At thirty-two, Joon is a secretary in a law office downtown, and she prides herself on her good sense. She understands Keaka will not leave Grace as long as the children are still living at home, and she has had her own dalliances in the years she and Keaka have been together. She once went an entire year without him, before running into him again by chance—he was at her favorite club, waiting for her it seemed—and falling back into old habits.
She has, at times, wondered how long their affair can last, the roller coaster of on and off and on again, but by now they’ve spent more than thirteen years together, and at times she wonders if they will continue like this for the rest of their lives. In more sober moments, she hopes to find a man who wants to marry her, or whom she wants to marry, and then she will drop Keaka forever, and he will understand what it feels like to need, not just desire.
If pressed, she would admit she cannot picture this future husband of hers. She cannot even create the smallest details of his face because, for her to love him, he would have to have Keaka’s mouth, and if his mouth, then why not his eyes and nose and the curve of his brow line? And this man—this future husband—would need to dance with her as Keaka does, holding her so tightly that each breath is pained. He must make her breakfast like Keaka does, remembering she likes her eggs over easy with fried onions and cold rice. And he would have to make love to her as Keaka does, sometimes roughly, with the old excitement of their youth, and sometimes with such gentleness she yearns to cry. Sometimes she feels sorry for this future husband of hers, who will always be compared to Keaka and found lacking, and having felt pity, she then is content again to be with Keaka.
She is lightly running her fingers along his bare arm when his cell phone rings. She sees the caller ID: Grace. He moves to turn the phone off, but Joon rolls away from him. “Just answer her,” she says. Her daydreams have been interrupted, and now she wants to get on with the realities of the day.
Joon can hear Grace’s voice blasting through the phone: “Do you have the kids?”
Keaka turns down the volume. “No, I at work. Why I go pick ’em up?” He digs his free hand under the covers and rests it on Joon’s naked hip. She doesn’t brush him away. As he tells Grace to check with her mom, his hand crawls along the curve of Joon’s hipbone, toward her pubic area, to the edge of her hair. She pushes the blankets off her naked body, shuffling the crisp sheets.
“You wen tell ’em go Tūtū’s house, yeah?” Keaka asks. He nestles his fingers in the folds of Joon’s labia. She is already wet. He strokes her softly. Keaka’s probing fingers, the daring of their affair, even Grace’s muffled voice on the phone have conspired to turn her on. Joon arches her back.
Suddenly, Keaka stops. He pulls his hand away and wipes his fingers, unthinking, on the pillowcase. Joon slaps his stomach, annoyed.
“Sarah?” he says. “Da girl missing?”
Joon pauses, sorry for slapping him. She knows how devoted Keaka is to his children, the kind of father he is. She can hear the worry in his voice.
The children are the one area of their affair that does not please Joon. Even when she dismisses Grace in her mind, Joon cannot remove the children. She feels, from a distance, an affection for those children, Keaka’s children. Sarah’s big and wondering eyes; John-Boy’s aloofness, like his father, that one. If she were allowed, Joon would love them as she loves Keaka. She would claim them as her own. They are that beautiful.
Now they are missing, or Sarah is missing, and Joon can do nothing because, in the end, she is just the woman with whom Keaka is having an affair. She is neither friend nor aunt. She is no mother figure. She is nothing.
Keaka springs from Joon’s bed. He tries to dress quickly, hopping to pull his jeans over his hips, and the phone jiggles between his shoulder and ear.
Joon is watching him, questioning with her furrowed eyebrows. He looks at her apologetically. He shakes his head, refusing to answer her implied questions. “I gon call you soon,” he promises.
Sarah and John-Boy always walk the long way to their grandmother’s house because going that way with Robert is better than taking the shortcut by themselves. Robert’s house is on the same side of Waiʻalae Avenue as their middle school, so they skip the guarded crosswalk and wait to dart across Waiʻalae when they reach Robert’s. From there, they cut over to Wilhelmina Rise.
The added benefit of walking Robert home is that Gordon Yu, a boy in Sarah’s grade, lives across the street. Gordon’s mom picks him up from school, but she always runs late, so usually she is parking her minivan, Gordon safely ensconced inside, just as Sarah and John-Boy reach Robert’s house. If Sarah hurries the boys slightly in their walk home, she can be passing Gordon’s house just as he climbs from his mother’s car. And Sarah can wave at him, perhaps pause for a brief chat about homework or P.E., before her brother pulls her away.
Gordon’s house is painted a delicate yellow, the color of the wine Sarah’s mother sometimes drinks with dinner. Sarah imagines that such a yellow would taste sweet and lemony all at once. She wonders if Gordon, too, might taste this way. Robert pulls on Sarah’s ponytail. “I asked you what you’re thinking,” he says. She looks at him blankly. Have he and John-Boy been talking to her all this time?
“Leave her alone. She’s tired.” John-Boy smiles at her, that small, secret smile, the one that says he knows what she’s thinking and won’t tell, and Sarah smiles back.
Robert shrugs. “Beach tomorrow?”
“Yeah, if I no need go Christmas shopping with my mom.” John-Boy makes a face, and Robert chuckles.
“You should see her.” Sarah pretends to carry a stack of boxes in her arms. “I think they’re for her, not us, but.” The boys laugh.
John-Boy steps toward the curb, and Sarah stands beside him. Robert waits to watch them cross, which is part of the routine. Sarah looks down the street, toward Gordon’s house. Mrs. Yu is climbing into the car, turning on the engine, preparing to back out of the driveway. Sarah feels her stomach sink. Mrs. Yu is later than usual, so no sightings today. She inches the car backward until her bumper is in the street, and then she pauses to see if any traffic is coming. Sarah spots a low-riding silver Honda come speeding off the highway and onto Waiʻalae. She wonders if she can stall the boys until Mrs. Yu returns from picking up Gordon. Sarah turns to look at Robert, to ask him about the beach or eighth grade or anything, only to stay rooted there for a few more minutes until Gordon appears.
“My side is good. Let’s go!” Sarah hears John-Boy call. He tugs her hand. She means to tug back, to hold him, but her fingers slip through his. The brake lights on Mrs. Yu’s minivan light up red, and the vehicle bounces with the suddenness of its stop. The speeding Honda careens around the minivan’s bumper. It doesn’t slow. John-Boy’s hand is no longer in Sarah’s.
She should yell at her brother or grab his cotton shirt or throw herself in the way of the car, but all she can do is watch it curve around Mrs. Yu’s minivan. Then, before she can finish turning her head toward the street, she hears a soft thump and knows, without looking, that this is the sound of her brother’s body bouncing against the Honda.
The problem, Grace realizes, is that she remembers everything and Keaka nothing. When they lie in bed at night, without touching, neither reaching to hold nor speaking to the other, Grace lists the things Keaka has forgotten, as if in tallying her husband’s erasures she might better rebuild the memory of their son. Grace knows that Keaka no longer recalls his drive to the children’s school, nor her phone call to him as he arrived in the parking lot. He has no memory of the hospital, no vision of the tubes that wound like complicated piping around the still body of John-Boy. Keaka does not remember the next morning when John-Boy died, nor the funeral the following week when Grace watched Keaka absently greet his coworkers and friends at the service, as he shook hands and allowed his cheek to be kissed. All the time he looked at their friends and family members—the people who had populated their lives for years—as if they were strangers and his
own actions were unrecognizable to him. He seemed to float blankly, while she was overwhelmed by everything, the sight of tuberose lei draped over the casket, and the apple scent of styling oil in John-Boy’s molded hair, and the stiff feel of her son’s earlobes, carefully reconstructed and slick as plastic.
Grace thinks Keaka has forgotten her, too. She wants him to look at her, to recognize her body, even as it becomes lighter, dropping off her like layers of fabric. And her skin, always pale, takes on a bluish transparency that frightens her. Keaka says nothing. He remains silent when the food on her plate goes uneaten, and when she shakes at night—not from cold or crying, but because her body has taken to shaking and she no longer controls it. Keaka refuses to see her, refuses to touch her. She no longer exists for him.
When the evening news describes the silver Honda, offers sketches of the two teenagers behind the wheel, Keaka stares blankly at the television screen. He seems incapable of connecting those men, that car, with the tragedy in his life—their life. Their son.
One day Grace overhears Keaka at the front door. He is speaking to another man, both their voices hushed, though the other voice—the unfamiliar one—is laden with grief and Keaka’s is blank. Grace steps into the hallway. From here she can see the front door, and she recognizes the black dress shoes, the blue uniform. A policeman. She waits, leaning against the hallway wall, pressing her cheek against one of the children’s drawings, which was taped to the wall years ago and then left there.
The policeman is saying the young men have been captured. Plenty of witnesses will help put them behind bars. Grace feels a sudden surge of rage. She wants to scream at the officer, at the boys, at the unfairness of the world. She steps toward the door, but then she hears Keaka: “Too bad, yeah,” he’s saying to the officer. “Kids nomo drive careful.” He sounds lost, as if speaking out of a fog. Grace steps back into the hall’s shadows again, her anger drained. Her husband is the voice of fog, she realizes, and as if in echo, the trade winds shift and volcanic ash blows from Big Island to Oʻahu and the vog hangs in the air.
At night, when Grace and Keaka lie together without touching or sleeping, they listen to Sarah cry. Sarah shows no emotion during the day—she is her father’s daughter in that way—but at night, when she thinks she is alone, her desolation is tangible. Grace can bear it—can bear to share Sarah’s grief in silence—but Keaka seems tortured by their daughter’s sadness. He tosses and turns. He grips his pillow tightly to his ears, and still the crying continues. At dinner, two weeks after the funeral, he announces, “Nomo crying in dis house.” He says this firmly, setting his fork down noisily on his plate. He doesn’t look at Sarah, but at Grace, and Grace stares back at him.
At first she thinks to argue: Who is he to make an announcement such as this? Who is he to direct the progress of their mourning? But then Grace looks at their daughter. Sarah is pushing a piece of chicken from one end of her plate to the other. Her silence is dense, her body taking on the same slightness as her mother’s. Perhaps Keaka is right. Perhaps a moratorium on crying is what Sarah needs.
“Nomo crying,” Keaka says again.
Grace holds his gaze. She nods. “No more crying,” she repeats.
Sarah says nothing.
Later that night, lying in bed, Grace is unnerved by the silence. The trade winds refuse to stir, leaves are moored to their trees, the neighborhood dogs have all crawled under porches and fallen asleep, and the cats have stalked off to find a different mate worth howling over. In the far distance, if she listens closely, Grace can hear the monotone buzz of traffic on the freeway. The night is heavy, suffocating. The vog sits immovable. In the silence, she wonders if Keaka misses their daughter’s grief, if the sound of her crying was a reminder to him that he was still alive.
Sarah learns to tell the story the same way every time. The same pauses, the same lift of her voice at the part where her parents show up at the hospital, the same embarrassed glance downward when she describes telling Robert to call 911. She can recite the facts with minimal emotion, slowly, looking her listener in the eye: a cousin, a friend, and later, college roommates, new boyfriends. Over and over, the same small hitch in her voice when she says, “The car came out of nowhere.” The same little tug on her right earlobe when she recounts riding in the ambulance.
“The story can be summed up in three words: hit and run.” This is how she always opens. She hopes the lead-in conveys how John-Boy’s death was completely unromantic, anticlimactic, dull. By retelling her story, she emphasizes the quotidian attributes of her loss. Who hasn’t witnessed a fender-bender? Or felt sadness? Or despised the antiseptic smell of a hospital waiting room? She wants her listener to nod in recognition while she speaks. But she also hopes her audience finds her story completely incomprehensible.
She hates that John-Boy died in a hit-and-run. He was worthy of something grander, more impossible, more beautiful. The fact of his death is plain, and in its plainness, his death becomes real. At night, when Sarah cannot fall asleep, she dreams up better and more flamboyant fatalities for her brother: shark attack, helicopter crash in Mākaha Valley, kidnapping, being run over by an airplane taking off from Hickam Air Force Base (she finds the military adds a certain level of national intrigue), fatal head injury while surfing, skydiving (this one she has returned to often; she is fascinated by the idea of her brother shooting through space like a star), submarine failure, mine collapse, and a house fire into which he runs to save a young girl. Most other modes of death strike her as comparatively hopeful and lovely. She wishes he had died differently. She wishes anything except “the car came out of nowhere.” But mostly she wishes John-Boy wasn’t dead.
While Sarah completes her homework, Grace hovers nearby. In the year since John-Boy’s death, Grace has become a moth, forever fluttering through the house, attracted to the light of John-Boy’s memory. “Remember when he won this essay contest?” she says aloud as she dusts a small trophy that remains on a shelf in the family room. Sarah looks up from her homework and nods even though her mother doesn’t turn to look at her. Sarah does remember when John-Boy won that contest. He wrote about the historical significance of Waikīkī to the ancient aliʻi. He was only in seventh grade.
Grace has given away much of his clothing to the Goodwill, and his baseball equipment was gifted to the school, but the trophies, the unfinished homework, worksheets with gold star stickers circling his name, his pillowcases: these items are treasured, dusted, wiped down with care, and neatly laid to rest on shelves throughout the house. “He was such a good student,” Grace sighs as she sits down on the couch to fold laundry, always in mid-conversation with an invisible companion.
Sarah’s schoolwork also draws comments about John-Boy: “John-Boy never had to learn about relative pronouns.” “John-Boy excelled at math.” “John-Boy loved American history.” Sarah understands that she, in life, will never measure up to her brother in death, and this seems right and good. Sarah comes to think of her brother as a sun. Everything he did shone with excellence.
After dinner, Keaka sits down next to Sarah at the kitchen table for their evening ritual: pre-algebra homework. This past week, though he has not slept at home, and he and Grace are barely speaking, he has remained late each evening to be with Sarah. She recognizes the devotion on her father’s part, even if she doesn’t understand why he cannot show this same tenderness toward her mother.
As usual, Sarah works through as many of the math problems as she can and then shows the rest to her father. Patiently, he explains how to solve the first of the unfinished equations. “You need divide on bot’ sides da equals sign,” he says. “What kine number you need?” Sarah smiles down at her homework. She loves the way her father’s pidgin contrasts with his acute understanding of mathematics. For years, this duality reminded Sarah of a caterpillar: seemingly simple, but within itself something beautiful and grand.
“Three,” she says, taking the pencil from him. She can feel him watching her intently. She can’
t remember John-Boy ever receiving this kind of attention from their dad. Keaka went to John-Boy’s baseball games, school events, even teacher’s meetings, but he never had the same patience with his son as he does with his daughter. Sarah almost feels undeserving of his interest, and she wishes he spoke of John-Boy more.
“Good. Now what you get?”
“Four. So x equals four?”
“Yes! Das it!” Her dad’s excitement is expansive. Its energy swallows her whole.
“I get it now.” She reaches her arms around his waist and squeezes, and her dad kisses the crown of her head.
“You like I stay watch you?”
“No need, Dad,” she says, though she knows he likes to sit with her.
“You sure?” He makes no move to leave the table. She wants to forgive him for his attention. Like her mother, he tends to stay close these days. But Sarah feels frustrated with him. Her old excitement in him is diminished. The promise she once felt he possessed is gone. He has put on weight, become roly-poly in the middle, lost much of his hair. His eyes are lined with tiny creases, his once-illuminating grin has been condensed into a tight smile. He seems to crawl through life. She doesn’t need him now as she once did.
“I’m fine,” she says, bowing her head over her homework. Eventually he rises and leaves her in silence, and then she is sorry for dismissing him as she has.
An hour later, as Sarah brushes her teeth before bed, she hears her parents talking in their bedroom. Grace is putting away the folded laundry. Keaka is watching. “John-Boy used to finish his homework before ten p.m.,” Sarah hears her mother say.
This Is Paradise Page 11