The disintegration of the drawings felt like another death to Alma: now, even the phantom was gone. It made her wish to weep, and most certainly made her begin doubting her judgment. She had seen so many faces in Tahiti over the previous ten months, but now she wondered whether she truly could have identified The Boy at all, even if he had been standing in front of her. Perhaps she had seen him, after all? Mightn’t he have been one of those young men at the wharf in Papeete, on the first day she’d arrived? Mightn’t she have walked past him, any number of times? Mightn’t he possibly even live here at the settlement, and she had simply grown immune to his face? She had nothing to check her memory against anymore. The Boy had barely existed, and now he did not exist at all. She closed the valise as though closing the lid of a coffin.
Alma could not remain in Tahiti. She knew this now without a doubt. She ought never to have come at all. What an awful lot of energy and resolve and expense it had required to get herself to this island of riddles, and now she was stranded, and for no good reason. Worse, she had become a burden to this small settlement of honest souls, whose food she had eaten, whose resources she had strained, whose children she had deputized for her own irresponsible purposes. What a fine state of affairs, was this! Alma felt she had fully lost the thread of her life’s purpose, whatever flimsy thread it had ever been. She had interrupted her dull but honorable study of mosses to advance this feeble search for a ghost—or, rather, two ghosts: for Ambrose and The Boy, both. And for what? She knew no more about Ambrose now than she had known before she arrived here. All reports in Tahiti declared her husband to have been precisely the man he’d always seemed: a gentle virtuous soul, incapable of malfeasance, too good for this world.
It was beginning to dawn upon her that, very possibly, The Boy may never have existed at all. Otherwise Alma would have found him by now, or somebody would have spoken of him—even if in the most roundabout manner. Ambrose must have invented him. This idea was sadder than anything else Alma could have imagined. The Boy had been the figment of a lonely man with an unsound mind. Ambrose had so longed for a companion, he’d drawn himself one. Through his conjuring of a friend—a beautiful phantom lover—he had found the spiritual marriage for which he’d always longed. It made a certain sense. Ambrose’s mind had never been steady, not even under the best of circumstances! This was a man whose dearest friend had committed him to a hospital for the insane, and who had believed that he could see God’s fingerprints pressed into the botanical. Ambrose was a man who saw angels in orchids, and who once believed he was an angel himself—to think of it! She had come halfway around the world, looking for a wraith concocted from a lonely man’s fragile and demented imagination.
It was a simple story, yet she had complicated it with her futile investigations. Perhaps she had wished for the tale to be more sinister, if only to render her own story more tragic. Perhaps she had wished Ambrose to be guilty of abominable things, of pederasty and depravity, such that she could despise him, rather than long for him. Perhaps she had wished to find evidence not of one Boy here in Tahiti, but of many boys—a throng of catamites, whom Ambrose had violated and ruined, one after the other. But there was no evidence of any such thing. The truth was merely this: Alma had been foolish and libidinous enough to marry an innocent young man possessed of faulty sanity. When that young man disappointed her, she had been cruel and angry enough to exile him here to the South Seas, where he had died lonely and unhinged, adrift in fantasies, lost in a hopeless little settlement governed—if one could even call it governance!—by a guileless, ineffectual old missionary.
As for why Ambrose’s valise and his drawings had remained untouched (except by nature) in Alma’s unguarded fare in Tahiti for nearly a year, when all of her other possessions had been borrowed, pilfered, picked apart, or ransacked . . . well, she simply did not have the imagination to solve that mystery. What’s more, she did not have the remaining will to contend with yet another impossible question.
There was nothing more to be learned here.
She could find no inducement to stay. She would need to assemble a plan for the remaining years of her life. She had been impulsive and misguided, but she would leave on the next whaling ship heading north, and find someplace to live. She knew only that she must not go back to Philadelphia. She had relinquished White Acre and could never return there; it would be unfair to Prudence, who had the right to take possession of the estate without Alma hovering about as a nuisance. In any case, it would be a humiliation to return home. She would need to begin anew. She would also need to find a way to support herself. She would send word tomorrow to Papeete that she was looking for a berth on a good ship with a respectable captain who had heard of Dick Yancey.
She was not at peace, but at least she was decided.
Chapter Twenty-five
Four days later Alma awoke at dawn to joyous shouting from the Hiro contingent. She stepped outside her fare to discover the source of the commotion. Her five wild little boys were running up and down the beach, turning flips and somersaults in the early morning light, shouting in enthusiastic Tahitian. When Hiro saw her, he ran up the zigzagged pathway to her door with wild speed.
“Tomorrow morning is here!” he shouted. His eyes were blazing with excitement, such as she had never before seen, even in this quite excitable child.
Baffled, Alma took his arm, trying to slow him down and make sense of him.
“What are you saying, Hiro?” she asked him.
“Tomorrow morning is here!” he shouted again, jumping up and down as he spoke, unable to contain himself.
“Tell me in Tahitian,” she commanded, in Tahitian.
“Teie o tomorrow morning!” he shouted back, which was merely the same nonsense in Tahitian as it was in English: “Tomorrow morning is here.”
Alma looked up and saw a crowd gathering on the beach—everyone from the mission, as well as people from the nearby villages. All were as excited as the little boys. She saw the Reverend Welles running toward the shore with his funny, crooked gait. She saw Sister Manu running, and Sister Etini, and the local fishermen, too.
“Look!” said Hiro, directing Alma’s eyes to the sea. “Tomorrow morning is arrive!”
Alma looked out to the bay and saw—how could she not have noticed immediately?—a fleet of long canoes slicing across the water toward the beach with incredible speed, powered by dozens of dark-skinned rowers. In all her time in Tahiti, she had never lost her wonder at the power and agility of such canoes. When flotillas such as this came rushing across the bay, she always felt as though she were watching the arrival of Jason and the Argonauts, or Odysseus’s fleet. Most of all, she loved the moment when, drawing close to shore, the rowers heaved their muscles in one last push, and the canoes flew out of the sea as though shot forth by great invisible bows, landing on the beach in a dramatic, exuberant arrival.