Chapter 3 #2
They were quiet for a while, just breathing, standing close enough that their shoulders touched. Another wave broke against the rocks, bathing them in white noise and a fine salt mist.
“I’m worried about Laurie,” Anne said after a while.
Oakley hummed an acknowledgement. “I feel bad.”
“What do you mean?”
“I live closer to her than anyone, but I haven’t seen her in… oh man, it’s been like two months. She never comes to Waimea, and between work and the kids, I hardly ever get away. But still. Two months is a crazy long time. I’m the worst.”
“You’re not the worst.”
Another wave exploded upward against the rocks, and light splintered into rainbow colors through the water that misted back down.
They walked on, following the undulating waves of black lava rock and walking around tide pools. Small fish circled restlessly, stranded three stories above the ocean. When Laurie was little, she used to spend hours catching them in her pink plastic bucket and throwing them back into the sea.
Another wave of guilt crashed into Oakley alongside the memory.
How had she gone so many weeks without checking on her little sister?
The summer heat was fierce, and neither of them had thought to grab a hat. When Anne’s nose and cheeks started to turn pink, they headed home. The sun beat down on them as they walked back across the hot black surface of the cliffs.
They crossed the patchy lawn in the backyard, rounded the corner of the house – and nearly ran into Noah Kapono.
His jaw dropped. Anne froze.
The air between them was electric.
“Annie Oakley!” Noah grinned, recovering from his surprise. “The dynamic duo together again.”
“Hey Noah,” Oakley greeted him.
He opened his arms, and she went in for a hug. He was a big man, tall and broad shouldered, and the easy comfort that she found in his arms made her miss her father with a sudden violence that made her hang on longer and tighter than she would have otherwise.
“It’s good to see you,” she said when she let go. Her voice cracked with emotion, and she saw a perceptive sort of compassion in Noah’s eyes. He missed Kimo every bit as much as she did.
Kimo had been a father figure to Noah, and they had worked together often on construction jobs. As an adult, Noah had probably spent even more time with Kimo than any of his daughters had.
Noah had lived with them for weeks and months at a time when they were young. He was never in the foster system, just a boy being raised by his grandma, who leaned on the community for help from time to time.
He’d always been just like a brother to Oakley. To Anne, though…
Noah turned to Anne, looking like he might offer her a hug too – but he saw her guarded posture and closed expression, and he dropped his arms.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
Whenever Noah spoke to Anne, there was a low gentleness to his voice that Oakley had never heard him use with anyone else.
“Hey Dad!” Zoe shouted from the lanai.
He looked up in surprise. “Hey there, Zo.”
“You gonna fix this leak or what?”
“I’m comin!” He smiled at Oakley and rolled his eyes, then gave Anne a rueful smile. “It’s good to see you. How long you here this time?”
Anne opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
“Indefinitely,” Oakley supplied, and Noah grinned.
“Well then.” His eyes lingered on Anne. “I’ll see you around.”
Reluctantly, he turned and went into the house.
“Dad?” Anne whispered as the screen door slammed shut behind him. “Since when does she call him Dad?”
“That might have just been to get under your skin,” Oakley said. Anne and Zoe had a way of bringing out the worst in each other.
“Suddenly they’re best friends?” she hissed.
“If by suddenly you mean most of her life…” Oakley trailed off.
“He wasn’t a father to her!” Anne retreated around the corner, back into the shade of the house. “Dad raised Zoe. Our dad.”
“Noah’s always been around. Especially since Dad got sick.”
“He wasn’t around!” Anne stomped her foot like a kid throwing a tantrum. “Not when she was little! He was off in the oil fields!”
“For a while,” Oakley conceded. “But by the time she was old enough to remember, he was back on island. He was around a lot.”
“I never saw him!”
“When you visited, he made himself scarce.”
Her pale gray eyes went wide. “Why?”
“You told him you never wanted to see him again. Screamed it, actually.”
Anne stared at her, slack-jawed. “I was seventeen!”
“Well, yeah. But you never said anything to the contrary.”
She pressed her hands over her eyes and leaned back until her head thunked against the side of the house. The silence stretched on, clawing at Oakley’s nerves.
“Anne?”
“No wonder she hates me.” Anne dropped her hands and looked at her with red-rimmed eyes.
“She doesn’t hate you,” Oakley said automatically.
It didn’t feel entirely true.
“She does,” Anne insisted, “and she has every right to. Leaving was one thing, but I could have come back. I could have been more involved.”
“You did come back. You were involved.”
“I chose an out-of-state college over my own baby,” Anne said wretchedly.
“I thought I could just leave her with Mom and Dad, then come and get her when I was ready to be a grown-up, and we’d pick back up where we’d left off.
Except by the time I had a degree and a job, she wanted nothing to do with me. ”
Tears streamed openly down Anne’s face, and Oakley’s heart broke for her.
“And the worst part is, it didn’t even get me anywhere. I’m broke and living at home, which is exactly what I thought I could avoid by focusing on college and career. I abandoned my daughter and I don’t even have anything to show for it.”
“You tried.” Oakley reached out and took her hand. “You flew home for every birthday, even if you had to fly back the same night. You were here every winter break.”
“Yeah. And that felt like a lot when I was twenty. But, well. You’re a mom. You can see now how that’s almost worse than nothing. And by the time I was old enough to realize that, by the time I was ready to be a mom… it was too late. She wanted to stay right where she was. And rightly so.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“Maybe.” Anne’s voice was quiet. “And maybe I should have tried harder.”
“You can’t go backwards. Don’t torture yourself. You’re here now.”
“I’m here now,” Anne echoed, but with more despair than hope.
The kids came back from Mrs. Kim’s house, filling the yard with happy noise, and Anne hurried to fix her face.
Oakley watched her girls run past. The thought of them growing up without her was too painful to touch. But she had fought tooth and nail for the chance to be a mother, years of blood and tears and excruciating hope.
Finally meeting her daughters, holding two-year-old Hayden and tiny newborn Harper for the first time, had been the fulfillment of everything she had ever wanted. There was no comparing that to the experience of a seventeen-year-old girl who had never wanted to be a mother in the first place.
“Done already?” Anne said suddenly. Oakley turned to see Noah coming down the front steps. She moved a few steps away, giving them space.
“Just need to run to the hardware store,” he said.
“So you’re coming back?”
“Yeah, in a bit.” He ran a hand through his dark hair. “I didn’t know you were back.”
“Much to Zoe’s dismay.”
“She’ll come around,” Noah said.
Anne let out a huff of breath like, yeah right.
“Give it time,” Noah said.
“People keep saying to give her time. Twenty-seven years is a lot of time.”
“How much of that time did you spend on island?”
Anne paled beneath her freckles.
“Give it time,” he said again. He opened his arms like he wanted to fold her into them, then paused and settled for an awkward pat on the shoulder. “I’ll see you later.”
“Noah Kapono,” Anne breathed when he was out of earshot.
“You liiike him,” Oakley teased in a quiet singsing.
“Shut up!” Anne shoved her arm.
“You love him,” she said in a stage whisper. To her surprise, Anne didn’t put up a fight. Instead she looked… wistful.
She did love him, Oakley realized suddenly.
Instantly, she felt guilty for teasing her. She hadn’t realized that Anne’s first love still had her in a chokehold. Maybe Anne hadn’t realized it either – until she found herself face to face with the man he’d grown into.
Sometimes it seemed like Anne had spent her whole life running from the place that raised her. Oakley could understand her sister’s need to chart her own course, but she’d left a hole in the hearts of everyone who loved her.
Zoe, Noah, Dawn… everyone had felt her absence.
What would their lives look like now that she was home again?