The Way Home

I became a novelist when I thought I was dying. I typed Death Game into my computer with eyes gritty and filmed from chemotherapy infusions; created scenes in the fog of four cancer and reconstruction surgeries. Scenes crept and chilled and chuckled in the marrow of my bones, as poisons fought the battle with cancer there—destroying damaged cells as well as those essential to my survival.

As things progressed, the reality of my disease set in and fear because a wall, high and hard and stone. I wrote Death Game to tear it down. Even the name was perfect; I was in a death game. Winner take all.

The first version was so bad that I wanted to throw it away, but it had cost me too much. Besides, the characters were part of my soul. The boy my heroine was trying to save was the child I wanted so badly. My heroine kept trying to find him, just as I kept trying to continue the adoption I had begun pre-cancer.

A new novel began to emerge when I started to recover. It was more hopeful—I allowed the bad guys to die. The good guys had another chance. My doctors told me I would have another chance. The cancer—for now, at least—was gone. There was always the chance it would come back, but the statistics weren’t that bad. I had a 90 percent chance of survival. I’m a risk-taker anyway. With those odds I would bet every dollar I have in Vegas.

And then entered, to the sound of trumpets—my adopted daughter from Guatemala. The exigencies of having to care for a child shocked me. Still in recovery, I shopped for formula bald, went to the park with her and couldn’t lift her into the swing.

Persist. My book was full of corpses, but I was alive. Groping onward, I left my home in San Francisco and moved with my child and husband to Hawaii. Not Honolulu, but off the map. As far as I could go, to the windward side of the northernmost Hawaiian island.

In an broken-down pole house hanging over a jungled ravine, my daughter was rock happy. She had a pet rooster and she loved the fact that she was never cold. But some nights I would sob with exasperation. I was a city girl, born and bred. My husband could not come with me—not for a long time, and were things in the jungle—feral pigs, rats, and centipedes.

The rats were the worst. They would climb up my mango trees, nibbling fruit on the way. Drop down on the roof and climb through the broken screens. When I ripped up the carpet, cockroaches scurried and the floors were black with ten kinds of mold I did nothing but try to make my house safe for the longest time. At nights the surf would keep me awake, and when I tried to surf, I broke my toe.

I got a beginner’s board, a soft top, and finally tottered upright. That moment I will not forget. In exile to my old life, I had ended up where I wanted to be. I was living in a place where the birds spoke in long, meaningful phrases, where clumps of tangled orchids hung from my trees.

I had proved what I had always suspected. As Paul Theroux said: "Even the crookedest journey is the way home."