8. Emma
8
Emma
E mma slipped out the door predawn, navigating her overgrown front yard by the light of the moon with a cup of chai in each hand. Juniper was awake already – she had woken up nauseous but managed to get down a piece of toast with tart lilikoi jam – and would be there for Kai if he woke up before Emma got home. Tara was waiting for her, van idling outside the front gate.
Emma climbed in and handed her one of the travel mugs.
“Thank you,” Tara said, accepting it.
“Thanks for driving.” Emma looked out at the quiet neighborhood as they coasted down their street. “You know, in all the time I’ve lived here, I’ve only made it down to the cliffs for sunrise one time.”
“It’s been ages for me too. I’m always up, but an ocean sunrise rarely wins out over morning chores. I never take time away.”
“We should do this more often.”
Tara nodded, but her mouth pulled down in a frown.
“What’s wrong?” Emma asked.
“It seems like every good thing I want to do comes at the expense of some other important thing… or five. My life was already full to bursting before Mitch and I got divorced, and now… no matter what I cut out or which animals I sell, I can’t seem to catch up. Even seeing Liam once or twice a week – usually with the kids in tow – has been hard to manage.”
“You do so much. Homeschooling, homesteading, and now your meal delivery business…”
“It’s too much,” Tara said with a sigh. “I’m juggling it all for now, but there’s no room for error. No one to keep all the balls in the air if I’m sick or just need a few days off. It’s too much.”
Emma looked at her neighbor – really looked at her – in the dim light as they turned onto the main road. She was exhausted. Tara had always seemed borderline superhuman, but carrying so much was taking its toll.
“I want to be able to help Jun with the baby,” she said after a while, “but as things stand, I don’t know how I’ll be able to.”
“I’m here for Jun,” Emma said.
“Thank God for that, but I want to step up too. It’s my grandchild.” She sighed again. “And it’s my son. He wants to do the right thing – he’s a nervous wreck right now, to tell you the truth – but I can’t let him throw his whole future away.”
“Is he throwing it away,” Emma asked gently, “or building a new one?”
“I don’t know.” Tara shook her head. “I want him to have options, and supporting a family in Hawai’i is hard , even for full-grown adults. Don’t get me wrong, I know that Juniper deserves support. I want to help both of them. I just… I don’t know how.”
They were quiet for a while, sipping their tea as Tara drove the rest of the way down to the cliffs. The sky was lightening from black to blue as they started down the path to the coast.
“I blame myself,” Tara said after a while.
“What do you mean?”
“I thought that Cody was… I don’t know. I thought that he was responsible. He took on so much after Mitch left, and I let him. I told myself that it was a healthy part of growing up, and I tried to let him have space to do that. I didn’t want to micromanage him or breathe down his neck, but… I think I stepped back too far.
“I’ve been working sixty hours a week, and my one day off I spend with Liam. At first all the kids came with us, and we did one family adventure day each week… but ever since Juniper arrived, Cody started hanging back. He’d stay home each week when we went to the ranch.”
Emma tried to soothe her: “But that is a normal part of growing up.”
“I should have been here,” Tara said emphatically. “I should have been more present.”
“What about me?” Emma’s chest churned with an uncomfortable mixture of self-deprecating humor and despair. “My brother sent me his daughter for safekeeping and she ended up pregnant.”
“You got thrown straight into the deep end. Juniper was already struggling when she got here. But Cody, he’s been with me every day of his life. I thought the teenage years would be easy, with such a strong foundation. And they were, for a long time.”
“He’s a good kid,” Emma told her.
Tara sighed. “So is Jun.”
They were quiet for a while, walking side by side as the trail opened onto the broad, flat expanse of the cliffs. The sky was brightening quickly now, but the sun still hadn’t crested the horizon. They turned left and walked north, weaving their way around pools of saltwater and high outcrops of rock.
“Neither one of them really understands what they’re in for,” Tara said eventually.
“How could they? Did you?”
Tara laughed, sounding exasperated. “No.”
“I thought I did,” Emma said. “I had managed classrooms full of kindergarteners for years. I thought that one baby would be easy compared to that.” She sighed. “It’s impossible to know what being a mother is like until you’re in it.”
“She’s so young,” Tara said mournfully.
“Yeah.” Emma sighed. “People keep saying that.”
“Their brains aren’t even fully developed yet!”
“It used to be normal, though. To have kids at their age. Think of how much more energy they’ll have while their kids are small.”
“It’s one thing to have kids at eighteen when you’re living in the family compound, surrounded by aunties and grandparents in their thirties. It’s another thing to try and support a family in the modern world before you’ve had the chance to establish yourself.”
“But Juniper does have a family compound,” Emma reminded her gently. “She can stay with me as long as she needs to.”
Tara nodded, but she still looked troubled. Emma sensed that as much as Tara wanted to show up for Juniper, her deeper fears were for Cody. Supporting a family on her own was crushing her, and she was terrified that it would destroy all of her son’s dreams and ambitions… whatever those were. Emma realized that she didn’t know Cody well at all.
“What if we started by spending more time together?” she suggested.
Tara gave her a brittle smile. “In all my spare time?”
“We’re right next door. Just meals here and there. We could start with that, right? Us and the kids eating dinner together a few times a week?”
“Are you sure that’s what Juniper wants?”
Emma frowned. “What do you mean?”
“She’s hardly spoken to Cody since she broke the news.” Tara’s voice was soft, but Emma sensed a quiet fury brewing beneath her calm expression. “He texts her about ten times a day, but she almost never replies. Whatever was going on with them this summer, I don’t know if it was serious to her. Cody is head over heels, talking about spending the rest of his life with her, and meanwhile she’s not even picking up his calls.”
Emma listened quietly as outdated understandings and preconceptions shifted around within her mind. Juniper had been working with their neighbor all summer, and they had seemed close. But now she wondered.
Tara liked Jun, but Cody was her whole world. She was feeling protective of him. In the same way that Emma sometimes saw a gap-toothed six year old in her mind’s eye when she looked at her niece, Tara probably looked at her son towering over her and still saw the little boy he had been. She was worried for him – terrified, even.
“I’m worried that it was just a summer fling,” Tara said.
“With lifelong consequences.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t know how Juniper feels about Cody,” Emma admitted. “She doesn’t open up to me very often. Whatever their relationship is – or was – she was fiercely private about it.”
“I just don’t want to see him get his heart broken, or structure his whole future around a relationship that doesn’t even exist.”
“Juniper’s not doing well.”
“Mentally?” Tara gave her a sharp look. “Or physically?”
“Either one. First trimester nausea has her in a chokehold, and she’s an emotional wreck. I don’t know if she ever truly dealt with the shock of her mother’s death. Her relationship with her dad is rocky, and she doesn’t fully trust me either.”
“Maybe she needs to talk to a professional.”
“I’ve tried to get her into therapy. She refuses.”
“Could you make it a condition of living with you?”
Emma frowned thoughtfully and shook her head. “I’m trying to get her to trust me. Giving her ultimatums will only push her away. She has two other aunts she could run to if I push too hard–”
“In California?” Tara asked.
“Yeah.” Emma glanced at her, uneasy. Did Tara want Juniper to go back to California, baby and all? She couldn’t tell; Tara’s face was unreadable. Sighing, Emma turned to face the horizon. The bottom of the sky glowed blue-gold.
“Her grandparents are there too, right? And her dad has a house there?”
“Yeah,” she said again, stomach sinking. “But I really think that Pualena is the best place for her, at least for now. Ethan can barely handle one baby; as much as he tries to pretend that he’s okay, losing Laurel absolutely wrecked him. My sisters have their hands full already. And my mother is, well, not exactly maternal.”
Tara nodded, taking all of that in.
“Here, she has me and Lani and Nell. And you?” she asked, uncertain.
“And me,” Tara agreed, but the resignation and exhaustion in her voice was not encouraging.
Emma took a deep breath of the cool sea air and watched as the sun crested the horizon, casting a dazzling golden light that bounced and shone across the ocean.
It was a tricky thing, depending upon other people. They had their own lives and their own struggles. In spite of that, she felt a quiet certainty that Juniper would be able to depend upon the community they had found in Pualena. Even if Tara was too overwhelmed to do much, even if each of their friends could only show up here and there, that was still an immense amount of support for a new mother.
And Emma would be the backbone of that community for her niece.
Whatever else happened, she told herself, Juniper could count on her.