Chapter XVII
Kauaʻi
1969 CE
Alicia watched the postal truck pull away from their house on the bluff. Maneuvering up the drive backwards, the vehicle stopped and started several times. She raised an eyebrow. The pathway was narrow and Billy hadn’t gotten to fixing the rail between the drive and the cliff. She toweled the water from her hair and hoped for the best. Maybe it was the conditioner she’d ordered from the mainland. She loved what the saltwater did for her skin, but her hair was a fright. Her kids used to tease her when her white-blonde-white hair stood up all over like this, the salt making the strands stick together in clumps. “Gramma and Grampa called from Iowa,” they’d hoot, “the scarecrow’s gone missing again!” Jesse was fair like she and Billy. Always burning in the hot tropical sun, but Romey was dark like his dad; looked like one of the native islanders. They were all coming Sunday for her birthday. Fifty. Where did time go?
She took the stairs straight up, rather than risk the easier path, the switchback up the cliff underneath the drive where the postal truck was still threatening to go ass over teakettle down to the beach. Alicia was huffing hard by the time she picked the package up off the porch and the truck was long gone. This couldn’t be her conditioner. What was with all of the stickers and stamps?
In the kitchen she set the package on the counter and poured herself a glass of cold juice.
“Bill?” she hollered into the house. Nothing. He must have gone into town.
Alicia sat down to examine the box. Postmarks and stamps dotted the bit-bigger-than-a-shoebox-sized package like a miniature travel trunk you see in the old movies. Thick brown tape ran criss-cross, stopping and starting again as if the box had been opened and sealed back up more than once. Their last two addresses in Freedom had been inked in and crossed out: her parents’ farmhouse where she and Romey had lived after Jerome shipped out and the bungalow Billy had rented for them in town.
Alicia smiled. She hadn’t thought about that place in years. Billy with Romey on his shoulders, carrying her over the threshold. They’d gotten married at the courthouse one week to the day after Billy showed up on her doorstep in 1945. Said he’d thought of nothing except her all through the war, and God bless Jerome who he’d known since they were born, but would she do him the honor, finally, of becoming his wife. Alicia had cried. Billy Courtright was someone she’d known all her life. They were good friends, more than that maybe, at times. And she knew she’d broken his heart when she started going with Jerry, and maybe their marriage had a little to do with the way that he’d left. He’d written her a letter once, in all dots and dashes. She knew what it said even so.
“Yes,” she said, “on one condition.”
“Anything,” he said.
“Get me away from this dust forever.”
He had grinned ear to ear, then cocked one eyebrow, just like William Powell in her favorite old movie when Godfrey proposed to Irene. “I know a place.”
She had suffered the airplane ride, sick the whole time. In hindsight, she’d been pregnant with Jesse by the time they left Freedom, which likely had something to do with it. But the view of the ocean from the air made her vibrate all over. She would have jumped out that window into the water and drifted the rest of the way to Hawaii if she could. Now she swam in that very ocean every day.
Stranger than the address corrections was her name. Alicia Gulbrandsen. Not Courtright or Jennings or even Hanson. Gulbrandsen was the maiden name of her grandmother, Hattie, on her mother’s side. She recalled the day Romey had come to her with a worksheet from school. A picture of a tree with lines for the family names. He was only required to go up to his own grandparents, but he was that kind of kid, so she sat down and helped him add extra lines and spelled Gulbrandsen slowly while he wrote. “What kind of name is that?” he’d asked. Norwegian, I think, she’d answered. Her wedding nightgown with the crystals. She still had it—washed and folded in a zippered bag. Waiting for Jesse to get married, which might be never, Alicia sighed.
Gulbrandsen. How strange. And was that a Norwegian stamp? Where else had this thing been?
The outer porch door creaked on its hinges and Billy walked in balancing shopping bags, two in each hand. Kissed his wife on the nape of her neck. “What you got there, kid?”
“A package from . . . I don’t know yet.”
Billy eyed it. “Gonna open it or get out the map?”
She glared at him over the rim of her juice glass. “I like to savor,” she said.
He snorted at that. “Well, savor away. I have a party to plan.”
Alicia hollered after him, “Bring me the atlas!”
Alicia showed Billy the route the package had taken while they shared a bottle of wine. She’d pieced it together by reading the postmark places and dates. The packaging came off in several layers. Some marks were smeared, but she thought she had it pretty close. She had stuck pins on the map she’d torn from the atlas and connected them with kite string she’d found in the junk drawer. The plain brown cardboard box underneath all the wrappers sat unopened on the coffee table next to the map. The sun was setting, something they had vowed in their second wedding, on the beach down below, to never miss together, if it could be helped.
“So I think it originated in Bengali, India, or maybe Eritrea? That’s here, the east coast of Africa, on the Red Sea. There are stamps from each, but no postmarks or dates. There are stamps marked ‘hold for return’ in a couple of places. Then the package was in Cairo, Egypt—see that stamp with the pyramids—next to an address I can’t make out for a Dr. Charlotte Wil—the rest is smeared—at Oxford University. Then there is a handwritten postmark dated May 18, 1962 and the name of a small town, here, near Norkopp. That’s Norway, at the top of the peninsula. And look at the stamp—it’s an aurora. I adore auroras.”
“Norway, isn’t that where your family is from?”
“On my mother’s side, yes, I don't know where. How can it be from some relative there, when it’s been so many other bizarre places?”
“It’s a mystery, my love, please continue,” Billy said, air toasting her with his wineglass.
Well, then it's the addresses in Iowa—my parent’s farm, then that little place you and I had on High Street. Then here.
“Any theories?” Billy asked, taking a sip.
“Nope. My grandma had a sister and brother that lived in England somewhere, I think. Professors, both of them—so this Dr. Charlotte is our best clue. My grandma lived in Norway when she was little. Their village fell into the sea or something awful and they all moved inland. As if England is inland.”
Billy raised an eyebrow at her.
“Worth it,” she said, knowing the look referred to their old argument about this house on a cliff in a chain of volcanic islands and its certain, sudden slide into the Pacific.
Alicia wished she’d paid better attention when her grandma was telling her stories every year on her birthday. One for each year. As a kid, Alicia had thought it was weird.
“You planning to open that box any time soon?”
“Sunday. Before the kids come over. My fiftieth birthday. Maybe it’s meant to be a present.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t want to open it early, after it took, what, eighteen years to get here?” Billy grinned.
“Shut up and kiss me,” Alicia said.
When the sun rose Sunday morning, Alicia was on the beach. The package sat in front of her while she dug her toes down to the cool layer of sand. The morning was warm already, the sun on her back. With one long, pink-painted nail, Alicia slit open the last bit of string on the box. She opened the lid and was met with a whiff of spices, then something else. Cold smelling, like fresh fallen snow. Then something almost fishy, yet not rank. A smell like her old pond in the clearing beyond the orchard. Remembered the last time. The lilies stroking her skin. Dreaming the dream once more before meeting Billy on their wedding day. The dream had stopped after that, not starting up again until this year.
The contents were nested in a length of watery blue silk. Alicia pulled each piece out in turn, laying them on the sand. First, a bundle tied up in a smaller piece of silk, rectangular, shifting in her hands. Next, a velvet bag—filled with coins, she guessed, from the feel of it. Peeked inside. Then a piece of white, pockmarked hide—from some kind of wild animal, wrapped and tied around something inside that quaked in her palm, or was she shaking? Too much coffee already, Alicia thought. Beneath these, she found an oversized iron key. To what? The top was beautiful, strange. Three rings that hung together when she picked it up. She couldn’t see exactly how they were connected. Under the key was a sheaf of papers, different sizes, and from the looks of them, different authors and ages. Alicia lifted the papers out of the box, holding them tight against the ever-present Pacific wind. She flipped through. Pages and pages of handwritten stories, some with illustrations. Sketches, some with paint daubs around the edge. And letters. The one on top was addressed to her.
She flipped to the end and read the salutation . . .
- Yours, Frieda Harris, Soror Tzaba, Princess of Fire.
Alicia heard her heart racing over the crash of the waves.
Back to the first page, the letter began . . .
My dear Alicia,
Once there was a story and no one to tell it.
That time is over.
Absorbed as she was in the letter, Alicia jumped out of her skin when the bird swooped in. She saw the talons first, falling back at the size of them, at the thrust of air whipping at her hair as the beast turned out of its descent, snatched up the key and was gone out to sea.
Alicia stuffed the papers back in the box and spun toward the water. The bird was already past the reef break—the size of that thing. Pure white it appeared; the rising sun flashing across its back as it angled north. So bright Alicia had to blink back stars. When her vision cleared she focused again, searched the sky. That was no sea bird, by the look of those wings.
All at once, Alicia stripped off her nightgown yelling WAIT! after the bird and dove into the blue-green-blue sea.
END | BEGINNING
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