The Signature of All Things

never recovered any of her spare bonnets. Some of her writing paper found its way back to her, but not much of it. She never again saw her medicine kit, but several glass vials for botanical collection showed up on her doorstep in a neat row. One morning she discovered that a shoe was gone—just one shoe!—though she could not imagine what somebody wanted with just one shoe, while, at the same time, a quite useful set of watercolors had been returned. Another day, she recovered the base of her prized microscope, only to see that somebody had now taken back the eyepiece in exchange. It was as if there were a tide ebbing and flowing in and out of her house, depositing and withdrawing the flotsam of her old life. She had no alternative but to accept it, and to marvel, day after day, at what she found and lost, and then found and lost once more.
    Ambrose’s valise, however, was never taken from her again. The very morning it was returned to her doorstep, she placed it on the little table inside her fare , and there it remained—absolutely untouched, as though guarded by an invisible Polynesian Minotaur. Furthermore, not a single one of the drawings of The Boy ever disappeared. She did not know why this valise and its contents were treated with such reverence, when nothing else was safe at Matavai Bay. She would not have dared to ask anyone, Why do you not touch this object, or steal these pictures? But how could she have explained what the drawings were, or what the valise meant to her? All she could do was keep silent, and understand nothing.
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    A lma’s thoughts were on Ambrose at all times. He had left no trace in Tahiti, other than everyone’s residual fondness for him, but she sought signs of him ceaselessly. Everything she did, everything she touched, caused her to wonder: Had he done this also? How had he spent his time here? What had he thought of his tiny house, the curious food, the difficult language, the constant sea, the Hiro contingent? Had he loved Tahiti? Or, like Alma, had he found it too alien and peculiar to love? Had he burned under the sun, as Alma now burned on this black sand beach? Had he missed the cool violets and quiet thrushes of home, as Alma did, even as she admired the lush hibiscus and the loud green parrots? Had he been melancholy and sorrowful, or was he full of joy to have discovered Eden? Had he thought of Alma at all when he was here? Or had he forgotten her rapidly, relieved to be free of her discomfiting desires? Had he forgotten her because he fell in love with The Boy? And as for The Boy, where was he now? He wasn’t really a boy— Alma had to admit this to herself, especially when she studied the drawings again. The figure in them was more of a boy on the brink of manhood. By this time, some two or three years later, he must be a fully grown man. In Alma’s mind, though, he was still The Boy, and she never stopped looking for him.
    But Alma could find no trace or mention of The Boy at Matavai Bay. She looked for him in the face of every man who came through the settlement, and in the faces of all the fishermen who used the beach. When the Reverend Welles told Alma that Ambrose had taught a native Tahitian the secret to tending vanilla orchids ( little boys, little fingers, little sticks ),Alma thought, That must be him. But when she went to the plantation to investigate, it wasn’t The Boy at all: it was a stout older fellow, with a cast over one eye. Alma took several outings to the vanilla plantation, pretending an interest in the proceedings there, but never saw anyone who remotely resembled The Boy. Every few days or so, she would announce that she was going botanizing, but she would actually return to the capital of Papeete, borrowing a pony from the plantation for the long ride in. Once there, she would walk the streets all day and well into the evening, looking at every passing face. The pony followed behind her—a skeletal, tropical version of Soames, her old childhood friend. She looked for The Boy at the docks, outside the brothels, in the hotels full of fine French colonists, in the new Catholic cathedral, in the market. Sometimes she would see a tall, well-built native man with short hair walking ahead of her, and she would run to him and tap him on the shoulder, ready to ask him any question, merely to make him turn around. At every encounter she was certain: This will be him.
    It was never him.
    She knew that soon she would need to expand her search,