This Is Paradise (17 page)

“What if it had been Jake?” Sarah asks, but she doesn’t want an answer. Keaka’s expression crumbles. Before he can speak, she interrupts him. “Or Mom? Or Joon?” Sarcasm thickens her voice. “It would have been worse for you if it was Joon.”

“Why you say dat?” Keaka’s tone is a warning. His face reddens, and she wonders if her dad will hit something—the wall, a mirror, the door.

But she doesn’t care what he might do or how he might feel. “You would have stayed if it was Joon. You wouldn’t have left us.”

Keaka slams his hand against the door frame and turns his back to her. “It no be different if it was Joon. I love you all the same.”

“Yea, that’s the problem.” Sarah’s voice boils with anger. “How dare you love me the same as her.”

Six months later Sarah leaves for college on the mainland. Her two oversized suitcases are filled with tank tops and jeans and heels that Keaka thinks are provocatively high but of which Grace has approved. Keaka joins his ex-wife at the airport to see their daughter off. He is reminded that this is the only child they will send to college together. Joon does not come to the airport, nor does Jake. Grace still cannot bear to see the boy, though she buys him a gift every year on his birthday.

Sarah is dry-eyed, excited. She is already thinking of her dorm and the roommates with whom she e-mails on a daily basis and will meet in six hours. She is dressed in tight jeans and two layered tank tops, a style Sarah says everyone in California is wearing. Grace cries the entire time: from the dimly lit parking garage where Keaka meets them to the ticket counter where Sarah checks her baggage to the security line, in which Grace insists on waiting with Sarah. Keaka is silent, watching his daughter.
She has her mother’s leanness and taut muscle structure, Grace’s flat face and tall, slender nose. Keaka sees flashes of himself, though, in Sarah’s broad smile and the long eyelashes she has coated with mascara. When Sarah disappears into the terminal, Grace cries even harder, and Keaka reaches out to her. Grace lets him hold her, and he lets her cry. After the years of disappointment he has caused her, he does give her this. Holding her, witnessing her sadness, is his apology.

They walk back to their cars together, and in the parking lot, they kiss each other gently on the cheek. Neither of them is much in the mood for talking. Keaka wants to get home to Joon and Jake, to forget that he already misses Sarah, to forget what it feels like to lose a child—whether to the mainland or to forever.

Back at home, Keaka opens a bottle of beer and wanders into Sarah’s room. In her closet, he has kept four boxes from his days as Grace’s husband. He thinks of those years like that—his days as someone else’s husband.

He opens the smallest of them—he remembers, without hesitation, which one contains what he wants—and digs through the stacks of insurance documents and tax statements, copies of divorce proceedings from his lawyer, a child-sized baseball mitt whose leather has stiffened after years of sitting unused in the box, until he feels the rough curves of an ornate gold picture frame. Now, when he looks at the image, the one of him wearing a plumeria lei, he thinks not of his unhappy marriage, of his days as
Grace’s husband, but of the child she was carrying when she took the photograph.

Keaka remembers when Grace hung that photograph in their sunroom. She was two days overdue and stubborn as always. When he didn’t hang it at her urging, she wrestled the step stool out from the broom closet and nailed the picture to the wall herself.

He has to admit he likes the photo. He likes the faraway expression on his face. He likes that, for many years, the image pissed off his mother-in-law, who thought it shameful to have a picture of him “half naked like a native” hanging where everyone could see it. When they had family gatherings, he always made a point of showing off the photo. Only one aspect of the image bothers him: it makes him long for something he can’t name.

He remembers the day Grace took the picture of him. He had wanted to go fishing with his friends, but after being out all night with Joon, it hadn’t seemed right. He was feeling so bad about Joon that when Grace asked him to run to the grocery store for more raspberry jam, he bought a lei, too, from the case of flowers at the front of Safeway. Back home, Grace was sitting in the living room watching television.

He came up behind her to drape the lei over her shoulders. “Beautiful flowers for my beautiful flower,” he said. She looked up at him, surprised and smiling. “I sorry I wen stay out late with da boys las’ night.” He sat down on the couch next to her and took her hands in his. “We start
talking story and haf some beers, and ho, you know how is wit’ dem. But today, I no go wit’ dem. Today, I take you out. We go beach or whateva you like.”

“Oh, you.” She kissed him on the cheek. She forgave him easily in those days.

He made a big deal of the little trip, packing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bottles of water, the granola bars in green foil that she liked so much. He even took a blanket along, one of the old ones they used to keep in his car back in the days when that was the only place they could have sex, before she was pregnant, before they lived together. He didn’t think Grace suspected anything about Joon, at least not then. It was all still new then.

Keaka was almost enjoying himself when Grace pulled out the camera. She always wanted him to “look natural,” like smiling at a camera wasn’t natural. He wanted to tell her, “People, dey smile at cameras. Das what dey do.” But he kept his mouth shut.

She snapped a couple of photos and then stopped to take a bite of the sandwich he had made. He couldn’t watch her eat it now that the jelly was gristled with sand. He turned his head and looked out over the water, closing his eyes slightly to see beyond the glare, and in the distance he could make out a Boston whaler bumping over the crests of the waves. He heard the camera click but kept looking over the water, wondering what else was out there he couldn’t see.

“Dat ting,” Harrison said, reaching to touch the saddle blanket slung over Pilipo’s arm. The cloth was a simple pattern, dark blue waves undulating through a turquoise sea, rough in the way wool can be. Harrison closed his eyes as he ran his fingers along its tight weave. “I wen give dat to yoa mudda when I aks her fo’ marry me. She da best horsewoman I know. If yoa sista eva ride like da momma, ho. I gon hope.”

Before Pili could answer him, Harrison began coughing again, hacking up blood and sputum. He deposited the pink mass as neatly as possible into a paper towel, then dropped it into the wastebasket beside his bed. Though Harrison was careful, Pili still had to take a bit of clean paper and wipe his chin. Harrison frowned impatiently, as if Pili were making a fuss over nothing, but Pili didn’t want to stare at the blood even if his father wasn’t bothered by it.

“Yoa momma, neva shy, her. Not like dem uddeh girls. She wen enta da Kona Stampede an’ she win roping two years in a row. Ho, I proud den. Plenny men in love wit’ her. Plenny like make her dere wife. But only one akamai. Only one say, I neva give you no ring. I promise fo’ give you plenny horses, but. An’ dat one me. Akamai yoa papa, yeah?”

“Yes, Dad,” Pili said. “You were one smart man.”

Harrison closed his eyes then. Pili waited for his father to say something more, but eventually the old man’s wheezing became long and even, and Pili realized he had fallen asleep. Pili wondered what his father dreamt of these days, if his sleeping hours were as haunted by Mahea, Pili’s mother, as his waking hours were, or if he dreamed of the girlfriends he had had after Mahea died. He had taken widowhood hard, but he had handled it in his own way.

Pili stood and adjusted the blankets, pulling them around his father’s neck. Maile claimed their father didn’t like to sleep with sheets touching his face, but really he didn’t like the way she tucked them so tightly beneath his shoulders. Harrison had told Pili that. Actually, Harrison had said, “What, she like strangle me? I no ma-ke fast enough awready?”

Pili left his father’s study and wandered to the kitchen looking for Maile. She didn’t hear him at first—her back was to the kitchen door—but when he coughed to announce his presence, she turned. “Takuan?” she said, holding out a plastic container. They had been her favorite as
a teen, after their mom died and later, when each of Harrison’s girlfriends left him. When she divorced five years ago, Maile moved back home to be with their dad and took to eating them again in fevered spurts. Entire plastic tubs of the pickled vegetables could disappear in a single afternoon. Pili gingerly fished out one of the radishes, its exterior dyed neon yellow and the interior white as a cloud.

“How Dad?” Maile asked.

Pili knew she didn’t ask because she was wondering but to fill the silence between them. She, more than anyone, understood their father’s condition. She had cared for him for the past year—from the moment of his diagnosis through the radiation and chemo and through this, the end. Only in the last six weeks, when he couldn’t be left alone at night, did they hire a hospice nurse for the evenings; Maile still dominated Harrison’s care during the day.

“Dad was spry. He was talking to me about Mom,” Pili said.

“He wheezing?”

“Not as much as last night.”

“Good sign, yeah?” Maile didn’t wait for Pili to answer, afraid perhaps he would disagree with her. She plucked another radish from the near-empty container and rose slowly from the chair, making her way to the wall of windows overlooking the summer pasture. The herd had been moved a couple miles away, where a deep
ravine provided them some protection from the winter winds, and the field looked flat and empty without their presence.

Maile pressed her hand to the windowpane, and Pili came to stand behind her. Although she never spoke of it, he could feel the barely suppressed panic that had engulfed her since their father’s diagnosis. She leaned into the cool glass as if it could steady her. Pili rested a hand on her shoulder. She was only four years older than him, but she had always treated him as a child, even through his twenties. Now he was thirty-one, an equal to her, and he hoped for once she would confide in him, that they might speak of what was to come and how they could help each other. But she was silent, and after a moment she removed her palm from the pane and shook his hand from her shoulder. “Albert is hea,” she said. “Can see da dust from his car.”

Outside a cloud of red rose up from the dirt road, revealing a blue Civic. Pili sighed. He would receive no confidences now. Maile walked across the kitchen to retrieve a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels from beneath the sink. She wiped her handprint from the glass, scrubbing until the paper shredded, and then returned the cleaning supplies to the cupboard. “Like curry tonight?”

“We had beef last night,” Pili said. “I’d prefer your vegetable lasagna.”

“Ah, selfish, you. I wen defrost beef dis morning. Albert,
he like my curry.” Maile reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a paper-wrapped package of beef. She dropped it on the cutting board, the meat’s center still frozen enough for it to make a sharp clapping sound. She cubed the beef quickly, without wasting a single flick of the wrist, and the knife slid easily across the grain of the meat. Pili knew she had timed the defrosting perfectly, waiting until it was no longer frozen hard but still firm enough to cube with precision.

“Since when does someone cook for their father’s nurse every night?”

“Since we lucky get such a good nurse.”

“I hope you aren’t trying to impress him.”

Maile glared at Pili over the cutting board. He felt a small thrill of triumph, but when she looked back down, her hands trembled and he felt cruel for teasing her.

“Aloha kākou,” Albert called to them from the front hall.

“In da kitchen.” Maile washed her hands in the sink.

“I brought you folks some ʻopihi.” Albert breezed into the room, kissing Maile on the cheek and shaking Pili’s hand before unpacking his duffel on the table. “My auntie picked ’em.”

“Where?”

“You know I no can tell you.” He winked at Maile. ʻOpihi harvesting was forbidden since the colonies had been overfished, but certain families still knew where to find the tasty limpets.

Maile laughed, her voice trilling at the top note, and for the thousandth time in the week since Pili had returned home, he wondered if his sister was in love with Albert. She often flirted with him, but she did so gently, as one might a favorite friend or a surrogate sibling, a brother who was actually around when she needed him.

Albert breathed deeply. “Smells ʻono in here.” He patted Maile gently on the arm, then picked up his duffel and left for the study. “Aloha, Uncle.” Albert’s voice echoed through the house, and Pili heard his father grunt sleepily in response. A few minutes later the toilet flushed, which meant Albert had emptied Harrison’s catheter. Next Albert would sponge Harrison’s chest and underarms, then rub lotion into his hands and feet. Albert had a set routine, an order for his duties, and Pili had memorized it. He could imagine Albert moving through each task, his body curving around the hospital bed and chair like water curves around rocks.

In the kitchen, Maile rinsed rice in a colander. She ran her fingers through the translucent kernels, feeling for rotten grains and the occasional rock shard, and when she was satisfied the rice was clean, she poured it into the cooker and added water. She moved without thinking, without grace or artistry, and watching her, Pili was suddenly gripped by disappointment. He wished his sister were extravagant in her movements and emotions, in her treatment of him and their father. Instead, the most passion
she could muster was for her pickled radishes and a smudged windowpane.

Pili left the kitchen to hover in the doorway of his father’s study. Albert had wrapped a hot cloth around Harrison’s face. Now he lifted it away and slathered shaving cream on Harrison’s skin. Harrison pressed his lips together in a tight smile, and Albert began to shave his face, starting with the left sideburn and working his way down to the chin.