I nodded. “I know. It’s just hard to do.”
We turned around to return to Tico’s room. Coming down the hall toward us was my big brother. Tatiana saw him and her face lit up, and I remembered what Tico had said, that he hoped someday he would be part of a love like the one Haoa and Tatiana shared, and I felt sad and angry and jealous and I knew that someday I would have to forgive him, but that I just wasn’t strong enough to do it so soon. I nodded to him and walked on past, heading back into the world.
When I got back to my parents’ house Harry was in their living room, chatting. “Hey, brah, how’d you get here?” I asked. “I didn’t see your car.”
“It’s at my folks’ house. I came through the woods. We can go out the same way and head up the coast for some surfing. Those news hounds outside will never know.”
More than ever before, I was noticing the acts of kindness people do every day. I guess when you stop expecting them, each one comes as a small gift. “He brought his boards with him,” my father said to Harry. To me he said, “Go on. Everything will still be here when you get back.”
I took my long board and Harry my short one, and we went out the back door, sneaking across the yard to the steep wooded slope. No one saw us go, though I did look back for a minute and see my mother framed in the patio doorway. We climbed a narrow, winding trail that led to a higher street, coming out a few doors down from Harry’s house. When I was a teenager we used this path almost daily, and I was surprised at how familiar it remained, twisting past a banyan with hanging tendrils, discovering an orchid flourishing under the shelter of a kiawe tree. It was a road back into the past for me, back to a time when all I worried about was the condition of wind and surf.
At the edge of the street we peered out and saw no one. Harry’s BMW was parked at the curb, and we bagged my boards and tied them down to the roof rack along with his, and then took off for the North Shore.
It wasn’t the best time to go north; the winter provided really prime surfing conditions up there. But it was a place we could go to get away from the press, where no one would recognize me, and if they did, it would only be as a fellow surfer, not a media target. We put the windows down under a clear blue sky and cruised north, up into the hills, past Schofield Barracks, descending again past fields of pineapple with the glorious blue sea ahead of us.
We snagged an oceanfront parking space just beyond Haleiwa, stripped down to our suits, and dragged our boards toward the ocean. From then on, all I concentrated on was surfing. I emptied my mind of murders, police, sex and family troubles, and felt wonderfully free as a result. The waves weren’t killer, but then I was accustomed to surfing Waikiki so it didn’t really matter. I practiced my turns for a while, and then just surfed for fun, catching the waves I liked and running them as long as I could hold on.
Harry had packed a picnic lunch, and after a couple of hours of surfing we collapsed on the beach and ate, then dozed for a bit and then surfed some more, until the sun was beginning to sink over the hillsides. “This was great,” I said, as we carried our boards back up the beach to the roadside. “Mahalo.”
“I had a good time too,” Harry said. “I’ve been wanting to get up here again ever since I got back from Massachusetts, but you’ve been so busy.”
“I’m gonna have a lot of time on my hands now.”
On the ride back to the city, I tried to hold on to the good feelings. I turned the radio up and when I couldn’t find a good station put in a tape of the Makaha Sons, luxuriating in the rhythms of the slack key guitar, the ipu gourds and the pahu hula drum. We stopped on the way back at a roadside diner we’d loved as teens and reminisced about high school.
“So you were always keeping this secret,” Harry said after the waitress had taken our orders. “All through Punahou, and years after.”
“I didn’t really understand it for a long time. I mean, I didn’t have any role models, and I didn’t have anybody I could ask questions of. So it was kind of a gradual thing, an awareness that kept growing.”
“Does it color your memories, when you look back, you think, oh, if I’d only known, I would have reacted differently?”
I shook my head. “You can’t go back and change things. You learn at a certain pace, and what you know to that point colors what you do.” I thought about Haoa. I had to give him a chance to learn, to assimilate what he knew about me in the past with the me I was today.
We slid easily into further reminiscences, and then eventually we were home. He dropped me off at my parents’ house, and mercifully, all the reporters and vans had disappeared, off to exploit someone else’s misery. I spent an hour or so watching TV with my parents in the living room before I went up to bed.
Sunday morning I woke late and had a bowl of cereal while I read the newspaper. There was no mention of either me or Haoa, a good sign. Funeral services had been set for Evan Gonsalves, at the Kawaiahao Church downtown, across from Honolulu Hale. The Clarks were descended from early missionaries to the islands, and had ancestors buried in the graveyard behind the church. Even though they had sold Clark’s to a Canadian with a chain of stores across the States, Terri’s family was still very prominent in Honolulu. Because of Evan’s connection to them, the funeral would be big and well-publicized, and I knew it wouldn’t be possible for me to sneak in the back unseen.
I wanted to go, but I didn’t know how Terri felt about my part in his death and I was sure that there would be reporters at the funeral who might come after me. I didn’t want to add my troubles to her grief.
I didn’t feel like doing anything much so I sat in front of the TV, watching cable reruns of talk shows, hoping the misery of others would make me feel better about my own.
By lunchtime my mother was fed up. “Come with me,” she said. “We’ll go somewhere for lunch, and then you can come along while I go shopping. I need a present for Ashley’s birthday and a pair of blue shoes with a low heel.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“You’re coming.” When her mind was made up, my mother did not tolerate argument. It was the same thing when I resisted going to Punahou because my brothers went there. It was simply not a matter open to discussion.
“All right,” I said. “But no place close to home. I don’t want to see anyone you know, or anyone I know, all right?”
“You’re going to have to face people eventually.”
“Eventually is fine. Just not today.”
I made her drive all the way to the Kahala Mall instead of going down to Ala Moana. There was a Clark’s there, along with a Liberty House and a bunch of standard mall shops, the same kind you find in every shopping center in every corner of the United States. Foot Locker, Banana Republic, The Limited, and all their ilk: the chain shoe stores and chain bookstores and chain record stores. Without the occasional crack seed stand or tourist knickknack shop selling plastic leis and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, you could think you were in Florida or California. If you stayed indoors where it was climate-controlled, you could imagine you were anywhere from Oklahoma to Oregon or Maine to Maryland.
I’d brought a book with me, a Florida thriller by James W. Hall, and I tried to sit and read while my mother tried on shoes or picked through dozens of junior dresses. But I couldn’t concentrate, and yet I didn’t want to make eye contact with any other shoppers. Instead I roamed the aisles restlessly, looking at the merchandise but not really seeing it. Finally my mother said, “All right, I can’t take any more of this. We can go home.”
That night at dinner she complained to my father about me. “He needs something to do. Why don’t you take him to work with you tomorrow.”