I pulled on a pair of khakis and an aloha shirt and walked over to the station. As I was about to walk in, Lidia Portuondo came out in uniform. “Kimo,” she said.
“Lidia.”
I started to walk past her, and then she said, “Look, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I never should have told anybody what I heard in that interview.”
“I guess you shouldn’t have. I thought you could keep a secret.”
She shook her head. “Couldn’t even keep my own. The lieutenant found out about me and Alvy. So he gets a promotion and I get transferred to Pearl City.”
“I heard he got his shield,” I said. “He’s taking over my desk.” I hesitated for a minute. “Are you two still…”
“For now.” She gave me a forced smile. “Who knows, I might meet some handsome guy out in Pearl City.”
I gave her my hand. “Good luck.”
“You, too.”
I nodded at the desk sergeant and started to walk back to my old desk. He said, “Sorry, Kimo, I’ve got to call the Lieutenant before I can let you back there.”
“I understand.”
I cooled my heels in the waiting area for a few minutes until Akoni came up front. “I can take him back,” he said to the desk sergeant.
“Hear you’ve got a new partner,” I said as we walked back.
“We’re working a new homicide, behind the Royal Hawaiian Hotel,” Akoni said. “He’s got a lot to learn.”
“Be nice to him, all right?” I asked as we got back to our desks. “What happened to me has nothing to do with him.”
I started to pack up my desk. I could see Alvy Greenberg had already been sitting there. “I punched him yesterday,” Akoni said. I looked up. “He was talking stink about you. I kept telling him to stop and he wouldn’t, so I hit him.” He had a kind of sheepish grin on his face, like a kid who knows he’s done wrong but can’t help bragging about it.
“Don’t make a habit of it, all right?” I asked. I smiled at him. “It doesn’t make for good relationships between partners.”
It didn’t take me long to box up my stuff. A favorite coffee mug, some pictures of my nieces and nephews, a miniature surfboard I won in a contest once and kept around for good luck. It hadn’t brought me much luck lately, and I could have just tossed it, but I didn’t want to tempt fate any worse.
“See you around,” I said, sticking my hand out to Akoni.
“Be careful, Kimo.”
“I won’t take you down with me,” I said. “Anything you say that takes any part of this on you, I’m denying it.”
“Just tell the truth. If I’ve got anything coming to me I’ll take it.” He looked at me hard. “I’m serious, Kimo. You lie to the bosses, it makes you no better than the criminals who lie to us. It makes our jobs worth nothing.”
“I’ll tell the truth. And the truth is I made all my own trouble.”
By the time I got back home it was time to leave for Terri’s house in Wailupe. If the department was giving me an enforced vacation, I might as well enjoy it.
Danny was glad to see me, and the three of us squeezed into my truck for the ride out to Makapu’u Point instead of taking one of Terri’s cars. “Makes it more like an outing,” I said. We put the picnic stuff in the back along with my surfboards.
When we arrived, Danny ran down to the shoreline to poke around and I helped Terri lay out lunch for us. “He hardly talked this morning,” she said. “I was worried we were going right back where we were.”
“Give him time. I’m sure he hurts just as much as you do, but he doesn’t know how to channel it. The good thing is kids heal a lot faster than grown-ups.” I spread a big blanket for the three of us and sat down on it. While Terri put out the food, I said, “I had a case last year, multiple homicide in a crack house on a side street off Kuhio Avenue. This woman was dealing, and she had her four little kids in the house with her. These two guys from the mainland came in and shot the woman and the kids and stole the crack.”
“How awful,” Terri said.
“Long way from Punahou, isn’t it? One kid survived, a six-year-old girl. She was smart way beyond her years. I mean, from her hospital bed she told us exactly what happened, described the two guys so that an artist could draw them, everything we needed. She even remembered the street name of one of the guys. We picked them up within hours.” I shook my head. “Then it was like she shut down, totally. Went into cardiac arrest, though the doctors couldn’t figure out why. They had to shock her twice to bring her back. And you know what? We had a follow-up hearing last month, and I saw her. She’s living with foster parents, going to school, and she looks like just the sweetest, happiest little seven-year-old you’ve ever seen. You’d never know anything happened to her.”
I opened the bag of potato chips and took one. “Of course, you don’t know what’s going on inside her head, how it all marked her, but she’s surviving. Danny will survive, too. It just might take a while.”
She called Danny back to eat, and he brought with him an assemblage of treasures-an odd-shaped rock, an iridescent shell fragment, and the bleached claw of a sand crab. I admired them each in turn and he sat down next to me to eat, his little foot pressing into the side of my leg, making the physical connection.
I think the hardest thing for me about accepting my sexuality and all its implications was thinking that I would never have children of my own. I know it’s theoretically possible, but it wouldn’t be the way I’d always imagined it. I really wanted to be a dad, and I thought I’d be a good one. I think my parents did a pretty good job of raising me, though I did feel my father worked too much, that he didn’t give enough of his time to me and my brothers. I wanted to make up for that with my own kid, to see a little part of me reflected in him, to marvel at the perfection of his tiny fingers and toes and then watch him grow up in the world.
Akoni didn’t want to have kids. He said he’s seen so much horror in the world, so many awful things that people do to each other, that he couldn’t imagine having, as he calls it, “a hostage to fate.” I felt just the opposite. Sure, I’ve seen just as much misery and tragedy, but I always saw the way people recovered, the way the human species was designed to go in the face of almost insurmountable odds. It gave me faith that a kid could actually survive.
After we finished eating, we sat around on the beach. Danny and I tried flipping pogs, but the sand was too unsteady a base. Instead we just lay together in a haphazard mass, Terri’s feet touching my leg, Danny’s head resting on my chest, and dozed. Then the sun passed behind a cloud for a bit and the coolness in the air woke us up.
I carefully shifted Danny’s head to the blanket next to me, and stood up and stretched. “I think I’ll surf for a bit, if you don’t mind,” I said to Terri.
“Go ahead. This is nice, just lying here relaxing.”
Danny woke up then and said, “Can I go with you, Kimo?”
“Tell you what, Danny, let me check out the waves, okay? Then I’ll come back for you and give you a little lesson.”
“Okay.” He pulled his legs up close to him, wrapped his arms around them, and sat there watching me as I walked down the beach.
I worked on my turns for a while, surfing back and forth along the beach, watching Danny, and then came to pick him up. “You’re sure it’s okay?” Terri asked anxiously. “The surf looked pretty strong out there.”
“I’ll take care of him. Come on, Danny.” He took my hand, and we walked carefully into the water. The bottom was rough there, and the undertow was strong, but he held my hand until we got a few feet out, and then I lifted him and sat him on my board.
We didn’t go very far out, just beyond the first line of shallow breakers. I stood him up on my board, me standing in the water next to him, and held him as the board crested over the light waves. It was just the way I’d been taught to surf when I was a kid, learning to keep my balance on the board. Since he’d boogie boarded before, he understood the waves, and pretty soon all I was doing was acting as his safety, my arms in a broad arc around him in case he fell.
Finally I said, “I think it’s time to go in, champ,” and picked him up off the board. I carried him in past the
