True, I didn’t want to drown in my anger at Dad any more than I wanted my joy to wither because I was so mired in the past: past hurts, past roadblocks, past betrayals. The wind picked up. I shivered but shook my head when Grandpa asked if I wanted to leave. Not yet. I had more questions.
“But what are the steps? How do you get to forgiveness?” I asked, knowing that I sounded like Mom, charting our cross-country move down to the last detail. Look how well those plans had turned out; life and Dad had thwarted her.
Grandpa spread his arms out. “You’re already here.”
“Here?”
He grinned as though he had eavesdropped on my doubt and skepticism.
“Here, as in this place is the destination?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest. But then I remembered Jackson and his self-assuredness in bucking his family tradition of attending the Naval Academy, defying his father even if he didn’t have a step-by-step plan, only a destination point: the life he wanted. Maybe forgiveness was another destination point, and getting there a journey each of us had to take—each a different adventure, each coming with its own threat of shark-infested waters. Each requiring hard paddling through setbacks. And each gifting moments of unexpected beauty.
Perched at the ocean’s edge, I breathed in the sea. Here we were, on the Big Island, famous for its mystical healing, standing on top of devastation in a place called forgiveness. It was only because of the volcano’s very destructiveness that this otherworldly beauty could exist. I gulped and looked—really looked—at this austere moonscape within a tropical paradise.
Only because Dad had an affair were we here, enjoying Grandpa George’s inn.
Dad’s affair brought Grandma Stesha back to us.
And healed my relationship with Mom.
And opened the possibility of finding my true passion in life, not the one that had been prepared and handed to me on a silver platter stamped MUIR & SONS.
Grandpa tugged me close. “Forgiving others is easier when I remember that I’m human and stupid, too. I haven’t treated the ones I love well all the time. I mean, look at how my revolving door of jobs has impacted your mom and your grandmother. Your mom’s so anxious about financial security because I didn’t provide that for her.”
Now I wrapped my arm around Grandpa’s waist and absolved him: “But you provided so much else. You were always there. You still are. And that counts.” Smiling up at my grandfather, I announced, as though I were an oracle, “Life is very strange.”
“Very.”
With my gaze refocused on the frothing ocean, I realized to my complete surprise that I was content. I relished watching love fill every crevice that had separated Grandma from Grandpa, Mom from her mother, and me from mine.
A sense of peace filled me as a burden I hadn’t even known I was lugging around released in an enormous wave of relief. Did it matter what had compelled Dad to do what he did? Would I ever know the truth?
Adulterer, liar, cheat.
All those labels could be applied to my father. That was true.
But he was also the father who taught me how to ride a bike after I’d fallen for the thousandth time and was scared to climb back on. Who helped me with my physics homework when no one else could explain optics and Schrödinger’s cat in a way I could understand. He threw himself into the lake without hesitation to rescue me when I was drowning, and he camped out in my treehouse every summer, my spider slayer who would sneak up the forbidden food of marshmallows and sugary cereals.
No matter what Dad had done, no matter the choices he had made, I still loved him. He was my father, and that was a destination point I could cling to tightly.
The sun dipped behind a cloud, and the crispness in the air could no longer be called refreshing. I clasped my freezing hands together. Without my needing to ask, Grandpa George slipped his steady hand over mine. As he did, I noticed that the scrapes from my solo bike ride on the volcano were already scabbing over. Without even being aware of it, I had been healing.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
All of us snickered at the name of the inn where we would be staying that night: Napoopoo Plantation. Even Mom chuckled when Reid intoned the name in three different voices, none of which, I’m sure, used the correct Hawaiian pronunciation. I rolled down my window in hopes that I’d catch a whiff of coffee—after all, we were high up in Kona coffee country—but the air that blew back my hair held only a sweet floral scent.
The truck chugged up the steep, plumeria-lined driveway to the five-room inn overlooking the coastline. In advance of opening his bed-and-breakfast, Grandpa had teamed up with a few other inns, so we were able to snag the two vacant rooms at a special price.
The wraparound lanai was painted a sky blue so glossy, I was thankful I wasn’t wearing a skirt as I took the stairs. Flip-flops, water shoes, and sandy sneakers lined the steps. A walkie-talkie was propped inside a rattan basket on the small table near the front door. A hand-printed sign leaned against the basket: IF YOU NEED HELP, TUNE TO 2 AND SAY, “ALOHA, DAVE OR WILL.”
“Who knew the world could have so many sanctuaries?” I asked Grandpa, already in love with this inn.
Grandma nodded. “And there are so many more to find.”
Perhaps it was the day spent at the Place of Refuge or the early evening down at the beach, where we watched a cloud of gemstone fish flicker in the sea. Perhaps it was being full from the fresh ono we bought at the local market and Grandpa grilled for our dinner. Or perhaps it was simply relaxing in the hot tub, watching the sky blaze with stars.
Whatever it was—the sea, the food, the stars—the rest must have freed my mind to brainstorm that night in Kona. Ideas knocked around inside my head. Why not work on the Big Island during my gap year and learn about innkeeping? While these properties were much larger than a treehouse, their charm lay in the specially crafted private and public spaces for the guests: Grandpa’s small huts and yoga room, for instance. The tiny sitting area outside the room I shared with Mom and Reid in this inn, fitted with a petite lime-green armchair and a basket of sea glass–colored yarn. There was a ton to learn here about creating a feeling of aloha welcome. So why not ask Grandpa to hire me as one of his helpers? I could prepare and deliver the breakfast baskets for guests and clean their rooms. And then maybe on my days off, I could embark on my own tour of sacred spaces on the island, visiting inns and private residences, waterfalls and refuges.
The last thing I remembered wondering before I drifted off to sleep back in my bed was how I could possibly capture this soul-restorative experience within the four walls of a treehouse.
Before six the next morning, Mom roused us to drive fifteen minutes to a horseshoe bay at the bottom of the hill. There, in their historic refuge from predators, a pod of thirty-some dolphins rested and calved their babies. Across the bay, a stark white monument memorialized the spot where Captain Cook had been murdered. Even paradise and refuges had their shadows, their murky pasts, their sorrows.
Locals, dressed in ratty flip-flops and stained T-shirts, lined the edge of the tiny parking lot and nursed their coffees.
“Have you seen anything?” Mom asked, sidling up to the group as though she were part of their community. These last few weeks hadn’t stripped Mom of her ability to make friends with just about anyone. I admired that.
“They’ve been here for the past couple of days,” answered a handsome, white-haired man whose opened aloha shirt showed off some serious chest muscles. His tanned face was the perfect canvas for navy-blue eyes that crinkled appealingly. I could hear Shana as she twirled her hair around her finger while studying this man appraisingly: You know, for an old guy, Mr. Aloha is pretty hot.
“Do you see them regularly?” Mom asked, brushing her hair off her face.
Mr. Aloha turned toward her, smiling. “I come here every day when I’m in town to check. You visiting?”
Weird doesn’t even describe how strange it was to watch a man flirt with my mother. My grandmother, I noted,
didn’t find anything uncomfortable in this. She practically shoved Mom into this stranger’s muscular arms.
I thought about how unfair I’d been to Mom, accusing her of using the family curse as a lame excuse to let Dad go without a fight. Accusing her of going straight into taskmaster mode, plotting the divorce before Dad had made up his mind. But maybe he had. And maybe Mom was simply stepping aside rather than languishing in unrequited love. Now she was free to find the soul mate who would accept and celebrate her: sixth sense and detailed lists, throw pillows and manic weeding weekends, wild curls, hot temper, and all.
An hour slipped by without any sign of dolphins; it was just a peaceful morning, aside from Reid’s dramatic impatient sighs and Mr. Aloha’s lengthy conversation with Mom—he was from New York, recently retired from a thirty-year career in banking (bor-ing!), and was searching for his next big adventure. Most of the other locals had drifted away, some venturing to a beach farther south, where the dolphins had also been spotted in the past week.
Suddenly, Mr. Aloha leaned a mite closer than necessary to my mother to point out a dolphin surging from the water. “There!”
“What’s it doing?” Mom whispered as the dolphin spun in the air before dropping back into the sea.
Mr. Aloha grinned down at her. “Playing.”
“Playing,” she repeated slowly, as though having a good time was a long-forgotten concept. Even so, her face glowed with the rapture I felt when another dolphin took to the sky, and she missed the appraising aloooooha! look the man gave her. I had to glance away quickly; that look reminded me all too painfully of the caressing way Jackson studied me whenever he thought I wasn’t paying attention.
Mr. Aloha nodded over to the rocky cove. “Going in?”
“Ohhhh…” Mom shook her head, suddenly self-conscious. She waved to the dolphins. “They’re so far out. I’m not that good of a swimmer.”
“You’re not supposed to swim to the dolphins anyway,” said Reid as he gestured to a sign requesting that people maintain a fifteen-foot distance from the spinner dolphins.
Mr. Aloha shrugged and explained, “They usually come to us. It’s like they want to interact. And if they’re asleep, we stay away.” Instead of cajoling us to join him, Mr. Aloha crouched to grab his banged-up flippers. “You girls can be like fisher wives and wait for your men to sail back.”
That comment rankled almost as much as the truth of his observation: Mom, Grandma, and I were watching from the safety of the shore while Mr. Aloha, Grandpa, and Reid prepared to swim in the cove. Dad would have been the first to frolic with the dolphins had he been here, pressuring Reid and me to join him, rolling his eyes if we didn’t.
While Dad didn’t believe that people could change, Grandpa did. And I chose to side with my grandfather’s philosophy. Ever since my near drowning off Grandpa’s houseboat, I’ve been leery of any body of water—oceans, rivers, ponds, pools. My friends lost count of the number of times I “felt sick” or “had my period” at pool parties and lakeside picnics. The one and only stroke I had mastered was a modified breaststroke where I could keep my face above water.
Reid’s and Grandpa’s laughter washed over the waves. My lucky brother: He floated free of our history of water-phobia. A dolphin dove near Reid, but my brother didn’t shy away, nor did he swim to the safety of the shore. He didn’t just stay; he played. In the echo of his laughter, I could almost hear Jackson now—not pushy but confident, the way he had been about my nonexistent mountain-biking skills the first time we went: You can at least try. Even if Mom, Grandma, and I were scared of the water, we could at least stand at the shoreline and feel the waves on our toes.
“Come on,” I said as I headed down the treacherous black rocks for the shore. When Grandma Stesha balked, I said, “Grandma, just because one of our ancestors may or may not have been dunked in water—”
“She was drowned, not dunked. She may or may not have been a witch. That’s the only may or may not,” Grandma Stesha replied, arms crossed. But I noticed that she followed carefully.
“Fine,” I said, slowing so Grandma wouldn’t rush on the uneven lava. “But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to drown if we get too near to water.”
“You almost did.”
I continued to make my deliberate way down, not too proud to crouch and use my hands for balance. Never again did I want to be a helpless girl who needed to be scooped out of the murky lake because I was too afraid to dunk my head underwater, too afraid to see all the scaries that lurked below the surface, too afraid to learn to swim. I swiveled around to my mother and grandmother, who were following me at a distance, and told them hotly, “History doesn’t have to repeat itself.”
Support came from an unlikely ally: Mom. She agreed so adamantly—“Reb is right”—that I knew she was talking not only about swimming but our family curse, too. There was a long line of women with sixth senses in our family, and an equally long line of men who had left them. Men who couldn’t handle our divining the future and reading their moods and knowing their thoughts. The dissolution of relationships wasn’t entirely our fault, nor the men’s. Could it be a confluence of everyone’s fear of being completely vulnerable and easily hurt?
Mom stood on a bulbous rock with her hand shading her eyes from the sun. She finally said, “We need to know how to swim.” Had I been mistaken about Mom yet again—that she was our crossing guard, safety patrol, fun police, not because she was cautious by nature but because protector had become her role in our family?
“Girls, remember who we are!” Grandma Stesha planted her hands on her hips, each foot on a different lava rock.
That was just it. I did remember who I was, finally, after all my denials. I studied my hands, pebbled with volcanic grit, square hands that came from Mom and Grandma. I may have been a Thom Girl, but I was also my mother’s daughter. I knew my limits, and I knew when to test them.
I bent down to the cool seawater to wash my hands of rock dust. Without warning, I spun around and flicked first my mother with water, then my grandmother. I grinned as they both squealed. “When we get back home, Mom, we’re signing up for swim lessons. That’s the first thing I’m going to do in my gap year.”
“I’m still not so sure about that,” Mom said.
“But I am. I know this is what I’m supposed to do: take a year off, figure out my next step.” I straightened, wiped my hands dry on my T-shirt. With Mom’s hand clasped in mine, we watched dolphin fins flash above the surf, then vanish, the ocean’s answer to a shooting star. “We can take lessons together. It’ll be fun.”
“You know,” Mom said as her eyes sparkled in the healing sun, “your gap year just might be growing on me.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Telling me that we were leaving for home in two days was easy compared with telling Reid, whose eyes reddened, a hidden volcano of anger. He kicked one of his sneakers so hard, it bounced off the door of our room at the inn, where Mom had taken us for a private talk after dinner.
“I don’t want to go to Seattle,” Reid said, slumped on his twin bed. His lower lip jutted out like a petulant toddler’s.
“I know you don’t,” Mom soothed. She reached out to stroke Reid’s arm, but he flinched away. “But Lewis is our home.”
“Dad’s in New York,” Reid argued.
“But we’d be in New Jersey, not New York.”
I didn’t want to move back to Seattle any more than Reid did. With my head lowered onto my hands, I slumped on the queen bed I shared with Mom. If anything, heading home felt like a concession of defeat, as though somehow we couldn’t hack it in our new lives. Plus, with all my classmates off to college, I was going to feel like a loser, left behind. And worst of all, we would be the gossip du jour among our neighbors and everyone at school, our lives flayed open for dissection. It made me so sick, I crossed my arms over my stomach, thinking about people feasting on every last salacious detail of Dad’s affair.
“You move, then!” Reid’s eyes f
lashed hot and he flung his pillow away.
Those could have been my eyes, my frustration, my anger, but after our nights at the kitchen table and our trek through the volcano, I knew how to translate Mom’s soft sigh. It was a sigh not of exasperation but of resignation. I could practically hear Mom doing the accounting: her need for home versus our need for Dad. If she thought it’d be best for us, she’d move back to New Jersey, to a house she despised, to a city where she had few friends, to Dad’s affair that would be rubbed in her face. That wasn’t a sacrifice I wanted Mom to make, nor was it one that Reid should request.
“Reid,” I said firmly, crossed the space separating our beds, and placed my foot atop the other sneaker he was preparing to kick. “We’re moving back to Seattle because it makes more sense.” He started quibbling, but I held his hand. “Mom needs a job, and all her connections are there. And I’ll be going home with you.”
“You’re only saying that because Jackson’s in Seattle,” Reid said, scowling at me.
“Maybe a little bit,” I admitted, “but our home is in Seattle.” Only then did I lift my foot off the missile of his sneaker.
Mom chimed in, “It’ll all work out.” Her laser-beam eyes that never missed anything settled on me. It was disconcerting. No wonder she had needed distance from Grandma Stesha if her every thought could be plumbed so easily. “Even going to the college you really want. If it’s Columbia where you want to go, you’ll go there. I promise you.”
“How can you say that? That it’s all going to work out? Huh?” Reid demanded.
“Because it always works out” was my answer, spoken with finality because I knew at a soul-deep level that we had survived the worst ripping apart of our family. Our lives were knitting back together into a different but stunning design of our choosing.