“There’s a difference between forgiving and condoning,” Tico said. “What you have to do now is educate him. We all have to, you know. One by one, the gays of the world are educating the straights that we’re people too. Your job is to go on with your life, living it in a way that makes you comfortable, and by doing that you show your brother that you’re still a good person, that you still love him, that what you do in bed or who you do it with doesn’t change who you are. And gradually he’ll change.”
“Do you think he will?”
“I think each of us has the potential to change,” he said. “Sometimes it’s painful, like what you’re going through.” He took a sip of water from a foam cup on the bed tray. “You’re very lucky to have such a warm and loving family. I look at Tatiana and Howard together and I think, that’s what I want, someday. I want someone who will love me the way they love each other. I can’t bear to think their love will be lost because of me.”
I knew what he meant. I had often seen Haoa and Tatiana together and envied them the kind of visceral connection they had. He loved her fiercely, with more dedication than I had ever seen him apply to anything, even football, and when he was a teenager he lived, breathed, ate and talked football. It was so much a part of him I couldn’t imagine him not playing. Nor could I imagine him without Tatiana. He would die. It was as if she gave him some essential nutrient he couldn’t live without.
“And you love him, too,” Tico said, looking at me. “You know you do. So you have to forgive him. Because if you don’t, you’ll have an empty place inside you like I have. And trust me, darling, you don’t want that.”
I reached out and took his good hand in mine, and squeezed. His grip was surprisingly strong.
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
I sat with Tico for a while, and then as I was leaving I met Tatiana in the hallway. “Howie’s not a bad person,” she said as we leaned up against the antiseptic green wall. “He just doesn’t think sometimes.”
“I know. And I know some people are going to treat me differently now that I’m out of the closet. But it’s hard when the trouble comes from inside your family.”
“He doesn’t do well with change,” Tatiana admitted. “I remember when I found out I was pregnant with Ashley I went running out to this job he was working on with your father. I was so excited! I jumped out of the car and ran up to him, screaming ‘I’m pregnant! I’m pregnant!’”
She laughed. “He had a cow. He was going ‘Oh, my God, how did this happen!’ and I said, ‘It’s sex, Howie, we had sex,’ and all the other guys were laughing, and God, he was mad at me for a month.” Her face got somber then. “And he went on a drinking binge and didn’t come home all night. I know he’s got problems, Kimo, and he really doesn’t drink that much anymore, only when something really upsets him. And you know he does love you, and this has all been kind of hard for him to take.”
“So you’re forgiving him?”
“I have to. I was really mad at him when I found out he beat up Tico. I mean, that man is like my brother. At first I thought he knew it was Tico, that he was mad at me about something and taking it out on him. Tico got me to understand.”
“Yeah, that it wasn’t your fault, it was mine.”
“It’s not your fault.” She faced me, pushing a big crest of ash-blonde hair from her forehead. “Howie overreacted. That’s his problem, not yours.”
“But I can’t help feeling it is my problem.” I started to walk down the corridor and Tatiana came with me. “If I hadn’t gone to the Rod and Reel Club none of this would have happened.”
An orderly passed us, wheeling an elderly Chinese woman with a tube coming out of her nostrils, connected to an oxygen tank on the back of the wheelchair. Her claw-like fingers gripped the arms of the chair, like she was holding on and wouldn’t let go.
“That man would still be dead,” Tatiana said when they had passed. “And you’d still be investigating his murder. And you’d still be stuck in your closet, and maybe you’d never get the chance for the life you deserve.” She took my arm and I stopped walking and turned to face her. “Everything happens for a reason,” she said. “I believe that. You have to forgive Howie, and you have to forgive yourself.”
I nodded. “I know. It’s just hard to do.”
We turned around to return to Tico’s room. Coming down the hall toward us was my big brother. Tatiana saw him and her face lit up, and I remembered what Tico had said, that he hoped someday he would be part of a love like the one Haoa and Tatiana shared, and I felt sad and angry and jealous and I knew that someday I would have to forgive him, but that I just wasn’t strong enough to do it so soon. I nodded to him and walked on past, heading back into the world.
When I got back to my parents’ house Harry was in their living room, chatting. “Hey, brah, how’d you get here?” I asked. “I didn’t see your car.”
“It’s at my folks’ house. I came through the woods. We can go out the same way and head up the coast for some surfing. Those news hounds outside will never know.”
More than ever before, I was noticing the acts of kindness people do every day. I guess when you stop expecting them, each one comes as a small gift. “He brought his boards with him,” my father said to Harry. To me he said, “Go on. Everything will still be here when you get back.”
I took my long board and Harry my short one, and we went out the back door, sneaking across the yard to the steep wooded slope. No one saw us go, though I did look back for a minute and see my mother framed in the patio doorway. We climbed a narrow, winding trail that led to a higher street, coming out a few doors down from Harry’s house. When I was a teenager we used this path almost daily, and I was surprised at how familiar it remained, twisting past a banyan with hanging tendrils, discovering an orchid flourishing under the shelter of a kiawe tree. It was a road back into the past for me, back to a time when all I worried about was the condition of wind and surf.
At the edge of the street we peered out and saw no one. Harry’s BMW was parked at the curb, and we bagged my boards and tied them down to the roof rack along with his, and then took off for the North Shore.
It wasn’t the best time to go north; the winter provided really prime surfing conditions up there. But it was a place we could go to get away from the press, where no one would recognize me, and if they did, it would only be as a fellow surfer, not a media target. We put the windows down under a clear blue sky and cruised north, up into the hills, past Schofield Barracks, descending again past fields of pineapple with the glorious blue sea ahead of us.
We snagged an oceanfront parking space just beyond Haleiwa, stripped down to our suits, and dragged our boards toward the ocean. From then on, all I concentrated on was surfing. I emptied my mind of murders, police, sex and family troubles, and felt wonderfully free as a result. The waves weren’t killer, but then I was accustomed to surfing Waikiki so it didn’t really matter. I practiced my turns for a while, and then just surfed for fun, catching the waves I liked and running them as long as I could hold on.
Harry had packed a picnic lunch, and after a couple of hours of surfing we collapsed on the beach and ate, then dozed for a bit and then surfed some more, until the sun was beginning to sink over the hillsides. “This was great,” I said, as we carried our boards back up the beach to the roadside. “Mahalo.”
“I had a good time too,” Harry said. “I’ve been wanting to get up here again ever since I got back from Massachusetts, but you’ve been so busy.”
“I’m gonna have a lot of time on my hands now.”
On the ride back to the city, I tried to hold on to the good feelings. I turned the radio up and when I couldn’t find a good station put in a tape of the Makaha Sons, luxuriating in the rhythms of the slack key guitar, the ipu gourds and the pahu hula drum. We stopped on the way back at a roadside diner we’d loved as teens and reminisced about high school.
“So you were always keeping this secret,” Harry said after the waitress had taken our orders. “All through Punahou, and years after.”
“I didn’t really understand it for a long time. I mean, I didn’t have any role models, and I didn’t have anybody I could ask questions of. So it was kind of a gradual thing, an awareness that kept growing.”
“Does it color your memories, when you look back, you think, oh, if I’d only known, I would have reacted differently?”
