by Hester Young
I finally locate the Sciences and Technology Building, a pristine structure that can’t be more than a few years old. Inside, a merciful undergrad sees me wandering around and escorts me to Sue’s office.
Sue has an evening class at six. When I spot her through the doorway, however, she’s not preparing or correcting papers, but staring vacantly at a painting on her wall. I rap lightly on her open door, and she snaps to attention.
“Come in. Have a seat.”
I shut the door behind me, taking note of the artwork she was staring at. An orange woman stands atop a mountain, her hair made of fire that trails to smoke at the tips. Below her, the ocean swells. At the crest of a wave, another woman rises up, her hair made of sea foam.
“That’s beautiful,” I say. “Who made it?”
“A local artist.” Sue wheels away from the painting. “Victor bought it for me years ago. It’s Pele and her sister, the goddess of the sea.” She takes a bag of baked goods from her desk. “Would you like a stone cookie? They’re a local treat.”
I take a proffered cookie and, with one careless bite, nearly break my teeth. The name is no exaggeration; one could build another Great Wall with these so-called cookies. As Sue rummages in her desk for a plate, I spit the cookie back into my palm and surreptitiously deposit it in the nearby garbage can.
“Those are pretty intense,” I say.
“Mmm-hmm.” Sue pauses, as if she’s forgotten what she was doing.
I detect a nervous edge to her tonight, a skittish energy magnified by the confines of her small office. We sit stiffly, surrounded by astronomy and physics books that underscore my own ignorance. Like her husband, she has no visible photographs of her family. Except for the painting, the room is sterile and forbidding, and the fluorescent lights overhead have an annoying tendency to flicker.
I don’t know where to begin, and Sue isn’t making this easy. “How—how are you?” I ask, like her circumstances might’ve dramatically changed since I saw her yesterday.
“Busy, I guess. Or trying to be.” Her fingers skim the side of her wheelchair.
“And Jocelyn? How’s she?”
She studies me, trying to decide if this is idle chitchat or a more purposeful line of questioning.
“It must be very hard for her,” I say, “with Lise being gone.”
“Lise’s her other half.” Sue picks at her cuticles. “Jocelyn doesn’t talk about it, but she’s struggling. She seems to be clinging to Kai more. I suppose that’s a coping mechanism.”
“There are worse ways to cope,” I say.
“Well, her grades haven’t suffered,” Sue acknowledges. “Jocelyn had a little hiccup early on—she got a D on a math test the day we realized Lise was missing. But she’s mostly pulled it together.” Sue says this like only the most emotionally disturbed of children would get a D. “Jocelyn’s like me. Resilient.”
“Sounds like.” I clear my throat. “Sue, I want to apologize for yesterday. You and Victor were kind enough to invite me into your home, and . . . I should’ve been more up-front about my motives. I’m sorry.”
She picks up a pen, absently taps it a few times on her desk. “Honesty wouldn’t have got you anywhere with Victor,” she says. “You’re here, and maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t like lies and subterfuge, but I do like competence. Save your apologies and give me that.”
“I can’t promise to give you anything.”
“You can promise me plenty. Promise me this conversation is off the record, that you’ll mention none of it to Victor. Promise that you’ll write your outdoor fluff piece about him like nothing’s changed and keep him happy.”
“You really think it’s best to keep Victor out of the loop?”
“Absolutely,” she says without hesitation. “He’d prefer it. Some of us have to live in the world, but not Victor. Let him have his work, his training. It’s safe there.”
“You must feel very alone.”
“I am very alone.” She continues to flick her pen against the desk. “When I had my accident, and the doctors were telling me I wouldn’t walk again, you think Victor was any help? ‘Just give it time, Sue,’ that’s what he told me. ‘Medical technology will improve. They’re making great advancements with spinal cord injuries.’” She lays her hands across her thighs. “He couldn’t face it.”
Sue doesn’t like the pitying looks I’m giving her. She returns to the topic at hand. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about Lise,” she says, “but if you’re going to look into this properly, you might as well hear a few things from me. Since we both agree it’s problematic to get information secondhand.”
“The Yoon family.” I lift my chin. “I need to know about the Yoons.”
Sue doesn’t balk at my bluntness. “I take it you’ve already heard the gossip about Elijah.”
“I’ve heard a lot of people think he’s responsible for whatever happened to Lise.”
“Yes, well, a lot of people don’t know Elijah.”
“You’re saying you do?”
“I’ve known Elijah for a long time. And he’s not a bad kid, no matter what Naomi thinks.” There’s no malice when she says Naomi’s name. “Victor and I were happy when Lise started dating Elijah. They’d been friends for years, and he was respectful—of us and of her. Much better than the other boys she took up with—she wouldn’t even introduce us to them.”
“What other boys?” I make a mental note: maybe her stalker was a frustrated ex.
“I never knew their names,” Sue says. “Local kids. No future, no ambition, into drugs. But Elijah . . . Elijah loved my daughter.”
“You felt he treated her well?”
“Yes. It was pure, sweet puppy love. Nothing violent about it.”
“She did break up with him, though, right? He could’ve had . . . a strong reaction.”
“He wouldn’t have hurt her,” Sue insists. “In fact, if I’d known she intended to end the relationship, I would’ve been worried about his safety, not hers.”
“She didn’t tell you that she was planning to break up with him, then,” I observe.
She rolls her eyes. “Lise’s sixteen. There are a lot of things she doesn’t tell us.”
The overhead lights stutter, as if on the verge of an outage. A storm, maybe. I stand up, approach Sue’s intimidating bookshelf.
She’s a smart woman, but how can I trust her to fairly evaluate this boy? She permitted his relationship with her daughter, encouraged it even. She has a vested interest in believing him innocent.
“Elijah was the last person to see her.” I slip a textbook off the shelf and pretend to read the back.
“Yes. That’s why the police have been so focused on him. But I talked to Elijah myself, that first day we couldn’t find her. His story hasn’t changed.”
“And his story is what, exactly?”
“He walked her home from school at about nine thirty. She seemed upset. And then she broke up with him, with almost no explanation. ‘I don’t want to be with you anymore.’ That was it.” She takes a breath. “The police think Elijah is lying about taking her home, that she never made it back into our house that night. It’s part of their whole timeline of how he killed her.”
I close the astronomy text and push it back into its narrow space on the shelf. “You think the police are wrong?”
“I heard Lise come in a little before ten,” Sue says. “That’s just when Elijah says he left her. I was in bed reading. I heard her moving around her room—she was alone; I could hear the footsteps. I yelled to her and she yelled back, but . . . it’s difficult for me to get out of bed and transfer to the wheelchair. And I was caught up in my book. We didn’t really have a conversation.”
I know Sue will regret that conversation they didn’t have for the rest of her life. It’s what happens when you lose a child: a cataloging of oppo
rtunities missed. I fold my arms, remind myself not to overidentify with this woman.
“If you never saw her, how do you know it was Lise? I mean, could that have been Jocelyn you heard coming in?”
Sue shakes her head. “I asked her, ‘Lise, is that you?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I’m home.’ Jocelyn was at school with Kai studying for her math test. She got home a little later, maybe ten thirty, and popped into my bedroom to tell me that she was back.”
“Did she see Lise?”
“No.” Sue sighs. “She saw the empty bed and thought Lise had snuck out to see Elijah, so she didn’t say anything. She thought she was covering for her. You know how it is with sisters.” Above us, the fluorescents dim with an inauspicious buzz. Sue glares at them. “These stupid lights. The building’s only four years old, and already the wiring is starting to go.”
“So there’s a half-hour window between when you think you heard Lise get home and when Jocelyn got back and found her missing.”
She nods. “Lise must have left the house in that period of time.”
“You didn’t hear her leave?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I think I heard her go out on the lanai, but I wasn’t really paying attention. She liked to sit out there at night—it wouldn’t have made an impression. And I dozed off for a bit.”
“But you think she left of her own accord.”
“There was no one with her when she came in. I listened to the footsteps just to make sure Elijah wasn’t sneaking in. She came and within half an hour, she was gone. It didn’t look like she took anything with her. As far as we can tell, all her clothes and belongings are still there. But she left her sweatshirt.”
“What sweatshirt?”
Sue opens a drawer of her desk and produces a neatly folded black shirt. She spreads the fabric across her lap. A grinning white skull design peers back at me, more than a little eerie, given the circumstances.
“When Lise left for school on Wednesday, she was wearing this,” Sue says. “She wore it to her classes. She wore it in the cafeteria that night at dinner. And Elijah told me she wore it when he walked her home. Thursday morning, after she’d gone missing, I found it on her bed. Lise was here that night, just like Elijah said.”
“Still,” I tell her, “maybe Lise stopped by the house and went back out with him.”
“No.” Sue grips the handrails of her wheelchair and leans toward me. “Elijah hitchhiked home that night. Alone. Nathan Mahoē says he picked him up at ten and dropped him off at Wakea Ranch. Naomi and Adam Yoon both confirmed that. They said he was up half the night crying about the breakup.”
“Ah.” I’m not gunning for Elijah here, but Naomi and Adam Yoon are not the most credible sources in my mind. Surely they would lie if they knew what Elijah was being accused of. As Adam said, family is what matters.
“There’s no way Elijah had time to kill my daughter and . . . and stash her somewhere before he made it home.” Sue sees my doubt and tries to squash it. “Whatever happened to Lise, it wasn’t Elijah’s doing.”
“If all that’s true, why are the police so hung up on him?”
“They have their ideas about what happened, and they adjust the facts accordingly. They say Lise must’ve left the sweatshirt earlier in the day, that she never came home that night at all. It doesn’t help that I fell asleep. As far as the police are concerned, my whole exchange with her was probably a dream.” Her fingertips trace the white lines of the skull on her daughter’s shirt. “People in Kalo Valley don’t love the Yoons. That makes them an easy target. But that doesn’t necessarily make them the right target.”
Something occurs to me now in her version of the night’s events. “Where was Victor in all this? Wasn’t he home?”
“He was visiting the Yoons, actually,” Sue says, so awkwardly I feel embarrassed for her. “He and Adam were rebuilding the kitchen shelves. That’s how I know Elijah came home when he did. Victor saw it. He confirmed everything that Naomi and Adam said.”
Now I understand. Sue is desperate to believe in Elijah because she is desperate to believe in Victor. Allow herself any doubt, and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. But seriously—rebuilding the kitchen shelves? At ten p.m.? Surely Victor could come up with a more convincing story. Though I say nothing, Sue sees my look of pity.
“I know what people say about Victor and Naomi,” she tells me. “It’s not true.”
How can I respond to that? It seems that Victor is not the only one with a tremendous capacity for self-delusion. “It’s great you have that kind of trust in your husband.”
Sue doesn’t let my deflection stand. “Naomi helped us after my accident,” she says. “She cared for me. I wanted to die back then, but Naomi didn’t let me give up on life. She’s an unusual woman, and I certainly don’t share her religious views, but I will always be grateful to her. Always.” She jerks her wheelchair backward a few paces. “If people in this town want to gossip, let them. But I’ll tell you the facts. Victor goes over there to help that family as a sign of friendship. He goes because I tell him to go, because Naomi needs a helping hand. Does he enjoy getting attention from a pretty woman? Of course he does. But he isn’t sleeping with her.”
Then who is Raph’s father? I want to ask. One of her patients? Is she running an escort service on the side? Having Tinder-assisted one-night stands? Given Naomi’s rigid beliefs, Victor seems the most likely possibility by a wide margin. I’m not cruel enough to poke holes in Sue’s little bubble of denial, however. She has enough on her emotional plate without confronting Victor’s probable infidelity. Instead, I move back toward the painting of Pele and her sister.
“Fire and water,” I say. “Kind of like your girls, huh?”
“Victor thought so. He always said that Jocelyn had a cooling influence on Lise. That she was the only one who could put out her sister’s fire.”
“Is that normal? For identical twins to be so different?”
“They aren’t so different. Not really.” Sue folds Lise’s sweatshirt in her lap, hood down, sleeves tucked into a neat rectangle of black cotton. “They’re both determined, passionate, competitive. Lise could’ve been like Jocelyn. She just chose not to be. I suppose there were lots of reasons for that. Some were my fault.”
“How so?” I’m still intrigued by this painting Victor picked. The yellow glow Pele casts upon the sky. Her jet-black eyes, like hardened volcanic rock. For a man like Victor, it’s surprisingly fanciful. “Do you think you treated the girls differently?”
“Intentionally? No. But there were complications with my pregnancy. Selective intrauterine growth restriction.” Sue’s voice is factual and devoid of affect, like a doctor’s. “The blood flow in the umbilical artery was inhibiting Jocelyn’s growth, while Lise developed normally. I had them very early, at thirty-one weeks. Jocelyn weighed barely two pounds and spent a long time in the NICU. She needed so much more from us early on—maybe I just got into the habit of tending to her first.”
“Understandable.”
“Jocelyn was so tiny. She had to fight so hard. When she finally met her milestones, I was always so excited, so relieved. With Lise, I just assumed she would do it. There was no celebration.” Sue purses her lips. “I look back, and I see how Lise was always chasing the limelight, looking for her share of attention. But at the time . . .”
“It must be very hard to have twins.”
“You have no idea. The girls have always been close, but they never stop comparing themselves.”
I find myself grateful for the six-year age gap between Micky and Tasha. The sibling rivalry has—so far—been minimal. With such different needs, they have always had highly individual relationships with Noah and me.
“Lise could’ve been so much more,” Sue tells me. “Jocelyn now, she’s an excellent swimmer, wins competitions, sets records. But for years, Lise was the better swimm
er.”
“Oh? What happened?”
Sue puts her daughter’s black sweatshirt into a drawer. “The summer they were thirteen, Lise broke her arm. She couldn’t train for months, had to go through physical therapy up in Hilo. Jocelyn got better than her, and so she quit.” For the first time, Sue’s voice betrays her emotion. “She threw away all her talent and took an art class instead. Made some new friends, started smoking pot.” Her grief, I note, is laced with anger. “She has all her sister’s intelligence, drive, ambition, and for what? I shouldn’t have let her quit. I should’ve pushed her harder.”
I have no idea how to respond. I understand her loss, understand the self-recrimination she must feel, although I’m far from convinced what Lise Nakagawa needed was more parental pressure in her life.
“When I think of all the energy I’ve diverted from my career to those children . . .” Sue looks regretfully around the office, as if its narrow walls are a reminder of all she’s failed to achieve. “I should’ve at least got parenting right.”
“Oh, come on. No one gets parenting right.” I smile. “If you wanted an easy job, you should’ve stuck with astrophysics.”
“I didn’t even want to be a mother,” Sue confesses. “I was on birth control when I got pregnant. Twins! Can you imagine? How different my life might’ve been . . .”
This conversation is taking an ugly turn. If Sue is sorry she became a parent, I’m not sure I want to hear it. I step away from the painting, finally facing her. “Why am I here today? What is it you want?”
Again, her mouth forms a tight line. “You want to know what happened to Lise,” she says. “And so do I. I wish I could be out there myself asking questions, but . . .” She gestures to her unmoving legs. “Always fighting this damn chair, aren’t I?”
“So, what? You’re looking for a surrogate?”
“That’s right,” she says. “You’re able-bodied, and you have a history of getting things done. Much as I’d like to, I can’t run around this island shadowing people, spying on Lise’s so-called friends. But I can point you in the right direction.”
