I sat with Tico for a while, and then as I was leaving I met Tatiana in the hallway. “Howie’s not a bad person,” she said as we leaned up against the antiseptic green wall. “He just doesn’t think sometimes.”
“I know. And I know some people are going to treat me differently now that I’m out of the closet. But it’s hard when the trouble comes from inside your family.”
“He doesn’t do well with change,” Tatiana admitted. “I remember when I found out I was pregnant with Ashley I went running out to this job he was working on with your father. I was so excited! I jumped out of the car and ran up to him, screaming ‘I’m pregnant! I’m pregnant!’”
She laughed. “He had a cow. He was going ‘Oh, my God, how did this happen!’ and I said, ‘It’s sex, Howie, we had sex,’ and all the other guys were laughing, and God, he was mad at me for a month.” Her face got somber then. “And he went on a drinking binge and didn’t come home all night. I know he’s got problems, Kimo, and he really doesn’t drink that much anymore, only when something really upsets him. And you know he does love you, and this has all been kind of hard for him to take.”
“So you’re forgiving him?”
“I have to. I was really mad at him when I found out he beat up Tico. I mean, that man is like my brother. At first I thought he knew it was Tico, that he was mad at me about something and taking it out on him. Tico got me to understand.”
“Yeah, that it wasn’t your fault, it was mine.”
“It’s not your fault.” She faced me, pushing a big crest of ash-blonde hair from her forehead. “Howie overreacted. That’s his problem, not yours.”
“But I can’t help feeling it is my problem.” I started to walk down the corridor and Tatiana came with me. “If I hadn’t gone to the Rod and Reel Club none of this would have happened.”
An orderly passed us, wheeling an elderly Chinese woman with a tube coming out of her nostrils, connected to an oxygen tank on the back of the wheelchair. Her claw-like fingers gripped the arms of the chair, like she was holding on and wouldn’t let go.
“That man would still be dead,” Tatiana said when they had passed. “And you’d still be investigating his murder. And you’d still be stuck in your closet, and maybe you’d never get the chance for the life you deserve.” She took my arm and I stopped walking and turned to face her. “Everything happens for a reason,” she said. “I believe that. You have to forgive Howie, and you have to forgive yourself.”
I nodded. “I know. It’s just hard to do.”
We turned around to return to Tico’s room. Coming down the hall toward us was my big brother. Tatiana saw him and her face lit up, and I remembered what Tico had said, that he hoped someday he would be part of a love like the one Haoa and Tatiana shared, and I felt sad and angry and jealous and I knew that someday I would have to forgive him, but that I just wasn’t strong enough to do it so soon. I nodded to him and walked on past, heading back into the world.
When I got back to my parents’ house Harry was in their living room, chatting. “Hey, brah, how’d you get here?” I asked. “I didn’t see your car.”
“It’s at my folks’ house. I came through the woods. We can go out the same way and head up the coast for some surfing. Those news hounds outside will never know.”
More than ever before, I was noticing the acts of kindness people do every day. I guess when you stop expecting them, each one comes as a small gift. “He brought his boards with him,” my father said to Harry. To me he said, “Go on. Everything will still be here when you get back.”
I took my long board and Harry my short one, and we went out the back door, sneaking across the yard to the steep wooded slope. No one saw us go, though I did look back for a minute and see my mother framed in the patio doorway. We climbed a narrow, winding trail that led to a higher street, coming out a few doors down from Harry’s house. When I was a teenager we used this path almost daily, and I was surprised at how familiar it remained, twisting past a banyan with hanging tendrils, discovering an orchid flourishing under the shelter of a kiawe tree. It was a road back into the past for me, back to a time when all I worried about was the condition of wind and surf.
At the edge of the street we peered out and saw no one. Harry’s BMW was parked at the curb, and we bagged my boards and tied them down to the roof rack along with his, and then took off for the North Shore.
It wasn’t the best time to go north; the winter provided really prime surfing conditions up there. But it was a place we could go to get away from the press, where no one would recognize me, and if they did, it would only be as a fellow surfer, not a media target. We put the windows down under a clear blue sky and cruised north, up into the hills, past Schofield Barracks, descending again past fields of pineapple with the glorious blue sea ahead of us.
We snagged an oceanfront parking space just beyond Haleiwa, stripped down to our suits, and dragged our boards toward the ocean. From then on, all I concentrated on was surfing. I emptied my mind of murders, police, sex and family troubles, and felt wonderfully free as a result. The waves weren’t killer, but then I was accustomed to surfing Waikiki so it didn’t really matter. I practiced my turns for a while, and then just surfed for fun, catching the waves I liked and running them as long as I could hold on.
Harry had packed a picnic lunch, and after a couple of hours of surfing we collapsed on the beach and ate, then dozed for a bit and then surfed some more, until the sun was beginning to sink over the hillsides. “This was great,” I said, as we carried our boards back up the beach to the roadside. “Mahalo.”
“I had a good time too,” Harry said. “I’ve been wanting to get up here again ever since I got back from Massachusetts, but you’ve been so busy.”
“I’m gonna have a lot of time on my hands now.”
On the ride back to the city, I tried to hold on to the good feelings. I turned the radio up and when I couldn’t find a good station put in a tape of the Makaha Sons, luxuriating in the rhythms of the slack key guitar, the ipu gourds and the pahu hula drum. We stopped on the way back at a roadside diner we’d loved as teens and reminisced about high school.
“So you were always keeping this secret,” Harry said after the waitress had taken our orders. “All through Punahou, and years after.”
“I didn’t really understand it for a long time. I mean, I didn’t have any role models, and I didn’t have anybody I could ask questions of. So it was kind of a gradual thing, an awareness that kept growing.”
“Does it color your memories, when you look back, you think, oh, if I’d only known, I would have reacted differently?”
I shook my head. “You can’t go back and change things. You learn at a certain pace, and what you know to that point colors what you do.” I thought about Haoa. I had to give him a chance to learn, to assimilate what he knew about me in the past with the me I was today.
We slid easily into further reminiscences, and then eventually we were home. He dropped me off at my parents’ house, and mercifully, all the reporters and vans had disappeared, off to exploit someone else’s misery. I spent an hour or so watching TV with my parents in the living room before I went up to bed.
Sunday morning I woke late and had a bowl of cereal while I read the newspaper. There was no mention of either me or Haoa, a good sign. Funeral services had been set for Evan Gonsalves, at the Kawaiahao Church downtown, across from Honolulu Hale. The Clarks were descended from early missionaries to the islands, and had ancestors buried in the graveyard behind the church. Even though they had sold Clark’s to a Canadian with a chain of stores across the States, Terri’s family was still very prominent in Honolulu. Because of Evan’s connection to them, the funeral would be big and well-publicized, and I knew it wouldn’t be possible for me to sneak in the back unseen.
I wanted to go, but I didn’t know how Terri felt about my part in his death and I was sure that there would be reporters at the funeral who might come after me. I didn’t want to add my troubles to her grief.
I didn’t feel like doing anything much so I sat in front of the TV, watching cable reruns of talk shows, hoping the misery of others would make me feel better about my own.
By lunchtime my mother was fed up. “Come with me,” she said. “We’ll go somewhere for lunch, and then you can come along while I go shopping. I need a present for Ashley’s birthday and a pair of blue shoes with a low heel.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“You’re coming.” When her mind was made up, my mother did not tolerate argument. It was the same thing when I resisted going to Punahou because my brothers went there. It was simply not a matter open to discussion.
“All right,” I said. “But no place close to home. I don’t want to see anyone you know, or anyone I know, all right?”
“You’re going to have to face people eventually.”
“Eventually is fine. Just not today.”
I made her drive all the way to the Kahala Mall instead of going down to Ala Moana. There was a Clark’s there, along with a Liberty House and a bunch of standard mall shops, the same kind you find in every shopping center in every corner of the United States. Foot Locker, Banana Republic, The Limited, and all their ilk: the chain shoe stores and chain bookstores and chain record stores. Without the occasional crack seed stand or tourist knickknack shop selling plastic leis and chocolate-covered macadamia nuts, you could think you were in Florida or California. If you stayed indoors where it was climate-controlled, you could imagine you were anywhere from Oklahoma to Oregon or Maine to Maryland.
I’d brought a book with me, a Florida thriller by James W. Hall, and I tried to sit and read while my mother tried on shoes or picked through dozens of junior dresses. But I couldn’t concentrate, and yet I didn’t want to make eye contact with any other shoppers. Instead I roamed the aisles restlessly, looking at the merchandise but not really seeing it. Finally my mother said, “All right, I can’t take any more of this. We can go home.”
That night at dinner she complained to my father about me. “He needs something to do. Why don’t you take him to work with you tomorrow.”
We sat at the dining room table under the glow of the chandelier. Our dining room was the most un-Hawaiian room in the house, lifted almost intact from a home decorating magazine of twenty years ago. The elegant crystal chandelier had been shipped in from San Francisco, as had the formal mahogany table and chairs. “I don’t need a babysitter,” I said. “I can stay by myself. I can even go home.”
Behind us was a tall mahogany cabinet filled with Chinoiserie and other knickknacks. Across from us the living room was dark. “Your Uncle Chin called today,” my father said. “We had a long talk, and I recognized something. Chin had two sons, and he has lost them both. I don’t want to lose any of mine. You are who you are, even if I don’t like it. You’re still my son and I’ll try to accept you.”
I didn’t know what to say. My father continued, “Uncle Chin would like to see you. I said we would have lunch with him tomorrow.”
“Where? I don’t want to go anywhere people will recognize me.”
My father laid his fork down next to his plate, and then used the napkin from his lap to dab at his mouth. “Places Uncle Chin goes are very discreet,” he said. “Why don’t you come to the office with me in the morning, and we’ll go together to lunch.”
“I don’t know.”
He leaned forward toward me, and the warm light from the chandelier glinted off his glasses. “I’m preparing a bid on a big job,” he said. “You could help me. It gets harder for me to read the tiny details on the plans.”
“All right.” I looked down at my plate.
A little later, from a phone upstairs, I finally reached Tim. “Hi, it’s Kimo. I haven’t talked to you for a couple of days.”
“It’s been really busy.” He hesitated. “I saw a piece on the news about you. How have you been holding up?”
“It’s been hard,” I said, and my voice broke. “I just want to be with somebody who accepts me totally, you know? I want to forget about all this for a while.”
“I wish I could be there for you. Things are crazy at my office right now. We’re in the middle of discovery for this big case, and there are piles of documents to read. I brought home two full briefcases tonight.”
“You have to eat. Maybe we can get together. It doesn’t have to be for long.”
“Kimo.” Then there was silence. I was afraid the connection had been broken, and then he said, “My private life is my business, and I don’t want to see it spill out into the headlines. I just need to back away from you for a while. It’s not that I don’t like you-I do. I think you’re handsome and kind and interesting and I enjoy being with you. But you’re public property right now, and I can’t be part of that.”
“I understand.” I wanted to argue with him, to say we could make it work. He could stay in the shadows and I’d carry the weight of the spotlight on me. But I’d already seen what that spotlight had done to my brothers and my parents and I couldn’t blame Tim for wanting to avoid it. After all, he’d run all the way from Boston to Honolulu to keep people from knowing he was gay. It wasn’t up to me to drag him out.
“You are very nice,” he said. “I hope you come through this all right.”
“I hope so too.” I paused. “Well, I’d better let you get back to work.”
“I guess so,” he said.
After I hung up the phone, I flopped back on my bed, surrounded by all those artifacts of my teen years, and felt just as confused and lonely and bad as I had back then, before I could really put a name on my problems. What a long journey I had taken from those high school posters and old books, to wind up at the same place. Well, not necessarily the same, but a place so close to where I had been that it felt no different.
I turned the light off and lay on my bed in my clothes, staring out the window at the crescent moon rising over the Ko‘olau Mountains, trying not to think of the brief time I had spent with Tim, trying not to worry if I would ever meet anyone else who could make me feel the same way.
I didn’t have much success.