When Mom called to tell me Aunt Pam had gotten a divorce and was moving back to Hawaiʻi, the first thing I felt was grateful. This was three years after Kiele was born, two decades before Mom would leave that letter in my mailbox—with no stamp, no name, no return address. Holding my cell to my ear, I stood alone on the back deck of the rental I lived in. Waikīkī twinkled below, and though the sun had set an hour ago, the ocean and clouds were still lavender with its memory.
“She could stay with me,” I said.
Staring at the silhouette of resorts, I thought of all the ways Aunt Pam could help. At thirty-two I worked as a land rights attorney. I was a single mom, the haole who’d gotten me pregnant having run back to the mainland at the first mention of a kid. I could’ve gotten an abortion—Mom had told me to, said no one would want me with a baby—but I’d chosen Kiele because I was tired of dating, tired of waiting for a partner who wanted me, not just tangled in bed or over seared ahi, but at five in the morning, when the sound of my pee woke them, tinkling from the bathroom like change in a bowl, who loved me even when they found me sobbing in the closet.
“She gets here next Wednesday,” Mom said, which I took as a yes.
I toasted to the curve of Diamond Head and what I could see of its crater. “I can grab her from the airport,” I offered, even though I couldn’t afford to take time off.
“You just focus on getting the house ready,” Mom said.
I knew what she was thinking: If it’s anything like your last place, it’s a mess. By that time Kiele and I had been living in the house on Maunalani Heights for six months, and Mom had yet to visit. She blamed it on her salsa classes. On the engine of her old Benz.
“Just let me know when you’ll be here,” I said.
Mom hung up. I dumped the last of my wine over the railing. Pushing open the sliding glass doors, I stepped back into the living room, which was still warm—south-facing. I ignored the pile of clothes Kiele had discarded on her way to the bath, the dirty dishes from our dinner of fried rice. I walked down the hall to Kiele’s room. I got into bed beside her, pressing my nose into her small belly. And though she was still slippery from the coconut oil I’d slathered on to keep her skin from cracking, I fell asleep like that, curled in her twin bed.
Maybe the signs were all there, and I chose to see nothing. But at first, all Pam seemed was sad. She’d been with her husband since college; they’d met at an ASU frat party. Mom used to have pictures of them next to the stereo in her living room—red-faced and smiling somewhere atop a hill in New Mexico, Pam draped in white, standing outside an adobe church. Her ex-husband was the breadwinner, a realtor, and while he’d sold houses, she’d taught middle school in Albuquerque. She’d retired before they’d split.
I attempted to clean the house for Pam’s arrival, but with Kiele it was impossible. She was three but at times still terrible. Every toy I collected she placed back on the floor. Every square of rug I vacuumed, she crushed Goldfish in its fibers. We’d been at this for nearly an hour when Mom and Pam walked in.
Mom’s face wrinkled. I picked up Kiele. “Do you want to meet your great-aunt Pam?” I cooed, calling on her charm for help.
“Oh, she can call me Aunty Pam,” Pam said. “None of that great-aunt nonsense.” She set down her bags and held out her arms. “Let me get at that cuteness.”
I had but a hazy memory of Pam from my childhood trips to the mainland—she'd served me lemonade on one of the hot, dry summers Mom and I had flown to Albuquerque. Now, in front of me, she was smaller than I’d remembered, shorter than me and even my petite mother. Her round face was framed by boyishly short, dark hair.
Something about the brightness of her artificially whitened smile chilled me. I set Kiele on the floor and she looked at me, nervous.
“Go on,” I said, and she walked slowly toward Pam. When Pam wrapped her arms around Kiele, I noticed her nails were bitten to the quick.
“So much for cleaning,” Mom said.
“How was your flight?” I asked Pam.
“Couldn’t say,” Pam said. She poked Kiele’s nose, and Kiele laughed, ducking her head like a turtle. She was already won over. “Aunt Pam had some vodka and Xanax and was out for most of it.”
Mom leaned against the counter. She tapped her key against its resin, counting the seconds until she could return home to the three-bedroom on Black Point she’d inherited from my grandparents.
“This place is so cozy,” Pam said, taking in the secondhand furniture, the fish prints I’d found on the side of the road and hung on the kitchen wall. “Is that a deck?” she asked and stood, picking Kiele up as she did. She bounced my daughter on her hip, unbothered as Kiele ran her fingers through her short hair. Sliding open the glass door, Pam turned back. “Mind if I take a peek? I could use the fresh air.”
She was on the deck before I could say yes.
Mom touched my arm as I took a step to follow Pam, who slid the door closed. We watched as outside, Pam pointed to the horizon, her voice a high whine through the glass as she baby talked to Kiele, bouncing my daughter on her hip while twisting side to side, so Kiele’s small head was thrown back and forth.
“Be careful with her,” Mom said.
When I screwed up my expression, she said, “The divorce was bad.”
I didn’t think of asking why it’d ended, or what badly meant. I thought maybe they’d fallen out of love, at the worst that Pam’s husband had left her for a younger woman.
“Maybe gentle is the word I’m looking for,” Mom said.
“Thanks,” I told Mom.
Pam walked back in, leaving the deck door open.
“I have to check on the construction workers before they leave,” Mom said, reaching for her purse. She was getting one of the guest bathrooms redone. It didn’t need it. “We should grab dinner at the club on Sunday.”
“I'm in,” Pam said.
Kiele squirmed out of her arms to say goodbye to Mom. “Can we get grasshopper pie?” she asked, as she hugged Mom’s knees. Her hair, which I’d brushed just a half hour before, was messy from being out on the deck.
“Of course, sweetheart,” Mom bent to give Kiele a hug, and saying her goodbyes to me and Pam, she walked out the door. I followed her to the driveway. She backed out. Took the turn onto Sierra. Then I went back inside and did what Mom had told me to do. I showed Pam my home. I welcomed her in. When I think about it now, I am angry at Mom for abandoning me to her. For not telling me exactly what she meant. But more than that, I am angry she did not believe me when I told her what I saw in Pam.
I was five when Dad left Mom and me. I have very few memories of him. What I do remember was what life was like afterward, with my grandparents. And how, for six months after Dad returned to Samoa, Mom, in mourning, exiled herself to bed.
As a child, I’d loved the country club because it was the one place I was free. While my grandparents golfed, walking the course, I breaststroked the pool, ate French fries on the deck, and stared out past the greens to the wide expanse of ocean. But when I went to college and studied Native Hawaiian land rights, my eyes were opened to what the country club was—acres of sacred land that had been stolen from Hawaiians. After law school, I took a job protecting Hawaiian land from development. Mom often complained when I blocked her friends from building houses and resorts, and she was furious the time that a case I’d worked on resulted in land taxes raised on a bunker my grandparents had built on the Big Island. When Pam came to town, I’d just landed my first big solo case: working to protect a heiau in Kalama Valley. The city had zoned the area for low-income housing, which Oʻahu sorely needed, but the land was a sacred site, where over a hundred Hawaiians had been buried. Building there would be desecration.
The Sunday after Pam arrived, I stuffed Kiele into a dress, and we drove with Pam from the house on Wilhelmina to Nuʻuanu. Kiele was mad I’d made her wear shoes. She kicked my seat as we turned off the highway.
“Pretty,” she yelled at a red ti that hung into the road.
Pam reached back to tickle one of Kiele’s feet, and Kiele, overjoyed, screamed.
“No yelling in the car,” I said.
I pulled up to the club’s entrance and, when the valet greeted us, handed him my keys. Pam unbuckled Kiele. We found Mom at a table on the terrace, overlooking the putting green. When Kiele saw her, she ran for a hug.
Though Mom hadn’t wanted me to keep Kiele, she adored my daughter. Every time she saw Kiele, she gave her a present—a crisp fifty-dollar bill that Kiele tried to stick in her mouth, a jade bracelet I’d had to crack with a hammer when Kiele’s hand grew too large for it. I’d thought Mom had loved me too. I thought she was just bad at showing it.
Mom put down her white wine and pulled Kiele onto her lap. “How’re you doing, princess?” she asked, as Kiele pulled at her necklace. “Here, you sit on my left,” Mom told Pam. “You need a view of the water.” She turned to me. “I asked for a booster chair.” I said thanks and sat.
“I’d love a drink,” Pam said.
“They’re only serving at the bar tonight,” Mom said, and Pam stood.
“Can you get me a glass of wine?” I asked.
“I want a Shirley Temple!” Kiele told Pam.
“Here, I’ll just come with,” I said.
We walked inside. Once we were down the stairs and had ordered, we waited at the bar, the room around us filled with families like our own. I looked past them to the floor-to-ceiling windows, where the mountains rose, green with the ever-present rain of Nuʻuanu.
“Do you remember your grandad’s funeral?” Pam asked. She gestured to the corner of the room. “They put a podium there for speeches.”
“You were there?” I asked. I’d been Kiele’s age then.
“I flew in from Albuquerque.” The bartender set her martini down and she said thanks and handed him a tip. “You know, Dad predicted that you’d be a brat.” She dabbed at her lipstick with the cocktail napkin while I blinked. Was that a diss? “He was wrong,” she said.
I felt a flush of pride, though I wasn’t sure she’d meant to give me a compliment. The bartender poured my wine and made Kiele’s Shirley Temple.
“Could you add another cherry?” Pam asked, and he did.
Back at the table, Kiele took one sip of her drink before pointing to the practice putting green. “I want the balls,” she said.
Mom and Pam were talking about an exhibit at the Honolulu Academy of Art so I stood and helped Kiele from her booster chair. She tripped down the steps to the green. I sipped wine as she took balls from a basket and lobbed them across the grass. They bounced over the cups and off the flags, would have knocked someone out if there had been anyone around. It was taking too long to empty the baskets with her hands, so Kiele pushed them over and the balls rolled in every direction. She ran after them, and I followed. Stopping at the wrought-iron fence that separated the grass from the road below, Kiele pointed at the ocean, which had turned gold in the setting sun, like a bowl of melted butter. She put her other hand on one of the fence’s metal posts, and I knelt.
“Do you see the airport?” I asked, pointing west.
Just then, a plane took to the sky. “Like a bird!” Kiele said, wide-eyed.
“That’s how Aunty Pam got here.”
The plane, climbing, soon disappeared into the clouds. Kiele turned and walked back to the terrace.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To my Shirley Temple,” she said.
I put my wineglass on the lawn and gathered the balls she’d scattered, using a shag tube the country club had left by the terrace stairs. The work was mindless and comforting. I’d lost myself in it by the time Mom came to check in.
“I ordered you surf and turf,” she said.
“What about Kiele?” I asked.
“The closest thing I could get to mac and cheese was alfredo.”
She grabbed a shag tube. Together we loaded them with balls that we released into the baskets. Pam was making a paper crane out of a cocktail napkin when we returned to the table. Kiele watched, fascinated, the stems of her eaten cherries gripped firmly in her fists.
Soon the food came, plates steaming. Kiele took a bite, the linguine dangling from her mouth. Though I’d grown up saying grace—sweaty hands held around my grandparents’ koa dining table—Kiele and I did not pray at home. I saw no value in addressing a God who had done nothing but take, who had been characterized only through absence.
Mom grabbed the plate from Kiele, and I took my daughter’s hand to quiet her whining. Pam took Mom’s hand, then mine. Her hands were dry, and I remembered the bitten nails I’d seen when she’d first picked up Kiele. Mom closed her eyes. I left mine open, willing Kiele not to cry.
“Thank you, God,” Mom started. “For another day. To live and laugh, to love and play.”
It was the same prayer she’d repeated at every meal—brunch or dinner—since I was a child. It was lilting, like the chorus of a song. I wonder if she said it alone in the house on Diamond Head. I wondered what foolishness I would resort to once Kiele had grown up and gone out into the world without me. I said Amen.
The next day I left Pam with a refrigerator door full of lists: Kiele’s food allergies, our family doctor’s phone number, Kiele’s favorite toys and shows, the best parks with swings, which the city was rapidly removing because of a lawsuit. Pam got the hang of things quicker than I expected. In the mornings, I took Kiele to school, but Pam was the one who picked her up. Still, I worried something would go wrong, the anxiety manifesting in tennis elbow from gripping my pens, a new line between my eyes, hourly calls in the afternoons that Pam picked up with a laugh. But, day by day, as I came home to a happy daughter, to folded laundry and a fully stocked fridge, I began to trust my aunt.
A month after Pam moved in with us, I left work late after getting lost in tax documents, tracking the years that the property in Kalama had changed hands. I got home to Pam making dinner.
“I should have texted,” I said.
She waved me off. “Have some wine.” She handed me a glass.
I took a long sip and realized she was wearing my apron. The last time I’d seen it was rolled up at the back of my underwear drawer. Steam from the stove haloed her head.
“I hope you like scampi?” she asked.
“Mama,” Kiele yelled, and smacked a hand on the coffee table.
“Sounds great,” I said.
I put the wine down to pick Kiele up. Her bent knees burrowed into my side. I gave her cheek a wet kiss that burst into a raspberry, and she giggled and pushed at my face with her hands.
“How was school?” I asked. Kiele didn’t like when I called it daycare. It made her feel like a baby.
She told me about the dinosaur she’d sculpted from Play-Doh. The scent of onions sautéing in butter congealed in the air, and I opened the living room windows with my free hand. I put Kiele down and she pulled me to the couch, where she pretended to read me a book about fairies making skirts out of orchids. Pam called out that dinner was ready, so we got off the floor to sit at the table on our sliver of deck. I slid Kiele into her booster chair as Pam lay the bowl of pasta on the table.
“Why don’t you ask your mom about her day?” Pam prompted, cutting Kiele’s noodles with scissors so she wouldn’t choke.
“It was long,” I said, and handed Kiele a fork as Pam put the plate in front of her.
“Work was bad?” Pam asked.
“Just a lot of hoops to jump through.”
“I guess I wouldn’t understand,” Pam said.
“It’s not that.” I blew on the noodles I’d spun around my fork. “The state is trying to bulldoze this heiau in Hawaiʻi Kai,” I explained. “I only have a month to stop it. It’s complicated because the plan is to flip the land into public housing, so we can’t paint them as the villain.”
“What’s a heiau?” Kiele asked, cutting the word into thirds as she spoke through a mouthful.
“It’s where Hawaiians sacrificed kids,” Pam joked, pinching Kiele’s cheek.
Kiele swallowed. She looked scared. I put down my fork. “A heiau,” I paused, thinking. “Is a place with a lot of mana. A lot of energy. It’s a place of worship, kind of like a church. Remember when you went to church with Nana?”
Kiele nodded, and speared a shrimp. “They gave me juice.”
“The blood of Christ,” Pam laughed. She looked at me. “We should all go together.”
I grunted, my mouth full. To myself, I thought, fat chance. We ate the rest of dinner in silence. Every time my wine glass was empty, Pam filled it again. The sea cut the sun in half, waves swallowing the orb. Kiele rubbed her eyes.
“Okay, little bug, let’s get you a bath,” I said.
Pam put a hand on my arm. “You rest,” she said.
“You’ve been watching her all afternoon.”
She told me it was fine. I was relieved. I couldn’t help it. I’d been flipping through tax code all day and was exhausted. I thanked Pam as she stacked the plates and freed Kiele from her highchair.
The wine pressed on my temples. When the last of the clouds had gone gray, I gathered the plates and went in. From down the hall, the bath drained, filling the house with the long, choking sound of water being pulled down the pipes. I washed the dishes and walked over to Kiele’s room to peek in.
The lights were off, and at first, I thought they were asleep. Then I heard Pam’s whisper. In the light of the glow-in-the-dark stars, she lay beside Kiele, inside rails I'd sawed from two-by-fours to make the bed into a crib. I strained to hear what she said.
“I love you, you know,” she said, and Kiele said it back. There was a pause before she asked, “Do you love your mother?”
Kiele murmured a soft, sleepy, “Yes.”
“Even though she’s gone all day?” Pam asked.
I waited for Kiele’s answer. I felt like I’d been slapped. She didn’t respond, so I walked into the room. Pam got out of my daughter’s bed.
“I’ll leave you to it,” she said. I caught the glint of her teeth as she smiled. “Goodnight, Kiele,” she said.
When I lay down, Kiele curled into me. I listened to her breathe. Outside, Pam filled up a glass of water from the sink.
“I love you,” I whispered, but Kiele didn’t say it back.
I stared at the ceiling, trying to find Orion’s Belt in the plastic constellation I’d plastered there. I thought of the apron, my apron, that Pam had worn. Why had she been in my underwear drawer? I had not laid out house rules, had assumed she’d know my room was off-limits. I thought about what Mom had said to me when she first brought Pam into my home. Be careful with her. Even now I am not sure what exactly she meant.
For the next few weeks, I made sure I got home on time. I helped with dinner. I gave Kiele her bath. On weekends I took my daughter to get Matusomoto’s shave ice, to watch whales off Diamond Head and name the flowers that bloomed in Lyon Arboretum. I even spent a Friday night with one of her friend’s mom’s that I did not like, packing a picnic up to Lanikai Pillbox to see the full moon rise, Kiele’s face covered in dirt as she and her friend Lady-and-Tramped a slice of pizza from Boston’s.
Some nights, Pam disappeared with the excuse that she was going to see Mom—for drinks, to hit balls at the country club, to see a new exhibit at the art museum. Once, I called Mom to see how dinner had gone, and she asked what I was talking about. Twice, I looked through Pam’s room, in the drawers and under the bed. I did not find anything more offending than a sock missing its pair and a pile of long, dark hairs lying beside some tweezers on her desk.
After I put Kiele to sleep, I buried myself in research for the heiau in Kalama Valley, compiling a list of precedents for similar cases in the islands. To avoid Pam, I worked in bed. I woke to paper cuts on my cheeks from falling asleep on printed briefs. The small cuts stung when I put on foundation.
In the three years since Kiele’s birth, I had not celebrated my birthday. I was too busy raising my daughter, and before that, my belly had been ballooned and pregnant.
“You should go out,” Mom said over the phone when I called.
“What about Kiele?” I asked.
“Pam can take care of that,” Mom said.
I didn’t want to leave my daughter with Pam, but I didn’t know how to tell Mom this. When I was pregnant with Kiele, Mom had said I was too young to know if I wanted to be a mother. She’d always struggled to believe me. When I was ten, she made excuses for the boy who’d pushed me down the stairs when she was called to get me from the principal’s office. She said I was at fault when I was twenty-one and someone took a handsaw to my car’s carburetor. “I told you not to live in Kaimuki,” she’d said, like it was a bad neighborhood. Like she had not been the one to kick me out when I got into college. Had not been the one to tell me to leave the home she’d inherited under the explicit instructions that I be allowed to live there as long as I wanted.
I asked Pam to babysit, and she was happy to do it. I texted friends I’d not spoken to in over six months, and we made plans to get drinks at a classy Waikīkī bar. I made reservations for my favorite Japanese restaurant. Even splurged for a mani pedi and a blowout from the expensive salon in Ala Moana.
On the night of my birthday, I took a taxi. It was strange. Every time I turned my head, I expected to see Kiele buckled in her booster seat beside me. I thought about stopping the cabdriver, making him turn around so I could give my daughter a last kiss, but I was already late. He sped through Kapahulu, the streetlights blurring past.
At the bar, my friends pressed champagne on me, then a martini, and soon we were walking to the restaurant, where they ordered too much food—platters of hamachi and maguro, stuffed portobello and butterfish that they would not let me pay for—and sake bombs. Halfway through the meal, I had to go to the bathroom. I walked through the restaurant to the back, squatted over the seat to piss and, after, in the mirror, regarded my reflection, the red-lipped woman I’d forgotten existed. Before returning to our table, I paused on the restaurant’s balcony. I leaned against the railing and watched the waves crash into the building’s foundation. I tried to remember the last night my life had been like this, before motherhood had stolen it. I’d blamed the stress of the past weeks on Pam, but even before her I’d been a cyclone of anxiety, constantly worried if I was giving enough, never thinking about if I was giving too much. I’d lost a version of myself—the girl who went surfing beneath the full moon, who stole fruit off the neighbor’s night-blooming cereus.
My friends wanted to go clubbing, but I was too tired and full. I tried to call a taxi, but my phone was dead. Someone got me a car. They sent me off, and I leaned my head against the window of the sedan. The glass fogged, a cloud that grew bigger with each breath. The driver pulled into my driveway, and I rubbed the condensation away to see the front of the house dark. I paid and got out before stumbling up the porch. At the door, I stopped to take off my heels, not wanting to wake Pam or Kiele. I tried to be quiet as I fumbled with the lock, feeling, somehow, like a teenager again, sneaking into the house while Mom slept. The porch light snapped on. The front door banged open. Pam stood in the frame, a dark silhouette.
“Where have you been?” she demanded. “I called your cell. I called the restaurant.” She flipped on the kitchen light so I could see her. “Are you drunk?” she asked. I didn’t answer. “It doesn’t matter. Kiele’s sick.”
It was a confirmation of what I’d feared: I’d left Kiele and something bad had happened. Pushing past Pam, I ran to my daughter’s room. She lay flushed in her twin bed. Mom was there. A question lodged in my throat: Had Pam done this? I reached to touch Kiele’s forehead, but Pam intercepted me, laying a cool washcloth over Kiele’s brow. Mom had a phone propped between her ear and shoulder.
“The doctor,” she told me.
Kiele didn’t respond when I said her name. Her breathing was loud and wet, like something was stuck in her chest. The doctor answered, and Mom listed Kiele’s symptoms—fever, lack of appetite, pain. I felt like an outsider, watching them care for my daughter, and began to cry. Mom got up, turning her back on me.
“Do you have Motrin?” she asked, once she’d hung up the call.
“In the bathroom cabinet.” I hiccupped, and Pam said she’d get it.
“The doctor said it’s probably a cold,” Mom said. “At worst, the flu.”
“I should have known,” I said.
“I’m going to get you a glass of water,” Mom said, and left.
Pam returned and made Kiele sit up. She gave her a dose of liquid medicine. Kiele’s small lips smacked.
“I know what you’re doing,” I told her.
“What’s that?” she said.
“You’re not her mother,” I said, just as Mom came back with a full glass.
“You should drink your water,” Pam said.
I finished the glass in one breath. Mom knelt beside me, stroking my hair as I lay my head beside Kiele’s. I drifted off, and when I woke, Mom and Pam were gone. Kiele slept soundly, flat on her back. I reached out, and her cheek, which had cooled, was soft beneath my hand.
I wanted Pam gone. I told this to my mother a couple of weeks after my birthday. It was a Saturday, and we were standing in line for fudge at KCC Farmer’s Market.
“You can’t kick out your aunt,” Mom said.
“She’s been saying weird things,” I told her. “About me. To Kiele.”
Mom sighed. She handed Kiele a five-dollar bill. “Go get an ice cream,” she said, and pointed to the booth beside us. Kiele ran to get a cone. Mom turned to me. “Remember when we’d visit Pam in New Mexico?”
“We went almost every summer,” I said.
“No,” Mom said. “We went after each of her miscarriages.”
The memory of a conversation I’d overheard as a child came to me. I’d been fifteen, and I was sneaking out of the house. It’s not that she doesn’t want kids, Mom had said. It’s that she can’t have them. My grandma had grunted. Well, she should try harder, she’d said.
“We went to Albuquerque so Pam could play house?” I asked.
Mom’s face hardened. She pulled Chapstick from her purse and swept it over her lips. “You have no idea what it is like to not be able to have a child when all you want is to be a mother. When all your life you’ve been told it is your purpose.” She put the lip balm back into her purse. The people in front of us ordered. “Just like you have no idea what it is like to be left with a baby you do not want.”
I flinched. She pulled out a wad of twenties.
“We went to Albuquerque to make my sister feel better,” she said. “Is that so bad? Has Pam told you why they divorced?”
I shook my head.
“Her husband left her. For the woman he was cheating with,” she said. “The woman that got pregnant when Pam couldn’t.”
The market was full of voices—vendors hawking their goods and people buying them—the soft sound of produce dropping after being nudged from tables, clothes rustling in the wind that had chased off yesterday’s storm. I remembered how Pam would brush my hair during the nights we’d stayed in Albuquerque, how she’d always have a present waiting for me—colorful shoes and frilly dresses that Mom knew better than to make me wear.
We were at the register. “I’ll have a tray of the macadamia nut,” Mom told the person behind the table.
Kiele ran up to us, her hands sticky. She’d dropped her cone and was crying. I knelt to wipe her hands on my shirt and thought of how Pam had asked Kiele if she loved me. When Kiele was sick, she’d treated me like the cause.
“Mom, I’m scared,” I said.
Mom handed me a corner of the fudge. “Don’t be silly.” She took Kiele’s hand from me. “Let’s get a bag of lychee. Aren’t those your favorite?” she asked, and Kiele nodded, thumb in her mouth, her face still damp.
I put the fudge in my mouth. We walked through the rest of the market, past food trucks with plate lunch and shave ice, booths heaped with dragon fruit and halved papaya, the seeds at the center looking like something scooped from the bottom of a pond. I knew Mom was mistaken. Something was wrong with Pam, and it had nothing to do with her infertility. The chocolate in my mouth dissolved, its sweetness souring, and I chewed the remaining chunks of macadamia.
I would not have found out about the tickets if I had not gone home for my lunch break on Tuesday. I’d lost a contract for work, but when I looked it wasn’t in the papers on my desk or bed, wasn’t on the kitchen counter or stuck in a book on the living room shelf, where I sometimes stashed clutter from the coffee table so Kiele wouldn’t draw on it. Pam wasn’t home, so I figured I’d check her room just in case. The ticket confirmations were just lying there, printed and peeking out from a manila folder on her bed.
They were for her and Kiele. Dated for next month. HNL to ABQ, a two-hour layover in Oakland. I called work and told them I would not be back in. I was waiting when she and Kiele got home from school. I was sitting on Pam’s bed.
“It was supposed to be a surprise,” Pam said when she saw me. She held Kiele as she had on my terrace, that first night she’d entered our home. “I thought we could go together.”
“Who is ‘we’?” I asked.
“You and me,” Pam said. “Kiele and your mom.”
“There are only two tickets.”
“I must have not printed the confirmation for the others.” She frowned. She put Kiele down. She took a step toward me. “I booked in two groups. There was a discount.”
I took my cell from my back pocket and dialed Mom. She picked up on the second ring.
“Did you know about Pam’s plan to go to Albuquerque?” I asked on speaker. She said no. “With my daughter?” I was yelling, and Kiele, who stood in the doorway, began to sniffle.
“Can you please hand the phone to your aunt,” Mom said.
“I want her gone,” I said.
Fifteen minutes later Mom found me locked in my bedroom, where I sat in bed, gripping Kiele, who squirmed and cried. Pam had tried to follow me, had tried to explain that it was just a trip. I could even come if I wanted. When I’d held my arms out to Kiele to pick her up, she’d run to Pam and wrapped herself around Pam’s knees. I had to pull them apart. Pam banged on my door until she heard Mom in the driveway; then she’d retreated.
I do not know why the flights she bought were to New Mexico. She had no life to return to there. Not only had her husband left her but I’d learn later that she’d lost the house. According to the papers, Pam had driven up to her ex-husband’s mistress’s two-year-old son and invited him into her car. She hadn’t taken him far, just to the gas station around the corner, where she’d bought him an ice cream sandwich. And though she’d returned him, his mom was suspicious of the Oreo residue around his lips. When she’d asked who bought him the ice cream, he’d described Pam. He’d said she was nice. That she’d told him she’d be back again.
In court, Pam was denied alimony for this. The judge considered jail but sent her to Hawaiʻi instead. She was supposed to live with Mom. Mom knew all this but let me take her in.
When Mom walked into my house after I found the tickets for her and Kiele, she tapped on my door.
“I can hear you crying,” she said. Then she asked me to come out.
I sat on my bed, feeling my and Kiele’s tears mix, tickling at my armpits. She had stopped resisting, and was now curled into my chest. I thought about the moment after labor, when Mom had laughed as I’d drawn my fingers over Kiele’s sleeping face, telling me I had no idea what I was in for, that this was the most peaceful it would get. I thought about the time I was five and Mom had screamed at me for puking on her Persian rug, accused me of making myself sick for attention, when really I had food poisoning from the spoiled milk in the fridge.
Through the thin walls, I heard Mom comfort Pam.
“Let me help you pack,” she said.
The drawers in Pam’s room opened and closed. Her books were pulled from shelves and dropped with a thunk into canvas bags. Her toiletries rattled in the bathroom. In just thirty minutes, her suitcase was zipped. The front door closed, and I emerged, with Kiele still in my arms, to Mom and Pam gone. The spare room was empty, the bed made with its corners turned down, just like it had been the day that Pam walked in.
The next week, Pam moved into a place Mom paid for. The two-bedroom house was just a few blocks from me. When I drove by, she’d sometimes wave at me from her garden. I never waved back. I got a restraining order. I was terrified she’d try to pick Kiele up from school, so I printed flyers of her face and paid extra for color. I handed these out to teachers and parents. Do not let this woman leave with my kid, I ordered. At night, I closed every one of the house’s windows, convinced Pam watched us from the yard. I found a house for sale in ʻĀina Haina and as soon as we closed, Kiele and I moved from our mountain perch to a windless valley. In summer, the humidity was so extreme that I often slept naked.
Mom stopped by every now and then to take Kiele to a movie or the beach. She did not call me just to chat, as she had before Pam came into our lives. I continued to call her. I was angry. I did not know how to say it. Instead, I told her about my day, about Kiele’s obsession with strawberries, and the vanilla orchids I was training up the avocado tree in my backyard.
I have only been alone with Mom once since Pam left my house. She had asked me to lunch. It was a Tuesday. We sat under the awning of the Spalding House Cafe. This was before they closed the museum.
“I’m planning a trip to the Big Island,” Mom told me. Deviled eggs lay between us, their yolks dusty with paprika. “I wanted to ask if Kiele could come with.”
Kiele was thirteen then. She played wing for the middle school water polo team and had a crush on the goalie, something she tried to hide but I saw in the blush that bloomed when the girl gave Kiele her swim cap. I’d found that she’d grown into my stubbornness—she cut her bangs herself, she refused to let me make the chocolate chip protein pancakes she ate for breakfast. But she was still sweet. She held my hand on the beach, wasn’t embarrassed to tell me she loved me in front of her friends.
I knew that Pam had moved to my grandparents’ compound on the Big Island. Mom hadn’t told me. A friend of the family had.
“I don’t want my daughter anywhere near her,” I told Mom.
“What are you talking about?” Mom said.
“I don’t want my daughter anywhere near Pam.”
Mom blinked. “It could be good for Kiele to see the house. One day, she’ll own it.”
I grabbed a deviled egg and stuffed it, whole, into my mouth. I thought about what Mom had said to me at the farmer’s market all those years ago. I wondered if she had ever wanted to be a mother. I wondered if, in Samoa, my dad had other kids.
“I love you,” I told my mother.
She did not say it back. I dropped my napkin on the table, and I did not call Mom again.
Over the years, Pam has sent expensive gifts—purses beaded with pearls, gold bracelets, a large check when Kiele graduated from high school. I donated and sold the gifts. I almost shredded the check. Once, I asked Kiele about living on Maunalani. She said she does not remember it.
On the morning of my fifty-second birthday, I find the letter from Mom in my mailbox. I am on my way out to walk the dogs. It is two decades after Pam moved out, and I have not seen Mom since Kiele left for college. I hold the envelope, my eyes tracing the familiar lines of cursive. Thinking of Mom hollows me out, scoops something rotten from my core. I consider opening the envelope, but my Frenchie, Louis, is pulling at his harness. Olga, the dachshund, growls at a flickering lamp across the street. I return the letter to my mailbox. I will read it when I am done with my walk, when I bring the rest of the mail in.
It is a quarter to six, the sky beginning to gray before the sun shrugs its way over Hawaii Loa Ridge. I walk the dogs in the early morning because it is quiet, the sidewalks empty before the circus of pseudo dog trainers descends, air unmarred by the weekend commuters’ exhaust. Dew carpets the zoysia of my neighborhood and the last of the Christmas lights hang, loose and sagging, from naked plumeria branches. Olga snuffles beside me, her long body wagging. She stops to dig at the corner of the neighbor’s lawn and comes up with an earthworm, which she swallows before Louis can steal it.
On dark days, when I’m stuck replaying reels of memory, the dogs force me out of bed. I’ve had Louis for ten years but got Olga after Kiele left. When I first brought her home from the shelter, I found her behavior disgusting, but I’ve learned to laugh at it. I joke now that she’s all natural, my farm-to-table girl. She refuses kibble, preferring to hunt geckos, slugs, and cockroaches, rolling in their dead bodies until she stinks. Once, when she was only a few months old, she killed a rat and dropped it at my feet as I sat on the lanai. I almost scolded her, but stopped—I’d read that dogs bring the dead as an acknowledgement of their love and devotion. I wrapped the rodent in a garbage bag and tossed it. Sometimes, she reminds me of Kiele, who after we moved to ʻĀina Haina, would sit in the backyard and wait for mangoes to fall. When they did, she’d bite through their skin, ignoring the sap, the fruit’s stringy fibers.
The two dogs and I make our way out to the main road, stopping every now and then for sniffs. We are headed toward the river, following the path I’ve walked for over a decade. These are the last untamed waters on this side of the island, the others scooped out and cemented in. The state says, publicly, that this is to prevent flooding, but I was on the case. Soon after I won the battle in Kalama Valley, I opened my own firm. Everyone wanted to hire me. ʻĀina Haina’s river is part of the Wailupe Watershed. There is an endemic snail that lives in these brackish waters. Developing the stream would destroy its last habitat.
Kiele lives in Palm Springs now, where she works as a wilderness therapist. I often lie awake at night, afraid that she will never come back. I worry that I was too strict, scared as I was after Pam tried to take her. I made so many rules: no sleepovers or dating, no drinking or parties, no license until she was eighteen and needed one for college. Once, we fought on a trip to Australia. She screamed at me in the middle of the Bondi Beach bike path. You are such a control freak! She accused me of making it impossible for her to make lasting friends.
On the main road, the dogs and I cross the street to avoid a Doberman. Olga is afraid of dogs she doesn’t know, and will often egg Louis into fighting them, barking like she’s being hurt when they’re not even touching her. When Olga barks, I pick her up. I know about fear, how it grows when others deny the cause of it.
The sky is blue when the dogs and I get to the bridge, though the sun is hidden, burning through the clouds that wrap like scarves around the mountain. Last night it rained, and the river is high. Olga watches it move through the steel railing. Louis shoves his head between the posts, trying to copy her, and his bat ears press flat against his head. He pants, his throat blocked by his soft palate. We stand there and smell the world as it runs by. There is peace in knowing that the water is on its way to the ocean, where it will rise and fall with the tide, sweep through deep-sea currents, evaporate in the sun and perhaps one day fall here, in this river, again.
Back home, I bring in the mail. I undo the dogs’ harnesses. I fill their water dish, placing it in the corner, where Louis shoulders Olga aside, then gags from drinking too quick. In the kitchen, I open the envelope from Mom. It is a birthday card. One of the ridiculous, glittery ones I might have given Kiele when she was six.
There’s a twenty-dollar bill. Happy Birthday, it sings. And then, in Mom’s writing: Get yourself a sundae. I hold the money. I want to be mad. I can’t. It’s ridiculous. I read the note again, then put it in the trash. A fleeting impulse crosses my mind—to call Mom, ask her what this means. I fill the kettle with water for coffee instead.
When the coffee has brewed, I sit on the lanai in my favorite chair. A book about Joshua Tree is spread across my lap. In a few weeks, I fly to Southern California to visit Kiele. For part of it she wants to camp. The mango leaves dance before me on the tree, twirling in the trade winds. Louis sits on my feet. Olga crawls into my lap.
Just then, my phone rings. It’s Kiele.
She sings me Happy Birthday, her voice a register lower than the squeaky card that is now in the trash. When she’s done, she asks how my morning is. I tell her about my walk to the river. I tell her about Louis and Kilo, about Olga and the Doberman. I tell her about the card, and once I start, I can’t stop. I tell her everything, from the day Pam came to the day that she left. And she stays on the line and she listens. When I am done, I wait for her answer to all of it.