Page 24 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
“Started just this morning.” She smiles, and the small library suddenly seems warm, bathed full of golden light; the effect of Juliet’s smiles on me never wanes.
I tug at my collar, which now feels as if it’s starched too stiffly.“I, er, was hoping some new novels might have come in.” I motion at the fiction shelves.
“Surely there’s something there you can read,” Rachel says.
“I could, but unfortunately I’ve already gone through all these books. I am, you may be surprised to find out, actually literate.”
Rachel laughs again, and the sound is light as a tropical breeze through coconut trees. “Come with me, then. I have a book in the back you’ll like. Someone just dropped off a box of donations.”
And even though I know it would be better if I could get away, I don’t want to. Sure, the curse brings an unhappy ending, but before that, there’s always a timeless love, like Paris and Helen. Marc Antony and Cleopatra. Dante and Beatrice.
So when Rachel walks, I follow. She does, indeed, find me a splendid book.
The next week, she lets me take her to dinner. We go off base to a hole-in-the-wall place that serves authentic Hawaiian food: pork lau lau steamed in ti leaves, sour poi that makes Rachel’s mouth pucker, and haupia, a rich coconut pudding, for dessert. Later, we stroll down Kapahulu Boulevard and she lets me take her hand.
The week after that, we drive up to the north shore of the island and watch local surfers ride towering waves over forty feet tall. The rise and crash of the water mesmerizes Rachel. And watching her mesmerizes me. When she concentrates, her lips purse, and when she’s delighted—like when a surfer catches a particularly monumental wave—she lets out a tiny, smiling breath. The fifth time this happens, I can’t resist anymore. I tilt her face toward mine and brush my mouth against hers, as sea spray mists over us and palm fronds rustle overhead.
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop myself,” I whisper.
She answers with that small, smiling exhale. “I don’t want you to stop yourself,” and she kisses me again.
Two weeks later, we are inseparable whenever I’m off duty. If she’s working, I’m in the library, and she spends most evenings with me and the other sailors. I am terrible at billiards, but Rachel is a ringer, which my men—to their dismay—don’t discover until after they’ve bet a night’s worth of beers on a game against us. Butshe’s abysmal at poker, so when that’s the game of choice, Rachel lets me play while she does her best to bat her eyelashes at the other sailors to distract them from their cards. We always laugh about it afterward, dissecting the evening and whom her performance most affected.
On Saturdays, we rise early to go fishing with her entire family—mom, dad, four brothers, and Grampa Fred. We head out into the ocean on their boat and spend the morning reeling in mahi-mahi, and if we’re lucky, a notoriously quick ono or a fatty opakapaka. With several lifetimes of seafaring experience under my belt, I’m usually the one to hook the prized fish. That wins me the immediate respect of Rachel’s father and brothers, and Grampa Fred later does me honor by inviting me to help him grill and steam our catch. (On the other hand, Rachel, like all Juliets, can’t cook, and is forbidden to come anywhere near the barbecue or kitchen.)
After dinner, her family gathers around the still glowing charcoal to play music. I can never remember chords, but Rachel and her brothers play ukuleles as if they were extensions of their fingers. Rachel can’t sing, though—she did for me once, and true to her word, it sounded like dolphins crying—so she leaves the singing to me. Her mother teaches me the lyrics to their family’s favorite songs, and I teach her some of my sailors’ shanties.
It’s blissful to be folded into a family. In my long life, I’m so often alone that I forget what it’s like to belong like this. The weeks pass in a joyful fugue, and I almost forget that it’s all too paradisical to last.
Until the reality of my existence comes roaring back—into my ears, my arms, my legs, every single cursed cell in my body.
On the morning of December 7, the Japanese blow up Pearl Harbor. Bombs scream down from the sky. Walls of smoke and flame rise like red-hot demons sent to brand us in pain. I am in my barracks one moment, but in the next, I’m swimming in the midst of a shipwreck, pulling men from the sinking hull. I hoist sailors onto my shoulders and drag them through water that seems on fire, setting them on flotsam to be retrieved by the rescue teams, while I swim back into the blazing ruins.
All but two of my command die that day.
When the attack ends, I finally collapse onshore.
After only a moment of respite, though, I summon the last dregs of willpower in me, and I stagger to the library.
I stop short where it ought to be.
For it is no longer a library, but a blackened shell of ash, nearly unidentifiable.
“Rachel?” I croak.
But she wouldn’t have been here, would she? So early in the morning. Her shift didn’t start till later…
Except she’d mentioned coming in before the library opened, to sort through several huge boxes of donations.
Scraps of paper—embers of former books—flutter through the gray air like doleful ticker tape. One scrap lands at my feet, right next to a name tag warped from the heat of a bomb. I can still make out most of the letters.
Rachel Wil—
I cry out and fall to my knees. I clutch the name tag, all that’s left of her, and howl until my voice is raw and my throat bleeds, until my lungs are choked with smoke and ashes, and even then, I refuse to leave, refuse to get up from the skeleton of the library, from the final resting place of my love. I try to light myself on fire, to add my corpse to the grim pyre, but the wind blows out each of my matches, and then a drizzle starts to fall, and Pearl Harbor will not take me.
So I lie there until Rear Admiral Kimmel himself appears and pulls me from the smoldering remains of the library. And later, when President Roosevelt awards fifty-one men, including me, the Naval Cross for our extraordinary heroism in battle, I throw my medal into the Pacific.
Because I don’t deserve it. I couldn’t protect my crew. I couldn’t protect Rachel.
