This Is Paradise (4 page)

The humid air carries the sound of their voices to us. “Baby,” he says. “Watch yourself.”

But she’s not listening. She just keeps repeating, “This is it. This is paradise.”

They descend the stairs of the veranda and cross the patio. Her body pitches forward as she walks as if she’s in a state of perpetual freefall.

As we drive home, we think of nothing but her words.

“Like go home now?” Cora asks us. We are standing outside the Lava Lounge, the music still ringing in our ears and the trade winds cooling our damp skin. It’s nearly two in the morning.

“Can surf early tomorrow,” Lani says. “Mean da swell, yeah.” Australia’s eastern coast has seen record storm activity in the past week, and the newscasters claim that the weather system is finally headed north. We’re giddy with the promise of six-foot faces on the south shore.

“Let’s check the water before we head home,” Mel suggests.

We leave behind the club and Kūhiō Avenue, with its explosion of car horns and police sirens, men hawking coupons for an indoor shooting range—half off for women!—and prostitutes whispering “Aloha” in lilting voices. When we reach the beach, the night is suddenly quiet, and we breathe deeply of the salt air. In the distance, the waves at Pops are gilded by moonlight, and we watch them rise and lumber along, slow and unambitious. By the morning we want them stacking up clean and high.

We pause outside the Banyan Hotel, the warm light from the lobby casting our shadows across the water’s edge. The tide sucks at the sand beneath our toes like a vacuum. We look into the hotel, and we can almost understand why here, in Waikīkī, the world appears perfect. The hotel lobbies are brimming with flower arrangements
and sticky with the scent of ginger. The island air is warm and heavy as a blanket. And the people are beautiful. Tan and healthy, with muscles carved from koa wood and cheeks the color of strawberry guava. These people—our people—look fresh as cut fruit, ready to be caressed, to be admired. These are people to be trusted. This is not New York or Los Angeles. No, Hawaiʻi is heaven. A dream.

Not far from us, we hear someone moan, and we giggle. A girl says, “No,” and we take a step in the direction of the voice. But her husky voice is muffled, and in the next moment we think we hear an excited “Oh.” We stop. We see this all the time. Tourist couples think the beach is some private fantasy island. Like no one can see them out there, when they’re about as hidden from view as mating monk seals. How many times have we glimpsed naked ass, white as moonlight, pumping away for all it’s worth?

We think of all the tourist women who have come here and taken a man to bed with them—or the men who have taken women. Are they proud of themselves, these tourists? Do they feel they’ve acquired the most exotic souvenir, or that they are now true islanders?

Our mood gets heavy fast. We tell each other to loosen up. Tomorrow the surf will be high and we’ll wash away all these questions in the water. We start to walk back to the street. We pause when we hear splashing nearby and a small, thrilled shriek, but when we look down the beach all we see are shadows staining the sand.

For the first time since we were college kids, we dream of the rolling ocean. Not of boardrooms or courtrooms, classrooms or meeting rooms, but of waves, of
room
, as much as we can bear, and the space of the sea. We dream we are falling deep into the ocean. At first the water is warm, comforting even, but suddenly we are scared. We can’t find our way up or out. We need air, and none exists beneath the weight of all this water. We hear a woman screaming for help, and we’re not sure if the voice is ours or someone else’s.

When we awake, our quilts are kicked to the foot of our beds. Kiana has balled her sheet in her hand. Esther’s pillowcase is clammy with sweat. Jason takes Paula in his arms, presses her tear-dampened face to his shoulder, and tells her that everything will be okay.

But we don’t think everything is okay. Something is amiss, muddled. Years have passed since we listened to our dreams, since we were youthful enough to trust them. Now we take the time to hear ourselves. In the quiet of our bedrooms, we finally fall back asleep, but we remain just below the surface of waking, afraid to again sink completely into sleep.

We’re on the early shift again, so we arrive at five in the morning. We begin by dusting the surfaces in the lobby,
vacuuming up the sand guests have tracked in, sweeping the patio—which the busboys for the Banyan Bar will later sweep again—and polishing all the metal fixtures and lampshades. The front desk signs the delivery slip for the arrangement of birds of paradise and centers the vase on the round wooden table in the middle of the lobby. Always birds of paradise, their pointed beaks threatening to stab the first woman who tries to dust the table. Today the stems are unusually long, and the flower heads sink wearily.

As soon as we finish with the common areas, we are supposed to load our room carts and ride the elevator to our assigned floors. But first we always slip away to glimpse the ocean in the first rays of sunlight. The sky is still dark in the west, but the horizon near Diamond Head is blooming with a pale yellow light. We cross the veranda, drawn by this soft glow, and descend to the patio. Even though we are facing east, toward mainland America, we pretend that in the distance, beyond the white haze that hangs above the ocean, lie our home islands. We don’t like to think of ourselves as homesick, but sometimes we feel an ache for their still, quiet air.

We kneel to roll a few grains of sand between our fingers. Here, the sand is soft and fine, imported from beaches on Maui and Kauaʻi. This sand feels fake to us, unlike the coarser sand of our islands, the sand that, like us, is whole and hardened. We stand and glance up again at the horizon, admire the white-yellow of the sky, and this is when we see her.

She is lying on her side, her right arm tucked beneath her ear, her back turned to us. People sleep out on this beach all the time: drifters, druggies, drunks, runaways, lovers, and tourists too lost or high to care if they make it back to their hotels. We’re not sure if we should disturb her, but something in the absolute stillness of her body makes us move toward her. Up close, we see that her hair is stringy and wet, and her dress hem has slid halfway up her left butt cheek. Stassi Nifon tugs on the hem to cover her nakedness, but we are still embarrassed for the girl.

We lean over her and place our hands on the wet cotton of her dress. We shake her gently. “Wake up,” we tell her. “It’s morning.” She doesn’t stir. She is heavy in our hands. We command her to get up, to move, but she doesn’t listen. When we touch her bare arm, her skin is cold. We jump away from her, startled. Her skin is too cold.

A couple of us run to tell management. Those who hesitated to leave the patio now retreat to the housekeeping office, not wishing to be involved. But those who found her, who touched her, who recognize her—we stay. We form a circle around her, protecting her even though she is beyond our protection. When management comes running to verify the police are needed, we remain where we are. Our shift leader tells us to go back inside, but we ignore her. Management withdraws to the hotel.

The girl’s hair and skin are pale as the sky at sunrise. She is older than even our eldest girls, and, on any other day, we could have called her
haole
, foreigner, a white
woman independent and capable of caring for herself. But in these few minutes before the police come running down the beach with a first-aid kit and walkie-talkie, this girl is a child. She is helpless. She is in need of a mother, and that’s a job at which we are experts. The sky lightens in the west to a dull blue as flares of orange rip the eastern sky.
We are here
, we tell the unmoving girl.
All us mothers are here
.

We’ve just turned the corner at the snack stand when we spot the crowd gathered outside of the Banyan Hotel. “Can jus’ surf Canoes,” Lani says, pointing to the break in front of us. “No crowd dere yet.”

“Bet it’s a turtle on the beach,” Cora yawns. She presses the heel of her palm to her left temple. We’re all a little ragged this morning, from lack of sleep and one too many margaritas. “Turtles always bring out the tourists. No one’s in the water.” We cross the sand, its cold granules clumping between our toes.

As we draw closer to the crowd, we see police uniforms and hear the odd burst of voice and crackled silence particular to walkie-talkies. The hotel’s housekeeping staff, identifiable by their floral-patterned dresses and white tennis shoes, are taking turns being interviewed by a couple of officers. When each interview is complete, the women are pointed in the direction of the hotel, but they refuse to leave the beach. Instead, they return in silence
to the circle their compatriots have formed. The women stand sentinel, very still and very tall. A man in a black windbreaker tries to take photographs of whatever is inside their circle, but each time he asks the housekeeping women to move or attempts to nudge them aside, they block his way. Finally, he gives up and takes his photos in the narrow spaces between the women’s bodies. We’re past the the hotel’s patio before we realize the back of the photographer’s jacket reads “Coroner’s Office.”

Mel turns to one of the housekeepers and asks quietly, “Auntie, what happened?”

The woman glances toward the ground shaking her head, and we glimpse a maroon dress, white legs, a half-closed hand. We run to the other side of the circle to see the face, and even when the police yell, “ ’Ey, get ’em outta hea!” we refuse to budge.

Lani, as always, is the first to speak. “We know her,” she says. Her voice is heavy with wonder and shock.

We know her
, we repeat. We know her and we warned her and we saw him. Cora shakes her head in disbelief. Mel looks sick.

The police officers frown at us in disbelief or annoyance, but one of them, a petite woman with dark skin and a protruding belly, yells at the rest, “Why are you staring at them? Do something.” She’s older than the other officers, and they defer to her. At first, they tell us to pile our boards on the sand and not go anywhere, but then they wander away to watch the coroner or manage the
growing crowd. A couple of us sigh heavily and we stare out at Pops. We’ll miss dawn patrol, we think. And then we’re ashamed for being so crass. We’d like to turn off our minds. We’d like to think only of Susan, of her smile when she thanked us for the drink, of the eagerness in her eyes. We’d like to cry, if for no other reason than to prove to ourselves that we are empathetic humans, but we have no tears for her. We’re already wondering if we’ll make it to work on time, what we should eat for lunch, whether the surf will still be good in the afternoon and not blown out by the winds. Already our lives are moving on, forward, into the future, and Susan’s life has been left behind on this beach.