13. Lani

13

Lani

L ani's left knee bounced with nervous energy as she cruised up the highway towards Hilo.

Rory was at New Horizons, and Lani had a rare free day. She didn't have to work at Haumona, didn't have any murals that she was working on, wasn't scheduled to volunteer with Pualena Playschool. Just an open day, with no obligations.

So, like any single mother, she filled it with errands.

She had a pile of picture books teetering in the front seat and a new stack of books waiting for her at the library in Hilo. The truck was nearly out of gas, so she would stop and fill up. And as long as she was in town, she might as well stop at one of the bigger stores for basics.

Sometimes it felt like she had forgotten how to enjoy herself, at least on her own. She could do fun beach days with Rory or lose herself in a painting, but she wasn't sure that she knew how to actually relax.

Was it anxiety, that energy that moved and twitched beneath her skin? For years, she'd had real, heavy things to be anxious about: a miserable mess of a marriage, a rapidly diminishing savings account, every decision she made on behalf of her daughter.

There was always something to worry about. That was motherhood.

…wasn't it?

Lately, she had started to wonder.

How much of her worry was justified, and how much of it was just a bad habit?

She'd had trouble learning to trust Tenn, and now she had her guard up with Lorenzo. Was that normal? Was it healthy? Or was it an insidious side effect of the years that she had spent in an abusive marriage?

She didn't know. She didn't know what was normal. It felt like she had been a single mother for all of a minute before moving in with Tenn. And that had felt right at the time, but now it seemed like all she did was second guess herself and question every decision that she made.

Had she rushed things, moving in with Tenn so soon after her divorce?

Was it selfish of her to choose him over Lorenzo?

She loved Tenn. She did. And she knew that he loved her – or at least he had. These days, everything between them felt so strained that she wasn't sure. He had been working crazy hours, leaving Olivia with his parents, slipping into bed around midnight and disappearing before she woke up the next morning.

It all left her feeling like an unwanted house guest in her own home… in his home.

She hated it.

Was she really going to deny Rory a shot of having both of her parents under one roof out of some vaporous hope that Tenn was The One? What if he wasn't?

What if he didn't love her anymore?

Lani was so trapped in her own head that she drove right through Hilo, over the bridge and up the highway. It wasn't until she saw Alae Cemetery on her left with its massive monkey pod tree that she realized she had overshot the library.

She pulled into the cemetery to turn around… but then, instead of flipping the truck around and going back to the highway, she drove up to the parking area.

She hadn't been to Alae since moving back to the island.

She hadn't been there since her dad was buried.

She had driven past a dozen times, had told herself a dozen more than she would visit some other day when she had the time, when she was ready… but she never had.

It was too painful.

Today, she parked her uncle's truck and climbed out into the cloud-filtered sunshine. The sky was bright white, making her squint.

Uncle John wasn't there in Alae. They had scattered his ashes out in the ocean along with his son's. She stood for a long time with her back against the truck cab, staring out over the blue Pacific and gathering her strength.

She walked up to the tree first, letting its long branches shelter her. With her fingertips trailing along the trunk, she circled the tree three times. Then she set out to find her family.

Some of the graves were beneath the branches of the enormous monkeypod tree. The overlapping green leaves shone above like stained glass. But her family was out in the sunshine, on the slope of the hill overlooking the water.

Lani hadn't been to the cemetery in over ten years, but her feet took her straight to their plots.

They were all together: her maternal grandparents, their parents, her mom, and her dad.

Her great-grandfather's headstone had his photo on it, as many of the older stones in this cemetery did. It was an oval with a black-and-white photo of him, younger than any other photo of him that she had seen. He'd died before she was born.

She knelt, brushed her fingers over it, and then moved on.

Her grandparents had a shared headstone, polished and gray, that read Kealoha on top and their given names below with the years of birth and death.

Her dad's grave was on the end, and she sat right on top of it, on the rectangular cement slab that marked it. Maybe that was a graveyard faux pas; she had no idea. But it reminded her of sitting on his lap as a little girl, all the mornings that she had stumbled out half awake to find him at the kitchen table reading the paper.

She leaned over so that she could touch her mom's grave with one hand, and tears spilled down her cheeks. It wasn't just that she didn't visit them. She hardly even talked about them.

It wasn't a lack of love – just the opposite. Remembering her parents hurt so much that she had locked those memories away.

Coming home to Hawai'i had brought it all back up again for a while… and then, without even realizing that she was doing it, she had locked it all back down again.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I haven't come sooner or brought Rory to see you." She took a shaky breath and looked out over the ocean.

She sat there for a long time, just breathing and looking out at the blue horizon.

The sunshine soaked into her hair and the stones and the fabric of her clothes.

And slowly, anxiety loosened its grip on her chest.

Her breaths came easier again, and the pressure behind her eyes let up.

"It's really beautiful here," she murmured, turning to run her fingers over her mother's name. "I'll come more. We both will."

Feeling lighter than she had on the way in, Lani stood and walked back to her uncle's old truck. Before she climbed into the driver's seat, she turned, kissed her palm, and blew the kiss back towards her family.

"I'll come see you again soon."

For once, the truck started up without protest.

She drove back over the bridge and turned right, then parked in the lot next to the library. Cradling the two-foot stack of books in both arms, she staggered to the main entrance and tipped them bit by bit into the collection slot. Then she went up to the desk and collected the books that she had ordered online.

She loved modern children's books, often even more than Rory did. The art was extraordinary. Some were so beautiful that flipping through the pages felt like visiting a gallery.

With yet another precarious stack of books in her arms, she made her way back to the truck. Her mind was full, but for once it wasn't with worries. She was thinking of all of the concepts she had for children's books, wondering if any of them had legs.

On her way back through town, she made a detour and parked by the Matheson gallery, where her mural of Ohia and Lehua stretched nearly two stories high. She sat staring up at it for a long time, picturing how the old Hawaiian love story could be made into a picture book.

Would anyone go for that? Or was it too sad?

The oldest stories all were, it seemed.

Finally, she got the truck going – after a few false starts – and got back on the main road. She would get gas at the grocery store, and she had just enough time to stop in for toilet paper and peanut butter before driving back to Pualena to pick Rory up from school.

Or she would have, if her engine hadn't sputtered to a stop on the highway.

The truck slowed to a crawl as she coasted on pure inertia and pulled over to the side. Cars and trucks swerved around her and raced past, creating a wind that shook the broad tropical leaves growing alongside the road.

She sat there for a minute, just staring out the windshield.

A chicken popped out of the jungle, followed by nearly a dozen chicks and then – miracle of miracles – a rooster. Mother hens were mostly on their own, but occasionally the dad would stick around to help out.

Maybe it wasn't even the dad. Maybe it was a brother or a son who had grown up and never left. Or a hopeful hanger-on, like the bachelor whales that hung around the young mothers in hope of a chance the next mating season.

She scrubbed the heels of her hands over her eyes like that might help scrub the tangled thoughts from her brain. She needed to call someone… and she didn't want to call Tenn.

The moment she realized that, she started to cry. Just put her forehead to the steering wheel and sobbed.

He was working. His mother was picking Olivia up again.

And Lani had no idea where they stood.

Still crying, she texted ‘ōlena to say that she would be late.

And then she called a tow truck.