The Sea Ain't Mine Alone
Page 49
“I heard about you after you won that first time,” she says. “Everyone was talking about it, boy. It was in the papers.” Her voice sounds wistful like she’s describing the plot of an old and favorite book. One with a very sad ending.
Sydney barely remembers to nod.
“And I saw you the next year there, competing. When you won again.”
Sydney’s eyes widen in shock. “You were there?”
She nods. Sydney wants to question everything he’s ever experienced in his life. The thought that he was standing along the Banzai holding his board while his own step-mom was secretly among the crowd without him knowing makes him feel like everything he’s ever seen has maybe been just a mirage.
Like maybe James Campbell never appeared out of nowhere in the tree-lined lane—neither time.
“You stopped writing to me, boy,” she goes on. “Did you get my letters?”
Sydney looks at his bare feet encrusted with sand and feels a flush of shame spreading up his neck. “I did.”
He’s not sure what else he could possibly say. “I did, but I didn’t want you to be associated with the new black sheep of the family, the queer?” or maybe, “I did, but you think I’m going to hell anyways so I didn’t really think it would be worth the time to respond?” or really he could just tell her the truth and say, “Because every time I picked up the pen I remembered that I hated my lonely fucking life a little bit more. And because you let him make me leave.”
Lahela doesn’t wait for him to elaborate. Instead she takes a calm breath and looks out at the sea, gesturing so the bracelets around her wrist tingle together. “So is this what you do then? To make your living?”
Sydney follows her hand to see the waves still pounding at their backs, and he realizes he’d completely forgotten the entire Pacific Ocean was even there.
He clears his throat, suddenly feeling ten-years-old again, that first day she ever shook his hand and asked him what was his favorite food. “Um, no. I—I work. I just . . . I do this. Too.”
He winces at himself—the pathetic jumble of words leaving his lips that is somehow supposed to stand in for the story of his life.
But Lahela’s expression doesn’t change at his vague answer, and she turns her gaze away from the sea until her eyes see straight through his skin. “You surf like were born out there in the water,” she says. Her eyes are focused and grave. “A true master of heʻe nalu.”
Sydney feels his eyes watering. He hears what she’s saying—what she really means—even though it feels inordinately difficult to hold his chin high and believe it. That somehow a kid from bumfuck nowhere Iowa worked his ass off enough to call what he does on a board an art. A religion.
He thinks of James, fists clenched and eyes furious in a way Sydney hasn’t seen him look like in what feels like a long, long time. “This isn’t just a game for me,” he’d said, as if it physically hurt him to spit out the words. Sydney suddenly understands those words in an entirely new way, deep in his bones. He wonders if Lahela can somehow understand any of the rapid thoughts flashing across his face.
He can still feel James’ quiet presence at his side, hovering in the background as if he’s expecting to simply be ignored, or be introduced as a surfing buddy Sydney’s seen a few times on the shores. And James looks perfectly fine with this arrangement, not bothered in the least that Sydney’s gone nearly a whole ten minutes without introducing the only two people he’s talking to on this entire beach.
In an instant, the thought of speaking a single word more to the lost memory of the woman in front of him without her realizing who James is feels worse than drowning.
But, God . . . he wants desperately just to stand there and look at her forgotten smile. To talk about surfing, and ask how she is, and if they still live in the old house, and pretend that his past is behind him—that his father hasn’t gone seven years without speaking his name. He wants to pretend that the reason he ever had to leave in the first place is now long dead and gone—just some teenage mistake mixed with coming-of-age confusion. He wishes he could look the woman who just called his surfing he’e nalu in the eyes and say he was no longer the man with a photograph of a sailor in his pocket—that he’s changed.
But James Campbell loves him, and the betrayal of not latching on to that with both hands shakes him to his core.
Sydney steps back from Lahela and looks over at James with a pointed gaze, and James immediately takes a breath and steps closer to his side. Sydney drinks in his last calm look at Lahela, while she’s still looking at him with warmth and pride in her eyes, and then he opens his mouth to speak over the sound of the waves.
“This is Jimmy Campbell,” he says. “James. He’s the new Billabong champion.” He waves his hand between them. “James, my stepmother, Lahela Moore.”
Lahela’s eyes widen, and she reaches out her hand to shake James’. “The new champion?” she gasps with sparkling eyes. “You’re as good as my boy, then.”
My boy.
Sydney tucks those words away in his mind so he can revisit them after this interaction inevitably goes to shit—after Lahela runs away from him, embarrassed and disappointed. He feels James stiffen beside him, and Sydney guesses James realizes roughly what he’s about to say. And James Campbell does absolutely nothing to stop him, just stands tall, his steady chin high.
“James is . . .” Sydney swallows hard over a bone dry mouth. He shuffles his feet so that their shoulders are nearly touching. “James is with me. We—he lives with me.”
Sydney stares steadily at Lahela, willing her to somehow understand. Eternal seconds tick by, as if the crash of the waves themselves is keeping time.
Just as a fresh wind blows her braid across her chest, she sucks in a breath, her eyes wide.
But Lahela doesn’t run away from them in the sand. Instead, she stands frozen. She whips her head back and forth a couple times between them both, then settles on James standing at Sydney’s side, looking strong and tensed and ready for a fight.
Sydney watches, helpless, with his heart in his throat as Lahela seems to study James with focused, narrowed eyes, her lips thin. The beach is silent and deafening all at once. Sydney hears his own breathing echo harshly in his ears, as if the water behind him has turned into sand paper thrashing and cutting against the rocks along the shore, filling the beach with snarling white noise.
Finally, Lahela reaches up to clutch her fingers around the cross at her neck. She looks at James as if she’s about to pop up on one of Waimea’s waves.
“You don’t look like a . . . you don’t look like it. One of them,” she says.
To Sydney’s surprise, James’ eyes soften. The corner of his mouth curves in a gentle smile. “No, I suppose I don’t,” he answers. “But I am.” He looks quickly at Sydney, eyes full and blue. “With him.”
Sydney has never wanted to scoop up and kiss James more than in that moment. He wants to run his fingers through James’ perfect hair, warmed by the sun, then look back at Lahela and ask her if she can even fucking believe it that he got this man to somehow love him—pack up his life and leave behind everything he’s ever known to move to Oahu with Danny Moore. To be with him.
Lahela is still standing frozen, watching them both. Sydney bites his tongue so he doesn’t beg her to speak—to just fucking say something, anything at all, instead of leaving them in suspense. Yell at him, curse him, tell him he’s going to hell, just anything instead of this silence.
She clears her throat and eventually reaches out her hand again, fingers slightly trembling. James frowns, surprised, then takes it.
“It’s nice to meet you, James,” she says, in a very even voice. “My boy was not happy. Before.”
James looks down at their clasped hands with a slight frown and shakes hers once before letting go. Sydney stares at the empty space where their joined hands used to be, scared to breathe unless everything around him dissolves into a dream.
“Danny,” she says softly.
“You need to trim your hair,” she says. “Too many tangles at the ends.” Then, before Sydney can even react, she reaches forward and touches his arm. “When will you surf next?”
Sydney feels like his brain is thirty seconds behind, frantically trying to play catch-up, still waiting for her to shake her head at him in disgust. “Sunset Beach is in three weeks,” he hears himself answer back.
She nods and releases her grip. She doesn’t smile, but there’s a clarity on her face Sydney hasn’t ever seen since the first day she showed up in their living room with his father’s hand on her shoulder and a new engagement ring on her finger.
“I will try to be there, then,” she says.
And then, after one last steady look, she’s turning to leave, skirt blowing out across the sand as she makes her way back to wait for a bus to take her clear across the island, on her way home to cook dinner and do his father’s laundry and sit with her Bible in her special chair to pray for his soul. And probably to pray for James’ soul now, too.
A flash of panic suddenly shoots through Sydney’s stomach. Dread claws at his mind—that despite what Lahela just said, despite everything he just learned, that if she walks away now Sydney will never see her again. That he’ll lose everything he thought he might have just hesitantly gained back.
He takes two running steps forward in the sand. “Wait!”
She turns, holding the blowing strands back from her face.
“Mikey,” Sydney says, the name completely foreign in his mouth. “Is Mikey okay?”
Lahela smiles, but her eyes are sad. “Yes, your brother is well,” she says. She pauses and licks her lips, then goes on, still turning back awkwardly at the edges of the beach. “He’s going to UC Berkeley in the fall. For engineering.”
Sydney finds he can’t ask a single follow-up question, and Lahela doesn’t offer up information about anyone else. Instead, she glances one last time at James, then turns to keep walking toward the palm tree-lined road.
Sydney stands stunned in the sand as Lahela’s skirt disappears into a cloud of dust and leafy green—her thin form, both familiar to him and alien, swallowed up by the island from which she came. His brain feels like it’s churning through thick, wet mud, dragging him back and slowing him down.
His brother is going to Berkeley. His brother, who always begged Sydney to finish his homework for him under the covers with a flashlight each night, is going to Berkeley to study engineering, probably making his father beam with pride when he tells the other Lieutenants on the base. And meanwhile Sydney stands on a beach without even a high school diploma, with a tiny ad in the phone book naming himself as a pseudo-mechanic for cheap, and saltwater and grease stains permanently etched into his fingertips.
It’s a shock, even though it really shouldn’t be—the fact that the world kept turning even after he turned his back on it and swam out into the sea. The fact that his brother isn’t still eleven years old, and that Lahela’s hair is streaked with grey. Fuck, maybe his father isn’t even Lieutenant Moore anymore.
His pride from before at conquering Waimea suddenly leaves his body in a rush. He feels pathetic and young in the sand. Left behind.
But Lahela had been proud of him, hadn’t she? She’d stood tall and looked at him with pride and called his surfing he’e nalu.
And James doesn’t care that there isn’t some fancy framed diploma on his wall.
Right?
“Sydney?”
Sydney realizes he forgot that James was even standing there, or that the rest of the beach was filled with surfers probably wondering who the hell Danny was just talking to, or that he’d just surfed one of the biggest waves Waimea’s seen in years and lived to tell about it.
He’d forgotten that James had held him close and whispered into his ear, “I love you.” How could he forget that?
He turns to look at James, still speechless, and James smiles in that way of his, lighting up every grain of sand on the beach into a brilliant burst of sunlight with just the lines creasing the corners of his eyes.
“Come on, then,” James says. “I just had a birthday standing here waiting for you to move. You need to say bye to any of these guys or can we get the hell out of here and be alone?”
James Campbell is a genius. Of course they should leave. Of course they should go back to their home together now that the fear is over. Of course they should go and kiss each other and fall asleep in each other’s arms. Because James Campbell loves him.
Sydney nods, and James lets out a breath like he’s relieved as they start to make their way over to Sydney’s board and bag. Sydney looks one last time out at the raging waves, frowning at the eerie sensation that he’d surfed across them thirty days ago instead of just thirty minutes, and then they turn to go, shoulder to shoulder, leaving the group still mingling behind them in the sand.
“Moore, come on, man! You ducking out on me?”
Hank jogs after them across the beach, waving a hand for them to wait. Sydney realizes that if any other surfer on that beach had just flagged them down, he would have felt an unprecedented surge of annoyance.
Hank lifts up his hat to wipe the sweat off his brow with his forearm before jamming it back down. “We’re all gonna head down for a beer if you guys wanna join. You know, celebrate not dying and all,” Hank says with a wink.
James chuckles sarcastically, and Sydney fights the urge to reach out and take James’ hand. “You know me, man,” he says back. “Not much for sticking around. We’re just gonna head back home.”
He realizes his mistake too late. Sydney bites his tongue in his mouth, waiting for the inevitable awkward clarification on what the hell he just implied with his words. By his side, James spreads his feet to plant himself in the sand.
Hank barely hesitates, just blinks and looks quickly at James with just his eyes. Then he smiles in the corner of his mouth and scratches at his jaw. “It’s casual, Moore. You out-surfed all of our sorry asses today. Guess you weren’t too skinny after all—deserve to be rid of all of us for a nice break.”
Sydney lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Or maybe he had realized it, the way it had burned like fire and ice in his concrete lungs. Hank nods over at James, hands in his pockets. “You’ll be at Sunset in a few weeks? To surf?”
James nods yes, and Sydney suddenly catches the gaze of understanding between them. He feels like a moron for not having spotted it before. Too focused on himself, on the waves, on his ride. James looks at Hank like he’s seeing a friend from his past, still covered head to toe in camo with the jungle at his back.
And Sydney wonders, fleetingly, if it takes having run through a Vietnam jungle with a gun in your hands to be a person who wants to have a conversation with him beyond hello. He wonders if that’s something that would bother him, or fill him with an oddly undeserving pride.
James rubs the back of his neck. “Guess I am, now that I’ve tricked everyone into thinking I know what the fuck I’m doing. You?”
Hank laughs. “Nah, man. Not much one for competitions this year. Just been sneaking out here when I don’t have to worry about points and heats and shit. Leave all them fancy trophies to Moore, here.”
Hank leans forward to hold Sydney firmly on the arm before Sydney or James can answer him. “Go on, then, you fucking hermit. You both earned it.”
The look in Hank’s eyes as he quickly glances between them instantly confirms just how much Hank understands. Sydney fights to hold his head high as he lifts up a hand, barely muttering, “Catch you later” in time for Hank to hear it as he walks back to the group of other surfers still lounging on their boards in the sand. Casually, as if he hadn’t just knowingly shaken the hand of the gayest surfer in Hawaii and told him to go home and be with his man.
“So, he knows,” James says under his breath, not a question.
Sydney’s eyes don’t leave Hank’s hat in the crowd. “Yeah. He knows.”
He’s just about to try and concoct some sort of apology when James taps his arm before turning to head to the Jeep. Sydney follows silently, watching his feet carve footprints into the sand. By unspoken agreement, Sydney hands James the keys when they get near, and after throwing his board in the back, he gets into the passenger seat, placing his hand firmly on James’ knee when James lets out the clutch to start driving them home.
The drive is silent. James whistles a Stones tune through his teeth as he drives, slowly meandering the winding seaside road back down along the North Shore towards home. Sydney stares out the window, letting the wind rush against his face, and he breathes in the salt sea air in deep gasps—the hints of warm flowers and earthy mud. Salted fish and grassy straw and sweet, milky coconuts wafting on the breeze. James’ deodorant, and the musk of sweat mixed with saltwater and hot sand, and the worn, cracked leather of the seats in the Jeep.
Sydney closes his eyes to the sea and trees rolling by, and with a rush of emotion he realizes for the first time in his life that this is home—the first time since he stepped off the plane in Honolulu holding his father’s hand with a Jetsons rolling suitcase behind him. That his little hut with its peeling paint and empty beach and creaking wood floors is the absolute best place in the universe. That he’s one lucky son of a bitch.
He looks over at James, driving with one hand hanging out the window and the wind rustling his golden hair, and he grins so wide it hurts his sunburned cheeks.
“Remind me,” Sydney says over the sound of the engine. “I’ve already forgotten.” He leans back further in his seat, letting his curls blow across his eyes.
James’ eyes light up even as he shakes his head in exasperation at the winding road. He covers Sydney’s hand on his knee with his own. “I love you,” he says. He wipes across his mouth with the hand that had been hanging out the window, and the corners of his eyes crinkle as he continues to shake his head. “You are something else, Moore. But fuck, I really do.”