Mr. Family. Margot Early
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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 best part of my day is seeing you after work and finding out what you’ve been doing.”
Hiialo’s 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