RASHID: HER RUTHLESS BOSS: 50 Loving States, Hawaii

by Taylor, Theodora

  And the next time I went to the Pacific Supermart, partly for groceries and partly to ask why he ghosted me, I found a flyer with a GoFundMe for their employee of the year.

  The manager on duty told me that Leon had been the victim of a home invasion. Two guys in ski masks had attacked him in his apartment. I rushed to the hospital where he was recovering as soon as I heard, but Leon wasn’t exactly glad to see me.

  Lying in traction in a hospital bed in several casts, he let me know what he hadn’t mentioned to his co-workers. That his two attackers had referenced me by name, told him this was his punishment for dating a whore, and even quoted Bible verses. When he’d tried to grab his phone to call the police, one of them had stomped down on his hand, hard enough to break several bones.

  “We are the police. And if you tell anybody about this, I’ll make sure you’re deported faster than you got into that whore’s panties.”

  I’d apologized over and over again.

  But angry tears had fallen from Leon’s eyes as he asked me, “Why didn’t you tell me your dead husband’s brothers were cops? You know how hard I’ve been trying to make it here. They could have me deported. Or worse!”

  But they hadn’t had him deported. In fact, here he was, no longer battered and bruised, but giving great customer service just like before. And I could see the word, MANAGER, now neatly typed across the top of his nameplate.

  “Hi, Leon,” I say quietly when it gets to be my turn.

  The light goes out of his eyes when he sees me, however.

  “Hello,” he answers, his voice tight.

  He has a wedding ring now, I notice. And I want to ask him about the lucky girl.

  But from the way he’s wordlessly scanning the groceries, like a robot set at bare minimum, I sense he wouldn’t be open to talking with me about the current state of his love life. Or anything else.

  Yes, this Waipahu Pacific Supermart has everything I need to make all my favorite dishes. No, I won’t ever be coming back, I decide, as Leon hands me the receipt. His body might have healed, but he still has the same resentful, broken look in his eyes as the last time I saw him.

  And just in case I don’t think there’s any reason he should still be bitter with me, the phone pops off with another unknown Hawaii number just as I’m almost back to the Diamond Head house.

  I check the voicemail transcript text message after pulling into the driveway: Hebrews thirteen-four: let marriage be held in honor among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous. Don’t be getting any ideas, whore.

  So yeah, that good mood I drummed up while shopping is all the way disappeared. Must be nice to be able to abuse your police powers like that, I silently say to whichever Bible-thumping police officer Lacerda is behind these texts as I haul all the grocery bags into the kitchen from the carport.

  However, I stop when I see the person now sitting on the house side of the open oceanside wall.

  It’s Rashid! Whoa, I’ve never seen him outside his room before. I drop all the bags on the counter.

  “What are you doing out here?” I ask, Leon and the creepy phone call falling away as I walk over to him.

  “Make them shut up,” he commands, not tearing his eyes away from whatever he’s looking at.

  I follow his eyes to the zero-entry infinity pool beneath the lanai’s outer edge and blink when I see Albie playing a game of keep away with my sister and Faizan.

  I’d been so preoccupied with seeing Leon again and then with the phone call, I hadn’t remembered she was coming over or heard them when I came in.

  In fact, the only person I had seen, the only person I had heard inside my personal turmoil was Rashid.

  “Mom! Mom!”

  Albie comes bounding up from the zero-entry part of the pool when he sees me standing there with Rashid.

  “Aunt Jazz came to teach Mr. Faizan to surf, but there are, like, zero waves, so we’re swimming instead.”

  Rashid is staring at Albie like he’s a lagoon monster, suddenly risen out of his pool.

  “Ah, Albie, could you quiet—” I start to say

  “Hey, I’m Albie,” Albie says, waving at Rashid before I can finish. “I’ve been wondering when I was going to see you. You got a really nice house, man. Like, a really nice house. You wanna come swim with us? You too Mom?”

  It’s a typical Albie greeting. A mile-a-minute, with a bunch of questions stuffed in, but Rashid reacts like Albie stabbed him, instead of inviting him for a swim.

  “No, I will not swim with you,” he answers, his voice rough with anger.

  “Okay,” Albie answers with a shrug. “How about you mom?”

  “You will make him shut up,” Rashid commands before I can reply. He wheels the chair around to face me. “I do not want to hear him out here. He is disturbing my peace, and that is not what you are being paid for.”

  “What did I do?” Albie asks as we watch Rashid roll away.

  The next thing we hear is a slam of his bedroom door.

  “It’s okay,” I answer, rubbing Albie’s back.

  Even though it’s not. Even though Rashid’s not.

  “He’s sad and sometimes that makes him really, really angry,” I explain to my son, pasting on yet another smile. Sometimes it feels like I’ll be spackling and pasting over everything until there’s nothing left. But I manage to make myself sound cheery enough as I say, “Let’s go swim down at the beach. Give him some space.”

  13

  RASHID

  I’d been prepared to go to extremes after that day. To not just call Zahir like a helpless invalid but hire outside help. A real guard, like the ones back at the palace. Ex-soldiers who, for a fee, would toss Mika and her son out of my house for daring to play in my pool. For screaming so happily, the sound of his voice had brought me out of my room.

  I hadn’t seen a child since that last moment with Aisha. Her squeezing my grandfather’s hand because she was scared and I wasn’t close enough for her to grab on to. The metal beam dropped. And then she was gone, just gone.

  Yet, Mika’s son was here. Really here.

  Until that point, Mika’s son had been a specter. First, a barrier to possessing Mika, then an accessory Faizan had mentioned she’d brought with her. Something kept somewhere else in the house. The only difference between him and the basketball I had reportedly stolen from him was that I had actually seen the basketball.

  I had expected him to be morose. A close-minded burden that kept his mother from accepting an even better-paying nanny job in the desert.

  I hadn’t been prepared for how alive he would be. How happy. Smiling and enthusiastic.

  He was nothing like Aisha. But he was everything like Aisha. And he was alive. And here in the house I’d inherited from my grandfather.

  The Kingdom Mall floor had given out underneath me all over again when Mika’s son turned that smile on me and invited me to swim. And I felt pain akin to my back breaking with the fall as I yelled at his mother that he wasn’t allowed to disturb my peace.

  So yes, I’d been prepared to go to extremes to never have to see him again. Whatever it took not to hear that child’s laugh again. But Mika must have sensed my boundary line when it came to this.

  I don’t hear him once after that, nor do I have to abide any further interference from Mika. After that day we fall into a routine of her setting food outside my wall window and otherwise leaving me be. Though she does slip a list of Pacific Hawaii University SCI Center therapists under my door, there are no more conversations.

  No more kisses.

  Which is good. Almost the way I wanted it…if I disregarded the delicious food I couldn’t bring myself to ignore, even though replacing the Ninja she’d stolen would be easy enough. Or that for some reason I never get around to ordering new blackout curtains so that I don’t have to see her when she drops off my food. Or the fact that I’m still breathing.

  As much as I hate to admit it, she’d be
en right about Aisha not wanting me to take my own life. That option, I’d decided the morning after giving her the gun was no longer on the table.

  So new plan, as Go Rodriguez used to say: Now instead of blowing my brains out, it would be a lifetime of suffering instead.

  I could live with that. I would live with that, I resolve. And for a day or two after figuring out how to close the window on Mika that had been enough.

  It’s just that there are so many hours in the day when you’re no longer half-starved and suicidal.

  My ability to nap most of the day and night disappears with the general hunger fatigue. Suddenly time stretches out in front of me, like a yawning maw.

  I have nothing but watching documentaries and Space X videos on my laptop to occupy me when I get up in the morning. But one morning when I linger in bed too long, I find my mind slipping back to that night. Re-imagining it as I stroke myself through my pants.

  In the fantasy the gun and the grief disappear. It’s just her and me and the kiss against the wall. It goes on for minutes, not seconds. And it doesn’t stop until I fist a hand in her hair and guide her down to the monster she’d awakened.

  “See what you’ve done to me? This is all your fault, and your punishment will be to fix it.”

  I pull myself out and imagine it’s her hand wrapped around my cock. Her mouth capturing it and gliding up and down. I close my eyes and picture her mouth on me as sparks of pleasure begin to shoot through my body. Pain too. My lower back cramps and spasms, unused to the sensations. But the hurt isn’t enough to make me give up the pleasure of the fantasy. Fisting my cock, I continue to guide her head inside my mind.

  “Don’t stop,” I command, and she moans around my dick. Taking her punishment, sucking me down so hard, I can feel my tip at the back of her throat. Submitting to me with her mouth until I…

  My head punches back into the pillow and my eyes fly open as my world explodes for the first time since the accident. Pleasure and pain. Pain and pleasure. I grit my teeth against both as a warm jet hits my belly.

  But the pleasure soon fades as reality sets in. I’d made another mess for Faizan to clean. This one much more embarrassing than food. But the next morning I do it again. And the morning after that. Faizan soon becomes used to me calling for my bath early and me sitting in the warm water a lot longer than usual until the back cramps subside.

  And perhaps due to his time spent with Mika, he becomes bold. “Did you have a chance to peruse the list Mika printed out for you, Your Excellency?” he asks one morning, after helping me out of the bath and back into my usual t-shirt and sweats. “They are willing to come to you and perhaps the exercises will help with the cramping in your lower back.”

  The only thing that will help with my lower back, I think but don’t say, is not masturbating to visions of Mika every morning.

  The mornings in bed make me weak, and perhaps that was why The Big Idea starts calling to me even louder than before.

  At first, I sketch it out on the back of the page of therapists Mika had brought me. A brain dump, I tell myself. So I can forget about it, and let it go. Back when I ran Future Bionics, I used to have an entire David Allen inspired Evernote brain dump list, filled with Someday/Maybe ideas I never planned to seriously pursue but needed out of my head.

  But after a few days of drawing and erasing, I realize the idea is way too complicated to capture with a rough sketch.

  So I re-download one of my computer-aided design software programs to help me draft a mock-up of The Big Idea. Unfortunately, the company that sold that drafting program has not only gone out of business, but the software is no longer compatible with my operating system. So I download a supposedly even better program that not only will let me draft a mockup, but also allow me to make drop-down actuator design and tactile sensor programming notes whereever they’re needed.

  However, my laptop doesn’t have enough processing power to handle the new software, and even if it did, I sensed drafting on such a small window would soon prove too frustrating for me to bear.

  “Hey, whatcha doing?” Mika asks, appearing in the doorway of the smaller downstairs bedroom mere minutes after I start setting up my new system. I’m running a wire from the high-end desktop computer I just bought to the room’s flat-screen television.

  “None of your business,” I answer, rather than telling her that I’m turning the TV into a third display.

  “I saw Faizan take the bed out of here, and snagged it for Jazz,” she says, coming further into the room despite my lack of invitation. “Oh, and hey, look there’s your desk along with another one. And why do you need these big old monitors now? Are you turning this room into an office? If so, can I tell you how much better for your mental health that is to finally take the work out of your bedroom?”

  Yes, it is my new office—at least temporarily. And, I had to have Faizan bring in the desk from my bedroom and slide it in next to this one because one desk wasn’t big enough to accommodate two computer monitors. I had a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything I was doing, but knowing Mika, she’d read more into this than what it actually was.

  So I ask, “What part of none of your business are you not understanding?”

  “Okay, minding my own business now,” Mika says backing out of the room. But I could tell from her grin that she thought this was some kind of breakthrough for me.

  Just a brain dump, I tell her silently. And myself. But then the next thing I know weeks have passed.

  Even stranger, whenever I run into a design problem, I find myself longing to take a walk around the neighborhood.

  That’s what I used to do when I got stuck on projects. Stroll out of the office park where Future Bionics was based into the neighborhood beyond. Whenever I was stuck, I’d walk and walk until a new idea presented to solve the current problem.

  Of course, I can’t do that here. I can’t walk. But I do find myself rolling toward the door and considering leaving the house for the first time since Faizan brought me here. A roll around the neighborhood. That could help…

  I curse when I see the step-up at the end of the entryway. Just high enough to be insurmountable in a wheelchair.

  I roll back into the house, looking for Faizan. But he’s nowhere to be seen downstairs. Maybe he’s in his room? I’m just about to call out when I hear a voice in the far off distance. “Albie? Albie? Where are you? Oh, there you are!”

  I look up just in time to see a woman running down the carport side’s beach steps with a surfboard under one arm. She’s dressed in board shorts and a short-sleeved rash guard top and has the same honey brown skin color as Mika. This is her sister…the one the boy had referred to as Aunt Jazz, I vaguely recall.

  She waves to two people at the water’s edge. One of the people is Faizan, I realize. He’s with Mika’s son, who’s waving both arms in greeting at his aunt.

  I meant what I said to Mika. I didn’t want to hear his voice, didn’t want him in my pool. But for some reason I find myself rolling toward the scene. Getting as close to it as I can, and braking my wheelchair at the edge of the flagstone lanai.

  The three of them are lined up at the shoreline now. The boy and his aunt stand on either side of Faizan, who is dressed in a full wet suit, even though the weather is too warm for that. Both Albie and Aunt Jazz jut their arms out and Faizan copies them tentatively. It takes a few squinting moments for me to figure out what they’re doing. Teaching him to surf.

  At first the sight strikes me as ridiculous. I’d learned how to surf during a university summer vacation in my very early twenties, and the sport had been extremely difficult to master. Faizan was in his forties, nearly a decade older than me. What did he think he was doing?

  I watch with morbid curiosity, until just as I predicted he tries to surf, only to immediately fall off his board.

  But then an extraordinary thing happens. Albie and Jazz merely laugh before encouraging him to get back on his board and paddle out again. Then again,
and again, and again, until suddenly…

  I whoop out loud like I’m at a soccer game when Faizan gets up and manages to stay on his board all the way to the shore.

  “Pretty awesome, right?”

  I look up to find Mika standing there with a coffee mug.

  “I have no idea how Jazz does it, but I’ve never seen her not manage to get a student going on the first day. She claims surfing’s in all our DNA, we just have to remember how.”

  She grins at me. It’s hard to believe how easily she threw around that dimpled smile. Didn’t she know the effect it had on people? Even people who considered themselves the living dead? At least outside the fantasies I continued to have about her every morning, and sometimes at night.

  I avert my eyes back to the ocean, away from the blinding sun of that smile. “She was very patient with him.”

  “He was really patient with himself.” Mika volleys back in the corner of my vision. “That’s the key, isn’t it?”

  It feels like she is poking me, trying to make me glance up at her again, but I don’t take the bait. The last thing I need is to look at someone who’s mere smile makes me turn to concrete inside my sweatpants.

  Does she have a boyfriend back in Connecticut? Does he miss that smile? Does he respond to her like me? Do they go on dates and have long conversations? What would it be like to sit across a table from Mika and have her smile and laugh and talk with me in that animated way of hers? To sip tea in my own mug while she drinks her coffee?

  I cut myself off from further consideration of those questions with a vicious shake of my head.

  No more discussion, I lift the brake on my wheelchair and roll back into my temporary office.

  But over the weeks that follow, I often find myself choosing to take my break at the edge of the lanai, at the same time of day when Faizan and Albie usually go out to practice. The sister often comes by to join them. Parking in the carport and going straight to the beach without stepping foot in the house just like the first time I saw them doing this.