Comfort Woman (32 page)

My mother reached into the box of maxipads and stuck a fresh one on her underpants to catch the blood of more dying spirits. “I will protect you, Beccah,” she said, “when the time comes. And I will pray.”

But despite my mother's prayers, her charms for my safety, her chants against Saja and Red Disaster, and despite my own efforts to still my body, I eventually bled.

When I felt the knot of pain pulling in my abdomen, pinning me to my seat in Mrs. Abernacke's ninth-grade homeroom, I folded my hands over my belly, picturing a beam of light soaking up the blood. The visualization had worked to suppress menstruation for more than two years, the flash of light cauterizing the wound between my legs, but this time I felt the light merge with my blood, rushing true and deep, thickening as it pounded against my tailbone and
poji
with heavy fists.

While Mrs. Abernacke called attendance, I dropped my head over my desk. I imagined blood, sweet and sticky as syrup, soaking through my jeans and onto the plastic seat. I stayed down, closing my eyes when first bell rang and everyone left for first period. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that the only ones left were me and, toward the back of the room, Fiaso Rialto—whom everyone called Fatso. Fatso, a cushioned cheek piled like dough on the desktop and his large, fat-ringed arms hanging down the sides so that his knuckles grazed the floor by his slippered feet, slept on even as Mrs. Abernacke stalked up behind him. She placed a hand against his neck, a caress really, and when he didn't move, she knocked the back of his head.

“Mr. Rialto!” His head snapped back and he looked around with red-rimmed eyes. “Naptime ended with kindergarten. Please gather up your belongings and proceed to your next class.”

“Huh?” said Fatso.

“Go,” said Mrs. Abernacke as she marched over to my desk. I expected a whack on the side of my head.

“Miss Bradley, first bell has sounded. If you don't want detention, please tell me why you are still lounging about in homeroom.”

“I, uh, don't know,” I stammered.

“Then go on.” Mrs. Abernacke folded her hands across her chest, waiting for me to stand.

I slid off the seat, keeping my eyes down, expecting to see a smear of red blood on the chair. Relieved to see nothing but a heart someone had carved, I bent to retrieve my backpack.

“Oh, I see,” Mrs. Abernacke said. “You should have just told me. I'm a woman too, you know.”

“Huh?” I said.

“It's a natural, though unfortunate, function. Let me write you a pass for the nurse.”

“For what?” I asked. I held my backpack between us.

“Please do not play games,” she said, looking pointedly at my pants. Then she frowned. “Didn't you watch
The Time of Your Life
in fifth-grade health?”

Instead of going to the nurse, I changed into my PE shorts and went home. I tried to sneak my pants into the laundry without my mother seeing, but she found me as I was rubbing Stain Stick against the crotch of my jeans.

“It's time,” she cried. “I delayed it for as long as I could, but now it's time.” She grabbed the jeans from me, pulled the legs apart and wailed, “Oh, my poor baby! Does it hurt?”

I pushed her away as she tried to hug me. “Quit it,” I told her. “It's no big deal, just the facts of life.” And then I started to cry.

“Aigu,
” my mother clucked as she ushered me into her bedroom. “It does hurt. Lie down.” She pulled the blankets to the foot of the bed, nestled me into her pillows.

“I swallowed a spirit, Mom,” I said, half laughing.

“No,” my mother said. “It's your own spirit fighting to get out, wanting to travel. We must make the way safe for it to go and then come back.”

“I was only joking,” I said. “I'm not a baby anymore that you can fool me with this stuff, you know.” And then I groaned as a spirit raked its nails against my womb.

“Shh, shh,” she crooned, stroking my hair. When I closed my eyes, I felt my mother move away from me, heard the glass doors open onto the garden.

I slept, sailing in and out of dreams, riding the waves of my first cramping. Through the night, my mother bathed my face and body with water that smelled sharp, like freshly cut grass, like newly unearthed roots. And as she stroked me, I dreamed I was swimming, then drowning, then climbing an embankment that eroded and dissolved as I scrambled toward the stars. I dragged myself over sand and stone, following the light, until I stepped on a bridge of fire and found a beautiful woman waiting for me.

At first I thought the woman was my mother, then I realized it was myself. “My name is Induk,” the woman said through my lips. I looked into the face that was once my own and wondered who she saw, who stood in my place looking at the body that Induk now claimed.

I looked at my new hands, trying to find a clue to my present identity, but as I looked, the hands melted, then dissolved into ash. Quickly I looked at the arms, the feet, the legs, and they, too, disintegrated. I knew I was being devoured by flame ravenous as a dragon, fierce as the sun. I waited, a thin column of ash, for the dragon's breath, the wind that would blow my body apart.

“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.