by Edie Claire
“He did,” she answered, but with a new and funny note to her voice. “But not until he was twenty-eight. He married a war widow a little older than he was. She had a school-age son, and Emilio adopted him.”
At last, I found myself able to smile again. “That’s… really good to hear. He deserved to have a happy life.”
I felt Zane’s arm tighten around my shoulders. I looked at him, wondering why, but Tara’s next words stopped me.
“Kali,” she said heavily. “You’re using the wrong tense. As far as I’ve been able to tell, Emilio James Lam is still alive. And he’s living right there in Oahu.”
Chapter 21
My body felt stiff with tension as Zane drove us through a seemingly endless stretch of stoplights. The west side of Oahu, I was learning, had a character all its own. While the North Shore was both countrified and touristy, and the “town” of Honolulu was a sprawling jumble of high-rise apartments and multi-million dollar beachside estates, the area where Kalia and Emilio had grown up was clearly “where the regular people lived.” It was to here that Emilio had returned after the war and, according to Tara, eventually opened up an auto repair shop. She had given us an address, which appeared to be an apartment building close to his former business on the main highway through Waianae. Every stoplight brought us closer. Every second seemed an hour.
“You haven’t seen her again, have you?” I asked Zane.
He shook his head. “Not since before we got to the park. I’m glad Tara’s info came in time to spare Kalia any more effort right now. She seemed really weak.”
Neither of us understood her urgency. Emilio had lived on the island all this time and was now in his late seventies… it was hard to see how his quiet, law-abiding existence could create any kind of emergency situation for my father. But Kalia had been adamant.
And this time, I intended to trust her.
“I have no idea what I’ll even say to him,” I worried out loud. “I refuse to believe that he’s the danger to my dad. You think maybe Kalia is leading us to Emilio because he’s the only one who can help?”
“Maybe,” Zane said thoughtfully. “Whatever her plan was, we’re on our own now. You’re just going to have to trust your instincts and wing it. You can do it.” The car turned off the main highway. “Here’s the street. We’re almost there.”
I looked up the block. There was only one apartment building in sight. It was a modest, flat-roofed two-story, with an outdoor walkway along the second floor. As we drew closer, I could read the apartment numbers. “204,” I said aloud as Zane pulled into a visitor’s spot. “That’s his door right up there.”
We got out of the car, and Zane took my hand again. With his radiating warmth boosting my confidence, I steeled myself, and we mounted the stairs. I could do this. So what if I had no idea what I was going to do?
We reached the door. The paint was peeling here and there, and the iron railing on the veranda was rusty. But overall the building seemed reasonably well kept, and many of the neighbors had cheered up their section of the walkway with potted bushes and hanging baskets of flowers. Zane raised a hand and knocked sharply.
There was no answer.
After another moment, Zane knocked again. I cocked my ear to the door, but heard no movement inside. Seriously? I thought in disbelief. No, he had to be here. I raised a hand and knocked myself. “Mr. Lam?” I called, my voice distressed. “Emilio? Are you home? Please, if you’re here, answer the door. It’s important!”
At last, I thought I heard someone stir. But the sound wasn’t coming from 204. After a brief moment, the door to the next apartment creaked open, and a tiny Asian woman in her sixties stepped out onto the landing and studied us critically. “What do you want with Emilio?” she asked brusquely.
I thought fast. “We’ve just come to talk to him about a family matter. My name is Kali Thompson. I’m… a relative.”
The woman’s eyes widened. Her face gentled a bit, but she didn’t smile. “I’m Tessa,” she replied. “Emilio isn’t here. He’s in the hospital. Did you get a call from a social worker or something?”
Zane and I exchanged a glance. Or something.
“No,” I answered, as calmly as I could manage. “We didn’t know he was in the hospital. What… why is he there?”
Her eyes studied me another moment before she answered. Tessa was clearly a woman who took pride in looking out for her neighbors, and I got the feeling she did not trust easily. But she was perceptive enough to know that my concern was genuine.
“You know about his son?” she asked.
My heart skipped a beat, but I soon remembered what Tara had told us. Tessa wasn’t talking about my dad. “The son he adopted?” I asked tentatively.
Her brow furrowed. “I don’t know if he was adopted or not. All I know is he meant the world to Emilio. Sammy and him, they built up the garage together. Emilio sold it to him outright a few years ago, but there’s no making that man retire. He was up there every day just the same.” She sighed heavily. “I guess you haven’t heard, then. Sammy’s dead. Week ago today he up and died of a heart attack. No warning. Nothing. He was only 61. Seemed fit as anybody.”
Zane’s hand tightened around mine. No, I thought miserably. Poor Emilio. After everything he had been through… it was too much.
“It tore Emilio apart,” Tessa continued, her eyes hard. “Ripped his heart right out of his body, it did. His wife’s been gone for years now, but he never thought he’d lose his child. Who does? And happening when it did… he had a cousin, you know, in Hilo. No surprise about her dying — she was eighty-nine, after all — but still, two deaths so close. She and Sammy were the last family he had.”
She looked up at me questioningly. “At least that’s what he said. Over and over again, he said it. ‘Tessa,’ he wailed, ‘There’s nobody left. They’re all dead. Why am I still here? Why me?’” She shook her head. “He’s always been such a strong man, but this was such a blow, and such a shock… he was in a horrible state. I’ve never seen him like that. I’ve never seen anybody like that. He started talking gibberish — things I didn’t understand. About the war, and the work camp — he was a POW, you know. He was on and on about how he had cheated death once, and now it was claiming its revenge by taking Sammy away from him.”
She clenched her jaws tightly a moment, then fixed her gaze back on me. “So why is it he never mentioned you?”
“I don’t think he knows,” I explained. “I only just found out myself.”
Her thin eyebrows rose. “You should tell him, then,” she ordered. “If he’s still alive.”
My knees weakened, but Zane’s firm grip steadied me. “What happened?” I begged. “Why is he in the hospital?”
Tessa’s eyes remained hard, but I could see a glint of moisture beneath them. “Sammy’s funeral was three days ago. Emilio broke down in the middle of it. My husband and I brought him home, blubbering like a baby. Couple hours later we heard a thud next door. Like he’d fallen. He wouldn’t answer us and wouldn’t open up and finally I called the police. He was passed out cold — took a whole bottle of headache medicine. Over the counter, you know, but… It was bad. Ambulance got rerouted, took him to Queens. I keep calling, but they won’t tell me a damn thing beyond that. Privacy rules, you know, and I’m not family.” She shook her head. “He was still there when I called this morning. But that’s all they’ll tell me. That’s all I know.”
“Is Queens the big hospital across from the Punchbowl?” Zane asked, speaking for the first time and startling us both.
Tessa nodded. “That’s the one.”
“We’ll go see him right now then,” he announced, squeezing my hand.
Right now.
I got his drift. After giving a heartfelt thanks to Tessa, we got back into Zane’s car, drove out of the lot, and immediately began fighting all the same stoplights — this time in the opposite direction. There was no alternative. There was only one main road, and we were on it. And the
hospital, unfortunately, was all the way on the other side of Honolulu.
“Three days ago,” I echoed dully as we stared at yet another red light. The ocean was off to our right somewhere, but a rise of earth blocked my view. If it weren’t for the picturesque volcanic peaks to my left, I could be in downtown Cheyenne fighting the traffic during Frontier Days. My carefree hours with Zane on the beach seemed suddenly far away. “Three days ago was when Kalia first appeared.”
“I know,” Zane said. “I thought of that, too.”
“My dad isn’t in danger at all, is he? He never was. All along it’s been Emilio. It’s his life she’s been trying to save.”
Zane nodded, his gaze focused on the traffic — and also, I was sure, on the lookout for any more surprise visits from Kalia.
“I wonder if she feels like it’s her fault,” I said quietly.
“Like what’s her fault?”
“That Emilio and my dad are now living within minutes of each other, and neither has any idea that they’re father and son. She must feel partly responsible for that, even if she made the best decisions she could at the time. It isn’t right that neither of them should know. At least not anymore. It needs to be fixed.”
Zane smiled at me. “I think Kalia would agree with you. I think that’s why she reached out to you in the first place.”
And I almost failed her. I caught myself pushing my feet against the dash. We were moving at a snail’s pace. It was crazy-making. “I’m sure she’s right that finding out about my dad could help Emilio. But what is finding out about Emilio going to do to my dad?” I tensed even more. “How can I even bring up the subject when he won’t talk about anything supernatural?”
“You forget,” Zane said calmly, “That Kalia has been working on that, too. I don’t know how ghosts in dreams work, but whatever you tell him, I don’t think it’s going to come as a complete shock. He’ll believe you, Kali. And he’ll come to terms with the truth — however you found out. It will be easier for him now that we understand the circumstances: the fact that there was no deception. It was just three people doing the best they could in a very difficult situation.”
I was silent a moment, thinking about how, aside from the forgotten scrap of newsprint, all traces of Emilio Lam were absent from Kalia’s memory box. I assumed that she herself had torn out the page in her yearbook — the page her boyfriend had no doubt claimed as his own. I had also assumed that if she were actually in love with someone else, she would have saved letters to remember him by. But I had been thinking about the box all wrong.
The mementos I saw were not what Kalia had collected for herself. She would have kept her yearbook and any letters Emilio had sent, certainly a last love note sent from Korea. She had no reason to hide her past from the man she married, and he had no reason to be threatened by it. But my dad was another matter.
After Kalia died, it would have been my grandfather who took on the painful task of going through her things and deciding what personal mementos should be kept for her son. It wasn’t Kalia’s box at all — it was baby Mitchell’s. And with both Emilio and Kalia gone, my grandfather had every reason to conceal the truth from the boy he was determined to raise as his own. Of course he would not have kept old love letters, and of course he would remove the troublesome page from her yearbook. He would have disposed of the obituary as well if he had noticed it, which I was sure he did not. Albin honestly believed that my father would be happier if the past remained in the past.
And he probably was. Then.
Now, things were different.
“Thank goodness,” I gushed as we reached the end of the stoplights and pulled back onto the freeway. I turned to Zane. “What would I do, by the way, without your driving me all over this rock? I owe you at least two tanks of gas. And a bunch of rides back and forth to the North Shore — as soon as my parents get a second car, anyway.” I envisioned what he would be doing now if I were still back in Cheyenne, and I felt terrible. He would be out on the water surfing, that’s what. Not dodging crazy drivers in rush hour on H1. “I’m sorry about all this,” I apologized, feeling like a drag. “You should be out at Backyards today.”
His green eyes twinkled at me. “Nah. The swell dropped to nothing overnight. Today’s worthless. But even if it wasn’t, I’d never pass up the chance to help a beautiful damsel in distress — makes for too good an ego boost.”
I smiled sadly back at him. “Kalia was beautiful, wasn’t she? I almost couldn’t believe it when I saw her in the gardens. I’ll bet Emilio and Albin weren’t the only two men to fall in love with her.”
“I wasn’t talking about Kalia.”
I blinked at him. “Oh.”
He chuckled. “You’d better watch that self-confidence thing.”
“I am self-confident!” I insisted. “But I’m not beautiful. You kept calling me that before, too, and I didn’t believe you then, either.”
He looked at me sideways. “Are you questioning my taste?”
“Zane!” I protested with a laugh. “I’m not beautiful. I’m flat-chested and I have a big nose. Let’s be real, here.”
“I am being real. You said Kalia was beautiful.”
“She was!”
“Her ears stuck out a bit, and her front teeth were crooked.”
I knew he was toying with me, but I took the bait anyway. “She wasn’t perfect, but she was still beautiful!”
He smirked in triumph. “And so are you. Now stop arguing and help me look for signs to Queens Hospital.”
Despite Zane’s efforts to keep my spirits up, the remainder of the journey was as excruciatingly slow as its start, and my anxiety climbed. When at last we reached the hospital and hustled inside, the mere sight of its information desk set my heart to pounding. Had I gotten here in time? Would he still be alive? I snatched Zane’s hand in a death grip. “Sorry,” I squeaked, realizing what I was doing and loosening my hold a bit. “Bad flashback from Nebraska.”
He turned to me quizzically, but then his eyes softened with understanding. He reached an arm around my shoulders and hugged me to him, dropping an affectionate, impulsive kiss on the side of my head, through my hair. Though his lips never touched my skin, I could feel a searing heat, and I turned to him with surprise. “You kissed me.”
“Oh, crap!” he exclaimed, looking horrified. “I forgot. I mean no, I didn’t. That wasn’t a real kiss!”
I smirked. “If you say so.” His resolution was toast.
“Can I help you?” The question from the hospital volunteer brought me quickly back to reality. But I felt stronger, now. Zane was right. I could do this.
I stepped up to the desk. “We’re here to see Emilio Lam,” I said with authority. “He’s my grandfather.”
Chapter 22
We were standing outside the door to Emilio’s room when a nurse stopped us. She was a small, middle-aged woman with an interesting mix of facial features which could have been inherited from any combination of Asian, European, or Polynesian ancestors. Every time I saw a face like hers, I felt a little more at home in the islands. Her flashing dark eyes, however, were less than welcoming. “Are you here to see Mr. Lam?” she asked sharply.
“We are,” I answered, bracing myself for battle.
“What’s your relationship to him? Are you a relative?” she demanded.
“I am,” I said, my tone just as clipped.
To my surprise, the nurse responded with relief. “Well, that’s good. Maybe you can get through to him. Our hands are tied, you know. When a patient refuses treatment, there’s not a damn thing we can do — not as long as they’re of sound mind, which he obviously is. We’ve had the chaplain and social services both in to see him, but he’s having none of it. I’m glad they were able to locate you.”
“He’s… refusing treatment?” I repeated.
“From the minute he could talk,” she said with frustration. “And a fine thanks that is to the people in the ER and the ICU that saved his ungrateful—” Sh
e broke off and cleared her throat. “Listen, Miss…”
“Kali Thompson,” I supplied. “I’m his granddaughter.”
Her lips twisted. “So, he has no family, huh?” She shook her head. “Look, Miss Thompson, I don’t mean to be disrespectful of your grandfather. I’m sure he’s a fine man. But I’ve been through this before, which is why they assigned him to me. He’s suffered a huge loss, and he’s grieving. He’s angry and he doesn’t care what happens to him. Now. He will, in time… assuming he gets that time. But he’s not going to get it unless he pulls himself together ASAP and consents to dialysis.”
“Dialysis?” I croaked. The woman spoke quickly; I was having to work hard to take it in.
“That’s right,” she confirmed. “He’s in acute kidney failure, brought on by an overdose of acetaminophen. Other than that, he’s in great shape — better than a lot of men a decade younger, frankly. Odds are, his kidneys could heal just fine, but he’s got to have dialysis while they’re doing it. If he continues to refuse, he’s going to die. Period. Simple as that. You understand?”
I let her words sink in a moment. Then I nodded. “How long…” I began uncertainly, “I mean, how soon would…”
“He could be dead by tomorrow,” the nurse said without flinching, her dark eyes boring into mine. Then, without warning, her face softened. “That’s why I’m glad you’re here.” She opened the door for us and stepped back. “Best of luck to you.”
I gulped.
No pressure.
We stepped inside the room, and the nurse shut the door behind us. Zane squeezed my hand. “I think you should talk to him alone,” he whispered. “But I’ll be right here.”
I nodded. I let go of his hand reluctantly and moved toward the still figure in the near bed. The figure in the far bed, an obese white man in his thirties, was watching something on a laptop with his earbuds in. Both men seemed oblivious to our presence.
Emilio’s head was turned toward us on the pillow. But his eyes hadn’t moved when we entered. They were fixed on some random point in space. On nothing. Unlike the patient in the other bed, he was attached to no tubes or wires. He just lay there, staring.