At the end of another December, in quite a different part of the world, she would come across ephemera from those days on the island over the years which she had pressed into notebooks like flowers into heavy dictionaries—pua—plumeria or frangipani, the deep purple orchids fished out of maitais, tucked behind an ear.
A church with a rusty steeple of corrugated tin.
Champagne corks and Chinese fireworks shot off into the ocean.
The parrot that said only "help" and "don't." "Help me."
A flotilla of fishing boats that left the harbor at sunset to sail up the coast, with all their mast lines strung with colored lights.
The Christmas morning she woke smelling the smoke from the luau pit, the stones and wood they had buried together, left to get hot for the evening's feast. Their Chinese friend who strung seed pearls told her it was turkeys they were smoking, for the feast later that day.
The paper lanterns being hung in trees just before the green parrot came into the garden.
Walking along the beach to the hotel, now abandoned and ruinous, where she had stayed five or six years before and took her coffee out, mornings, to the black rocks of ruined temples fallen into mirror-still tidepools, to write and redefine herself and read a paperback of Robert Browning's poems. The image of an empty hotel (and that one, hers, particularly) was eerie and unsettling—maybe because so contradictory.
—Christie
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