2 Empath

by Edie Claire

  I fingered through a few more photos: a picture of Kalia’s parents when they were young, and several pictures of a young Kalia with female friends. “My dad never did know who any of these girls were,” I said with a sigh. “She didn’t label anything. I guess she figured she would always remember.”

  “Oh, look at that!” Kylee exclaimed as I flipped to the last picture. “Is that your dad?”

  I nodded. It was a picture of Kalia as a young woman, her hair now short and fixed into the stiff, unnatural curls that were stylish in the fifties. She wore a dress that looked like Sunday best, and on her hip she held a toddler with a thick head of dark, unruly hair. I had seen the picture before. But this time I noticed something else.

  “My dad said this was the last picture ever taken of her,” I explained. “He didn’t frame it because it made him sad. Now I can see why.”

  The telltale curve of Kalia’s abdomen, meaningless to me before, now spoke volumes. “She must have been pregnant with her second child when she died,” I thought out loud. “I didn’t know that.”

  “What did she die of?” Tara asked.

  “A brain aneurysm,” I replied. “Dad said that his dad told him it happened very quickly and unexpectedly. Albin was devastated. Not to mention completely clueless about how to take care of a toddler. Somehow Albin managed to get transferred closer to home in Minnesota, and my grandparents took care of my dad until my step-grandmother Lotta came into the picture a few years later.”

  Tara and Kylee asked no more questions, and for a long time they each looked through the books on their laps while I dove into the packet of correspondence. It was as uninteresting as I remembered. Mostly cards and brief notes of congratulations on her marriage and on my father’s birth. Christmas cards signed simply with names and well-wishes. A few letters from girlhood friends, who wrote mainly about themselves. Two high school English papers, both about the war. Much of the paper was brittle and crumbling, and the packet bottom was littered with broken-off corners of notepaper and discarded bits of torn-open envelopes. I found no correspondence from anyone in Kalia’s family. I might have been surprised by that, if my father hadn’t told me that her mother had died not long after he was born, and that her brothers, all teenagers or young twenties by that point, had scattered. When no one from Kalia’s family had showed up at her funeral, Albin got really upset, and he had never tried to contact them again.

  “Here are the dates, Kali,” Tara said finally, after she finished studying the scrapbook. I remembered that it was fairly short, having only been started at Kalia’s wedding. It contained the usual: news clippings, ticket stubs, cut-outs from church bulletins, event programs. “Kalia and Albin were married on August 8th, 1953,” Tara announced. “He was twenty-five; she was only eighteen. Your father was born on February 23, 1954.”

  I blew out a breath. “A shotgun wedding, obviously. Still, that doesn’t really tell us much. My father would have been conceived in” — I counted backwards — “late May, probably. He’s always told me that his parents met at a Christmas party at the base, and that for Albin, it was love at first sight. So they must have been dating eight months or so before they got married.”

  The ache in my stomach, which began when the results of my DNA testing first sunk in, was getting worse. All my life I had idolized Kalia… my hauntingly beautiful Hawaiian grandmother, who had died so young, so tragically. I had looked at her pictures and imagined that I knew her. Her bright smile and dazzling eyes had always seemed so full of warmth, and humor, and adventure…

  But my father was not her husband’s child.

  “This is so funny, Kali,” Kylee said suddenly, breaking my melancholy. “Kalia’s classmates wrote in her yearbook, just like we do, and the funny thing is… they wrote all the same things! Seriously, you could swap out some of the names, and I would think this yearbook was mine. Never mind that it was all written like sixty years ago. Sounds like your gram was the life of the party!”

  I looked at the handwriting scrawled over the blank pages at the end of the yearbook. Many of the entries were jazzed up with hearts and flowers and indecipherable cartoon drawings.

  “The book itself is bare bones,” Kylee continued. “Which isn’t surprising since there was a war going on. They didn’t get individual pictures, and the sports and clubs were pretty thin. But these guys still knew how to party! Look at these crazy dance pictures! And did you know your grandmother was voted ‘Most Popular?’”

  “I did,” I said, able to grin a little again. No grade-school girl would ever miss that. Particularly one who’d never been “popular” with any school crowd except the faculty, which from a social standpoint, was absolute death.

  “I read every entry,” Kylee continued, sounding disappointed. “But I didn’t see anything about her dating anybody — either a dashing young officer from the base or anyone else. Not that anyone necessarily would mention that, but you never know.”

  “Let me have a look,” Tara said, extending a hand.

  Kylee passed the book over. “They’re all talking about graduating in a matter of days, so I’m guessing it came out in May or June. It says 1953.”

  Tara flipped the pages at the end back and forth, staring hard at the binding.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She turned her blue eyes up to mine. The glasses were back again — had been back ever since the prom. She claimed the contacts bothered her eyes and she wasn’t ready to wear them full-time yet, but Kylee and I both suspected that what she really wasn’t ready for was six foot two and went by the name of Jack. “Kali,” she said intently. “A page has been torn out, here.”

  My pulse picked up a notch. I looked at the binding where she pointed. A thin, irregular ridge of paper poked out from its center.

  “It was in here when everyone signed the book,” Tara added. “You can tell from what this guy Kai wrote down here in the corner. Part of it is obviously missing.”

  “I noticed that one was weird,” Kylee said vaguely. “But I didn’t think…”

  “Torn out,” I echoed, the sick feeling getting worse again.

  What exactly had Kalia been trying to hide?

  I took the yearbook from Tara’s hands and replaced it in the box along with the rest of my grandmother’s possessions.

  The life of the party.

  “Let’s get back to packing,” I said dully, standing up. “I’ve got to decide how much of this crap I’m taking with me.”

  My stomach ached abominably.

  “And how much I need to let go of.”

  Chapter 12

  My dad was like a kid opening birthday presents. Nothing excited the man more than moving to a new location and a new base, which was one reason why he was one of the oldest colonels in the Air Force. The joke was that the military couldn’t get rid of him. The reality was that he couldn’t imagine a life outside of it. It was a miracle that my mother had convinced him to let us live off base in Cheyenne; it was a double miracle that she’d done the same in Oahu, considering the insane cost of housing anywhere around Honolulu.

  But here we were.

  “Now, Kali, darlin,’” he said for the eightieth time as he drove into our new neighborhood in our new (used) car. “You could fit this whole house in your mom’s living room and dining room in Cheyenne. And it needs a little TLC, for sure. The neighborhood’s a bit congested and it’s got a totally different feel from the wide open spaces out West… but I’m sure we’ll all get used to it in time.”

  “I know, Dad,” I said mechanically, my heart pounding. My face was so close to the glass of the car windows I might as well have squished my nose flat like a little kid. From my first view of the coastline as the plane landed — the raw beauty of breaking whitecaps on a sea of blue, surrounding a paradise of green — I had been mesmerized. Stepping outside at the airport, the warm wind and lofting scent of flowers were like a caress. The typical bustle and ugliness of city traffic didn’t faze me; I saw only the palm t
rees, the tropical bushes, the sharp green volcanic peaks towering into the clear blue sky.

  O.M.G.

  After all these months, it was finally happening. I had my beloved Hawaii back.

  Now all I needed was Zane.

  “Here it is!” my father crowed, turning off the winding street directly into a carport framed with painted wooden latticework. “Home sweet home!”

  From inside the carport, I could see nothing. I hopped out of the backseat and moved to the patch of grass outside the front door that could only be loosely termed a front lawn. I looked up. I had seen pictures of the house before, but the structure in front of me now appeared only half the remembered size. The paint on the trim was peeling and the concrete stepping stone under my feet was cracked and wobbly.

  I didn’t care. The breeze picked up my hair and tossed it across my shoulders while rumpling the fronds of the tall coconut palm beside the carport. A huge bush by the front window was covered with giant orange blossoms. Over the roof loomed the sharply angled side of a mountain peak that was lush and green as a jungle.

  “Hello,” I whispered.

  I was inside the door the second my father opened it. The living/family room was a featureless rectangle. To my right was a small kitchen with frighteningly aged metal cabinets and scratched white appliances. Just beyond it was a square nook barely bigger than the average kitchen table. Other doors appeared to lead to the master bedroom and the bathroom. The whole place seemed close and smelled slightly musty.

  I didn’t care. All across both the front and back walls were large windows streaming with sunlight, with screen wire on the outside and movable glass louvers on the inside to let in the balmy breezes. And outside of those windows was my Oahu.

  “There’s a deck leading off the kitchen,” my mother said to me. “I’m hoping we can eat a lot of our meals out there. The view is lovely. At least if you’re looking up!” She turned to my father, and her voice lowered. “You’d think they could have cleaned the kitchen a little better,” she grumbled.

  “Now, Diane,” my father soothed. But I was no longer paying attention. I had found the stairway and was on my way up. The house had only two bedrooms; mine was a sort of loft that occupied the whole of the small half second story.

  The wooden stairs creaked under my feet. The twist in the stairway had a ceiling so low that even I had to duck my head. There was no upstairs bathroom; the one full bath below would have to be shared with my parents.

  I didn’t care.

  I turned into my new room. The carpeting appeared to have been patched together from a stack of cast-off store samples. The ceiling was open to the gently slanted roof. At either end was a closet, each consisting of a recess in the wall with one shelf, a hanging bar, and no door. There were two windows, one on each side of the house, and just enough full-height floor space for a twin bed, a dresser, a chest of drawers, and maybe a trashcan.

  None of that mattered. My hand went immediately to the glass-louvered door at the bedroom’s back end. I unlocked it, turned the knob, and stepped out.

  Perfect. My own private lanai was no more than a leveled spot on a patch of the first-floor roof. But it was almost as big as the bedroom. And the view… oh my.

  A sweeping panoramic view of the Honolulu skyline and harbor, it was not. We couldn’t have afforded that if it had come in a house half this size and twice as old. But to me, at this moment, it was the most beautiful view ever. The house was perched high among the sharp green peaks, and while a look down showed a mishmash of other houses and yards and privacy fences and barbecue grills and kids’ bikes and lawn tools and just plain junk, a look up showed a glimmering, shining world of fresh, blazing green and azure blue. At present, not a cloud was in the sky, but I knew that before long, giant purplish masses would appear from nowhere, rolling in and around the dramatic peaks, promising brisk winds and a cooling splash of rain. Here I could sit, year round, looking out, breathing deep, drinking in the unending natural beauty and forgetting everything else in the world.

  Even the shadow of the little boy climbing on the rooftop beside me.

  “Well, Kali?” My father asked. He and my mother had come up the stairwell behind me. “What do you think?” he begged hopefully. “Do you like it?”

  I turned and smiled at them both.

  “I love it.”

  ***

  I stared at my phone with gritted teeth. Its silence was killing me.

  I had texted Zane as soon as the plane landed, and I still hadn’t heard a thing. He didn’t know exactly when we were arriving, true. I had been deliberately vague about that because I wanted the chance to surprise him. But the closer the big day became, the colder my feet had gotten. Could I even find where he was living? Did I plan to just stalk the beach until he appeared? And most frightening of all — would he really appreciate a drop-in visitor, when he’d so obviously discouraged me from visiting him in California?

  “It was in a box labeled ‘Kitchen,’” my mother said, her voice harassed. “You’d think that would be plain enough. Unless they lost it altogether…” A lock of her hair, curly and unruly as mine, though much shorter, had escaped from her hairband and was hanging in front of her eyes. “It must be around here somewhere. If not, we’ll have to shop tonight. I can’t manage without the utensils and the cookware!”

  I rose quickly from the kitchen floor, where I had been helping to unpack the dishes. “Shop tonight” was not a phrase I wanted to hear. We had only the one car still, and I had to get to the North Shore. Losing my wheels was not acceptable. “I’m sure it’s here somewhere,” I said with conviction, heading for the stack of boxes in the family room. “I’ll find it.”

  My dad, who had been carefully placing his favorite books on his favorite bookshelf, also stopped what he was doing and joined in the search. He surveyed my efforts with a grin. “Got other plans for the evening, I take it?”

  I grinned back, though I was pretty sure that the plans he was imagining involved different personnel than my own. My dad rarely acknowledged my situation with Zane, which was annoying; but I knew it was no reflection on Zane as a person. Even if the perfect son-in-law (a.k.a., Matt) were not in the picture, the unseen surfer boy’s existence fell into the same can’t-deal-with-it nether zone as my seeing the shadows. Out of sight, out of mind.

  But that was about to change.

  “I’m hoping to take the car and drive to the North Shore to see Zane,” I admitted. I looked back at my phone. “But I’m not sure when, yet.”

  My father’s face fell. He harrumphed. “Well, it can’t be too late. You’ll be jetlagged, you know. Midnight here will feel like three in the morning.”

  “I know, Dad,” I said automatically, then realized that wasn’t true. I hadn’t even considered the time change. What did it matter? I was seeing Zane today, and nothing was stopping me.

  I stared at my silent phone again, then shifted another box to read its label. Where was the stupid kitchen one my mom wanted?

  “Have you heard from him since we landed?” my mother asked, poking her head out from the kitchen.

  I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. So, she thought his silence was odd, too. “No,” I admitted. “I’m not sure where he is.”

  “Did he know we were flying in today?” she pressed.

  “Not exactly,” I said with a sigh. “I kind of led him to believe it would be tomorrow.”

  “Why’d you do that?” my dad asked, sounding surprised. He knew I didn’t play mind games with guys — something he appreciated in my mother as well, and had encouraged in me the second I hit puberty.

  “I wanted to surprise him,” I explained. “But now, I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.”

  My mother came fully into the family room. “Maybe not, Kali,” she said gently. “You still don’t know exactly what his situation is… it might not be fair.”

  My dad looked from my mother to me with a frown. “What the hell are you talking about, his ‘situation?
’ Does the boy want to see you or not?”

  I swallowed. I couldn’t believe we were seriously having this group conversation, when my dad hadn’t so much as mentioned Zane’s name in months. But I was glad that he remembered. And that he seemed to care. The truth was, no matter how regularly Zane sent his light and witty texts, I couldn’t rid myself of the cold, hard knot of fear in my stomach. The fear that keeping up a texting relationship from a distance, and his wanting to be with me as much as I wanted to be with him, were not the same thing.

  “Zane’s always said he wanted to see me when we both got back to Oahu,” I tried to explain to my dad. “He still says that. It’s just that… Well, when the chance to get together came up for real, when I offered to go see him in California, it was pretty clear he didn’t really want me to come.”

  My dad’s eyes widened. Both eyebrows lifted. “Well, why the hell would he?” he asked sharply.

  “Mitch!” my mother scolded, looking as horrified as I felt.

  My dad flinched, then looked wounded, like a little boy who has no idea what he did wrong. He looked from one to the other of us for a long moment before a light seemed to switch on. Then he smiled. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, honey,” he said apologetically, touching my arm. “I didn’t mean he wouldn’t want to see you. What I meant is, he wouldn’t want you to see him.”

  “And why not?” I demanded, still upset. He was making no sense at all.

  My dad looked back at me with equal confusion. “Well… hellfire, girl! The boy nearly died, didn’t he? He was in a car crash, had a coma. Most likely he was laid up in a bed, tubes coming out his arms, stuck using a damned bedpan. You think he wants a girl seeing him like that? You think he wants the likes of you within a hundred miles when he’s struggling to get out of bed, ambling around with an old man’s walker, letting a bunch of strange women poke needles in his butt?”