The Color of Air

by Gail Tsukiyama

  Nori turned, startled when someone touched her arm, only to see Koji standing next to her.

  “Saw you standing here staring at nothing,” Koji said. “Daydreaming, yeah?”

  Nori smiled, clearing her thoughts. “Was just thinking Pele finally had enough of all this foolishness,” she said. She looked up at his tired eyes, the glaring raw tracks of his wound above his right eye, and asked, “How are you feeling?”

  They never did find time to talk about his accident.

  Koji touched his forehead. “Fine, yeah. I had a good doctor.”

  Nori shook her head and turned serious. “You scared me,” she said. “You could have killed yourself up at the lava flow. You’re too old for such foolishness.”

  “Everyone’s entitled to be foolish once in a while, eh,” he teased.

  “Doesn’t make it any less foolish,” Nori returned. “And selfish, yeah, thinking only about you. What would we have done if you’d gone and killed yourself up there?”

  She’d already lost so many; Razor, Mariko, and now Mama, who was one step closer to leaving them. Nori couldn’t bear to think of losing Koji, too.

  Koji became quiet. “I didn’t,” he managed to get out.

  “Mariko never would have forgiven you,” Nori said, her words suddenly caught in her throat. She swallowed, fingering the small scar on the back of her hand. “I never would have forgiven you.”

  What happened next was sudden and completely unexpected: Nori felt a flush of heat, followed by a sudden pressure behind her eyes before her tears came. She turned away, crying, as if she were that child again, only there was no Mama and no Mariko to take away her fear and loneliness. That girl wasn’t her anymore, she thought, embarrassed. And still Nori couldn’t stop the tears. It was as if some great welling inside of me erupted like Loa, she thought. She felt Koji slip her his handkerchief, then wrap his arms around her and hold her tight as she cried and cried. When he finally did let go, he looked around, cleared his throat, and said, “Folks going to start talking about us, yeah. Don’t want Samuel coming after me.”

  He made her smile. Inhaling, Nori hiccuped and began to laugh, wiping her nose, her eyes, catching her breath.

  “Better, yeah?” Koji asked.

  Nori nodded, self-conscious. “Don’t know what came over me,” she said, hiccuping. She felt better letting out the anxiety of the past weeks, the fear she’d been holding in.

  “I’ll be fine, yeah,” he said. “And Mama will wake up,” he added.

  “You think?” she asked.

  Koji smiled. “Like Pele, when she’s ready.”

  Nori didn’t question how he would know. She wanted to believe it was true. And then she remembered. “I have news to tell, yeah.”

  “What’s that?”

  Nori glanced at the pickle jar filled with nickels. “Never guess who won the pot.”

  “Who?”

  “Samuel,” she said.

  This time it was Koji who laughed.

  * * *

  Nori left not long after to visit Mama, and for the first time she didn’t pause in front of her old childhood house but kept walking. As she approached the Natua house, she heard Leia’s voice, happy and animated, coming from the porch. Nori paused before she opened the screen door, assuming they had visitors. She remembered the scared young girl, heart racing, running away from her house, thinking if she just reached Mama everything would be all right. How many times had she flung open the screen door and found Mama stringing leis in the porch, or cooking in the kitchen; rushing into her arms. “Okay, yeah. You’ll be okay. Mama’s here,” she’d tell her. “I’m here.”

  Nori hesitated now as she rapped lightly before she opened the screen door, something she’d never done before. She saw Leia first; then her eyes fell on Mama, who was awake and sitting up in her wheelchair.

  Nori’s heart was drumming. “Mama?” she asked, surprised.

  “She woke early this morning,” Leia said elatedly. “Waiting for Daniel to drop by in a little while.”

  Nori squatted beside her wheelchair. “Mama,” she said, “I’m here.”

  Mama looked at her, and for just a moment Nori saw the sweet kernel of recognition in her eyes.

  Ghost Voices

  MARIKO, 1933

  I feel stronger this morning, well enough to ask Koji to take me to Onekahakaha Beach, where we all met so many years ago. He looks at me as if I’m joking, but I keep my eyes on his until he knows I’m serious. “Time is short,” I say. The cancer has spread to my bones, yeah, and I’ve been a prisoner of this bed so I won’t break my brittle limbs. I think back to a time I couldn’t stop moving, and now I’m fragile as a teacup. I slowly push myself up from the bed to show him just how serious I am. Tomorrow the pain may be back full force, or the sorrow, or the anger of being cheated out of precious time with the people and the life I love. There’s no time to waste.

  “Let’s wait for Daniel,” he says, hesitating. “He just went to pick up a few groceries, should be home any time now, yeah.”

  Daniel is home from Chicago looking thin and tired, ever the serious young doctor who carries the burden of not being able to save his own mother. “All the years of medical school,” he says, “and there’s nothing . . .” His voice caught as he talked quietly to Koji in the living room last night, or was it the night before? What they don’t realize is that while my body betrays me, my other senses seem heightened. I can hear their whispers as if they’re in the room with me. “You did save me a long time ago when your father left,” I whispered back. “What would I have done without you?”

  “No, we’re not waiting!” I say, too sharply. Doesn’t he know there’s no time to wait? Then I say softly, “Just you and me, yeah.”

  Koji looks at me for a long moment, then nods. “Stay right here,” he says. “Don’t move, eh, I’ll be right back.”

  I throw the sheet back and wait.

  When Koji returns I’m sitting up. “Anxious, yeah,” he teases. He carefully wraps a robe around me before lifting me with ease into his arms as if I were a child, cradling me gently. I lean against him. I’ve always leaned on him.

  Koji carries me outside. It’s warm and hazy and I breathe in the daylight as he carefully lifts me into the truck, the front seat a soft nest of pillows and blankets. Sitting up in the truck, I study my house from the outside. It looks as disheveled as I feel, the long grass, the overgrown shrubs, my grandfather’s mango tree gloriously full of hard, green mangoes, which delivers another sobering blow: by the time they’re ripe I’ll be gone.

  “The mangoes,” I say, and a wave of grief fills me.

  “Don’t worry,” Koji says as he settles into the driver’s seat.

  I hadn’t realized I said the words aloud.

  “Onekahakaha Beach, you sure, eh?” he asks.

  “Very,” I say, glancing at him.

  * * *

  Koji takes the long way, slowly driving down the streets I’ve known all my life. When we leave the neighborhood and the outskirts of downtown, I roll down the window and close my eyes, letting the warm wind caress my face. How long has it been since I’ve felt its touch? My mind is racing as Koji drives slowly, carefully over the uneven dirt roads softened by the cocoon of blankets. I know we’re nearing the beach even before I open my eyes. There’s the sharp salt-fish, seaweed smell of the ocean, the swishing of the palm trees that surround the beach, and suddenly the past rises before me, and I’m that fourteen-year-old girl standing on the rocks with Nori and Leia.

  “Let’s go,” Nori says.

  We were fishing for bonefish, carrying our bamboo poles and buckets and walking back across the hot sand of the beach.

  “Not bad, yeah, we caught two,” Leia says.

  When I glance across the sand I see the three boys on the beach looking our way, one of them strutting toward us as if he owns the beach.

  “Hello, ladies,” he says.

  We laugh because we aren’t ladies, we’re still girls. />
  “My name is Franklin and my friends over there . . .”

  I think of that Franklin, so young and handsome, all he did was look my way and I fell under his spell. I think of all the things he could have done if he’d just set his mind to it. Instead, he wasted his talents.

  I feel his hand reach out and touch my shoulder, but when I open my eyes it’s Koji I see.

  “We’re here,” he says.

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  “You okay?”

  I nod, even though there are increasing flashes of pain.

  “Take a breath,” he says, knowing.

  Koji parks the truck in the shade of the palm trees facing the ocean. He rolls down his window and reaches over me to carefully roll down mine. We sit, comfortable in our silence, letting the wind speak, letting the briny scent of the ocean embrace us. The sun overhead casts an inviting light on the water, and I wonder what it would feel like to just lie back and float out to sea, yeah. I imagine the coolness of the water, the pain and fear gone, the complete calm of drifting off until I simply become part of the ocean. But then Koji reaches over and takes my hand gently in his and draws me back to shore.

  “Beautiful, yeah,” Koji says, looking at me. “You were always the red lehua blossom to my twisted, gnarled branches.”

  I squeeze his hand tighter. “Nonsense,” I say. “You’ve never seen just how beautiful you are.”

  Koji laughs. “I’ve never been beautiful.”

  I think of the old Hawaiian legend that Mama had told all of us when we were young, how Pele had been jealous of the young lovers ‘Ōhi’a and Lehua, wanting ‘Ōhi’a for herself. When he refused Pele, she turned him into an ugly tree. Taking pity on her, the other gods turned Lehua into a beautiful red flower that bloomed on the tree so the lovers could always be together. I can’t help but smile to think how our lives have turned around. Koji is now the good and gentle Lehua on my brittle branches. Just the thought brings back the pain that wrings my body dry.

  I’m nothing more than pale skin over fragile bones. I rub the callus on Koji’s thumb and feel how blessed I am. I gaze out at the ocean and will my thoughts his way. I want you to know that you are the one I loved most. The years with you have brought me such happiness. I won’t go far, I promise, yeah. Like this island, I’m already remaking myself. Look and you will feel me everywhere, in the rocks, in the water, in the color of the air.

  Hilo

  July 28, 1936

  48

  The Mango Tree

  Even with all the windows of the truck rolled down, the morning air felt hot and sticky, rain likely to come by the afternoon. Koji was already sweating by the time his truck reached Hilo and he turned up the hill toward the green bungalow. He was still getting used to his new life. After leaving the plantation, he’d stayed with Nori and Samuel in town before finding a small house out toward Mountain View. Koji had driven back up to Puli to find Hula, bringing the cat back down in an old wooden crate. He was surrounded by the rain forest, the old lava tube cave that he’d taken Mariko to just a couple of miles away. After spending most of his life surrounded by the hot, flat cane fields, he wanted to be among towering koa and ohi’a trees and the cool, dripping moisture that came after the rains, filled with the scent of damp earth, eucalyptus, and moss. He usually drove into Hilo once or twice a week because he knew that if he didn’t, Nori would never let him hear the end of it.

  By the time he arrived at the bungalow, Daniel had already filled a couple of baskets with mangoes and was working on a third. He was reminded of the first time he saw Mariko doing the same. Koji watched for a moment from the truck, happy to see Daniel settled in. He had started his own medical practice downtown, but had taken the morning off from seeing patients so they could pick the mangoes together.

  “I’d like to carry on the tradition,” Daniel had said when he’d asked Koji if he could come over.

  Tradition. Mariko would have liked that. She must have told Daniel of their yearly ritual.

  “Tradition is good,” Koji had said.

  * * *

  “You going to sit there all day, or are you going to get out of the truck and help?” Daniel had stopped working and looked over at Koji, watching from his truck.

  Koji shook away his thoughts and smiled. “Looks like you’re doing a pretty good job on your own, yeah,” he teased back.

  Koji got out of his truck and grabbed a basket. The tree was laden with fruit, the warm air ripe with the sweetness of earth and melon and pineapple, the mangoes still firm to the touch. Mariko was right there with them.

  “It was a good year,” Daniel said, the mangoes falling into the basket one after another with a soft thud.

  “Nori will be overjoyed to get a couple of extra baskets this year. She’ll be making mango everything for the next few months, yeah,” Koji said, and laughed. He leaned the old wood ladder against the tree, climbed up, and quickly began filling a basket. By midday, they’d have all the baskets of mangoes stacked high on the front porch.

  “Looks like you’ve found something you’re good at,” Daniel said, stopping to watch.

  “Your mother trained me well,” Koji said.

  “She would be happy,” Daniel said.

  “Very.”

  Perched on the ladder, Koji looked up toward the now quiet Mauna Loa, which had had the entire community tied in knots for six weeks, only to have the lava simply stop flowing a week after the army bombed the vents, before reaching the river. While the geologists and the army claimed credit, the locals laughed. They knew it was all Pele’s doing. She was playing with them, yeah, the locals said. The bombs were no more than a tap on her shoulder.

  Koji turned when he heard the front door of the bungalow open. For just a moment he imagined that it was Mariko stepping out to the porch, heart jumping. Instead, it was Maile who walked out, setting down a pitcher of cold green tea. Still an old fool, he thought. She smiled and waved to them. In the months since he’d left the plantation, he could feel Mariko’s presence, urging him forward. It was time to stay in the present, however much he could. It was Razor who once told him that he needed to live life like the way he cut cane, “move quickly forward and don’t look back, yeah.”

  Koji plucked a mango from the tree. When all the fruit was picked, he’d be sure to cut back the branches, start paying more attention to the yard. Next year the tree would be full of ripe mangoes again, renewing itself for another generation to come. Koji looked around and knew nothing stayed the same, with one exception: he and Daniel would be back here at the green bungalow picking mangoes from the tree next summer and the summers after that.

  And for now, it was more than enough.

  Acknowledgments

  Heartfelt thanks to Joy Harris, for her unwavering support and dedication; to Tara Parsons, for her insight and advocacy; and to everyone at HarperVia. Thank you always to my Sistahs, and to Mary Roach. I’m grateful to Abby Pollak, Blair Moser, Cynthia Dorfman, and Catherine de Cuir, with whom I’ve shared not only many manuscripts but many Zachary’s pizzas over the years. Special thanks to my family and friends, near and far, and especially my brother, Tom.

  And to all those who answered my questions, encouraged, and inspired me through the writing of this book, your voices have been invaluable.

  Lastly, many thanks to the Hedgebrook Foundation.

  Here ends Gail Tsukiyama’s

  The Color of Air.

  The first edition of the book was printed and

  bound at LSC Communications

  in Harrisonburg, Virginia, April 2020.

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  The text of this novel was set in Sabon. The Sabon® font was designed by Jan Tschichold. Released in 1967, it was inspired by a type cut by Claude Garamond and named after Jakob Sabon, a student of the great French publisher and printer. Sabon is known as a classic font, elegant and highly readable.

  An imprint dedicated to publishing international voices,

  off
ering readers a chance to encounter other lives and other

  points of view via the language of the imagination.

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE COLOR OF AIR. Copyright © 2020 by Gail Tsukiyama. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tsukiyama, Gail, author.

  Title: The color of air : a novel / Gail Tsukiyama.

  Description: First edition. | New York : HarperCollins, [2020] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019060263 (print) | LCCN 2019060264 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062976192 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062976208 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780062976215 (ebook)