Green Flash
Christie Cochrell

            Earlier that day she’d gone out looking for the yellow fish, and seen the young Hawaiians diving from the lava cliffs: one fat, one tall, one paler, sly; all differences erased as they dived, cutting clean into the bluest possible water with its black heart.  They saw Marcella watching, laughed and called out to where she stood on the cliff top that she should try it.  She badly wanted to, to feel the water slide over her skin, head first, like a new coating, like a silk dress (her friend Holly’s mother’s tight, husk-like dresses in the darkness of the upstairs closet, kicking off their jeans to try them on). To slip on another skin. To stand with the tallest of the Hawaiians showing her the right angle, the perfect point of entry, the tallest who she imagined was one of the dancers in the Polynesian show, who would stand with his hand at the small of her back and push her gently into the Pacific water—but she shrugged, miming helplessness.

            “I don’t have my bathing suit.”

            “Come anyway—what does it matter?” The paler, sly one.

            “Come back later.” It was the dancer, the cute one.

            “We’re going to the volcanoes,” she said reluctantly. How touristy, how dumb! She wanted badly not to be going to the volcanoes—but into the ocean which had been forbidden her (it was too dangerous; they’d swim just in the pool, with the tanned matrons, the paunchy old men, and only when the lifeguard was on duty).

            “Don’t let Pele get you.” Teasing her.

            “It’s better at dusk anyway,” the cute one said, looking at her. “When the sun goes down.” The young men laughed, significantly.

            “When there’s the green flash?” she asked, stupidly, not knowing what to say, but wanting them to see she knew what mattered.

            “Hey, Gabriel—she wants to see the green flash.”

            “Haven't you ever seen it?” she persisted, desperate to connect.

            “Oh yeh,” they laughed at her. “Bet you haven’t. Not like this one.”

            Gabriel looked like he wanted to stop them, but wasn’t the one who made the rules. She wanted to tell him to leave them; they weren’t worthy of him. Just as she, too, wanted to get away from those who never let her be what she was all about.

             Her father had become obsessed with seeing the green flash since they’d gotten there, almost as if he thought there would be redemption to be had in it. He insisted every day that at least a half an hour before sunset they be in place on the bar terrace beside the ocean, facing west, waiting for the moment of revelation.

            “It’s only a myth, Ken,” her mother said every evening, quellingly—and every evening so far had in fact quelled it. Every evening the sun had sunk into the western ocean solidly, without a trace of green, leaving only the usual pretty tropical sunset and Cassie asking if they couldn’t go to the buffet now, and her father not talking for a long time, withdrawn into some gloomy private place against another day of waiting. And then it would get dark, and they would join the tour groups and querulous old couples in the hotel restaurant for soggy breaded fish and colorless vegetables, or the spaghetti with a clovey sauce which Cassie always insisted on having. And then to bed.

            The fifteen-year-old Marcella felt in the periphery, dangerously, a different Hawaii just beyond that. In the heavy fragrance of the frangipani blossoms, the dark pools with the orange-gold glint of koi, the sound of warm rain pocking the water’s surface; her skin a little feverish with sunburn from the days in the sun, colored like her usual blush (and rather becoming for it), the light cotton on it like nothing; the purple orchids behind her ear, her hair long then, smelling of the coconut shampoo she’d insisted on buying in an open-air shop, brushing her bare back. She felt this forbidden other island, that was somehow also connected with adulthood, with the secrets the girls in her class—the daughters of archaeologists, of art photographers—had known for several years now, instinctively, as if inborn. Something left out when she was made (like the cake she tried to bake herself for her birthday last year that didn’t rise).  It was unbearable that she should be so close now and yet be prevented—again, always. She had to know what was there, what all those others were keeping from her. Some holy communion with the human race, and not the solitary confinement of her family.

            All day she thought of the dark skin of the Polynesian dancer, Gabriel, knifing into the turquoise sun-shot water with its black heart (son of Pele), the bright-sailed catamaran like a Hawaiian Icarus flying into the sun, saying “it’s better at dusk.” The green flash that her father yearned for as the sun went, swallowed into night, the yearning color of salvation out in the region where mirages live. She would go, she decided abruptly. The want was too much for her—as big as her father’s, for his was somehow in it, and her mother sitting stiffly with her arms folded against her hard, still body, waiting for nothing. Maybe the beautiful Hawaiian would kiss her, as the dark came on.  And she would know, then. But in any case there would be the swimming. They would come up dripping with dissolving sun, like golden oil skeining off them, warm and lingering as when Leander swam the Hellespont for love.

            She told her parents she had a stomachache (and it was true, she did, with the enormity of what she was doing); that they should go without her to the sunset deck, to dinner—she couldn’t eat. The fish at the Volcano House buffet must have been bad; it tasted kind of funny. Her father looked concerned, her mother put out—though she offered to stay with her, in their adjoining rooms, but Marcella said she’d be fine, and her father was impatient to get in place.  This would be the night.

            As soon as they were gone she put her swimsuit on, her new apricot-colored pareo, showing off her tan nicely—and gone swiftly along the cliff edge towards the rocks from which the Hawaiians had been diving that morning. She climbed carefully down towards the water, the pools silvering as the sun approached the far horizon, the end of its journey—or its beginning, as it entered the sea. Out of sight of the hotel there, she saw no one, heard no voices except carried faintly from the bar. Coming down towards him, if he was there. And sure enough—slight movement.

            He rose up from the ledge unwrapping a towel—the one they’d called Gabriel, who she’d hoped to find there, to show her the way into the darkening sun-dissolving ocean, into his island that was different from that other. Against the sun he turned to face her, grinning, and she saw he was entirely naked now that the towel had been shed, his body—every last inch of it—glowing phosphorescent green. Some kind of body paint, she thought, fascinated, as she turned, confused (but only from the mocking laughter of the others, hidden until now), the fat one calling after her “Green flasher!” Not shocked by him—his almost ethereal beauty—but by their reducing the whole thing to a joke.

            She burned with mortification and misery—when she’d come in good faith, come open to life itself. She'd been cheated, her gift of innocence rejected cruelly. She didn’t blame him, but the others. He would have been different if they hadn’t been there. Her eyes burning, she stared into the sun as it went. And as she looked with torment at the end of this day that had made promises it hadn’t kept, she saw it—a definite, unmistakable flash, certainly green, as if the sun had gone up in green smoke. 

            Of course, she thought dismissively. It was like any optical illusion. When you stare at a red square long enough, and then glance at a white space, the red turns green. They'd done that in school.  It wasn’t any big deal after all. But at least her father would have gotten what he wanted, she thought bitterly—and they could all relax now, not be driven crazy by his need. Caught between that and her mother’s silent resistance.

            But when she slipped back into her room, they were all there, awfully—waiting for her. Cassie smug, her father disbelieving, her mother grim-lipped—not surprised at this further disobedience or anything she’d do, however monstrous. No sooner had Marcella left than Cassie had had to come back for a sweater (chilled with sunburn, whiny) and had seen her sister gone, exultantly, the bathing suit too, from the shower rod where it had been drying next to hers. Always pleased to get her in trouble.  

            “Marcella isn’t in the room.”
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            But never as serious before. A little scared, even, to be the one to carry word of this enormous transgression to them.

            She’d wanted to swim in the ocean, she said—to have those colors on her skin. But even that was too unusual, too subversive. They didn’t want to know, and that was that.

            “But I only wanted—” 

            “Don’t tell me.” Repressively. Somehow hearing made it worse. Putting things into words made them too real—you couldn’t hope they would just go away after, the unwanted revelations of awful emotions. And that had been the worst—being misjudged, not allowed to explain. Betrayals on both sides left unlanced to fester.

            “We won’t speak of this again.” And of course they hadn’t, though Marcella fumed and raged. She was persona non grata with all of them the last two days of the trip, with Cassie playing holier-than-thou as only she could.
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            She only learned by accident what was of the incident had been unforgivable. Their father had gone looking for Marcella at the swimming pool, at their mother’s insistence (watching her hawklike since she’d reached her teens); and halfway down an inside hallway carpeted with garish pink and purple thick with tracked-in sand, saw nothing of the sunset after all.  

            She never told him what she’d seen—either green flash or green flasher, the afterimage of the man. She'd learned enough that day of secrets and forbidden knowledge to know she couldn't live with that betrayal. After all, it had been nothing more than a mirage.

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