The Whiteness of Bones Read Online Free Page A

don’t think you quite understand what has happened. You can’t have, Mary,” said McCully.
    “What did happen?” asked Claire. Jimmy was hypnotized by the coconut cake, still held in Mitsuya’s weakening, outstretched hand.
    “Did you ever—” Mary began to say.
    Luckily for all of them, something in McCully’s face warned Mary that it would be dangerous for her to continue, thatshe could not win this contest. “Oh!” she said and left the kitchen.
    McCully awkwardly put his arm around Mamie. She was sobbing. Mitsuya, gums bobbing, edged the cake shakily onto the counter. His prey lost from view, Jimmy’s eyes flickered sleepily with the kitchen heat. He yawned with a high, sliding whine.
    “So what happened?” Claire asked plaintively, but no one could tell her.
    The grief that overcame Mamie that night smothered her and soaked into her. She never spoke of it to anyone, and she bore the loss of her friend, Hiroshi, and, it might be said, the loss of her mother, without complaint. It was her nature to be fair. But she suffered greatly nonetheless, perhaps even because of her fair-mindedness, and it was days before she could speak to her mother without shaking, so strong was her sense of the injustice done her, and it was years before she ever even approached the banyan tree. The pain held a certain interest for her because it was, to her surprise, an actual physical pain in her heart. She had read about such things, maidens who felt sharp pangs in their hearts, but she had not, until then, understood that hearts really could break.
    Mamie did not blame her mother for not believing her. Mamie did not even blame Hiroshi. She had not been frightened by his putting his hand once on her vagina. She had known that she had to tell her father because she had known that what Hiroshi had done to her was wrong and dangerous. What she had not known was that the almost unbearable weight of grief and regret brought on by her assumption of responsibility would nearly crush her.
    Surprisingly, Claire was kind to her, and that first night and for many nights after, Claire and Jimmy slept in Mamie’s bed with her. They would lie back together on the small pillow and gaze out the big screened window into the palm grove to watch the stars drift through the dipping branches. Offshore, the small, dry island of Ni‘ihau floated like an abandoned war junk. One yellow moonlit night, Claire enticed Mamie into the grove, and they read Archie and Veronica comic books by the light of the moon while Jimmy ecstatically killed toads. He did not eat them, perhaps knowing that they were poisonous, and the girls let him wander off in his sinuous, stealthy way. Now and then they would hear the pop of an exploding toad as he tossed it up like a ball and caught it in his little dry teeth. They were not squeamish or sentimental girls.
    Toward the end of the summer, when Mamie was sleeping calmly enough for Claire to remain in her own bed, there suddenly arrived at the plantation the two stepchildren of their Aunt Alice. They were Courtney, who was twelve, and Brooke, who was eight, and they had been sent straight from camp in New England to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is possible that they did not even stop one night at home in New York, so eager was their stepmother to have nothing to do with them.
    They were, understandably, in a daze. McCully was in the fields all day, and Mary, as she pointed out, had more than enough to do now that she was without a head gardener, so the stepcousins were left to Mamie and Claire. They were sweet-tempered and malleable. Claire and Mamie were amazed at the girls’ timidity and their fear of adventure, such as stealing and eating the grave-offerings from the Chinese cemetery. Claire and Mamie realized that the girls had been orderedand shunted about all of their lives. They were astonished when they made this discovery, and felt sorry for them and did not take advantage of them.
    They were picked up one