I could not deal with this.
And I couldn’t talk about it either, because that would make it real. I decided right there that I wouldn’t tell Ana. I just wouldn’t tell her.
I didn’t bother cramming the cell phone back into Chuck’s pocket. I dropped it into his crotch instead, right on top of the flower.
?
Before the boys went to bed, Jed asked Ana again what his gift would be. “What did you mean by sort of knife?”
“Be patient,” she said, looking up at him under her heavy mascara. Despite her hand on her stomach, there were no signs that she wasn’t a healthy, thriving person. I didn’t think Jed or Cam knew she wore a wig.
I hugged Cam for longer than usual and then I hugged Jed for just as long. “I am so proud of both of you,” I told them.
Ana put her arms around the three of us. “I just want to feel what this is like,” she said.
We stood there for a long time. Ana started humming something. I thought it was “Lean on Me,” but it wasn’t. And then she stopped. “Family,” she said, her cantaloupe breath hot on my cheek. I knew she would repeat it, and she did. “Family.”
?
I washed my face in the bathroom. Wash off that guilt, Nan. I splashed the water on my skin again and again and again and again. The towel felt scratchy but good. The scratchiness of a cheap towel. I rubbed hard and then harder. When I took the towel off my face and looked in the mirror, there was Ana, standing behind me. She set her chin on my shoulder. The plastic smell of her wig. How our faces could be easily confused. But no, no they couldn’t be. There were differences. She had higher cheekbones, I had a pointier nose. I had real lips, hers were fake. The line of her hot-pink chunk of hair fell between us. It separated us. Or it confused us further. From this angle, it wasn’t clear who the pink hair belonged to. It could have been mine.
“Nan?”
“Ana?”
“It has to be tonight.” I saw in her eyes that she meant it. There would be no negotiation. I would try anyway.
“It’s been such a long day, I—”
“Nan, you’re not listening.” She winced. Hand on her stomach. She whispered, “It has to be tonight.”
29
By the time we were searching the closet for black hats to match our black spandex outfits, I was giddy, too.
“How about this one?” Ana held up my giant white beach hat with the pink bow around it and buckled over, muffling her laughter in her palm.
“Or”—I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe—“we could just put stockings on our heads!”
“Yes!” She doubled over. “Yes!”
Having to suppress the laughter made it funnier. I laughed so hard my head pounded. I was delirious.
When she caught her breath, she said, “Wait, do you have stockings?” And that started the laughter all over again.
“Ssshh,” Ana said. “Sshh.” She put a finger to her lips. She looked at the door. She whispered, “Should we check again?”
I tiptoed down the hall. Finally, the boys had turned their lights off. When I got back to Ana, I gave her a thumbs-up. She was wearing the giant white hat and shooting fake pistols with her fingers. We held each other’s eyes for a second and then buckled over again. Ana crumpled to the floor and I crumpled to the bed. When we couldn’t laugh anymore, there was only the silence of crickets, chirping in unison like the string section of an orchestra, and then Ana said, “It’s go time.”
From that moment on, we were serious. We tiptoed down the hallway. We froze at any sound. Ana had placed our shoes by the staircase so we wouldn’t have to search for them in the pile now. She had parked her car near the street so the engine wouldn’t wake them. In the driveway, I looked for Chuck in the center of the half-built shed, but he was gone. The ohana lights were off. He must have made it back inside.
?
Peter lived higher up Kaloko, just like Ana had predicted. We drove slowly up the winding road. The steepness at certain parts pushed us firmly back into our seats. I’d never taken the road this far up. Ana had. She had gone to see the place earlier so we wouldn’t get lost now.
“Don’t worry, Nan,” she said, “this isn’t going to be a hard one. All we have to do is open the barn door.”
She’d taken her wig off. When I looked over, all I could see was the shape of her bald white head and her pale hand on her stomach.
“We will open the door and the horse will be free,” she said, slowing down, which meant that we were close.
We will open the door and the horse will be free, I repeated to myself. But wait. “Wait,” I said, “where’s it going to go?”
“Into the wild,” Ana said, like that was very obvious. “To join the wild horses. There are tons of wild horses on this mountain. Or, not tons. But there are a few.” She slowed the car even more, and then she stopped. “This is it.”
It was a big property. Big and completely stripped of jungle and surrounded by a fence. A high fence that followed the long curving driveway up to two structures. A house and a barn. I could see the outline of the barn, and in the house a light was on. Only one light. Maybe his bedroom.
“Shit, he’s awake,” Ana said, and sped up. Once we’d passed the house, she turned the car around, parked it behind a tree at the top of the property, and killed the engine. Then she buckled over and I thought she might be laughing again, but no, it was the pain.
I inhaled and exhaled deeply, showing her what she had shown me. My hand on the back of her neck, but only for a second. Ana took my hand and squeezed it.
“Are you sure you want to do this right now?”
“Yes,” she said softly. She made herself sit up. “Yes.”
We sat there for a full minute, or a full three minutes, holding hands. We didn’t need to say out loud that we were taking pause now. The crickets were even louder this high up the mountain. The mountain, the mountain, I kept thinking. The mountain that wasn’t a mountain like in other places. In Hawaii, a mountain was a dead volcano.
When Ana squeezed my hand again, I knew the pause was over. I opened my eyes. There was her white face in the dark and there were her dark eyes and they were spinning. “Okay,” she said, “I’m ready. You ready?”
“Yes.”
Her smile. Her veneers. How the wet saliva caught the red light of the buttons inside the car and shone red. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “I’m going to run up the driveway, open the barn door, and run back. When you see me at the mailbox, you drive down and get me and we’ll leave. Easy-peasy.”
“Okay,” I said. Then we could go home and shower, or I could take another bath and maybe take some more of those pills and sleep.