Where Time Begins by Sasha Paulsen

Author:Sasha Paulsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press

30

Fresh Air was sitting in Foeata’s garden beneath the vines of purple passion flowers.

“Malo e lelei, Seli,” he said. Thank you for living.

“It is a fine night,” he added as Foeata brought out tea. “I like it when the world makes you look at it, by being too hot or too cold or too wild. I am here, it says, do not forget me.”

“It is too hot,” Foeata said.

“It warms my old bones. Like the sight of a beautiful woman in her garden.”

Foeata began energetically weaving a mat of pandana leaves. “Women,” Fresh Air observed. “So full of mysteries. You had a good day, Seli?”

“I had lunch with Joe Storey. And about fifty other people,” I added, so Foeata could stop clutching her head. “Why don’t you like him?” I asked her.

“Of course I must love him,” Foeata said dolefully, although it seemed that her Christian duty weighed heavily on her. “But he is a rich man. He could go anywhere. Why does he come here always?”

“Do you know how he got his money?”

Fresh Air sipped his tea. “It is said he was a poor man who married a rich woman.”

“Oh, like—a lot of people. Where is she?”

“Dead,” Foeata said, darkly.

“Of a long illness,” Fresh Air added.

“Tarkington has gone away,” I said. “But he left a captured stonefish. I was thinking I should set it free, but I wasn’t sure how to pick it up without a net. So I didn’t.”

“A wise decision,” Fresh Air said. “It is not a good way to die.”

“Does it happen often?”

“No, but it is the way my friend, Dr. Omont, died.”

“The story of Lily is finished,” Foeata said firmly.

“Is it?” he asked. “When is a story finished?”

“Who will care now?”

“Always there is someone who knows what is the truth.”

She sniffed. “You? Maybe your friend Dr. Omont said to you, ‘I will share a secret.’”

“He and I talked of many things.”

“Yet I know more of the story of Lily. I know that one night a man came to hospital to ask Dr. Omont to go to a woman in the bush.”

“No, the man came to his island,” Fresh Air said. “And the woman was far away on an island in the Hai’pai group. Dr. Omont went to help her. One week he was gone. And he returned with the child.”

“And it was said that perhaps the father was Dr. Omont,” Foeata added.

“I did not know this.”

“You do not know the talk of women. Why else would he die in a way so strange unless it was the angry father or brother come to kill him?”

“It was an accident.” Fresh Air turned to me. “Often the fishermen brought him fish. He would wait on his dock, and they would throw a net filled with fish to him. One day, inside the net was a stonefish, and when he caught the net, it pierced his chest. The fishermen rushed him to Neiafu, but the injury was too close to his heart. Their remorse was great. No one knew how such a fish had come to be in their net.

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