Diamond Head (30 page)

Bohai was hired right away at Punahou, his old school, teaching mathematics in the seventh grade. He stayed up all night creating lesson plans for weeks in advance. He had his briefcase embroidered with his initials and the Punahou hala tree. More than anyone else in the family, Bohai began to create a new life for himself, burying his grief with his father and moving forward happily, eagerly.

For me, it was more difficult. The fact that I had no college degree limited my choices—but even more challenging was the fact that I had never before had a real job. It seemed somehow inappropriate for me to resume cleaning houses for the neighbors in Diamond Head, and I refused to go back to work for my father. So I relied on the only other skill I had, and offered my services to the various dress shops in Waikiki. When all of them said no, which I expected, I thought I might have to travel farther along the island to find work. But then Hong told me of a small shop at the end of a residential block that she had used before. I went the next day, wearing a dress I had made myself, and I asked for a job. There were three women, all of them middle aged and plump from sitting, and after a short assessment of my stitching and a few questions, they hired me on the spot.

I left the shop feeling surprisingly gratified; I was light and calm and strangely pleased with myself. Not that I’d ever dreamed of becoming a seamstress, but it was something that made me valuable to the real world. After weeks of feeling useless, it was a welcome surprise that I was, at the very least, qualified to work an actual job. In some small way, I could make it on my own.

But on my first day of work, that pride was quickly trampled. The way the other women were constantly smiling in my direction and asking me questions and disappearing into the back room two at a time—by the end of the day it was clear to me that they recognized my face from my wedding pictures in the paper. It was obvious that they knew I was the newest Leong, and that they were either still excited by the family name or, more likely, that they had continued to read the papers and they knew how the story ended—that they had hired me out of pity and curiosity. But they were the only shop who had offered me a paycheck, so I put aside my pride, what little of it remained, and focused on my sewing. I really had no other choice, and I continued to remind myself, each morning as I entered the shop, that it wasn’t so bad. That things could be much, much worse, and so I began to occupy my mind with those things. Death, war, starvation, disease, they all helped me get through my day.

Clumsily, then, and with mixed emotions, the three of us began a new life together. I woke up at six each morning to prepare breakfast, and when the dishes were cleared and drying on the rack, Bohai and I would set off for our new, regular jobs by eight.

We left Mrs. Leong alone during the day, encouraging her to spend her time as she pleased. We told her to use the dock or walk to the neighborhood park or to rest all day if she needed to. We assumed that Hong would visit often. We gave her a key. But every evening when we returned home, we found Mrs. Leong alone in the same position, sitting fully upright in a chair or a stool or on the floor, and we knew that she had been there for hours, trapped in the stillness that was polluting her mind. It was as if she couldn’t understand that her surroundings had changed; that she had moved houses, that she lived with us now, that things were different. Mrs. Leong continued to sleep on the floor; she still refused hot meals; she spoke only in whispers. Even Hong could handle only so much; I understood completely.

We exchanged words of encouragement, despite the obvious. Mrs.
Leong was not getting better, not at all. Our house had become a sad place, our four walls a kind of casket as we watched her fade, the slow pull of death always present. She wasn’t dying, not physically, at least. We weren’t witnessing the death of a person, but the death of a spirit that would never, could never return. Mrs. Leong was sixty years old when her husband passed, too old to look to the future and imagine a different kind of life. She’d experienced too much to believe in renewal. And as the thought passed through my mind, I realized that I could say the same thing about myself. There was a punishment for indulgence, I saw it every day. It happened in the mind; there was a breaking point. It seemed to me that Mrs. Leong chose stillness, punishing herself for guilt or extravagance or stupidity. And wasn’t I punishing myself as well? Why did I stay with Bohai? The answer was immediate. I had taken too much. I had been greedy and selfish and there was no way, no way I could see to give it back.

It was me who found her that Saturday in May, wrapped in newspapers on the kitchen floor. I had just come home from a long shift at the dress shop, having stayed late to help with an order of a dozen
mu’u mu’u
. I couldn’t wait to get home. As I opened the door, I heard a rustling sound from the kitchen and went to greet my mother-in-law.

I found her shivering in her undergarments, newspapers wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl, sitting in a mess of corn kernels, grains of uncooked rice, and their torn packaging. She was freezing.

“Tell my husband to turn on the heat,” she whispered to me, picking a grain of rice from her thigh and putting it into her mouth.

“Okay,” I said, carefully offering Mrs. Leong my hand, “I’ll tell him right now. But first let’s get you in a hot bath. It will make you feel much better.”

She slapped my hand away and I took a long, slow breath.

“No!” She wailed. “Just tell Frank—he’ll know what to do. This rice tastes terrible.” She spat it onto the floor.

I steadied myself against the counter and gathered all my strength
so I wouldn’t cry. I forced the rising resentment back down into my chest but still, tears welled; a vengeful warmth pressed against the backs of my eyes. I looked at Mrs. Leong, waiting on my kitchen floor for her husband to save her, still waiting. A husband who had lied and deceived her, who had escaped to death without any concern for the time she had remaining. I tried not to think of him now, knowing that it would only make things worse, that it would only stir up anger and hostility. But I couldn’t help but wonder how it felt; to love so tenaciously that the world could crack and fall around you, that everything you believed could be a lie, and yet you continue to wait. You continue to wait, full of hope, for someone who would never arrive.

I tried two more times to get Mrs. Leong off the floor, and each time she refused. So I kneeled and I sat with her, in the mess of damp food, telling her that Frank was on his way. That he’d be here soon to turn up the heat. I didn’t know what else to do.

I pretended to shiver with her, wrapping a newspaper around my shoulders despite the fact that it was eighty degrees. I excused myself to the bathroom and called Bohai at Punahou. My voice cracked as I told him to get home quickly and to call his brother. There was something terribly wrong with his mother.

When Bohai arrived at home that evening, Kaipo and Hong five minutes behind him, his mother could not remember either of their names. She called Kaipo Frank, and scolded him for leaving the house so cold. When Dr. Lum arrived later that night, bringing a specialist with him, she could not tell them what year it was. She could not tell them what she did that day or any other day that week. She said she had gone fishing with Frank, that they had caught a golden mahimahi. The specialist suggested a small clinic on the North Shore, in Waialua, where they specialized in senile dementia. It was an intimate home, he told us. She would receive constant care and be ensured privacy from the press.

Waialua. My heart slowed when he said it, everything did. Of course, it had to be Waialua. There were dozens of quiet towns that lined the North Shore but only one where Henry and I had met. Only one where I had memories buried in the sand, tears floating in the ocean. So this was how I’d return, I thought to myself, almost laughing from the revulsion that filled me. What destiny. What a piece of shit it was.

Bohai refused at first and I thought we might be okay. He didn’t want to send his mother away. He said that he would quit his job and look after her himself. But after the purchase of the new house, Bohai and I could not survive off my wages alone, and he refused to live off Kaipo’s earnings. He looked to Hong then; he asked her for help.

“I know it’s not your burden, but my mother trusts you more than anyone, she loves you. You could live here, we have plenty of space. You would have everything you needed, anything at all.”

Hong’s gaze met the ground, her face tortured. Her eyes, already so narrow, strained with distress as we looked to her, waiting for her verdict.

“She is sick,” Hong said finally, holding her stare below her, her arms shaking gently. Her voice was hoarse, her accent overpowering. “I am a not doctor. I do not know how to take care for her. Soup, tea . . .” She paused. “It cannot fix this.”

She barely finished her sentence before pushing forward in her chair, stumbling on her tangled feet, her body hunched forward as she made her way from the room, wiping the moisture that ran down her face. The rest of us, we looked at each other and knew what had to be done, because if Hong had lost her faith, then how ludicrous it was to think that we could keep ours.

The next Saturday, we packed two cars and drove Mrs. Leong to Waialua.

It was all the same.

The dirt was still red, the roads still narrow, the old sugar mill still
there among the overgrown grass, the rusty silo, the Waianae Mountains wrapped in mist. The sight of these things hurt, literally hurt like a lit cigarette being pressed into my skin, over and over again. I felt treacherous the entire time, but against whom I didn’t know. Henry didn’t know I was there. Bohai didn’t know what the place meant. And me, I was holding all the secrets, gorging on these sights like an addict. I sat in the front seat with Bohai, sunglasses concealing my stare, fearful the entire ride that I was leaking, that my glasses could not contain all that I felt.

We parked in front of a yellow house with a wooden porch that wrapped around the front. Inside we were greeted by a Filipino woman who offered us cans of guava juice, showing us down the hallway to the last door on the right. The walls held pictures of tranquil things: sunrises and hills with flowers and a wicker basket with a litter of golden puppies.

We settled Mrs. Leong into her new room, the four of us crowded around her single bed, and did not discuss how tiny it was. We did not talk about how the window did not open. We did not speak of how immensely depressing, how horribly sad it was in this sterile shoebox, how appalling it was that the four of us were so marred by the year that we couldn’t come to a different solution, that we could not find a better fate for the matriarch of our illustrious house.

With the decision to send Mrs. Leong away, faced with an enormous bill that would recur each month, we reached an agreement in the lawsuit with the hospital. Bohai and Kaipo, refusing any profit from the death of their father, asked the hospital to pay their mother’s medical bills. Anything she needed, any expense related to her health or well-being would be provided for as long as she needed it, no stipulations. A life taken, a life restored, that was the way we put it to each other, knowing full well we could have asked for something else. Could have used the money to care for her ourselves, could have found a way to keep her closer. But not one of us suggested it, not even a mention, not Bohai, not Kaipo, not Hong.

It was then, as I left the room, apologizing to the others, that I promised myself—I swore to myself on absolutely everything I valued, threatened myself with a fate worse than this reality—that I would visit this woman once a month, my oath good until the day she passed. I shut the door quietly behind me and found myself squatting against the wall in the narrow hallway, head lowered into my hands, elbows balanced on shaky knees. Breathing.

I hated that even in death, Mr. Leong had this kind of power. I hated that I had fallen under his spell—that we all had, and now we were left to suffer, to contemplate what the hell we had done to deserve this.

How does it
feel
, I thought to myself, to love this strongly when it’s so devastatingly wrong? Was this fate, or was it a punishment for eluding it? Something that people hoped was fate as they neared the end of their lives; as they tried to come to terms with all the mistakes they had made and all the clues they had missed but now understood.

This was not fate, I told myself; it was the furthest thing from it. This pain was intimate, deeply, sickeningly personal, and as I closed my eyes and lowered myself to the ground, I knew that it had all been created. The tangles from one generation to the next, the mistakes passed from mother to daughter, the lies from father to son—it wasn’t fate, who could call that fate? These things were within our control, outcomes not linked to our flesh, and all of us, every single one of us, had played a hand in this destiny.

November 1964

H
ONOLULU
, H
AWAII

Theresa places her hands on her father’s casket; she closes her eyes, filled with intention, and does not know how to begin. I’m sorry. That’s the first thing that comes to her, the words she’s thought so often, almost every time she thinks of her father. But the apology is loaded; it’s more complicated than that. She’s sorry she got pregnant, of course she is. She’s sorry she disappointed him. She’s sorry about her mother’s selfishness, sorry about the letter; she still feels deeply, maddeningly responsible. But she’s also sorry that her father did not rise to the occasion. She’s sorry that he could not defend himself, couldn’t fight harder against his own insecurities so that he might live past this.

No, Theresa thinks, quieting herself. She will not say sorry; that will not be the first thing her father hears from her.

I love you, she thinks, but even that sounds strange.
Love
was not a word she and her father used often, not because they didn’t love each other but because they shared so few words between them.
Love
felt too serious, too demanding for every day, for informal greetings. But now Theresa wishes she had said it more. She feels ashamed for so many reasons, but there’s one that plagues her more than the rest. She never knew her father, not in any truthful way. All these things she’s learned since his death, all these heartbreaking, noble details about his life, while he was her father, while he was alive, Theresa didn’t know a single one. She never thought to ask.

There’s a barrier between them, something keeping Theresa
quiet. Every time she considers speaking, she thinks of her mother. She thinks of how, without her mother, there is very little she can say, very little that will matter.

Without her mother, Theresa’s burden is enormous. She feels the need to comfort her father, to say the things that her mother should be saying but is not, because she’s not there. Because she is a coward, Theresa thinks, because she’s still on the cemetery road, still feeling sorry for herself, still rewriting history to favor her delusions.

Without her mother, Theresa must find a way to say it herself.

“She told me everything,” she begins suddenly, leaning into her father, each word like a magnet drawing her closer. “Since you left, she’s been telling me everything she knows about you. About your real mom. About NaiNai.”

“She knows a lot about you, Maku. I know that doesn’t mean much now, but she does. She remembers everything; she remembers more about you and your time together than she does about anyone else. And that’s the truth. You were her life—you and me.”

“I don’t understand what happened twenty years ago, I don’t and I probably never will. But in the last six months she changed, Maku.
She
changed—not what she felt for you. She’s still not the same; she’s still acting like an idiot and I can only assume that she’s confused and . . . she misses you.”

Theresa pauses. She hears what she must say next and loses her momentum; she whispers now.

“Do you want to know what gets me the most? It’s not Mom. It’s not the letter. It’s not the way you went. What kills me the most, what I can’t stop thinking about, is how well I know you, how much I understand you now, now that you’re gone. All these things Mom’s told me, all your bravery, all the odds you weren’t meant to beat—you’re
remarkable
, Maku. You’re the strongest person I’ve ever known, and I didn’t know it until now, until this week. We’ve gone all this time, all my life never really understanding how much you took
care of us, how much your strength held the three of us together. You chose to leave; I get that now and I don’t blame you. It was us who pushed you away, Mom and I who were unworthy of you. You deserved to make this choice, I sincerely believe that, and I’ll never think less of you for it.”

Theresa inhales, folding her lips inward, feeling her father’s presence beside her, wishing he could respond, knowing that he never will.

“But I wish you hadn’t. For the rest of my life, Maku, I’ll always wish you had stayed.”

Theresa places her forehead against his casket, her eyes still closed, her words blowing warm air against the wood. There are so many things she’d like to say, a mountain of fears she’d like to share with her father. She wants him to know how panicked she feels, how terrified she is about being both a wife and a mother. She wants to tell him how, with every minute, with every step, she feels his absence. She feels how easily she could topple, and fears that without his steady hand, there will be no one left to help her find her feet, to help her stand. She has never learned to help herself and that, Theresa realizes, is her greatest fear.

The sun beats against the back of her exposed neck. She considers staying there, never opening her eyes, letting them carry her away. She thinks of her father within the casket; she remembers him on his final day, drained of emotion, withered beneath his hospital gown and then, finally, Theresa finds her point. She sees him with his suitcase, walking out the front door, and it comes to her; the only thing that matters, the one thing that was never said.

“She loved you,” she says decisively, because she means it. “She loved you, Maku. I really believe she did.”

Theresa takes a deep breath, drawing the air slowly to her lungs. She raises her head and opens her eyes.

Her mother stands before her, on the opposite side of the coffin.
Her eyes squint beneath the afternoon sun. They can barely contain their moisture, which collects along the bottoms, reflecting the light. Theresa looks at her mother and feels the first relief of the day; it swells within her like a balloon, a lightness she has almost forgotten. She presses her hand to the casket and breathes again; she says goodbye to her father; she leaves her parents their final moment.