Two wronged women
and their choices

I NOT supposed to be alive," the woman said, as she opened a battered mustard-yellow vinyl bag that matched the mock leather jacket covering her thin frame. She dislodged a packet of tissues from the tote and dabbed at the corners of her eyes before raising them to my face.

Age had diluted the chocolate-brown of her pupils with a milky film, but she could still see the anticipation of her story in mine. With a small smile and the twitch of her lips, she began.

We were strangers made comrades by the long wait airline passengers are conditioned to these days. With check-in times double the minutes it takes to fly to another island, we had a stretch before the flight to Hilo.

We quickly exhausted the small-talk topics -- the cost of plane tickets, traffic to the airport, the weather.

When I asked if she was going on a vacation, she shook her head yes, then no. The simple question unleashed her narrative.

She was born in Olaa on the Big Island. "Now they call 'em Kurtistown, maybe Keaau," she said, disapproval of the change evident in her raspy voice.

She was one of nine children, or at least that's what she was told. She didn't know for sure because all her siblings had been scattered among different families, except for her and a younger sister. There were no records of births or adoptions, no way to trace the others. She didn't even know the names of her parents.

The man who raised her and her sister had recounted only once how he came to care for them and she never asked him to again.

"Papa" told her he was fishing somewhere near Kapoho or Opihikao when another man unloaded a mess of kids from the back of a truck. The man, drunk and abusive, began dragging the children across the rocks to the ocean. He tried to drown them.

Papa and several other people ran to their rescue. As they pushed the man away, he screamed that they were "devils," the offspring of a bad woman. Apparently, the woman had run away, unwilling to bear him any more children. He thought if he killed the ones they had, she would change her mind. Prevented from completing his horrible mission, he drove away, abandoning the kids.

Papa told her that the people at the beach that day agreed to take home one child each, but there were only eight of them so he took in the two girls.

When she was about 16, Papa arranged for her to marry an older man, but soon after, Papa died. So she took her sister with her when she moved to Oahu with her new husband.

Turned out he, too, was a drunk. He beat her and abused her sister. "It was not so good," she said.

She endured this for some years, but one day she thought about her mother, the woman who had forsaken her children, about how desperate she must have been, how she must have felt she had no other way out.

She understood then that she had a choice. She divorced the "terrible fella." She found work, mostly cleaning hospitals, and though it wasn't easy, made a life for herself and for her sister.

Now her sister was "gone," she said. I thought she meant that her sister had died, but no. "She gone," she said, pointing a crooked finger at her head.

The flight would take her to her sister, whose bounds to the world had been cut by Alzheimer's disease.

Elderly and frail, full of a dignity acquired through withstanding hardship, the woman was again going to care for the one person she was sure shared her blood.

It was her choice.