Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A fter saying a quick hello to Stan in the lobby, we head upstairs. I brace myself to be thrown around my apartment, in the best possible way, the second we step through the door. We are out of the public eye now, just the two of us, with a big box full of condoms in my bedroom. The night is ours.
Instead, I’m surprised when Kimo makes a beeline for my bookshelf. The term bookshelf is a little misleading, since there are zero books on there—it’s more like a “stuff-shelf”—but he takes his time looking at everything, like it’s the site of an ancient civilization and he’s piecing together truths about their society based on these artifacts.
“These are your sisters?” he asks me finally, picking up a framed picture.
It’s an old one of the three of us, the last time we were all together. Alina had just graduated from high school, so I’d picked up extra shifts at both of my part-time jobs and bought us all tickets to go to Santa’s Village, a Christmas-themed amusement park about an hour outside of Chicago. It was an ill-planned adventure on pretty much every level. I’d hoped it would be just the three of us, finally together again, but Alina invited along her best friend without telling me and spent most of the day talking to her. I’d thought Sasha would love the Christmas theme since she’d loved the holiday so much as a little girl, but at fourteen, she was surly and irritated about anything that reminded her of her childhood. It was the same trip where Alina announced to me that she’d be rooming with her friend at the University of Chicago instead of with me, like we’d been planning, and then Sasha informed us her adoptive family was moving to Oregon. That picture was the last time the three of us were together in person, and it was taken only after lots of cajoling that turned into aggressive scolding on my part.
Seeing that picture in Kimo’s hands now, my stomach seizes up, but I force myself to smile. At least I don’t snatch the frame out of his hands, so—progress! “Yes. Sasha and Alina. Taken about...eight or nine years ago, I guess?”
“They live close by?” Kimo’s voice is careful, and I get the sense that he’s treading lightly, aware this is a sensitive topic. “You see them a lot?”
“Um.” I think the last time I saw Alina was about a year ago? I’ve FaceTimed with Sasha occasionally, but the last time I saw her in person was probably...at least three years ago now? She still lives on the West Coast and doesn’t seem to have any plans to change that. But saying all of that out loud feels like admitting I failed—failed at being the sister they needed me to be, failed at keeping our family together. “Fairly often,” I lie.
Kimo sets the frame back down, and I hold back a sigh of relief, hoping we’ll move on to something else. “You have other family nearby?” he asks instead.
I’m not sure where all of this is going, or why he’s so interested in my family all of a sudden. I fold my arms, feeling defensive. “No.” But two lies in under two minutes is my threshold, apparently, so I correct myself. “Not biological family. My adoptive parents live close enough, I guess.”
His face brightens almost hopefully at that. Am I really such a transparent loser, that he’s this worried about me? “Oh, yeah? Are you close?”
“No,” I say bluntly this time. There’s no sadness around this topic, just irritation, so I cling onto it. I’m much more comfortable in this emotional zone. “They’re just two people who let me live with them for a couple years. Kind of like adult roommates.”
Kimo’s brow furrows. “But they adopted you,” he points out.
I huff out a laugh. “When I was seventeen. What did I need parents for then? Why couldn’t they have found me when I still needed them?”
When I make myself meet Kimo’s gaze, his face is all sympathy. “Kind of seems like that’s not their fault,” he points out to me kindly.
How dare he be so logical about the whole thing? I glare at him. “You don’t get it, okay? It’s...complicated.”
And that much is true, at least. Logically I can reason that Brian and Connie were nice people, that they had always done their best by me and had supported me in whatever ways they could in the short amount of time we had together. Sympathetically, I can even understand that it probably wasn’t their dream to get placed with a surly teenaged foster daughter who wanted nothing to do with them, when all they’d wanted was a child to help complete their family.
But illogically, irrationally, I’ve always resented them for everything they offered me. Kindness and love, when I’d already suffered too much rejection to be open to it. Parents, when I felt too jaded and grown-up to need them. A family, when it was already too late.
Kimo closes the distance between us, running his hands up and down my still-folded arms. “You’re right. I don’t get your situation. But I do get complicated.” He sighs, as if bracing himself. “You know my dad left. Well, before he took off, our thing was working on cars together. I don’t know how much I actually helped him, but every weekend, we’d be out in the garage, tinkering around with whatever new piece of junk he was trying to salvage, jamming out to ’80s music.”
I remember following him through the park and hearing “Careless Whisper” blasting through his headphones. “’80s music?” I prompt him, curious to hear more despite myself. I know he’s just trying to soften me up, get my walls to come down, to bond with me, and dammit, it’s working.
“The greatest era of music,” Kimo confirms. “Music isn’t really music unless it makes you feel it in your gut. Unless you have to stop whatever you’re doing just to close your eyes and sing along.”
A smile tugs at my mouth, despite my best efforts to fight it. “I don’t think there’s literally any kind of music that does that to me.”
“You must’ve been listening to the wrong stuff. Don’t worry—I’ll make you a playlist.” Kimo nods to himself as if it’s a done deal, and surprisingly, I trust that he’ll actually remember to do it. “Anyway, when my dad left, I couldn’t listen to that stuff anymore. Too many painful memories. I’d change the radio when that music came on, leave a party if someone started playing it. It was very dramatic. But, you know, I was in my emo phase.”
Now there’s no stopping it—my smile breaks free. “Just how emo was this emo phase?”
“Black combat boots, dog collar, haircut like a bearded collie, dance sequence in Spider-Man 3 –level emo,” he confirms with a shudder. “And before you ask, I’ve destroyed all the photographic evidence, though I suspect my mother has a safe box somewhere to use for blackmail purposes someday.”
I laugh, and Kimo grins before continuing. “Anyway, one day I’m stuck in the dentist’s chair getting a tooth filled, and they’re playing a classic radio station. Michael Bolton comes on, but I obviously can’t run out of the room. So I have to just sit there and listen to ‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’ And you know what I realized?”
“What?” I ask obligingly, though I suspect I already know where this is going.
Kimo grips my upper arms and gives my body a gentle, enthusiastic shake. “That song’s amazing! That guy really pours his heart out, you know? Anyway, Bolton turned out to be the gateway drug. Next thing I know, I’m listening to Journey, and Foreigner, and frickin’ George Michael, and I realize...my dad took away a lot from me when he left. But those memories are mine, and me refusing to listen to the music I used to love just gives him the power to take that from me, too. I’m not punishing him by keeping that music out of my life—I’m punishing myself. And that’s hammajang.”
“Hammajang?” I repeat, smiling around the unfamiliar word.
Another gentle shake. “That’s messed up!” Kimo shakes his head at me, rueful. “Look, I’m not trying to tell you what to feel. But I guess I’m just saying, don’t shut out the people who want to be there for you to punish the people who weren’t.”
Hmm. That’s certainly...something to consider. But I’ll have to parse through all that on my own, and I’m feeling too open and exposed again, so I focus on something lower stakes in what he just said. “I think I’m going to need to get a Hawaiian dictionary to understand all these words you and your family are always throwing around. What was it your mother called me? Halo?”
“So you noticed that, huh?” Kimo runs a sheepish hand over his face. “It was haole. It basically means you’re someone not from Hawai’i. A mainlander.”
I can tell from his grimace that this is not meant to be a compliment. At my widened eyes, he hurries to tag on, “Honestly, Māmā has a bit of a chip on her shoulder about dating haoles, but it’s not personal. It’s because my dad was a white guy and left us to go back to Denver. I think she figures most non-Islanders will eventually want to leave again and won’t stick around.”
I want to be offended, but again, I understand where Aunty Kapono is coming from too well to hold too much of a grudge. “Does that make you haole, too, since your dad was white?”
“Hapa,” he corrects me. “It means mixed, basically.”
I study his features carefully, noticing he does have a slightly different look than his mother and even his niece and nephew. “You took your mom’s last name?” I guess.
He shrugs. “She’s the one who raised me. And I know she can be a pain, but she means well. And it isn’t personal.”
I consider this. “So she’s tried to scare off all your other haole girls, too? It isn’t just me?”
Kimo’s face unexpectedly softens as he looks at me. “There’s never been anyone else like you, Mattie.”
I’m having that weird sensation again, where my heart feels like it’s trying to burst out of my chest, like my body is suddenly too small to contain it. I don’t know what to do with my arms. It’s so much, so fast; I don’t know what to do with someone offering me so much softness. I blink up at Kimo, and abruptly ask, “Do you wanna have sex?”
He huffs out a laugh, giving me a sideways look, like he knows exactly what I’m up to. “Later.” He takes a step back from me, like he needs the physical space, then crosses back over to the bookshelf. “First I wanna watch Full House .”
Oh no. This is worse than conversations about love and family, somehow. I might as well be naked on an operating table, with my legs spread wide and my body cut open, that’s how exposed I feel. “Why?” I bark out defensively.
“You have all the seasons. Multiple copies of them,” he points out. “You bonded with one of our kidnappers about a dog in here I barely remember from the reruns I used to watch when I was a kid. This is obviously a thing for you. I want to get it.” He selects a season at random and holds it out to me.
“Why?” I demand again, not quite able to stop the shake in my voice.
Kimo holds my gaze, unafraid, unflinching. “I want to get you.”
I could spontaneously burst into flames or into tears—those feel like the only two options if he says something like that to me again. Instead, I take the season he’s holding out and pop the first disc into the DVD player—because, yes, I know that streaming is a thing, but I’m always worried they’ll take the show down and then I won’t be able to find it. I like having my own set.
When I turn back around, Kimo has shamelessly made himself at home on the couch, his bare feet up on the coffee table, one of my blankets across his lap. He pats the spot next to him, leaving me no option to sit farther down the sofa and keep some space between us.
I sit next to him, ramrod straight, but let him draw me up against his warm body. I’m not the passive type of girl who lets anyone tell me what to do, so I’m not sure why I’m letting him get away with all of this. Maybe it’s possible that I...want him to succeed in his obvious efforts to knock down my walls? It must be, since this is no gentle demolition. He’s shown up with twenty wrecking balls and is pummeling down all my defenses.
As the familiar music of the opening credits begins to play, I let myself relax against him, just a little. He’s done so much of the work that I feel like I need to offer him something, just to show him I want him to be here, sitting next to me on this couch. I may not know what to do, or what happens next, but I want him here. “I learned how to speak English watching this show,” I tell him quietly as the cheerful laugh track permeates the background.
Kimo doesn’t say anything, but I can tell he’s listening intently, from the way his body tightens, just a little; and I can tell it means a lot to him that I’m sharing something personal, by the way he’s holding his breath.
“It was always on,” I continue. “On some channel, at some time of day. And they were always so happy. Even though...even though they lost their mom, too. They all took care of each other. And everything gets resolved in the end, every time. I needed that. I really needed it.”
Before and after my mom left. Through the different temporary foster homes, and the group homes, and while I was living with the Bergmans. During those lonely hours at university, when I was too busy studying and working my various jobs to make real friends. After leaving the Poor Clares, when I no longer had any sense of purpose or family, until I met Helen and then Nina. And now, when I spend almost every night by myself, surrounded by my fake family.
As if he understands, Kimo puts his arm around my shoulder and squeezes it before drawing me even closer to him. My head comes to rest on his chest, and I can hear his heart beating.
“I get that,” he murmurs into the top of my head. Or maybe, it’s “I got you.”
Either way, it’s the safest I’ve felt in...ever. Either way, I think I might believe him.