Between the Deep Blue Sea and Me Read online

  BETWEEN THE DEEP BLUE SEA AND ME

  BETWEEN THE DEEP BLUE SEA AND ME

  LURLINE WAILANA MCGREGOR

  KAMEHAMEHA PUBLISHING

  HONOLULU

  Copyright © 2008 by Lurline Wailana McGregor

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Between the Deep Blue Sea and Me is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the story’s characters and real persons living or otherwise is purely coincidental.

  Inquiries should be addressed to:

  Kamehameha Publishing

  567 South King Street

  Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96813

  ISBN 978-0-87336-304-4 (digital edition)

  ISBN 978-0-87336-206-1 (print edition)

  Book and cover design by Design Logix

  Cover illustration by Imaikalani Kalahele

  For my parents, Calvin C. and Madeleine Fauvre McGregor

  “Ua alaula mai ‘o uka,

  ua moku ka pawa o ke ao,

  a ke‘oke‘o ma uka,

  a wehe ke alaula,

  a pualena,

  a ao loa.”

  DAVIDA MALO

  PART ONE

  In the void of darkness, birds stirred with anticipation. The approaching daylight separated sky from earth. By the time the first rays of the sun reached the top of the Ko‘olau Mountains, the birds were already in full chorus, celebrating the arrival of a new day.

  On the leeward coast of O‘ahu, a Hawaiian woman, ageless as the ocean, stood in the mystery, ready to carry out her role in the morning ceremony. Water lapped as the tide rose. Into the darkness, facing the intense calm of the water, she began her chant. The primal sound of her voice was filled with the power of those who came before her. Her song carried out to sea.

  Nā ‘aumākua i ka pō

  Nā ‘aumākua i ke ao

  Mai ka lā hiki a ka lā kau

  Mai ka lā kau a ka lā komo

  Far out in the deep, a shark was aroused. He recognized the woman’s voice and started to move toward it. This ritual had taken place since the time of the ancients, unbroken by the inconsequential changes of invaders and governments.

  ‘O Koihala

  ‘O Kahi‘ukā

  ‘O Ka‘ahupāhau

  He hau ke anu i pā mai

  Ma ka welelau a ka Moa‘e lū lehua o‘Ewa uli a Lākona

  He lehua au, he pulapula ho‘i na Kawelo ē

  E holo aku kākou, e nā ‘aumākua

  Mai ka nuku o ke awa lau o Pu‘uloa

  A ka malu o ka ‘ohai o Honouliuli

  E lei kākou i ka pua o ka ma‘oma‘o

  I ka lei kauno‘a ‘ula o Ko‘olina

  ‘Olina ke kui lei hua kukui

  Ho‘ā ke kukui i ka lamalama pumehana o ka ‘āina

  The shark rose, its gray dorsal fin breaking the surface of the water as it gained speed, anxious to reach the source of the call.

  E ao, a ‘ōlinolino, a mālamalama ka lā

  E kā‘eo ka ‘umeke a piha ka pūniu

  E ‘ike ‘ia ke au nui, ke au iki

  Ke au loa, ke au poko

  Nā au ia a ‘oukou i alahula ai, e nā ‘aumākua

  A ho‘i mai i ka moana kai lana o ka‘āina

  ‘Ano‘ai ā

  The shark reached the chanter’s feet underwater and stopped next to her. In her faded mu‘umu‘u that rose barely above the water, the woman bent down, her gray hair falling around her face, and lovingly stroked the shark’s back.

  A handsome Hawaiian man, in his worn thirties, sat in a small living room speaking with an older Hawaiian woman. His casual sports shirt and slacks appeared almost formal next to the woman’s threadbare mu‘umu‘u. The room was lit by the remains of the day that filtered through the partially opened window. Even though no one else was around, they spoke in lowered voices.

  “Aunty, I made a mistake,” said the man who squinted his eyes at the sun’s reach. His head was almost too heavy to lift. “I need your help to fix it.” His voice was a prayer.

  The woman looked at him. She knew him as well as she knew her house, the surrounding land, this ocean. Finally she sighed. “We can try, Puni, but this is something maybe we can’t put back together. It may be too late,” she told him. As she spoke, the room started to tremble.

  Two thousand four hundred miles across the Pacific Ocean near Santa Monica Beach, Moana Kawelo was startled from her sleep by a tremor. She was four years old and her father was steadying her surfboard as a small wave caught it and started pushing it forward. No, there was another dream. In her shaking bed, she turned toward the window for signs of dawn. Must be an earthquake, she sleepily thought as she realized the whole room was mildly shaking. By the time she was fully conscious, it had stopped. No damage. She looked across the bed at Charlie, who was still out, oblivious. She looked at the clock. Five a.m.

  Moana rinsed her face, changed into her sweats and was out the door. It was a routine she could do in her sleep and often did. As she jogged from the doorstep of her condo to the beginning of the beach trail and picked a play list on her iPod, the tentacles of her dreams still had a hold she couldn’t shake. This morning she needed upbeat Hawaiian: Henry Kapono, Sudden Rush, Brother Noland. She always listened to Hawaiian music when she needed comfort food for her soul. She stretched just long enough to be able to say that she stretched before starting her watch to begin her serious run. The sky was already beginning to lighten.

  After only a few minutes into her run, Moana was warmed up and in her stride. She had the slim body of a runner although swimming was her first passion. Anything to do with the ocean—surfing, snorkeling, especially bodysurfing, would always win out over any other exercise, but in Los Angeles the water was too cold, too murky. Not inviting, like at home.

  Moana turned her attention to the salt air, the pale blue of the morning sky. It contrasted with the dark blue of the Pacific Ocean, where the sun, in pure white sparkles, danced on the water. She kept pace with the beat of the music in her head. There was something so beautiful about the morning that Moana stopped to look across the vastness of the sea and breathe in the day. She thought about her home across the ocean and sent a silent greeting to the islands and to her family. Imagining her parents still sleeping, she pulled the elastic off her long dark hair and shook her head, letting each strand receive the blessings of the wind. Impulsively looking at her watch, Moana tied her hair back again and started running. She needed to stay focused today.

  By the time Moana walked back through her front door, Charlie was dressed for work and already eating breakfast. Charlie McNeil was two years younger than Moana, and they both looked considerably younger than their mid-to-late thirty-somethings. He looked more like a professor than an attorney in his corduroy pants and tousled sandy hair. His boyish good looks, intelligence and unaffectedness made him irresistible to Moana, and she still melted whenever he smiled at her. Maybe it was because his sparkling blue eyes reminded her of the ocean. They had dated since grad school at UCLA but had been too busy with their budding careers to spend time getting into a serious relationship. Three years ago they realized they were both ready, and after officially announcing their engagement, Charlie moved out of his parents’ estate and into Moana’s condominium. In another four months, they would be husband and wife.

  “You should have gotten me up,” Charlie said, barely looking up from his newspaper. “I would have loved to go running with you. Maybe I could have ou
trun some of this paperwork.”

  “You looked so comfortable lying in bed that I didn’t want to bother you. Do you even know you slept right through one of your famous California earthquakes? The shaking bed woke me up. Anyway, if you’d have come I wouldn’t have your specially made orange juice and espresso waiting for me,” she teased.

  Moana rifled through the fridge, looking for something simple to eat. The refrigerator door was a mess of pictures of family and friends: her and her parents at the airport, her piled with lei; her and Charlie bundled up at the top of a ski lift; her grandfather memorialized forever with raw crab remnants all around his mouth on his eightieth birthday; even a picture of her and her father when she was little and he was pushing her surfboard on a little bump, teaching her to surf. Why put them in an album, she reasoned, where she would rarely look at them? This way she could see the pictures every day and keep them in her thoughts. Inside the fridge, a box with leftover pepperoni pizza caught her attention. She took out a slice and walked across the kitchen to get a plate and join Charlie at the table. Even though a paper towel would have served the same purpose, Moana preferred the decorum of eating off fine china.

  “Cold pizza, the perfect pairing for freshly squeezed orange juice,” Charlie noted with amusement. It was a typical Moana breakfast, one of the many contradictions that intrigued him about her. When they decided to get married, they sat together and made a list of positives and negatives about each other. There were such categories as “endearing traits I can live with,” “unbearable habits I cannot live with,” and even “family members I will not sit next to.” Charlie smiled to himself thinking that cold pizza fell under “endearing traits.”

  They had both settled into eating and reading the newspaper when a radio report caught their attention. Moana went over to turn up the radio. “A series of earthquakes shook the Hawaiian Islands early this morning, causing minor damage. The source of the quakes is off the west side of O‘ahu. Scientists are baffled, as it was an unusual place for a seismic swarm. They say it could be the earth simply relieving pressure, or it could mean the start of new volcanic activity.” The reporter then turned to the local traffic report.

  Moana turned the radio down and resumed her breakfast. “Now I remember,” she said, as much to herself as to Charlie. “There was an earthquake in Hawai‘i in my dream at the same time I felt it here. I wonder if they’re related?”

  Still not looking up, Charlie responded, “Are you sure you felt an earthquake here, or were you just dreaming it?” He recalled “weird dreams” being on his list of Moana’s “strange but bearable habits.”

  Even though she was in a hurry, Moana thoughtfully recounted the details of her dream to Charlie. “I woke up remembering a dream about Dad teaching me to surf, but there were more dreams after that. There was an old Hawaiian woman at the beach, chanting out to the ocean. In the dream I saw that her chant made a pathway across the ocean right up to a shark. The chant belonged to the shark, and when he heard it, he turned in the direction of the chanter. The shark was lonely for the woman. He swam to her, following the path of the chant. He liked it when the woman leaned down and stroked his back. Then I saw my father as a young man. He was talking to the old woman. She called him Puni, and he called her Aunty. He was upset about something and very sad. I’ve seen the old woman in my dreams before. When she talked, the earthquake started.”

  Moana continued to think about how lucid the dream was. “It gives me chicken skin just thinking about it. The woman’s voice sounded so real, so powerful, like it was calling through the ages. In fact, she looked like an ancient Hawaiian wearing modern clothes. I wonder what all this means.”

  “Maybe it means you should watch out for sharks today, especially the ones circling in your office,” Charlie joked, having only half listened to Moana’s story.

  “Very funny.”

  Putting down his newspaper to give Moana his full attention, Charlie tried to be conciliatory. “Hey, I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I was just trying to be practical, thinking that maybe it has to do with your meeting today and your colleagues finding out there are going to be some choice new job opportunities. But you’re the dream expert. Do you think it’s some kind of premonition? Maybe you should call your parents. When’s the last time you talked to them?”

  “There are lots of shark stories about ancestors and ‘aumākua,” Moana said, not listening to Charlie. “I don’t know what this could have to do with me or my family, though. Dad never talked much about our ancestors. He was mostly raised in the city, with his dad and stepmother and stepsiblings. He respected those stories, so much that he walked a wide path around them.” She checked her watch and realized she needed to get ready for work. She wanted to look her best today for the big meeting. Today was going to be a turning point in her career. “Uh oh, I’d better get going. I definitely don’t want to be late today.” Moana stopped to kiss Charlie as she balanced coffee and papers on her way out of the room.

  “Honey, you’re never late,” Charlie pointed out.

  “Wish me luck, Charlie Brown,” Moana called from the bathroom.

  “You’ll do great, Dr. Kawelo,” he called back over the blasting shower. Smiling, he thought to himself, “You always do.” That was another definite plus about Moana. She did great work, and she was always on time. Charlie wondered if Moana’s drive for quality and punctuality was the main reason they were so compatible.

  As Moana drove to work, she thought about the upcoming meeting and how she wanted everything to be perfect. She was dressed in her favorite blue Ann Taylor dress that flattered her slender shape and olive skin. Eyeliner accented her dark Polynesian eyes that shined through long lashes. She even wore her strand of black pearls that Charlie had bought for her last birthday. Her taste was impeccable, and Charlie knew better than to try to select her jewelry and clothes, an arrangement that suited both of them. Moana’s hapa mixture of Hawaiian and Caucasian features gave her a gorgeous look that had always turned heads, both male and female. Moana was making a statement today that notwithstanding her looks, she was to be taken seriously for her expertise and skill at brokering an agreement between one of the leading museums in the country and California State’s casino-rich Indian tribes. She deserved to be chief curator of the new wing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, where she started as an intern in graduate school and worked her way up to the position of assistant curator.

  She remembered that she needed to double-check the gift bags her staff had put together for everyone who was expected to be at the meeting. She needed to make sure there were extras in case the Indians brought along family or friends. Moana smiled to herself thinking about how if she was in Hawai‘i, there would definitely be more people coming than just those holding invitations. She liked the inclusiveness of Native people, how everyone became family.

  Moana then made a mental note to read the press release a final time before it was sent out. This was a huge announcement. Moana would go over the statement again to be sure that every sentence was crafted to make the tribes look good, that there was no room for anyone to read into the agreement anything other than honorable intentions by both parties.

  This was a healing, Moana thought, proud of her role in bringing the museum community closer to the tribes through this new project. It was a different era from when museums ripped off artifacts and bones from Indians in the name of science. At times like this Moana was sad that she couldn’t share her achievement with her father. He had been totally against her becoming a cultural anthropologist. “Leave the past in the past, it serves no purpose to study artifacts,” she could hear him saying. He wanted Moana to be a lawyer, like him, to help the Hawaiians still suffering from the ravages of colonization.

  Moana had no interest in becoming a lawyer. Ever since she convinced her father to let her spend a high school summer on an archaeological dig for the Knight Museum, there was no question. Her passion was studying the past, and Moa
na had an aptitude for learning about culture and artifacts. Once she had tried to get her father to talk about his parents’ cultural practices and stories he heard growing up, like tales about night marchers. He scolded her so severely for wasting time on useless questions that she never asked him again. A few times Moana had asked her mother why Dad got so upset when he saw her reading books on Hawaiian legends and ghost stories, but she didn’t want to talk about it either. Moana told herself that someday her father would understand why this knowledge was important and why it was especially important that a Native person be doing this work. She argued with him in her mind that one didn’t have to be an attorney to help our people; understanding the past and coming to terms with who we are was just as important. “He will be proud of me yet,” she thought as she turned into the museum parking lot.

  Precisely at 9:55 a.m., museum curators and directors filed into the boardroom. The meeting was to begin at 10:00, but the council members were late. Moana knew better than to be upset about it. Instead she wondered if she should have told the executives that the meeting was at 10:30, to allow for “Indian time.”

  “It’s like Hawaiian time, Richard. Native people don’t live by watches,” Moana whispered to her colleague, Richard Kingsley, who was secretly taking pleasure that the Indians were late. He wondered why, if Native people were always late, Moana was never late. Dr. Kingsley was ten years older than Moana and although he always acted friendly toward her, Moana knew he didn’t care for her. It offended him that she was younger, female, Native and of equal rank in the museum hierarchy. As a white male and Yale graduate who always dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and a bow tie, Kingsley believed he should have become a department head years ago. Dr. Goldberg had assigned Moana as the lead and asked Kingsley to assist her on this project with the Indians, and both were determined to make the best of the situation. Nevertheless, Moana had never had a good feeling about Kingsley and did not trust him. She smiled to herself remembering Charlie’s remark about the office sharks as she looked around the table. “Yeah,” she thought, “they’re right here in this room.” Charlie was no fool.