Lara tilted her head. “Hopefully the painkiller kicks in soon, eh? And no wonder Aroha likes you. You’re one of the more interesting criminals we’ve brought in lately, I’ll tell you that. Perhaps the most interesting…ever? You are a person of interest in a couple of counties in Colorado, it seems. I’ve left a message with a sheriff there, letting him know you’re here.”
Ammalie put her fingertips to the necklace again. “Oh…that’s minor. A minor thing…a dog I had to rescue…or maybe trespassing…or maybe it was a car I donated,” she mumbled. Then she really looked down at her necklace, since Lara was looking at it. “My dead husband gave this to me. From his trip here. I think jewelry making has been some deep-seated unconscious effort to bring him back, to talk, to say goodbye. Or to bring the old me back. This was our engagement ring.”
Lara paused. “Someone else is coming too. Nina Sis. Do you know who she is?”
“No.”
“That name doesn’t ring a bell?”
“No.” Then Ammalie added, “Well, I heard there was an Apolena Sis. Looks to be the same age as my son, Powell. Is Nina her mother?”
Lara nodded. “Yup. Nina is her mother.” She tilted her head and softly added, “Nina wears the same necklace as you. Is that why you really came? She knew your husband? Perhaps—”
Ammalie blinked. “No, I’m sorry. That also would be too Hollywood. That would be a predictable story. But it’s not the story here.” She said it with conviction. Vincent could be a lot of things—checked out, for one—but he wouldn’t have lied about a lifelong secret of such import. He did not have a child in New Zealand.
CHAPTER 21
The Sea Creature lodged in her throat as the idea spread. Vincent did have a lover here; she’d always known that. So, what this policewoman was saying was: Nina had been his lover, and Apolena his…child? Powell had a half sister?
No. Impossible.
She doubled over with a cramp and gasped. Her uterus felt like it had acid in it, as if it were tearing away from the walls of her body, and the Sea Creature dove down into her pelvic region and exploded. She heard a loud yelp come out of her mouth, and then she felt the vomit rise, and then Lara was saying, “What’s going on here? How bad is it? Do you need medical attention? Do you need a doctor?”
Ammalie now had the trash can in her lap, but the pain subsided. “No, no, not necessary.” Ammalie heard her voice coming in fits and starts with the cramps. “It’s just perimenopause. It’s just being…a woman. No one talks about this.”
Lara tilted her head and got up and brought her a glass of water, which made Ammalie wince once again. Something was breaking inside her, tearing inside her, and suddenly she was scared. More scared than she’d been walking in the desert, more scared than in the freezing snowstorm, more scared than during the housecleaner incident back in the cabin, which seemed years ago.
“I’m taking you to the clinic,” Lara said. “No, I’m not. I’m calling an ambulance to take you to Auckland. They have imaging.”
“I don’t have the money…”
“What are you talking about?” Lara was grabbing her shoulder, as if to steady her body and spirit. “Oh, god. I forgot. You poor Americans! For the love of any god. No wonder you do weird, weird, weird things.”
A vague disassociation descended on her, and she felt her body slump and Lara’s voice float away again and the room warp and wave as if she were looking through a thick piece of sea glass. Then she was being helped down to the floor by Lara and was curling into a fetal position. She closed her eyes to try to stop the dizzy wave hitting her, and what she saw in her mind’s eye was the Sea Creature. The actual Sea Creature, made manifest. The Sea Creature had always been her name for this force, a noncorporeal, disembodied energy that moved around her body—from her heart to her throat to her uterus, swimming all over and causing various types of chaos, sometimes surging around in joy, lighting her here and there, sometimes a heavy weight. But now she saw it, tentacled, like a glowing octopus, pinging and zinging. It was behind her belly button but with arms in every direction, electrocuting her. She was vaguely aware that tears were streaking down her face with a force that reminded her of storms.
—
The female body existed in silence. Muted. Made invisible. Even in the best of books and movies and conversations, the topic was mostly avoided, rarely fully revealed or made manifest, even now, even with supposed access to open and forthright media and medicine. For that reason, women of all ages suffered in silence and confusion, without much recourse, without much relief. This was Ammalie’s thought as she waited in the hospital bed, staring at a white ceiling, her legs in stirrups.
As the vaginal ultrasound beeped, and the doctor rotated the wand this direction and that, and mumbled something about not finding the left ovary, Ammalie’s clear thought was: This world simply, simply, simply needs to be a more honest and vocal place.
The doctor came and went and someone new came in. This doctor was young—so young that Ammalie wasn’t sure how she could be a doctor already—and Ammalie had a quick vision of blond curly-headed Lulu someday walking into a room with such authority and grace.
“There is a prominence of left adnexal vessels,” the woman said, looking from a computer screen to Ammalie. “There is a presence of follicles. Those are the findings. But good news. Your uterus measures eight by five by five, and there is no discrete mass.”
Ammalie nodded. The silence stretched on for a long time, so she added, “Thank you. I have no idea what that means.”
“You don’t have the thickening that would suggest uterine cancer.”
“Excellent,” Ammalie said, resting her head back.
“But it sounds like you’ve been going through years of pain?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“A lifetime. But it’s gotten worse.”
“So, I am seeing what we’d call suspicious pelvic congestion syndrome. It’s like having varicose veins, but inside, and it can be very painful. There’s some medical dissent about what this is, what to do, only because, well, I’m sorry to say, it hasn’t been studied much,” to which Ammalie felt her eyes rolling of their own accord.
“What can you do?”
“Well, I’d suggest you wait till you’re back home to discuss the pelvic congestion. It won’t kill you, but I know it’s very, very painful. So I’m sorry you’ve been dealing with that. There are several options. They could try to regulate your hormones a little better. You’re a little too old for birth control, in my opinion. Blood clots and all. Leads to stroke. So you could try an IUD, an ablation, or, if you feel like it’s gotten too bad, a hysterectomy, though of course that’s extreme, but on the other hand, this pain seems extreme. There are other treatments, but I’d prefer you talk with your primary doctor back home.” And patting Ammalie’s foot, she added, “I need to leave to have a consult about this, and to check another patient. I’ll be back.”
When she was gone, Ammalie lay panting in pain, then roused herself and asked a passing nurse if she could make a call. She took the offered phone and called the restaurant, hoping for Aroha, who did indeed pick up after the odd buzzing ring.
“I lied to you,” Ammalie said first thing. “I am not the artist. I’m a fake.”
There was a sigh and silence.
“I’m so sorry,” she rambled on. “I’m so very sorry. You always felt so genuine and real. And I deceived you.”
“Crikey,” Aroha finally said in a voice that felt like tempered anger. “I guess I don’t understand.”
Suddenly Ammalie felt another sharp pain on the left side, and gasped. She screwed up her face tight in order to bear the pain and push down the vomit, and then panted, “Listen, I understand if we never speak again, but before you go, can I ask you one thing? What do you daydream about?”
“Oh, stone the crows! Where are you?”
The tearing pain passed, and now she felt the echo of it thrumming. “I’ve been noticing. Here in New Zealand, my daydreams are about my real life, about reality, about the me I am now, not a younger version of me. Because my life here is more real. My daydreams have substance, because my life has substance. If you know what I mean?”
“Not sure I do.” Aroha’s voice was confused, but felt softer now. “Why do I hear beeping? Why am I getting another call from the police?”
“Thank you for your friendship, your whakahoahoa,” Ammalie panted. “I need to go. But I wanted to say. Because of you, I’ve learned words like whanau, family. Whenua, land. Moana, ocean. Thank you for expanding me. I’m”—and here she gasped with a shooting star of pain—“I’m truly sorry for lying. I…I had to take over other people’s lives until I could find my own. You are a wonderful person.”
She gasped out the last words and grabbed her left side and hung up the phone just before accordioning on the bed and emitting a high-pitched animal sound. She found herself thinking, once again, How very animal I’ve become! As she continued moaning, somewhere far away she heard the dog’s yelps, the gasp of the freed tree, the cry of humans and animals everywhere.
—
The young doctor was back, was asking her about her pain in her left side, was pressing on the right. “Rebound tenderness?” the doctor mumbled, and then there was another doctor, both hovering, and one was slowly pressing her fingers on the left side, then quickly letting go, which is when her right side started shooting pain. “Contralateral rebound,” and “Yes. Yes, that’s what threw me.”
“Not ovary—”
“Not this congestion syndrome—”
“Appendix!”
“The two-fer rule. Two things at once.”
