by Edie Claire
Maddie shut her mouth. Her emotions were running away with her. Too much, too soon. “I’m sorry,” she added, laughing at herself a little. “You’re very unlucky to be the first person I’ve run into here. There’s just so much stuff I’ve been waiting forever to say, and to ask. But I know you’re busy working. Is there any chance you could give me a ride into town? If not, I’ll be happy to pay anybody with four wheels to drive out and pick me up.”
Mrs. Nakama looked unsettled as she waved off the suggestion. She pulled out her phone and checked the time. “Of course we’ll get you into town! I can’t hijack the van that long, but Gloria’s out of school now. She can come get you.”
“Gloria?” Maddie repeated. “Baby Gloria?”
Mrs. Nakama smirked. “She’s seventeen now, God help us.”
Maddie blew out a breath. She herself might have grown up in the last fifteen years, but for Kai’s youngest sister, who had been born when they were eight, to do likewise seemed preposterous. “I don’t want to put her to any trouble. I can wait and go in with the tour later if I have to.”
Mrs. Nakama was already calling. “It’s no trouble. She’s trouble, but not you. You have someplace to stay already? How long are you going to be here?”
Maddie’s heart warmed. She was so damned lucky. “Just overnight. But no, I haven’t found anyplace to stay yet.”
“You’ll stay with Nana,” Mrs. Nakama announced. “She’s got room. She’ll be so happy. Should I tell her, or you want to surprise her yourself? She— Gloria?” Mrs. Nakama’s voice turned scary-mom in an instant. “Who’s that I hear talking? Where are you?”
Maddie hugged herself. Nana. Her precious, precious Nana was alive and well… and she was going to stay with her tonight! As it became clear that Gloria was in trouble with her mother for reasons unrelated to the requested ride, Maddie left her pack on the ground near the van and stepped away to give the mother and daughter some privacy.
The beach park at Hulopo'e looked different. There had been a parking lot, restrooms, and picnic benches when she left, but the whole park area was larger and fancier now, and there were more people both on the beach and in the water. But the changes were only superficial, and as she caught sight of the same stretch of sand on which she’d spent so many joyful hours splashing and playing, her feet began to itch abominably. The urge to kick off her flip-flops and go running straight out into the clear blue water was so strong it was almost overwhelming. “Patience, Maddie,” she begged. “Patience.”
She had never been very good at patience. In her mind she saw the same bay as it had appeared fifteen years ago. Kai was standing in the shallow water near the reefs, poised with a handmade spear. He could stand there motionless, just like that, seemingly forever.
Don’t you get bored? Maddie had whined.
No.
I don’t believe you.
No answer.
I’m not that hungry. Can’t we just go home and eat?
I’m hungry. Be patient! Sheesh.
There’s one.
I see it.
So go get it!
Don’t move! he ordered.
But if you stepped over there you could—
I’m fine.
She groaned. Will you just—
And then, always, he would spear a fish.
“Maddie?” Mrs. Nakama called.
Maddie whirled around, embarrassed. Exactly why she was embarrassed, she wasn’t sure. “Yes?” she replied.
“Gloria will be here in a couple minutes,” Mrs. Nakama said. “Keep an eye out for a red truck. She’ll take you to Nana’s house and then Nana will bring you over for dinner tonight.” She stepped in closer and her eyes grew suddenly moist. “I still can’t believe our little Maddie grew up into you,” she said fondly, leaning in to deliver another quick hug. “And that you came back to us. I’m sorry I can’t chat more now. I have to go; I have to run some people back over to the harbor to look for something they lost. But we’ll catch up over dinner. Okay?”
“That sounds fabulous,” Maddie agreed. “Thank you so much.”
Mrs. Nakama snorted out a laugh. In most women, any sort of snort would be unattractive, but her particularly merry take on the art could only make one smile. “Don’t thank me yet. Gloria’s in a mood — I caught her hanging out with that guy at the golf course again. Just don’t pay any attention to her. She’s doing that high school senior thing where the parents go from ‘Wah, my baby’s leaving home,’ to ‘God, get this child out of my house!’ You know what I mean?”
Maddie chuckled. “That bad, huh?”
Mrs. Nakama swore. “Worse than that. Chika was bad. Gloria’s…” She waved a hand in the air and shook her head. “There’s no words.”
Chika. Maddie did some quick math in her head. The Nakamas’ middle child would be 22 now. Maybe out of college, if she had gone to college. “How is Chika?” Maddie asked tentatively. The older sister was just three years younger than Kai, and although Maddie had known her well and even played with her sometimes, Chika had her own set of friends.
Mrs. Nakama smiled. “She’s good. She’s working in Honolulu now, but she visits every couple of months.”
“That’s nice.” Maddie hesitated. This was the perfect time to ask about Kai. It would almost be strange if she didn’t.
“Well, it looks like my passengers are ready,” Mrs. Nakama said, moving back toward the van where a flustered-looking young couple were being led by one of the boat crew. “I’ve got to go, but we’ll talk more tonight, all right? See you then!”
“See you!” Maddie called, her gay tone belying her disappointment at the missed opportunity. She watched as the passengers loaded up and the van drove away.
Patience, Maddie. All her questions would be answered soon enough.
She was tempted to run to the beach now and at least dip her toes in the water, but if Gloria had been “caught” at the nearby golf course at Manele, the Nakamas’ truck could roll up any second, and it would be foolish to prevail on Gloria’s good nature to wait around. Maddie’s memories of “the baby,” who had been all of two when she left, were positive. She remembered a sleeping infant and a cute, placid toddler who didn’t talk much, but was always ready with a smile. How difficult could the teenager be?
An engine roared. Maddie looked up to see a bright red four-door pickup tearing down the lane towards the park. Kicking up a storm of dust on either side, it made a wide turn in the parking lot and came to stop with a jerk six feet short of Maddie’s toes. The passenger window was half rolled down, and as the dust slowly cleared, the angry face of a very short teenaged girl became visible behind the steering wheel. The girl said nothing, merely glared, and Maddie stood silent a moment, watching her.
“So?” the driver bellowed finally. “If you don’t know who I am, go away! If you’re this chick I’m supposed to take to Nana’s house, then get the hell in!”
Chapter 3
Maddie got in. The truck started up with a fury before her seatbelt was fastened, and Maddie had only just managed to secure it when another truck came into view, at which point Gloria immediately slammed on the brakes, launching Maddie into said belt like a crash-test dummy.
“Sorry,” the girl mumbled, moderating the vehicle to a respectable speed. As they passed the oncoming truck and the drivers exchanged a wave, Maddie suppressed a chuckle. For Gloria, being rude to a stranger was a relatively minor infraction for which she willing to bear the consequences. Having another Lana'ian catch her driving recklessly in her dad’s truck was another matter entirely.
Maddie studied her young chauffeur and decided the girl looked very much like her older sister Chika. She was tiny in stature, with a delicate bone structure and fine, straight black hair. Both girls resembled their father, but whereas Chika had inherited their mother’s smile, Gloria had Mrs. Nakama’s spirit. You could see it in the spark of fire behind her eyes.
Maddie remembered well when Mrs. Nakama had been pregnant with G
loria. Maddie and Chika had been tremendously excited about the upcoming birth, and so had Kai, although in boyish fashion, he had attempted to hide his feelings. For some unfathomable reason the Nakamas had promised to let Chika name the baby if it was a girl and Kai if it was a boy. The family had been less than enthusiastic with the outcome, but five-year-old Chika was certain that her baby sister had the most beautiful name in the world.
Wordlessly, Gloria drove them from the beach up the long slope of cliff and onto the high, flat plateau that formed the center of the island. The wide, windswept plains of the plateau, from which the ocean was no longer visible, were a different world from the shorelines that surrounded them. The one paved road that meandered through the country was bordered on each side by a single line of Cook Island pine trees, which stood tall and unflinching despite their obviously artificial placement in a rolling, arid landscape covered with bunches of green grass, scraggy bushes, and short, scrubby trees.
For most of the last century, Maddie knew, these fields had been covered with pineapple plants. For almost seventy years, “The Pineapple Island” had been the largest pineapple plantation in the world. Before James Dole came on the scene in the nineteen twenties, “outsiders” had tried using the island for other things, like a ranch, and a mission outpost, and a sugar plantation; but nothing else ever seemed to work out very well. And eventually, neither did the pineapples.
Maddie looked out at the red dirt to see torn remnants of the old weed-choking black groundcover still sticking up from the earth as far as the eye could see. When pineapple farming ceased to be profitable, the island’s owners had turned to tourism instead — building the resorts that had employed her father — and the fields had been left to go fallow. The ecosystem had filled the void, as ecosystems did, with a variety of resilient wild plants. But although the available pickings might be acceptable to the imported axis deer and mouflon sheep that roamed the island, the leftover, torn-up, half-buried groundcover material made the land forever useless for grazing livestock.
It was a beautiful sight, nevertheless, to watch the wind rippling through the pale green grass with the darker mist-topped mountains beyond. Maddie had always wondered, as a child, why the later newcomers had so much trouble making the island work for them, when long before the first haoles arrived Lana'i was already home to twice as many as people as lived here now. Not that the island’s original inhabitants didn’t have their own problems — like humans everywhere, the Hawaiians on the various islands couldn’t resist fighting with each other. But without power, refrigeration, airplanes, or container ships, the first Lana'ians still managed to fish and grow their own food, build houses, raise families…
“So how do you know Nana?” the girl barked, breaking Maddie out of her reverie.
Maddie cleared her throat, which had become dry with the stirred-up dust. Gloria was talking to her. It was progress. “I used to live down the street from her.”
Gloria’s thin eyebrows rose. “Seriously?”
Maddie smiled. “I went to Lana'i Elementary for first grade through most of fifth. I spent a lot of time at Nana’s after school, and sometimes in the evenings, too, when my father worked late. Nana was always so kind to me. She took care of other people’s kids all day, and as far as I know, my parents never paid her a dime, but when I showed up on her doorstep lonely and—”
Maddie stopped. She was about to say “starving,” but that wasn’t true. She had never been starving. It was just that her mother wasn’t the greatest about remembering to keep food in the house, much less cook it, and when her dad worked evenings Maddie often did go hungry for a while. Nana must have opened her door dozens of times, at all hours of the evening, to find a little girl with an unkempt mass of red hair standing there looking embarrassed, fidgeting as she tried to come up with a new excuse for coming over. Always, Nana would usher her in with a smile and a hug, then chit chat with her as if she’d been waiting and hoping for Maddie to appear. No matter what Maddie actually said, Nana could always ascertain the real reason for the visit, which usually meant that Maddie soon found herself in the house’s tiny kitchen, wolfing down vienna sausages and eggs. After a while, Maddie stopped bothering with the excuses. Nana’s home became an extension of her own. Nana became her own.
“So you were one of Nana’s strays?” Gloria concluded, not unkindly.
“Yep,” Maddie confirmed. “Fleas and all.” Gloria’s use of the plural sent another ripple of worry through her. Of course Nana would be attached to many children. She had run a home day care center for decades. Maddie liked to think that she was special, but she needed to be realistic. Even if it hurt. “It’s been fifteen years since I’ve seen her,” she admitted sadly. “I’m afraid she may not remember me.”
Gloria snorted. Unlike her mother, her snort was in no way appealing. “Nana remembers everything,” she said somewhat spitefully. “She’s not that old.”
Maddie sensed there was a story behind the teenager’s tone. Perhaps one involving certain deeds that were witnessed by certain grandmothers and relayed to certain parents. Given the frown on Gloria’s face, Maddie declined to pursue it, and instead went back to looking out the window. The outskirts of the city were coming into view.
“So, you knew my mom and dad, too, then?” Gloria asked.
“Sure,” Maddie replied happily. Despite Gloria’s desire to be unpleasant, she was evidently enough of an extrovert to dislike long silences. “I knew your family very well. In fact” — Maddie weighed her options and decided to risk it — “I was at your house the day your parents brought you home from the hospital.”
Gloria’s face screwed up awkwardly. She said nothing.
“You were unbelievably tiny,” Maddie continued, “and you were wearing a little knit cap with a pink tassel on top. Your mom had you wrapped up in a bright yellow blanket, and your dad carried in that little stuffed dog he bought on Maui. I thought it was so funny that he’d gotten you a poodle, of all things! A white, fluffy poodle with a turquoise blue collar around its neck.”
“Puffles,” Gloria murmured. “Okay, that’s just creepy.”
Maddie laughed and gave a shrug. “Sorry. I’m afraid it was a pretty memorable day for me. There were never any babies in my family. My stepbrothers were preschoolers when we met.”
“So,” Gloria continued, sounding a little freaked out, “you were a friend of Chika’s?”
“Chika was three years younger than me,” Maddie answered. “I was more a friend of Kai’s. He and I were in the same grade.”
Buildings popped into view over the horizon, and Maddie could barely contain her excitement. A tingling warmth spread over her as she realized that Mrs. Nakama had been right. Very few small towns went fifteen years with no changes at all, but it seemed that Lana'i City, with its population of around three thousand people, had come pretty close. So far, everything looked wonderfully familiar. The city had been built in the nineteen-twenties to be a model plantation town, and as such it had been intentionally laid out with a rectangular green space in the middle and neat grids of residential blocks to either side, all nestled comfortably within the curve of the mountain ridge. Although the town had continued to expand throughout the plantation boom, the outskirts which they were approaching now, Maddie noted with glee, were in essentially the same place she remembered, with no signs of random sprawl.
She sensed that Gloria was staring at her. She turned.
“You,” the girl said heavily, “were a friend of Kai’s?”
Maddie blinked at the bizarre reaction. “Um… yeah. When we were kids. Why?”
“Like, what kind of friends?” Gloria demanded.
Maddie’s lips twisted. Why had Gloria said Kai’s name in such a weird way? “Like, how many kinds of elementary-school-age friends are there?” she asked in return.
“What I mean,” Gloria said with exasperation, “is were you, like, close? Would he even remember you, now?”
Maddie’s teeth gnashed. She d
idn’t know the answer to the last question, as much as she would like to. But she had no reason to lie about the first one. Heck yes, they’d been close. They had been best friends! That had been no easy feat, either, considering that they were of opposite genders in the height of the “cootie” years, and that she was a haole besides. Kai could have been teased for hanging out with her; he probably had been. But she had never heard him complain about it. Kai had always been one to do what he wanted, just like her. They’d spent time together because they enjoyed each other’s company; it was as simple as that. And yet, it wasn’t. Maddie had felt convinced they shared a special connection — like she understood him better than anyone else. That’s why she had been so certain that he would write back to her after she left Lana'i, certain that he would understand, if no one else did, how much she missed the island, and how upset she was at the way she had been made to leave it.
Clearly, she had been wrong about the cosmic connection thing. She had created expectations for an ongoing, long-distance friendship that Kai had obviously not shared. But that didn’t mean they what they had shared wasn’t special at the time.
“We were close,” Maddie admitted. “We were best buds, actually.” She looked out the window again, her spirits oddly diminished. The Buddhist temple looked just the same. That was nice.
“Has he seen you since you were ten?” Gloria pressed.
“No.” The houses were all very small, by mainland standards, but to Maddie they looked wonderfully normal. They passed an unkempt hovel with hoarded debris piled up waist-high in the yard, tumbled against a partially caved-in fence covered with “No Trespassing” signs. The house immediately next door, an otherwise identical cottage, was in pristine condition and surrounded by a finely manicured flower garden. Maddie’s spirits picked up a little.