“I mean about your passport.”
“Right.” I feel instantly sorry for the remark. “What did he say?”
“He doesn’t think it’s any of the usual suspects. Nobody’s been flashing money or anything like that.”
“That’s weird,” I say. “Maybe they’re playing it safe.”
“I don’t know,” Ben says. “I think we might’ve jumped to conclusions.”
I take a big sip from my can. A kind of dreadful emptiness overwhelms my stomach, a feeling that can’t be erased, not with beer or anything else. No matter what, I have to get out from under Pelochucho’s thumb. That much is clear.
“Ben,” I say. The beer can grows woefully light inside my hand. “I have something to tell you.”
He seems to know that this means bad news and keeps his eyes on the ocean. “What’s that?”
“I didn’t stay at La Estancia the other night while you were in the hospital.” I look at the side of his face.
He brings the beer can up to his lips and then down again, the red fur on his cheeks rising and lowering in a tight swallow. “Is that right?”
“I was with Alex.” As I say it, I wonder if maybe I’ve overestimated how much of a surprise this will be for Ben.
“You fuck him?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I turn my eyes away from his. Tears dump down my cheeks in a quick, watery way, as if from spicy food or chemical drops.
“I see.” He takes the last sip from his beer can and then crushes it inside his fist. “You go visit him yesterday?”
“Yes,” I admit. “I had to say good-bye. The other morning was weird.”
“What about the embassy? Did you even go there?”
“What?” I’m taken aback. Perhaps I shouldn’t be. “Yes, of course.”
“So the lost passport, that’s true, right? That really happened? That’s not some other lie meant to get you out of this fucking surf trip”—he raises his voice, still staring out to sea—“which you wanted to come on in the first fucking place! And which you can bail on, at any time, just by saying so! It’s your fucking life!”
I’m suddenly a child, screamed at by a well-intentioned but exasperated parent.
“My passport got stolen,” I manage to say.
“Sorry to yell,” Ben says.
I wonder if he’s suspected such a thing all along, or if my one confession has led to a viral breeding of jealousy and paranoia that’s taken over his entire mind in the last minute or so. My eyes are on the concrete roof below our feet, but I can feel his gaze settle upon me.
“Does Pelo know about this?”
“Pelo? What?” It’s the last question I expect from him.
“That whole song and dance outside our room this morning. ‘Do you know somebody named Alex?’ Blah-blah-blah … Is this what that was about? Am I the last person in El Salvador not to know who my girlfriend is screwing?”
My head does a cross between a shake and a nod. “No. Well, yes. That’s nothing. He heard me talk to Alex on the phone.”
“You’ve been talking to Alex on the phone?”
“He called here; I blew him off.” This all seems so tangential to the real reasons Ben should be mad at me. “That part is no big deal, seriously. But I did sleep with him that night you were in the hospital. We were drunk. A lot of weird emotions were going around. I’m sorry.”
“Look at me, Malia.”
I wipe at the sides of my now-puffy eyes with a trembling finger and turn toward him.
“I forgive you.” He’s not yelling anymore. He is impossibly calm.
“What?” Somehow, this is not at all the response I anticipated.
Ben rolls his eyes. “That’s right. If you want to be with Alex, if you want to stay in this country, if you want to bail on our plan and on us, then you’ll have to decide it for yourself. You’re going to have to pick up your bag and walk out. I’m not going to push you away.” His chest rises in a hard breath. “Frankly, I think it’s pretty lame that you’d put me in that position.”
My chin goes rubbery. The crying jag gets a second wind. Is Ben right? Did I confess only to force one of my doors closed, be made to either stay or go? I can’t bring myself to tell him about Pelo’s blackmail. I don’t want him to think that’s the only reason I came clean.
“That isn’t what I want. I want to go to South America with you. I’m just scared that it won’t happen.”
“I need to be away from you for a little while,” Ben says. “Can you handle that?”
I nod, careful not to ask him for more understanding than I deserve.
Ben goes down the stairs. I let myself cry in a way I’d not wanted to in front of him—with deep, wheezing, self-pitying gasps. The bedroom door slams. A second later, a vehicle enters La Posada. I rise to have a look, and see a pickup full of shirtless young men. It’s the pool diggers. Pelochucho hops out of the truck. I step back from the edge of the roof so that he won’t see me.
I can’t quite make out their words over the sound of the truck pulling away, but Ben and Pelo greet each other, then walk out. The rough shuffle of their rubber soles sounds against the street outside.
I stay on the roof for a while and watch the rest of the sunset—a clear-skyed affair of purple and orange that seems to mock me with all its beauty. Once it’s over, I go downstairs and wipe my eyes and nose with a handkerchief. Thankfully, Ben left his tobacco and I can pass the time with smoking and hand-rolling.
Neither Ben nor Pelo returns to the hotel. Perhaps they’re drinking together and speaking ill of me, of all women. Perhaps they’ll visit the whorehouse. The very thought unnerves me.
A whistle sounds from the street. I see Peseta outside; he’s not allowed to enter the courtyard unless he has potential guests in tow. He makes a gesture for me to come over.
I walk toward him, not sure what he wants.
“Take this.” He looks from side to side on the street, then hands me a small prescription bottle. “Sorry it took so long. My friend was out of town.” I nearly forgot about the Valium.
“Thank you,” I say, feeling ashamed for my suspicions the night before.
“And this.” He holds a few coins on the flat of his palm.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Your change.”
I pick a couple of the coins off his hand, then say, “You keep the rest.”
He nods and walks off.
I cross the courtyard, enter the bedroom, and swallow two of the pills. The drugs take effect in an instant. I try to confine my body to one side of the bed, hoping that Ben still wants to share it with me.
22
“Can I meet my mommy?” It was the last time I’d ever mention her so casually. My father had made lunch, then served us each a dish of ice cream. I must’ve been nine at the time.
His spoon jangled inside the empty bowl. With a hard exhale, he rose and carried all our dishes to the sink.
“Put your good shoes on,” he said. “I’ll make a phone call.”
Together, we took a silent drive. Up the Pali Highway and over the Ko‘olaus, we passed through clouds and a minute or two of rain. On the other side of the tunnels, the sky cleared. We had a view of the Windward Coast, looking down at both the Kaneohe and Kailua bays, the narrow spit of land between them. Though my young eyes must have traveled that road before, it would be my first lasting memory of that high panorama.
My father parked the car along a street in Kailua town and we climbed out. I followed him to the front door of the house, not understanding why we were there, and too scared to ask.
An older haole woman answered the doorbell. She was fat, with falsely red hair, wearing a frowsy muumuu. My jaw dropped open once I saw her, incredulous that she could be a possible relative of mine.
My father spoke to this woman in tones too hushed for me to understand.
She smiled and said, “Malia?” in a louder voice. “Come on in.”
I looked to my father for confirmation. He no
dded.
We followed the woman into her house.
“My baby!”
I was blindsided by another woman and smothered inside a tight embrace. The arms that wrapped around me smelled of mint and smoke.
“You’ve gotten so big.” The words were muffled into my shoulder.
I didn’t see my mother’s face until she let go and held me out at arm’s length.
“You look just like me,” she said.
This wasn’t true, but it made a nine-year-old me happy. She was pretty: dark skin, defined features, long, wavy hair. She wore all black clothes, including a small military-looking hat, which seemed stylish to me at that time. Behind her stood that older haole woman, along with a man I presumed was the woman’s husband.
“I’m your mama.” She smiled hard, grinding a piece of gum between her back molars.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said.
The other adults all laughed aloud.
My mother put her hands on my shoulders and looked up at my father, who stood behind me. “Can I be with her alone for a minute or two?”
I turned around to face him as well.
He nodded, not having spoken a word aloud since we’d entered.
* * *
My mother led me to a covered carport at the side of the house. She closed the door and leaned over my shoulder, placed her head next to mine. “Look!” She pointed with her index finger. “See that gecko?” The dark outline of a lizard shone against the off-white of the patio table.
“Watch this,” my mother whispered. With three quick paces, she crept up toward the table. Her flattened hand slapped down upon the lizard’s rear half. “See that!” she shouted.
I joined her at the table. The lizard ran away in a jerking blur.
“Look at the tail.” My mother pointed with her other hand. “He let it go!”
On the table, the small black length of reptile flesh—now free of the body—squirmed and twisted, forming curlicues and sidewinders. I squealed with delight.
My mother let out a loud, cackling laugh. She swept the tail away with the back of her hand and put an ashtray and cigarettes down on the table. “Have a seat.”
There was a refrigerator out in the carport, and she opened two Coca-Colas—a treat my father never allowed me. She smoked cigarettes while we talked, the gum grinding in her mouth the entire time. I remember seeing the name Kools printed on her cigarette pack. For years afterward, I thought that was a Hawaiian word.
She asked me unremarkable questions about school and hobbies, how often I saw my Tutu, her mother. If anything underhanded went on—any attempt to get dirt on my father or how he raised me, to leverage any kind of custody for herself—it was too subtle for me to notice.
I don’t remember the substance of the conversation so much as the soda and the cigarettes. But toward the end, she scooted her chair a bit closer to mine and put a hand on my knee.
“Listen to me, Malia. This is important.” Once she stopped smiling, thick lines showed at the sides of her face. “You’ll hear bad things about me as you grow up. Plenty of them are true; I’ve made mistakes. But keep this in mind: I love you very much, and I do the best I can. Okay?”
I nodded. She took me back inside and we said our good-byes.
* * *
I didn’t know it at the time, but the haoles were a couple of evangelical Christians who had met my mother through a church. She’d enjoyed a short period of recovery while staying with them. I never understood how my father knew that she was there, especially at the moment I asked to meet her.
That was the last time we spoke of her in my father’s house. The rest I picked up from rumors, eavesdropping, and a few candid questions at Tutu’s.
My father was good about keeping my mother’s mother in my life. I often spent Sundays and holidays in her Makiki home, eating big meals and visiting with uncles and cousins I knew moderately well. During middle school and high school, Tutu came to all of my volleyball games, and cheered louder than any parent.
In hindsight, my understanding is that my mother was a full-time alcoholic, and opportunistic in her use of other drugs, depending on the company she kept. My father supported her initial attempts to beat the disease. The final reason for my parents’ split, according to Tutu, was not addiction, but infidelity. My mother ran off with another man not long after I was born. Tutu described him as “one haole motorcycle man.” To my younger mind, that description conjured up an image of a part-human, part-machine lover straight out of science fiction—some bionic Caucasian cyborg with chrome arms and wheels for legs, able to steal my mother away faster than anyone could stop him. They spent time together on the mainland but eventually split up. My mother went back to Hawai‘i, but not back to her husband and child.
I’m almost certain that I spotted her a couple of times in my teenage years. Once was on my way back from surfing in Waikiki. Obviously drunk, a woman cackled loud near the far end of Kalakaua Street. I turned and saw a leathery-skinned, red-eyed Hawaiian lady. She hung from the arm of a shirtless haole with an ugly handlebar mustache. I was with friends, on our way back to the zoo parking lot, and insisted we cross the street.
The last time was downtown, near the bus stop on Fort Street. I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk, her back to one of the storefronts, lifting her head and then dropping it back down to her knees. She was older—her hair a tangled mess, lines so deep in the skin of her face that they looked like they’d been etched there with a chisel. She wore rubber flip-flops. Her toenails were long, yellow, and crooked.
I considered approaching her, maybe saying hello. For most of my youth, I’d been angry and resentful over her abandonment. Those emotions left me once I saw her in that state. What I felt then was pity, followed by something more like repulsion, or fear. I told myself that it wasn’t her at all—just another homeless woman. Again, I walked away and caught the bus elsewhere.
She died the summer before I went to college. Tutu and her side of the family tried to protect me from the details. I aggressively eavesdropped on their conversations. My uncles mentioned several times that she was found “half inside, half outside” a minivan left in Kapiolani Park. I heard that phrase repeated through closed doors and thin walls, as if there were some enigmatic explanation wrapped up inside it somewhere.
At nineteen, I took some comfort in that image: my mother half inside an icon of American domesticity and half on the street, caught between two worlds, being birthed by the automobile.
The official cause of death was listed as alcohol poisoning. As a college freshman in the months that followed, I would pay special attention to that topic during the mandatory information sessions. Almost everything I learned about it could be distilled down to this single fact: Alcohol poisoning has as much to do with copious drinking as it does with the lack of anyone close by to call for help.
My father sent me to the funeral with Tutu. Having prepared many years for the event, the family members shed few tears. Afterward, we went to the Makiki house for a long afternoon of eating and talking, less festive than normal.
My father picked me up later that night. More than any emotion related to grief or mourning, I felt excited about my first year of college, doubly ready to leave an island that suddenly seemed unbearably small.
23
In the morning, I wake feeling paralyzed, tethered to the bed. I summon the force to feel the spot beside me but can’t find Ben. I close my eyes again for a long string of minutes.
The ceiling fan spins and oscillates from above. The sound of Kristy’s broom scraping the tiles carries in. I rise, get dressed, and open the door. With one hand, I shade my face from the sun. Across the courtyard, Ben and Pelochucho sit in the dining room. Ben waves me over.
Still foggy and confused, I walk toward them. Has Pelo forgiven me as well? Did I only dream the events of the previous day?
“Morning, Chinita,” Pelo says.
“Sit down, Malia,” Ben says.
I
do as I’m told. “I’m sorry,” I say to both of them, “about yesterday.”
“It’s okay,” Pelo says. “Water under the bridge. Anyway, Chuck Norris and I have come up with a way to solve all our problems.”
Kristy drops a mug of hot milk and the jar of instant coffee in front of me. Ben must’ve ordered it on my behalf.
“Come again?”
“A midnight run,” Ben says. “Out to the cove at K Ninety-nine.”
“I’ve been talking to the guys here in town,” Pelo says. “There’s a shipment coming in tonight. They need a middleman.”
“What?” I ask, still confused.
“Or middlewoman, as the case may be.”
“The bales,” Ben explains. “The cocaine.”
I look each of them in the eye and wait for a punch line. They’re serious. I nod, then scoop a spoonful of instant coffee into the mug of warm milk.
“We all need the dough,” Pelo says. “Buying the rest of those houses out there cost me everything I had stashed. If this hadn’t come through, then I’d be sitting on a bunch of land and cement, and no cash to build with. It’s perfect timing.”
“We’ll make all our money back,” Ben says. “Pay off our tab here. As soon as your passport comes, we can get on the road.”
I take a sip of coffee but don’t say a word.
“And I’ll tear up your contract with SalvaCorp,” Pelo says. “Water under the bridge, like I said.”
“It’s a one-time thing.” Ben isn’t asking for my permission on this. “The crack trade here is the reason our money got stolen. It’s only fair we get it back through the crack trade.”
That’s an interesting bit of logic.
“I’ll give those guys the green light, then.” Pelo stands up. “Glad we had this talk. No worries about yesterday, Chinita.” He heads off to the shared toilets.
I sip desperately at my coffee.
“You okay?” Ben asks.
“Okay? Yeah. It’s just … happening fast.” I’m not sure what to say. This sounds like a terrible idea. But Ben is no longer angry. After what happened with Alex, the robbery, and the way I blew the hotel job, I hardly have the right to put my foot down.
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