Chapter 12 Laurie #2
There was no School for the Deaf on the Big Island.
The possibility of a residential school had been floated several times throughout her childhood, but in the end, she had remained in Pualena.
She’d loved her sisters and foster parents too much to leave them.
Their home was the first and only place that she had ever felt safe, and she’d clung desperately to that security.
Whenever a social worker brought up the option of leaving the Kalama home to live in the dormitories at the Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind, Laurie would wail and sob and beg to stay where she was.
She was a quiet child, and those were unusual outbursts for her.
Between that and her birth mother’s insistence that she stay on island, the social workers never pushed too hard.
She wondered, sometimes, what her life would have been like if she had grown up in a Deaf community, fully fluent in American Sign Language.
Instead, she had grown up on the edge of things.
English or ASL, sisters or friends, it didn’t matter.
She was always the odd one out.
When she was younger, she hadn’t minded so much.
She wasn’t interested in her classmates; she’d piled books around her like walls.
The constant busyness of the Kalama home was more than enough socialization for her.
She loved running errands with Halia and surfing with Annie Oakley.
Akemi was her shadow in those days, and they passed countless happy hours with books and crayons and board games.
The written word was the one place where she felt at ease.
Following some bumpy years early on, after the uphill struggle of speech therapy and lipreading and learning ASL, she had thrived in school.
So much, in fact, that she had taken shelter in the world of academia.
Multiple degrees, a masters, a PhD – she’d loved that world.
It was only now, in the extreme isolation of Hawi, that her chest housed a perpetual sense of discontentment.
Maybe that was just a part of growing up.
She was grieving her father, grieving the sense of wholeness that she’d felt when her family was intact. And she was grieving time with her daughter, too – still adjusting to this new age, where her little opihi would rather run off with her cousins than stick to Laurie’s side.
She loved Mia with her whole heart. If it were up to her, she would be with her daughter all day, every day.
But Chris had pushed for private school, and Laurie filled those hours as best as she could.
She took a great stack of library books home every week, and she’d even picked up some odd jobs online – proofreading, copywriting, whatever she could get.
It kept her busy and fed into an emergency fund that gave her some peace of mind.
Oakley flapped her hand repeatedly, moving into Laurie’s field of vision, and she looked up with a start.
“Hello, Earth to Laurie!”
What? she signed.
You OK? Anne asked.
Fine, she replied automatically. Just tired.
Three sets of eyes stayed fixed on her: Anne’s almond-shaped silver, Akemi’s wide and almost black, Oakley’s bright and glaring blue.
Stop staring! Laurie signed sharply.
“What is with you today?” Oakley demanded.
“I’m tired.”
“Just tired?” Anne asked.
“Laurie, we can’t help you if you won’t tell us what’s going on.” Oakley was still staring, despite what she’d said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you in trouble?” The words were exaggerated, like a stage whisper – or maybe she was mouthing them without making a sound. Laurie rolled her eyes.
I’m fine, she signed.
Before they could say anything else, she stood and walked away.
Oakley couldn’t be bothered to visit her, hardly texted or called, but now she cared? Enough to make some big show of concern in front of the others?
Laurie was fuming.
I’m going for a walk, she told Mia as she crossed the backyard.
OK! She waved goodbye and ran to catch up with her cousins. She adored Hayden and Harper, but those girls were perpetually overscheduled. Even in the summer, they were so booked up that there was no time left to play.
At least, that’s how Oakley responded whenever Laurie tried to make plans.
But then when Anne showed up, Oakley suddenly had plenty of time to spare.
Just like when they were kids. Annie Oakley, forever BFFs… with no time for their tagalong kid sister or baby Akemi.
Laurie slammed the gate on her way out, making the fence shake.
She hated how getting together with family dredged up all of her childhood trauma. Away from them, she felt mature and settled. She was confident in her work, confident in her parenting. She was grown.
But all it took was a perceived snub from her sister to make her feel like a kid again. Dawn gave her the cold shoulder, and suddenly she was that little girl who sat out on the front steps from sunup to sundown every Sunday, waiting for her birth mother to show up for a visit.
Laurie kicked at a loose rock, suddenly frustrated with herself. She missed her sisters like crazy when she didn’t see them – but then they drove her crazy when they were together. Maybe that was just the nature of family.
Life had been easier with their dad around. She missed him terribly. Kimo’s stable presence always steadied the ship. He was the one they turned to when they were sad, the one who held them up.
Her feet took her nearly to the edge of the cliffs, close enough to feel the salt spray. She looked out at the vast blue Pacific beneath an even bigger sky, and her breath came easier. Looking at the horizon steadied her somehow.
A wave crashed into the rocks below, shaking the ground beneath her feet.
She understood Akemi’s impulse to run – to go to new places and reinvent herself, free from any of her childhood stories, far from the people who had watched her grow up.
That promise of a fresh start was part of why Laurie had agreed to the house in Hawi, when originally she had hoped to find something closer to home.
As it turned out, living in isolation could be difficult, even (or perhaps especially) for an introvert. It had been fine when Mia was little. Laurie drove her down to the Waimea playground most days, or they would meet friends at the beach, and that was all the company that Laurie needed.
Then Mia and her friends hit five. Between school and other activities, those play dates slowly dried up. Everyone was just… busy.
Everyone but her.
Then Laurie’s car broke down, and it never came home from the mechanic.
Chris had promised to help her find a good used car – no small feat on the island, where cars took a beating on backroads and rust was always a problem – but he’d never followed through.
After being told “next week” for months on end, she started working freelance while Mia was at school.
She’d buy a new car herself, without having to ask.
Another wave shook the rocks, sending a white spray of water skyward. It hung in the air for a moment, then dispersed into a rainbow mist.
Laurie blinked, almost surprised to find herself in the here and now. She lived so much in her head that it sometimes made her blind to the world around her.
Sometimes she would snap out of that trance state – memories, a good book, the hyperfocused state that she often fell into with her work; there were any number of things that took her there – and feel surprised to remember that she even had a body.
These are my arms, these are my legs… she used to wonder if other people got lost that way, but everyone around her seemed so present and alive.
Dawn was like that, always in motion. Or… she used to be.
Now she hardly seemed to be there at all.
Was it early trauma that had left Laurie so disconnected from her own body, living in a world of words and thoughts instead of inhabiting the present moment?
Or was she just an overly thoughtful, bookish kid who would have turned out that way regardless?
The older she got, the more years that she mothered, Laurie leaned more and more towards the former. But really, it was impossible to know. Nature versus nurture. They were too tangled and complicated to ever really sort out.
With Mia she was present – mostly – but without her daughter there to pull her into the present moment, she tended to get lost in thought – or deliberately lost in a book or project, if her worries started to eat away at her.
She walked along the cliffs, trying to be mindful of each breath.
A walking meditation.
She paid attention to each step, a task aided by the uneven ground that required more attention than any flat sidewalk.
She made a conscious effort to appreciate the vast and shimmering ocean; it was such a constant presence in her life that she sometimes took it for granted.
The cool shade of the ironwood forest invited her in.
Beaches were fine and the ocean immense, but those trees had her whole heart.
They were an invasive species, intrepid pioneers, weirdly at home in this harsh environment of new black rock and a constant spray of salt that would kill most other plants.
These trees had sheltered Laurie her whole childhood. They dropped a thick blanket of pine needles that cushioned every step and made the forest floor a comfy place to sit. When the house was in chaos, she would walk to the woods and read until she finally lost the light.
As she got older, she brought her own light and stayed well past dark.
She would have even slept there, but that was where her foster parents drew the line.
She was only allowed to sleep in the woods if she could coax one of her older sisters to join her.
Halia would agree sometimes; only then did the other three show an interest. Those were some of the best moments of Laurie’s childhood, the forts that they would build out there on the cliffs, bedding down in the shelter of the trees.
She wandered through the woods for a long time before she finally walked back. The party was winding down, and the family was cleaning up. Laurie grabbed a stack of plates – apparently she had missed the song and birthday cake – and brought them into the kitchen.
Her sisters were there, all but Halia, and they turned to face her when she came in. The air was thick with tension; she saw varying degrees of worry on each face. Her first thought was of her daughter, and a stab of fear went through her.
“What’s wrong?” She reached up to turn on her hearing aids. “Where are the kids?”
Mia’s fine, Anne signed quickly.
Laurie let out a breath of relief.
Chris is here, Oakley signed, glancing towards the front door. Laurie followed her gaze and saw Chris just past the window, sitting in Dawn’s rocking chair and drinking a bottle of beer.
How many has he had? she asked quickly.
Oakley held up two fingers.
“Okay,” she said out loud. “We should head out.”
“Why?” Akemi asked. “He just got here.”
“He just came to pick us up. He hates parties.” She had liked that at first, the fact that they were both introverts. Those early years were so peaceful. Long hikes and quiet dinners. Their marriage had felt like a refuge from the world.
It didn’t feel that way anymore.
“The party’s done,” Anne said and signed. “Halia got a call after cake and drove to work. Everyone went home after that. It’s just us.”
Laurie just shrugged. Chris hated her sisters too, but she couldn’t say that.
“Can’t you stay a while longer?” Anne asked.
“It’s a long drive, and Mia’s got school tomorrow.”
“But it’s summer!”
“Her school is year round.” Laurie drifted to the corner of the kitchen, where she had plugged her phone in to charge and forgotten about it for the rest of the afternoon.
The whole front screen was filled with notifications, all missed calls and texts from Chris. She pocketed her phone without reading them.
“Where’s Mia?”
“Out front with her cousins,” Oakley answered.
Laurie moved through the door, and Oakley held a hand out to stop her.
“I can drive you home later,” she offered.
“He drove all the way down here.”
“Do you want to go home?”
“Of course I want to go home,” she said quickly. She worried about whether her voice was utterly lacking in conviction, but maybe irritation was enough. “It’s my home.”
She softened the words with a hug, squeezing Oakley tight for a long moment before she let go.
Sisters. In a single afternoon, she could go from feeling like they didn’t see her at all to realizing that they saw far more than she’d realized.
They saw the things that she wasn’t ready to admit, even to herself.
Disregarded or psychoanalyzed, both extremes made her want to scream. But those women would go to the mat for her in a second, and she loved them for that.
“I’ll see you soon,” she said, hugging Anne. She kissed Akemi’s temple and then hurried towards the door.
“Mia!” she called, making Chris jump. “It’s time to go!”
She didn’t look at him directly. If she didn’t look at him, he couldn’t say anything harsh or hurtful. He could use the whole long drive home to cool down, and they could pretend that this had never happened.
“Do I have to?” Mia asked. Her face pulled together in a tragic expression, and Laurie’s heart hurt for her. Then Chris stood and shouted something. Laurie didn’t catch what he said, but Mia hurriedly hugged her cousins and ran to the car.
Laurie opened the passenger-side door and glanced back. Her three sisters stood on the lanai, watching her with varying degrees of concern.
She waved goodbye and got into the van.