by Skylar Finn
As she left, she lightly brushed Walt’s cheek with the back of her hand. He pursed his lips together but didn’t pull away, allowing his mother the one gesture of affection. Once Victoria left, he let his shoulders relax.
“I’m going to check out the balcony,” Keiko said. “You two should talk.”
Her footsteps receded upstairs. Walt sank into the plush cushions of a leather couch and buried his head in his hands. Ailani longed to sit next to him, but she had a feeling he needed space rather than another person attempting to coddle him.
“Do you want to talk?” she asked. “You never told me what happened here. I kind of assumed you got kicked out, but why does your dad think you’re dangerous?”
Walt rubbed the palms of his hands together until all the dirt that had collected on them rolled up and fell off. He cared not for the state of the impeccably clean hardwood floors.
“I’m not dangerous,” he said.
“I know.”
He massaged his temples. “I don’t know how long I can stay here, Ailani.”
She sat on the far edge of the leather couch, and when he didn’t flinch, she moved close enough to let their thighs tough. “We don’t have to talk to your father. We don’t have to see him at all, but I think it’s best if we stay here as long as possible. Your mom and your brother seem to be on your side. It’s two against one. If they want to protect you—”
“He’s the head of the house,” Walt interrupted. “It doesn’t matter what Mom and Paul want. Besides, it’s not just that. You don’t know my father. He’s not exactly a stand-up guy. Look at this place. He’s still living in luxury while everyone else is suffering.”
“But he’s spending his money on repair efforts,” Ailani reminded him. “That’s gotta count for something.”
“He’s doing that to make sure he stays comfortable,” Walt argued. “If he were truly a good man, he would turn this place into a safe house. He would let people in trouble stay here, and he would share his supplies with them. That’s not happening though, is it?”
“He let us stay here.”
“Out of obligation to his wife.”
She pinched Walt’s cheeks. “Well, how could she say no to these beautiful sculpted cheeks, huh?”
He managed a weak smile, but that was enough for Ailani. For the moment, they were all safe and well-cared for, even if it did mean taking part of an unwilling family reunion. Walt gradually relaxed, his muscles sinking into the couch. After a few minutes, he planted his hands on his knees and stood up with absolute confidence.
“You know what? You’re right.” He took Ailani’s face between his hands and planted a wet smooch on her dirty forehead. “Screw my dad. We have everything we need here, and I’ll be damned if I don’t take advantage of it.” He peeled his sweaty, bloodied shirt off. “I’m going to take a shower. Then we’re going to order lunch and go in the pool. As of right now, we’re all on a temporary vacation.”
Despite Walt’s attempt to change his attitude toward his family, the following week was nowhere near as easy and relaxing as Ailani expected it to be. Though Victoria promised they would have whatever they needed, Walt’s father Raymond did his best to thwart that promise. First, he claimed they hadn’t ordered enough food to feed the Dailey family plus Walt and his friends. Victoria demanded he put in an additional order for new supplies, but he declined for several days. Then, Raymond had the water shut off completely in the pool house. Ailani was halfway through a shower when the faucet refused to release another jet. With her hair full of shampoo, she hollered for Walt, who proceeded to get into a screaming match with his father over the issue. Security had to separate them before it got physical. Once more, Victoria solved the issues, following Raymond around and yelling at the top of her lungs until he finally relented and turned the water back on in the pool house.
Ailani watched Walt get smaller and smaller. Each time he interacted with his father, he shrank a little bit more. No longer did he stand tall and proud. His shoulders began to roll inward. His head bowed forward. He didn’t smile or laugh unless Ailani worked for hours to unwind his terrible moods. Even then, she only got a glimpse of the old Walt before the light in his eyes extinguished again.
Things wouldn’t have been so bad if it were just Victoria and Paul in the house. They both made frequent trips to the pool house in various attempts to bond with Walt. Ailani gracefully left the room each time, but she couldn’t help but eavesdrop from the second floor as the Dailey family tried to mend their relationships with Walt. Victoria missed her son. She recalled happy memories from his childhood and asked him dozens of questions about his life now. He answered as best as he could, but it was hard for him to explain that the best success he’d had so far depended on his success in the queer community. Victoria was sharper than Walt expected though. She gradually began asking him about that part of his life too, even inquiring if he had a boyfriend. Walt, taken aback, could only reply with vague answers. If they had time, maybe he would trust her with the information, but it seemed like everything at the Dailey house was on tenterhooks.
Paul didn’t bother with delicacy. He asked his little brother right away about the things he wanted to know, with little regard to Walt’s privacy. Paul meant well though. He simply had a different personality than Walt. Unlike Victoria, he didn’t let Walt stay in the pool house. He dragged him outside for a game of golf, to play with the family dogs (two purebred hunting hounds named Dolce and Gabbana), or to swim competitive laps in the pool. Paul’s plan of action was to tire Walt out, then attack him with questions when Walt was exhausted from their romps that day. Sometimes it worked, and the brothers caught up with each other over an expensive glass of whiskey. Other times, Walt demanded that Paul finally leave him alone. Paul protested then returned to the main house with his tail between his legs before returning the next day with a new activity for them to do together.
Walt was so often busy reconnecting or fighting with his family that Ailani and Keiko had no one to turn to but each other. Like Walt and Paul, they had been separated for a long length of time, but they did not harbor the same resentment against each other. At least, they didn’t think they did.
Keiko spent most of her time on the balcony of the pool house. She dragged one of the lounge chairs up there, slathered herself in sunscreen, and spent the majority of the day with a radio she’d found upon venturing inside the main house once. The venture itself was a doomed one and became yet another reason for Raymond Dailey to abhor the visitors at his house.
Ailani and Keiko were not so different as they might have thought. Keiko did not let her rebellious nature rule her life, but that didn’t mean she ignored it altogether. She slipped inside the main house without anyone, not even Ailani, noticing. Ten minutes later, she emerged from the back door at a flat-out sprint. Raymond chased after her, his velvet robe getting caught up around his ankles.
“Stay out of my house!” he thundered, brandishing a pistol at Keiko as she ran across the pool deck with the radio clutched to her chest. “If you come back in here, I’ll kill you! You hear me? I’ll kill you!”
Ailani met her little sister at the entrance to the pool house, pulling her into its relative safety. Keiko, huffing and puffing, dropped the radio to catch her breath. Ailani smacked her lightly over the head.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Ailani demanded. “Do you want us to get kicked out of here?”
Keiko shrugged, grabbed the radio, and headed upstairs to the balcony. “That guy’s nuts. Like clinically insane. It’s only a matter of time before he kicks us out anyway. I’m just trying to be prepared.”
“By stealing?”
“Do what you gotta do!” Keiko called from the second floor.
Since then, Keiko was rarely seen anywhere but the balcony. When she got too hot, she leapt into the pool from the second floor, swam a few laps, rinsed off, and returned to her post. For hours, she scanned through the radio stations, listening to the static. Ai
lani didn’t know what she was looking for, but she recognized Keiko’s desperation. A connection, no matter how distant, would help Keiko feel like not all humanity had been lost.
One morning, Ailani ventured up to the balcony to sit with her sister. Keiko didn’t look up from her radio or say hello. She kept scanning through the stations, her ear to the speaker.
“So how’s school?” Ailani asked casually.
Keiko gave her a look.
“What?”
“You want to make chitchat now?” Keiko asked. “You haven’t been interested in my life since you left Kauai.”
“That’s not true.”
“You called me once a month,” Keiko said. “Usually, you spent ten minutes complaining about how terrible your life was and how much better you deserved at your job, and then you’d say someone at the studio had asked you to do something and hung up on me. You never asked me about what was going on in my life, so why does it matter now?”
Ailani stared at her bare feet. Once upon a time, they matched the steady tan that covered the rest of her body. Now, her shins were a dark red-brown, but her feet and ankles remained pale from all the time she had spent in hiking boots.
“You’re right,” she said.
Keiko lifted an eyebrow. “I am?”
“Yes.” Ailani drew her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. “When I left Kauai, I didn’t want to be reminded of anything that would make me think of Mom. That included you. I worried about you. I wanted to know about you, but I couldn’t call without you asking if I wanted to talk to Dad. When I did let you talk about your life, I missed Kauai so much that it made me want to fly back home without a second thought.” She stuck her toes in between the plastic strips that made up the lounge chair. “I’ve never thought of L.A. as home. It always felt like an in-between place. As long as I’ve been here, I imagined finally getting the chance to make a film that mattered. I imagined screening the premiere in Kauai, on the beach, with all my old friends and family there. Then I’d picture Mom in the audience—” An old feeling got stuck in her throat, and she coughed to clear it. “And it killed me. She’ll never see me succeed. Hell, now I don’t know if I’ll ever get the chance to succeed.”
Keiko switched off the radio for the first time in days. “You know, you really should have just gone to therapy instead of cutting the rest of your family off and flying across an entire body of water to get away from us.”
Ailani let out a laugh. “Yeah, that would have been a better plan. Maybe if I’d stayed in Kauai, none of us would be in this mess. Hawaii is safe, you know? The EMP blast didn’t extend that far. Dad and all your friends are probably fine.”
Keiko sank into her lounge chair, her body relaxing with relief. “Why didn’t you tell me that before? How did you find out?”
Ailani took the radio from her and tuned into the channel number she remembered. It was all static. The woman who’d been broadcasting all those weeks ago was no longer on the air.
“A secretary who worked in an office for the state government made an announcement on this channel a while ago.” Ailani scanned the channels around the original number, but it was no use. “That’s how we learned about those county camps too. I wonder what happened to her.”
They fell silent. Keiko didn’t provide an answer to Ailani’s question. Ailani knew why: the most probably answer was that the broadcaster was no longer in a position to announce information on the air. Either she had died, was injured, or the government had found out she was leaking information to civilians without permission.
“What if we could get to Hawaii?” Keiko asked. “What if we could go back home?”
She didn’t want the real reply. She didn’t want Ailani to tell her that it was impossible, that there probably wasn’t a plane in the state of California that could get them across the Pacific Ocean, let alone a pilot to fly it. Keiko didn’t want that.
“That would be good,” Ailani said, closing her eyes and leaning her head back to let the sun soak into all of her pores. If she let her imagination wander far enough, she might as well be back on the beach outside her parents’ house on Kauai. “That would be great.”
After about a week at the Daileys’ mansion, Ailani had settled into a routine. Every morning, she politely declined Victoria’s invitation to breakfast at the main house and instead had coffee and toast at the pool house. Then she checked in with Walt to make sure he was managing his familial issues without approaching insanity. Once he assured her he was fine, she went for a run around the property, jumped in the pool to cool off, and ate lunch with Keiko on the balcony. She spent the rest of the afternoon reading books from Walt’s old collection and jotting down ideas and outlines for potential movie scripts. In the evening, she collected Walt and Keiko at the outside dinner table and made them eat together. As long as the days weren’t interrupted by another member of the Dailey family, it felt like the three of them were on an extended vacation at a private resort. Unfortunately, they couldn’t evade Raymond forever.
One morning, during her usual run around the property, things took a turn for the worse. As Ailani ran past the front gates, a haggard woman appeared from the surrounding woods and stumbled alongside her on the other side of the fence.
“Please!” the woman gasped.
Ailani, who’d been focused on the path in front of her, was so startled by the woman’s sudden presence that she tripped over an elevated piece of land and sprawled forward. She caught herself with her hands and rolled safely to a stop. The woman clung to the iron bars of the fence that separated them.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. She was fairly young, in her early thirties, but filth and stress made her look older. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but I need help. My son—he’s four—is back at my camp. We ran out of food and water. If you could spare anything, I would be so grateful.”
Ailani got to her feet and dusted the dirt from her hands. “Is your son okay? Is he hurt or anything?”
“He broke his arm,” the woman said. “We were running from a group of weirdos in the woods, and he fell.”
“Weirdos?”
“These people at an RV camp,” she went on. “They tried to lure my son to their camp, but something didn’t feel right.”
Ailani pointed to the front gate. “Come around to the front. I’ll let you in, and I’ll see what kind of supplies we can spare. Is your son safe now?”
The woman nearly dropped with relief, but she mustered her strength to run around to the pedestrian gate. “We’ve been hiding out in a cave nearby. I don’t suppose I could bring him here, could I? Would that be asking too much?” She stared at the enormous mansion behind Ailani. Surely it wasn’t too much to ask of someone who lived in such a place.
“That wouldn’t be my decision to make,” Ailani said, trying to figure out how to unlock the pedestrian gate from the inside. “I don’t actually live here. It’s my friend’s place—well, his family’s—and he doesn’t really get along with his father. It’s a long story.”
“If you could convince them—”
“Hey!” Matthew, the head of security, came running down the driveway, muttering furiously into a handheld radio. As he neared the gate, he pulled his gun from his pocket and aimed at the mother. “Get away from the gates.”
She backed away hastily, lifting her hands in the air. “I’m sorry! I don’t mean to cause you any trouble. If you could spare some supplies for me and my son—”
“We don’t take in drifters,” Matthew spat. “Get out of here.”
“Put your gun down,” Ailani ordered Matthew. “She’s not armed, and not everyone is as rich as the Daileys. Go get her some food.”
Matthew glared at me. “I don’t take orders from you.”
“No, he takes orders from me,” boomed Raymond from the front porch. The other security guard, Graham, was nearby, holding another handheld radio. Matthew had notified them of the situation so quickly.
Raymond took his
time as he walked down the driveway. He threw Ailani a sneer as he passed her to look the desperate mother up and down. “Let me guess. You have some ridiculous sob story and a plea for help.”
The mother sniffled. “My son broke his arm—”
Raymond turned around and muttered in Matthew’s ear, “Shoot her. Then get rid of her. I can’t risk her going back to whoever else might be hanging around and telling them about us.”
“Are you crazy?” Ailani asked. “You can’t shoot her. She didn’t do anything wrong.”
The woman, who was smart enough to know a losing battle, began backing farther away from the gates. Matthew raised his gun again.
“Do it,” Raymond ordered.
The woman turned on her heel and fled through the forest. Matthew closed one eye and took aim. Right as he chambered his gun, Ailani leapt onto him and yanked his arms down.
He pulled the trigger.
17
The bullet went wide, ricocheted off one of the stone pillars that framed the driveway, and landed in the dirt several feet away. Ailani clawed at Matthew’s face and hands. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get the gun from him, but she could at least distract him long enough to prevent him from shooting the woman. The security guard let out a strangled yell as Ailani dug her nails into his cheeks, drawing blood from them. He dropped the gun to tear her hands from his skin, but she wouldn’t let go without a fight. He folded forward, using his momentum to flip Ailani over his hip. She landed flat on her back in the dirt with such force that all of the air was forced out of her lungs. She tipped her chin and looked backward. The troubled mother had vanished into the forest, no worse for wear.
Before Ailani could catch her breath, Raymond dragged her up from the ground by her hair. She yelped and fought against him, but the pain in her scalp was too staggering to do anything but go with the force that compelled her upward. As she struggled to get her feet under her, Raymond’s snarling face appeared in her view.