I came to myself standing under some banyan trees a bit outside of town. I shook myself (a habit I had picked up from the dogs – people laughed, but it was a great way of re-establishing the proper boundaries of my physical body) and hopped across a little stream, climbed the bank and got to the road. I turned right and walked thoughtfully along it, trying to decide where things had gone wrong.
I dismissed the entire issue of Maile’s shirt. That was so unimportant I couldn’t believe anyone was spending emotional energy on it, and my only response was to renew my determination to never take her shopping again. But my hair had been on fire, no doubt about it, and I couldn’t regrow it properly. What was that all about? Was it somehow connected to my mysterious visitor? I didn’t know, and that bothered me.
Once I started thinking about problems, they came think and fast. The kahuna was clearly a nut job. Bill was insufferable. Orfali wanted to declare war on crazy people, who wanted to kill everyone who had ever looked at them sideways. Kimo refused to cook. Dancer was in even more of a fog than usual for him. Fritz said his stomach hurt. Plus, I didn’t get dinner and I was hungry. And, my hair was a disaster, with every hank a different color and length. I sighed, thinking that I would tell Kalani that it was an experiment in home coloring gone horribly, horribly wrong. She’d believe that.
I walked past the various tourist stores and the shave ice stand, took a left down a dirt road and passed a few houses. Chickens squawked and swirled around my feet as I turned toward Kalani’s shop, which was above a florist shop. There were elderly Chinese ladies jabbering away in Cantonese in the back room where the stairs started, and I was a bit surprised. Leis are made in the morning, and there didn’t seem to be enough flowers piled up for that anyway. I glanced over at them and relaxed. Mahjongg. They would probably be here all night, and might very well exchange more money than the florist shop was worth. I will never understand the way the Chinese gamble.
Upstairs, Kalani was doing something to the hair of a middle-aged woman wearing a plastic poncho and way too much makeup. I nodded at Kalani, whose eyes widened as she took in my catastrophic coiffure. I sat down by the window and started leafing through fashion and gossip magazines from two years ago. I let the client’s monologue about her various grandchildren fade into a background drone while I brooded about what to do next. My problems were clearly insoluble, but if I could think of anything, even something minor, that would make some improvement, things would get better. My experience was that if I kept doing the little things problems eventually vanished, either because I solved them bit by bit, or because the improvements unblocked other variables. I closed my eyes and reviewed my options.
Suddenly, I jerked awake. I was disoriented for a second, and hot. I thought I was burning up and couldn’t breathe fast enough to cool off. I jumped up, looking around wildly. Kalani and her client were both staring at me. I gaped back at them, and realized where I was, and what was happening. Thalassia was contacting me. She was, she told me, passing along a message from Maka. I remembered then, that I had left him lying in the sun, on the stone staircase leading to my tower room. He was overheating. I swallowed hard and looked at Kalani. “Can I use your phone?” She nodded, still watching me, and pointed to the desk behind me.
I picked up the receiver, acutely aware that everything I said was being listened to. I dialed home, and waited, impatiently, while it rang. And rang. And rang. I was about to give up and start trying to direct Thalassia (hard at a distance, especially when it was things that didn’t come naturally to her), when Keali’i picked up. “Howzit?”
“Hey, listen, it’s me. I need you to go and give Maka some water.”
“What?”
I started to snap his head off, saw Kalani’s eyes on me in the mirror, and took a deep calming breath. “Maka. Water. Give him some.”
Silence. “Where he at?”
“He’s” I stopped, aware again of the interested silence around me. “He’s in my office.”
“Yeah?” Keali’i was deeply skeptical of my office. He had been poking around in there as a small child and accidentally gone into a transporter. I did find him, and nothing actually happened to him, but he had a healthy respect for what happened when doors in my office opened.
“Yeah.” I glanced at Kalani again, and lowered my voice. “On the steps. You know, the steps down from the back door.” I glanced at her, and realized that she had stopped cutting to listen more closely. “Just give him some water, and rig up some shade for him. Don’t talk to anybody” I wondered what Kalani would make of that “and just leave him there, but make sure he has water.”
I was ready to hang up, but Keali’i wasn’t. “You got company, yeah?”
“Company? No, I’m at Kalani’s.”
“No, company here. Some haole guy, says he’s your new apprentice.”
“What!” I just about exploded. What the hell? I suddenly remembered my conversation with Darian, and sent an angry, sharp message to Thalassia. Why didn’t she tell me? We had several seconds of confusion, then she went into the kitchen and I saw Keali’i on the phone and a tall, skinny kid sitting at the table, looking nervous and out of place. Thalassia said she thought he was some friend of Keali’i’s. “How did he get there? What is he doing there? Tell him to go home!”
Kalani and her client were openly gaping at me now. I turned my back on them and took a deep breath. A sudden thought made me turn back around and check the mirror. No, no smoke coming off my head. I turned back to the phone again. “Get him out of there!”
“I think apprentice should better feed Maka, and go find that castle.” Keali’i was clearly not in a good mood. Either that, or he was enjoying how upset I was. Whichever, he was cementing his place on my list of children I would trade for a decent paperback.
“No, he shouldn’t. He doesn’t know his way around. You do it.” I thought for a second. If this kid had been assigned to me, telling him to leave was useless and just put him in an awkward position. I checked with Thalassia. She was sniffing his shoes, and jumped up to balance her paws on his knee. She nosed his hand experimentally. He peered at her uncertainly, and then looked at Keali’i. “Can I touch her? Will she bite?” Oh, hell, another caninophobe. I had a sudden surge of hope that he liked cats, which would be a good excuse to get rid of him. Thalassia jumped up into his lap and turned to survey the table. She pointed her nose at a Keali’i’s half-empty plate and barked once. My new apprentice reached over and moved the plate so she could reach it, and she started gulping down chunks of Spam. I focussed on her. What about the damn apprentice? She approved of him, but I wanted to know more than how easily she could wheadle food out of him. I snarled mentally and she turned her head to look at him. I saw a thin, anxious face with large glasses. Great. Just great. He looked startled. “Why did her eyes go green?”
Keali’i spoke from behind Thalassia, and I got a weird stereo effect from hearing him through the phone and through her ears. “Eh, Mom just wants to know what you look like.” He spoke directly to me. “That’s my suppah, tell her to stop it.”
I had control of myself now. “You eat too much Spam. It’s all fat, salt and preservatives.”
“Yeah, so it’s OK for her?”
“No, it is not OK for her!” Thalassia ignored this, licking the plate with clinical thoroughness. “Look, there’s real meat and stuff in the fridge. Make yourself a sandwich, give him one, too, and I’ll deal with both of you when I get home. And give Maka water! You, personally, go give him water. Did you hear me? What did I say?” When dealing with children and dogs, double checking for clarity is vital.
“Yeah, I go give him some water and some umbrella. I don’t talk to the local boy. I give the apprentice boy some sandwich. I eat real food and not Spam. I stay out after the game ‘til 2.” He waited to hear my response to this one, and I sighed.
“Fine. Good. Whatever. I’ll talk to you when I get home.” I hung up and sat down, and buried my face in my hands. Could this get worse? I hoped not, but experience suggested otherwise.
Kalani’s client finally left, giving me a sharp look on the way out. I had a sick feeling that Kalani had vented her opinion of me at some length before I arrived, and reminded myself that I didn’t like her very much, either. I waited for her to wave me over to the chair, and she futzed around, sweeping the floor, rearranging implements, clearing towels and such away while she contemplated my head.
“What you do to it?”
“Um, I thought I’d change the color.” She didn’t respond, and I added, “The I tried to fix it.” She didn’t react to this either, which was a bit unnerving, and I said, “My birthday’s next week.” True, but irrelevant, and I wondered why I said it.
She walked all the way around me, staring, and shook her head slowly. “I don’ know, I see what I can do.” She moved me into the chair and started running her hands through it. “This burned, here and here, and your scalp blistered.” She sounded oddly matter of fact. I decided not to say anything. Now that she mentioned it, my head was hurting, badly. Her fingers felt cool as she separated the strands, and I suddenly realized that whatever she did was probably going to hurt a lot. “Dis purple, dis orange, dis black,” she catalogued. “What color you trying for?”
“Um, kind of reddish brown. Like Katharine Hepburn.” She sniffed, and I wondered if I had the wrong actress. She pulled on a section near the crown, and tears came to my eyes. I closed them and focused on a painkilling spell, moving my fingers as minutely as possible under the poncho. The pain ratcheted down a bit, and I opened my eyes again. Even I could see the swelling and blistering across the top of my head. Had that popped up when I did the spell, or had I just not noticed before? Kalani didn’t seem surprised, so I probably was just too worried about my other problems to notice. Damn. I didn’t dare try to get rid of it. The way things were going, I’d end up getting rid of my whole head.
Kalani stepped back. “If I put anyt’ing on it, it make the reaction worse, yeah? I wash it gentle, I got some shampoo for chemical burns, from perms gone bad, yeah? I cut it a bit, you come back in two week, we see what growin’ back. Maybe we just cut it all, real, real short. Maybe a lot of it fall out.” She started toward the wash basins, and I followed her, glumly wondering if that last bit was a hope for the best possible outcome. Bald might well be better than this.