Hiialo, threatening to tickle. “You didn’t like my song?”
Hiialo grinned, and Jakka ruffled her hair affectionately. He met Kal’s eyes, his own apologizing for his earlier remark. “I miss our band.”
Kal thought, I miss her. He’d lost all his music in one bad night.
“Laydahs, yeah?” Jakka squeezed Kal’s shoulder briefly, then wandered out onto the lanai, down the steps and into the rain.
As Jakka crossed the tiny lawn to stand beside the zebra-striped door of his cousin’s lavender-and-green VW bus, Danny lingered on the porch. “You got to be kind,” he mused. Swiftly he executed a ka hola, four bent-legged steps to one side and back to the other, his hands and muscular arms saying aloha. “I like Ms. Aloha.” With a last tug on Hiialo’s hair, he turned and leapt down off the porch and into the rain.
“Danny!” In Kal’s arms, Hiialo perfectly and gracefully imitated her uncle’s aloha, eliciting approving laughter from Danny and Jakka. Stirring useless pangs in Kal’s heart.
Wish you could see her, Maka…
As his friends climbed into the Volkswagen and the bus backed out and disappeared down the wet driveway, Hiialo pulled the sleeve of Kal’s T-shirt. “Can we go to the gas station and get shave ice? Eduardo’s hungry.”
“That mo’o is going to eat up my last dollar on shave ice.”
“Please?” Hiialo smiled at him from her eyes, from ear to ear, from her heart. “And can we stop and see Grandma and Grandpa at the gallery? I have a picture for them.”
Her grin made him grin, too. So much like someone else’s smile…Kal asked, “You know who has the best smile on this whole island?”
Hiialo kissed him. “My daddy.” She slid down, starting for her bedroom, knowing they would go get shave ice.
“Put on a shirt,” he called after her.
“I know,” she said, as though he were so tiresome. “I have to dress like a girl.”
DAMN IT, YOU’VE GOT to be kind.
Kal turned again on his mattress, trying to quiet his mind—and ease the burning in his gut. But the moon outside was too bright, and tonight he couldn’t make his breath match the rhythm of the waves hitting the shore just two hundred yards away. He shifted his chest against the bottom sheet, wishing he could sleep. His fingers spread on the mattress, and he remembered touching something more.
But this bed, the captain’s bed he’d built of koa just to fit his small room, this bed was only wide enough for him and then some—Hiialo when she bounced up beside him with a book in the mornings, wanting him to read to her.
Hiialo…Shave ice…His eyes closed, and his mind, drifting off, played music. His own. Chords. Finger-picking…
He opened his eyes and stared without focus at a groove in the paneling beside his bed. Sitting up, Kal grabbed a pair of loose cotton drawstring shorts beside the bed and pulled them on.
He put his bare feet on the floor and reached past his two packed bookshelves, filled with humidity-warped paperbacks, music books, lives of musicians. His fingers grasped the neck of the Gibson L-50, familiar as the limb of a lover, and he pulled it from its hanger on the wall. As he slipped out of the room, he passed the other instrument still hanging, the shiny chrome National etched with palms and plumeria, and those in cases on the floor, the Stratocaster and the Les Paul. The guitars saved him each night. Companions in the emptiness of forever. Loyal as dogs.
In the dark, he went into the narrow front room and pushed aside the hanging curtain to look in on Hiialo. She slept in one of his puka T-shirts—full of holes. Her mouth was open, her legs uncovered. Kal drew the quilt back over her.
“Thank you, Daddy,” she murmured in her sleep.
“I love you, keiki.” She made no response, and Kal headed out onto the lanai through the open front door.
He inhaled the ocean and the flowers, the jasmine crawling up the wood rails, and as he sank down on the tired porch swing and stared at the plants in the moonlight, he felt the water hanging everywhere in the air.
A sprawling blue house with an oriental roof, a vacation rental owned by his parents, stood between the bungalow and the beach. No view from his place, but Kal could hear the ocean and the insects, the bugs of the wet season. He saw the gray shape of a gecko doing push-ups on the porch. Watching it, he reached for the unseen with his mind and his soul.
Nothing.
Where are you? he thought. I need you.
It was one of those nights.
She was dead.
He strummed his guitar, tuned up in the moonlight. A flat, F minor, B flat seven…“The Giant was sleeping by the highway/winds called pangs of love brewed on the sea…” The words were symbols of Kauai and of his life—with her and without her. “Why didn’t you wake up, Giant?/Why didn’t you wake up and save me?”
He sang into the night, the act of singing easing tension in his abdomen, and he didn’t hear the sound of feet. But he noticed the small body climbing up onto the swing beside him.
Fingers still, he stopped singing. “I’m sorry, Hiialo. Did I wake you?”
She shook her head, her lips closed tight, middle-of-thenight tears-for-no-reason nearby.
Kal rested the old archtop in the swing, the neck cradled in a scooped-out place in the arm. It was a system he often used—for holding a guitar so that he could hold Hiialo at the same time. He lifted her into his lap and cuddled her against him.
“I don’t like that song,” she said. “It’s sad.”
That was true. And the song was true. Mountains didn’t rise up to stop fate. Kal hadn’t been able to, either. Not the accident. Or Iniki, the hurricane.
It wasn’t a truth for children.
“Want to hear ‘Puff’?” Kal had played “Puff the Magic Dragon” too many times in bars in Hanalei to consider it anything but agonizing. Still, it was Hiialo’s favorite, and maybe Puff could wipe that teary sound out of her voice.
But Hiialo shook her head, snuggling closer against his chest.
Five seconds, and she’d say, Wait here, and dash off to get her blanket and a stuffed thing called Pincushion that Kal couldn’t remember where or when she’d gotten. Whenever she tried that trick, he’d get her back into bed, instead. If allowed, she would stay up all night.
Like him.
Hiialo whispered, “I wish you weren’t sad.”
Something shook in Kal’s chest. He opened his mouth to say, I’m not sad. But he never lied to her.
He hadn’t known he seemed sad.
“You make me happy, Hiialo. The
