AFTER OUR LONG GETAWAY, WE GO BACK TO THE cottage so Danny can help my mom in the kitchen. I walk over to the big house. It’s cool out, a nice trade wind, which seems to make the clouds march across the sky. When I go around back, I hear music coming from the house, and it transforms the familiar setting, elevating it to something momentous. I love the way Hawaiian music can outfit something or act like an undercurrent, carrying us all along, making me feel like I’ve been here before and will be here again.
I don’t see Eddie at first, but then I see him by the gate, looking out at the ocean where a low froth of cloud has settled on the horizon. Bright orange sunlight shoots up and down.
He turns then and nods his head when he sees me, an approving, observant look, as if I were walking down a runway. When I get to his side, he says, “Your mom said you wanted to talk to me. I’m told you’ve been brought up to speed.”
“Yes,” I say. “She told me everything.”
“About what now?” he asks. “I’ve forgotten.”
My mouth is open. I need to fill it with words somehow. After being with Danny today, I was prepared to go in strong with my shoulders back. Instead I stand, hunched.
“I’m kidding with you,” he says. “I’m still here. Still got it. I’m like a vampire. It comes at night mostly. As of now.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t say you’re sorry.”
“I’m not sorry,” I say, meeting his eyes.
“There you go,” he says. “Now, that’s refreshing.”
But I am sorry. My mom told me that it could happen so quickly. I imagine him being swept off in a flood, but managing to stay afloat in its rapids for years, barely thinking, just grasping for air and solid ground.
“Thank you for taking care of me all these years.” I’m losing control of my voice, and he looks at me quickly, detecting it.
“What have I done?” he asks, then I grin. He’s kidding again.
“Thank you,” I say, “for helping my mom.”
“She deserved to be helped.” He clears his throat, then takes a sip of his clear drink. “I’d like to keep helping if it would be of use to you.”
Of course it would be of use.
“We don’t need your help anymore,” I say and hope it’s true. “And then you won’t have anything to hide. Why did you do it?”
He sighs, as if I were his own incorrigible child. A slice of his hair lifts in the wind, then falls like a wing.
“Because I could,” he says.
I let that sink in, see if it satisfies. It does, mainly because of its simplicity and directness. Maybe it wasn’t so complicated—just habit, like paying the electric bill.
“Are you in love with my mom?”
He laughs in a quiet and resigned way. “No,” he says. “Maybe. When you’re this old, you’re in love with everything that happened a long time ago.” He makes a diamond shape with his hands as if capturing a shot. “That’s all set in amber. Easy to be nostalgic about old shit.”
“Right,” I say. “You don’t have to be old to know that.”
He looks my way as if someone new had appeared beside him and points his finger at my nose.
“I don’t want Melanie to know that you’ve helped,” I say, thinking that the information will make it onto her show if she ever makes the cut. How wouldn’t she be able to make the cut? She’s a perfect housewife. She’s like a robot, looking at people and expertly scanning them for their worth and capabilities, their potential and their roots. She should really have a job. She’d be so good at it, anything from interior designer to venture capitalist. But she has taken this role as mother and wife and social entertainer like someone out of the past. She belongs in a different era.
“I don’t want her to know either,” he says, out to the ocean, a blue canvas, brushstrokes of whitecaps. “But sometimes I can’t shut up.”
Because she blamed me, blamed Danny, because she snared my mom like a bluefin tuna, because she basically casts her children’s friendships and love lives, I boldly ask, “What does Melanie want?” I don’t know how to say, Why is she the way she is? I truly want to know: how does one start out as a girl and become a woman like Melanie? Or a woman like Vicky, or the countless types who never seem to have sand between their toes. And why do their children seem to replicate them exactly?
I’m about to add to this when Eddie faces me with a hard look in his eyes. “We’re who we are because of each other.”
His tone is stern and unforgiving. It reminds me that I’m talking about his wife, the mother of his children, the woman he fell in love with. It also reveals that her faults, whatever I see them to be, are partly due to him. She became the woman she is while being married to him. At least I think that’s what he’s telling me. He seems done with the conversation now. Something has dulled in his gaze. He turns to the house and scans the yard lazily, contentedly, surveying a place he knows deeply. I do the same, for the first time realizing that I can be comfortable anywhere.
“We’re moving out,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “But have your mother remind me,” he winks. “And go find Whitney. She’s lucky to have you.”
He doesn’t know a thing, I realize. About our falling-out, about Will, about dramas at the hotel, or dramas in his own backyard, and not because of his health but because it’s not his job. Melanie does it all. Men like him are off the hook.
I walk with him back toward the house, but slowly make my way apart from him. “Thank you,” I say again.
“You don’t owe me anything,” he says. We’re at a distance now where we have to raise our voices. “Unless you want to,” he says. “Make you work harder.”
Something in his face kindly dismisses me, letting me go. He raises his hand in farewell.