Welcome Reluctant Stranger

by Evelyn Journey

  But she was discovering that the present had a way of pulling people back into the past. The present was difficult—but the past, impossible—to run away from.

  In as neutral a voice as she was capable of, Leilani said, “General Huang works fast. I didn’t expect anything from him only a week after he said he’d check with his source.”

  “I don’t care about his tactics. All I can think of is your Papá is alive.”

  “Can you trust this man?”

  “He said General Huang had contacted him to find out about Papá, and had given him my phone number.”

  “I see. Mamá, maybe you should verify with General Huang. Call him tomorrow. Ask him what he knows of this man. Did he give you his name?”

  “Yes. Bernie Tanteo.”

  “If the General recognizes the name, ask him how much he knows this man. If he doesn’t, then this could be a hoax.”

  Her mother did not answer right away, and when she did, she sounded uncertain. “You may be right. This Bernie Tanteo asked for money.”

  “How much?”

  “$15,000.”

  “More than General Huang quoted.”

  “That’s what bothered me. But why should anyone lie to us about your father?”

  “That kind of money means survival in that impoverished country. It will buy years of food, necessities.”

  “Then, it’s money well-spent. We’ll get your father back and we’ll be helping someone or some family survive.”

  “Maybe, but we’re not certain of anything. What if this is a scam? We’re not rich anymore, Mamá. That amount will empty my savings. And you can’t touch your investments—what little of it is left. You’re living on the dividends.”

  “It’s Papá we’re talking about, Lani. I’ll get a mortgage on my house, if I have to.”

  “I know you’ve said that, but how would you pay for that mortgage? … Forget I asked. I’ll help, but I know Rudy can’t. And Carmen’s iffy.”

  Her mother said, “Okay, you’re right. We should check it out. I’ll call General Huang. Can you come to the house tomorrow?”

  “Yes, Mamá, I will.”

  Leilani turned off her cell phone and sat on the nearest chair. She sat in the dark a few minutes before she returned to bed.

  Hours later, she sat at the kitchen bar with Justin, a cup of coffee in her hand. Neither of them felt hungry after dinner the past night. He toasted a couple of slices of bread, but she could not work up an appetite for even a piece of it.

  Justin took the second piece. “You sure you don’t want any?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re quiet this morning,” Justin said when he finished the toast. “Does the prospect of getting married scare you?”

  “Doesn’t it frighten you a little? I’ve never lived with anyone. That’ll change a lot of things I’ve been used to doing my way.”

  “Yeah, you adjust, accommodate, compromise.”

  “You have experience with Megan. I don’t, not with anyone.”

  “I’m sure we’ll be okay. We’re a better match than Megan and I.”

  “I do love you very much, Justin. But think of it. I was unattached for years. I meet someone in an unlikely incident and six months later, we’re married.”

  Justin chuckled, ready for a quip, but Leilani’s phone rang and interrupted him. Her mother was calling again.

  “Lani,” she said with some urgency. “I just talked to your father.”

  Leilani was dumbfounded for an instant. She thought her mother had to be joking, but she sounded serious and a little too agitated.

  “What? Are you sure?”

  “I’ll never forget that voice. It was a little shaky but it’s your Papá, no doubt about it.”

  “How’s it possible?”

  Leilani’s eyes began to well up with tears. She wanted to shout, for no reason other than that she was a knot of mixed emotions all at the same time—happy, incredulous, anxious, hopeful; but most of all, uncertain and afraid. Shouting might give her some relief. Could it be true?

  “He’s out, free. Bernie Tanteo did it. He came through,” her mother said.

  “What did he say—Papá, I mean?”

  “‘Cita, it’s me.’ Nobody else ever called me Cita.” She burst out crying.

  “Oh, Mamá,” Leilani said, her tears quietly rolling down her cheeks.

  Justin came up to her and gathered her in his arms. He said, “Your father? They’ve found him?”

  She nodded.

  *****

  That afternoon, she went to her mother’s house. Justin had offered to accompany her but she insisted on going alone. She knew her mother saw the meeting as a family affair, closed off to anyone else. Rudy would be there, but not Carmen who Mrs. Torres had asked but who, as usual, said she had too much to do on the farm to leave it on short notice.

  The meeting was as emotional as Leilani had expected it to be. Her mother cried the whole time. Maybe, less from happiness than from relief at being freed from twenty years of turmoil, helplessness, and fear bottled up inside her, wondering whether her husband was dead or alive. Those years gushed out that afternoon in profuse tears that Leilani suspected would come again when her mother was alone.

  Before the evening was over, her mother decided she was too nervous, too discombobulated—a word her mother liked to use to show off her Americanized self—to go back to the old country. She was too old, too drained to do what it would take to work with the man who had rescued her husband and bring him home to his family in America. She would rather wait for him to come to her. He owed her that for all she had braved and endured for him.

  Rudy couldn’t go, either. General Huang had told them getting the doctor out of Costa Mora would take a few weeks. He couldn’t be away from work or home that long. Asking Carmen was a waste of time. That left Leilani.

  Leilani called Justin that evening to tell him they had to postpone their wedding plans. She was going back to the old country to fetch her father.

  Justin said, “Let me go with you. I’m sure I can get along with anybody else who’s going. I’ll grit my teeth, put on a wide smile. That’s not hard.”

  “There’d be no need to. I’m going alone.”

  “No way are you going alone!”

  Leilani chuckled. “You sound like my mother, although she said nothing this time. She’s not going. And Rudy can’t.”

  “Do you realize how dangerous it can be in that country? I’ve been reading about it online and what I’ve learned gives me the chills. I’m going with you.”

  “General Huang does say it’s dangerous, if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’ll make two of us without a clue. Is that double the danger?”

  Justin said, “No, the opposite. In math, two negatives make a positive. We’re better off together. But, seriously, we can at least watch each other’s back.”

  Leilani said, “I should just say yes. I know you’ll wear me down until I do. And you’re right. I’ll feel safer if you came with me.”

  When she later called her mother to tell her Justin was going with her, her mother said, “No, you and Justin can’t go together.”

  “But why? It’ll be safer.”

  “I agree one hundred percent, but that country hasn’t changed. People living in sin get ostracized. That will ruin your efforts to get your father out of the country. If you married, no problem.”

  Leilani burst out laughing. “Oh, Mamá, you’re so obvious. You’ll find any excuse to see me married.”

  “Well, Justin isn’t so bad.”

  “Really? I thought you didn’t like him much because he is, in your own words, ‘American’ and ‘too blond.”

  “I know. I say many things I don’t mean. Can’t you get him to propose to you? Or, are you the problem? Bent on staying single, are you?”

  “As it happens, he has proposed and I have accepted.”

  A long minute
of silence was her mother’s initial answer to her declaration. Then, she cried in delight, “Oh, Lani! Such great news. The very thing I’ve been waiting for, after the good news about Papá.”

  She was silent again for a few minutes, but she did not hang up, and Leilani was sure she was crying from joy and thanking her God for her good fortune.

  XIX. The Return

  Leilani pressed her forehead close to the airplane window as she watched the landscape several thousand feet below—a palette of brown and green against a sea of dark blue. She and Justin were on the plane headed toward the two islands of Costa Mora, her birthplace—one big island and a tiny one clinging by two bridges to the other. Seeing it from a bird’s eye view for the first time, she was struck by how green much of it was.

  Before long, the plane circled around the two islands. As it descended, a city began to take shape, a city that would have been like any other seen from above, except that it sprawled along a coastline, and was trapped on one side by an expanse of blue sea and on the other, by rugged green hills. When her family left eighteen years ago, she sat between Carmen and Rudy, deprived of any last glimpses of the country they were leaving forever.

  Not that it mattered to her then. All she had cared about was her own little world—the toys, books, and clothes she left behind, Myrna’s friendship, the school that dominated her days even at home. An existence—she realized much later—crammed within a bubble, limited to her family home, her walled school, the street life she observed with little interest from inside a car, and the mildly exciting occasional forays into malls or the homes of her parents’ friends.

  How simple the passions were of a child and how easily buried in memory. She had not understood until she finished her professional training how unhappy she had been to leave the only world she knew. For months after their departure, while they adjusted to their new country, events flew by with no warnings and all she could do was react to what the moment presented and complain about all she had lost when they left.

  Only minutes away from setting foot on that soil once again, a pang of loss nipped at her heart for a land about which she could remember little. This was still her father’s country. But it was no longer hers. Attested to by the very first passport she ever had. Stamped with the seal of the United States, the country that now owned her.

  The plane floated along the perimeter of the smaller island, waiting for a signal to land. All Leilani could see were buildings, roads, and vehicles, most of them monotonously modern.

  She sat back and yawned, lethargic and worn out from the sixteen-hour flight that first took them to Hong Kong where they had a two-hour layover. The trip was a long boring test of endurance for someone like her who could not sleep sitting up. She wanted to rest, harness the stamina she had left from a few tense weeks of intrigue and uncertainty about her father.

  Justin reached over to grasp her hand. Her mother had won. He was now her husband of less than forty-eight hours. They married in a civil ceremony attended by their families—the full ceremony she and Justin had talked about shelved for some indefinite date in the future.

  In marrying an “American,” she had also managed to discombobulate her brown-skinned extended family. She acquired new familial connections, two of them blonde—Elise, now her sister-in-law, and Mrs. Halverson, her Polish mother-in-law she had to get used to calling “Mom.”

  Leilani smiled, remembering Carmen’s look of surprise when she introduced her new family to her old one. Carmen stared at Elise but seemed too intimidated to talk to her. For much of the reception at Greg and Elise’s house, she stuck with Mrs. Halverson, and Leilani guessed they talked about recipes and families.

  Justin said, “How are you doing?”

  “Exhausted. Sleepy. I slept through the flight going to Hawaii when we left eighteen years ago. Sixteen hours feel so much longer when you can’t sleep.”

  “Yeah, I feel like a zombie. The longest I’ve flown is six hours. First to New York where we stayed overnight. From there, six more to France for Elise and Greg’s wedding.”

  Leilani gripped Justin’s hand tighter as the plane touched ground with a jolt that made her gasp. The plane cruised a few hundred yards before it stopped. The flight attendant asked everyone to remain seated until she called their seat numbers for them to disembark.

  Leilani said, “I’m nervous. Not only about being back in this country. Afraid it might seem strange to me. I dread meeting my father.”

  “He never carried out the plot, Lani.”

  “Because it was discovered.”

  “He’s still your father.”

  “But I can’t remember his face or his voice. Do you know he was the first one who taught me how to shoot?” She paused before adding, “When I was eight.”

  Justin scowled. “Geez. I have to admit that boggles my mind. Eight years old? Why?”

  “I know now—but not then—that it’s because living in this country at that time was dangerous. And, maybe, we were in much greater danger because Papá was in deep with subversives. He and Mamá agreed we should all learn to use a gun in case we needed to defend ourselves.”

  “Was your father a great shot, too?”

  “No, that’s what’s ironic about it. He hated firearms. After the first few times, Sargent Lim, who worked for my father as a kind of bodyguard, took over teaching us.”

  “How was it, learning to shoot at eight?”

  “The first gun they put in my hand scared me. But after I’d fired it a few times, I was fascinated. The gun could kill. It made others afraid of you. Then, Sargent Lim began showing us pictures of blood and guts every time we practiced. I hated that. I think those images were Papá’s idea. So, I have this mix of awe and aversion for guns.”

  “How did you become a great shot?”

  “We continued to practice after we arrived in California. Mamá insisted. She said that, as long as we didn’t know what happened to my father, where he was and why he couldn’t join us, we remained in great danger.”

  “You mean, that someone could still target you, kill you in California?”

  “Yeah. So, for a couple of years Rudy, Carmen and I went to target practice with Sargent Lim. He also fled Costa Mora and helped us a during those early years. He had family in the Central Valley and knew his way around. At first, he took us about once a week. After two years, he said we were good enough. The skill gave me a sense of power. Target practice was also something I could do outside my usual routine, so every time Sargent Lim called and asked if we wanted to go to the shooting range, I went. Later, when he moved back to the Central Valley, I went every so often by myself, to keep me sharp.”

  Justin chuckled. “I should thank Sargent Lim for turning you into a dead shot. Who would have thought I’d meet my wife because of it?” He raised her hand to his lips and kissed the back of it. “Are Rudy and Carmen as good as you?”

  “Yes. Carmen, too, but she might be rusty. She stopped practicing when she got married.”

  “Do you still go, by yourself?”

  “Not since you and I—as they say—became a pair.”

  “We can go to the shooting range together next time.”

  Minutes later, Leilani stood at the door of the plane for an instant as her gaze swept across the vast space before her. Yes, it was a city like most others everywhere, with a few skyscrapers straining for the sky. And, yet, it was also unique, with its face to the sea and its back huddled against mountain ranges as far as the eye could see. The airport terminal was still the low-slung structure she remembered, but it had doubled in width, although it remained a fraction of the size of the San Francisco airport.

  Inside, the terminal was bouncing. That was the only way Leilani could describe it. Greeters jumped and shrieked their welcome at arrivals they had not seen in a while. Children squealed as they played, running through throngs of people. Heels clicked and clacked, luggage rollers groaned against rough concrete floors, loudspeake
rs blared arrivals and departures, and on top of all those, excited talk buzzed in a language that she had hoped would awaken memories.

  But she never quite remembered the airport crowd that way. Not at nine years old when the mystery of being spirited away held much promise as a thrilling adventure.

  She had never been at any airport as lively, its ambiance more like a carnival. The plane from Hong Kong had been full of Pacific Islanders, many of them American immigrants returning to this country for a visit. Loud relatives with big smiles were now swarming around them with open arms.

  Justin grasped her arm. “This way. There’s the sign for the baggage pick-up.”

  At 6’ 2” he towered over everyone else, and for that, and for being, obviously, a foreigner, the thick crowd seemed to part to give them clear passage.

  Leilani let herself be led. She knew no one was going to be there to greet them, but she had expected a sense of having come home. And it wasn’t there. These people were all like her and she was in a place where she looked like she belonged and, yet, everything seemed strange. And they stared at her with curious eyes. Did she look as strange to them as they did to her?

  Her eyes were moistening, her throat and chest tightening, as if she was mourning the loss of something that had been taken away from her. Seeing this country again, she felt a strong need to reconnect with it. But was that merely an illusion? Maybe, it was never there, whatever it was she expected to reconnect with.

  An hour later, dragging their luggage behind them, Justin and Leilani walked out of the airport to look for the van that bore the name of their hotel on its sides. They were the only passengers the van was picking up that evening.

  *****

  Night had fallen on the city by the time they arrived at the island’s oldest and best hotel where Justin had booked a suite. He said they were, after all, still on their honeymoon, and deserved the most deluxe accommodations the place could offer, at least for the first week. They initially meant to transfer to a cheaper room or hotel for the rest of their stay, but the cost of luxury on the island turned out the same as a moderately priced hotel room back home. They decided they could afford to remain in the lap of luxury. Justin extended their booking for a whole month.