao where I kept two dozen hives. The first time we spoke, she told me she wanted eleven. Eleven was a very powerful number, according to Chesa. It brought balance, the presence of both the sun and moon, masculine and feminine. I wasn’t sure about all that, but I did like the number. It was very satisfying to write, the austere brutality of it, two quick strikes to a piece of paper like a blow from each fist. 

I bought eleven queens from Lynn Chun in Paradise Park, had Kahi help me build the hives, and assemble the brood boxes. I started coming over once a week. Chesa stayed in the house when I was working, watching from the front window, a huge sheet of tempered glass. She was afraid of being stung, couldn’t stop herself from swatting, wouldn’t listen when I told her to walk calmly away. “It’s fucking instinct,” she would say, swiping her hand manically around her head, receiving a stinger to her brow for her efforts, the limp body of a worker bee dangling from her face like jewelry. Sometimes Jeff was around, her husband, soft-spoken and slender, but mostly he wasn’t. 

In the beginning, she liked to come talk by the truck when I arrived and before I left, lingering with her hands in the front pockets of her joggers, hair a nest atop her head. It went like that for a few months, her coming out to ask where she could get the safety done on her Prius, if I knew where to find a durian. Her younger sister was in the little cabin behind the main house then. Adria was lanky as Chesa but with scoliosis, nubby bangs cut severely across her forehead like a child’s bad drawing. She never addressed me directly, and when she went back to Brooklyn, Chesa asked if I’d like to have the cabin in exchange for taking care of things.

That’s what she called it. Taking care of things. I had bees on six properties at that point, visiting each once a week, watching for symptoms of an impending swarm, checking for mites.

I’d been with my parents still, and was eager for privacy. Into the cabin I went, one large room with a double bed facing a wall of louvered windows and a kitchen faucet that dripped constantly. The hale was set back from the house, but sound carried across the property like air, so unbroken that when Chesa listened to her podcasts or watched TV or spoke with Nathan who came to do the parts of the yard that I couldn’t manage myself, it felt as if we were in the room together. 

From what I could tell, Chesa rarely left the main house, a hideous concrete thing with an unparalleled view of the coast, a jagged forty foot drop down to the place where the sea slammed, again and again, with a violence I found soothing. “Weather proof,” Jeff called it. I am still sure it was a comfort for him to believe this. 

He came for a few weeks when he could, whenever he was “between projects,” though I didn’t know what kind of projects, how long they had been married, or how they met. Instead, I knew Chesa refused to eat anything with a face,” and that she was addicted to ordering polished stones off the internet, which arrived in padded boxes and were then placed carefully around the house, distinct solutions for different personal afflictions, protection, healing, stability, courage. In early December, she gave me a wrapped box containing a small piece of shiny black rock, said I should keep it near me when I slept. It was glassy and slick, like wet pahoehoe. “Tourmaline,” she called it. I placed it on my bedside table, next to a small pair of koa nēnē figurines Kahi had given me for my twenty-second birthday, their long necks wound together.

The stones, to her, were measures of protection. This, I understood.  

Taking care of things. This meant the hives of course, but I also weeded the garden, rode the mower, tested the water tank, changed the UV filters, inspected the pig fence for signs of infiltration, fed chickens, collected eggs, and picked the lettuce that grew in her six raised beds, for Chesa was like a rabbit; she ate a salad twice a day from a bowl the size of a human ribcage. 

I did what she asked. I moved in. I took care of things.

—

The rats ran around the roof after dark. They squabbled, banging between the walls. The creatures were massive, raiding the compost, not shy about the space they inhabited, and why should they be? They believed in their right to exist. Weren’t concerned about the repercussions of their presence. Most of us are not.

Chesa was wary of slaughter. “Bad karma,” she insisted. This, too, was the reason I was instructed not to salt or poison the slugs, only remove them from the property. At first I did as I was told, sourcing large Have-A-Heart traps, shoebox-sized cages with baited trip wires that triggered the quick snap of a swinging door. I placed these around the cabin and main house, baiting them every evening. “Anything?” Chesa asked in the mornings. Always, the answer was “no.”

The flower garden was her only charge. She did the planting and the weeding, orchestrated the placement of seeds, bulbs, starts. She picked bouquets daily, which she arranged with a dedication I rarely saw from her, watching as I did from the window in my hale’s kitchen, or the side of my skinny lanai. Anthuriums, lobster claws, pikake, kiele, native and invasive, she did not discriminate. She did this work in the early morning, wearing the same pair of army green overalls and beat-up Locals, her exposed toes unpainted, grassy and glistening with dew.

We were almost fifteen years apart in age, had been raised in wildly different habitats, but something about us felt the same, though it was possibly just the striking similarity in our physicality. Same size, height and hips and feet, same breadth of shoulder, though my hair was thicker, my skin darker. This congruence in our shape was an open channel between us; every few weeks she would knock on my hale door with a bundle of clothes she no longer wanted, and I would pick through them, sliding into her old jeans, a knit tank with the tag still on.  

I loved listening to her speak, her rapid staccato, her godly worship of the word fuck. One afternoon that fused quickly with early evening she told me about an engineered bacteria that, when consumed, changes the color of a patient’s secreted waste depending on the type of disease they might have. The hope was that doctors could diagnose them faster, and for less money. What Chesa was interested in, however, was not the science or medicine but that she learned this at a contemporary art museum.

“Just this big white room and there in the center, colored shit in glass fucking boxes, and like, no one was sure if it was real shit or a recreation, which was sort of the point I guess.” She was an energetic orator, hands spirited, the cartilage of her left ear punched through with a line of glittering stone.

—

The fever began not long after the headaches. She was cotton-headed, dry-mouthed, sweating. She was googling signs of perimenopause.

She struggled to keep up with her daily salad habits. It hurt her head to chew. And so she began to juice, ears capped in noise-canceling headphones as a heavy white machine masticated her romaine, her kale, shat out snot-colored roughage like the ill fecal bacteria I imagined in that art exhibit.

At night the rats multiplied. The Have-A-Hearts remained empty, bait gone by sunrise. Early one evening, the sky a hematoma of mottled indigo, I happened to glance out my windows to catch a fat rodent skimming across the lanai banister, headed directly for an open trap. She moved with incredible grace, one long blurred line of tawny fur. When she reached the trap, baited by the browned tip of an apple banana, she lifted the fruit from the hook with surprising delicacy. The door swung down and came to rest atop the fat trunk of her tail, so thick and long it curled out of the trap and draped off the side of the wood rail. I watched her eat the fruit, ears and whiskers twitching in turns. She seemed acutely aware of her audience, her face twisted in my general direction. When the fruit was gone, the rat used her paws to smooth her whiskers, then turned with ease and exited, her bald tail like a foot in a door.

I relayed this to Chesa, and she laughed, itching at her elbow. Her body was studded with the raised, florid savagery of mosquitos. “It’s sort of impressive, don’t you think?” 

I told her we’d likely need to upgrade to the kill traps.

“But it’s so tragic. Punishing them for their own intelligence. Maybe we should be rewarding them.”

“I think we have been. That was a fat rat.”

“Good for her,” Chesa said. Her elbow had begun to bleed.

Without telling her I went to Ace Hardware, bought kill traps and set them on banisters, or in the eaves above the laundry room, anywhere freckled with shit. I baited them with mango and banana, with fatty slicks of peanut butter. In the mornings the food would be gone, the traps unsprung. Smart creatures, adept at problem solving. Survival.

Before the headaches began, Chesa left the property and came home with a cat, a pied molly, orange and white. She fed her from a little red dish on the bottom step of the lanai, setting the bowl inside a larger one filled with water, like a moat, to keep the fire ants out. The animal, it turned out, was not interested in the rats. Instead, she killed two cardinals and procreated. I noticed the distended belly a few weeks before the kittens came, blind things birthed in an old suitcase in the laundry room.

Jeff was home the week they were born, and though he was thoughtful, always rubbing Chesa’s shoulder, bringing her cups of tea, offering to upgrade the weedwhacker or combat the drip from the cabin’s kitchen faucet, I preferred when he was gone, when Chesa and I were left to ourselves. 

To avoid Jeff I made an excuse of the newborn kittens, spending hours with all three of them in my lap, a writhing, mewing mass. Holding their little bodies gave me a feeling of great power. I was so much larger. I could do anything.

In their second month one of the kittens disappeared and now there were just the three, the mom and two little ones, six months old by the time the headaches started. And still, even with such strong feline presence, I heard the rats at night. 

“Just stop feeding them,” Jeff said, scooping scored flesh from a mango into his mouth as Chesa examined a fresh hole chewed in the kitchen’s screen door.  

“The rats?”

“The cats. Maybe they’ll work harder.”

The kittens were three months old at that point, had emerged from all that baby fluff into clumsy, sharp-clawed predators. Chesa was still well then, her eyes bright. She picked at an infected mosquito bite on her knee. “They’re supposed to kill for sport.”

Jeff tousled her hair, roots stiff with grease, and left us to ourselves.

—

The hospital waiting room smelled of stale coffee and manufactured freshness, a cheap candle or dryer sheets. Chesa had been sick for eleven days. Had begun to feel nauseated. Her neck was so stiff she struggled to turn her head. The two of us waited together, picking up magazines and putting them down, and then I waited alone. 

When she reemerged her face was screwed shut, and she stayed silent until we were back in the Prius.  

“A flu,” she said, bladed with the savagery of personal injustice. “Said my immune system seems compromised. Asked after my levels of stress.” She produced a throaty, arid cackle that startled a finch from the barren coconut palm overhead. 

I drove us home. 

That evening we were out in the flower garden, bees humming across the heliotrope and Chesa drinking salad in her sunglasses when Kahi’s Ford rumbled in, tires so large they met my hip when I stood beside them. Chesa was both sweating and shivering, wrapped in a sweater that resembled a blanket with arm holes, but still she smiled at me like she always did when Kahi showed up, a smile that said good for you. She liked to remind me how attractive Kahi was, as if I had not chosen him myself. He was still living with Ipo and Hualani, one thin wall between the two bedrooms, and though we used to spend time there when we had nowhere else, now we used the cabin, which had of course been its main appeal.

I kept my back to him as he approached, feeling conspicuous, aware of the way she watched his body ripple up the driveway. I glowed internally when he kissed my cheek, fighting the urge to meet Chesa’s eye in shameless gloat. When she offered him a cup of swamp green liquid, he raised a broad hand in polite refusal. 

She shrugged. “Lauren won’t drink her vegetables either.”

“I don’t like them raw,” I said.

Chesa rolled her eyes. “Prefers to cook her kale.”

Kahi said: “Smart woman.”

That night I curled into him as always, his knees tucked behind mine, his breath hot on the back of my neck, strong hands wandering, and when we were finished we lay there, sticky and warm. We’d been stacking ourselves this way since we were kids, since we knew that we could, long before Ipo and Hua, who’d married the year prior. They would start with family soon, and when they did, Kahi would go. Probably somewhere with me. Not here of course. This would be over. 

“I don’t like how she talks to you, Lahe.” His voice was low. Protective. It warmed me, and though we had just finished, I felt myself slickening again.

“We talk fine.”

“You don’t.”

I took his hand from where it rested on my shoulder. “We do.” 

I slid two of his fingers deep into my mouth. Behind me, I felt him grow.

—

When the sun settled, everything on the island reached. The plants grew, the spiders spun, the rats argued and the slugs emerged, methodically sliming their way along various flora, along the hills of shit the rats left behind, the moon tracing their thick, mucused bodies, their gummy feelers slowly waving. 

A woman called Doreen came every other day to massage Chesa’s body. The pain in her neck had migrated through the vast country of her joints, elbows, hips, knuckles, knees. She could no longer juice her salads; the throb in her head had grown so severe that even with the headphones, the noise of the machine caused her tremendous pain, though at this point, most of her solutions still revolved around rest, around dim lighting.  

On a Sunday, I drove us to the warm pond so the brackish water, sulfuric and mineral rich, could cradle Chesa’s fraying nervous system. It was rare to get her in water of any kind, because she’d once participated in a shamanic-led DMT trip during which she suffered an extremely lucid vision of herself drowning. “I could feel the water in my lungs, Lauren, like actually feel it burning.” There was the tunnel, and the light, the rush of memories, “disturbingly visceral flashes, Adria and I as toddlers making snow angels, me sloppy drunk in a dorm room, the D train at rush hour, Jeff’s face the first time we fucked, the peony bouquet at my wedding.” Science, she explained, now suggests our brains flood with DMT the moment before we die, our flashing life review not a nostalgic eulogy from the soul but instead a generous hallucination, a mental euthanasia to carry us kindly from one side to the other. “Water, man. That shit is deadly.”

It was ironic, of course, that someone with a drug-induced fear of drowning would move into a home set above the world’s largest body of water, but here she was. And the warm ponds were benign, separated from the treachery of open ocean by a sturdy rock barrier, man-made, essentially a large communal bath. It had rained that morning and the pool was sparsely populated, steps scummed with algae that squished satisfyingly between my toes. Inside, we floated on our backs, the cold ocean that crashed over the wall summered by hot liquid pumping from various crevices, natural springs heated by volcanic gas. It had been a private pool once, built by someone not unlike Chesa and Jeff, but when the springs emerged and the pool began to heat, they donated it to the county, who turned it into a park. We were lucky to have it, for as long as it lasted, and if I was still alive when it was gone—in Kalapana, it is not if but when—I would not mourn its loss but instead celebrate the moments I had been given.

When I talked this way, Kahi often called me cold. “Like the top of the mauna,” he’d tease, plucking at my earlobe. But I was not cold, I was unattached, which was important for regulation. I had learned somehow as a child that if I could resist attachment, I could resist loss. The kitten, for instance. It had been the smallest one, speckled black and gray, and to me it was normal for it to go, we all will, at some point, and when I realized it was gone I thought about who it had been, its life as small and ordinary as its body. Whether it had been taken by hawk or owl or mongoose or disease, by the wheels of a truck so large they never registered the fleshy mash of destruction, the little mewing life taken while trying to get where it was going—these were the risks we all faced, the hazards of daring to take a breath in the first place.

Chesa, on the other hand, had wept over the disappearance of the kitten, though she had spent far less time with it. Her grief was also normal. Fatalities of any kind remind us of our own. 

Beneath the water, small fish nibbled my toes, filling their bellies with old skin. I watched Chesa lead herself deeper into the pool. She’d grown thinner. Now, when she curled her shoulders forward, the knobs of her spine protruded like a row of golf balls.

I thought, as she often did, how different it was for us, her being born in a place where the buildings had outlived the trees. 

—

For all my unattachment, there was one place I knew I had gone under, and that was Kahi. The man was vital as my own skin. Should he go, I imagined it would feel as if my largest organ had been removed, and I stood with my nerves and capillaries exposed, my body oiled in my own blood.

In bed he liked to press the tip of his tongue to my most sensitive point and drum, one hand gripping my wrist, matching his tempo to my own pulse, mimicking the cadence, the velocity, of my heart. When I surrendered the sounds of my pleasure no doubt carried from the cabin into the morning air, sweeping up through the main house. The mornings he stayed with me we lingered in bed well past sunrise, and when I walked him, his park badge already clipped to the front of his shirt, Chesa was often out in her flower garden, smirking first to herself and then to me as he rumbled down the long drive.

I knew where her curiosity with Kahi lay. It was not him specifically, but his interest in me, an interest that she found amusing. 

Surprising.  

Kahi himself often surprised people, and this surprise always, without fail, felt to me like a small victory. His job especially gave a certain type of stranger an initial pause. They’d looked at his size and imagined he would wield it, that body made for manual labor.

“Mosquitoes?” Chesa had asked, one eyebrow elevated.

“Mosquitoes.” I went on: DNA extraction, biotic, abiotic, viral reduction, phrases that bled easily from my mouth after years of hearing them hemorrhage from his.

“…Meaning?” she asked finally.

“Population control,” I said, and then, almost an afterthought: “Disease control.”

Her brow lifted. This surprise over the supposed contrast between my mind and Kahi’s was, to strangers, to Chesa, less shocking than the disparity between our animality. I was flat chested and thick ribbed, my face long, nose broad. I had my father’s proud brow, my hair so dense it was often untenable. Of all my cousins I was the least beautiful, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t notice, that I hadn’t, since girlhood, always noticed. Chesa was this way as well. Moused. But Jeff, too, was sleight and average, five foot six, his hairline swiftly abandoning the front half of his skull. In presentation, Chesa and Jeff equated.

Kahi and I did not. He towered, six foot four, jaw angled, eyes honeyed, shoulders outstretched like the levers of a balance scale. It was why we made love like spoons, my body curled into his, one of the few arrangements that worked. When we came together in early adolescence, he held only a premonition of the aesthetic grace he would later inhabit, his face fine, teeth square and abundant. We loved each other as unformed things, and this was a love that grew as we did, that retained symmetry even as our bodies did not. I was lucky for it. 

Chesa wanted to make sure I knew it.

—

The week before the headaches began, I turned twenty-four. For the occasion, Malia, Ipo and Hualani had gone in on a gift for me, slip-on wellies rubbered a deep hunter green. They were expensive, the interior felted, the soles cushioned. They embraced my feet like a lover. I wore them in the garden, walked the land’s perimeter, enjoying the plush comfort of exorbitant support. I was collecting slugs in the vegetable garden when Chesa came out, overalled, clippers swinging down by her knees.

“Those are great shoes,” she said when she reached me. Her hair was tied up in a thin red scarf, knotted at the forehead. She rarely complimented my clothing and I often wondered if her continuous donations to my wardrobe were attempts at communicating something. Now, pride swelled in my sternum. I did not mention that they were a gift, because she did not know it was my birthday. Then she said: “Can I try them on?”

I dutifully slid myself from the wellies, soles bare against the damp grass. Chesa’s Locals lay discarded by the base of a raised bed.

“Fuck these are comfy.” She took a few steps toward a bank of heliconia, bouncing a little. “And the tread is so nice.” When she gave the shoes back they were warm, but whether it was from the blood in my body or hers, I could not tell.

The next morning the wellies were not outside my door. 

I had set them in a careful line beside my slippers, my one nice pair of slides, the ratty work boots splattered in bee matter. Now the spot lay empty. 

I didn’t look for them. I knew where they had gone.

—

Mid-April brought a blistering drought. The flowers drooped in the garden, the grass paled, and the water in our catchment winnowed. Doreen could no longer come for massages; contact of any kind created a burning sensation on Chesa’s skin. She couldn’t even slide beneath sheets on the bed, which was ultimately fine, because her pyrexia continued. She sweated torrents of water and salt and human fat. She called her doctor, who recommended a psychiatrist. 

She stopped sleeping. The lights in the main house went off and on at odd hours. Chesa was not the type to lay awake in the dark as I was, and even with my curtains closed a frame of bright light from the house cut the blackness of my room. I did my best to turn my back on it, but I could still sense it somehow, like a stranger standing in the corner of my bedroom, whispering ugly ideas.

Come dawn the light in the main house was off. It had not rained in ten days. Chesa had been ill for sixteen. I pulled myself from my bed, walked the perimeter, collected four eggs from the chicken coop which I left in a line on Chesa’s lanai. She was not up. The cats mewed in frustration and I fed them for her, then reset the rat traps.  

Jeff came home, and I was surprised it had taken him so long. He tried to force her back to the hospital but Chesa, enraged by the maltreatment of her first visit and gouged by her follow-up call, refused.

It was week five with her vision blurring and she had developed her own path: spirulina and chlorella tablets dissolved in her crystal-infused bottle. A Chinese herbal medicine ordered on the internet that no one knew how to pronounce. Noni shots every morning and Aleve crunched like breath mints. Doreen now came for acupuncture, unpacking her sterile needle sleeves on the lanai. There were discussions of intravenous vitamin therapy, but the hour-long drive to Hilo was daunting. 

These solutions made Jeff uncomfortable. He preferred more traditional medical intervention. “Ches, it could be serious.” 

“I know it could be serious. I’ve been the one saying it could be serious.”

I could not see them while they had these dialogues. Only their voices reached me, rolling across the lawn, and even still I could somehow sense the inevitable placation of Jeff’s sigh. It seemed somehow, both in hospital and at home, that the more Chesa argued for the severity of her illness the less seriously people actually took her. 

As this went on our drought continued, and Jeff brought in Nathan to build a stone wall to mask the ugly green plastic of the catchment tank, which amused me. As if beautification could solve the problem. 

Their voices drifted through the window of my hale. Jeff was standing around with a beer as Nate worked, telling him how the doctors think her illness is neurosis. 

After a moment I heard Nate say: “Could there be something there?”

“Something like…?” I was relieved by the serrated edge in Jeff’s voice.

“Oh, just, if she wanted you home?”

“She’s always been good on her own. She’s not the needy type.”

“She doesn’t worry?”

“About?”

Here Nate laughed a little. “You know. Big apartment, big city, all alone…”

A pause landed. I heard Jeff clear his throat. “You know, I’ve found it’s actually very easy not to do that.”

There was a smile in Nathan’s voice as he said: “Is it?”

“Yeah. You just don’t do it.”

Again Nathan laughed. The end to this conversation, the reveal of Jeff’s fidelitous nature, should have made me like him more, but it did not. There was something condemning in how he dismissed Nathan’s question, a layer of baked hauteur, a diminishment of the very selfish and flawed essence of human nature, the inherent greed of our desire and our dumb, reckless impulsiveness. Even while I agreed with him—I had never been with anyone other than Kahi—I was bothered by how reductive he made it all seem. As if he were immune to self-immolation.

—

The morning my wellies disappeared, back when Chesa was still well, I walked the yard’s perimeter barefoot, searching for slugs. Their greasy bodies, plump between my metal tongs, plopped with satisfaction into my milk jug, one by one, two, nine, ten, a dozen.

I hunted the lettuce patch, fourteen fifteen sixteen, shook the jug and peered down into the plastic basin. At the bottom coiled an orgiastic mass, muscled tongues knotted together, marinating in their own toxic mucilage.

When I turned toward the edge of jungle where I normally dumped them, something stopped me. On a whim, an instinct I did not question, I moved back toward the vegetables. In the large swath of lettuce, I tipped the jug onto its side.

I watched as the creatures slowly slimed their way back out of the plastic, bodies bared like organ meat, their slick antennae undulating, calibrating something I would never understand. It was not their fault, really. They did not know they carried poison. When the jug was empty, I picked it up and walked away, exposed bottoms of my naked feet clammed with morning condensation.

That afternoon I did not go to Chesa’s lanai. Instead, when the heat reached its afternoon apex I lay in the cool dark of my bedroom, and after the swelter broke I went to the bees, found their chambers thick with brood and honey. I pulled the supers from storage behind the laundry room, grateful for the task, access to this environmental language I spoke so fluently, and the ability to lose myself in the roar of their collective vibration. They were perfect creatures, the bees. Self-regulated. They truly did take care of things.

Midway through my work I thought I caught a flash of Chesa at the windows, but when I looked again, the plane of glass showed only the glare of the sun as it began its gentle journey toward the horizon. I went to sleep early that night, the coquis launching me into sleep with their nightly lullaby, and in the morning, my wellies were back on the lanai.

—

Jeff stayed only six days, and after he left I took to weeding Chesa’s flower garden, picking her fresh arrangements daily, watering with catchment from the tank despite the dwindle of our stock. If it ran out, we would have more delivered. It was an expense I didn’t have to worry about, though I still lined half a dozen Home Depot buckets beneath the eaves of the gutter-less cabin to catch an overflow of rain should it come.

Under my surveillance the flowers thrived. I cut luscious bouquets of vivid bougainvillea, of ambrosial plumeria and jasmine, plumped bundles that I brought into the house, stuffed into vases and mason jars, retrieving their predecessors when they went limp. I was entering Chesa’s space with more frequency than ever before, placing the eggs in the fridge, checking for fresh compost, for trash. No one had asked this of me and yet it felt like a natural order, to extend my stewardship from land to household. Chesa rarely left her bedroom. The exercise bike lay dormant in the living room, and in the kitchen, her beloved Champion juicer was covered with a dish rag, as if even the sight of it pained her.

On week six of Chesa’s illness it rained, a torrent of sound on the tin roof all afternoon and into the evening, the buckets beneath my eaves flooding, the roar rocking me to sleep. Before bed I had set the rat traps with squares of honeycomb, an idea that hadn’t occurred to me earlier, and I was woken at three in the morning, the rain finally quiet, to the snap of a trap, that violent hinge of metal jaw, then nothing but frog song. I thought then about getting up, taking care of it immediately, but the air was cool and my bed warm and as I oscillated between going or staying sleep pulled me back under, my body making the choice for me. 

I slept deeply and dreamt of lava, of being out on the water just off the coast, a geyser of magma pummeling into the ocean like it had been a year earlier, a fire hose of hot earth that beat endlessly down, the smell of sulfur and brine, a boat steady beneath me, someone’s strong hands—Kahi? My mother?—on my shoulders, and no matter how I turned I could not see this person’s face, could make out nothing beyond the raging torrent of liquid rock, the hiss of steam, the slap of waves, and from somewhere distant, the gentle call of my name.

I woke with the sun, still carrying the feeling of someone’s steady grip at my back, and for a moment I thought Kahi was in the bed with me, but as I returned to myself I realized no. He wasn’t. I was alone, the air smelling of fresh rain and orange blossom.

Then I remembered the snapped trap. I peeled myself from my covers, my t-shirt damp with my own sweat, wood cool beneath my bare feet. I pulled on a pair of thick socks, Kahi’s, too big for me, the heels sagging midway up my ankle.

The place where the trap had rested was nothing but a plane of smooth, polished wood. I let my eyes drift down where they found a barren pool of dark, gluey fluid, smeared at the perimeter, creating a firth that streaked outward across the floorboards in a gory track of eight or ten feet, curving around the rightmost edge of the cabin.

I followed it, a foreboding gurgle beginning in the base of my stomach, or maybe that was hunger; comforted by the rain, I had gone to bed without dinner. Around the corner of the house, the smear of blood ended at a furred body the size of a very small cat, trap still attached to its neck like a demented Elizabethan collar. The animal, I understood, had broken its neck but remained alive, had spent the time I was souped in sleep dragging its body across the floor, toward some sense of salvation I did not understand. It had not made it. 

The rat’s eyes were closed, one small limb reaching forward like the Creation of Adam. Strangely I felt no pity for the mangled beast, not even revulsion, only a curious sense of concatenation—Chesa’s flowers which fed the bees I kept, the bees who pollinated her lettuce, the lettuce that called the slugs, the slugs which spread the shit of the rats, the rats who had been tempted by the honey, a temptation that led one of them to be here, expired upon my floor. I was braided throughout this chain of events, but also, I was nowhere, had done nothing but move the pieces where they were meant to go.

At the lanai steps I retrieved my slug jug and tongs and approached the rat’s body once again, leaned over it, my hair falling into my face, still snarled from sleep, but just as the stark metal kissed the creature’s coppery down, its eyes popped open, and the animal began to shriek.

I jumped backward as the rodent’s body, not at all lifeless, flailed against the floor, the wood base of the trap slapping gruesomely against the lanai planks, the dark pearls of its eyes sharp with pain and terror.

This went on for ten seconds, maybe more, as I gathered myself, regulated my breathing. The rat flailed, moving several inches laterally, its high-pitched keen surprisingly carnal. Leaning forward again, I pinched the jumping body between my tongs and lifted. Its weight came heavier than I anticipated, body thrashing with such force I needed to squeeze the tongs much harder than I’d have liked. It shrieked louder. I wondered if the sound carried all the way to the house, if Chesa could hear it in her dazed state. Blood smeared the side of the jug as I slipped the body inside, the creature bashing against the plastic, my own heart thudding as I hurried out into the gray, damp morning.

Beneath the eaves the orange buckets were full to the lip and I tipped the jug down into the closest one, the rat clawing at empty air as its body pierced the water’s skin, flailing harder as I used the metal tips of the tongs to push it under. Its eyes were on mine, and though I ached to rip my focus away, to look at the white-washed side of the cabin, the sodden shy grass shrinking away from my socked feet, or just the endless black of my own closed eyelids, I could not, would not, deny this animal its final tether to the conscious world. I peered into the twin inked beads of its soul as it furiously ruddered all four small limbs, its broken body spasming. Was its brain flooding with DMT? And what sort of life would a rat flash back on? I saw a warm nest of hairless pinked siblings, nights of rowdy play, delicious tastes artfully snatched in gambit, the cozy curl of a tail, the press of a silken paw, on and on until now, finally, here it was upon us both: merciful stillness.

I let the carcass float. From elsewhere on the grounds came the peaceful, lonely call of a dove. When I felt a respectful amount of time had passed, I used the tongs to retrieve the limp animal, placed it back in the jug, and dumped it over the pig fence.

On the way back I cut a spray of sweet jasmine from Chesa’s garden. In the kitchen of the main house, I set the slender stem in a vase and carried it upstairs into her bedroom. Her body was curled away from me, bare on the bed in a pair of gray underpants, her skin marmoreal, ribs visible through her back. I set the vase by the bed. Instead of leaving, I stood there for a moment, my body shadowed, as the room filled slowly with the heavenly scent of fresh cut greenery.