11. Anne
Anne
Anne had taken to walking the cliffs at night, watching the slow and subtle shift of colors that marked a Pualena sunset.
Sometimes Noah joined her, and sometimes one of her kids tagged along, but usually she walked alone.
It gave her the chance to compose her thoughts and find a bit of zen before diving back into the chaos of their overcrowded house.
Today, she was accompanied by Oakley, her soul-twin sister and dearest friend. They talked and texted basically all day every day, so when they finally got a moment alone, there wasn’t usually much left to say. And that was fine with them.
They strolled along in companionable silence, sometimes splitting off to peek into a tidepool or climb a rise in the lava-rock cliffs before coming back together to walk arm in arm. It was like reliving the best moments of their shared childhood.
They walked home through the gloaming, enjoying the endless crash of waves against the rocks, pointing out stars and planets as they blinked into sight. Up ahead, the windows of their family home shone bright with welcome.
Halia had brought an early dinner of Thai food, and Akemi handled the washing up while Kaleo bounced between aunties, so the kitchen should be clean and ready to use when they got back.
“I need to do some prep for breakfast tomorrow,” Anne said as they walked up the back steps. “Want to give me a hand?”
“Sure. We’re in no rush. It’s a five-minute drive home these days. And the girls would much rather be here than there.”
“It’s a tough house to beat.” Anne took one last look at the moonlit sea before she turned and walked inside… and into a mess of flour-dusted counters and dirty spoons.
“What happened here?” Anne turned to Claire, then laughed when she saw the flour that covered her daughter’s face. A layer of white obscured the many freckles she had gained since their move to Hawaii.
“We’re trying to make cookies,” Claire cried, “but I don’t know how to use this old-fashioned oven!”
“What do you mean, old-fashioned?” Dawn asked from the living room.
“It doesn’t even say what temperature it is! How do I know when it’s done preheating?”
“The vibes,” Zoe said sagely. She sat at the kitchen island, flipping idly through a seed catalogue.
“You just feel it in your heart,” Akemi added.
“You open the door!” Dawn shouted. “You open the door, and if a blast of hot air hits you in the face, it’s ready.”
“But how do I know if that air is three hundred or three fifty?” Claire demanded.
“It doesn’t matter!”
“Of course it matters! This is baking! You have to be precise!”
“I’ve been baking with this oven for forty years!”
“You see? It’s ancient!” Claire shoved the cookie sheet into the oven with a clatter and closed the door with a clang. “I guess we’ll just see what happens.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Anne said.
“Can’t we keep this kitchen clean for five minutes?” Dawn walked to the sink and looked at the accumulated mess.
“It was going fine until I tried to close the flour bag and it just exploded everywhere!” Claire stomped over to the sink and splashed water on her face, turning the flour to paste.
One of Anne’s guests edged through with wide eyes, grabbed a bottle of juice from the fridge, and then hurried back upstairs.
She watched him go with a sigh. Her reviews were mostly glowing; the few bad reviews she had gotten were due to the crowded house and general chaos of the place.
“I’m not sure how much longer I can live like this.” Dawn started washing the dishes with such agitation that the noise of them clanging against each other made Claire flinch.
“Grandma, I was about to do that.”
“Fine.” She shut the water off with a sudden jerk, then yanked open the nearest drawer and grabbed a kitchen towel.
“Calm down,” Claire muttered.
“It’s too much, Anne.” Dawn turned to her, looking thoroughly agitated.
“What is?” Anne asked, perplexed.
“All of it. This crowd. Family is one thing, but I’ve had it with these guests.”
“The guests are way quieter than we are,” Claire protested.
“I’ve been very patient, Anne. But you said one summer. It’s too many people.”
“This house has always been crowded,” Anne argued quietly. “It’s always had this many people.”
“At least that was for a good cause,” Dawn said sharply.
Anne flinched. And before she could say anything else, her mother turned and retreated up the stairs.
“Kaleo’s sleeping on your bed,” Akemi warned her.
“I know!” Dawn snapped back, already halfway up the stairs.
“It’s our fault,” Akemi said when she had gone. “Kaleo woke up screaming at one in the morning, and Mom’s been in a mood all day.”
“That’s my fault, though,” Anne said wearily. “This is the last night we have anyone booked in your room. After that, you get it back for good. I’m sorry.”
“I wasn’t supposed to be back this soon anyway,” Akemi said with a shrug. “I’m going to make some mamaki tea, maybe add a bit of chamomile. You want some?”
“That sounds great. Thank you.” Anne sank into one of the kitchen chairs.
Her mother made her feel like such a disappointment.
Dawn’s general attitude towards Anne implied that her only biological daughter had never lived up to whatever ineffable standards she had set decades before.
There had always been a faint disapproval in the way that Dawn looked at her when she spoke up, as if she were completely selfish and shallow. Even when she was still just a kid herself, she was never allowed to be upset; all of the other kids who came through their house had lived through worse.
Don’t be selfish was the mantra of their childhood. Dawn must have said it to her a thousand times, any time that she had the temerity to complain or ask for more.
Eventually, she stopped asking. She made herself small, escaped to the woods, and planned to leave the island altogether. An utterly selfish decision, in the end, compounded by her decision to leave the daughter she’d had at seventeen.
At some point during Dawn’s outburst, Zoe had slipped quietly out the back door.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Anne said quietly.
“Moms, am I right?” Claire said from the sink.
“Give us the room.” Oakley’s voice was kind but firm.
“I’m doing dishes,” Claire protested.
“I’ll finish the dishes.”
“Deal!” Claire tossed the sponge down.
“Go on, get.”
“I’m coming back in ten minutes to check the cookies!” she shouted as she ran up the stairs.
Oakley shook her head and then crossed the kitchen to rub Anne’s back.
“I don’t know where else to go, but I can’t live here anymore. She’s driving me crazy. And she lost her patience with me a while ago.”
“She’s in a mood today, that’s all.”
“It’s not just today.” Anne sighed. “To be fair to her, I’ve been doing this guest house thing a lot longer than I said I would originally. I love it, but I have to get out of her house.”
“It’s our house. All of ours. She always says so.”
“Yeah… she says that until I do something she doesn’t like, and then it’s her house again.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to get out of here.” Oakley pulled out the chair next to Anne and sat down. Akemi joined them, bringing three glass mugs of golden mamaki tea.
“She always says it’s our house,” Anne muttered. “But when I take her at her word, she gets resentful.”
“It’s our house in the sense we’ll always have a place to sleep,” Akemi said, “even if it’s on a couch, or right there in bed with Mom. But she didn’t expect you to come in and take over.”
“It was never really our house,” Oakley added. “Even when we were babies, it was Tutu’s house. And her house was everybody’s.”
“Everyone’s and no one’s,” Anne said with a sigh.
“And that never really changed.”
“It was always packed to the gills. That’s what really makes me mad. It was always crazier than this when we were kids, right?”
“There were always foster kids coming and going,” Oakley agreed.
“It was too much! It was too much to put on us.”
“It’s the only reason we’re here,” Akemi said softly.
“Don’t get me wrong.” Anne reached out and grabbed her hand. “I’m grateful that we grew up together. I’m so grateful for all four of you. I can’t imagine my life without you.”
Akemi squeezed her hand.
“But that wasn’t enough for them,” Anne continued. “They had to take in more kids, and more and more. It was overwhelming. But I was never allowed to feel that way, because then I was selfish.”
“You were just a kid,” Oakley said. “Kids are allowed to be selfish.”
“Not according to Dawn,” Anne said sourly. “And I think that having a mother who always thought I was selfish actually made me selfish.”
“You’re not a selfish person.”
“I was so desperate for a life of my own – a life that was only mine – that I just left Zoe here. That’s the most selfish thing a person can do.”
“You were just a kid.”
“I wasn’t a kid. I was a mother.”
“You were both,” Akemi said. “And that’s an impossibly difficult thing. I can barely manage now, and I’m forty. Imagine trying to go it alone with a baby at seventeen.”
Anne sat up and brushed away the tears that had gathered in her eyes.
“I know I sound ungrateful. We’re so lucky to have this place. I’m so lucky that I was able to rent the rooms out for as long as I have. It got me back on my feet. That was always the plan. Now I have to figure something else out.”
“You could move in with Noah,” Oakley suggested.
“No,” Anne said. “It’s way too soon.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re right. You’ve only known him for three decades or so. You wouldn’t want to rush things.”
Anne stuck her tongue out at her sister and then took a sip of tea. She held the mug in both hands, looking down into the familiar golden liquid.
“We’ve only been dating for about a year as the people we are now,” she said slowly, “and life is so busy. It’s not like we’re together every day. We need more time.”
“You would have a lot more time together if you lived together,” Akemi pointed out.
“If we were still kids – or empty nesters, for that matter – I would. It’s not about me and him. It’s the kids. They need more time too.”
“You don’t want Claire and Jayce in the same house,” Oakley guessed. Anne looked at her in surprise.
“That’s part of it,” she admitted.
“I get that.”
“Are they a thing?” Akemi asked.
“I don’t think so,” Anne replied.
“But that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be,” Oakley said, “given the right circumstances.”
“Remember that kid Jimmy?” Anne asked, citing one of the older foster kids who had come through the house.
“Vaguely,” Akemi said. She was five years younger than they were, too young to remember a lot of the drama that had shaped her older sisters.
Dawn and Kimo had learned lessons along the way and eventually taken more precautions – but for Anne and Oakley, the damage was already done. There were other names that they never spoke; Jimmy had been the least of it.
“He got together with Amanda,” Oakley remembered.
“And Tiff and Kelly and Erin,” Anne added.
Akemi grimaced. “Are you saying that Jayce is a Jimmy?”
“No.” Anne looked down at her tea again. “He seems more like Noah.”
“Which can be just as dangerous, in the end,” Oakley said.
“Mom?” Pete came through the back door with a bowl in his hands. He looked close to tears.
“What is it?” Anne asked, opening her arms to him.
“Rikki hasn’t been here in days.” His mongoose had been ranging farther and farther afield over the past year. “He hasn’t even touched his food.”
“I’m sorry, kiddo.”
Pete set the bowl on the counter and came in for a hug. He was getting so tall that it was almost like holding Akemi in her lap.
“It means he’s found a good life for himself,” Anne reminded him, “living free and in the wild. He would come back if he was hungry.”
“But what if he g–g–got trapped?” Pete asked, still trying to hold back his tears.
“He’s too smart for that.”
“But you don’t know!” Pete folded forward and began to sob.
Anne rubbed his back, exchanging sympathetic looks with her sisters.
Finally, Pete calmed down and went to find his cousins.
“You want me to bring all this chaos over to Noah’s house?” she asked, picking up her tea again.
“Isn’t that what partnership is about?” asked Akemi quietly. “Navigating the chaos together?”
“He’s got two traumatized teens over there already. I love him, I do, but I’m not sure that our relationship could survive the combined chaos of both of our lives.”
“What’s even the point, if you’re not doing life together?”
“I love him,” she said again. “I enjoy spending time with him. Right now, what little time we get together is an escape from everything else. Those dates make me feel young again, even if it’s just for a few hours at a time. I don’t want to mess that up. Not yet.”
“So you want to mess it up eventually?” Oakley teased.
“I want to live with him eventually,” Anne shot back, kicking her with one bare foot beneath the table. “But I don’t want to complicate things yet. Not any more than they already are. It’s all plenty tangled already.”
“So what are you going to do?” Akemi asked. “Keep living with mom?”
Anne grimaced. “I don’t like that idea either. And she’s obviously lost all patience with my business endeavors.”
“You’ve made enough to move out, haven’t you?”
“Maybe. If I can find a new stream of income to replace what I’m doing here.”
“So what’s next?” asked Oakley.
“That,” Anne said slowly, “is an excellent question.”