little fingers touched the few dark golden hairs on his chest. “Will you tell me a story about my mommy?”
Kal winced.
“Tell me about when you were in the band in Waikiki and Mommy—”
“How about not?” He kept his voice light. “But I’ll play ‘Puff.’”
She shook her head. He took a breath and watched the trade winds make some nearby heliconia, silver under the full moon, wave back and forth like dancers. Maka had moved like that.
Gone.
In a weary tone of resignation, Hiialo said, “I’ll hear ‘Puff.’”
“What an enthusiastic audience we have tonight.” Kal set her on the swing beside him, then picked up his guitar. As he started to play and sing about the dragon, he thought, I’m not the only one who’s sad.
Hiialo couldn’t remember. But she felt the void.
Later, after he’d tucked her in with Pincushion and the invisible Eduardo, Kal went to get his guitar and hang it up in his room, and on the way he noticed the paper grocery bag into which he’d stuffed the letters to Mr. Ohana.
Damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
Yes, he thought. Be kind to my daughter.
He put away the Gibson, and then returned to the front room that was kitchen and dining room and living room crammed into a hundred square feet. He grabbed the grocery sack, took it to the boat-size chamber where he slept, turned on his reading light and dumped out the letters on his bed.
He had to push them into a heap to make a place to sit, and then he read them and dropped them, one by one, back into the paper bag on the floor. He’d work up a form reply to the letters. Thank you for responding to my ad in Island Voice…Good luck in life and love. Sincerely, Mr. Ohana.
Only one note he laid aside, without taking the card from the envelope. He could cut out the picture of the girl and the dolphin and give it to Hiialo to tack on the wall of her room.
Damn it, you’ve got to be kind.
Finally he took an old spiral notebook and a pen from his desk drawer, and he lay on his bed and wrote a letter he didn’t intend to send to a woman he’d never met. The bag of letters on the floor seemed pathetic—answers from a sad but hopeful world to an even more pitiable plea. But their collective refusal to despair gave him a fleeting, moonlight-made hope. And after he signed the letter, “Sincerely, Kalahiki Johnson,” he got up and pulled open another drawer, the big bottom drawer, and drew out the shoe box full of photos.
Pushing aside the cassette case that lay on top, cached among things he loved, he flipped through the snapshots, careful of fingerprints. Careful of his own eyes. Pictures still hurt.
The photo Christmas card showing the three of them was near the top. It seemed right. Stealthily, not wanting to wake Hiialo, not wanting his actions to be known in the light of day, he went out to the kitchen to find scissors and finally picked up Hiialo’s green-handled little-kid scissors from the floor by the couch. Biting closed his lips, his eyes blurring in the ghostly gray dark, he cut apart the photo.
Maka’s arm still showed, stretched across his waist as she touched Hiialo, and for a moment Kal pondered how to remove it. But at last he left it, because then Ms. Aloha would understand what he’d tried to say with words.
Santa Barbara
ERIKA COMMITTED HERSELF to overcoming fear of risk. In the days after she answered Mr. Ohana’s ad, she photographed scenes on the streets of Santa Barbara. A pink poodle outside Neiman-Marcus. Children giving away kittens in front of the supermarket. She spent as much time petting the poor dyed dog as photographing it, and she wanted to adopt a kitten. Instead, she developed the pictures and painted from them, telling herself this was the kind of gamble she’d promised to take. These were not women by the sea.
But what would Adele say? Would she say that Erika might lose her following? If her art stopped selling, if she had to get another job, she would die. Flower without water. Painting was all she had.
Erika’s reaction to the possibility was detachment; she tried to feel equally aloof about the other risk she’d taken. Answering a personal ad.
So when she pulled bills and catalogs out of her post-office box and saw a number 10 envelope hand-addressed to Ms. Aloha, she muted her feelings. The response had come from K. Johnson, Box J, Haena, Kauai.
K. Johnson.
Mr. Ohana.
She didn’t open the letter in the post office or when she reached the Karmann Ghia parked at the curb. Instead, she set her mail in the seat beside her and drove down State Street toward the harbor. She parked in the marina lot, in Jake Donahue’s space. Jake was her brother’s business partner and sometimes first mate on his ship. Jake was going to be in Greenland with David until June, and Erika was boat-sitting his Chinese junk, the Lien Hua. It was a usual sort of living arrangement for her.
Temporary.
Erika collected the mail and her shoulder bag and crossed the boardwalk, pausing at a gate in the twenty-foot chain link fence outside Marina C. She used Jake’s key card to open the lock and made her way down the creaking dock. Erika was painfully familiar with the harbor. It was where she had lived with her brother and his son on David’s old ship, the Skye. It was where she had lived During.
That was over, she reminded herself again. This was After.
Memories of that earlier time would always be with her. Some things shouldn’t be forgotten. Some things couldn’t be.
She reached the Lien Hua’s berth. Walking alongside the junk to its stern, she caught her muted grayish reflection in the dingy glass windows. Tall. Rayon import dress. Hair that fell several inches below her shoulders, neither smooth nor curly, brown nor blond, but simply nondescript.
Erika unlocked the cabin of the junk and ducked through the hatch, descending into the two-room space that contained all her worldly goods and most of Jake Donahue’s. Her art supplies lay on the fold-out kitchenette table. Unfinished watercolors covered the meager wall space in places where the sunlight wouldn’t fade them.
She tossed her mail on the narrow bunk where she slept. K. Johnson’s letter was on top, but Erika resisted picking it up, tearing it open. Restraint was possible through routine.
She opened the overhead hatch, then dropped down a companionway to the unlit galley. In the gloom, the light on Jake’s answering machine glowed steadily. No messages. From the small icebox run on dockside electricity, she took a bottle of fresh carrot juice. Erika removed the lid and sipped at it.
Suddenly she could wait no longer. She capped the juice, put it back in the refrigerator and returned to the salon and her mail.
She took K. Johnson’s letter topside, where the air smelled of beach
