This Is Paradise (16 page)

“Three,” she says, taking the pencil from him. She can feel him watching her intently. She can’t remember John-Boy ever receiving this kind of attention from their dad. Keaka went to John-Boy’s baseball games, school events, even teacher’s meetings, but he never had the same patience with his son as he does with his daughter. Sarah almost feels undeserving of his interest, and she wishes he spoke of John-Boy more.

“Good. Now what you get?”

“Four. So
x
equals four?”

“Yes! Das it!” Her dad’s excitement is expansive. Its energy swallows her whole.

“I get it now.” She reaches her arms around his waist and squeezes, and her dad kisses the crown of her head.

“You like I stay watch you?”

“No need, Dad,” she says, though she knows he likes to sit with her.

“You sure?” He makes no move to leave the table. She wants to forgive him for his attention. Like her mother, he tends to stay close these days. But Sarah feels frustrated with him. Her old excitement in him is diminished. The
promise she once felt he possessed is gone. He has put on weight, become roly-poly in the middle, lost much of his hair. His eyes are lined with tiny creases, his once-illuminating grin has been condensed into a tight smile. He seems to crawl through life. She doesn’t need him now as she once did.

“I’m fine,” she says, bowing her head over her homework. Eventually he rises and leaves her in silence, and then she is sorry for dismissing him as she has.

An hour later, as Sarah brushes her teeth before bed, she hears her parents talking in their bedroom. Grace is putting away the folded laundry. Keaka is watching. “John-Boy used to finish his homework before ten p.m.,” Sarah hears her mother say.

“But he neva work as hard as Sarah does. When he no get someting, he no do it. Sarah work t’rough da problems until she get evryting.” Sarah can hear her father’s pride.

“I wish you wouldn’t compare them like that.” Grace’s voice is high-pitched and quavering. She is about to cry. “John-Boy was very good at school.”

“He was. I know,” Keaka says soothingly. The bed springs creak under his weight. “I jus’ mean Sarah stay a hard worker. She really like try, her.”

“Don’t talk about my son like that. He was a hard worker too.”

“I neva say John-Boy not a hard worker. I just wen say dat Sarah …” Keaka trails off. “Stop crying,” he pleads. But Grace can never stop once she’s started.

Sarah closes the bathroom door and stands behind it, listening. “You don’t miss him,” Grace sobs at Keaka. “You didn’t love him like I did. He was the reason you had to stay with me.”

“He neva was no reason fo’ nutting. He was my son. I loved him.” Sarah can picture her dad, his hands upturned in helplessness, his caterpillar face scrunched up in frustration.

“It doesn’t matter. You would have treated her better than me no matter.” Her hand slaps the wall and the flat sound echoes in the hallway.

“I tol’ you neva bring her into dis.” Someone closes the bedroom door so Sarah can’t discern what else is being said, but she can still hear her parents’ muffled voices rising and falling. In the mirror above the sink, Sarah studies her reflection. She is growing out of her childish looks. Her face is narrowing, her cheeks are less full, her chin slightly more pointed. She has the first hint of breasts poking from beneath the thin cotton of her nightshirt, and she can see, on her bare legs, the dark hair that has become embarrassing to her in the past two months.

“Stop!” Keaka yells suddenly. “Stop crying!”

“It would have been different if it was hers.” Grace is screaming hysterically. Someone punches the wall, and the mirror in the bathroom shivers with the vibrations.

The bedroom door slams. Then the front door. Then her father’s truck door. Sarah hears the engine growl
awake. She sits on the closed toilet lid and leans her head against the wall. She focuses on the word “hers.”

It would have been different if it was mine
, Sarah says to herself,
my life that ended
. If John-Boy had lived instead, then perhaps her parents wouldn’t fight as they do now. Perhaps her father would have grieved for Sarah more openly, and Grace would have forgiven him his faults, and John-Boy, who understood their parents in a way Sarah never has, would have comforted them as Sarah never could.

She hears a light tap on the bathroom door. She opens it hesitantly. Her mother is standing outside, eyes red-rimmed but dry.
If only I had been the one hit by the car and not John-Boy
, Sarah thinks. Grace takes Sarah into her arms and holds her.
If only it had been my life and not his
.

When he finally comes to Joon, Keaka has been driving in circles for hours, up the spiraling side streets of St. Louis Heights, and back down to the beach community of Kāhala. He has left Grace at last. Joon knows without him having to tell her. In truth, he has been in the process of leaving Grace for two weeks, since Joon told him she was pregnant. Sometimes Joon wonders if Keaka has actually been leaving Grace for years, since before Joon was pregnant, before John-Boy’s funeral, even before Keaka’s wedding, all those years ago, when he loved Grace enough to marry but not enough to remain faithful to her.

Even after Joon opens the front door, Keaka remains standing on her porch, without moving to come in, as if he is just dropping off a note or a piece of mail, and she has to take his arm and lead him into her ʻohana. He sits down on the edge of the bed, and she sits down beside him. He is shaken, but she can’t understand by what or why. His leaving is not a surprise—not to her, not to him, not even to Grace, who has known about Joon and her baby for a week now.

Keaka doesn’t speak. Joon asks, “So are you done talking things out with Grace?”

He nods. “She get plenny mad tonight. I tink, maybe I leave and we still be friends. Now I know I crazy fo’ tink dat.” He laughs without smiling. “You know, she said someting and I no stop tinking ’bout it.”

Joon reaches out and folds her hand around his. She waits for him. With Keaka, silence is a form of dialogue.

“She wen said, ‘It would have been different if it was hers.’ ” His choice of words is precise, his speech taking on Grace’s cadence.

“I don’t understand,” Joon says. “If what was whose?”

“If it was yoa baby gone died. Our baby. If someting wen happen to ours, like happen to John-Boy. She tink I go treat you bettah. I stay wit’ you. She tink, if da wors’ happen fo’ you and me, I gon care more.”

“She said all that?” Joon crosses her arms, rigid with indignation.

“She said dat, and I tink, maybe she right. I neva gon
leave you, no matta what. But I tink, she not right when she say dese tings ’bout da kids. I love ’em, you know. Our baby I will love, but my Sarah.” Keaka’s voice quivers. “And John-Boy …” He does not continue, but Joon can finish the sentence for him.

“He was your son.”

Keaka nods. “Nutting can replace dat.”

“Not even our baby,” Joon says, and her voice betrays more regret than she wishes. Keaka does not reply.

Joon knows Keaka wants her child. He has told her that he is excited to be a father again, and this time without the weight that Grace’s pregnancies carried so many years ago, when he was tied to her and unable to escape his future. Keaka has said that this time around, with Joon, he feels light, eager, free.

When she first realized she was pregnant, Joon told Keaka he could stay or go. She would make it without him. But he chose to stay. He chose to make a family with her, even if it meant leaving his first family. And Joon knows his desire to be with her is genuine and lasting. She feels his devotion when he presses his hands to her still-flat stomach in wonder, as he kisses her breasts and navel and pubic bone, when he lies beside her and matches his breathing to hers.

Still, even if as a wife Joon comes first, she realizes that her children will always come second. Keaka will not love or care for Joon’s baby less, but the child will never be as primary in Keaka’s life. If Joon has a boy, he will fail to
match the memory of John-Boy. And if she gives birth to a girl, then her daughter will always be in Sarah’s shadow. Joon has accepted this, and while at times she feels despair, she does not feel anger. She has chosen this, and she and her baby will bear it, and Keaka will give them all the love he can.

In January of her senior year, Sarah runs into Gordon Yu at the Kahala Mall. She is in the candy store buying a bag of hurricane popcorn—the kind with seaweed, sesame seeds, and hot Japanese crackers—when she feels a soft tap on her shoulder. She recognizes Gordon immediately. His eyes are still large and brown and a little watery, but he has grown his hair long, to his shoulders, so that the waves transform into soft curls near the end. “I remember you,” he says. “Sarah Paliku.”

She nods. She feels her hands start to shake and heat rise into her cheeks. The friend she’s with giggles.

“What high school you at now?” he asks, casually, like they are old friends.

“Sacred Hearts,” she whispers.

“The girls’ school?”

She nods. He is beautiful to her still. Even behind the skinny jeans and chain belt, the affected stance that juts one hip in front of the other, the pimpled skin. With sudden clarity, she again feels the joy of walking past his house
as he arrived home, the craftiness she felt when, attempting to time her appearance with that of Gordon’s, she would pause to tie her shoe or tell John-Boy and Robert to hurry along. And in that rush of memories she thinks of her brother. He never teased her about Gordon, never mentioned her purposeful stride when Mrs. Yu picked up Gordon on time. John-Boy protected even the secrets no one told him.

“How you?” she asks Gordon. He describes a party he went to the night before and University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, where he hopes to matriculate in the fall. Sarah tries to focus on Gordon, but she is thinking of John-Boy: his half-opened lips when he concentrated on his homework, the rough calluses on his hands from playing baseball, his easy gait when he ran bases. She is hearing the sound of the car’s brakes, and the soft thump of her brother’s body against the bumper. She is remembering how Mrs. Yu ran into the street.

Sarah realizes for the first time that Gordon must have waited at school for his mother for more than an hour that day. Why did he think she was late? What did she tell him when she finally arrived with John-Boy’s blood on her jeans?

“What you doing now?” Gordon asks her. He flips his hair out of his eyes and playfully taps her left hip. She recognizes he is flirting. Her friend watches, smiling knowingly as John-Boy used to, and Sarah remembers what
it felt like to be twelve, deep in the recesses of her first crush, and pining for Gordon with such earnestness she felt as if she were in mourning.

“I’m …” She pauses. What is she doing? Buying popcorn. Talking to her first crush. Remembering her brother.

John-Boy has been dead five years now, and she has marked every anniversary with private ceremonies, quietly lighting candles in her room after her mother has gone to sleep and visiting the cemetery alone, without either Grace’s loud display of sobbing or Keaka’s stony silence. Sarah has wound her solitude into a tight ball of grief, and now Gordon is threatening to unravel it. “I’m thinking of my brother.”

Gordon glances at the ground. “Yeah, I remember him.”

“Your mom was there that day.”

“I know.” He reaches out his hand, as if to comfort her, but Sarah doesn’t take it. Still, she feels compelled to tell him what she has hidden for the past five years.

“I was thinking about you. I wasn’t paying attention to the car because I was thinking about you.”

“I didn’t know that.” Gordon turns nervously toward the counter where buckets of honey chews and red vines beckon. Sarah has assaulted him with this admission, and now she feels sorry for him. He seems so small compared to her, so young and naive. Sarah can taste salt water on her lips, and her cheeks are chilled where the air-conditioning is hitting her damp skin, and she understands that she is crying.

“It was good seeing you, I guess.” Gordon edges toward the candy counter.

Sarah’s friend grabs her hand and pulls her toward the door, but Sarah is rooted to the spot. Gordon changes course and makes a dash for the exit, his gait awkward in the tight jeans, and Sarah again recalls her brother’s legs stretching widely as he ran. He was a beautiful runner.

She doesn’t know how long she sobs next to the bins of sour gummy apples and peaches. The customers and staff move around her until at last she lets her friend lead her to the car.

Sarah is dropped off at her dad and Joon’s apartment, where she spends every other weekend. Keaka is watching football with Jake, his and Joon’s son. “How you?” Keaka asks as she walks through the door. He waves his hand at her without looking away from the television screen. Jake flaps a chubby arm. He’s three and a half and mimics their dad’s every movement.

Sarah goes to her room without speaking. She can hear the television announcer: Steelers have possession of the ball after a stunning interception. Sarah drops her purse on the floor by her bed. She turns when she hears a sound at the door. Her father is there, leaning awkwardly against the doorframe. “You okay, Princess?”

She begins to cry again. She can’t help herself. She hasn’t cried in front of her dad for five years, and now she is afraid of making him angry. She waits for him to yell at her to stop, but instead he pulls her to him and wraps
his arms tightly around her shoulders. “Ah, baby girl,” he says. “Is dis ’cause some boy?”

Sarah shakes her head. She almost wants to laugh, her father is so unaware. But then she cries even harder because her father is so unaware.

“What dis den?”

She takes a deep breath. She wants to know what she’s always suspected: “Would it have been worse for you if it had been me instead of John-Boy?”

“Why you ask dis?” Keaka waits for her to reply, but when she doesn’t he shakes his head. “No, it would have been da same.”

Sarah knows this is the right answer, the one her father should give. The answer, in fact, that she told herself she wanted to hear. But instead of relief, she feels betrayal. She has believed for years that Keaka loved her best—more than John-Boy, more than Jake, even more than Joon. But now … Sarah looks into her father’s face and sees that he is proud of himself. He has finally said what a good father would say, acted as a good father should act.