Chapter 2
Anne
It had rained overnight, as it so often did in Pualena, and the day was still gray as she drove north along the highway. Every license plate showed a rainbow, but the clouds overhead refused to budge.
The freckle-faced redhead in the driver’s seat didn’t mind; she had always preferred the gray skies and green gardens of Pualena to the sun-scorched landscape that dominated the western side of the island.
In the passenger seat, Laurie was quiet and subdued.
She had been texting back and forth with her soon-to-be-ex-husband all morning, trying to walk that impossibly thin line of both placating him and standing her ground.
She couldn’t just disappear without a judge condemning her for parental alienation, but she’d also made it clear that she wouldn’t be returning to their house in Hawi.
All in all, it redoubled Anne’s gratitude that she’d never had to fight for custody of her own children.
No doubt it would wound them when they discovered how thoroughly their father had washed his hands of them…
but she was selfishly relieved that she wouldn’t have to send them to San Diego every summer – or worse, find a way to scrape by in California, where she had no job prospects and nowhere to live.
In Pualena, she could leverage empty rooms in her mother’s house to create steady income. At least for a while.
Anne had been up since first light. She’d already fed her guests and cleaned up after breakfast, and now she had a few hours before she needed to strip the beds and prepare for the next round of tourists.
The work was starting to wear on her – the constant cooking and cleaning and fielding questions from current and future guests – but it was still worlds better than working from nine to five beneath fluorescent lights.
At least this way she could get out and adventure with her family, even if it was just a quick trip into Hilo.
They pulled into the Rainbow Falls parking lot, which was crowded already at eight in the morning. Tour vans and buses lined one side of the lot, and cars filled the rest. Anne found a free spot and parked.
“Finally!” Mia jumped out of the car with Pete close behind her.
Tourists lined the edge of the gorge, each of them pointing a phone or a camera at the waterfall below. Mia and Pete found a place at the rail and stood there for a second or two before racing away.
“No rainbow today,” Mia announced. Her hands flew through the signs as they ran past, headed for the stairs – and the real reason they had driven to Rainbow Falls that day.
Laurie went straight up the steps after her daughter.
Anne paused for a moment to admire the view. The wide white waterfall and lush green surroundings were a balm to her soul after decades of living in the scrubby, dessicated landscape of Southern California.
It was still overcast. The sky overhead shone a bright white as the clouds began to thin, but there was no rainbow shimmering in the mist below.
Anne’s daughter stood beside her, arms crossed as she looked down at the water.
“It’s nothing much compared to Hikuwai,” Claire said.
Anne bumped her hip into Claire’s and shushed her playfully. “Hikuwai is a secret.”
An open secret among locals and a longtime family favorite, Hikuwai was technically off-limits.
Its seven waterfalls were located in a restricted watershed area, and trespassing there was illegal.
That didn’t stop intrepid locals from hiking there to swim and climb, but more and more tourists were finding the place as travel bloggers mapped out the way.
Still, it was free of the sort of crowd that always gathered at Rainbow Falls.
“Ready for the main attraction?” she asked.
Her fourteen year old responded with a shrug.
“Come on.” Anne took Claire’s hand and pulled her towards the stairs. Claire left her hand in her mother’s for a solid seven seconds, which was remarkable for her current phase of life.
When Claire’s hand did slip away, Anne felt a sudden longing for those early years when they always walked hand in hand – accompanied, as always, by a deep regret when she thought about all of the time she had missed out on with Zoe – and even, to a lesser extent, with Claire.
It wasn’t until her third and final baby that she fully appreciated how quickly their childhoods flew by.
Together with her daughter, Anne climbed the black stone steps that wound up the left side of the gorge.
They paused to admire the top of the waterfall, where the river rushed around rocks and burbled through pools before finally plunging off of the cliff’s edge, and then they walked into the deep shade of the banyan grove.
Thick roots snaked across the ground, and they picked their way carefully downhill, weaving through the branches of the trees that reached every which way.
Some branches ran parallel to the ground, and Claire swung from them with an easy agility that harkened back to the endless gymnastics classes Anne had carted her to, back when Pete was just a baby on her hip.
They made their way to the center of the grove, where massive banyans occupied huge swathes of the open space. Complex tangles of branches rose up to a green canopy that hung seven stories high.
Anne stared up at the central tree in awe.
The trunk alone – if that interwoven collection of prop roots could be called a trunk – was at least fifty feet wide.
Some things and places from her childhood proved themselves to be much smaller in her adult eyes than they were in her memory…
but not this tree. It was as extraordinary as ever.
The kids looked like ants crawling along the prop roots of the banyan tree. From a distance, their brightly-colored clothes were vivid specks against the mud-colored chaos of intersecting branches.
Pete swung from one of the lower branches, hooting like a monkey. Claire laughed at him as she loped over to the trunk and vaulted up into the prop roots, swiftly climbing the complex structure.
Anne loved seeing her teenager act like a carefree kid again. It was happening more and more since their move to Hawaii; nature brought out the best in all of them.
Even Laurie had joined in; she stood in a nook of the tree a few feet off the ground, helping Mia navigate her way up.
Anne stood watching for a while, and then she dove in.
It was almost too easy, navigating the abundance of grips and footholds offered by countless roots and branches. So easy that she glanced down and experienced a sudden wave of vertigo when she saw how high above the ground she was.
She retreated back along a wide branch until her back met with the trunk of the tree, and she sat in that secure nook while she caught her breath.
“Hey Mom!” Pete shouted. “Look at this!”
He swung from a narrow branch one-handed and made a flying leap to the next, catching it with his other hand and pulling himself into the canopy. He was high enough to give Anne a shock, but she bit back the Be careful! that rose in her throat.
“Amazing!” she shouted instead.
Pete beamed.
She stood and looked down, holding a branch for stability. Getting up had been easy enough… getting down safely was the tricky part.
Anne bent forward, clinging to her handhold as she surveyed her path back down the tree, and suddenly a memory rose up with startling clarity.
She must have been about the same age as Claire. Her dad had dropped a whole group of them off in Hilo for a change of scenery on a summer’s day. They had started at the beach, wandered across town, and finally ended up at Wailuku River State Park.
She’d climbed this exact banyan and gotten stuck – maybe even in the same spot. Oakley had tried to talk her down while their classmates jeered, but Anne was frozen. The longer she looked down, the worse it got.
And then Noah clambered up the trunk, nimble as could be, and offered her his hand.
It was the first time Anne had put her hand in his, and she remembered it as clearly as if it had just happened.
She could still feel the warmth of his skin and the way that her terror had evaporated, gone as quick as it had come on.
Suddenly, she’d been certain that she wouldn’t fall.
She had, of course.
Just not from the tree.
An entire year had passed in between that moment and their first kiss, but to Anne, that had always been the start of things. For her, it was the moment when their relationship had shifted from a childhood friendship into something more complicated and difficult to navigate.
It had always been strange to her that all of the angst and anguish that followed had begun with a moment of such simple steadiness… but that was always the way with her and Noah.
When they were together, things felt easy.
The rest of the world faded away.
And then as soon as she was alone again, she spiraled. As a teenager, she’d hated how he could make her forget everything else that mattered: her hopes and dreams, herself.
In the end, that was why she had driven him away. She had needed to figure out who she was without him – without all of them.
And where had it taken her?
Right back to the beginning.
Anne blinked with surprise when she found herself back on solid ground. She had been so lost in thought that she hadn’t even been fully conscious of her movements as she made her way back down the tree; muscle memory had kicked in, a relic of those long-ago summer days.
She refocused on the day in front of her, a sad sort of smile playing across her face as she watched her children climb.
It was impossible to regret mistakes that led to people…
and yet it was hard to avoid the thought that she had wasted nearly thirty years trying to prove something to herself only to end up right back where she had started: living in her family home with no career and no direction, nothing driving her beyond motherhood and survival.
It was a good life, really. If she let it be.
And maybe that was the hardest part.
If she had stayed, she might have been able to build something. A real life. A real family. Not this fractured mess that she had created: one daughter abandoned and traumatized, two more children uprooted and fatherless.
She thought of all the extra time she would have had with her dad – and that was such a gut punch that she forcibly wrenched her attention back to the present.
She would drive herself crazy thinking that way.
Anyway, what she really wished was that Claire and Pete had grown up closer to their grandfather – but if she hadn’t moved to the mainland, they wouldn’t exist.
It was all a hopeless jumble, and she tried her best to stay clear of it.
Mostly she succeeded…. The trouble was Noah.
Everywhere she went on the island – every nature spot, anywhere in Pualena, even her own house – she was plagued by memories of her childhood sweetheart. The memories were almost all good… which only made it harder. She had met her match decades before she felt ready to settle down.
Her relationship with her ex-husband had been different: good on paper but ultimately hollow.
Noah was the only man she had ever truly loved… and she had spent so much of their time together holding him at arms length or actively pushing him away.
She still did; it was a perverse habit rooted in fear, and she wanted to rip it out of her life like a weed.
Noah Kapono had loved her since they were children. Against all reason, he seemed ready to love her still. Was she finally ready to let that love in?
Anne wasn’t sure… but she wanted to try.