The polished one from the cardboard box. And a plain one from the funeral home in Eugene. Dad. Half of him. The other half is buried under a maple tree in the cemetery in Eugene, next to a spot with Mom’s name already on the stone. That was Mom’s idea. “He was always half here and half there,” she said. “I made him pretend he wasn’t. I’m done making him pretend.”
Mom had the window seat. About an hour before we landed, she shook my arm. I’d been sleeping. She was pressed against the window. Her face was wet. “Look,” she said. I leaned over her. Below us, in a sea so blue it didn’t look real, there was land. Green. Impossibly green. Mountains with clouds sitting on top of them like hats. White lines of waves breaking around the edges. “It’s exactly how he described it,” Mom whispered. “Thirty-one years and I’d forgotten. It’s exactly how he said.”
When we walked out of the airport in Honolulu, the air hit us. Warm and heavy and wet. It smelled like flowers and jet fuel and something else.
Salt.
The ocean. I couldn’t see it. We were in a parking garage. There was concrete everywhere.
But I could smell it.
I stopped walking. I closed my eyes. I breathed in.
“Annie?” Mom said.
“You can smell the ocean,” I said. “Before you see it. Dad was right.”
Mom closed her eyes too.
We stood in the middle of a parking garage at the Honolulu airport with our eyes closed, breathing, while travelers walked around us with suitcases.
They were waiting for us outside baggage claim.
All of them.
I don’t know how many. Forty, maybe. Fifty. Old people and young people and babies in strollers. Men in aloha shirts. Women in long flowered dresses. Kids holding a giant handmade sign on poster board.
WELCOME HOME LINDA AND ANNIE
And in the middle of them, a small woman in her late forties. Dark hair pulled back. Dad’s eyes. Dad’s exact eyes.
Leilani.
She walked toward us. She was holding something in her hands. Two leis. Plumeria. White and yellow. The same flowers in the dried brown bag in Dad’s sock drawer.
She stopped in front of my mother.
They looked at each other for a long time.
My mother was shaking. I could feel it. She was holding my hand so hard it hurt.
Then my aunt lifted the lei and put it over my mother’s head. She settled it on her shoulders. She kissed her on one cheek. Then the other.
“Aloha, Linda,” she said softly. “Welcome home.”
My mother made a sound. Then she put her arms around Leilani and held on.
Fifty people I’d never met stood around them in a circle and didn’t say a word.
We stayed for two weeks.
In the little green house in Waimānalo. The one Dad grew up in. Leilani lives there now with her husband and her three kids. They gave us Grandma Malia’s room.
On the bed, there was a white quilt. With a deep red pattern. Different from ours. Older. Faded.
“Mama’s first one,” Leilani said. “She made it when she was sixteen. Ulu, same as yours. Every Hawaiian girl starts with the breadfruit.”
Mom sat down on the edge of the bed. She ran her hand over the faded red pattern.
“Can I ask you something?” she said. “About the night on the lanai. Thirty-one years ago.”
Leilani sat down next to her.
“Mama told me about it,” Leilani said. “Many times. She said it was the worst thing she ever said. She said she’d lost her husband, our dad, the year before. Heart attack. On his fishing boat. And then her son moved four thousand miles away. And she was so lonely she couldn’t breathe. And when she saw Kai happy, really happy, at the party, at the house, she thought, Maybe he’ll come back. Maybe he’ll stay.“
Mom closed her eyes.
“She didn’t know about your father,” Leilani said gently. “The one who went to Ireland. She didn’t know until Kai wrote to her about it. Years later. When she found out, she cried for a week. She said, I told that poor girl the one thing she was most afraid of. Out loud. In the dark.” Leilani took a breath. “That’s when she started sewing faster.”
Leilani showed us everything.
The beach where Dad learned to swim. The rocks where his uncles taught him to throw the net. The little store where he bought shave ice every summer afternoon. The school where he won the science fair three years in a row.
She showed us the room where he grew up. It was her daughter’s room now. But in the closet, on the top shelf, there was a box. KAI’S STUFF. Mama had kept it. Every report card. Every school picture. His high school graduation cap. A plaster handprint he made in kindergarten.
And a stack of photographs. Hundreds of them. Every picture Dad ever mailed home.
Me at one day old. Me at my first birthday with cake on my face. Me on the swing set. Me in my softball uniform. Me at my high school graduation. Me at my college graduation. Me in front of my first classroom, holding up a sign that said MS. AKANA’S CLASS.
On the back of each one, in Grandma Malia’s cursive, she’d written my age and the date she got it.
And on the back of the very last one, the classroom one, she’d written something else.
My granddaughter Annie. A teacher. Like I always wanted to be. I hope someday she comes. I hope someday I get to tell her I’m proud.
I sat on the floor of my father’s childhood closet and cried for an hour.
On the twelfth day, we went to Makapuʻu.
All of us. The whole family. Fifty people. On a gray morning with clouds hanging low over the cliffs.
It was the beach in Dad’s photograph. Exactly. White sand. Turquoise water. Big dark cliffs on one side. And out in the water, a little island shaped like a turtle.
Two of my cousins, Keoni and Makana, took us out past the reef in an outrigger canoe. Their canoe club’s. Mom and Leilani and me. Keoni in front, Makana in back, paddling.
I held the polished wooden box. Grandma Malia.
Mom held the plain one. Dad.
When we were past the reef, out in the deep blue water, the cousins stopped paddling. The canoe rocked gently. The turtle island was off to our left. The cliffs were behind us.
Leilani sang something. In Hawaiian. Very softly. I didn’t understand the words. I didn’t need to.
Then Mom opened Dad’s box.
Her hands were shaking. She looked at me. I opened Grandma’s.
“Together?” I said.
“Together,” Mom said.
We leaned over the side of the canoe. We tipped the boxes at the same time.
Two gray clouds went into the water. Side by side. They drifted for a moment. Touching. Then the waves took them, and they swirled together, and you couldn’t tell which was which anymore.
Leilani dropped a lei into the water. Plumeria. White and yellow. It floated on top of the place where they’d gone in.
“There,” Leilani said quietly. “Now they’re both home.”
Then it started to rain.
Just like that. Out of nowhere. The clouds over the cliffs opened up, and rain came down on the canoe. On the water. On the floating lei. On us.
I held out my hand. Palm up. The way Dad used to.
The rain was warm.
Warm like bathwater. Soft. It ran down my face and into my mouth, and it tasted like salt and flowers.
Mom tipped her head back. She closed her eyes. She let the rain fall on her face.
Just like Dad. In the backyard in Eugene. Barefoot. When I was seven.
She stayed like that for a long time. With her face up. With her eyes closed. With the rain running down her cheeks so I couldn’t tell which part was rain.
“He was right,” she said finally. Without opening her eyes. “Kai. You were right. It’s warm.”
Ten minutes later, just like he said, the rain stopped. The sun came out. Everything steamed. The cliffs. The water. Our shoulders. Our hair.
The whole island smelled like flowers and wet dirt.
On our last night, the family threw a party. In the backyard of the little green house. Just like they did thirty-one years ago for Dad and Mom’s honeymoon.
A whole pig cooked in the ground. Cousins singing. Uncles playing ukulele. Little kids running everywhere with plates of food bigger than their heads.
Mom sat on the lanai. The same lanai. Where Grandma Malia said the words that started everything.
Leilani came and sat down next to her. They didn’t say anything for a while. They just watched the party.
“Thirty-one years,” Mom said finally. “I kept him from this. From all of this.”
“You didn’t keep him,” Leilani said. “He stayed. There’s a difference.” She looked at Mom. “He could’ve come anytime. He was a grown man. He chose to keep the promise. Because he loved you more than he missed us.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Mom said. “That someday he’d have to choose. And he’d choose here. Like my father did.”
“He never had to choose,” Leilani said gently. “That’s what Mama was trying to tell you with the quilt. You don’t have to choose. Not between places. Not between people. A heart’s not a suitcase, Linda. You don’t have to take things out to make room.”
Mom started to cry. Quietly.
“I wish I’d known that thirty-one years ago,” she said.
“Mama wished she’d said it thirty-one years ago,” Leilani said. “So it took both of you a long time.” She put her arm around Mom’s shoulders. “That’s okay. The ʻulu tree is slow. But it feeds everybody in the end.”
We flew home on the twenty-second of June.
Mom had the window seat again.
When the islands disappeared behind us, she kept looking out the window at the empty blue ocean for a long time. Then she turned to me.
“I want to come back,” she said. “Every year. On his birthday. And Malia’s.”
“Okay.”
“And I want you to come with me,” she said. “If you want to.”
“I want to,” I said.
She nodded. She looked back out the window.
“Your father never had to choose,” she said quietly. “I just made him think he did.”
The quilt is on Mom’s bed now.
Deep red on white. The breadfruit. Thirty-one years of tiny stitches. Folded at the foot of the bed during the day. Pulled up to her chin every night.
She sleeps better under it, she says. She doesn’t know why.
I think I do.
The photograph of Makapuʻu is on the refrigerator. The faded one Dad used to turn over at the kitchen table at night. Next to it, there’s a new one. Mom and me and Leilani in the outrigger canoe. Soaking wet. Laughing. In the warm rain.
The red Christmas cards come every December now. From Leilani. Addressed to Linda & Annie Akana.
Mom opens them at the kitchen table. She reads them out loud. Then she puts them on the refrigerator.
Last week, it rained in Eugene.
Of course it did. It’s Oregon. It rains eight months a year.
I came over for dinner. Mom wasn’t in the kitchen. I looked out the back window.
She was standing in the middle of the backyard. Barefoot. No coat. In the cold November rain. Next to the old swing set and the dead tomato plants.
Her head was tipped back. Her eyes were closed.
I went outside. I stood next to her.
“Mom,” I said. “What are you doing? You’re all wet.”
She opened her eyes and looked at me. She smiled. Not a sad smile. Something else. Something I don’t have a word for yet.
“Just checking something,” she said.
“Checking what?”
She held out her hand, palm up, and let the rain land in it.
“It’s cold,” she said. “The rain here is always so cold.”
I held out my hand next to hers.
“At home,” I said, “the rain is warm.”
She looked at me.
“Which home?” she asked.
I thought about it. About the yellow house in Eugene. About the little green house in Waimānalo. About a canoe rocking past the reef, and two gray clouds drifting together, and a lei floating on top of the water. About thirty-one years of tiny stitches.
“Both,” I said.
My mother laughed. Out loud. In the rain.
Then she took my hand, and we stood in the backyard with our faces turned up, cold and soaking wet, in the place where my father kept his promise for thirty-one years.
And I swear, just for a second, I could smell the ocean.
