“Mari, my body is aging—boy do I feel it. But the real Ammalie is getting younger. More playful. More free. More accepting. More childlike. It sounds so cliché, but clichés are clichés for a reason, no? I couldn’t have done it without this journey.”
Mari opened her mouth, closed it. “I’m not sure I should say this, and I don’t intend any hurt. But I wish Vincent could see you now.”
Ammalie laughed. “I know. Frankly, and egotistically, I wish everyone could see me now. And yet, I don’t need to be seen anymore.”
“Well, sorry, but we’re all here, seeing you. It’s important that Powell see you this way.”
Ammalie nodded. “Yes, I guess you’re right. And you came! I needed you, and you came.”
Mari put her arm around Ammalie’s shoulder. “I finally got to be the companion fated to go along! I adore you, adventurer! I suppose that back home, I’ve been on my own journey. You were right all along. This last arc of life? We better do it right. We only have so much time. And you know what you’ve taught me? It’s not so much pressure to do it right. No, it’s more like a challenge to do it right.”
Ammalie turned so she could hug her friend full-on, and she rocked Mari back and forth, back and forth, back and forth as the sea thundered and echoed.
—
That evening, Ammalie found herself alone with Aroha in the restaurant—the others had needed to sleep off jet lag at their holiday rental. Aroha slid a plate of fish-and-chips close to her, peered out from behind her black-rimmed glasses, said, “For you, love,” and held her gaze with warmth and steadiness. Then, sitting, she took a piece of fish and took a hearty bite. “Don’t mind if I do. This is very good food.”
“Yes. I’m so grateful.”
“Richard is very angry with you. He was hoping to…you know…well. He said that one thing you learn in older age is to be direct, honest, open, and reach out while the iron is hot, and so he did, and now he feels betrayed. He was right all along. You were a fake. He can’t quite forgive you. That you were lying to us all.”
Aroha arched her eyebrows playfully. “But I can. First, I have to say, I have been friends with Nina Sis all my life. So when you said that Vincent had a relative named Apolena, and was from the Midwest, I remembered. ‘The summer of love,’ we called it. That summer, Nina fell in love with an American wwoofer, and that is the same summer I realized I liked women. I was sleeping with the artist who was here at that time. She was much older and a perfect first lover. But I was so confused: What were the chances that Vincent’s widow would show up here? But then I began to understand—you’d come here because he’d been here. And you knew about the residency and the house.”
“Yes.”
Aroha flashed her gorgeous smile. “What a world we live in. Pear-shaped all the way.”
Then she grew serious. “I was not the one who called the police, by the way. Richard called Nan to tell her about the pink ribbons. Amazingly, she answered her phone. I suppose he wanted to speak with her to, well, find out more about you, to tell her that he’d been delighted to discover you weren’t a surveyor for a real estate company. And she didn’t know who or what he was talking about! So he called the police.”
Ammalie felt a flush in her cheeks. Anger or embarrassment, she wasn’t sure. “I wish he’d—I don’t know—”
“I know.”
“It feels like a betrayal to me. I was trying to help him, after all.”
“Yes, but you have to understand. It was out of a love for Nan. And you did pretend to be someone you were not.”
Ammalie ate a fry slowly and let her gaze linger on the view outside the window, all the greenery and birds and sky. “Yeah, I get it. I understand, I do. I feel terrible. I probably would have called the police too. Well, maybe not. But I do owe him an apology. I didn’t tell him the truth. I let the lie float around. And…it’s not right.”
Aroha reached over to touch her cheek. “No, it’s not, but he’ll heal. And how are you, love?”
Ammalie knew her to mean health-wise, but she responded in a truer way. “I feel…free. Not problem-free, just free.”
“Well. If you had no problems, I think that means you’d be living a lazy life.”
Ammalie snorted. “Exactly. I have some regrets. I also have confusions. About the way I grew up in a culture that…I dunno, assumed the male gaze, how maybe much of what I did was to attract that gaze, want that gaze, depend upon that gaze, whether I was conscious of it or not. I’m a little jealous of women growing up now. I think the world has been opened up to them in various ways.”
Then she winked at Aroha, who laughed and said, “This is why I like you.”
Ammalie felt emboldened. “I grew up in a family and in a time when heterosexuality was, you know, assumed. Or at least encouraged. Looking back, I now see that some of my female friendships, well, maybe that was romance. But I didn’t experience it as that! It didn’t even occur to me to call it that. Or explore that. I…I…There’s a lot to unpack here for me. All the assumptions I’ve made! All my blind spots! I need another life!” But then she added, “But I will die loving the life I’ve had.” She gulped in a breath, feeling as if she’d been talking for too long. “Do you have regrets?”
Aroha considered the question. “No, I have no regrets. I would have liked to be born in a different world, though. One that was more honest. More kind. More accepting. Of other cultures, of other sexual paths, of identities, of everything.”
“Yes. Yes. I know.” They held each other’s eyes, acknowledging what all the yeses meant, the paths not taken, and then Ammalie said, “I feel like my heart awoke so very late. The other day I was thinking that maybe only now, as my womanhood fades, has my heart become a woman.”
“That sounds as it should be, the natural order of things.” With that, Aroha stood up enough so that she could lean across the table to kiss Ammalie’s forehead, near her scar. Then, intentionally, she leaned down and kissed Ammalie briefly on the lips, and Ammalie kissed back, closed her eyes, and felt the pure perfection of this one moment.
—
Nan hosted a dinner in her Auckland home to celebrate the solstice, for now they were near the day that signaled the longest, lightest day of the year in the Southern Hemisphere. A time, she reminded everyone, to rededicate oneself to bringing the most light that you could into the world, working right alongside the sun. While everyone else was celebrating other holidays, she said, she would always celebrate the original one that inspired them—the full arc of the sun’s journey.
Ammalie looked around the room, noting how nearly everyone was as odd and beautiful as sea glass, tumbling together in old and ancient ways. Nan and Aroha remembered Vincent from thirty years ago. Nan had been middle-aged then, and Nina a young woman. Nina described her and Vincent’s passion with obvious joy and Ammalie felt only happiness in hearing about it, in remembering her own limerent time with Vincent. Erik seemed to take it all in with acceptance and happiness too. Ammalie was relieved that something about middle age brought depleted jealousy and replenished joy for anything that had been beautiful.
Powell loved hearing stories about his father at the age he was now, and how his father had “wwoofed it through New Zealand,” as everyone there put it, and it became clear he was going to apply to do the same. He was checking into getting an extension on his visa, and he’d been invited to stay with the Sis family. It also was apparent to everyone in the room that he and Apolena, sitting near each other on a blue couch, had a crush on each other, and that all their lives would now be further linked.
Mari was trying to extend her stay as well. After all, she and Powell were over here, and it was gorgeous, and they were awed by the tui birds and the pohutukawa trees and the Tasman Sea.
Aroha arrived last, whispering, “Hi, love.” Ammalie touched her own lips, remembering their kiss the night before, tentative and brief and yet brave and curious too.
Also in attendance was Lara the policewoman and the actual jeweler, Brumby, who had arrived early for an arts festival in Auckland, and who wore scarves and big jewelry and a flowing dress and was delighted by the whole story—and confessed to being glad about clean cupboards. “Peace, justice, homes, and art for all,” she said after a few drinks, hugging Ammalie with real force.
The one person who refused to come was Richard, who was still angry. Ammalie had written him a long letter, and would follow up with a call later. “It wasn’t right,” he had told Aroha. “It simply wasn’t right to go around breaking into a private home, pretending to be someone else—who does that?” Ammalie felt the sting of that truth—he was right; she deserved his anger. The sliver of muted shame that ran through her was something to be borne.
Simultaneously, though, she felt delight, especially when she Zoomed in Lulu and Dan, Rita and Rex, with Lady bounding around in the background. Together, they toasted Vincent, who, although absent, had brought them all together. Though she didn’t say it aloud—some emotions were meant to be kept private—Ammalie had the clear knowledge that the marriage would have faltered and ended. Yet it had been a worthy journey overall, and she felt a great sorrow for the fact that he was not alive, heartache for the fact that Powell would not have more time with his father, and a real worry that Powell would be affected in ways which neither of them could foresee.
It hurt. It hurt and it was complicated—and it was okay.
“We must age and die, because that is our debt to nature. Debitum naturea,” Nan said. “Our debt to nature is to die!” She raised her glass in a toast.
