Her mother always did that to her. She was the voice of reason when Leia wanted to jump to conclusions. Ingrid’s medical training, unlike her own, made Leia analyze everything. “Maybe. Tony had a way of making people believe in his dream.”
“Did you see T?t??” Malia asked.
Leia nodded. “She’s doing well.” She kept her eye on her mother’s forehead. When a slight frown creased the fair Scandinavian skin, Leia held her breath.
“I suppose you pushed more of your herbal preparations on her?”
“The scars are fading.” Leia squared her shoulders and met her mother’s gaze.
“You’re wasting your medical training, Leia. Why can’t you see it? Two more years of residency, and you’d have been a full-fledged doctor.”
“Why can’t you see I’m not cut out for filling out insurance forms and seeing patients in ten-minute segments like cattle?” Leia fired back. “I tried it your way for months, Mama. I felt like I was turning into someone I didn’t know or like. And I couldn’t stand the smells of antiseptic and drugs. That’s not how God wanted us to live.”
“You didn’t give it a fair try. I know San Francisco wasn’t what you were used to, but I pulled every imaginable string to get you that opportunity, and you threw it away. It was one of the most sought-after residency programs in the country.”
“I’m not like you,” Leia said. “I have Dad’s Hawaiian blood in me too. I just want to be who I am inside. I want to learn the old ways before it’s all gone.”
“Making paper cloth. What good is that? You can do better, Leia.”
Leia’s gaze shot to her cousin, but Malia didn’t seem to take offense at Ingrid’s denigration of Hawaiian arts. Maybe because she was actually making a living at her leis while Leia scraped by on what little she could sell her cloth for and the tiny payments she got from the patients at Kalaupapa. If not for the chance to live in a house her father owned, she’d never make it.
Her mother’s gaze touched the scar on Leia’s lip, and Leia had to resist an impulse to cover it with her hand. Her mother wanted only what was best for her—she knew that. She’d known it when she was six years old, when Ingrid had taken her to the hospital for yet another operation for her cleft lip. No tears had leaked from Leia’s eyes since that day, and she vowed never to cry again. She was strong enough to be her own person.
She watched her mother stand and go to the house. Nearly six feet tall and still blonde and graceful, she had always seemed to Leia to be a throwback to some Valkyrie, maybe Brunhild herself. All her life Leia had tried to live up to her mother’s expectations. Leia often thought of the verse in Revelation of being lukewarm. That’s how she felt—lukewarm. Neither Hawaiian nor Swedish but something in the middle. Neither a success nor a failure but always a dis-appointment. Since the medical school fiasco, she had become all the more determined to prove to her mother that she was capable of choosing her own path.
Malia winced. “You’ve riled her again.”
“You brought up T?t?,” Leia pointed out.
“Sorry. I didn’t think it would reopen the subject of your chosen profession.”
“Bane showed up today too,” Leia blurted, watching her cousin’s face.
“His plane fell into the water,” Eva said, sitting up. “We saved him.”
Malia was beginning to smile. Leia dropped her gaze. “He’s with Pimental Salvage now, the company that Tony had gone into partnership with to find the Spanish galleon he always talked about.”
“Bane Oana. What a yummy man. Did you talk to him?”
“I had no choice. We plucked him out of the water, like Eva said.”
“You two belong together. God has opened the door again. Don’t let him get away this time.”
“Nothing has changed. He is still too rigid and structured. I hate being put in a box.” Besides, she didn’t want to run the risk of Bane figuring out the real reason she’d broken off the engagement.
Aschool of wrasses sensed the movements and darted away. The tiny earthquakes, barely large enough to disturb the current, vibrated along the seafloor and moved through the sea cave. Ripples of tiny waves from the swarms—several quakes back-to-back—caused the sleeping shark to awaken and escape the enclosed space with a flick of its tail. The swarms finally subsided and left no evidence of their activity except for a tiny crack that opened on the seabed, right under the garden of lobe coral. The crack was barely a quarter of an inch across, but it stretched along the seafloor more than a hundred feet before it petered out at the edge of the abyss. A moray eel poked its head out from under a rock and grabbed a wrasse that got too close. Life and death resumed its usual placid rate.