by T W Neal
“Hey!” I yell. “Any year now!” I inject my voice with sarcastic vigor. “This is lame, you fuckers!” I use really bad words, hoping to lure them out of where they’re hiding, waiting for me to cry and beg. “Pricks! Assholes! Sissy rug munchers!”
I wait some more.
Slowly, it dawns on me that they’d never sit around waiting for me to cry this long—they’d get bored. Clearly, Chris and Knight aren’t coming back.
I try to pick at the knots but can’t reach them. One of the boys must have been a Boy Scout because I can’t get them loose, can’t twist my hands around. I can’t bend enough to chew on the ropes either.
I’m going to be stuck here forever, unable to sit down or pee, my legs throbbing with pain from standing immobile.
But there are other houses back here. Surely someone will drive along and find me.
Time passes, and I eventually work the ropes down a little lower so I can squat.
By the time a passerby on the dirt road sees me, dark is approaching. I’ve screamed myself hoarse, calling for help.
I don’t know the kindly woman driving by who finds me. She really has to work to get my knots untied, and her exclamations of horror make me hysterical. I’m shivering and can’t stop crying when she finally gets me loose. She wraps me in a towel and drives me the few blocks home.
Bonny has been telling Mom and Pop that something’s happened to me with those boys, but they aren’t looking for me yet since it’s not quite dark. Dark is our curfew.
Mom gets me into a hot bath, and I cry more because the rope burns sting my wrists and ankles. I hear Pop talking loudly into the phone to Darren about what Knight did.
I hope Knight gets lickins. I really do.
Mom tells me that Knight got lickins, but no amount of beatings is enough to make his betrayal okay. Our families don’t hang out anymore, and now we ignore each other at school.
Chris’s mom is a waitress who works all the time and “can’t do anything with him,” so Chris continues to roam the neighborhood looking for trouble and doesn’t get punished that I ever hear of.
The Josephsons come back for their three-month summer stint just when it feels like we’ve adjusted to living in their house. Other people plan things differently, but I’m not surprised when my parents handle the disruption by saying, “No problem! We’ll just camp!”
After the ordeal of Wainiha, I’m not looking forward to camping. I’ve gotten used to hot showers, a flush toilet, and a mosquito-free, soft bed. I’m grumpy and slow packing up my stuff to move to our campsite in a vacant lot overgrown with huge kamani trees a block or so away from the Josephsons’ house.
The new camp area is dry and smells of the sweetness of summer leaves. The tropical sunshine blasts down above, but here under the vast, spreading kamani trees, it’s cool and dappled.
Pop sets up a campsite on top of a carpet remnant, with plastic over our tents and an open cooking area. Bonny and I have acquired guinea pigs by then, wonderful squeaky friends named Guin-Guin and Mr. Fuzzy that we bring over from the house. We build “habitats” for them out of rocks and logs and play with them constantly.
The Josephson family is really nice, and their twin sons, Leif and Eric, are a little older than me at thirteen. I’m nervous at first that they will come up with evil plans, but the boys seem happy to have some other kids to play with, and they don’t mind that we’re younger and girls. Bonny and I take them across the street to the ocean, and we go spearfishing with my three-prong.
I’m good at getting fish with that spear, called a three-prong because the head has three points that spread open. The end of the spear has an attached loop of rubber tubing, and to hit fish, you wind the tubing around your hand and twist and stretch it up the shaft of the spear. When you let go, the spear flies out and nails the fish. Usually, I follow up by driving the fish into the bottom and pushing the spear all the way through so it can’t get off the prongs.
You have to get really close to fish to hit them with a three-prong, though, and I teach the boys my tricks, like hiding behind a coral head and scratching on the reef so the fish come check it out. They both bring in their first fish and are stoked.
Leif and Eric have been coming from Canada to Kauai every summer since they were little, and they know our vacant lot well. When we’re not at the beach or playing with the guinea pigs, we play tag and hide-and-seek.
One day while doing that, Eric disappears. The three of us search, and search, and search. Finally, I yell, “Come out! We give up!”
We hear him laughing—somewhere way above. I tip my head back and look up. Eric is grinning down at us from a mat of vines on the very top of the tree we’re under, at least forty feet up.
“Come on! It’s solid up here!” Eric bounces on the vines to demonstrate. A yellow lilikoi falls at my feet with a thwack, but the vines don’t move, and he doesn’t plunge to his death. Eric’s bronzy eyes are gleaming with excitement. He reminds me of a mongoose, a creature they have on Oahu—all sinewy brown motion. Leif is tall, blond, and better looking, but I like Eric’s attitude—he’s daring and funny. “You scared?” he challenges me. Somehow in the order of things, Eric and I are the leaders.
“Ha! No problem.” I start climbing. I’m not particularly fond of heights. I wouldn’t call it fear, exactly. It’s more of a breathless dizziness when looking down. So, I don’t look down, which is really the secret to climbing anything.
Eric yells directions from above: “On your left, there’s a branch. Then you have to go out a bit . . .”
Near the end, I have to shinny along a narrow branch thrusting up through the canopy. It’s slender, and bounces as I slide along with my legs on either side, not looking down. Bonny and Leif shout encouragement, waiting their turn. Eric widens the entrance hole in the vines for me, and I pop my head and shoulders out into the sunlit sky.
The vines billow off into the distance in mounds and dip like a scarf tossed down over the tops of the trees. Monarchs, white cabbage moths, and a small blue butterfly flutter in sunlight so bright it stabs my eyes. The air is filled with the sweet/tart scent of lilikoi blossoms, round white spaceship-like medallions dotted across the green sea of vines.
“This is exactly like the part in The Hobbit when Bilbo climbs to the top of a tree to find his way out of Mirkwood,” I exclaim, enchanted. Eric looks blank—he clearly hasn’t read the book. He goes down a few notches in my estimation.
“Is it safe?” Leif hollers far below us.
“Let me check it out.” I yell down into the gloom, and climb off the branch fully onto the vines. I spread myself out and go slow as I crawl over the thick mat of vines on the treetop, checking for holes, my heart pounding with a feeling that I’m pretty sure is joy. Eric is bouncing on the vines, testing them with me. I can see that the vines are laid down in layers—each year, a new layer, and the growth is at least a foot deep.
“I never knew this was here all these years,” Eric says, bouncing. “I can’t believe I never knew about this.”
“Me neither.” I wish I’d found this when we first moved into the neighborhood. Knight would have been so impressed. He wouldn’t have tied me up and sold me out if I’d found this and showed it to him. I still feel weirdly sad about what happened, that we can’t be friends anymore.
I make my way back to the hole and peer down. Leif’s and Bonny’s white-blond hair seems to glow in the dim, their faces as pale as a deep-sea fish looking up at me through forty feet of space. “Come on up, you guys. You won’t believe it up here,” I say.
Thus, begins my happiest summer ever.
The Josephson boys are adventurous and fun and not a bit mean. The four of us become inseparable. We get so comfortable on the treetops that we run across the vines, playing tag and hide-and-seek. No one falls through, though a few times we fall partway, dangling an arm or leg into space.
None of our parents know about our treetop escapades—they’re just glad we’re out of their hair.
>
Pop is still working at the Anchorage alternating lunch and dinner shifts. Both Mom and Pop surf most days, but they usually leave Bonny and me at camp and drive to Tunnels or Hanalei to go out. During the days, Mom reads a lot while Pop plays guitar, or she walks the beach picking up puka shells and stringing them for the necklaces she sells to tourists. They both still drink and smoke pakalolo, but I’m not as worried about them as I was. They seem happier than in Wainiha—and I have friends and freedom now that take me out of our little world.
When we feel like swimming, the four of us kids get into suits and grab towels and trek down the dirt road to the ocean, going snorkeling and diving for fish on the reef near the Anchorage. Other times, we walk the beach, foraging for shells for Mom. The whole time, we stay in the characters of endless games of make-believe: pirates and crusaders, knights and Viking explorers, cowboys and Indians.
We’re so happy together it seems like it can’t end—but it does. At the end of the summer, the boys tell us they have to go back to Canada. We start packing up the camp, getting ready to move back into their house. I’m so sad that they’re leaving, but I’m also looking forward to plumbing again.
One day, right before the Josephsons leave, Pop returns to camp, loud and bright with excitement—he’s got a new job as the caretaker of the big Wilcox estate in Hanalei.
Kauikeolani Estate is right on Hanalei Bay, a sprawling, white, plantation style mansion, surrounded by acres and acres of lawn with ponds, coconut trees, and decorative plantings. It’s owned by an old-money haole family descended from missionaries, the Wilcoxes. Instead of returning to the Josephsons’, we’re moving into a cottage on the Estate, part of Pop’s salary package.
Eric and I climb up to the vine mat on the top of the trees to say goodbye. I feel sluggish with sadness. He’s been my best buddy all summer, and his friendship has gone a long way to heal me after the meanness I’ve had from others.
Popping our heads up out of the hole, we stare out at our summer kingdom. Our heavy play has trampled and damaged the vine mat, wearing it thin. There are few lilikois and hardly any leaves. It’s going to be another year before it grows back.
“The vines will be ready for us to play up here again by next summer,” I say.
“Right,” says Eric. His usual banter is missing. We climb up through the hole and lie on our backs and look at the big arc of sky. There are just a few clouds up there today, feathers drifting on the blue.
“Hey,” he says.
I turn my head and look at him. He’s lying on his side, facing me and very close, his hands folded under his cheek. His golden-brown eyes, slightly too close together, are intent on my face. I feel a fluttery feeling in my stomach that I’ve never felt before.
“Can I kiss you? To say goodbye?”
“Okay,” I whisper. He puts his lips on mine for a long moment, just resting them there. They’re warm, and his breath smells like Crest. I like it and wriggle a little closer, and he wriggles a little closer, and he kisses me again, a soft smooch that makes me tingle.
He picks up a handful of my hair, sifting it through his fingers so it drifts down over my face. My hair’s the palest gold it ever gets from all the summer sun, but I still wish it was thick, blonde, and shiny like Bonny’s, and that I didn’t have all these freckles.
“I like your hair. I wish I could take some with me,” he says. “To remember this summer by.”
“My hair? Sure.” I yank out several strands, making my eyes water, and hand them to him. Now I turn on my side and watch as he very seriously wraps the golden hairs around each other, twisting them together into a coil.
He puts the little circle in his pocket. “You’re going to be here next year, right?”
“Yeah. I live here, not like you poor tourist lame-asses who have to go back to the mainland every year.”
“Hey!” he says. I jump up and run away across the thinning, trampled vines, and he chases me one last time.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Working for The Descendants
Age: 10, Kauikeolani Estate, Hanalei, Kauai, 1975
“Albert Wilcox, offspring of missionaries, built up a fortune through growing sugar. He married a Hawaiian woman, Emma Kauikeolani Mahelona, and named their estate for her,” Mom tells us as we unpack our stuff and carry it into the two-bedroom plantation cottage that’s our new home. “Carol, my high school friend, married Gaylord Wilcox, a descendant of Albert, and they have three little girls. Carol and Gaylord need help cleaning the big house and babysitting, as well as keeping the grounds tidy and mowed. We’re all going to help with the work.”
I’m so excited to live in a beautiful place like this, right next to Hanalei Bay, that I don’t care what we have to do to keep it.
The whole place’s official name is Kauikeolani Estate, but everyone calls it the Estate, and the white mansion where the Wilcoxes live is the Big House. Our caretaker cottage was built for servants around the turn of the century and, along with four other cottages and barns, is separated from the Big House by a huge, impenetrable green wall of ironwood hedge.
The cottage is tin-roofed, and has creaky, painted wood floors. Nobody’s lived in it for years, judging by the dust, mold, and mounds of gecko poop on every surface. Two bedrooms, a big kitchen, a small living room, and a front porch make up the floor plan. The bathroom at the back has a deep, claw-footed tub with a shower on a rod.
Pop’s full-time caretaker pay is three hundred a month, plus the house, which roughly equals the same money he made at the Anchorage but for a lot more hours of work. Mom says we definitely still need food stamps to get by. Taking a look out at the rolling lawn in front of the house, she says, “First thing we’ll do is put in a garden to supplement our food.”
Mom and Pop have noticed that Bonny and I don’t bicker as much when we have our own rooms, so I get my own bedroom, and Pop sections off a portion of the living room with plywood to make a bedroom for Bonny. Gigi and Grandpa Jim, thrilled that we’re going to be in an actual house again, offer to buy paint and materials to make it nicer. Mom unpacks her sewing machine from the stuff we stored in the Josephsons’ garage while we were camping, and buys fabric for every window to sew curtains and pillows.
We all tackle painting the kitchen and living room white, with sunny yellow trim. The kitchen is the biggest room in the house, and we paint all the way down to the galvanized tin counter and deep, battered, iron-and-porcelain sink. When Mom adds a yellow checked curtain to cover the open area under the sink, and a ruffle above the window looking out at the back yard, the kitchen becomes as cheerful and charming as she’s tried to make everywhere we’ve lived.
My room is already painted a powdery sky blue, with old-fashioned sash windows trimmed in white. I love it just the way it is. We put a rag rug down on the red-brown painted floor. Pop builds Bon and me each a twin-size plywood platform bed, and I choose a light cotton fabric spattered with fat, pink, old-fashioned roses for the curtains.
Lying on a foam pad on a raised bed in the reflection of those blue walls, I feel like I’m inside a flowery cloud.
It’s utterly perfect. I shut my eyes and wish and hope we get to live here longer than six months.
The lawn around our cottage and the Big House goes on for acres and acres. A pond, shallow and green with algae, fills the back area. Half of it is in the mowed lawn, and the other half is in the fenced cattle pasture peppered with coconut trees that’s also part of the Estate’s land.
Standing on the grassy bank looking at the pond, I’m shocked to see a huge fish’s dorsal fin cutting through the water. Other surges and jump patterns in the water show fish that are way too big for a normal backyard pond.
I yell for Pop, pointing at the fin cutting the water. “Looks like an ulua, a jack,” he says. “Gaylord told me the pond used to be connected to the Hanalei River, so a lot of small fish and even a turtle got in here. When they closed the pond off, the trapped fish grew huge. But you aren’t allowed to fish
in here.”
“Not allowed to fish?” My eyes bug out. “What? I want to catch that thing!”
“Nope. Only the family from the Big House are allowed to fish in the pond, and they save it for guests from the mainland and their friends.”
My shoulders sag with disappointment.
“Get over it,” Pop snaps in the grumpy way he has since he started the job. He takes off his sweat-soaked ball cap and wipes his forehead on his arm. He’s not used to putting in a full forty hours a week at something so physical as the yard work of this giant place, and I can tell he’s having second thoughts about taking this job. I hope he doesn’t quit. I already love it here.
Bonny and I continue our exploration and discover a deserted boathouse with an attached classroom filled with old wooden desks.
“Looks like they had their own school here,” I tell Bonny, running my finger over a deeply grooved KIMO carved into the desk.
We find a big barn filled with shadowy rusting tractors and farm equipment and an abandoned greenhouse, overgrown with neglected orchids. We’re poking around inside the greenhouse when I hear a kid’s voice call from the door.
“You aren’t supposed to go in there. Broken glass.” I turn to see a petite dark-haired girl. She points at broken glass inserts of the glass roof overhead. “The glass is all over, and our parents don’t let us inside.” The girl looks a little older than Bonny. Behind her stands a younger girl, big-eyed, with wispy brown hair.
“We just moved into one of the cottages. We didn’t know about the glass. We just wanted to see everything,” I tell her. “I’m Toby. This is my sister, Bonny.” We pick our way carefully out of the broken-down greenhouse to face her and her sister.
“I’m Nicole. This is Darcy. And this is our place.” She makes an arm gesture that encompasses the whole area. These must be the kids from the Big House that we heard about. “Our other sister is too small to play out here with us, but we can show you everything.” Nicole grins, and it takes up half her face.