“There’s your answer.”
“But he seems different than the rest of their clientele. At first I thought he might be a lifeguard or something, but those reels. And that hook.”
With his tousled and amber-streaked hair and freckled skin, he had clearly spent some time in the sun. But it was more than that. He had this undercurrent of confidence in the water, around a boat. He reminded her of her own kind.
Nalu was still watching the man as he scrambled up on the rocks, timed perfectly with the wash of a swell. “He’s definitely a fisherman—of more than just‘opihi.”
Journal Entry
From the journal of Minnow Gray
Hawai‘i, February 23, 1998
It was Rachel Carson,themarine biologist I aspire to be, who so eloquently helped me understand why we see the sea as blue, and in Hawai?i this seems more the case than ever. Especially here on the Big Island. The water molecules and tiny particulate matter reflect sunlight back to our eyes, yet the ocean has absorbed the red and some of the yellow, leaving cool and glorious blue light. When you think about it, the blue we see is this subtle and ever-changing dance between the sun, the ocean and our eyes.
Chapter 9
The Kiawe
Honu: turtle
In her mouth, she tastes blood. A tooth has come loose, she realizes, and she coughs it up into her hand. More come after the first, tall triangles, serrated and sharp, and she can’t get them out fast enough. The inside of her cheek is torn. There is no surprise these are shark teeth—it seems perfectly normal, except they begin to pile up in her mouth and she is choking and gasping for air.
“Hello? Minnow?”
A loud knocking woke her up, and it took a moment to orient herself. Saggy mattress. Salty breeze. Rustle of coconut fronds.
“In here,” she said, wiping the drool from her chin as she sat up, slightly disoriented. Weird, there actuallywasblood on the back of her hand.
“Are you okay?” Nalu called.
“Yeah, I fell asleep.”
“Sounded like you were croaking.”
“Nope. I’m still alive. Just having a weird dream. Sorry to freak you out.” The inside of her cheek burns. She must have bit it.
“I just need to grab the keys to the truck and I’ll be on my way,” he said.
“They’re where you left them.”
“Unless you need me to drive you to the hospital?”
By the time Nalu came through the screen door dripping wet and letting it slam behind him, she was alert. It would be nice not to be so tied to him and to have her own car and her own boat, but maybe this was what it felt like to have a younger brother tagging along.
“Not today. Stonewalled again.”
When she returned to the house earlier that afternoon, she’d called again. This time another tight-lipped nurse told her that the patient in room 206 was not ready for visitors, even scientists on official business.
“I’ll take you up there tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe we can work our way in.”
He was right, but there was a part of her that was also relieved at not having to come face-to-face with the reality of how fragile humans were in the mouth of a shark. She thought of her dream again and could almost feel how easily those teeth would pierce the skin.
A few chunks of bleached white coral marked the road that branched off from the driveway and headed to the Kiawe. Minnow wanted to walk over and see if the resort owner was around, maybe pick his brain. Joe hadn’t told her much about him, just that he was distressed about the deaths so close to the resort—and he’d been all in for a shark hunt.
For most of the way the lava road hugged the coast, and the breeze off the ocean cooled her skin. When one short section curved away from the water, the temperature rose a good ten degrees, and Minnow felt like she was walking in a field of sauna rocks. The lava crunched underfoot, and she was glad to be wearing shoes, not slippers. Walkinghere midday would be brutal, she decided, and was glad she had waited for the sun to drop.
Twenty minutes later, the road ended at a crushed coral circle, where a person could park a car if careful not to drive into the ocean while turning around. Several big logs blocked vehicle access to the Kiawe, and she sensed Woody probably didn’t want anyone driving down to his house, not the other way around.
