Chapter 25: Koa talks with Kent; considers going topside
...and wonders how she could ever fit in
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WILD GIRL
Chapter 25: KOA
“My mother’s name was Mary Ilima Anderson, and she was from a place called Pahoa.” Koa kept her gaze on the hunter’s face as she spoke her mother’s name.
His eyes flared wider, just slightly, but enough to show recognition.
She waited for him to speak.
Instead, Kent got up to put more wood on the fire from the pile they’d collected. Smoke billowed, still smelling of roast pork, but now with a tang of the green leaves he’d added.
There was no unpleasant reek of burning hair from the fire; Koa had taken the boar’s hide and staked it out, some distance away, for the ants to clean. “I can use it,” she’d told him. It would make a warm rug in the shack if she cured it.
Darkness had fallen quickly as it did in the Valley, once the sun dropped behind its towering, steep walls. Mosquitoes emerged from the woods in buzzing hordes.
Koa moved to sit on a log closer to the smoke, which rose in a thick column, engulfing the meat on the rack they’d built over the low-burning flames.
Kent fiddled with the fire, adding more green material, stirring things around. “You said you only recently found out your mother’s name. How is that?”
“Mama never told me her name. She insisted I just call her ‘Mama.’ Said that what she’d been called before she came to the Valley wasn’t important. She told me she named me Koa so I’d be strong.” She slapped a mosquito that had landed on her ankle; she was glad of Kent’s long sleeved shirt and the thin camp towel wrapped around her waist and thighs; it covered most of her exposed legs. “Mama never wanted to talk about the past. She punished me when I asked.”
Something in her voice brought his head up. His dark eyes seemed to pierce her from across the flickering fire. “How did she punish you?”
Koa swallowed; she didn’t want to answer. “Why do you care?”
“I don’t know.” Kent poked the fire, added a handful of green leaves. “I honestly don’t know. I do care, though.”
Koa believed him.
She hid behind her hair as she spoke. “Mama locked me in the cold room under our house. Usually it was a long time. Days. Other times, she beat me. Sometimes it was both.”
“That’s not the way to treat a child,” Kent said. “That’s illegal. Wrong.”
“I know. Ella told me. Mama said it was to make me stronger. To teach me so I wouldn’t forget.”
“No one knew you were back in here in the Valley, when you were growing up?”
“Everyone knew, I think. But it wasn’t their business.”
Kent snorted. The angry sound made the dogs sit up and pay attention. “Someone should have reported it.”
“But that’s what we were hiding from.”
A long moment passed; Kent set down the stick he’d been using to stir the fire. “I know a little about your mother. She was reported missing by a sister in Pahoa. After seven years, she was declared legally dead, which is what is done in cases where a person disappears. Her sister, your aunt, inherited a coffee plantation they jointly owned.”
“Really? I have an aunt?” Koa sat up straight, clasping her hands together. “I have family? I was so hoping...”
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