by Edie Claire
“Calm before the storm,” Zane murmured.
I studied his too-serious face again. I really didn’t like what all this weirdness was doing to him, and if it wasn’t a matter of life or death I would make him cut it out right now. “Let’s take a walk,” I urged. “We can show Tara and Kylee King Kamehameha’s summer cottage.”
Zane didn’t argue with me, but the zombie-like way he walked beside me across the grassy lawn was less than reassuring. I purposely moved away from him a little, just so he couldn’t cheat and start viewing again while I wasn’t paying attention. We both loved Moanalua Gardens, which was blessed with an abundance of happy shadows including some from my own family, but I couldn’t focus on them now.
We left my parents to finish up their dessert in private while the four of us headed off at a brisk pace, trying to wake up our foggy brains. “I think you should text him again,” Kylee suggested to Tara. “It’s been long enough and he obviously liked you. He didn’t mention having a girlfriend, did he?”
Tara frowned. “It wasn’t like that! We didn’t talk about—” She looked uncomfortable. “Look, I don’t know whether he has a girlfriend. For all I know he has twenty. I really don’t care. We got along really well yesterday, but it wasn’t about that. It was like, I don’t know… we were kindred spirits, or something.”
Kylee arched an eyebrow. “Kindred spirits?”
“Oh, shut up,” Tara snapped irritably. “We just think alike, that’s all. We understand each other. Have similar interests.”
“Whatever floats your boats,” Kylee fired back. “Just text him again, will you?”
Tara glared, but pulled out her phone. “How about, ‘We’re heading out to the South Shore — you out here anywhere?’”
“Perfect,” I agreed. “Friendly without being stalkerish.”
Tara started texting.
“It’s so frustrating we can’t get more out of the stupid jersey!” Kylee moaned. “I was sure it would help us.”
I looked at Zane, but he didn’t look back at me. His eyes were on the ground. “Zane!”
“What?” he asked innocently.
“Just checking,” I said with relief. He had been as annoyed as I was about the jersey. We had experimented with it at length, but all it had earned us was a pain in the head. He got nothing unless he was also touching me, and then the vision always began the same way — with a pang in his left temple. Every time I made contact with the baby-blue fabric I felt like my skull was splitting open. From there, the same drowning sequence began, and although Zane was willing to go through the whole thing and see where it led, he had blacked out at the same end point I had reached and then found himself back in the present. We had learned absolutely nothing.
“I have to check again,” Zane said firmly, sitting down as we reached a bench near a meandering stream. “It’s been almost twenty minutes now.”
I sat down and settled against his side while Kylee and Tara walked off to explore the rest of the gardens. I looked out over the pleasant greenspace around the famous Hitachi monkeypod tree, where happy shadows cavorted in equal measure with shouting, running, living children enjoying their last full week of summer. To see what I was seeing when I could think of nothing but the pall of death hanging over Makani’s head seemed so surreal… and so unfair.
We were all so incredibly anxious to act, to do something, that we were sure the endless hours of waiting would drive us mad. But though he searched and searched, Zane did not see Makani. And when Kylee returned, she reported seeing no ghosts. Makani had not answered Tara’s texts, nor had he picked up his phone when she broke down and called him. My mom and even my dad, who had taken a rare personal day for the occasion, spent their time scouring the internet and making calls trying to find out if Makani had any media events or public appearances scheduled that could — at the very least — give Zane a couple hours off. But none of us knew where the surfer was. All we could find out was that although he shared an apartment somewhere in Honolulu with a cousin, he claimed he was “almost never there,” since he had friends and relatives all over the islands and surfed couches as much as water.
By mid-afternoon, we were all in a such a stupor that even taking turns jogging around the lawn couldn’t shake the cobwebs from our brains. It was just too quiet. Too peaceful. Too sunny.
The calm before the storm.
When the text finally came, I thought that Tara was going to pass out. The four of us were walking aimlessly across the lawn for the twentieth time when she stopped cold, pulled the phone out of her back pocket, stared at it, and swayed on her feet. “It’s him,” she said breathlessly.
“What does he say? Where is he?” Kylee demanded.
Tara shook her head. Her hands were trembling. “He says, ‘Guess what? My dad thinks you’re right.’” Her hands fell back to her sides. Her eyes closed.
No one said anything for a second.
“Well, what the crap does that mean?” Kylee shrieked. “Tell us!”
Tara drew in a long, shuddering breath. I was about to reach out a hand and steady her when she opened her eyes and smiled a little. “It means he told his dad about The Plan. Makani loves what he’s doing and all, but he really does wish he could go to college, and I told him he doesn’t have to completely put his brain on ice. I was encouraging him to enroll at UH as a part-time student and take at least one class at a time online. He has enough downtime that he could do it, even if he is racing all over the world. He never even thought about it, but now he has, and I guess his dad agrees with me that he should go for it.”
The rest of us looked at each other. “That’s nice,” Kylee said flatly. “Now where the crap is he?”
Tara was already typing. “I’ll ask.”
“His dad,” Zane echoed thoughtfully. “His parents still live in Waialua. I’m sure of it. He told you before that his mother was on the Big Island taking care of his aunt, but if he’s with his father, he could be on the North Shore right now.”
“Or his father could be with him in Honolulu,” I pointed out.
“True,” Zane agreed.
“Baldy!” Kylee screeched.
She pointed to nothing, and Zane’s gaze snapped immediately to the same spot. After a moment, they looked at each other. “What’s that way?” Kylee asked.
Zane looked back at the highway that ran near the park, seemingly to get his bearings. “Waialua,” he murmured.
“What are you seeing?” Tara begged.
“The bald ghost with the surfboard was standing right there, looking at us and pointing,” Kylee explained.
“Then Makani is in Waialua?” Tara breathed.
Zane shook his head. “All we know is that he pointed vaguely in the direction of the North Shore. But if he has a gift for timing—” His eyes suddenly shifted to a new location. I looked at Kylee and saw her staring at the same place.
In the next second they both shifted into action.
“Let’s get your parents and go, Kali,” Zane said. “Makani must be in Waialua!”
“About time that guy made himself useful,” Kylee said as we all set off at a jog.
“Baldy?” I asked.
“No, Jabba!” Kylee answered. “Jerk shows up just long enough to nod his head, and even then, he’s got to do it with an attitude. Like we’re all stupid to even need his help! Where does he get off, anyway? After trying to scare us away, when we’re on his side! If you ask me, he’s the stupid—”
“Kylee!” Tara ordered. “How about we play nicely till we don’t need each other anymore?”
Kylee muttered something under her breath and kept moving, and I said nothing, knowing that Tara was right. But secretly my sympathies were with Kylee. I’d had more than enough of bully ghosts with bad attitudes.
My parents sprang into action with us. They got into my dad’s car and we piled into Zane’s, which I insisted on driving. Zane didn’t argue, since we agreed that he should
try to zone in on Makani’s location while we were en route. Waialua was a mostly residential area right next to Haleiwa, and he wasn’t familiar with any of its side streets. But if Makani and his dad were eating out in Haleiwa or walking around on any of the main drags, there was a chance Zane could spot them.
Tara sat in the back seat with her phone in her lap, and every few miles she would let out a frustrated sigh. Unfortunately, Makani’s burst of inspiration for communicating via cell phone had come and gone. She had written him back with a simple “That’s great!” expecting to engage him in a longer conversation. But instead he had gone quiet. Her later, “So, what are you up to today?” still hung out there unanswered.
Despite our initial enthusiasm, our drive to the North Shore proved to be as tense and endless as the rest of this accursed day. “Still no sign of Makani?” I asked as Zane pulled his hand off my knee, where it had been resting while he remote viewed as I drove.
He stretched his arms and legs as much as possible in the small car and looked at me with still-bleary eyes. “No,” he answered with disappointment. “He’s probably just hanging out at his house. But the good news is, he’s not too likely to go in the water. The swell they forecast is starting to come in, but so far it’s just little stuff. The people out now are only goofing off. Beginners. Stand-up paddlers. A few locals who haven’t been able to get to town and are dying to surf on anything. You know.”
I didn’t know. Not really. But I took his word for it. Still, as glad as I was to think that Makani was in no immediate danger, I couldn’t stand the thought of another day like this one. Besides, had the ghosts not sent us here? Now?
Kylee screamed. Zane made a noise and jumped as well, and the car swerved toward the centerline as I startled, allowing my hands to shift on the wheel. “Don’t do that!” I ordered, trying to calm my racing heart as I plastered my palms in the ten and two o’clock positions and pulled the car back into place again. Thank goodness my parents were ahead of us — I could only hope they weren’t looking out the rearview mirror at the time. That kind of grief I didn’t need.
“I’m sorry,” Kylee squeaked. “But I couldn’t help it! The old woman ghost was right in front of the windshield! I mean, what was she thinking? If Zane or I was driving we would have run off the road for sure!”
My teeth gritted, but I said nothing. Kylee had conveniently forgotten that I committed vehicular shadow-cide on a daily basis.
“Well, what did she do?” Tara asked.
“Nothing helpful,” Zane answered heavily. “She just looked upset, as always.”
“She looked completely beside herself,” Kylee elaborated. Then her voice lowered. “I think she was trying to tell us to hurry.”
Oh, no. No, no, no…
My foot pressed down on the accelerator. Then I realized what I was doing and eased up again. We could only get to the North Shore so fast. There was only one two-lane road here and when traffic was heavy it went the speed it went. We would get there when we got there, and not a moment sooner. The car felt hot. Beads of sweat began to break out on my forehead.
“I’ll take another look around Waialua,” Zane said, putting his arm across the seatback and resting his hand on my shoulder this time.
“I’m going to call him,” Tara announced. But within seconds I heard her phone plunk down in her lap again. “He’s not answering,” she reported miserably. “I swear I think he only looks at the thing when he feels like it, and keeps it on silent the rest of the time. Which isn’t a bad way to live, really. But—”
She broke off her next thought, leaving the words “to live” hanging awkwardly in the air. I couldn’t see her face and was afraid to take my eyes off the road, but I thought I heard her gulp a bit.
All of a sudden Zane straightened and opened his eyes. “I just saw Lacey and Matt!”
“You did?” I thought he was probably mistaken until I remembered Lacey’s earlier text. “Oh, right! Where?”
“At Ali’i Beach Park in Haleiwa,” he explained. “They were just walking out from the parking lot. Lacey has a surfboard with her! She told me she used to go surfing with her brother and his friends, but that she hadn’t been out in a long time.”
“Well, good for her,” I thought out loud. It seemed she was getting some quality time with Matt after all.
“I know they’re not who I’m supposed to be looking for,” Zane said more soberly, “but it’s nice to find something. Now I know why the handlers of those drug-sniffing dogs plant some goods every once in a while, just to keep up morale.”
“You so totally deserve a dog biscuit,” I said with a smile, trying to encourage him further. His eyes looked weary, drained. He had been stressed enough before, but the appearance of the suicidal old woman had frayed all our nerves even further. And I knew that Zane probably felt at least twice as strung out as he was willing to let on.
I fought the urge to floor the accelerator again. We still had at least ten minutes to drive.
“I’d better do a full sweep again,” Zane said determinedly. He settled back in his seat, and only I heard his quiet sigh.
I wondered if what he was doing made his head hurt. I wondered if Makani would ever text Tara back. And I wondered if the old woman ghost would have taken the risk of running us off the road if the famous surfer was doing nothing but sitting on his dad’s couch eating burgers and watching television.
Zane jerked upright. His eyes were fixed wide open, staring at the road ahead.
“Makani is at Ali’i Beach Park right now,” he announced. “And he’s headed for the water.”
Chapter 22
We piled out of the cars, and Zane raced to unhitch his board from the roof rack.
My heart pounded. “Zane,” I pleaded, sounding shrill and panicked and nothing like myself. “Do you have to take the board out? You’re practically a zombie right now!”
He shot me a quizzical look, but didn’t pause. “I’m all right,” he insisted. “I have to stay close to him on the water. It’s the only way.”
“You don’t know that!” I argued. I really wasn’t sure what was wrong with me. All I knew was that at that moment, I was more worried about Zane than I was about Makani. “You’re not yourself. We don’t know what all this remote viewing has done to you!”
He finished untying the board and gave it a tug.
“Which way?” my dad called. The others were already heading out of the parking lot toward the beach. When Zane pointed, they hurried forward without us.
Zane pulled down his board and tucked it under his arm. “Look me in the eyes, Kali,” he said as we walked after them. “All day I’ve had my brain split over two places. But as of now, I’m all here. You can tell that, can’t you?”
I looked deeply into his expressive green eyes, and he was correct that they were no longer distant or unfocused. He was fully present and fully engaged. But he still looked exhausted.
“You’re tired,” I insisted, even as I had to double my pace to keep up with his long strides. “You know that all this psychic stuff has drained you!”
He looked away from me. “Not physically it hasn’t,” he proclaimed. “And all I need to do is swim.”
We reached the crest of the hill and looked out over the sand and across the water. Ali’i Beach was a vast, inviting arc of sand and rock that extended southwest down the coast from the small boat harbor in Haleiwa. Having ample facilities and being located right in town, it was a favorite spot for family picnics, turtle-walks, surfing, diving, fishing, barbecues, community events, and general hanging out — and had been so for generations.
Today, both the beach and the water were hopping with activity. People of all ages milled about on land, while children played in the sand and swimmers waded in the shallows. Farther out from shore, local surfers who had been waiting all summer for something more than a ripple to shred had taken to the small waves with zest, cluttering the ocean with stand-up paddleboards, s
hortboards, bodyboards, and every hybrid in between. Zane paused only a second to study the water and determine where he should paddle out.
“I don’t see Makani,” I said, following as Zane set off again.
“Look where your dad and Tara are focusing their binoculars,” Zane offered, not slowing down long enough to point. I turned my head to see my friends and my parents standing on the ridge near the lifeguard tower, gazing out over the break. I knew they would watch Makani like a hawk and alert the lifeguards immediately if anything happened to him. The fact that they didn’t seem to be panicking yet must mean that he was still okay.
But I wasn’t. I was scared to death.
We reached the water’s edge and Zane set down his board. He pulled off his shirt and handed it to me, then attached his leash strap to his ankle.
I didn’t want him to go. Had he ever even had real lifeguard training? Could any of us be sure that the doom I kept sensing was all for Makani? What if we did manage to change the course of events? What then?
“Zane—”
He reached out and brushed the hair from my face, then slid his hand behind my neck, turning my face up towards his. He stepped closer. “I am coming back,” he said slowly, firmly. Then he leaned in and kissed me. Warmly, but quickly. “I love you, Kali.”
And with that, he picked up his board, turned his back to me, and paddled out.
I stood on the sand and stared after him. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t move. My whole nervous system was numb. He’d never said those words to me before… I almost couldn’t believe he’d said them now, so casually and just like that, when my head was already spinning. I was happy, I was delirious with joy, and at the same time I was paralyzed with terror.
Why did he say those words now? Did he really believe he would be okay? Or didn’t he?
“Kali! What are you doing out here? I didn’t know you were coming!”
I looked over to see Matt striding toward me, shirtless, tanned, and smiling from ear to ear. He seemed not to have a care in the world, and his presence here now felt like an awkward moment in a really bad movie.