This Is Paradise (14 page)

They drive all the way to Sandy’s on the east side of the island because the boys want to bodysurf and Keaka is feeling generous. At the beach, Sarah and the boys change into their swimsuits in the bathroom. Sarah hates the beach bathrooms, with their cement flooring where the water pools and their unflushed toilets. In one toilet, the water is dark red with blood, and Sarah wonders how someone can bleed that much and not die.

Outside of the restrooms, she and her brother wait
for Robert. He is carefully applying sunscreen, using the metal tablets that serve as mirrors to see if he’s missed any spots on his face. Sarah thinks of Joon, the shininess of her black belt, and the way her dress moved like water across her skin. “I met one friend of Dad’s today,” Sarah says. John-Boy looks up from the scab on his knee he’s been picking but doesn’t answer her.

“She was so pretty,” she adds. John-Boy frowns and Sarah senses she has said something wrong. “Joon is a friend of Dad’s from work,” she tries to explain. “She needed a ride home.”

John-Boy glares at Sarah and opens his mouth to speak, but at that moment Robert emerges from the bathroom, his pale skin now white with sunscreen, and his belly waggling slightly as he jogs to them. “You better not say nothing to Mom,” John-Boy whispers angrily before he and Robert run to the water.

Sarah wants to ask her dad why John-Boy is mad at her, and why her mom shouldn’t hear about Joon. Sarah remembers wanting a purple satin nightgown from Sears and her mother flatly refusing to buy it for her. Sarah suspects that women like Joon sleep in nothing but purple satin.

Sarah knows she is getting too big to ride on her father’s back, but she insists he take her beyond the break all the same. She gets him to agree by promising to ride in a wave on her own, without holding on. He has tried to teach her to let the whitewash buoy and carry her, like a
thousand hands, toward the shore, and how and when to dive under a wave, her head and body deep enough to slip unharmed beneath the break even as her feet remain near the surface, tickled by the swirling wash.

In the water, she climbs on his back, and he paddles out with her. At first she wraps her arms around his neck, but he says she’s choking him, so she moves her hands to his shoulders and digs her fingers into the soft indentations above his collarbones. They dive together beneath the first wave, Keaka telling her to hold her breath and then saying when it’s safe to breathe again. A second wave breaks close behind the first, and Sarah takes a deep breath. When they dive beneath the lip of the wave, she sticks her head up, like a turtle, to feel the water lift and twirl her hair.

But she miscalculates the water’s strength. The wave lifts her off her father’s back and pushes her down, breaking on top of her. Without knowing which way is up or down, she flails. She opens her eyes, but the water is cloudy with churned sand. She swims for a murky patch of light and breaks the surface of the water as yet another wave crashes down. This time she doesn’t have a chance to catch her breath, and the wave rolls her over and over like a tumbleweed in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. She has been told once, while hiking, that if she loses her way, she should stay in one place and wait to be found. She wishes to apply that logic now. Her father will be looking for her. Can’t she just wait for him?

Her lungs burn and she can feel the ocean sucking back
the water and building into another wave. She knows she will drown if she waits for help. She swims toward the light again, and when she breaks the surface, she is facing a steep wall of water. She takes a deep breath and dives beneath it.

She struggles through the waves until, finally, she is outside of the break zone. When she spots her dad, he is frantically looking for her, calling her name, diving under water, as if she could be seen in the haze. He is outside of the waves, though, and Sarah feels betrayed, as if he hasn’t tried hard enough to find her. Shouldn’t he know she’d be caught on the inside in the mess of the break zone?

Back on shore, as he wraps her in a towel and hugs her, she studies him. His brow is creased with concern, his eyes watery from the salt. She wants him to tell her the things she doesn’t yet know. “Joon doesn’t have kids, yeah,” she says.

Keaka leans back from her, his hands still gripping her upper arms, and stares at her, a little surprised. “No. No keiki.”

“She doesn’t work construction. Cannot if she like dress how she like dress.”

“She no work construction,” Keaka confirms. Sarah feels like a hypnotist: the way Keaka watches her is how she’s seen people on television watch a pocket watch on a chain. “She’s a good friend, yeah.”

Sarah wants to push him further, wants him to tell her that Joon is the reason Keaka does not come home
on Friday nights, that she makes him forget dinner or his promise to watch a movie with Sarah and John-Boy or tell her a story before bed. Sarah does not know what Joon has that she, Keaka’s daughter, does not, but Sarah does understand jealousy, and some part of her understands how to make her father feel bad for making her feel bad. She sits quietly on the warm sand. “I just wish you’d come home when you say you will.”

Keaka recoils, his hands dropping from her shoulders as if her skin has burned them. Sarah is instantly sorry for what she has said. She has damaged something between them, hurt her father in a way she didn’t mean to. Instead of earning his trust, she has loosened the small, tightly woven cord that holds them together against the world of whitewash and rogue waves and brothers who always beat her into the ocean. Suddenly, Sarah understands she will no longer be invited to ride on her father’s back, and that their Saturday afternoons at the beach are numbered.

When John-Boy and Robert return from the water, Keaka tells the kids to pack up. They are going home. “So early?” John-Boy whines. Keaka shoots him a cold look, and John-Boy knows enough to turn accusingly to Sarah and whisper, “What’d you do?” Sarah does not answer. She’s not sure what she did, but she knows what she wanted: for her dad to belong wholly and completely to her family.

Her entire life Grace has suspected men know things because they think them, and women know things because they feel them. She cannot describe her philosophy any better than that. She just knows that men and women are different in how they come upon knowledge, and women do not need to witness something to know it has happened.

This is why, on December 15 at 3:42 p.m., when her cell phone vibrates in her blazer pocket, Grace senses the world is not right. She has been counting twenties for Mr. Osaka, an elderly Japanese gentleman who has banked with Central Pacific for more than fifteen years, and who always remembers to ask Grace about her children. Grace stops between two hundred and two hundred and twenty, sets the bills down, and answers her phone. Mr. Osaka watches her, confused, concerned.

Mary, another teller, stops what she is doing the moment she hears the high note of alarm in Grace’s voice. “Why aren’t the kids at your house, Momma?” Mr. Osaka’s unfinished transaction blinks on Grace’s computer screen. He bows his head and stares, without seeing, at the pile of bills on the counter in front of him. He moves his hand forward, as if to hold Grace’s, and then stops himself. Mary waves him on to the next available window and turns her back to the growing line of people waiting to cash their mid-month paychecks.

Grace is aware that while Mr. Osaka and Mary cannot hear what’s being said on the other end of the line, they
can hear her responses, and she offers them a tight smile. “I’m at work, Momma. The kids were supposed to be at your house this afternoon. I’ll call John-Boy’s cell.” Grace hangs up the phone.

Grace steps into the glass meeting room behind the teller windows. As her son’s phone rings, she watches Mary finish counting Mr. Osaka’s bills. Mary apologizes to him for the interruption. Mr. Osaka bows toward Mary, and then he looks at Grace, gazing at her through the soundproof glass of the office, and bows again. His expression is one of deep pity, and panic rises in Grace’s chest. She feels as if Mr. Osaka can see something she cannot.

When John-Boy doesn’t answer his cell, Grace tries her husband. “No, I at work,” Keaka shouts. “Why I go pick ’em up?”

“Don’t yell at me. I merely want to know where the kids are.”

“Maybe dey wen go fo’ shave ice on da way. No can reach ’em on John-Boy’s cell?” Keaka shuffles something on the other end of the line, and Grace pictures him at his desk with a stack of invoices. He’s always grumpy when he’s paying bills.

“I tried already. No answer.”

“You wen tell ’em go Tūtū’s house, yeah?” Despite his calm voice, she can’t help but feel he’s blaming her for this.

“They know the routine.” She tries to remember if,
that morning, she told them to wait for her at school. With Christmas coming, she’s been picking them up more often than usual so they can run errands with her, buy gifts for the grandparents, bake cookies for a classroom party, stop by the Ben Franklin craft store for an end-of-term science project. She wants to believe she misspoke this morning and told them not to walk to their grandmother’s house. She wants to believe that whatever mistakes she’s made, they’ll be the kind she can easily fix. “Maybe they’re waiting for me at school. Or maybe John-Boy went to a friend’s house and Sarah is watching the boys play video games or maybe …” Grace shakes her head, frustrated with herself. “But if they were waiting at school for me, John-Boy would have called. And if John-Boy went off with his friends, he’d make sure Sarah was with one of us.”

“Sarah? Da girl missing?”

“I don’t know where either of them are. I just told you that!” She shouts. Keaka only hears pieces of what she says, never all of it.

Grace hears more shuffling on the other end of the line, and then a small cough. “I gon drive to da school fo’ try see ’em walking home.” The phone taps against Keaka’s cheek as if it’s bouncing as he jogs to his truck. “I gon call you soon.” His voice is gentle, whispered, like he’s telling her a secret. His voice is so unexpectedly tender that she will remember it long after the rest of the day has sunken into a dark blur.

In the back of Mānoa Valley, the rain is falling heavily, and Joon listens to it drum against the roof of her ʻohana. She has nestled herself beside Keaka’s chest, her nose an arrow to his nipple, her mouth against his rib. Her breath gathers damply against his skin, and she can feel the moisture echoed back on her upper lip.

Her studio has no curtains or shades, but the little building is set on the back of her parents’ property and surrounded by avocado trees, so it stays cool and dark and private. She likes her space, the rattan floor mats, the sliding screen that separates the bed from the living room, the kitchenette off to the side of the entrance. She likes that this belongs to her, that she can share it at her will. Keaka has his house, his wife, his family. And she has her ʻohana, which belongs to her alone. Sometimes she refuses to let him inside, declines to see him, a reminder of the power she can wield. Other days she is grateful to see the outline of his body beneath her sheets, to hear him humming in her shower, to see him cooking on her little hot plate.

At thirty-two, Joon is a secretary in a law office downtown, and she prides herself on her good sense. She understands Keaka will not leave Grace as long as the children are still living at home, and she has had her own dalliances in the years she and Keaka have been together. She once went an entire year without him, before running into him
again by chance—he was at her favorite club, waiting for her it seemed—and falling back into old habits.

She has, at times, wondered how long their affair can last, the roller coaster of on and off and on again, but by now they’ve spent more than thirteen years together, and at times she wonders if they will continue like this for the rest of their lives. In more sober moments, she hopes to find a man who wants to marry her, or whom she wants to marry, and then she will drop Keaka forever, and he will understand what it feels like to need, not just desire.

If pressed, she would admit she cannot picture this future husband of hers. She cannot even create the smallest details of his face because, for her to love him, he would have to have Keaka’s mouth, and if his mouth, then why not his eyes and nose and the curve of his brow line? And this man—this future husband—would need to dance with her as Keaka does, holding her so tightly that each breath is pained. He must make her breakfast like Keaka does, remembering she likes her eggs over easy with fried onions and cold rice. And he would have to make love to her as Keaka does, sometimes roughly, with the old excitement of their youth, and sometimes with such gentleness she yearns to cry. Sometimes she feels sorry for this future husband of hers, who will always be compared to Keaka and found lacking, and having felt pity, she then is content again to be with Keaka.