“Slipping On Chippewa Street” by Pat Zalisko, 48″ x 88″, acrylic, mixed media on canvas

It was after midnight when they admitted my old man. He was in the hospital bed closest to the door. A curtain partitioned the room even though the window side was empty. They had raised the bed, propping my dad at an angle to make it easier for him to breathe. Oxygen tubes were tucked in his nostrils and every few minutes he’d touch them with his fingertips. His eyebrows would arch when he felt the plastic as if discovering the tubes for the first time. Outside, a relentless February wind howled.

“How far did we drive tonight in this weather, Johnny-Boy?” my Dad asked, his voice soft, tired.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other as I stood by his bed. Buffalo General was a mile-and-a-half ambulance ride from his house. “We didn’t drive anywhere, Pop. You’re in the hospital.”

He touched the oxygen tubes, raised his eyebrows. Surprised.

A monitor was clipped to his fingertip; sensors were taped to his chest. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds—a buck thirty he would have said—almost a featherweight. A screen mounted above his bed displayed his vitals—oxygen level, blood pressure, heart rate. All low numbers.

“How come you picked such a crappy hotel, Johnny-Boy? I got money.”

I smoothed his white hair into place. “We’re still in town, Pop. You’re in Buffalo General.”

Finger tips. Oxygen tubes. Eyebrows.

The hospital gown hung loose on him. The broad shoulders were gone, his thick chest a memory. His skin was almost translucent, the back of his hand already bruising where they had inserted the IV port. It was hard to believe this was the same man who had once thrown Jimmy Slattery, the former lightweight champion of the world, Buffalo’s greatest boxer, out of his restaurant. He had bum-rushed him by his collar and belt, tossing him out on Genesee Street, and watched him belly slide across the icy sidewalk to the curb. Slattery’s drinking buddies, other once-dangerous men with flattened noses and cauliflower ears, had yelled at my old man, saying he can’t treat the champ that way, that he should show him more respect. My old man had yelled back in Greek, cursing them and their Irish mothers, and went back to his grill. This was after the war when my old man was hard and lean from marching across Europe with Patton and Slattery was a drunk, his fighting days long gone, just another bum who bothered waitresses late at night.

It was one of my father’s favorite stories to tell back when he still told stories. If there were others listening around his age—my uncles, my mother, all gone now—they would add their own Jimmy Slattery story: how he had danced on his toes and fought with his hands down decades before anyone had heard of Cassius Clay; how he would have filled out and taken Dempsey’s heavyweight crown if it wasn’t for the bottle; how handsome he was with his dark hair and crooked Irish smile.

A nurse came in then. She was pretty with caramel skin that contrasted with her light blue scrubs. Her dark eyes were tired from a long shift but still flashed when she smiled and asked my father how he was feeling. She had a sweet face with soft features and deep dimples, the kind of face you wanted to see while propped in a hospital bed, while propped in any bed.

“What’s the maid doing in our room so late at night, Johnny-Boy?” my Dad asked. “I didn’t call her.”

“Pop,” I said, hushing him, and then apologized to the nurse.

“That’s all right,” she said, her lips pressing into something like a smile. The light in her eyes faded, the dimples disappeared. “Everybody’s tired. You should go home before the weather gets worse. Get some rest. Let him sleep.”

I nodded. I had calls to make in the morning: to the priest; to my sisters spread across the east coast, telling them to come home despite the storm; to Debbie, my ex-wife, living a thousand miles away on the other side of town.

“I got to go, Pop. I’ll see you in the morning.” I bent to kiss his head.

“You get your own room?” he asked. “You next door?”

I looked down into his eyes, pink rimmed and watery, a new vacancy seeping into the irises. I kissed his head again. “Yeah, Pop. Right next door.”

I didn’t go home.

I found myself skidding down Chippewa Street, the roads icing from sleet. I slowed to a creep as I passed the bars: Bada Bing, Bacchus, Bottoms Up, their neon calling me. Seven hundred and eighty-six days had passed since I last had a drink, the same number of days since Debbie had left me, as if sobriety would show her I had become a changed man, a better man, someone worth returning to. My tongue rolled thick and heavy in my mouth. I took my hand off the wheel and curled my fingers as if a lowball glass was already snug in my grip, smooth and cold against my palm. I could almost hear the ice cubes rattle.

I needed to call my sponsor.

I pulled to the curb in front of where the House O’Quinn, Slattery’s favorite bar, had once stood. Katie, the last bartender there before it was sold and gutted and transformed into a trendy Italian bistro, had told me about Slattery’s ghost—how the cleaning crew and day manager had all claimed catching a glimpse of the prizefighter hunched at the end of the bar only to have him disappear when they turned to look dead-on. Or how customers who sat on his old stool would complain of an icy chill and ask her to turn down the air conditioning. She told me other stories, too, ones she heard from cops and cab drivers and early-morning deliverymen, all swearing they saw Slattery’s ghost staggering down Chippewa Street with his arms outstretched like an aerialist trying to keep balance.

I didn’t call my sponsor.

I called Debbie and listened to her recorded message assuring me she was sorry she’d missed my call, that my call was important to her, that I should leave a message at the tone. I hung up and wondered if she didn’t answer because someone was lying next to her or if she was just long past taking middle-of-the-night calls from me. As I slipped the phone into my pocket and swung from the car, my breath fogging the frigid air, I made promises: I’d only have three drinks, only beer, I would not call Debbie again.

I went inside and ordered Scotch.

The new owners had kept the old oak bar with the brass foot rail that ran along the east wall. That may have been the only thing that Slattery would have recognized if he still haunted the building. Pine floors had been ripped out and replaced with laminate that looked like wood. The natural wainscoting and doorframes had been painted over with a black matte to match the new high-back bar stools. Light fixtures of the same dull color had replaced the original brass ones and were suspended from the faux tin ceiling. Tables in the darkened dining room were covered with white tablecloths; a vase centered on each held a single red rose. I wondered if patrons still felt a chill when they sat at the far end facing the entrance or if that had ended when Slattery’s barstool was hauled away with the heart pine floor and everything else they had torn from the place.

“The kitchen’s closed,” the bartender said, setting the Scotch on a cocktail napkin in front of me. He was short and stocky with mean, narrow eyes and didn’t look like he smiled much.

I nodded.

“And this is last call.” He said it like a threat as if he was looking forward to throwing me out by my collar and belt and locking the door behind me. There was no one else in the place. “Drink up.”

I nodded again, certain other bars on Chippewa closed later.

A flat-screen TV was mounted between two tiered shelves lined with bottles behind the bar, the shelving painted the same dismal matte. A basketball game from the west coast flickered without sound and I imagined squeaking sneakers and the leather-against-wood dribbling ball. I looked everywhere—at the bottles, the ball game, out the front window onto frozen Chippewa Street—everywhere but at the glass in front of me. The Scotch remained untouched but I could feel the rim touching my lips, the whiskey’s first bite, the heat in my throat, then my belly, then spreading through me, melting everything. If I take that drink, my eyes will close and when they reopen the world will have reverted to the way it had been seven hundred and eighty-seven days ago. Time travel, I thought.

Magic.

A man about my age, maybe older, entered the bar and cold air rushed in with him before he shut the door. The temperature must have dropped as the sleet had turned to snow. His cheeks were pink from the wind and dark circles bagged under his eyes. He pulled off his wool watch cap and his static hair stood at angles. I turned back to the bottles, to the ballgame, to the shelves.

“Last call,” the bartender snapped, angry, I guess, that another customer had wandered in when he wanted to cash out for the night. “We’re closing soon.”

The man stomped snow from his boots and headed to the end of the bar without answering. He must have lost his balance when he passed because he bumped my shoulder and muttered an apology; I would have spilled my drink if I had been holding it, the amber staining my jacket cuff, a waste of precious drops. He, too, ordered Scotch.

I felt the man staring at me, studying me, but I didn’t turn. The last thing I wanted was to talk. Then the phone was in my hand and I pressed redial and heard Debbie’s voice thanking me again for my call.

“Slipping?” the man at the end of the bar asked.

Now I had to turn. “What?” I set the phone next to my glass, wondering which I’d pick up next.

“You slipping?” he asked again.

“I don’t know what you mean, friend.”

He didn’t wait after the bartender slid his drink to him; he picked up his glass and drained half in a single gulp. I swallowed hard watching him, my Scotch still filled to the brim in front of me. I felt so tired then, as if weariness, thick and heavy, was sludging through every vein. I tried to remember the last time I had slept. My old man, so unsteady on his feet and confused, had been getting up every hour to use the bathroom, and I’d gotten up with him to hold him upright, to make sure he got back to bed without falling, to change him and mop the floor tile if he didn’t make it in time. This had gone on for weeks. My eyes burned as if all the moisture had been seared off days ago.

“I know you,” the man at the end of the bar said, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. One eye squinted as if steadying me into focus. “I know you.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said, and it was my turn to study him. His cheeks and nose weren’t reddened from the weather. Broken blood vessels mapped across his face. The lowball glass shook in his hand as he set it down. “From where?”

“Saint John’s Grace,” he said, nodding, certain. “From the meetings in the basement.”

I didn’t recognize him, but I hadn’t been to a meeting since my old man had started to fail. Maybe he did look familiar, one of those guys who stood in front of the old church on Lafayette Avenue smoking cigarettes and drinking thin, Episcopalian coffee during breaks. I don’t remember him getting up and telling his story: how he had awakened parked on railroad tracks, or in a different city, or in the back of a police cruiser covered in blood. Or hearing of his broken marriages, or broken children, or lost jobs, the same sad stories we all told. No memories surfaced of him confessing to the lies he had whispered to himself or others, or the violence he inflicted on those he said he loved. Still, he may have been one of the guys in front of Saint John’s Grace, hunched to the wind, talking about anything—football, movies, the weather—anything except how much he wanted a goddamn drink.

“You slipping?” I asked.

“No,” he snorted, and lifted his glass in a wretched toast. “Way past that, brother.”

He finished his drink and his body shuddered as if a door somewhere behind him had opened letting in the icy wind. I reached out, my hand hovering above my glass ready to snatch it but grabbed my phone instead and checked for missed calls, certain I had shut off the ringer at the hospital. The phone was on, the volume set to maximum. There were no messages. I set the phone down, the screen facing me, just in case.

The man tapped his empty glass against the bar to get the bartender’s attention. “Another,” he said.

“I already called it,” the bartender answered, his voice sharp. “That was the last one.”

The man tapped his glass louder. “Another.”

“Look,” the bartender said, his voice rising as he walked towards him. His face and slit-narrow eyes darkened. “I told you it was last call when you came in. Last call means last call. If you’re done, leave.”

Bastard.

The man showed him his empty glass as if it was piece of crucial, convincing evidence. “Another.”

The bastard reached under the bar and pulled out an old wooden billy club, something I hadn’t seen since my old man had sold his restaurant. He, too, had kept one under the counter for late-night customers who wouldn’t listen. The nightstick even looked like my Dad’s with the same ribbed handle and brown leather strap. The new owners must have found it under the bar and kept it. It’d probably been hanging there since Slattery spent his days at the House O’Quinn drinking to forget all he had lost and what little remained for him to lose.

The bartender slapped the baton against his palm—wood against skin, wood against bone. “Get out.”

“I just want another drink,” the man said. “This is a bar, isn’t it?”

“I said get out. I’m not telling you again.”

“Get me a drink. It’s your job.”

The bartender smashed the billy club against the oak-top, the sound cracking across the empty restaurant as if it had come down across skull. The man jerked backwards almost tipping his stool.

“Hey.” I grabbed my Scotch and slid to my feet. “It’s all right. He can have mine. I don’t need it.” A memory flashed of me as a teenager and my old man lecturing me on the difference between a want and a need. I set the drink next to the man’s empty glass. “Everything’s fine.”

The bartender pointed the nightstick at the man. “Finish it and get out.” He aimed the billy at me. “You, too.”

I raised my hands showing him my empty palms, surrendering, proving there was nothing up my sleeves.

“You’re a good man,” the drunk said, and reached for my drink. Debbie would have differed.

I pulled some crumpled bills from my pocket to pay for the round and a white chip fell to the floor. My sobriety chip, the Desire coin, the one they give you for being sober for that first awful twenty-four hours. I bent to pick it up before it rolled away. I had other chips at home—silver, red, blue—thirty days, ninety, a year, but I only carried the white one with me.

The bartender stood across the bar from us, the billy club in his fist, waiting for the man to finish the Scotch. I zipped my jacket; the prick must have already turned down the thermostat for the night. I watched the man down the drink, glad I had given it to him, wishing I hadn’t, my guilt increasing every time he swallowed. The bartender snatched the empty glass as soon as the man set it back on the cocktail napkin and pointed to the door with the nightstick.

“Get out,” he said.

The man grabbed my arm and steadied himself as he slid off the barstool. He wavered a moment and took a deep breath before releasing my sleeve. I didn’t say anything to the bartender when I left—there was nothing to say—and only slowed to scoop my phone from the bar; I hadn’t missed any calls.

Outside the wind drove the snow at a slant into our faces, my cheeks pelted by tiny bits of ice. I turned from the wind. Chippewa was already covered in white—the sidewalks, the icy street, the parked cars—giving the false impression of purity, of cleansing, of grace. I shoved my hands in my pants pockets, the chip, the same color as the snow, tight in my grip.

“I’m going to Bacchus,” the man said, slurring a bit, and nodded across the street to the cream terra cotta building that probably hadn’t changed much since Slattery had haunted Chippewa and the bar there had been called The Calumet Club. “You coming?”

“No,” I said, squeezing the chip in my pocket so tightly I’m sure it left an impression. “Early day tomorrow.”

The man nodded, turned and stepped into the street just as a car was turning left onto Chippewa from Franklin. The driver, startled that the man had stepped from the curb, slammed his brakes but the ice beneath the snow stole the tires’ grip and he skidded toward the man. I grabbed the man by the collar and jerked him back to the sidewalk as the driver fishtailed passed. It happened so fast. I saw it in slow motion.

The man turned to me breathless and smiled showing no teeth, no light in his eyes. “You saved me,” he said, then crossed the street without looking either way again.

I hadn’t saved anything—not him, not my father, not my marriage. I gripped my white chip and headed to my car.

The next morning, I called the priest and my sisters; Debbie still wasn’t answering. I brushed snow off my car and chiseled ice from the windshield. At the hospital, I signed forms—Medicare, HIPAA, Do Not Resuscitate. A different nurse, ginger-haired and freckled, maybe a year out of nursing school, told me they would soon be moving a new patient into the window-side bed. It didn’t matter. I had spoken to the doctor. They were transferring my father to the Hospice floor that morning.

I opened the curtain that partitioned the two sides and let sunlight flood the entire room, hoping it would warm my old man. I moved to the window still holding the white Styrofoam cup of thin, now cold coffee and looked down on the city. Brilliant sunshine reflected off snow-covered roofs, the sky a cloudless blue backdrop, the storm having moved off to the east. From twelve floors up I could follow Delaware Avenue past Chippewa, past Lafayette Avenue and Saint John’s Grace, and guess which was my father’s street, but I was facing the wrong direction and Debbie’s new neighborhood, new life, was far from view.

Movement flashed from the corner of my eye and I turned toward the hospital bed. My father, eyes still closed and somewhere beyond sleep, had stretched his arms to his sides like airplane wings as if he was about to take flight and was waiting for the wind to lift him. Or maybe he was dreaming of the old days, of his restaurant, of The Calumet Club and The House O’ Quinn, of Slattery’s ghost weaving down Chippewa Street like a drunken aerialist, reminding us in his own way to keep our balance, to steady ourselves, to try not to fall.

Stephen G. Eoannou is the author of Muscle Cars, a short story collection published by The Santa Fe Writers Project. Stories have appeared in Best Short Stories from the Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest (2013 & 2014), The MacGuffin, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and have been honored with two Pushcart nominations. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and an MA in English from Miami University. He currently lives in his hometown of Buffalo, New York.

Read an interview with Stephen here.

“Tomoka Trail” by Pat Zalisko, 24×24, acrylic, mixed media on canvas

Kimo and I stretched out long in my bed. I ran my finger over his arm wrapped around my waist. I traced the edges of the blotches on his skin, milky white patches blossoming against brown. “It’s what Michael Jackson said he had,” Kimo said when Kayla asked him what was up with his skin. I’d hushed her: That’s rude. But Kimo, he didn’t mind. “It’s just the way I am.” People call him Hapa Kimo. Hapa is what locals call folks who are half Caucasian and half something else. Half haole, half Japanese. Half haole, half Samoan. Kimo’s mom was haole, his dad Filipino. “Guess my skin wanted to keep Mom close by,” he said.

Kimo came by every Tuesday. It was the day he delivered bottled water to the Lawa‘i Valley. I once asked him if he had a woman for every day of the week, for every part of Kaua‘i. He laughed. “You’re crazy. You think they knockin’ down doors to get to Kimo?” I wasn’t sure what that said about me, or him. He also taught surf lessons and did handyman work. That’s how it is here: you have to work three jobs to get by. I only worked one, giving massages at a hotel spa, because John was paying enough child support for me and Kayla.

“Almost Kayla time,” Kimo said. I slid out from under his arm. We were always sure to make the bed back up by the time Kayla was home from school. Most days, my daughter came home covered in the island’s red dirt. It was on her ankles or her elbows, sometimes on her knees. When it got into her shorts and shirts, there was no cleaning it out. Kayla used to wear white, when we lived on the mainland. She had white dresses and frilly white tops; little white Capri pants and even white sandals. But since we moved to Kaua‘i last year there was no point. The island made its mark on everyone and everything.

Kimo and I sat on the porch, not saying much, just listening to the way the trade winds swished the palms, when Kayla came walking up the road in her shorts and T-shirt and flip-flops. Slippers, Mom, she always reminded me. That’s what they call them here.

“Howzit?” she said, plopping her backpack on the porch.

“Hey, little wahine,” Kimo said. “You ready to hit some waves?”

“I need a snack,” she said and headed inside.

“Little grind!” he called after her. “No want your stomach too full.”

I waited until Kayla was in the kitchen, away from us. “I’d like it if you didn’t talk Pidgin with her,” I said.

“That’s how people talk round here, Dorrie,” Kimo said, just looking out at the breeze, making me believe it was possible to see a breeze. “You been here long enough to know.”

Nine months. At first it didn’t take me long to slip into the island ways, the slow talk and the slow walking, slang that seemed easier than saying the real words. But after John left us, my attitude went back the other way.

“How about when she needs to get into college?” I asked. Or how about if we’re not forever stuck on this island? Someday we might just get back to the mainland, and kids would tease her.

“She’s twelve,” Kimo said. “Plenty of time till college.”

Kayla came back with a fruit roll-up in one hand, her surfboard tucked under the other arm. “Let’s rip,” she said. “You coming, Mom?”

“You bet.” There was no work that afternoon, no tourists wanting me to rub their muscles with coconut-scented oil. The three of us squeezed in the front seat of Kimo’s rusted pick-up and drove down the curving road to Po‘ipu.

~

When John and I moved to Kaua‘i we bought a small house in Kalaheo, in a valley away from Po‘ipu’s tourists and desert landscape. Kalaheo is carved out of jungle, blanketed by bamboo and monkeypod trees and philodendrons with leaves like giant flat fingers. On Po‘ipu’s south side, it’s just dry red dirt and cactus. It’s barren like the surface of Mars, except where a mainland developer came in and planted palm trees and thick-blade grass. Orchids, plumeria, yellow hibiscus. If you went the other direction from our house, you’d be in Waimea canyon, deep walls carved away by the river’s erosion. If you want something different on Kaua‘i, you don’t have to go far. John went North, to Leilani’s house. It’s rainier there, but greener, too.

Kimo and Kayla took to their boards, paddling out to waves. I sat on the beach with the tourists lazing in the sun. They bring that fake coconut smell with them, painting them slick and brown. When I was fifteen, sixteen, I’d sit in my backyard coated in baby oil, trying for a Valley Girl tan. I thought the burn would wear off into luscious brown. It never really happened that way, but I kept on burning my flesh anyway.

Kimo paddled ahead of Kayla, sometimes looking back for her. Little waves rolled towards them, and Kimo and Kayla slipped over the tops. Like riding a bucking bronco, but gentle. Sometimes a bigger wave came, but too close to the shore, so they grasped the front of their boards and dove under. “Always better to go under or over a wave than through it,” Kimo would say.

John didn’t want Kayla surfing, still wouldn’t want her surfing if he knew she surfed. “It’s too dangerous for a young girl,” he said. Kayla had been trying to wear him down since before we moved, since we were on the plane. She kept talking about a girl from Kaua‘i who lost her arm in a shark attack. “She started surfing again only one month after the shark bit her arm off,” Kayla said. “And she’s a professional now.” The argument did little to sway John, and who could blame him? But for every surfer who gets mauled in a shark attack there are hundreds of thousands who never do. John would never see it that way, but after he left us for Leilani, I figured how he saw things wasn’t the only way.

Kayla and Kimo were so far out that I couldn’t hear them, they couldn’t see me. Not that they were looking for me. I wondered why Kimo never had any kids of his own. Then again, I didn’t know that he didn’t. I didn’t even know if Kimo had ever been married. Hell, I didn’t know what he was doing with me, some uptight, middle-aged haole.

Kimo waved a windmill through the air at Kayla. Take this one. She paddled to catch the lip of the wave. Then she was up on her feet. Sometimes I imagined her on that board when I did Warrior Two in yoga. I’d imagine the salty spray around my face, a roar so loud I couldn’t hear. No mirrored walls in front of me, no click-click-click of the overhead fan, no rubber mat sticking me to the ground.

Her first few seconds upright were a fight between Kayla and the wave: who would ride who. She gave a good knee bend, and won that battle. The wave pulled her along, like she was tethered to the other end.

Whatever tension had been keeping Kayla upright was severed, and the water tunnel crashed down. I shielded my hands over my eyes, afternoon sun grimacing back at me. Kimo paddled toward where Kayla had gone down. Her yellow board popped up, and then her head. The ocean spit her right back out. Kimo held out his hand and pulled her on her board. The two paddled back out again. They went to fight another battle against the sea.

~

John had Kayla every other weekend, more if he wanted. There was no official custody agreement. That could have never happened on the mainland. John would have had one of the partners at his firm draw up reams of paperwork. Everything would have been official, from the separation to the division of assets to the final divorce. But after we moved to the islands, John lost that drive. Killer instinct, he used to call it.

Every Friday John drove clockwise around the island to pick up Kayla from my house. On Sundays, I drove counter-clockwise to retrieve her. His way was worse, getting choked in Friday rush hour in Lihu‘e. Nothing like L.A., of course. This traffic was just one long lane going one way, one long lane going another. When I drove up on Sunday, the worst of the traffic wasn’t in Lihu‘e, but up North. Tourists heading for Hanalei beaches and the Na Pali Coast. Pulling their cars aside to snap pictures of rainbows.

Leilani’s house was inland, surrounded by mango trees. “We eat a lot of mangos when I’m there,” Kayla told me. “Like, all the time. It drives me crazy.” I knew she just said this for me. Leilani’s three mangy dogs barked and followed my car up the long driveway to her house. Wagging tails, ears forward. No teeth bared.

“Are you early?” John was on the porch, wearing a shirt bursting with orange plumeria.

I looked at my watch. “Not really.”

“Kay, your mom’s here!” John yelled into the house. “Get your stuff together.”

“Yeah, coming!” my daughter yelled back.

John stood against the porch railing, looking out at the mangos like I wasn’t on the top step, my arms folded across my chest. “You want some tea?” he said. “Or juice? Hey, Leilani!” he called behind him. “What kind of juice do we have?”

“Why you yelling?” Leilani stepped through the front door wearing peach-colored scrubs. I couldn’t tell if she was coming from the hospital or going. “Hi, Dorrie.”

She wasn’t pretty like the word Leilani makes you think, long and thin, on an exotic postcard. But she wasn’t some big Samoan either, a formidable force of womanliness. She was an average woman. Except she was more.

“Bring some juice out,” John said. “We can sit, talk story.” It—talk story—sounded stupid coming out of John’s mouth. It’s what everyone said around here, Kimo all the time, Kayla, and even me, but from John it sounded like trying to force a round peg into a square hole.

“I’m not thirsty,” I said.

“Maybe some cookies, then?” John said.

“John, come inside,” Leilani said. He followed her in.

All the windows in Leilani’s wood house were open to capture whatever breeze made it that far inland. It also pushed out John and Leilani’s voices.

“What are you doing, trying to get us to all sit and grind?” she asked.

“There’s no reason we can’t be friendly,” John said.

“You left her for another woman,” Leilani said. “She doesn’t want to be your friend.”

“She’ll get over that,” John said. “She’ll move on.”

He didn’t know about me and Kimo. I didn’t want him to think I’d moved on.

“John, just let her be,” Leilani said. “Show her respect.”

It made me want to say, “Yeah, I’ll have some mango juice,” to sit on Leilani’s porch and eat coco-mac cookies, just to prove her wrong, because it pissed me off that she was right. But Kayla skipped through the front door, carrying her backpack and duffle bag. “Okay, Mom,” she said. “Let’s go.”

There was hardly any traffic on our side as we drove clockwise again. I’d gotten hungry, standing on that porch, so we stopped at a roadside stand in Anahola for burgers and shakes. We ate at a round picnic table with tourists. Two wild chickens and a rooster wandered around our perimeter, waiting for us to drop a piece of meat. The island was overrun with feral roosters, crowing day and night. We watched the birds scratch and scrape, waiting for their prey.

~

Next Tuesday, when we were still lying in bed, Kimo said, “Let’s you and me get some dinner on Saturday. While Kayla’s with her dad.”

“Why?” I asked. Kimo and I had never been outside of the house together, not unless we were at the beach with Kayla, getting shave ice, eating Puka Dogs.

Kimo pulled himself on top of me and kissed my lips. “If you’re this pretty in the daylight, you must be a goddess at night.”

There wasn’t much more to say, really.

~

We ate at a Chinese barbeque joint in Lihu‘e, but didn’t eat barbeque. There were too many places to get island barbeque, so we shared shrimp with choi sum and sizzling scallops with black bean sauce. Fried coconut ice cream for dessert. The place was full of brown-skinned locals, a few haole, like me, and some tourists brave enough to go off the beaten path. I kept thinking that most of those locals were technically hapa, but none of them looked hapa like Kimo. His brown and white skin, the way he didn’t care much about it, made him seem royal. Maybe Kimo was right, maybe there was something about seeing each other in nightlight that made us divine.

We went back to Kimo’s place, a house he shared with two other guys. One was tending bar, the other waiting tables. The living room furniture was worn wicker, dusty walls covered by tapestries of whales and sea turtles. The air smelled like old apple cider vinegar.

“It’s how locals live,” Kimo said, even though I’d said nothing. I got the feeling that he could read my thoughts. That maybe he had some sort of island mojo.

His bedroom was small, but immaculate. No clothes on the floor, no clutter on his nightstand. The bed made with crisp-looking sheets. His mattress sat on a bed frame of carved koa wood.

“It was my tutu’s,” he said, as I ran my hand over the reddish-brown wood. “She gave it to my dad, and my dad gave it to me.”

My grandmother gave me a brooch, once. It was gold-plated, shaped like a snowflake, mindlessly picked out of her jewelry box. Here, she’d said, you can have this. I lost it in the backseat of some guy’s car years ago.

Kimo’s bed was bigger than a back seat. We stretched out and up, laid flat and round. We bathed in the scent of plumeria and sex. We were royalty.

~

Next Tuesday I worked at the spa. Another massage therapist called in sick and I had to cover her shift. I don’t know if anyone really got sick—more likely someone was heading to big waves on the north shore. “Cough, cough,” they’d spew into the phone. “I have a sore throat.” It meant I wouldn’t see Kimo, but he was going to drop by the house and pick up Kayla for surfing anyway.

I gave massages to three couples that day, folks who just got married or wanted to pretend like they just did. Olina and I worked together, standing side by side in a thatched hale. Her hands glided over one client, mine over the other. We worked separate, but moved together. The rain beat outside.

Olina and I were standing outside the hale, waiting for the couple to put on their long terry robes. Rain smacked the tops of broad leaf plants, then slid into the garden. There was water from the waterfalls, water from the sky. When it rained like this, it was easy to believe the island would just return to the ocean.

“So, I hear you were out with Hapa Kimo the other night,” Olina said.

“Where did you hear that?”

She waved a hand. “Oh, you know how people talk. Nothin’ better to do.”

“We had scallops,” I said.

“Just scallops, yeah?” she poked me in the ribs. If Olina knew that Kimo and I had Chinese BBQ in Lihu‘e, then could the news travel to John? Sure, it was an island of fifty-thousand people, but only fifty miles of road between us. Maybe there was some math, some physics, some law that made information travel faster. Then John would think it was okay, dragging me and Kayla all the way across the ocean, only to leave us amid giant leaves for mango trees.

“Hey, Dorrie?” It was the receptionist who stood behind the spa’s front desk looking impossibly pretty. “Phone call for you. Says it’s an emergency. About your daughter.”

All the smells and sounds of the island shut down. I could have been on the surface of Mars, ice cold and airless.

~

Kayla was at Mahelona Memorial Hospital in Kapa‘a. She got hit by a big wave, and then another, and she couldn’t grab her board. The waves kept coming, and one finally threw her into the rocks. Ancient lava, black and jagged, tearing into my baby girl’s skull. She was bleeding in the brain, needed surgery to stop it. I signed the papers, called John. Waited for him to show.

I sat next to Kimo in the waiting room. His hair was still wet. “Why is she here?” I asked.

He put his hand on top of mine, but I refused to give him a hand. Just a fist, so his hand was more like a piece of paper in rock, paper, scissors. “I know. It’s hard to understand.”

“No,” I said, pulling my fist away from him. “Why the fuck is she here? On this part of the island? Why were you surfing up North?”

“She wanted to surf where Bethany surfed,” he said.

“You mean where Bethany got her arm bitten off by a shark?”

“That’s not what happened,” Kimo said gently.

“I know what happened.” I stood. “You took my daughter someplace dangerous. You let her do something that could kill her.”

“Dorrie . . . .” Kimo reached up, pulled my hand. “She’s going to be fine. She’ll be fine.”

Kimo didn’t know if Kayla would be fine. I didn’t know it, John didn’t know it, and Leilani didn’t know it either. Even if Kayla was fine, John would be pissed. Pissed enough to take Kayla away from me.

Leilani walked around the corner, just wearing shorts and a T-shirt, like it was any old day. “John’s on his way,” she said. “Had his phone turned off. Just got the message.”

“Have you checked on Kayla yet?” I asked. “How is she?”

“The surgery’s coming along,” Leilani said. “Right now she’s okay.” Then Leilani turned to Kimo. “You have that looked at yet?”

“No time,” Kimo said and touched his head. I didn’t see them before, the scrapes and scratches on his forehead and his arm. Red bleeding into the borders of his brown and the white.

She said something in Tagalog, and he said something back that I couldn’t understand. She stood at Kimo’s side, peeked closely at his skull.

Kimo put Kayla in the ocean, and Kimo pulled her out. But it didn’t feel like a zero-sum game. Especially since I knew John could turn back to his killer-instinct ways. If he took Kayla away, I’d have no reason to stay. But I still couldn’t go back to the mainland, where plants were small and turned brown and dry. I’d stay here, alone, just for those two weekends a month when I could drive counter-clockwise for my daughter. I’d be stuck with half of me on one side of the island, half of me on the other.

The elevator bell dinged down the hall. I waited for a doctor or a nurse to deliver the news. I waited for a priest to take my hands. I waited for John to be harried and irate. I waited for John to punch out Kimo. I waited for John to take Kayla away. I waited to be expelled from this uncertain paradise. I waited for my daughter, dressed in bright white.

Liz Prato is the author of Baby’s On Fire: Stories (Press 53) from which this story is reprinted. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, The Butter, and Subtropics. She is Editor-at-Large for Forest Avenue Press, and teaches at literary festivals across the country. Liz is currently working on an essay collection that examines her decades-long relationship with Hawai‘i, using the prism of White colonialism.

Read an interview with Liz here.