Mr. Family

“There are some galleries on Kauai that carry your prints. I’ll send you their names. I know they’d love it if you stopped in.”

The Okika Gallery, Erika remembered. Kal’s parents owned three galleries. It seemed like destiny. She longed to tell Adele everything. But if she did, Adele would worry. Anyone would worry, would question her judgment. Erika hated that. Better to say nothing, just leave Adele her new address and stick to her story. “All right.”

After they’d hung up, Erika climbed back up to the main cabin, where the paintings of Kal and Hiialo and Maka confronted her. She needed someone to ease her anxiety, to believe with her in this risk she was taking, believe that it would work out.

There was really only one person who could help with that, and Erika wished the phone would ring again.

He had promised to call.

Apelila: April

Dear Kal,

Thanks for your letter and the photographs and your phone calls. I painted the enclosed picture for Hiialo. I did it using the photos you sent. I hope she can recognize who it’s supposed to be…

The watercolor was of Pincushion. Kal loved it, had wanted to keep it himself. He’d considered taking it down to the gallery to get it framed, but then…Questions. How come he had an Erika Blade original. Of Pincushion.

I stole it, Mom.

Instead, he’d put the watercolor in a cheap document frame, replacing a photo of the great blues guitarist Robert Johnson, and he’d given it to Hiialo, as Erika had wanted, saying it was from a pen pal. After explaining what a pen pal was, he’d added, “Sometimes I talk to her on the phone, too.”

Soon he’d have to explain more. To everyone. Erika was coming to live in his house, maybe for good.

Sitting on the porch swing while Hiialo played in her room, Kal remembered his phone conversation with Erika just that morning. He had asked if she’d told her brother what they were doing. “I wrote to him,” she’d said, and Kal had wondered if she knew she wasn’t answering the question. He was pretty sure she did.

He was pretty sure she’d told her brother almost nothing.

Kal talked to her once a week, always calling Thursday at seven in the morning. It was his day off, Hiialo usually wasn’t up by then, and it was around ten in Santa Barbara. Making the call was agonizing every time. The cultural gap between them was bigger than Waimea Canyon. But Kal wanted to know all he could about Erika Blade before she arrived, before he brought her into Hiialo’s life.

She was hard to know. She turned conversations away from herself and tuned into him, perceiving his difficulties as a single father almost as though she’d been one herself. Or had known one, which she had.

Her brother.

He left the swing and went inside. It was already one o’clock, and he had things to do. He’d recently enclosed the back lanai, creating a new room—for Erika. It still needed finishing touches. But Danny and Jakka had stopped by that morning, and a jam session had eaten half the day. “Hiialo, let’s go to Hanalei. I need something from the hardware store.”

Kal heard a rustling from his room and took a step down the hallway, pushed aside the beads in his doorway and looked in. Hiialo peered up from where she crouched beside his open desk drawer, photos spread out around her. The portrait of a naughty girl.

Kal saw a photograph of Maka under the leg of his folding metal desk chair. Entering the room, he picked up the chair. The surface of the photo was marred, across Maka’s face.

“What are you doing, Hiialo? Those aren’t yours.”

She began a cry he knew would rise to a full-throated wail. She looked at a photograph in her hands, a snapshot of her mother, and ripped it in half.

“Hiialo.” Kal scooped her up, and she hit him with her fists and kicked him, screaming. “Don’t hit. I don’t hit you.”

Her small arms and legs struck a few more times, to prove that she didn’t care what he said, before she subsided to screams. He carried her through the beads and out into the main room and then through the curtain door of her room. Her voice had reached a high continuous sob, and she cried, “It’s your day off! You’re supposed to spend it with me! You’re supposed to spend Thursday with me!”

Kal couldn’t speak. Even as he left her on her bed, kicking the wall and crying, he wondered what he’d done that had made her that way.

Not enough time at home.

He should have skipped the music, told Danny and Jakka it was his day with Hiialo.

Listening to her shrieking, he wondered if all parents felt trapped. Guilty for wanting their own time. For wanting…

Music spun inside him, trying to soothe. “Rock Me on the Water…”

He went back into his room and saw the photos scattered on the floor, including the one that had been ripped in half. In the next room, Hiialo’s cries reached a crescendo, and Kal crouched down to pick up all the Makas from the throw rug.

HIS FATHER CAME BY late that afternoon to look at some bad siding on his rental property, the blue oriental house in front of the bungalow. Kal was caretaker of the vacation home. He cut the grass and cared for the plants and cleaned after tenants left. The blue house had been rebuilt after Iniki; he’d just discovered that the siding was poorly installed.

Leading Raiden, one of the Akitas, up to the porch, King asked Kal, “Where’s the keiki?”

“Taking a nap.” They stood together under the porch awning with the rain pounding the roof and the garden, and at last Kal said, “Yeah, it’s been a great day.” He told his father about the photos.

King shook his head. He’d seen Hiialo in a temper, too. They all accepted her moods as part of her nature, but everyone hated the sulks and the screaming.

Together the two men toured the back-porch room, scrutinizing the construction. King had never asked the reason for the project; the house was small. When they’d examined the new room, Kal offered him some juice—he seldom bought beer, which he liked but which made him sick—and they sat on the veranda with Raiden exploring the yard nearby.

The Akita had a pure white coat and double-curled tail, and Kal studied the dog with admiration and envy. His parents’ stud was immaculately bred, intensively trained, utterly trustworthy. Kal knew the time that went into raising an animal like that.

He didn’t even have time for his daughter.

Watching Raiden lift his leg against the heliconia, Kal said, “I’ve made friends with an artist in Santa Barbara. Erika Blade. We write letters. Talk on the phone.”

His father tipped back his cup of guava juice. “She’s a big artist. How’d you meet her?”

“I placed a personal ad. She’s coming to Kauai this summer. She’s going to stay here.”

Lazily King stretched out his legs and rocked the porch swing. “With you?”

On the top porch step, Kal shrugged. “Here.” His house, not his bed.

The rain drizzled, creating waterfall sounds all around the lanai, and Raiden came over to lie at his master’s feet.

“Is this romance?”

No, thought Kal. It’s practical. “Something like that.”

The rain poured from the gutter and splattered on the ground at the corner of the house. As Kal stared out at it, his father said at last, “Well, we’ll look forward to meeting her.” He stood up and so did Raiden. “I’m going to take a look at that siding.”

Kal glanced toward his own house. All was quiet indoors, Hurricane Hiialo sleeping. Watching the Akita follow his father down the steps into the rain, he drew a quiet breath. King hadn’t criticized, hadn’t shown any disapproval at all. Kal knew that when his father had said they’d look forward to meeting Erika, he meant it.

His parents always kept things in perspective. They’d survived Hurricanes Iwa and Iniki.

And Kal had cried in his dad’s arms after Maka died.

CHAPTER FOUR

Iune: June

HIIALO KICKED HER SEAT in the Datsun. Thud, thud, thud, in a mindless rhythm. Her lips were tightly sealed, her eyes nervous. In her lap was a plastic bag containing a braided lei hala lei, made of flowers of the pandanus tree, and a second lei made of braided red ti leaves.

“Stop kicking the seat, Hiialo.” He ate a Turns. “You okay?”

She nodded.

She’d been up half the night, coming out of her room every five minutes for another drink of water. Must have picked up on his mood. All he’d told Hiialo was that he’d placed a want ad to meet a woman; he was lonely without her mom. His daughter had reacted as though what he’d done was sensible. But did she suspect the truth about Erika? That if all went well she would stay for good, as Hiialo’s stepmother?

Kal saw the sign for the airport and manually worked the Datsun’s broken turn indicator, flipping it back and forth as an Aloha Airlines plane flew in over the sea, descending to the terminal.

“Is your pen pal on that plane?” asked Hiialo.

“I think so.”

Her lips clamped shut again.

Kal parked in the visitors’ lot and came around to Hiialo’s side of the car to lift her into his arms. “I love you, Ti-leaf.” It was his special name for her. Ti leaves were a symbol of luck; she was all of his. Everything he had.

Hiialo kissed his face and rested her head against his shoulder. “I love you, Daddy.”

Kal carried her toward the terminal, thinking, Hiialo B. Goode…

LOW GREEN SHRUBS—Hooker’s Green Dark, thought Erika—lined the shore, and white caps dotted the ocean beyond. Her carryall was tucked under the seat in front of her, and she resisted reaching for it to open her compact. She looked fine—especially for a woman who hadn’t slept in a week. She’d been too excited to sleep.

Absently Erika touched her hair. Days earlier she’d gone to the beauty college in Santa Barbara for a free haircut. The result was that her hair hung at one length, just brushing her shoulders. Nothing dramatic, but she was glad she’d done something. She wore a silk sheath of aquamarine—shin-length, with slits partway up both sides. Sandals, no stockings.

She hoped Hiialo would think she was pretty, would like her. That was everything. Meeting Kal was just…

Well, okay, it was natural to want him to like her, too. In fact, it was necessary. She couldn’t afford to go back to the mainland. Adele hadn’t wanted to publish prints from any of her recent watercolors. Erika didn’t know what she was doing wrong, but it was months since she’d sold anything. Until she received royalties from Sand Castles, she had four hundred and fifty dollars to her name, not even enough for a ticket home. She was going to have to get a job.

But if she had a job, she couldn’t watch Hiialo during the day.

I have to sell some art.

As the plane touched down, the captain welcomed everyone to Kauai. “The temperature in Lihue is eighty-five degrees…”

The plane taxied interminably before it stopped and the seat-belt signs went off with a quiet ding. Erika remained in her seat, letting the other passengers go first. She’d be slow on the stairs. Beside her was a diminutive local beauty in a beach cover-up and flip-flops. She jostled Erika with her bag, then turned and said in charming apology, “Oh, I’m so sorry!” Her voice was musical, her manner sweet. Had Maka been like that?

A graceful human being in every way…

Suddenly Erika felt about a hundred years old.

When the other passengers had passed, she stood up, ducked under the overhead and limped to the door. Slowly, holding the railings, she descended the stairs to the humid airfield and made her way to the small utilitarian terminal. As soon as she stepped inside, she smelled flowers.

He was there, conspicuous for his height and his looks and the little girl beside him, who wore turquoise shorts and a tank top silk-screened with the image of a surfer and the slogan “Breaks to da max!” She was peering intently into a nearby planter bigger than herself.

Kal spotted her and waved, and Erika walked toward him, conscious of her limp, of him watching her. Three yards away, she thought, Your eyes are blue.

Teal, so fine a shade that Erika was surprised she hadn’t always known the color. A teal she could mix from Turquoise and Hooker’s Green Dark. He wore off-white, slightly wrinkled cotton pants and an aloha shirt in navy blue, black and yellow, covered with trumpet vines and ukuleles. Despite the flip-flops on his feet, Erika knew he had dressed up for her coming, but in contrast to the men she knew in Santa Barbara, he seemed casual. Unpretentious. No designer labels, no cologne. Yes, red meat, yes, domestic beer. Shaka. Hang loose.

Mr. Family?

Like a daddy wolf. His wolf’s expression was on her, assessing her, sniffing the air. Alert.

Mutely Erika submitted to the examination.

It was brief, though Kal found her face hard to absorb in one take. Brown eyes. Olive complexion. Smooth skin. She was tall and slender, with the honed limbs of an athlete.

And a slight limp.

He draped the lei hala lei around her neck, and her thick hair reached out and wisped against his fingers, clinging to them with static electricity. “Aloha,” he said and touched his lips to her cool cheek. Strands of hair seemed to leap against his face, and he drew back.

Still feeling the kiss and his hands brushing her as he’d put the lei around her neck, Erika recalled the word for thank you. “Mahalo. What a beautiful lei.”

Well, she’d figured out that mahalo wasn’t Hawaiian for airport trash can, reflected Kal. When she clued into the fact that the word was used mostly by poolside entertainers and interisland flight attendants, she’d be all right.

She was fingering the lei, examining it as though she found it wondrous, which he had to admit it was.

In truth, the lei gave Erika an excuse not to look at Kal. A slanted half-inch white scar crossed the indentation above his upper lip. Its effect was to make her want to stare at his mouth, at his straight white teeth and the faintest gap between the front two.

Instinct distracted her from the flowers, made her glance down, and there was Hiialo, her arms reaching up with another lei. Erika crouched in front of her, and the little girl put the braid of reddish leaves around her neck.

“Aloha, Erika. I’m Hiialo.”

“Aloha to you, Hiialo.”

“My uncle Danny’s hula group made these for you.”

Had that been Maka’s hula group, too? No wonder the leis seemed so intricate, so special. An unexpected welcome from people she had never met. People who loved Kal and Hiialo enough to reach out to her, too. The depth of generosity, the level of hospitality and courtesy, seemed foreign—and beautiful.

No wonder Adele’s so crazy about Hawaii, thought Erika, looking forward to sharing stories about her trip. Then she remembered it wasn’t just a vacation. She might stay here.

Kal said, “Let’s go get your bags.”

AS THEY DROVE NORTH, Erika tried to adjust to riding in a car with two strangers who might become the most important part of her life. Luckily there was a lot on the road to occupy her. Sugarcane grew in fields between the road and the sea. Outside a shopping mall, men harvested coconuts from royal palms that reached skyward like Jack’s beanstalk.

When the businesses and houses of Wailua were behind them, Kal nodded toward the inland hills. “That’s Nounou Ridge. We call it the Sleeping Giant. Can you see him lying on his back?”

“Yes.” Erika knew from studying a map that they were on Kauai’s main highway. It almost circled the island, stopping only for the impassable mountains of the Na Pali Coast. Was Maka killed on this road? How did it happen? Who was at fault?

Kal was thinking of Maka, too. The road was narrowing. They drove past the place where her heart had stopped beating. If Hiialo hadn’t been in the back seat, he would have shown Erika where the cars collided.

He ran out of words until they neared the next town. “This is Kapaa. My folks have a gallery here. It’s right there.” He pointed out the Kapaa Okika Gallery.

Beyond the reflections in the windows, Erika caught a glimpse of paintings hanging against a light background. Then the gallery was out of sight, and the car trawled past shops full of tropical-print silks, colorful beach totes, surfboards and various trinkets. In a blink they left Kapaa, and the highway opened out with a view of the sea.

Miles farther on, as the road curved around the north shore, Kal indicated a lighthouse on a promontory. “Kilauea Lighthouse. You surf?”

“Not anymore.” Not well enough for Hawaii’s waves. Erika stole a glance at Kal. She’d seen in his photographs that he was attractive. But a photo couldn’t carry a man’s smell or his voice. She’d thought she was used to the low warm gravelly quality of the latter from talking to him on the phone. But hearing him speak and seeing his face, his body, all at once was a different matter.

The Pacific shifted colors under her eyes, like a quilt being shaken out.

We’ll be fine, she told herself. I’ll get used to him, and he won’t seem so sexy.

The countryside became lush, and Erika could feel the dampness in the air as the Datsun passed valleys planted in taro. Blossoms spilled from tree branches, and the roadside flowers held as many shades as her paint box. In a tree whose limbs stretched out on sweeping horizontal planes, like a bonsai, sat dozens of white birds with exotic plumage on their heads. They reminded Erika of tropical ports of her childhood, and she thought of her parents, especially her mother, who had loved flowers.

What a place to paint.

She subdued the now familiar doubts…that she’d never sell another watercolor.

“Daddy, Eduardo’s hungry.”

Erika glanced into the back seat. Hiialo had one toy with her in the car, the thing Erika had thought was called Pincushion. A watercolor subject. But she must have been mistaken about its name. “Is that Eduardo?”

“No,” said Hiialo. “This is Pincushion.” She frowned, as though puzzled that Erika had asked. “Eduardo is a mo’o.”

“What’s that?”

Hiialo seemed at a loss. “Daddy…”

“Mo’os,” said Kal, “are giant magical black lizards of Hawaiian legend.”

“Giant?”

“Thirty feet long.” The topic was a good icebreaker. “The ancient Hawaiians worshiped their ancestors, who they believed could be powerful allies after death. Actually some people still depend on their aumakua, deified ancestral spirits, to help them out of trouble. In the old days, a kahuna, an expert in magic, would help people transform their deceased relatives into sharks or mo’os or whatever. Mo’os lived in ponds and were supposed to be fierce fighters, protective of their families.”

“Except Eduardo lives in our house,” said Hiialo.

Erika briefly entertained the notion that Maka had become a mo’o after death. It was a silly idea, but it seemed less cruel than death’s stealing her, leaving her husband and baby alone.

There was only a shade of humor in her next thought: I should make friends with Eduardo.

With Maka’s memory.

“We’re coming up on Princeville,” Kal said. “In a minute you can see Hanalei Bay.”

The terrain was changing again. The green hillocks inland had become mountains, rich forested green and draped in billowing shifting mist. Banyan trees grew alongside the road, their roots stretching twenty feet down the earthen embankment to the asphalt. Erika understood why Kauai was called the Garden Island. Everywhere, everything was verdant; plants with sprawling leaves caught the mist and the first raindrops.

A moment later a shower came in a clattering torrent. Through the rain streaming down the windshield, Erika caught her first glimpse of Hanalei Bay. A Zodiac motored across the water, and then the bay was obscured again by a tangle of foliage, trumpet vines, bottlebrush trees, amaryllis blossoms.

In another few minutes they reached Hanalei.

“That’s the gallery,” said Kal, identifying a white building with a wraparound porch.

Hanalei was not the tourist trap Erika had half expected. Despite its galleries and T-shirt shops, surf shops and boutiques, the community had an unpolished small-town atmosphere. Leaving the shopping area, they passed a soccer field set against the backdrop of mist-cloaked mountains. Beside the field was a green clapboard church with dramatic Gothic stained glass, a bell on the roof peak and a side tower with a pointed pagoda roof. In the doorway two women in identical holoku gowns and leis corralled some small children. Other people emerged, and Erika realized it was a wedding.

Somberly she looked away.

Kal was silent.

As they left Hanalei and continued driving west, the road narrowed. Vines and blooms overhung the road, which was broken by one-lane stone bridges. To Erika, it seemed a fairy-tale place—enchanted. They passed the sign for Haena, and soon Kal turned right, toward the ocean, on a gravel road. At its end, amid a jungle of flora—plants with pointed Cadmium Red leaves resembling lobster claws, trees with frilled and lacy hanging blossoms—stood a Private Property sign. Kal turned down the dirt drive.

A stand of mixed tropical trees to the left hid a tiny one-story green house. The dwelling would have blended in with its background if not for its white porch pillars and railing, a faded wind sock hanging from the roof of the lanai and a child’s bright plastic tricycle in the road. Erika recognized the bungalow from the photos Kal had sent.

But he didn’t stop there.

“Where are you going, Daddy?” asked Hiialo.

The Datsun continued down the gravel drive. “I thought Erika would like to see the beach.”

Separated from the bungalow by a forest of trees and shrubs was a vast lawn and a low slate blue house with an oriental roof. Palm trees shaded the beach. The calm summer sea was every shade of blue and green. It took Erika’s breath. When Kal parked beside the beachfront house and she got out, she could only stand and hold her arms about herself as the trade winds cooled her body.

“This house is a rental property owned by my parents,” said Kal, as Hiialo climbed between the seats and out his door. “It’s occupied off and on. When my aunt and uncle from the mainland visit, they stay here. I take care of the place.”

Erika stared at the sea. “I didn’t imagine you were this close to the ocean.”

No longer having to concentrate on driving, Kal studied her face. Prominent bones, smooth planes, a straight nose. He’d already noticed that with different expressions the whole arrangement of her features seemed to change—and that she had a way of looking at things with deep concentration, as though planning to paint them someday. Erika’s was not a boring face.

“Daddy, I want to go home.”

“Burnbye, Hiialo.” In a while.

“We can go,” said Erika. “I can walk back here anytime. This is just beautiful.” I want to stay…She spotted a boat covered by a canvas tarp, lying on some vines under what seemed to be a pine tree. “Is that yours?”

“That’s the outrigger,” said Hiialo. “It was my dad’s wedding present from my mom. She and Uncle Danny made it.”

Maka. “It must be a very special boat,” Erika said. Hiialo was sweet. This would be easy.

Kal moved toward the car. Erika would have preferred to walk to the bungalow, but they all climbed into the Datsun, instead, and he backed up the driveway, spun the wheel and reversed into a gravel space beside a wobbly green gardening shed.

He parked, switched off the ignition and stared straight ahead, out the windshield. Then he looked at Erika. “We’re here.” He lifted his eyebrows slightly, then turned away, reached for the door handle and got out.