Stillborn

By Christie Cochrell

/ Fiction /    

No one really knows why restoration stopped on the abandoned St. Julian hotel, where commoners and kings once came to relax in luxury. The investors behind its latest makeover were said to be from Japan, so weren't around on the island to brief the media, to quell rumors, to affirm or deny any of the unlikely stories circulating of forced labor, trafficking, Somali pirates (Chinese thugs?) on motorboats landing one moonless night and spiriting the managing partners away. More prosaic suggestions included a disastrous run of luck in the market, an ill-timed change of heart.

Marley Blackmore was staying in a rented garden cottage down the coast from the hotel, while studying its history and especially its recent past, because of her mother's last known days there. Helena Stevenson had been a quietly famous poet, who corresponded regularly with a number of fellow poets including Czeslaw Milosz in Berkeley and W.S. Merwin over on Maui. After a rather hectic life with varied men, traveling between five of the world's continents, she'd stayed at the St. Julian for six or seven months before her presumed death almost two years ago, and written all of her last poetry collection there. Stillborn—inspired (said the preface) by the island's King Kamehameha III, revived after his inauspicious birth across the harbor from where the hotel would stand. Other than the poetry, the small volume she had in hand, those last months were a mystery to Marley, with no idea whatsoever what had caused Helena's death. If anything. Her body had never been recovered, but there'd been a brief, unapologetic letter sent to Marley days before she'd disappeared, insisting she not contact the authorities, but instead let sleeping dogs die—referring plainly to the otterhound Jeremiah, a fast friend (family, really) in Marley's teenage years, who'd been endearingly grumbly when awakened without due care.

Marley was having a hard time recovering from her always-absent mother's final disappearance. The not knowing had thrown her for a loop, and as the days went on she wondered if she'd ever be fully herself again. After almost two years of stubbornly pegging away at ordinary life in an effort to regain her footing, she admitted defeat, requested some personal leave from work, and made the journey to Hawaii's Kona Coast, hoping to find the answers there she needed to be going on with.

She'd been shocked when making travel arrangements to learn that the St. Julian was closed—having naively expected that Helena's singular, eloquent spirit would be left everywhere in the hotel, like Noel Coward's sassy ghosts in Blithe Spirit (one of her mother's favorite plays), along with all the people who had known her there. She'd consequently booked the little garden guest house for a month, and a small rental car, though she could walk easily to the harbor and the adjoining St. Julian.

It affected her deeply when she first saw the graceful multi-story building empty, like a beached ship on the lava shore, wrecked by the hand of man or god and falling visibly into ruin. The thought of an empty hotel was unnerving in general—maybe because it was an intrinsic contradiction. But the setting was gorgeous, and the air like balm, something she'd noticed as soon as she stepped out of the plane, and being there felt like a healing bath in unguent, attar, gentle baby oil. The site of the St. Julian was as her mother had described, and drew her back time and again, as close as she could get to what was left.

The teal blue spire of the wooden chapel in the grounds Helena had mentioned in several poems was still rising upward through a shower of palm fronds, though the chapel itself was boarded up, wrapped with tattered yellow "caution"tape. (One of the poems showed maids cleaning the chapel, throwing the shutters open to the bath-like air.) Marley could get fairly close to some of the abandoned structures, approaching either from the boat harbor or the golf course, and get into the gardens on the property's periphery. She unfolded the flowered beach chair she had bought up at the shopping center on the hill, and sat for hours on a strip of sandy lawn, or just in from the pitch black lava pools mirroring sky (cornflower, Maya, satiated blue), and try to picture how the place had been once, full of life. The ocean was a living presence still, black-hearted blue, the color Helena had christened Kona blue, full of the spiritual energy the Hawaiians called mana. A graceful freehand tree at harbor's edge, not a species she recognized, was her sole company. Even the birds seemed to have gone for good.

Line by line again she read her mother's poems, watched kayaks slipping in and out of the harbor like needles through green silk. The harbor where the king was born, her mother said—just across the water from here. Where boats anchored, cruise boats for snorkeling and island history tours, sportfishing boats, kayak rentals, and paddle boards. She watched a fishing boat go by out of the harbor, past her observation post, loaded with brightly colored floats. She glanced again the other way, toward the silent old hotel, bare as a scoured bone.

The lines she read, some fragmentary, some like swift haikus, offered achingly fleeting glimpses of Helena's last, lingering days. Marley studied for clues the unnamed islanders who'd come and gone, touching her mother's life and leaving tracks on the watermarked page.

A boy and his mother roam the tide pools. 

The boy catches a tiny fish or a rock crab 

he'll keep with ocean water in his shoe.

The kupuna at the folding table

on the pool deck every day

smiles his welcome, ready to talk story, 

stringing the seed pearls 

heaped like rice on his indigo cloth.

collecting urchins from the rocks, 

a man of substance 

with a red cloth band around his head, 

cloth bag around his hips

in his grass mask, barefoot,

a native dancer learns to dance with sticks 

an old, slow woman walks along the road,

a white bird on her arm—white cockatoo

(paloma, she'll tell me, alaʻau,

because this bird has no name of its own)

Among those others, though, there'd been the musician Helena wrote about less sketchily, time and again. A kind of archetype, it felt, an Orpheus or island deity like Prospero, a recurring musical element or theme. The shadowy figure had been a singer-songwriter, a player of the ukulele and ipu hula—a Hawaiian drum made from two gourds. Who had he been, the beating heart of that body of poems? And how in the world could Marley find out, find him? She'd hoped he would be here playing his instruments, or at least lots of hotel staff who'd known him well.

But all of them were gone, and she had no idea how to track them down. Her landlord, Sandro, hadn't known any of them. No musician matching the description turned up online. She could only go on doing the small things in her power—haunting the gardens and the lava pools, comparing her impressions with the elliptical record her mother had left. Noting the old worn volcano above the harbor taken by cloud, as Helena had described it. Not forgetting that just across the boat harbor from where she sat (six shades of translucent blue), Hawaii's last king was born—stillborn, the title of the poetry, then revived magically and given life. Just past the buoys and the fishing boats, the kayaks slender as ti leaves.

At the farmers' market each Thursday she bought a bagful of papayas and armful of flowers as Helena wrote she had done—pink ginger, orchids, New Pahoa Red anthurium, to make the little breakfast nook cheerful. To forge another link with her absent but increasingly revived parent.

* * *

Marley was named for the reggae singer and songwriter, who her mother had met in London in the 70s and quite fallen in love with (platonically, surely?) for his music and vibes. Marley'd had reggae in her veins since earliest childhood, and Harry Belafonte's calypso. She liked that Hawaii was big on reggae too. She listened to the reggae station from Maui each morning, often while she was writing what was shaping up to be the story of a music-channeling poet and a music-touched hotel, both doomed. While she was trying to think of some way to get in touch with the musician who had likely been the poet's last lover. There were countless intimations in the poems, and Helena had always been attractive and attracted, drawn incautiously to men. Marley's father had come and gone without marriage.

Days were reggae, nights Chopin. Marley, perfectly Gemini by nature as by birth, sat in her little cottage most evenings listening to music coming through her open windows from those of the Plantation-style main house, her landlord from Miami (with a Cuban mother, blue-rimmed Elton John eyeglasses) playing Chopin and Schubert fluently on his vintage baby grand, the old-world music sweet and wistful, mingling with the fragrance of plumeria and other tropical flowers she couldn't name. She'd been reading Somerset Maugham—The Trembling of a Leaf, a collection of stories set in the Pacific, followed by The Narrow Corner, set in Southeast Asia. Feeling the poignance of being a stranger and alone in a faraway place. Being the conduit between her mother's otherworldly spirit and normality.

The dishes in her rental were the finest French Limoges, with some very slight blemishes marring the lips (as the piano was ever so slightly out of key). She drank Old Lahaina Gold rum out of a bone china teacup with ice from her tiny freezer, unable to help feeling like a bourgeois Marie Antoinette, slumming and certainly not wise to much. She'd learned from Sandro that the dishes had come secondhand from the St. Julian Hotel, when it was up for sale by the Frenchman who'd owned it for a while and given it its current name.

Pursuing that, online, she found a detailed write-up by a sugar-cane heiress who'd lived in the vicinity most of her life after graduating from Vassar in the early 30s with a History degree, and tried to preserve as much island history as she could, as well as helping to restore native culture. Marley found her account helpful and beguiling.

The hotel proper, on Keauhou Bay, was built by Protestant missionaries from New England in the 1820s on the site of the old hale—the temporary palace where the ali'i and other Hawaiian royalty stayed during Makahiki (a winter celebration in honor of the god Lono), for the sacred sled surfing, He'e hōlua. This traditional sport involved racing (ali'i only) down a slide of rocks covered by a slick veneer of dirt and reeds on hand-carved wooden sleds lashed together with coconut fiber.

Considering the sport both frivolous and dangerous, the missionaries put a stop to it in 1825. Subsequently, the hotel lodged American sailors and businessmen, and later the adventurous on their way to the southeast shore to see the Kilauea Volcano, followed in turn by rich tourists sailing on luxury ocean liners from San Francisco to Honolulu and then on by steamboat to the Big Island.

The hotel buildings were refurbished over time, leaving the initial structure of rock, wood, and native thatch—comprising palm fronds, leaves, and grass. Redwood shingles were introduced, shipped in from California and hauled along primitive roads by mule teams to the bay. Eventually, imported cement too was used, as well as veneers, tiles, galvanized metal roofs.  Hawaiian elements were brought back in (as if an afterthought): natural materials which suggested a "tropical" feel. Wooden floors, decks, walls, and trim; rattan, lauhala matting, tapa cloth, etc. Stuffed fish, and koa wood canoes. Cultural displays and programs: hula demonstrations and lessons, lei making, native arts and crafts.

In another transformation, the hotel went from being Protestant as designated by its missionary founders (never mind the indigenous beliefs and practices of the ali'i there before) to Catholic—nominally, at least, when a rich man from Le Mans, France, the supposed birthplace of St. Julian the Hospitaller, bought it and changed the name. Possibly to remind him of his home town far away and the swanky chateau with antique furnishings, orangerie, and aviaries his family had owned. (Aka, the Hawaiians called it, the sticky threads of connection to places far away.) He gave the nouveau Julian a whiff of neoclassical grandeur among the spindly palm trees and riot of bougainvillea on the lava shore where a golf course and posh convention center would also be going in. The restaurant on the Lā kau deck would feature exquisite French wines, Kalua Pork Bourguignon (the pork cooked in an authentic imu), and Mahi Mahi à l'orange.

After ten hugely successful years, the rich man lost interest and started a new resort in the Seychelles, lured by their greater sophistication and accessibility and glorious sandy beaches (jagged lava left him cold). Following that the aggrandized St. Julian became rather run-down and quickly gained a laid-back vibe, more Hawaiian than French, with only a few fleurs-de-lis among the birds-of-paradise to raise questions. It settled down to being something homely, fun, with music and hula again—that is, the place the distinguished poet Helena Stevenson had loved and celebrated in her final months, her last, award-winning volume. 

As the elderly historian wrote in her account, shortly before her death at 93, the hotel was sliding slowly towards oblivion, as far as the world was concerned. The convention center closed; the only banquets were during the Christmas season and on New Year's Eve, and twice in the third week of January for a group of Japanese brush painting enthusiasts who came each year and ordered gallons of Genmaicha tea, ground their own ink using an ink stick and a grinding stone, and were presented with a display of fine rice papers and various brushes (bamboo, horsehair, squirrel hair, wolf/weasel hair, goat/sheep hair) from a little art store in Hilo.

* * *

The month passed hazily. Still not having figured out how she might get in touch with the musician she wanted so badly to talk to, Marley continued to collect local color, listened to Chopin's Barcarolle while reading Michael Ondaatje's wonderful novel about a Sri Lankan forensic pathologist and the artist restoring a damaged Buddha statue, and tried channeling her mother's ghost, different and difficult though she had always been.  (The poet's daughter couldn't help being less sociable, less fey, less sensual.)  She guessed Helena too had read the history of the hotel; one of the poems mentioned the ancient sled racing, and Makahiki, its time of year—the rising of the Pleiades. But where did that get her?

One noontime at the poolside restaurant in the condo complex next to her rental, where she enjoyed lunch once or twice a week, Marley found herself in the midst of a lively group of older women at the tables around hers. 

"Lady crime writers," one said, twinkling, seeing her studying them. "We meet here every February, at Keauhou Bay."

"We used to always stay at the St. Julian, but had to relocate to these condos last winter, since it closed," another added. "So disappointing."

"Really a crime," the first chimed in again, high-spirited as her purple kimono splashed with neon pink hibiscus. "And we should know! But we took shameless advantage, and that surely paid off." The others at her table cheered.

Intrigued, Marley asked what she meant.

They were the ones who'd started the rumors about the hotel's sudden close, it seemed, after they'd found out about it the year before—writing and publishing a collection of stories exploring its "most fishy" demise.

"A memorial collection, really, for a place we loved."

"We never imagined that anyone would take it seriously."

But as it turned out, in the absence of any official explanation, their frisky fictional accounts had served as dry tinder for a speculative blaze. The book had sold like crazy, the lady in purple—Pauline—said.

"As popular as macadamia nut pie," Ardith, in cool yellow linen, added.

They talked and talked, much of the afternoon, over pitchers of hibiscus mango iced tea.

Pauline's story sounded as colorful as its author—"about a rich lady who traveled with a pet Mynah in a large cage and a large maid to cart it around and pamper the bird." That part was drawn from life, apparently (and Marley remembered her mother's sketch of the woman with her white cockatoo), but in the story the lady was mad, and madly rich, and madly, fatally in love with the unfortunate hotel owner. "Tahitian/Chinese—or was he Maori/Canadian? I've forgotten which I decided on."

Iyla (plump and grandmotherly) summed up what she'd written about the superstitious Japanese backers of the restoration project—"completely imaginary, no research"—telling a kind of ghost story about the curse they'd learned had been placed on the property by the ali'i whose souls had been stolen by the missionaries. Jessa (blue streaks in her long, silver hair) had followed that up with a grisly tale of a murderous pastor who served the chapel—arrogant, scornful, led to great harm by his implacable beliefs. There was revenge (Phoebe, with a Bad Ass Coffee t-shirt), a vendetta by the Yakuza, enemies of the backers (giggly Trish), and Ardith's nuanced ghost story, starring Mark Twain's restless and implacable spirit.  The famous author had undoubtedly stopped here on horseback during his visit to the Big Island, the soft-spoken ex-librarian claimed. 

They remembered seeing Marley's mother too—and Davina (in a cotton eyelet crop-top and skimpy boardshorts) admitted having written her into her crime story, "along with Kelii, that man she was so enthralled with!—the musician . . ." She added quickly, a little shamefaced, "whose name of course I changed, as well as hers. Don't worry; nobody would know."

"But you did know his full name?" Marley felt sudden hope that she might actually be able to trace him, through these witnesses.

"Oh, yes. If I just put my mind to it." Davina frowned, trying to recall.

"Lemaire," Ardith said. "He'd told me he was French Polynesian, and I thought of Debussy's La Mer . . . French for the sea, and quite appropriate, of course. But he corrected the spelling."

"Of course," Davina nodded. "He was the favorite entertainer on the Sunset Deck, where they served mai-tais and pupus—heavenly kalua pork nachos or sliders, seared tuna and avocado with wasabi. Those often served as my dinner, but Helena stuck to a single mai-tai—healthy enough, she said, with all those chunks of pineapple and maraschino cherries!"

Jessa added "I know she'd often mention fixing instant ramen up in her room, after—before coming back down to see the manta rays."

There had been mantas in the poetry as well, spirits or deities, which Helena had described with reverence. The great white bellies of the manta rays, almost phosphorescent as they fed at night just off the deck, attracted to the big spotlights which drew plankton. Waiting expectantly for the first shimmer at the edge of sight, emerging out of nothingness. Then watching as they rolled and spun, like grace, like liquid bliss.

Like Kelii, as the poet's daughter could now call him, another luminary holding light.

Iyla, sitting next to Marley, added another bit of helpful information.

"Your mother was also good friends with Catia Oliveira—half-Portuguese half-Polynesian—who fed all the hotel's feral cats and was the banquet manager, though there were almost no banquets that final year, and she had to work part-time somewhere else besides, way up on the Kohala Coast." 

Marley was advised by Trish, said to be an impressive researcher, on ways in which she might go about finding "Helena's musician," as the pert blonde put it, giggling. Trish had found out somehow that Catia "the cat lady" had moved to the region of Portugal where her family was from, with no email listed, so Kelii Lemaire, player of gourd drums, tattooed with a kakau dolphin (but where?), seemed more than ever to be key to the mystery of Helena's last days.

___

Though she'd been given hope by talking to the women who had been at the St. Julian at the same time Stillborn was being completed, Marley was really no further along. Helena was still dead, or as good as; her elusive musician was nowhere to be found—other than three blurry photos Trish found on Pinterest of Kelii with his ukulele on the Sunset Deck at the hotel one New Year's Eve. Nothing else had come of various leads.

After a couple of deeply despondent days, driving around the island to places she hadn't visited before, listening to "Jawaiian" reggae from Maui on her staticky car radio, and out the open window railing bitterly against the prospect of never knowing, practically howling as she descended the remote Kohala Mountain Road, the oldest volcano, long extinct, Marley woke in her little cottage room one rainy morning feeling strangely light, accepting that she wasn't going to find anything more. It was okay to let the whole thing go. Her mother's mystery, the sorrow which had lain on her heart for so long.  

She drank good Kona peaberry coffee, fresh ground, sitting on the ginkgo leaf bedspread in her favorite old worn jeans and an oversized cotton sweater the color of alaea sea salt with its tang of clay, as the rain washed it all away. Over her second cup she started writing, inspired by her fellow littérateurs—Trish and Iyla, especially, who were sending her frequent emails from the mainland. Like their book of crime stories about the demise of the hotel (titled A Hui Hou, the Hawaiian farewell used at funerals meaning "until we meet again") which she'd read cover to cover by then, she'd write several different endings to Helena's story, and be content to leave the truth of what happened ambiguous, up in the air.

She toyed with several possibilities.

They had been married quietly, exchanging maile leaf rings, in the chapel with its teal blue spire on the hotel grounds, or maybe in the little church with the ocean in it along Ali'i Drive. The daughter of Kelii's first marriage, sadly not in her right mind, was distraught when she learned, and slowly poisoned the new wife with castor beans—poisoned them both.

Or Helena had contracted a rare disease (an infection from water or seafood) and in the end let herself slip into the deep black-hearted water off the side (starboard) of a small boat rather than enduring excruciating pain and letting her lover endure it.

Or this: rather than let themselves be separated by the importunity of their families (especially an ex-wife who'd been stalking Kalii), the two vanished to Guam, finding it easiest to cut all ties. 

The day before she closed up her notebook for good, in an odd twist of fate she'd not expected, Marley received a letter from Catia Oliveira, from the medieval walled village of Óbidos in Portugal, letting her know the truth—which she would so much rather not have known.

But no, that didn't work. She tried one more ending, a simple haiku of the sort Helena would have liked. Together, their last day, Helena and Kelii went to place dried leis on the statue of the fish god, wading in the shallows afterwards amid the petroglyphs, the fallen walls of lava temples worn to indistinction by the sea.

Fade out. Enough.

* * *

On Marley's own last day, another day of rain, she closed her overflowing notebook and zipped it into the outside pocket of her travel bag along with Stillborn and A Hui Hou, noting that her rooms smelled of coffee and plumeria, as in the poetry. She went out walking one last time down to the gardens' edge. The waves were high, crossing the harbor like running horses, white-maned. The rain had taken the far side of the harbor, hill and all, and only one tin roof was left, gleaming, above the cadenced breakers. It was a story with no words and no outcome, a kind of stillborn gift. Born of the silence which was left, Helena's legacy.  

She thought of sleeping dogs and stillborn kings. 

Born of stillness. Borne on stillness, she mused. Borne, still. That jogged a vague memory, something which hadn't really registered. A typo, she'd supposed, wondering if Helena had noticed or had cared.  When she got back to the cottage and toweled off the rain, she pulled out the poetry book again, and leafed to a page near the end, a line near the bottom. A life stillborne, it read, definitely with the E—subtly throwing new light on it all. Suggesting being carried, on, away, alive. Revived and given life, like the Hawaiian king. 

That single final letter allowed hope, the way the Hawaiian farewell, a hui hou, carried hope in it as well, past death and loss, across the shapeshifting harbor—again now, as she left it for the outside world, black-hearted but light-filled, translucent blue.