NAURU 1968
ON THE DECK OF a tiny trawler off the coast of Nauru, Elenoa’s body thrashed like a fish on a line.
She never let me see her sleep. Now I knew why.
The sun was sinking below the horizon, staining the sky the colour of blood-orange flesh. I lay flat on my back, staring at a fixed point on the outrigger, the wood of the deck warm and salt-rough under my bare legs.
We’d both been born girls, in this life, and I adored the softness of it, all sweet tongues and gentle edges.
Loving someone of the same sex wasn’t without its challenges, of course – throughout history we’d faced the constant threat of flogging and branding, castration and execution – but in the last few lives I’d had a sense that the overall arc of the world was curving in the right direction. Some cultures were broadening their arms to all kinds of love, the different colours and textures it could be woven from. Girls loving girls was still illegal on this small, conservative island, but it didn’t stop us from stealing kisses beneath the stars, from lacing our fingers together like ribbons in plain sight.
It had been a good week on the boat – a small red trawler passed down from Elenoa’s uncle. We’d caught coral trout and groupers, lobsters and giant clams. We’d sat on the bow with our legs dangling over the edge, eating mangos and pawpaws with juice running down our chins. We’d watched every sunset, taking turns to swig at the bottle of sour toddy made from fermented coconut flowers.
Propping myself up on my elbows, I looked back at the island, now washed in warm-red light. It was beautiful, in an apocalyptic sort of way. Almost a third of it had been strip-mined for phosphate, leaving behind a jagged plateau of limestone pillars and pinnacle-dotted white coral. It was even more dystopian from the land, abandoned tram tracks and rusted kerosene tins littering the once-lush landscape.
Humans were a blight.
We’d gained independence from the British earlier that year, and the more optimistic Nauruans thought this heralded a glittering new era. But I’d lived through enough post-colonial periods to know things were rarely that simple – especially when your fortunes were quite literally built on bird shit.
The island was ringed by shards of coral, making a port impossible but keeping us largely safe from pirates. It was just beyond the jutting reef that Elenoa and I lay on the deck of the fishing boat – our hold full to bursting with freshly caught tuna – watching the sun set.
Or at least that’s what we would’ve been doing, if she hadn’t fallen asleep.
‘No, please … no … arghhhh,’ she moaned, head thudding repeatedly on the hollow wooden boards. Her soft, tanned limbs jerked violently, and she started to roar as though being tortured.
A nightmare.
This had happened before, I recalled, in the asylum in Vermont, and even before that, though those earlier memories were hazier, like the washed-out background of a watercolour landscape.
I ran a thumb over the dagger-shaped chunk of coral in my palm. I could do it now. I could kill her now, in her sleep, and save us both the heartache of saying goodbye yet again.
Or I could try, yet again, to push for answers.
To convince her to let us stay .
My ridiculous optimist’s heart, always believing that this time it could be different.
Tucking the coral into a folded pile of netting, I laid my hand over hers. My callouses – forged from years of working the tag lines – notched between her knuckles, like our hands were puzzle pieces always meant to slot together.
An image came to me, raw as a wound and deep as a well: our hands fastened together with a ribbon of red. But the picture vanished as soon as it came, leaving behind an empty grave. Fallow earth.
Elenoa’s curved body twisted away from me in another vicious judder, anguished shouts echoing around the bottom of the boat. I pressed myself against her back, burying my face into the thick dark hair at her neck, wrapping an arm around her gentle waist.
Warmth spread through me, halfway between pleasure and ache. We’d never had sex in any of our lives – a matter of principle, for Arden, on account of the inevitable and often imminent murder – but the gentle tug in my lower belly was becoming harder to ignore.
‘Elenoa.’ I nuzzled into her shoulder blade. ‘Elenoa, shhh. It’s okay. You’re dreaming.’
As I felt her wake up, the writhing slowed and the groans stopped, but her body remained stiff as a plank. Even without seeing her face, I knew she was embarrassed.
‘What were you dreaming about?’
‘Just nightmares,’ she said gruffly.
‘What about?’ I’d never been one to let her off the hook easily.
‘Doesn’t matter, Heilani.’
‘Sounded like you were being tortured.’
‘Leave it, all right?’
Shaking my head, I sighed into her back. ‘You’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met. Stubborn, and proud, and infuriating.’
Her hand found mine and squeezed. ‘You’re still here, aren’t you?’
‘Sometimes I feel like I have no choice,’ I admitted. ‘Not in a bad way. In an our-souls-are-destined-to-meet kind of way.’
The boat bobbed softly below us, and my eyes stung from a day of searing South Pacific sun. I could understand the appeal of falling asleep, and yet there were too many questions and not enough time.
There was never enough time.
‘How do you always find me?’ I whispered, my forehead pressed against her shoulder blade, my arms tightening around her waist like she was a buoy at sea.
After several moments of contemplation, she murmured, ‘There’s, like … a tether, or something. It thrums between us. Draws me to you, like a magnet. And until it finds you … it’s like always being hungry. It gnaws at me.’ Her chest rose and fell as she swallowed. ‘You don’t feel it too?’
I chewed the inside of my cheek. ‘I do, but it doesn’t point me to you like a compass. It’s more like a deep yearning. Only, it doesn’t ease when we’re together. It intensifies.’
Was that how all humans experienced love? I’d never know for sure.
‘Saudade,’ whispered Elenoa, and the word lit a spark of recognition from a past life.
Before I could translate it, though, Elenoa unfolded herself and turned to face me. The warm light of the sunset made her skin look like liquid copper. White salt crusted around her temples from the heat of the day.
Her eyes bored into mine, dark and fierce. ‘Do you actually want to be with me?’
‘ Yes. ’ It was the truth. ‘And that … that stretches back as far as my memories do. Further, if that’s possible. Can you remember our beginning?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered softly, as though the word itself were a knife to the heart.
‘I’m not ready to let go again.’ Familiar desperation began to claw up my throat. ‘I want to be with you long after we turn eighteen. I want us to be little old people who sit and play chess together. Who bicker about whether or not it’s going to rain.’ Tears stung at my waterline. ‘And I’ll never understand why that can’t happen.’
But her answers had finally dried up, and she just gazed at me in pained silence.
I cupped her jaw in my rough palm. ‘Look, if I didn’t want to be with you, I’d bunker myself up in a mountain cave and wait it out alone. Until I came of age and you got off my back.’
The corner of her mouth quirked upward. ‘Because that worked out so well for you in Portugal.’
Portugal. That’s where I’d heard the word saudade before. It wasn’t easily translatable. A kind of longing, a nostalgia, a sense of incompleteness, not just romantic but existential, rooted in the very fabric of our people. Arden had suited it. Portuguese was the tongue of melancholic dreamers, of lonely poets.
‘You know how we’re bound together, somehow?’ I mused. ‘If you couldn’t find me in one life, for whatever reason … do you think that if you killed yourself, I’d die too?’
Something flashed across her face, but it was gone before I could parse it. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. It’s never seemed worth the risk.’
Frustration crested in me so suddenly that I almost lost my breath. ‘But what are you risking ?’
The question inflated into the silence, then withered as it remained unanswered.
Clambering to her feet, she crossed over to starboard and gazed out to the horizon. The sun had almost set, its final rays glowing red as a phoenix. ‘My love for you could fill an ocean, Evelyn.’ There was an awful resignation to her tone. ‘But it can’t stop the tide of time.’
I knew in that moment that she was going to do it, and so I resolved to do it first.
The boat bobbed right in front of a particularly treacherous barb of reef, rising from the water like a sword.
Taking in one last breath of salt tang and fresh fish, I steeled myself against the wave of guilt and pushed Elenoa forward with all my might. The shudder ripped through me as her chest was impaled on the coral.
We died right as the sun fell below the edge of the world.