Jill Widner

Don’t

As the elevation drops, heat begins to accumulate in the air. Elizabeth has forgotten the dryness, the stillness, the remoteness.

Don’t.

Elizabeth glances at Abby, whose face is turned to the sunswept slope of yellow grass and broken black boulders that seem either to have tumbled from the sky or to have erupted from a fissure in the earth. In the distance, a tangle of treetops, a strip of beach, rough white caps on hard blue water. Elizabeth stares at the road through the windshield.

Twenty minutes later they are following a trail through sea grass toward a shoulder of wind-packed sand. As they walk, Elizabeth points to something she has forgotten, an orange vine that at a glance one might mistake for discarded string threaded like fishing line through the grass. “Abby. Do you know what this is called?”

“Dodder. Cuscuta sandwichiana. The Hawaiian name is kauna’oa. It’s a parasitic plant that attaches, as you can see, to the above-ground parts of whatever plant lives in the immediate surroundings.”

“I used to see women gathering it. It must have been at graduation time. They twisted it into head leis. The girls looked so beautiful wearing them. I’d never seen anything like it before. I had forgotten its name.”

“What did you say the area is called?” Abby asks.

“Shipwreck Beach.”

“You called it something else before.”

“The name of the village is Keomuku.” As Elizabeth says the word, the letters tumble like dice from a cup, rearranged in the shape of two girl-names: Leimomi and Lovena. She kneels to break off a piece of the red-orange filament winding like tapeworm through the grass. Wraps a strand around her wrist.

Elizabeth sees them, twelve years old, in the back seat of her station wagon. Leimomi is climbing between the bucket seats. Somehow she has slid behind Elizabeth and elbowed her out of the way. Somehow she has taken the wheel. Elizabeth’s feet come away from the pedals. She feels herself falling; she lets herself fall into the passenger seat. Now Leimomi is driving.

“What are you doing?”

“Why?” Their voices overlap. “It’s only the pineapple fields.”

Their voices stop and start. The sound vibrates and rings the bones in Elizabeth’s face. Leimomi’s eyes widen. Lovena squints. Leimomi steps on the gas. Then the station wagon slides to a stop in deep yellow sand, and the car is stuck. They leave it behind. Lovena points to an orange vine that snakes through the beach grass, a fine splintery chain, attached to the grass. See that? That’s kauna’oa, that.

The shoreline is littered with pebbles, pieces of glass, bits of metal and plastic. Here the ocean is a murky brown-green because of the shallow reef, which is visible offshore for some distance. Small waves gather momentum then break across the reef before they have a chance to form. The wind blasts whitecaps across the surface chop.

Guarding their eyes and holding back their hair, Abby and Elizabeth walk toward a protected inlet where the beach seems to curve to an end against a jetty of lava boulders.

Backed against the dune and nestled in the beach grass, a row of houses faces the water. Shacks pieced together from driftwood, plywood boards, and kiawe branches. Some of the porch railings are wrapped with sea rope. Glass balls swing from the eaves. Tacked to a sun bleached, weather-beaten wall, a fisherman’s net; on another, the desiccated tail of a fish.

Small waves lap their feet. Elizabeth turns to look over her shoulder as though someone is there. The beach is empty. Their footprints mark the hard-packed wet brown sand.

The two girls run ahead. Then, like dogs let loose, they circle back.

Lovena’s bangs fall into her eyes in jagged uneven lines. Her eyes are so dark, so serious, that Elizabeth is surprised when her mouth breaks into a smile. Her teeth are very white, very crooked, too large for her twelve-year-old mouth.

What? she asks, when their eyes meet.

“What did you say you call the color of your hair? The sun bleached red color? What do you call that?”

Ehu. Why?

I like it.

Leimomi interrupts. Do you want to know what my name means?

What, Leimomi? Tell me what your name means.

Necklace of pearls.

That’s a beautiful name, Leimomi.

Not.

Yes. It’s just like you. Pearls represent purity and innocence. Did you know that?

Not.

It’s true. And integrity.

What is that? Integrity.

It’s what you know when you look into someone’s eyes.

Like when you can tell they no going bullshit you?

Like that.

You can’t always tell.

I know. That’s the thing about integrity.

Sometimes what their eyes say changes.

I know.

Sometimes even they don’t know what they mean.

I know.

It’s kind of fun not to know.

Come, the other girl says to Elizabeth. I like show you something.

What is it, Lovena?

Just come.

They climb a rough staircase. The planks of the steps and the walls of the house are made of driftwood.

Look. Lovena is kneeling on the floor, her fingers splayed around a silver cross, or is it splinters of abalone shell Elizabeth sees, a mosaic of iridescence embedded in the driftwood board.

I wish I could have it.

Take it. I can pry it loose for you if you like.

No. Someone put it here. It belongs here.

You can have it. No one would care. No one would even notice.

I’d rather leave it here. What if I come back some day? If I did, I’d want it to be here.

Are you going leave the island?

Of course she will, Leimomi says. The teachers always leave.

Not any time soon, Lovena.

Don’t.

“Abby? I’d rather walk the other way. Do you mind?”

Jill Widner is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She received a 2007 Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission fellowship and was a resident at Yaddo in 2007 and 2008. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in North American Review, Kyoto Journal, Hitotoki, and Memoir (and). “Don’t,” an excerpt from her novella Before the Rain, is set on the island of Lana’i, where she lived and taught in the early 1980s.