“Wakarimasen,” he said, and lounged on a blue Styrofoam noodle, the kind of water toy children were more likely to play with.
So he definitely was Japanese, and he was pleading that he didn’t understand English. I didn’t bother continuing the conversation in either language, but splashed back to my father, who was lounging against the pool wall, reading.
“Did you see the Japanese guy with the noodle? He just touched me!”
“Oh really? That’s Jiro Kikuchi,” said Uncle Hiroshi, who had been lounging in a chair wearing a sun-shielding visor that covered almost his whole face. “If he likes you, maybe that’s a good thing!”
“What?” I was incensed.
“He’s the developer’s son, Rei,” my father said. “We met earlier when you went into the restroom. I was just talking with him in Japanese, and then for a few minutes with his roommate.”
Now I remembered what Kainoa had said about the younger Kikuchi and his caregiver. I followed my uncle’s gaze to a short, bronzed man in his thirties with thick black razor-cut hair wearing a Speedo suit and reading The Annals of Psychiatry behind a pair of dark sunglasses.
“Did the roommate mention that he’s a psychiatrist?” I asked, recalling Kainoa’s information.
“Yes, how did you guess?” my father answered. “His name is Calvin Morita, and he’s just like you, Rei, partly Japanese and partly American. He went to Yale for his undergraduate and medical degrees. Since you didn’t care for Kikuchi-san, shall we introduce you to Dr. Morita?”
“No!” I got out of the pool and found a chair far away from the matchmaking brothers, where I buried myself in The Waikiki Widow, the Juanita Sheridan novel that was next in the series I’d started on the plane. I hadn’t finished two pages before Calvin Morita strolled over.
“Are you Doctor Shimura’s daughter?” he asked with the long vowel sounds of the Midwest. I nodded warily.
He crouched down close to me. “I’m Calvin Morita, and I live in the house over there.” He waved his arm in the direction of the end of the cul-de-sac, where the Kikuchi mansion lay. “I was wondering if something happened in the pool.”
“Yes. Jiro Kikuchi just came up and grabbed me when I was swimming.”
“I’m so sorry. He’s got some psychological issues.”
“Perhaps he does, but he still should be kept from touching women like that.”
“It’s called schizoaffective disorder.” Calvin gave me a penetrating look. “He’s fine most of the time, but sometimes he expresses himself in a way that we would consider…boisterous. I know it’s hard for a layperson to understand. I take care of him, so please accept my apology for not doing a very good job.”
I examined Calvin, who was neither good- nor bad-looking, just completely average, except for his physique. Such blown-up muscles on a man who was barely five foot six inches tall was ridiculous. And what kind of a doctor had so much time in his day that he could pump iron?
“You might want to stay very close to him, or avoid public swimming areas.” I glanced over at Kikuchi, who seemed to be focused on rubbing himself against a noodle.
“Oh, he’s fine, just a bit frustrated at times. And regarding supervision, it doesn’t work well when I’m in the water with him. He feels as if he’s being babied.”
“Well, you’re doing splendidly at not hurting his feelings then.” I stood up, because I noticed that Jiro was getting out of the water. It was time for me to jump back in. I waved at Calvin and without another word dove smoothly under the surface. This time, when I came up, my father was beside me.
“Are you feeling better now?” he asked.
“Not really.” I was treading water, and my father joined me.
“Well, let’s take your mind off the present and talk about the situation with Edwin,” my father said. “I want to explain why Hiroshi and I are so concerned about it.”
“Hey, I’m concerned too, but that doesn’t mean I want you to throw a lot of money into paying a lawyer to chase a dubious proposition.”
“I’m not happy to become involved in Edwin’s personal life either, but Hiroshi and I must do something to amend for what our great-grandparents did to Harue Shimura by sending her to become a laborer in Hawaii.”
“But you can’t apologize to her. She’s dead.” As we talked, I kept my eye on Jiro Kikuchi, who was watching us, but seemed content to be poolside, for the moment, with Calvin.
“I received a telephone call from Edwin this morning, while you were running,” my father continued. “He pressed me for an answer, and I have delayed until dinner tomorrow evening.”
“Where? At their place again?”
“No, ours. I would have asked you first, but you were gone. We can all cook together…”
The last time my father cooked, he’d started a fire. Hastily, I said, “I’ll cook the meal like I’m doing all the others. The only catch is I don’t have a really good cookbook with me-I’ll have to think up some impromptu things, I suppose”
“There will be nine of us, since Hiroshi invited Calvin Morita. I hope that isn’t a bad surprise?” he added, when he saw my face.
“How could you? What’s he going to do, bring along Jiro?”
“No, no, Calvin explained that he expects Jiro’s father to be in town, which means he can come alone.”
“Just my luck,” I said grimly.
“Thank you for understanding, Rei. Also, I wanted to ask if you had time to drive me to my first appointment at the Queen’s Medical Center today?”
“Yes, of course. What time?” I was in the mood to get away from Kainani.
“It’s at two, but I thought we could go in earlier, and I’d take you to lunch at Chinatown first. Then, during my appointment, you could start researching legal documents that pertain to the cottage situation.”
“But we already know there was no real estate transaction. If there was a deed giving the Shimuras claim to the land, Edwin would have been able to use it for his earlier lawsuit.”
“You’ve said from the start that you don’t trust Edwin,” my father said. “So it’s better for us to verify all the facts personally.”
“But you’re supposed to be relaxing, not running around doing research.”
“It won’t be so bad for me, if you help out. Hiroshi and Tsutomu are helping, too.”
“How?”
“My brother agreed to talk to a realtor about land values, and Tsutomu is going to try to reach the lawyer Edwin worked with before.”
I blinked water out of my eyes, thinking that my father had done more groundwork than I thought him capable of. Still, I doubted a land records search would turn up anything more than we had already learned from the appraiser’s report we’d seen the evening before. I said, “We must find a way to speak with Uncle Yosh privately. He probably could tell us some things that would make the situation clear. But do you want to do that, Dad? I mean, you’re closer in age to him, and a man.”
“I don’t think so. Yesterday when we met, he refused to speak Japanese. He’s deeply conflicted about his identity. You have more of a…colloquial way about you than I do. You’re the American. I believe you’ll be more successful.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “But I hardly know how to bring it up, with Edwin always hovering and interrupting.”
“You might ask Great-Uncle Yoshitsune to take you shopping before you prepare the meal. That will give you some privacy.”
As my father and I climbed out of the pool, I shot a glance over my shoulder. Jiro and Calvin were together on lounge chairs on the other side of the pool, far enough that they couldn’t over hear us-or so I hoped.
10
AFTER PHONING UNCLE Yosh to set up our next-day shopping trip, my father and I set off for Honolulu. It was midday, so there was little traffic, and I had a chance to enjoy the massive mountains on the north side of the highway, and the sparkling sea on the south, although I knew I should ban those words from my vocabulary; in Hawaii, north and south were replaced by mauka, meaning ‘mountainside’, and makai, which meant ‘toward the sea’.