Diamond Head (29 page)

I opened the car door and got inside, wanting to crawl into the backseat and melt until there was nothing left. But they were still
watching me, I knew they were. I started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot without any idea of where I would go next.

I drove for two more hours, through small side streets that reminded me of home, and then along the highway, where I was finally able to breathe. I drove until I was almost out of gas and realized I had no money. No money and no place to go but Diamond Head—to the place where I least belonged. I took it slowly, watching the valley floor disappear behind me, finally understanding that this was it. Right before the Leongs’ street, I pulled off to the side of the road and placed my head against the wheel, promising myself that no matter what happened, I would remember this feeling. I would never forget how I hurt at this moment; hollow and broken with a single option left. And if I continued to behave like this, always searching for something better, never satisfied, soon I might have nothing left at all.

This is it
, I said to myself, my shaky voice filling the car.
No more running, no more regrets. This is your life now. Be happy.

The next day, Mrs. Leong was still in a fragile state. Physically, she was fine. The cuts on her ankle had begun to scab. Her blood level was healthy and stable. But mentally, she couldn’t focus for longer than a minute or two, and Mr. Lee had to repeat the terrible events to her several times before she responded with a single sentence.

Sell the house, sell everything.
Then she closed her eyes and went back to sleep. Hong left the room immediately after. It was almost impossible, excruciatingly difficult for me to watch the two of them together. Mrs. Leong would flicker out, close her eyes and retreat, and Hong, so unlike herself, would leave. She would stand up or turn around and exit the room at the first sign of pain. It was the first time she seemed without a solution, without the capacity to make tea and place a hand on Mrs. Leong’s back, to simply sit with her, wordlessly as they so often did.

Over the next few days, Bohai and the others decided on an
auction, which their lawyer said would be the least painful way to get rid of the house. Whoever offered the highest price would be handed the keys straightaway, and we would find a new place to live with Mrs. Leong. But two days before the house was to be released to the public, Kaipo changed his mind. He came to us first and we came to an agreement. And then, knocking on his mother’s door later that evening, he gathered us all in the sitting room and began to speak with a sincerity and sorrow that I never knew he possessed.

“I’m resentful,” he began, his voice dipping between two pitches, neither of them his own, “like everyone else in this family. I’m angry that we’ve been left like this and I don’t know if that anger will ever go away.”

He paused for a moment and looked at his mother, who was rubbing her fingers along the hem of her shirt. Her eyes were unfocused, disconnected. She was wearing the same black T-shirt, the same black pants. I had seen very little of her since they’d found her in the kitchen, but whenever I did, I looked away. She was managing her grief in the most devastating of ways, and it felt disrespectful to witness her so vulnerable, so changed from the woman I had known.

“But if for some reason it does,” Kaipo began again, “I can’t help but feel that selling the house to a stranger would be a mistake. One that might surface after the resentment has subsided. Which I hope, with time, will be the case.”

I looked at Bohai, whose expression remained the same, knowing that he felt very differently. A few nights before, after I returned from my drive, we had sat in the kitchen together, drinking whiskey into the morning hours and speaking more openly than we ever had. If I was going to live this life, if I was going to learn to be with my husband, then we had to get to know each other; something we had overlooked amid the excitement of our wedding.

He had told me about his birth mother, a teenage concubine who died back in China. Bohai had no memory of her. It had always eaten away at him, he said, that he was different, that half of him belonged
to another woman, to a frightened girl. And now, with the discovery of his father’s first two wives, he felt completely isolated.

“I feel like one of them,” he told me. “Like I should have been left in China, just like them. I keep thinking, had I not been born a boy, then what? I would have been just another secret child, another skeleton in my father’s closet.”

I listened. I had tried so hard to listen and care and feel something stir within me for this man. But all that came was pity. It made so much sense. He was the oldest son, but Bohai was not the first son. What a sad life, I thought, what a tortured existence. I searched the deepest folds of my heart, trying to find some sympathy, a sliver of encouragement for the man before me, my husband, but I couldn’t. What could I offer him? What could I say when this sorrow, this burden was my life, too?

And then, without waiting for a response, Bohai took my hand from across the table. He had leaned in as if he had a secret, and he had said something else.

“But it’s not all tragedy, because I have you. I can’t wait to spend the rest of our lives together. We have a chance to be just us, ordinary people, unpolluted by the lies my father told
.
”

He looked so happy when he said it. The exhaustion in his eyes gave way to the hope he held for our future, and it took all my effort, everything I had left, to smile and pretend that I, too, wanted to be ordinary.

“I know why you can’t live here,” Kaipo continued, looking at his mother, his eyelids heavy with grief. “I do. But after many sleepless nights considering the situation, I’ve decided that I can’t leave. This house is my oldest memory. It’s where I took my first steps, where I chased geckos, where I want to return after a long trip. This is where everything important in my life took place.” He took a slow breath. “Mom, I want the house. Not because of its ties to Dad, but for the significance it has in my own life. I want my children to grow up here. I want to pass it through the generations.”

Mrs. Leong looked up at Kaipo with the same expression that made me look away each time; blank eyes, hollow cheeks, each feature more lifeless than the next. She spoke only in whispers now. She was suspicious of everything, worried that a display of emotion might tip the scale, that a single outburst might shatter her fragile bones.

“The money,” she whispered. The sound came from her throat, cracking under each new syllable. “We need the money.”

I looked at Kaipo and knew it took all of his strength to continue. I had never witnessed such a disturbing transformation in a person. Mrs. Leong no longer ate meals with us. She refused them. She ate from the pantry now, forbidding us to shop for fresh food. When Hong had stocked the cupboards earlier in the week, Mrs. Leong had scolded her in Chinese and made her take all the groceries back to the store. The two of them together, they spoke only Chinese now. I was the only one who couldn’t understand them, the only one unnerved by their linked regression, the only person who felt the house shift into a different world, a different era, the Oriental rugs now imperialist and stifling, the red door no longer modern or warm.

Mrs. Leong ate dehydrated peas and strips of preserved cuttlefish straight from the plastic bag, and when those things ran out, she ate cans of cold corn and kidney beans. The rest of us had stopped eating at the table, stopped eating together entirely because it upset her so much. I think I was the only one who didn’t mind. For me it was almost soothing, sitting cross-legged on my bed, eating leftover rice alone from a single bowl.

Last week, Kaipo had found his mother in the kitchen, frying up pounds of pomfret—a strange flat fish that no one had ever seen in the house. It had a stale, assaulting smell that rose through the floorboards. The hot oil burned, and smoke sailed from room to room like a warning. Mrs. Leong sat on the kitchen floor and ate the fish with her hands—I saw it out of the corner of my eye—and when she was finished, she passed out on the greasy tiles, tiny bones and bits of flesh still stuck to her fingers. Every night, she slept on the floor of
whatever room she ended up in, with no pillows or blankets, refusing help of any kind. She cut off chunks of her hair and hid them at the bottom of trash cans; Hong would find them and show Bohai and Kaipo.

Mrs. Leong could still walk and bathe and respond to certain questions. She wasn’t completely gone, not yet. But it was clear to us all that we needed to get her out, that she was rapidly deteriorating within the house that she had built with her husband.

“Mom,” Kaipo said, placing his hand on her knee, “we’re going to take care of you. I’m going to buy the house, for whatever price you think is fair. And with that money, we’re going to find you a new home. Whatever you want, Mom. Whatever makes you happy. Just say the word and it’s yours. Don’t worry about the money. I have plenty saved and so does Bohai. We’re going to take care of you.”

Mrs. Leong stared off into the corner, above Kaipo’s shoulder. She said nothing.

“If it’s okay with you,” Kaipo continued cautiously, “Bohai and Amy will move in with you, to your new house, to help take care of you. Would you like that?”

Mrs. Leong began to hum. A forceful buzz escaped her mouth, the uneven sound pushing through tightly shut lips. She didn’t look at Kaipo; she didn’t look at anything. It was as if she barely knew we were there. I was afraid that she might faint. She hadn’t stopped for air and the sound kept pushing, growing, retreating but never stopping. We looked at one another but no one moved, not even Hong. There was something satisfying about her humming, something decent, as if she were purging herself of the pain. I hoped it was working. I watched her, the sound beginning to penetrate me, to reach into my bones and twist, and I begged God to please,
please
allow this woman some relief.

Bohai and I were given the task of selecting the house in which we would live with Mrs. Leong. It was Bohai who had first offered to
be his mother’s caretaker, and I agreed, feeling closer to her now, as things fell apart, than I had before. It was a new beginning for Bohai, I told myself, and for me as well. We would have our own place, the constant reminders of his father left in the past.

We knew she needed a complete change of scenery—the exact opposite of the house in Diamond Head. We looked at properties on the beach. We even considered moving her to the calm of the North Shore, but in the end we decided it was too far. She needed the strength of her entire family—needed to be close to both of her children, to Hong. So the minute we saw the house in Hawaii Kai, with the open marina and the dock out back, we knew. She could have the peacefulness of the water, the privacy of the dock, the distance from downtown, and the proximity to Kaipo and Hong. It was a beautiful house, simpler than I had imagined but perfect in almost every way. It reminded me of old Hawaii with its moss stone wall and assortment of low bushes and skinny palm trees. The shape of the house, like a horseshoe, gave us privacy at the entrance, a place to breathe as we sorted things out. A cast-iron gate, thin and discreet, guarded the house from the outside world. We bought it immediately with a portion of the money Kaipo had given us for his father’s house, and moved in the following week.

So badly did I want my family back, but of course, we were different now; my father and I, our days together were over. After Mr. Leong died my parents backed away, perhaps unintentionally, but without my in-laws, without the money, they were terribly uncomfortable around Bohai and me, around Hong and Kaipo. They asked about the investigation, about Mr. Leong’s business and state of affairs, or else they asked about nothing. It was as if I were the acquaintance and Mr. Leong their flesh and blood, the shipping business their investment and I their oddball daughter, a girl they had trouble looking straight in the eye. I no longer trusted them; Bohai and I both, we feared that his father’s secret, so closely guarded by Kaipo, would be betrayed. Soon enough, I stopped missing them.
Not Kaneohe—I missed my old life every day—but my parents, I thought of them less and less.

Kaipo was alone in his investigation of Mr. Leong’s murder. He managed to trace phone calls to Germany, dozens of them in the final weeks of his father’s life, but what could that prove? According to the police, it meant close to nothing. Without a threat letter or a confession, without a clear motive, a clear idea of what exactly Mr. Leong was doing abroad, they had very little to go on. Kaipo had yet to find the file. He needed help but he wouldn’t go outside the family, wouldn’t risk exposing his father’s last endeavors, dirtying his family’s name. The investigation went slowly, hitting one dead end after another as Kaipo realized that for the most part, his father did as he pleased. Kaipo had the kitchen staff from the wedding interrogated; he had their backgrounds checked; he searched for ties to science labs, pest exterminators, glass manufacturers, anything that might tie back to the thallium. But they all came back clean, and Kaipo began to realize it was a futile task trying to compile every bite of food and sip of tea his father put into his mouth, trying to trace its distant origins.

With the hospital, there were small victories. Dr. Harris had been fired, his medical license under scrutiny of the state. Mr. Lee was in the process of negotiating a settlement out of court, as neither party wanted to risk public exposure. An agreement had yet to be reached, but it was going well, Mr. Lee told us. With them, we had the upper hand.

Despite asking Bohai on countless occasions, trying to persuade him in a dozen different ways, Kaipo was also alone in his decision to carry on with his father’s shipping endeavors. Mr. Leong’s wives in China had no interest in taking over the business, so it went to Kaipo, who continued his work as if his father had never passed. For two weeks, Bohai agreed to help his brother. He showed Kaipo the company’s paper infrastructure, how shipments were processed and billed, recorded in the books, training the young accountants Kaipo
had hired. When he was finished, Bohai told me something that I wish I’d never known. He told me how quickly money was building in the company bank accounts, how swiftly the business would get back on track—it was simply a matter of years, but Bohai wanted nothing to do with it. He was relieved that his burden was over. Kaipo would be fine, he’d keep the house, his life would continue almost exactly as planned. It seemed likely Bohai would not be needed again. We were free to begin our new life.