TWR 41 on its way to subscribers; sad news about the passing of a contributor

Volume 41 of The Worcester Review is now on its way to subscribers far and wide, and our excitement about the issue's publication is tempered by sad news: we have just learned of the passing of a feature contributor, Soren Ambrose, of complications from COVID. 

The feature this year, edited by Josna E. Rege and Ross Griffiths, spotlights the social justice work and poetry of South African anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus. Below please find the table of contents for the feature and Ambrose's remembrance of Brutus, co-written with his wife Njoki Njehu. If you would like to read more about Soren Ambrose's life and work, please visit this link. We at The Worcester Review send our condolences to Soren Ambrose's family and friends. 

FEATURE SECTION: “Stubborn Hope”: Dennis Brutus’s Poetry and Persistence through Hard Times

Josna E. Rege and Ross Griffiths,  Introduction

Tyrone August, Dennis Brutus: The Making of the Man

Carol J. Gray, “Think of them, the people who are not free”: Politics, Poetry, and Political Asylum

Craig McLuckie, Dennis Brutus, The Stubborn Siren

Beverly Bell, Dennis Brutus: A Small Tribute to a Giant Man

Njoki Njehu and Soren Ambrose, Remembering Dennis Brutus, Passionate Activist

Ross Griffiths, The Dennis Brutus Collection at Worcester State University

Remembering Dennis Brutus, Passionate Activist

 by Njoki Njehu and Soren Ambrose

The 50 Years Is Enough Campaign (later Network) was founded in advance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank’s fiftieth anniversary in 1994. Both of us became involved with the cam- paign in its early days, before we met at one of its steering group meet- ings in early 1996. We stayed involved until 2005, when we relocated to Kenya (Njoki’s home).

The membership roster of the campaign, basically a list of endors- ers, had a number of intriguing groups, but none more so than Africa Network in Evanston, IL, just outside Chicago. The contact person was Dennis Brutus.

Dennis Brutus! Njoki had met him once at a conference of the African Literature Association and, like her, Soren knew well his reputation as a poet and the anti-apartheid campaigner who had succeeded in getting South Africa ejected from the Olympics. Now there seemed to be the possibility of working directly with him.

In 1997 or so, we traveled from Washington, D.C. for a conference at the University of Chicago, where Njoki was presenting (and Soren was an alumnus). We learned that Dennis was on another panel and arranged to meet him. We had dinner at the Medici and talked for hours. Dennis, by that time at the University of Pittsburgh, made clear that he was available for speaking roles, lobbying, and whatever else we might need him for.

Soon Dennis was making regular trips to Washington for meetings with the IMF and World Bank and with members of Congress. He rou- tinely stayed in our apartment, sleeping on a foldout sofa. One time he neglected to tell us he was coming; we found him huddled, asleep, on the floor outside our apartment door when we got home close to midnight. He had no complaints, but Sam, the overnight front desk security guard from Sierra Leone, was furious that the “old Professor” was locked out.

We soon discovered that Dennis relished speaking his mind, not with- out a twinkle of mischief, when engaging those with power. Once in an elevator at the World Bank, he turned to World Bank employees, who were obviously from the Global South, and asked, “How can you look at yourselves in the mirror every day knowing you are selling out your own countries and people?” At an event at MIT, he refused to speak at the podium after a World Bank official spoke, announcing that he wanted to distance himself from both the person and from neoliberalism. At the IMF/WB 2000 annual meetings in Prague, he confronted an old ally, Mamphele Ramphele, erstwhile partner of Steve Biko but by then a man- aging director at the World Bank. “Steve Biko is turning in his grave,” he shouted; “Let the man rest,” she shot back.

Dennis was an activist, mentor, teacher, and poet. When he stayed with us we would find fragments of draft poems in various places. He always carried an old-fashioned fountain pen with him; he only wrote poetry with that. After he came to Nairobi in 2007 for the World Social Forum (WSF), he left us a Kenya travel book with a draft poem scribbled in the margins.

He was also a genuine absent-minded professor, but one with a lot of luck. On one trip to Washington we had managed to get a meeting with David Bonior, then the Minority (Democratic) leader in the House of Representatives, on the strength of his promised presence. A few hours beforehand he went on a bookstore expedition, and he was late getting back to our office. While Njoki waited at Bonior’s office, Soren rushed him down to the Capitol. He made it in time; the Congressman really wanted to meet the anti-apartheid hero.

But it turned out he had left his jacket, with some papers in it, in the taxi he took to the office. There were dozens of taxi companies, so it was impossible to figure out who to call and Dennis didn’t even remember the color of the vehicle. The next day, Dennis hailed a cab and it turned out to be the same one, still carrying his jacket.

In Kenya at the time of the WSF, he lost his wallet and passport, per- haps to a pickpocket. They were turned in to the South African embassy. Something similar happened to Dennis in Porto Alegre, Brazil at one of the early World Social Forum meetings.

Too many times to count, Dennis offered to take us out for dinner when he stayed with us. Virtually every time he would find in the end that he had left his wallet at our apartment. Could we pay, and he would reimburse? He always did. And he saved us in Addis Ababa when we fool- ishly assumed we’d be able to use ATMs and the internet, back at the time of the African Social Forum there in 2003. He was able to cash a check at the state bank and give us the cash we needed to cover accommodations for those we had brought to the event. We paid him back too.

Dennis was the highlight of every rally we held, not because of his reputation, but because of the fire and energy this visibly old man brought to everything he did and said. He was an inspiration and an activist father- figure for many of us.

He was not sentimental. He could tell stories of hiding Nelson Mandela, or breaking rocks with him on Robben Island, but he had no illusions about the ANC or Mandela’s presidency. He saw him, along with other top ANC officials, selling out the Freedom Charter for the false promises of neoliberal economics peddled by the World Bank.

Neither of us had been to South Africa when we first worked with Dennis. We finally went in late 1999 for the founding conference of Jubilee South, the Global South/borrowing countries’ own debt cam- paign. Soon after we got back, we flew to Seattle for the demonstrations at the World Trade Organization meeting there. We spent an evening with Dennis at a restaurant celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday and our third wedding anniversary. We shared our impressions of South Africa and got his insights.

By that time, Dennis was starting to spend more time in South Africa. On occasion he would fly there for a single event and be back in the U.S. two days later. As his health declined in 2008, he moved there to live with his son, with whom he had a continuing debate about the younger Brutus’s work in the ANC government. We last spoke with him on the phone in 2009, when he complained that the doctors were telling him he had gout—“a rich man’s disease!” Just a few weeks later, he was gone.

We miss Dennis every day. The struggles we’re involved with now—on inequality, tax justice, and the same old IMF/World Bank conditions— would benefit greatly from his perspective and his energy. But his sly grin, his Afrikaans-inflected accent, his cackle when he told people his “underground name” in South Africa—Daffodil—still seem entirely pres- ent to us. Dennis Brutus, ¡Presente!

From Volume 40: "You Wore Your Canoe" by Alice O. Duggan

You Wore Your Canoe
by Alice O. Duggan

on top of your Ford Fairlane,

a signal I read, a sign saying single,

strong arms and back, competent knots,

wants to drive north longs to launch

canoe in lake water, hear white pines sing

in the wind we’ll stake our tent there —

somewhere along the way I became we,

mine became ours, there was a leap

in your reasoning, strengthened by your happiness,

by summertime and your mop of thick hair,

your easy tiger stride,

your easy tears.

From Volume 40: "The Celebration" by Alison Ruch

The Celebration
by Alison Ruch

On the Wednesday that Abe would die, he sent a text message to all of his friends. “I want costumes. I want Halloween, and I want to go out to the pub.” It was early in the morning, and some were still in bed; others had started their days at desks. Some farmed and had been up for hours and didn’t see the message until lunchtime. Some wrote back, disbelieving but wanting to play along: “When?”

Abe was so nearly gone. He was now, always, attached to a bag of morphine; he was supposed to have died yesterday. Some friends wrote back to applaud the spirit of the invitation: “We love you, Abe. We are thinking of you. Let us know if we can bring you anything.” The rest did not reply. They had said their goodbyes, and it was hard to find words after goodbye.  All else seemed redundant or like a dragging out of stilted formality when what they wanted to remember—what Abe should carry with him—were the good times, the spontaneous flares of joy and grief, for they had shared each in all the years together.  

At four o’clock, he sent another message: “Tonight—Costumes, the pub! Please come.”  

The friends had closets full of costumes. Abe was a regular in community theatre productions, and the performers and crew had become his large family. His parents were gone; his wife was gone; his children were far away. It was this assembled family with whom he wanted to spend his final hours. Moira and Colin and Ken and Stephan, Colette and Joseph, T and Big Bill. He wanted to spend these hours with Meg Wylie and Josiah, Lucette Jones-Kalep and Molly Bovarn; yes, especially Molly Bovarn. Oh, those eyes he’d memorized, an arresting seaweed green. He knew always which way they would turn and direct, thoughtfully absorbing story. She danced healthily into her late fifties. They had been through storms and sunsets for all of these years—each of them marriages and children—and here they still were, knowing each other, really knowing.  

But it was Ken who went to see Abe first on the day he would eventually die. He knocked and waited, and the longer he waited, the more he thought this is it. But Abe came to the door, with his morphine, looking gaunt and pale as he had for months. “It’s a celebration,” he said, and he smiled, and through his atrophied muscles and thin flesh, his joy was visible. He gestured weakly, like a much older man, separating his wrists and curled hands as wide as they would spread, to say it was a celebration, an expansive celebration, and that everyone was welcome and invited. Ken knew this meant Molly in particular, but Abe wanted a crowd, a party, and so Ken started making the calls.

It was easy to gather the troops once they knew Abe meant business. What do you say to a man on his deathbed? You say yes; you say yes!  

They dressed quickly, throwing on clown suits and boas and masks, top hats and tails and rabbit ears, princess gowns and face paint and anything that was out of the ordinary. Ken helped Abe into tuxedo pants, a clean white T-shirt, and a jacket, and he looked dapper despite his near translucence. He looked alive. He was alive now; he would die later.

They paraded into the pub to the sounds of gawking others. A little boy cried in terror at Ken in his lizard mask. He took off the mask and smiled kindly at the boy, now curled in his mother’s arms. “I’m so sorry,” he said, but he did not explain.  

The waitress assessed the crew and looked overwhelmed by their number or startled by their dress, and Josiah tried to tell her that they were there to celebrate the life of a dear friend, and she blinked with a semblance of understanding, but the real understanding came when Abe spoke to her: “It’s Halloween,” he said with all of the gusto he could manage, and it was not much gusto, and it was clear that he was a dying man. They ordered pitchers of beer and fries for Abe that mustn’t have salt, and the waitress blinked back tears and shook off chills; she was inexperienced with life and with death.  

Molly went to the bar and asked if there was any way to play New Orleans brass, and the manager, who knew both life and death, tapped a button and made it so, and the pub swelled with brass and life, and most of the people had no idea that this Halloween in August was Abe’s first and last Halloween in August.  

Talk was jokes and stories, and the tone teetered between birthday celebration and joyful wake. There were warm pauses, too, in between.

Big Bill recalled the time when Abe knocked over a set wall, exuberantly dancing as Fagin in Oliver!

Lucette and Molly teased about the time he had them each convinced she was his only girlfriend. They laughed about the years it took for them, the two humiliated women, to form a friendship outside of Abe, and thank god they did because what would they do without each other now? Times like these.  

And talk of times like these got them on Henry who had died a few years back from throat cancer, and no doubt he would be at the table now, were he living. He’d have polished a pitcher, solo. He’d be dressed, they all put in guesses, as Superman or Zorro or some such brawny and heroic figure. He’d be trying to outshine Abe, the dying man, they all laughed.  

Abe laughed, too, and he missed Henry, and he thought—but not for long—about how it would be for them to miss him, to miss Abe. It would be sad, he knew, for each of them in a different way. Sad for Molly to miss her riverside walking companion. Sad for Meg and Josiah not to see him at the coffee shop in his usual spot, drinking decaf and flirting wildly with the counter girls. Just like they felt the big, cool place-holder that was where Henry had been, they would feel it with him, with Abe, though it would be physically smaller, and, maybe, he fancied, a little warmer. Bah! he thought, because he knew he could think happier thoughts on the night he was going to die: warm friends, crisp fries, Molly and music and everyone dressed for his favorite holiday. Even the weather was right, this oddly cool and drizzly summer night.

Ken sat back and took it in—the crowd and the costumes, his dear friends and the rambunctious music. He smiled at the waitress who he imagined pieced together more and more the story of Abe, and he saw she was teary, and it made him feel teary and connected to her, but he knew better, much better, than to spoil this night with tears. There was plenty of time for crying and not nearly enough time for this celebration.  

And it wasn’t long before Abe grew too tired to sit up, and so they gathered by the door of the bar, preparing to go, and, just with luck, “When the Saints” rang through the speakers, and the smiling and dancing, costumed crew went marching on into the cool and rainy August Halloween night, clapping and celebrating and feeling their veins draw life from their hearts, working like the vines of flowering pumpkins.

From Volume 40: "In Memory of Whitey Bulger" by William Doreski

In Memory of Whitey Bulger

by William Doreski

Raking wet leaves into heaps

isn’t like harvesting souls

or combing the ocean for pearls.

The air shivers with effort.

The leaves still hostage to trees

rattle in dull old colors

painters abandoned when abstract

expressionism stripped the land.

You rake as hard as I do but

with conviction I can’t muster

except as a crude memorial.

The famous gangster I met

decades ago in a Southie bar

has died in prison, his corpse

a mangle of obscene gestures

inflicted by friends of enemies.

I’m raking these leaves in memory

of the beer he bought me, a glass

of Miller’s on tap. He murdered

eleven people and subverted

the FBI with his ghostly charm

and surefooted gift of gab.

His small talk was a tombstone

of the purest Carrara marble.

His eyes were flakes of mica

iridescent in the low bar light.

I rake the leaves so pungently

they decay right here at my feet.

You never met him, never saw

half of Boston cringe in his breath,

big men dropping their feral gaze,

women shrinking in the new clothes

they’d bought in Filene’s Basement.

The drab October afternoon

falls on its face and whimpers.

You sense the change in the air

but don’t realize how the death

of one man perfects a scene

for a moment of abject glory.

I rake and rake, then wheelbarrow

the wrack to compost heaps

at the edge of the woods where

tonight a bear will tumble forth

with playful appetite raving.

From Volume 40: "We Could've Gone to Minot" by William Snyder

We Could've Gone to Minot
by William Snyder

my father said, but he’d made his case

to the Air Force—seniority, specialty—for

Cape Canaveral. So we drove, in 1963,

from upper New York state, my father, two

brothers and me in the Olds, and finally,

Florida’s east coast, early morning,

and the bridges across the Indian River,

the Banana—drawbridges then. Florida

damp and flat and shimmer, and three boys

and a man alone from Plattsburg

in the blue and yellow light, the water

like rippled mercury beneath the bridges.

My father, a Major, on the business end of

missile into space—how he

felt then, arriving with three boys—he’d

been in Florida alone for months away from

home, away from kids, away from wife—

my mother—my mother who stayed in

Plattsburg with a lover, with a job—her first—

nightshift waitress at a roadhouse.

We boys quiet as we rolled across

those bridges, down this morning,

no boats sailing, sunlight shifting onto

wave-face and trough—it hurt my eyes—lidless

they seemed. Me, seventeen, who would

discover Dylan soon—an LP

in a record bin in the air base store—

me, who knew Baez already, who knew

much much more about my mother, more

than my father knew himself, my father

who I hated for it all. He hadn’t had

an inkling of what she’d say when he returned.

Goodbye, she’d said. And in that car, as we

turned south on A1A, beach and sea

on our eastern horizon. I didn’t think about

him—who he could have talked to,

explained to, confessed to after his trip to

claim us, after he heard my mother.

And how his heart might’ve broken even

more there, in Florida, with just the slightest

extra flex—a drop of rain, a slow flat tire,

a son who would never ask his father’s heart.

From Volume 40: “The Dry Years” by Jessica Barksdale

The Dry Years
by Jessica Barksdale

Pippa sometimes forgot the joke Em told them when times were strange. What was it? That saying from the British comedy show in the 70s?

On the YouTube clips, the audience burst into laughter when the red-robed, crucifix-wearing priests broke through the flimsy set door and surprised the family eating dinner, the employees at the quarterly meeting, the primary school students learning fractions.

Em had repeated the expression in the face of four-mile long traffic jams, surprise tax bills, leaking toilets, raccoons in the basement. She said it when Mattie brought home bad grades or Pippa forgot to clean her room. Em would cross her arms, give them a pretend-stern look, and repeat it slowly, her voice a fake deep. “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

She said it at the very end when nothing was funny.

Pippa agreed. No one expects extermination, even though that’s the deal with living in the first place. Disease, rancid old age, fascist regime, pogrom, tornado, earthquake.

You just don’t expect it, is all.

***

Pippa refilled her coffee mug and sat back down at her computer, waiting for someone to respond to their boss Sue’s rant about the lack of donations. She had colleagues she’d never met in person and who were images (sometimes pixilated) on a computerized meeting screen, words in messages, emails, and texts, and/or voices on infrequent phone calls. She’d met Sue once, when Pippa interviewed for the data position at Nature Now, two days before moving to Hilo three years ago. The only thing they all had in common was the slogan: Remember the Sloths.

After a pause, Royce from Minneapolis, the guy with the profile pic that looked like a 1980s Marlon Brando, said, “The school shooting diverted the flow.”

“Jesus,” Sue said. “Of course it did.”

“The NRA picked up the slack. Their donations tripled last month?” Royce said, a lift at the end of his sentence. Even over the internet, Royce looked red as sin.

The ConfAll link screen went silent. All sidebar messages stopped. Apparently the NRA was worse than the school shooting itself.

Pippa, a familiar, uncomfortable feeling in her chest, coughed the scratch from her throat. “But it’s a new month.”

“Be that as it may,” Sue began, “we are way down in legacy donations not to mention tip jar giving.”

The conversation began to roll again. Pippa relaxed in her chair as she listened to a meeting that was happening 2500 miles away and three hours ahead in time.

“As long as you meet your deliverables,” Sue had said to Pippa’s question about working remotely on the nonprofit’s data team. “You can live anywhere. Just get your work done.”

So that’s what Pippa had done for twenty-five dollars an hour, money that wouldn’t go very far in Hawaii if she didn’t have her caretaking job. After two months with Nature Now and at Sue’s repeated request, Pippa had posted a headshot on her page, email, and links. By then, Sue had forgotten what Pippa looked like anyway, so Pippa got away with using a photo of her older sister Mattie. In essentials, they looked the same, so Pippa really couldn’t blame busy Sue for not noticing. Blonde, brown-eyed, oval-faced, darkly eyebrowed. Prominent cheekbones, pixie chin.

The photo Pippa snagged was from Mattie’s wedding. The sun glinted behind her sister, her whole face alight. Mattie had married her true love, Walter, and moved to Portland to open up their very own restaurant. Last year, they had their first child, named Emma, after Em.

“You haven’t even pretended to want to visit,” Mattie said every time she called, which was at least twice a week. “You haven’t invited us to come see you. I miss you.”

“You can’t leave the restaurant,” Pippa replied each time because it was true.

In front of her, the computer images flickered like a flock of starlings.

“I’ll search for all the maybes,” Pippa said into the silence of the online meeting space. “Those who were encouraging on the cold calls but didn’t donate.”

“Social media,” Royce added. “Barrage.”

“Do it,” said Sue.

And then, like that, the meeting collapsed into nothing but air.

***

Outside, the air was crisp and filled with the calls of invasive bird species, the ones Pippa liked best for their colors and sounds: red-billed leiothrix, red-crested cardinals, Gambel’s quail. Alone in the yard, she would answer the quail, calling out, ha, ha, aha, aha, aha, mimicking the slow, prolonged laugh.

“If you don’t catch the seedlings,” her landlord Nate told her when he explained the yard work, “the whole house will disappear. A three-bedroom house is no match for ten acres of wet Hawaiian soil.”

“That’s not the plants’ fault.” Pippa tried to keep her voice light. “It’s not like they asked to come here.”

“Someone brought them,” Nate said.

“They could have been stowaways,” Pippa said, “on ships and in luggage.”

“Or flung by storm.”

“Trapped,” Pippa added.

“Trying to escape,” Nate said, laughing. “No rest for the wicked.”

“It feels so arbitrary.” She wondered how she could rip something whole and alive from the ground. She could almost hear the roots screaming.

“Everything is. But you can do it,” Nate said. “You’ll see.”

Now, sweat trickled down her spine as she clipped and yanked, practiced now at plant murder.

“A gentleman’s farm,” Nate said during their first call. He had called from his dry-as-toast house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he’d already moved. “Keep the farm out of the house, and you can live there forever.”

For two weeks, she wondered if Nate’s ad on Craigslist had been a scam that would eventually find her a sex slave in an Illinois subdivision, but he was really Nate in Santa Fe who didn’t want to sell his Hilo house, at least not yet. His closest neighbor was moving back to the mainland and couldn’t watch the place anymore.

“Let’s see where this artist thing goes,” he told her.

Every month, he reported on the high and dry climate of the southwest and his wretched painting classes. “Watch out or I’ll send my rejects home to Hilo.”

But he never did.

Pippa plotted out her work, listed her tasks on a spreadsheet along with her work schedule. Today was ripping out the bastard jasmine, which was its actual name. Bastard jasmine. She sat on the warm, wet grass and pulled at the vines that scrambled over the hedges and across the lawn. The tubular flowers were bright crimson with yellow pistils, so pretty that she had two vases of them on the kitchen counter.

She’d taken the machete to the pampas grass yesterday, and tomorrow was about ripping out the rubbervine. Once a week, she sat on the mower and made perfect circles around the house, the thick, springy grass an orderly protection against the other flora that threatened to swallow it.

She made sure the catchment was catching and the cesspool didn’t overflow or explode or whatever it was that cesspools did when things went horribly wrong. She kept an eye out for cockroaches and fire ants. Pippa battened down the hatches and closed the storm shutters against potential tsunamis, not that she or the house would survive one of those.

As best as possible, Pippa took care, as per agreement.

Wind pushed up out of the ocean and swirled across the tops of trees. Pippa hunkered on her haunches, throwing a wad of jasmine on the pile. The clouds overhead were black with rain but nothing was falling. On the house wall next to her, a gecko paused.

Em had taught her about birds. Plants, too. That’s what she was doing at the very end as she and Pippa looked out the shattered window.

Blood trickled down her face, but Em pointed up. “Look at the branches. We’re held between palms.”

Em tried to smile, and Pippa stilled.

“Eucalyptus,” Em said. “So green.”

The long leaves hung down like claws, seed pods clicking on the car roof.

***

Mattie was eighteen when it happened, old enough to be given charge of her thirteen-year-old sister. The judge appointed her custodian, even though it was clear she couldn’t take care of herself, much less Pippa. Mattie stayed out late and came home early, sleeping till noon. She lost one job and then another. Her skin grew dry, her hair turned into magical dead straw. She weighed less than one hundred pounds, her knees as knobby as oranges. So Pippa made sure they ate dinner and the rugs were vacuumed. She paid the bills online and fed the animals.

After court-appointed therapy, Mattie managed to crest up and over her “bad period” and signed Pippa up for SAT tutoring and helped her with college applications. Mattie rented the U-Haul and drove Pippa to Claremont College and went to freshman orientation with her. Pippa came home to Mattie during college breaks. Mattie was Pippa’s family until Mattie made another one.

After Pippa’s first year of college, Mattie sold the house. She paid off the mortgage and the back taxes and put enough aside for Pippa’s last three years of school. Just before she moved to Portland, Mattie split the proceeds fifty-fifty, money that Pippa had mostly spent. She gave Pippa exactly half of everything else, six spoons, six knives, six forks. Fifty books. One of the two big tables. Pippa put her things into storage and sold them before she moved to Hilo.

***

In the late afternoon after dumping the cuttings into the compost pile, Pippa headed downtown. She had her dinner menus down pat: tofu and broccoli, red curry over basmati, salmon on mixed greens, mushroom rice. Repeat. Breakfast was always yogurt, fruit, and granola. Lunch was nuts and half a papaya squirted with lime or some leftovers from the night before. All the clerks at the KTA knew her, nodding or giving her the half-smile for a resident but not a true local. The store aisles were clumped with retired mainlanders, all of them sun-damaged and wearing inappropriate shorts.

They smiled at Pippa as if in collusion, and she smiled back, hoping to get by without conversation. In the produce section, she hovered over the vegetables, nodding to Brian, who worked most afternoons.

“Just put out some new broccoli.” He pointed to the fresh, densely headed stalks. “Get it while you can.”

During her first shopping trips here, Brian seemed to flirt with her, despite the fact he was a true local. Maybe Dale from meats had flirted, too, but while she tried to figure out how to respond, they stopped. Now they made pleasant conversation, the same way they did with the retired folks.

“Watch out for the condiment aisle. Some kind of medical emergency.”

“What?” she asked, but Brian was rolling away with his trolley.

Pippa put a head of broccoli in her wagon and then headed past the packaged meat toward the aisle in question. Three emergency-garbed men stood with hands on their hips staring at something. Wildly reflective even in the daylight, their bright greens, yellows, and reds beat into Pippa’s head. One talked into a radio giving an update. A man, chest pains. Maybe diabetic.

“I need some soy sauce,” an older woman said to a KTA employee. “I really, really need it.”

“You can’t go down there yet,” he told her.

“Well.” The woman looked at Pippa for agreement, and when she didn’t get any, she huffed past.

Pippa stared, though she could see very little. The only visible body part was the man’s outstretched arm on the painted concrete floor, his skin weathered and dark, fingernails thick and slightly yellowed. He was tented by highly trained professionals, their gear spread around them. The radio crackled again, and then came the clack of the gurney being wheeled down the aisle.

“Step back,” one of the emergency workers said, and Pippa did, literally backward. One step, two. How she remembered that feeling of being saved. Her body on the flat expanse of a gurney, the air on her face as they pulled her up.

“I said step back,” the man said again, even though Pippa was moving away. But he knew. He saw that in her mind, she was standing right next to the man, urging him to be okay. She was next to him as they rushed to the hospital. She would be hovering all night, until it was over.

***

The next day, Pippa logged off work at the same time there was an earthquake in Papua New Guinea. As she closed her computer, her phone buzzed with texts, the island chain of Hawaii under tsunami alert, even though the forecasters predicted a non-event. Worse than the imagined tsunami was the rain that started to fall, hard, the roof clattering. Wind slapped the house and blew palm fronds onto the sodden grass.

She didn’t bother to shutter the windows but sat at the kitchen table, watching as things flew past, the view as it had been that last day with Em. All they had been able to do was look up, still and quiet.

“That looks like an ice cream cone,” Em had said about a cloud. “Maybe a dog.”

“Or a cat,” Pippa had said, trying to encourage Em to say more. But mostly, Pippa had stared at the back of Em’s head, her hair dark and wet.

Pippa’s cell phone buzzed and then at the same moment, the house phone rang, a sound she’d only heard a few times because no one ever called it.

“Hello?” she said into the home phone. Her cell phone blared Mattie, and then went to voice mail. Her sister kept alerts on her phone, and this call was likely about the tsunami and the storm, a double whammy.

Her cell phone rang again. Still Mattie.

“Pippa Randall?”

“Who is this?” Perhaps she was being evacuated, Pippa thought, the threat finally real once again.

“My name is Donald McDonald. I represent the estate of Nathaniel Brower.”

“Estate?”

Donald McDonald cleared his throat. “You haven’t received our letters?”

Pippa sat down on the kitchen chair, blinking into the refrigerator’s stainless door.

“No.”

“I’m sorry to say that Nathaniel Brower died last week.”

Pippa’s mouth opened, and she stopped breathing for a moment. Outside, the world crashed against Nathaniel Brower’s home. All the trees threw what they could at his former house. Her former house. Soon real estate agents would converge. The furniture would be sold; the yard would be wacked into an inch of its life. The tenant would be evicted, she that tenant.

“Miss Randall?”

“I’m sorry,” she blurted, a strange, ragged feeling in her throat.

“My apologies,” Donald McDonald said. “You should have received notification by now.”

She wanted to tell Donald that no one even knew her enough to notify her about anything, much less news about Nate’s gentlemanly farm. His mail was forwarded to Santa Fe; she had a box at the post office. She was a stranger who talked with him once or twice a month. She did what he asked, but he didn’t know anything about her.

“I’m calling because I have news. It’s good, I hope.”

A wall of wind beat the kitchen window like the whirring whap of helicopter blades rising out of a canyon.

“What do you mean?”

“Mr. Brower left you the Hilo house.”

The kitchen light wavered but stayed on. Pippa wiped her eyes and nose and looked out the window, expecting to see a giant wave cupping the shore, but all she saw were clouds.

“I don’t understand.”

Donald cleared his throat, discomfort in the gravelly sound. “Mr. Brower had no remaining family or beneficiaries. The rest is going to various charities. I’ll be sending a letter he also left for you.”

Pippa brushed tears off her face with the back of her hand. “Wait! How—how did he die?”

“I’ll send the letter,” Donald said. “And expect some registered mail with important documents. Also, I’ve contacted a Hilo lawyer who will help you with some documents. She’ll be in touch.”

She gave him her P.O. Box address. “Thank you,” Pippa said, wishing she could really say that to Nate. She pictured walking up to him and giving him a hug, but she didn’t even know what he looked like, having only seen a few photos in the house. Maybe he’d looked like the sound of his voice. Skinny, light, full of hope.

***

By the time Pippa got on her flight to Hilo, it had been years since she’d been in the air. She wasn’t afraid until the moment she sat down in her seat, economy, 29C, an aisle seat close to the bathroom. As the flight attendant went over lifejacket protocol during a water crash, the cabin began to swim with orbs of light. Pippa’s entire body felt ready to split from her skin.

“Are you okay?” the college kid next to her asked.

“Sure,” Pippa said as she dug in her purse.

“I’m Malcolm,” he said, extending a hand. But Pippa was opening a pill bottle and swallowing two of the Trazodone she’d been prescribed years before.

The rest of the flight was a dark wall of nothing. When she woke up, she was in a dorm at the U of H with Malcolm and his two nervous roommates. Her luggage was in the middle of the room like a lonely piece of Stonehenge.

“They were going to arrest you for drunk and disorderly behavior,” he told Pippa when he drove her up to Nate’s. “I had to tell them that you were my sister. I lied and said you had the flu.”

Pippa wanted to invite Malcolm into Nate’s house, but she didn’t. At first, she thought she’d call him, but she didn’t do that either. When she went into town, she almost hoped she’d run into him, so she could take him for a drink or a coffee. But she never saw him, not once. By now, he must have graduated and gone off into his real life, the kind that other people seemed to take for granted.

***

Pua Kalawai’a’s law office was on Laukapu Street, not too far from Big Island Candies, a store Pippa went to when she sent her guilty gift basket to Mattie every Christmas.

Pua’s receptionist had bright red lips and heavy eyeliner, as if preparing to join Cirque du Soleil. Her body was tight like the piece of corded rope that she might twirl up.

“Ms. Kalawai’a will see you now.” Her voice was like flung knives.

Pua came out of her office and gestured Pippa in. She wore no makeup and a very sensible lightweight blue suit and black flats. She was round where the receptionist was thin, but Ms. Kalawai’a was sturdy and buttoned-down.

“Pua Kalawai’a,” she said, reaching out a hand.

“Pippa.” Pippa put her hand into Pua’s, shaking in a way that she hoped meant business.

“Sort of like the lottery, right?”

Pippa sat down on the chair, as Pua riffled through the pages of the document. “Wish someone left me a big house when I was twenty-five.”

“I—”

“So lucky.”

Pippa’s thighs tightened, her feet solid on the floor. She could call Donald McDonald and tell him to get another lawyer.

“This Mr. Brower. You know him well?”

“I’ve been taking care of his house for three years.” Pippa rubbed her right thumb, her skin dry, her cuticles ragged from all the gardening.

“So like I said.” Pua handed over a document with a yellow tab showing Pippa where to sign. “Lucky duck.”

“I’m not lucky.” Pippa scratched out her name once and then again.

Pua waited for more and then when Pippa just stared back, she said, “Lots of people don’t have their own house.”

Pippa nodded. “I know.”

As Pua waited, Pippa flushed, heat filling her from the top down.

“So the deed has been transferred,” Pua said finally. “And these—Grace, I need the next page notarized.”

Grace came in with her box and pens and stamp. “Driver’s license.”

Pippa swallowed and pulled out her ID and handed it to Grace who began to fill in a form. This was almost over.

“Do you know how he died?” Pippa asked.

Pua and Grace both looked up from their papers.

“No one told me,” Pippa explained.

“Suicide,” Pua said. “Apparently he was really sick. Oh, and here. I was supposed to mail this, but you’re here. He wrote this to you before, well, he did it.”

Pippa took the envelope, and then she signed everything Grace and Pua asked her to, leaving her thumbprints behind as proof.

***

It hadn’t rained for months, so when it finally started to pour in mid-December, everyone was ecstatic. But who expected the oils to pull up from the roads? No one, apparently. And really, who cared when everyone could finally turn off their sprinklers and lawns could grow back? Trees and shrubs plumped up and dust washed off cars, buildings, and benches in dirty rivulets.

Each morning, Pippa had a long, uphill walk to the bus stop, so on Day Four of the deluge, Em told her enough was enough. Mattie had already left for her English comp class at the college, so this seemed the best plan. “You are showing up to school like a wet rat. Let’s go.”

Pippa hadn’t been paying much attention. She was reading a book and then looking at her cell phone, hoping her best friend Julia would call. She worried about smashing her orange in her backpack. Em turned on NPR, so she wasn’t talking, either. It wasn’t until she said, “Oh, no,” that Pippa looked up into a world that was off balance and then spinning.

It was slow at first. The car sliding diagonally down Honey Hill Road, surfing the asphalt sideways, gaining speed, bumping up and over the curb and the partially broken guardrail and then hurtling down, down, down into the canyon below. The dry years killed the Monterey pines that might have caught them, but the car crashed through branches crisped and sharpened by drought, one busting through the windshield to impale Em on their way down. They smashed, they spun, they flew, finally caught and pulled back by an enormous eucalyptus.

For a few seconds, they hung, bouncing, ready to break free and fall to the road far below. Too afraid to cry, Pippa looked at Em who was unconscious, part of a branch in her stomach, one of her arms at a strange angle.

“Mom,” Pippa whispered, scared her voice might add weight to the car.

The rain beat down, drops heavy like bullets. Pippa watched her mother, noticing a new wound with each breath: ear, shoulder, forehead.

Pippa was untouched, snug in her seatbelt cage, her side of the windshield unbroken.

“Mom,” she whispered again, and then again, one “Mom” every few seconds until finally Em woke up.

“Oh,” she said. “Pippa. Are you okay?”

“I think so,” Pippa said. “But….”

Em passed out again, coming to every once in a while to reassure Pippa that someone would come and save them. Somehow, the invasive, improper eucalyptus kept them aloft, even when the wind whipped lashes of rain against and then into the car through the broken window.

“Mom,” Pippa kept repeating. “Please.”

***

Not only did Pippa get the house, a yearly operating budget, the land, and all of Nate’s possessions in the Hilo property, she got his car, too, the Honda she’d been driving since she moved in. When she got home from Pua’s office, Pippa allowed herself—for the first time—to go into Nate’s room. He’d taken most of his clothes and personal things during his move to Santa Fe, but he had a dozen or so Hawaiian shirts in the closet and flip-flops lined up underneath them. There were sculptures of Hawaiian birds and a few prints of the ocean and the volcano in a sulfurous uproar, but nothing else offered up much information.

On his dresser, there was a photo from a long time ago, the edges yellowed, a smiling man in a uniform, Naval, maybe. Pippa had only seen Nate in photos in the kitchen drawer, but she thought she saw a resemblance. His grandfather. After opening a few drawers and surveying the shelves, Pippa couldn’t find any other evidence of family, a fact that both lawyers had confirmed. Nate had ended up alone in the world except for Pippa who lived thousands of miles away, a total stranger.

In the dining room, Pippa sat at the table and opened the letter. For a second, she thought she might recognize the handwriting, but of course that was ridiculous. Nate had never sent checks, but paid all bills online. He emailed and texted but never wrote, so she was surprised by his light and flowing scrawl.

Dear Pippa—

Sorry to do this in such a terrible manner. I didn’t tell you I was sick when you applied for the job. Hilo didn’t have the medical services I needed, so thus the move to a city with a specialist. It wasn’t the art that drew me to Santa Fe, but the art was nice, at least for a while.

After our first phone conversation, I looked you up. A background check with a couple of services. You were going to be taking over my life, after all. I didn’t mention it later because nothing bad surfaced. Then one service sent me some links about you and your mother, but what happened wasn’t something I could work in when discussing the roofing materials or patching the driveway.

What a horrible story. So much danger. You were there for her until she wasn’t. After I read the articles, I wondered how you still managed to walk the planet, much less move to another state and set up a whole new life.

You took such good care of my house, and by extension, me. Thank you for giving me something so special—the ability to not worry about all that while I worried about my health.

But things aren’t going well, and I’m done. Flat out ready. It’s been a long haul. I’m not scared. And I don’t want you to feel responsible for any of this. You did everything right, and even if you’d known, you couldn’t have changed my mind.

Quit that remote job. Enjoy the house and the farm. You know exactly what to do—you’ve been doing it for three years. Buy a couple of goats. What about one of those miniature donkeys? Plant some tomatoes.

All best,

Nate

Pippa sat at the table. The sun set and the bullfrogs started in with their nightly honking. Her mother was next to her, nodding as she read the paper. She smelled like toast and sleep and black tea. On the stove top, something odd, lentils with squash or bouillabaisse. Sunflowers in a vase on the pine table. A book, a magazine, and a newspaper. As she read, Em pushed her hair back and chuckled at something she read, looking up at Pippa and then reading aloud.

“So funny,” Em said, slapping her hand on the table. “Who would have known?”

Pippa could only stare. Em. Her mother. Mom. Blonde-haired and brown-eyed, just like Mattie and Pippa. Slightly crooked nose. Fingernails painted pink, her favorite color. Mattie now was exactly as their mother had been for all their childhood.

Just before Pippa had heard the helicopter and saw the helmeted man dangling outside her window, her mother died. Pippa hadn’t really known clinically, but something heavy lifted from the broken cab.

“Ten more minutes and that branch would have snapped,” she’d heard a firefighter say in the hospital hallway. “Can’t believe it held that long.”

The last time she saw her mother, Pippa was in the air, held flat in a metal gurney being lifted into the sky. Despite being strapped down and buffeted by the great machine above her, she turned her body so that she could see her mother’s hair, part of her face, her hand. Later, her throat raw, she would remember she had been screaming.

The helicopter pulled her up and up, her mother a dot in a giant tree.

***

Outside, the rain stopped. Pippa flipped on an outdoor light, terrifying a gecko, who stared at her with its bulging dark eyes, all parts of him pulsing with fear. His green, blue, and red sides heaved air in and out so fast Pippa worried he might explode.

“Sorry,” she whispered, stepping back. “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

The gecko opened his mouth, and Pippa waited for a second to see what he might say. Instead, he licked his left eye. So she turned toward the lush darkness. From the trees came the popping whoop of coqui frogs, another interloper, calling and responding to things she could only begin to guess at. A warm wind held her upper arms and her face. In the distance, the ocean tumbled against the invisible shore.

Pippa waited. Sucked tight to the wall, the gecko’s breathing finally slowed, his rhythm like the wind. In and out, in and out. After a moment, he started to amble up the wall, one sticky foot at a time.