Thick Love

by Eden Butler

  “You ever think once in your selfish little life, Ransom Riley-Hale that all the bad that happens, all the weight you have holding you back is self-inflicted?”

  “How the hell is this,” I wave my hand back toward the metal doors behind me, “self-inflicted?”

  “You get back what you put out in the universe.” She stepped so close then that I could just make out the small flecks of green growing darkening her eyes. “You get it back, Ransom and you don’t even know it. All that guilt, all that shame, all that fucking pity you feel for yourself, it comes back because you speak it into the ether. Me zanmi, I’ve seen it before.

  It always comes back.”

  “I didn’t do this!”

  Something shifted in her expression when I yelled at her, something that looked like I might not be able to fix, but then the doors behind us flung open and through them came my screaming, fighting father held back by four orderlies that didn’t look nearly strong enough to keep him in the waiting room.

  “No! Don’t you fucking dare!” Dad say, pushing back at a tall, but scrawny looking guy in green scrubs.

  “Stop,” I told them, moving to Kona’s side as he struggled. “Dad, please. What the hell is going on?”

  My father was the strongest man I knew. He was power and strength, he always seemed in control and ready to tackle anything that came at him. But just then, as Aly and I managed to move him from the doors without his doing any harm to himself or the orderlies who ran back through the doors, my father looked completely lost.

  It took him a second to get his breathing under control and he let Aly sit next to him, holding onto his arm as he scrubbed his fingers through his hair, then massaged his neck. Finally, a few more exhales and he looked up at me. His hands didn’t stop shaking.

  “She…they said it was…something about the amniotic fluid and a…” he licked his lips like the words stuck on his tongue, “an embolism…I…” Dad covered his face, breathing in again as though he’s lost all his energy.

  “Souple, Kona, it’s okay. Take your time,” Aly told him and for a second I wondered how she managed—to be composed, to not scream like the world was shattering all around her. It was. Right there in that damn waiting room with those strangers’ pending celebration broken apart by the shock and fear pulsing off the three of us.

  “I…” Dad cleared his throat and got up from his seat like there was too much adrenaline pumping in his veins and he needed to move. “Half an hour ago we were home…we were…” Kona closed his eyes, moving his head like he couldn’t understand how any of this had happened. “She was nauseous, short of breath…I didn’t want to mess around, not with the preeclampsia…I called 9-1-1. It…it got worse.”

  “Dad…” He only looked at me when I grabbed his arm, clinging onto the hope that his fear was just an overreaction, that this wouldn’t be as final as the look on his face told me it would be. “Where…is she okay?”

  “Ransom…”

  One look at Kona, at the shock, the realization of what he’d seen and I felt as though I’d been knocked down, like something heavy landed right on my chest. “Oh God… you have to…”

  “She started bleeding…” Kona wobbled a little when I gripped the thin fabric of his scrubs. “There was…there was just so much blood.”

  “Kona?” Aly said, stepping behind me. “Is she okay?”

  The only time I’d seen my father cry was the day he married my mother. It had been one of the best days of our lives. We were finally whole, and on that secluded beach in Hawaii, with sixteen years of distance falling away, my father cried as he kissed his bride. Today his tears came from fear and because my own fear crippled me, because Kona could not seem to get the words out, I cried right along with my father.

  “Is she…Dad…please…is she gone?”

  He blinked, mouth working like he couldn’t believe I thought the worst. “No! No, Ransom, no, keiki kane, no, she’s not.” My father held me, tried to keep my arms still when my forehead fell against his chest. “No, brah. She’s sick.” He pulled my face up. “When the blood…it freaked everyone out. I lost it, I…I got too loud. They wanted me out of there so they could work on her. She’s okay. I think…I think she’s going to be okay.”

  “You think? What do you mean you think? Is she okay or not?” My fists balled tight, gripping my father, but he didn’t move. I’d hit him once back when I thought he’d released that stupid video of me. But Kona had let me. Now he stood like a stone as I let that fear cradle me, as it shifted to rage. “How can you not know? You…you’re supposed to…”

  “Ransom, stop,” Aly said, making attempts to pull me back.

  “You can’t let this happen. She’s…if she…I can’t do this again.” I tried to push him again, a little desperate to make this moment something I’d dreamed, something that wouldn’t completely devastate me. “I can’t do this…Mom…you don’t know, Kona. You have no idea what this is.” When he shook me and he looked down at me like he had no idea who was, that I meant anything at all to him, I opened my mouth, not thinking, forgetting anything but the fear I felt and the pain it caused me. “You don’t know about this. What it is to do something like this…to know you’ll never get to take it back. You’ll never love someone like that again…you’ll never get to say you’re sorry…”

  “Enough!” My father had my shoulders between his hands and jerked against them. His face was dry, but he still looked lost. “That is enough.” His eyes slipped over my shoulder and that frown on his face hardened. “I don’t know? Me? Ransom, of course I do.” I pushed away from him, stepping back when I realized where my fear had really come from, how it had suddenly become about more than just my mother. This was the regret that came with terror, the burning, sharp knowledge that your life would never be the same and because we are all pathetic, selfish creatures, because loss is more about our grief than the final goodbye of the people we love, our first worry is the absence of their presence in our lives. I knew my expression left me open, wholly vulnerable and my father had seen that, likely for a while.

  “You were sixteen and you were careless. You were responsible for Emily’s death.” Though I could never forget what I’d done, even hearing my father say that was a burn I deserved but never wanted to feel. “Ransom, I was twenty. I was supposed to be a man and I put my brother on that street. Where he died. I know this.” He gripped my shoulder. “I’ve been trying to remind you that I know this for a year and a half.”

  Dad’s breath came out hard then, as though he swallowed down that shame and the taste was toxic. “I’m a man now and I’ve never been more scared in life. Right now, in this moment, I am unbelievably scared. Three years ago I was responsible for myself. Just myself. I had no real worries. And now…now I have sons. I have…” Dad blinked, as though only just realizing how his life had changed completely in less than an hour. “Jesus, I have a daughter and I have no idea what to do. Keira, my Wildcat… I don’t know what will happen. I’m so fucking scared. And I love you. I’d kill for you, but I cannot let you destroy yourself.”

  Then everything fell away—the small sniffles around us, the low, mumbled prayers I heard an old woman to my left making in our name, everything disappeared but the tight grip I placed on my father and the strength I felt draining, just a little from him. Instead of wondering what would happen, instead of expecting the worst, the impossible, I sat down by my father, arm to arm as we waited for those doors to open.

  We waited all damn night. We waited alone.

  Real grief is brutal. It was something that my parents had tried explaining to me when I lay in that hospital room over a year ago, my mouth blistered from exposure and my heart emptied by Emily’s death. That was unbearable. This, though, none of us would walk through this and be the same people on the other side if Mom didn’t wake up.

  There wasn’t much room in the ICU—a small bed elevated, holding her as that damn tube worked to keep her breathing steady. She was out, completely, her fa
ce still swollen from the dangers of the pregnancy and her already fair complexion hollowed by the blood loss.

  “This is a serious condition, Mr. Hale.” The doctor had kept his voice calm, his expression impassive and I’d caught the way he stayed several feet from my father, as though he half expected another alpha protest like the one in the delivery room. “Amniotic fluid embolism.” My father and I both frowned at the man and he held up his hand as though he knew questions were coming. “It’s extremely rare and so little is known about the condition that we really aren’t certain how to prevent it. But we can treat it. You got her here in time, that’s the most important thing.”

  “I don’t understand what this means. Please, tell me,” Dad said, ignoring the doctor’s attempt at making him feel better.

  The man had an easy face, looked friendly, compassionate, even the way he’d stood, arms crossed and a chart between his fingers gave him a relaxed but professional vibe. “It happens when the amniotic fluid or other fetal materials enters the mother’s bloodstream. That fluid can cause clotting issues with the lungs and blood vessels. It may be possible that the preeclampsia put Keira at a greater risk, but the important thing is that we’re treating her. The oxygen and the cycle of meds we’ve got her on will get her back to fighting shape, but you both need to understand Keira will be very weak for a while; we’ll need to keep her here for some time.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Weeks, possibly a month, it will all depend on how she responds to treatment.” The doctor watched my father as he nodded, and I caught the way the man’s eye shifted from Dad’s face to mom lying on the bed and then back again. “Mr. Hale,” he said, clearing his throat and Dad straightened his shoulders as the doctor glanced at the floor. “I can’t be sure until Keira’s recovered but, in my professional opinion it would highly ill-advised for Keira to get pregnant again.”

  There was the smallest moment, a little flash that he tried to cover with a shrug, and I knew the news had disappointed him. Family was everything. Ohana wasn’t just some catchphrase in a Disney movie. It was real to him, to all of us.

  “Doc,” he said, grabbing the man’s shoulder, “you take care of my Wildcat and my baby girl. That is all I care about right now.” He’d squeezed the doctor’s shoulder. “You get my girls healthy so I can take them home.”

  We’d only seen the baby for a few minutes in the NICU; her breathing was labored and she was being monitored. It was probably nothing but they weren’t taking any chances. That baby was perfect and beautiful and I had to force Dad away from that incubator before he’d caused another scene. Between the waiting game of both Mom and my little sister being out of reach, Dad and I got little sleep.

  The hours went by slowly as we waited next to Mom’s bed, watching her, avoiding anything that resembled a conversation because on that bed, between me and father, lay the fear that hung in the room like humidity. We couldn’t look at each other, make comments about football or practice or any damn thing because we were the same. We were so similar and neither of us was good at hiding what we felt. Not when it came to Mom. Not when it came to loss.

  Dad did nothing but stare at her, practically lying on the bed next to her with his hand covering hers and his thumb rubbing along her knuckles. He touched her, kissed her as though he expected her to wake up and apologize for worrying him so much.

  “One time,” he said, that deep, sleep-deprived voice made him sound sick, “when we were in college, she broke up with me.” He kept his eyes moving over her face. The right side of his mouth moved as something came to him and then he shook his head. “She was always trying to do that.” I let him talk, didn’t remind him that I knew that. They’d spent the past three years filling me in on their destructive, desperate relationship when they were kids and I’d never quite understood if they thought the stories were funny or if they told them to me to scare me. “God, we were young. We were…” one long blink and my father swallowed, “we were addicted to each other and there she was mad at me because I did something else that was stupid, I kept doing things that were stupid and the whole time I was away from her, I thought ‘How can I fix this?’ ‘How can I make this right?’ because I knew…I knew…” Then he went quiet, seeming too distracted by the small bones in her face and the smooth skin that covered them. Dad leaned on his elbow, pulling her hand against his chest.

  “What did you know, Dad?”

  He glanced at me like he’d almost forgotten I was there. “I knew my love was so thick, that what I felt for her then was something I didn’t just want, but something I needed. Even when I pushed her away, even when I was so scared of what she did to me, even when I spent years laying in bed at night wondering if that feeling would ever go away, I knew no one would give me that. There was only ever her. No one does love like Keira.”

  “Thick love?” I said when he let the room go still again and the silence was too much for me to take.

  He smiled and for the first time since we’d been here watching her, waiting for her, my father’s eyes relaxed. “‘Thin love ain’t love at all.’”

  It took me a minute, but then I remember the line, something Mom had said through the years, that later I’d read in high school, something that stuck through repetition. “Morrison?” I asked him and Dad nodded.

  “It was our…” he shook his head, like the explanation didn’t matter, “it was us wanting to prove that this thing between us wasn’t temporary. Thick love is best. Thick love is…it’s when you know.”

  I sat up then, leaning on my forearms and Dad went back to his constant gawk of my mother, brushing away the hair from her face, looking a little more lost than he had in the waiting room.

  “It’s when you know what?”

  When my father looked at me, there was something telling in his expression, something that made him grin and I felt as though he’d been waiting for me to ask that question. “It’s when you know you’ve found the one that can pick up the pieces when you let your heart get broken.”

  Kona Hale wasn’t a philosopher, but at that moment I realized I had never heard anything more profound.

  I watched him as he clung to her, moving his cheek to her chest and his arm around her waist. It was a position I’d frequently found them in—him hanging on to her like she was his salvation, her with her fingers running through his hair. Leann had once told me they’d always been that way, needed those subtle, almost unconscious touches to keep them centered to the earth, and to each other. I felt almost like I didn’t belong in that small room just then, like I was somehow in the way of a moment that was one-sided. They’d loved each other for so long, so fiercely and had since they were kids. Since they were my age. Since they were Aly’s and my age.

  I leaned back, rested my shoulders on the wall behind me, watching my parents but finally taking a moment to remember what Aly had been like tonight on the stage. And even afterward, when my panic had me lashing out at her, screaming, she’d taken what I’d given her, and fed it back to me.

  We were not my parents. There was no epic, life-changing love between us, but there was the hope that we might have that one day. After all, she had held me when the roses in my car reminded me of an anniversary I never wanted to celebrate. She took the bitter, angry venom I gave her and didn’t pacify me with words that meant nothing. She fought back and I liked it because no one else had done that for me before. Emily had been the sweetest girl, but she’d been a girl scared of hurting anyone’s feelings. Aly was a woman who wasn’t afraid to stomp on my toes to make me realize how stupid I’d been.

  My eyes felt heavy and I could barely keep them open, but then a movement from the bed, a slow, easy movement woke me up. It wasn’t Dad. He hadn’t moved; he still held my mother. But my mother…when she blinked, when her hand with the I.V. moved, when it rested on my father’s head, my heart sped up.

  Mom’s mouth curved slowly upwards, as though the sensations around her were starting to come into focus. The first th
ing she recognized was the feel of my father’s heavy body laying where he always did, next to her, expecting her touch. And she did touch him—slow, barely moving strokes through his hair, once, twice and then my father jerked awake.

  “Keira?” He raised up on the bed, holding her face as I pushed the call button. “Wildcat…no, don’t take off the mask,” he told her moving her hands away from the oxygen mask. “Baby…”

  She seemed to realize, then, that she was in the hospital. She stopped fumbling at the mask, and instead started to look around. When she saw me, she feebly tried to offer her hand to me, and I quickly crossed the room to gather it into my own. We had a few moments to hold her, for Dad to kiss her gently before her room filled up with medical personnel. There was activity then, lots of it—the quick action of the two nurses coming in to check on her, followed by a doctor who questioned Mom quietly, calmly, and then spoke to Dad after his examination. And then, when she was more alert, stronger, and sitting up in her bed, we had a visitor.

  My baby sister was tiny, much smaller than Koa had been. Still, watching my father hold her against Mom’s chest, I thought that she fit so easily, so naturally into the ohana my parents had built.

  “Makana,” Dad said, holding her like she was made of glass, like he had never seen anything like her before. “Keira because she is beautiful. Makana because she is a gift.”

  And Keira Makana Riley-Hale, that precious baby with the mouthful name and beautiful caramel skin like mine, like my little brother’s, held our father’s finger with the tightest grip and leaned against my mother’s mouth when she kissed that tiny cheek.

  My mother hadn’t simply been there to pick up my father’s broken pieces. She’d been the one to hold his heart in her hands so that the children she gave him, the light she put back into his life covered him, filled him with love so thick he would happily have drown in it.