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Under the Sun Cynthia Oi |
A gift of a second chance
SHE HAD a Hawaiian name, but I can't remember it. We were strangers who had encountered each other briefly, spoken about intimate matters for a few minutes the way strangers oddly do, then had gone our own ways.
If I saw her again, I doubt I'd recognize her or she me. Still, she stays with me.
I'd left the room when my sister's good friend dropped by to visit. They were talking and laughing about people and places and events they'd shared and I withdrew to give them time together.
I made my way through the maze of hushed corridors and humming elevators of the hospital with an unwished-for familiarity, a representation of the many hours my youngest sister had been confined there, her vivacity trapped by unrelenting illness.
Wanting air unfiltered by machines, I stood outside in a dark alcove lighted solely by the garish luminosity of other machines that dispensed soda, chips and candy bars, but no cigarettes.
That was her immediate problem. She'd come looking for a smoke, but there were none. She asked hesitantly if I had one to spare and as she lit up, she said it made sense that a hospital wouldn't sell cigarettes, yet it was funny it would set out those concrete pillar ashtrays to accommodate those who'd brought their own.
We leaned on a railing, watching the erratic stream of headlights flash by, catching faint breezes nudging through the humid night.
"You here for a sad thing, no?" she said. "Me, too," she continued without waiting for my answer, seeing the truth in my face.
Her mother was very sick and would likely die soon. "She had a hard life. Having me for one daughter nevah help," she said in a husky voice.
I asked what she meant. Her story was mournfully familiar. She quit school at 15, got pregnant at 16 and, horribly, was unsure of who her son's father was. No matter, she said, because she loved the boy anyway, but not enough to give up her ice habit.
She often left her son with her mother, who was disabled and depended on government checks to buy food, pay rent. Sometimes, she'd be away for days and weeks, crashing at homes of friends and others -- "wherevers," she said.
After a while she became angry, seeing other girls wearing pretty clothes, riding in fancy cars, laughing and chatting at coffee shops, living carefree lives full of things she didn't have.
She began stealing. "I got real good," she said, breaking into cars quickly, developing techniques to pinch beach bags left on the sand without anyone noticing. Or so she thought until the day she was busted. She was 19 years old.
She spent a few months in prison and received treatment to break her of drugs.
"Been clean for eight months now," she said, a proud grin lifting her smooth brown cheeks. Her son was living with her, sharing a bedroom in the home of a cousin who let her come on a promise that she would stay that way. "I not going back to that," she said, determination strong in her shining eyes.
She had found a job working the counter at a plate lunch restaurant. A week before, with her second paycheck, she bought her mother a necklace, a simple gold-filled chain dangling a small shell-shaped charm.
She dug through her denim backpack to show it to me. It was still in the slim cardboard box, tangled in the white squares of tissue and cotton. Her mother had become gravely ill and had not had a chance to wear it. She'd brought it to the hospital, hoping she could hang it somewhere so her mom could see it if she regained consciousness.
She wished her mother were well, now that she was working and doing OK "for once in my life." I'm sure her mother was proud of her, I said, hoping to comfort her.
She hugged me hard, then gathered her things to leave.
"Second chance," she said and walked away.
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Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin since 1976. She can be reached at: coi@starbulletin.com.