Wills stared at the woman. “She’s dead.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “I’m sorry.”
God, but he was tired of those words. “It would mean a lot to her that you remembered,” Johnny said tiredly.
“She had a beautiful smile,” the woman said.
Johnny nodded.
“Well.” She patted his shoulder as if they were friends. “I hope the island helps you. It can if you let it. Aloha.”
Later, as they walked home in the fading light, the boys were so tired they started fighting. Johnny was too weary to care. In the house, he helped them get ready for bed and tucked them in, kissing them each good night.
“Dad?” Wills said sleepily. “Can we go in the water tomorrow?”
“Course, Conqueror. That’s why we’re here.”
“I’ll go in first, I bet. Luke’s a chicken.”
“Am not.”
Johnny kissed them again and stood up. Pushing a hand through his hair and sighing, he walked through the house, looking for his daughter. He found her on the lanai, sitting in a beach chair. Moonlight bathed the bay. The air smelled of salt and sea and plumeria. Heady and sweet and seductive. Dotted along the two-mile curve of beach were fires, around which shadowy people danced and stood. The sound of laughter rose above the whooshing of the waves.
“We should have come here when she was alive,” Marah said. She sounded young and sad and far away.
That stung. They’d meant to. How many times had they planned a trip, only to cancel for some now-forgotten reason? You think you have all the time in the world until you know you don’t. “Maybe she’s watching us.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“A lot of people believe in that.”
“I wish I was one of them.”
Johnny sighed. “Yeah. Me, too.”
Marah got up. She looked at him, and the sadness he saw in her eyes was devastating. “You were wrong.”
“About what?”
“The view doesn’t change anything.”
“I needed to get away. Can you understand that?”
“Yeah, well. I needed to stay.”
On that, she turned and went back into the house. The door slid shut behind her. Johnny stood there, feeling shaken by her words. He hadn’t thought of what his kids needed, not really. He’d folded their needs into his own and told himself they’d all be better off.
Kate would be disappointed in him. Already. Again. And even worse, he knew his daughter was right.
It wasn’t paradise he wanted to see. It was his wife’s smile, and that was gone forever.
This view didn’t change a thing.
Four
Even in paradise—or maybe especially in paradise—Johnny slept poorly, unaccustomed as he was to being alone, but each morning he woke to sunshine and blue skies and the sound of waves that seemed to be laughing as they rolled onto the sand. He was usually the first to waken. He started his day with a cup of coffee on the lanai. From there, he watched daylight come to the blue waters of the horseshoe-shaped bay. He often talked to Katie out here, saying things he wish he’d said before. In the end, as Kate lay dying, the mood in their house had been as somber as gray flannel, hushed and soft. He knew that Margie had let Katie talk about what scared her—leaving her children, knowing they would be sad, her pain—but Johnny had been unable to listen, even on that last day.
I’m ready, Johnny, she’d said in a voice as quiet as the brush of a feather. I need you to be ready, too.
I can’t be, he’d said. What he should have said was, I will always love you. He should have held her hand and told her it was okay.
“I’m sorry, Katie,” he said to her then—too late. He strained for a sign that she’d heard. A breeze in his hair, a flower falling in his lap. Something. But there was nothing. Just the sound of the waves whooshing coquettishly onto the sand.
The island had helped the boys, he thought. From dawn to dusk, they were on the go. They ran races in the yard, learned to body-surf in the bubbling foam of the breaking waves, and buried each other in the sand. Lucas talked about Kate often, mentioning her in casual conversations almost every day. He made it sound as if she were at the store and would soon come home. At first it had disconcerted the rest of them, but in time, like the gentle, ceaseless roll of the waves, Lucas had brought Kate into their circle again, kept her present, shown them the way to remember her. Mom would have loved this became a common refrain, and it helped them all.
Well, perhaps that wasn’t quite right. After a week in Kauai, Johnny still had no idea what would help Marah. She had become a pod version of herself—same elegant beauty and commitment to personal grooming, but with a flat look in her eyes and an automatronic way of moving. While he and the boys played in the surf, she sat on the beach, listening to music and tapping her cell phone as if it were a transponder that could get her rescued. She did everything that was asked of her, and more that wasn’t, but she was a ghost version of herself. There and not there. When Kate was mentioned, Marah invariably said something like, She’s gone, and walked away. She was always walking away. She didn’t want to be on this vacation and she wanted to reiterate that point on a daily basis. Not once had she put so much as a toe in the water.
Like now. Johnny was standing waist-deep in the warm blue water, helping the boys catch waves on their Styrofoam boogie boards, while Marah sat in a bright pink beach chair on the sand, staring to her left.
As he watched her, a group of young men approached her.
“Keep walking, guys,” he muttered.