by Austin Aslan
But I’ll never know. I’m here. Always will be. Lost. Rocked by lightning and thunder and storms to come. Adrift on a sea of my own.
Good-bye, I say again, and not only to the honu slipping away into the shadowy heavens.
Good-bye, Tūtū.
As the world fades from emerald-green to nicotine-yellow, I fall slowly to the road and finally, truly sob.
CHAPTER 25
Two weeks have passed. My seizures haven’t gotten any worse.
I linger in my room this morning, surrounded by my things—my comfortable bed, my gymnastics trophies, my surfing and volleyball posters. It could be any Sunday morning since I moved to Hawai`i. I read my Hawaiiana book—the one Mom gave me—listen to the birds, try on three outfits. My camisoles and my shorts are all too large, but they feel right. Something about how Mom washes and dries them; only she can make my clothes feel that soft and smell so good even though she must beat them against worn lava rock down at the river to get them clean.
In the bathroom I flip on the lights. Lights! Some of our solar panels work again, and the extra wattage we’re getting from our generator fed by the waterfall seals the deal. Much of the wiring in the house is shot, but we’re replacing it systematically, as we can. Copper is the new gold—we’re now trading gas and propane away for wire! What will it be next?
The bathroom was a priority. A smart decision. I put on a hint of eyeliner and study myself in the mirror. Kai’s dreamcatcher failed to net all of my drowning thoughts last night—but there have been no storms. My eyes are still slightly puffy and red. The eyeliner helps, but I won’t be fooling anyone. That’s okay, I guess.
Breakfast with Kai feels like any morning from the past. We banter and bicker just like the old days. As always, he makes me laugh more than I make him laugh. Mom sizzles up whole-grain pancakes topped with fresh starfruit, and we wash our food down with pulpy, ice-cold guanabana juice—made in the refurbished blender. Another priority.
“What have you been up to?” I ask Kai. “You’ve been awfully quiet around here.”
He shrugs, looks down. “Just finished the Little House on the Prairie books.”
“Mine?” It’s the first time I’ve heard of a boy reading them, but I won’t say so.
“They were on your shelf, yeah. Makes it feel like current events.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I can see that.”
“Not for long!” he pipes up. “Is Buzz really coming down today with a working Blu-ray player and TV?”
I cast Mom a look. This was supposed to be a surprise.
“He needed the boost,” she says.
Anything to help Kai out of his post-funeral funk is welcome. “Yeah,” I explain, “he flashed us word yesterday.” Buzz is using the lens of one of the three-meter scopes up at the observatories to flicker sun-fed Morse code messages to me. He’s learning the code with the help of an ex-marine, hired to keep trespassers away from the scopes. The guy is a friend of Keali`i’s. Manō.
“I want to watch The Avengers!”
I give my brother a wink. “Bring the pile of movies down from Mom and Dad’s room. Sounds like a good one to start with.”
“You bet!”
“Hey,” I say, “while you’re up there, wanna grab one of my volleyball posters? Hang it up in your room?”
He blushes, slowly nods. “Yeah, okay.”
“Go to it.”
He runs up the stairs.
Mom busses my scraped-clean plate. “You want a haircut today?”
“I’m overdue, aren’t I?”
“You’re chewing on it.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry.” I quickly pull my hand away from my neck. She’s right: I’ve been twirling the end of my hair with my pointer finger, nipping at it with the corner of my lips every several rotations.
Mom offers me a patient smile. “Are you getting enough sleep, honey?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You look…” She doesn’t finish. Her expression, exhausted and heartbroken, says everything.
“You, too,” I answer, meeting her soft eyes for just a moment.
It’s Sunday. Day of Rest. Uncle Hank and Auntie Nora stayed in town overnight and will be with their congregation in Hilo. A few blocks around downtown already have power, and the Millers’ church is leading an effort to get one hundred refrigerators up and running per week. Other churches and community groups have similar goals. Hilo’s on the mend, but it’s far from stable. Resources of every kind are still scarce. The promise of recovery—slow recovery—has made the overall levels of violence less frequent but more intense. The Tribes have chilled out a bit, but other groups—especially families in town—seem to be more anxious and impatient than ever to make sure their children are next in line to get what they need.
Paul and Sara and baby Chloe have taken the day off, too. But not Dad. He asked me to join him in the upper plots to pull weeds and clean the irrigation channels. It’s easier to stay busy than it is to stop and think.
Weeds, then muck, then movies. That’s all. I give my locket a squeeze. He’s always right here. Close to my heart. Every time I see a stray cat in the bushes, I smile. I just need to learn to breathe again before I dare say his name aloud.
Tūtū.
Speaking of strays, Tami has permanently moved in with us. Keali`i and Tami were gone overnight, out pig hunting. They should be back by this afternoon with or without a catch. I’m sure they’ll nab one. We have new dogs now, after all. Well trained, too! The two pig dogs from the back of the Hanaman truck are actually pretty sweet. I’ve named them Lilo and Stitch. They’ve made great additions to our family, and Mindy loves them.
Tami and Keali`i wanted me to go hunting with them. But I still can’t look at a gun without my stomach turning. I don’t think I’ll ever get over what I did. Besides, Grandpa was supposed to teach me how to hunt. I kept putting it off. Now he can never do it.
Mom has promised to take me hunting, teach me everything she learned from…him. Just the two of us. Amazon women. I can’t wait. But not yet.
Dad and I rake out the irrigation ditches. Between the routine silences, Dad ventures into several topics. One is: “You and Aukina.”
I scoff. “That’s your opening? That’s how you’re going to speak to your daughter about boys?”
He gives me that confident smirk that Kai perfected long ago.
I wipe sweat from my forehead and bend back down to my task. “I like him.”
“You don’t really like him,” Dad suggests in a perfect Obi Wan Kenobi monotone, waving his hand magically in the air. “Do you? Sure you’re not just being…?” He trails off.
I stand, muddy hands pressed into my hips. “What am I being, Dad? Hormonal?”
Dad laughs. He actually laughs. “Well, yeah. There’s that. But I was getting more at the Stockholm syndrome.”
I eye him suspiciously. “What’s that?”
“You did meet him in an internment camp.”
“So?”
He hesitates. “It’s when…prisoners start to sympathize with their captors.”
I gasp, raise a fist. “Like beef?” A pidgin phrase, meaning “Wanna fight?”
He laughs quietly, all of this a joke to him—which is good. I know he likes Aukina. This banter is his way of showing me that he approves. I jump across the ditch and slap him on the shoulder, leave a black mud stain on his T-shirt.
On our lazy walk home, late in the afternoon, a truck comes toward us from mauka. Keali`i and Tami. Lilo and Stitch and Mindy are in the cages, and a large sow is draped across the bed. We chat through the driver’s window. “Dogs cornered it. Tami brought it down,” Keali`i reports.
“Good for you, Tami!” Dad says. “Great work.”
My stomach rumbles loudly, the highest compliment I could offer.
“Should we get the imu going?” Keali`i asks. “Pull an all-nighter? Eat like kings around two a.m.?”
“Yeah, sounds good. I know just how to pass the time. Buzz has been b
usy with his soldering iron ever since the electron started behaving again. He’s coming over today with a working TV.”
“Seriously?” Keali`i asks. “Super! I’ll get to work on the coals right away. What’re we going to watch?”
“On the Beach,” Dad declares.
“NO!” all three of us shout. Everyone laughs.
“If we don’t put on Avengers,” I warn, “Kai may turn into the Hulk and smash us.”
“We’ll start with that,” Dad agrees. “Then move on to my favorites. Casablanca, Wrath of Kahn, and The Muppet Movie.”
“Oh, Lord,” Tami says. “The lights are finally coming back and I’m surrounded by total geeks.”
“Hey,” Dad says, “you worry about the food. I’ll worry about your education.”
“Mind if I let the troop know about the luau?” Keali`i asks Dad.
“Guess who’s coming to dinner?” Dad says. He sighs, says that’d be fine, thanks Keali`i for asking first. My eyes widen. The Manō might join us for dinner? This new, open understanding between the Tribe and our neighborhood group is going to take some getting used to.
Keali`i and Tami drive away. Dad and I walk the rest of the way home in silence, coqui frogs tuning their instruments in preparation for their nightly concert in the park.
Buzz’s skeletal van is parked in front of the garage. I spy several new alterations spilling out of the hood. He’s been by three times in the past two weeks, always running between here and the pearl site. He went back up there with Mom and Dad the first time, to recover Tūtū. The other Hanamen who had been up there were long gone. Disbanded, hopefully. Buzz has been back twice since, racking his brain trying to find a way to extract or harness the pearl before it buries itself. He says there’s time—that it’s not burrowing as quickly as he had feared, and that the tunnel is quite stable. He’ll figure out how to pull it out, or use its power right where it lies; I know he will. The second pearl is a lost cause, of course, forever swallowed by the eruption.
I feed the horse before heading inside. When I finally do walk in the front door, I stumble back in surprise.
Marcus and Rachel are on the sofa, chatting with Mom.
They stand up. We trade hugs, pull apart. I shake my head. “What’s this?”
“We went to Moloka`i. Met that Father Akoni fellow,” Rachel says. “Figured out what you’ve been up to. We couldn’t set off for Australia knowing what we had learned. We had to come back.”
“You got way under our skin, Leilani.” Marcus polishes his glasses with the corner of his quick-dry shirt. “The Rorschach flaring the way it did the night we brought you home, the insistence that Phoenix was okay, that we shouldn’t worry—it all haunted us. Later I remembered Tami’s drunken rant about you and the Rorschach.”
“Wait. You saw Father Akoni?” I ask.
I hear a rolling chuckle emanate from the kitchen, and Father Akoni rounds the corner, flanked by Dad and Buzz. His ruddy grin grows warmer as he strides over to me. He’s lost a lot of weight, but he’s the same jovial, off-season Hawaiian Santa Claus who helped us on Moloka`i.
I’m shaky as we embrace. “How’d you get here?” I finally manage.
Marcus answers: “We stopped on Moloka`i, as you suggested, Lei. Met this fine man of the cloth. Got to talking about you. Compared notes. We caught glimpses of what you were doing with the Rorschach. The whole island chain is talking about you. In general terms. No one has details about the person behind it. We schemed to get back over here, try to help if we could. Looks like we missed the party, though.”
“How’d you get here, though?” I ask. “Where’s your boat?”
“One of Akoni’s men is babysitting Cibola off the coast,” Rachel explains. “A generous gesture. We’ll only be staying the night, I’m afraid.”
“That’s all?”
“Lots of work to do. On Moloka`i, here, everywhere,” Akoni reminds us. “Power’s slowly coming back on, but we’re still on our own for a while. Everyone has their own problems to solve. These islands are still forgotten. Satellite communication is years away, to say the least. And we’re on a basaltic rock! Can’t mine our own ores, fuels. We have what we have, and we’ll have to make do. We can’t assume any help for a long stretch yet.”
“Lucky for us the cargo ships are lining up around the block!” Dad teases.
I run my fingers through my hair. “I’ve been thinking about that. Commander Towers is rounding South America, but I’m still not sure how much I trust him. If he comes back, it’d better be with a fleet. Anyway, I’ll keep up the Morse code.”
Father Akoni places a hand on my shoulder. “You went to the mouth of the cave, didn’t you? You listened. Nānā i ke kumu. You looked to the source. Excellent, Leilani, Flower of Heaven. Excellent.”
I turn to him. “Thank you, Uncle, for that advice. Thank you for helping us. For coming here.”
“I had to check on you. The only thing stopping me before was that I didn’t know where to find you. These lovely pilgrims changed all that.”
I blink the gathering tears away. They come from somewhere deep.
Father Akoni senses my struggle, gives my shoulder a tender squeeze. “Time will heal, but slowly. We’re a body, and every bone beneath our skin has been shattered. We have a long convalescence ahead. We will walk again, though. Each of us. Each of our communities. Each island.”
“I wish you could stay longer.”
“So do I. But we’ll be in much better touch now. I’ll make a habit of visiting, okay? At least we have tonight!”
As I nod, Kai bursts in the front door with Tami and Keali`i. “Imu’s going. We’ll check on the coals in twenty minutes. Don’t we have a movie to start?”
We all laugh as Kai races forward and skids to the TV on his knees. He turns to Buzz. “Will it work?”
Buzz shrugs, but his twinkle shines in his eyes. He gestures at the TV with his wrist still in a sling. “All new circuitry. Why don’t you give it a shot?”
An old TV is set up against the wall, crowned with a black Blu-ray player. Wires run from the appliances over to the same cobalt box that housed the shard of pearl once used to power the 8mm projector. A small green light blinks from the corner of the disc player.
We all crowd around Kai and the TV. Tami and Keali`i both look at me, smile, and link arms with me. Kai rummages through the pile of discs, finds The Avengers, and hovers his finger over the Open button.
He pushes the button.
The disc tray slides open.
We cheer.
The anticipation and celebrations continue with each step of the process. TV turns on! Play button works! Movie home screen appears! Movie starts! But I grow quieter with each victory. My throat feels warm. I push it all down, but each time the stew of feelings rises anew, it becomes harder to block.
The music and the dialogue and the sounds, somewhat tinny through the old TV’s internal speakers, are exhilarating. It’s surreal and amazing, and we’re spellbound. Suddenly we’re five minutes into the film, staring blankly forward, occasionally sharing self-satisfied glances. But I find myself staring instead at the 8mm projector forgotten in the corner. We used it once. Now it’s junk again. Just like that.
Father Akoni and Marcus and Rachel are here. They’re here with us! For one night! There’s so much news to share, stories to swap. Why aren’t we talking to each other? Why are we all staring in the same direction, each of us alone in this small room?
I remember that this movie is about a troop of superheroes who have gathered to push back an invading alien force. But the biggest threat may be humanity’s arrogance. We’ve acquired weapons and technology we’re not ready to use.
But don’t worry, the freaks of nature with special powers will save the day!
And the gunfire. It’s in every other frame. Everybody is shooting each other. Extras are blown away left and right. Limbs everywhere. Trucks and Jeeps flipping and helicopters crashing. Flames and explosions and more guns!
Mom rushes forward to the TV, turns it off. The trance ends. “Lei!” She comes to my side. “Honey?”
I start, realizing that tears are streaming down my face. I’m holding my head in my hands. I’m trembling. I shake my head. “Uncle,” I croak. “Can I do confession with you?” I’m not even sure what confession is, but it’s suddenly a fierce need.
Father Akoni says, “Of course, Lei. What’s wrong? When would you like to—?”
“I killed someone,” I say, quaking. “I”—I fall against his shoulder, bury my head—“I don’t even think I was wrong.” When I raise my eyes to glance around, Mom, Dad, and Buzz are wiping back tears. Marcus and Rachel sit as still as statues on the couch.
Akoni turns to my parents. “We’ll go outside, talk on the steps?” They nod.
Father Akoni turns back to me. “Let’s talk story, eh?”
My throat swells shut.
We talk on the lanai for more than two hours, about the sheriff, the Star Flowers—the betrayal I perpetrated by separating the mother and the baby—Grandpa, Aukina, the fear that my epilepsy will return, my worry that I’ve made a mistake by giving the world back its power, everything. I tell him that Grandpa died with secrets locked away inside of him. Ghosts he never got out. I tell him that it’s eating me up that I don’t know those things about him, but maybe that’s fine, because the Grandpa I’ve always known and loved my whole life is Grandpa enough. Father Akoni listens.
“None of us are open books when we die,” he tells me. “We all take secrets with us into the next life.” He has no answers. He understands my fear about the epilepsy—and shares it; he suffered from it, too—but offers no solution. He absolves my sins, tells me I’ve already done a world of penance.
