Dredging Up Wanderlust

(Originally published in North American Review, 2019)

We barreled down the New Jersey Turnpike toward Newark Airport in a pre-dawn taxi silence. An August smog hung heavy over the smokestacks and oil refineries, a scene so ugly it filled me with perverse pride.

The driver fiddled with the radio. I glanced at my mother. She rifled through her purse, checking for her ID, our plane tickets, her money. Hawaii, this glamorous idea she had tossed out the week before, was now overwhelming.

“You have your license?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said. I didn’t look at her.

“Check again. Are you sure? Show it to me.”

I cracked my window. Sea air and the scent of rotting garbage drifted in from the nearby port. The highway was 12 lanes of macadam and tractor-trailers and passenger car congestion, even at sunrise. To the east was Newark Bay, its docks lined with battered cargo ships. Cranes unloaded stacks of color-blocked shipping containers, monstrous Tetris blocks piled high into a filmy sky. The dark, oily water of the bay swirled under train trestles lined in graffiti. The cargo in particular always fascinated me. Where did it come from? Where would it end up? An Ikea the size of Texas shimmered in the distance.

My mother looked out her window and sighed. I looked away.

She wasn’t used to traveling without my father yet. Neither of us were used to being alone together. Since he’d died the year before we’d circled each other cautiously, quietly. Polite and careful, like acquaintances who couldn’t quite get a lock on each other. This trip was a dramatic offering, a ploy to get me to spend more time with her. I’d been away a lot, living in the dorms at college, in Florida for a summer internship. I was busy being 20. She wanted more.

“Anywhere you want to go,” she’d said the week before. She was wearing a bright red sweater and shiny silver earrings. I liked her in silver, the way it picked up the graying streaks in her dark hair. The kitchen table was set with enough food for a bigger family, a louder house. Huge bowls of pasta, a loaf of Italian bread. Everything smelled of garlic. She’d put out a big green salad drowning in black olives. I ate them with my fingers before we sat down.

“It’s summer. I want to see my friends,” I said. What I wanted to say, but didn’t, was that I resented this. Our forced sociability, these awkward meals. His vacant seat more present, somehow, than our full ones.

“China,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Ireland?”

“Can we just eat? God.” I wanted to go to my room, shut the door in her face. Read a book. 

 She took a breath, then a drink of water. She refilled my glass without asking.

“Hawaii?” she said. A Costco travel brochure appeared, sliding across the table. Blue water, gold sand.

Another mother might have suggested a lunch date, maybe joint pedicures. Casual mother-daughter things, the kind we rarely did anymore. But I’d grown up with maps plastered to my bedroom walls. When I was eight, my older sister graduated from college, then traveled in Europe. When she came home, she handed me a small change purse made of soft green and red plaid—a souvenir from Scotland. It was filled with loose change, different currencies from the different countries she’d visited. I lay on my bedroom floor that summer counting the coins out again and again, putting them into neatly stacked piles by country. I traced their rough ridges with reverent fingertips, dreaming of Paris and London and Rome, of any place New Jersey wasn’t. I fell asleep like that one late summer afternoon, and woke up with my hair in my eyes and a coin stuck to my sweaty cheek.  

Why did Hawaii make me pause? The drama of it, maybe. The extravagance. How desperate she must have been to keep me; how sharp my need to get away. She saw my hesitation and latched onto it. Hawaii it would be. I shook my head, adjusting.

*

We left a week later. On the airplane, somewhere over the empty west, I looked down and counted crop circles through the dust. I watched the horizon line, music pouring through my headphones while I waited for that jagged bright line where California ended and the Pacific began. I was nervous about the mechanics of crossing that big blue ocean in a tiny metal airplane. Everything made me nervous those days but I knew to keep it locked in, shut down, out of sight. If I opened, even just a crack, I would never close again. I absorbed the rumble of the air below the wings and counted my breaths until the panic crested, then drifted away.

When Hawaii appeared through my dirty double-paned window, its beauty knifed through me. It was so precisely perfect, so tropically dreamy, it had to be manufactured. In my excitement I glanced at my mother but she was asleep. I watched the sunlight play on her face, the way her mouth fell open a little, and my breath caught in my chest. When she was sleeping I sometimes found myself picturing her in a coffin, thinking about how sleeping and dead are a little bit the same, although of course they aren’t, they aren’t. I felt that thread of panic blooming again, rising up and out of me. I pushed it back down. Turned my music up. Twisted a curl of my hair over and over until my wrist ached. Looked again at the mountains as the plane began to descend.

*

We arrived at our Oahu hotel on Waikiki Beach. I stepped out of the taxi blinking in the gleam of a tropical sun. A woman in a white sundress with shimmering black hair approached, murmuring alohas as she draped leis over our bent necks. I felt anointed.

The lobby floor was a polished hard wood, dark and shiny, the kind that makes you want to bust out into a tap dance. White ceramic vases sat on scattered tabletops, dripping with magnolias and lush vines. At the scent of the sea I realized the lobby had no walls—just open air leading out to a pool dotted with laughing ladies in sun hats. The beach beyond was so bright and perfect that I again thought of factories, churning out island paradise theatrical sets on rusted conveyer belts. The sunlight flashed off the startlingly blue sea. I grinned at anyone who bothered to look at me. My mother kept glancing my way, searching my face, but I avoided her gaze.

“It’s nice, right?” she asked later as she peered out our hotel window. “Daddy would love this view.”

I stiffened over my suitcase. “It’s great,” I said, not looking up. She waited a beat, then bent back to her own suitcase. I put on fresh lip-gloss and fussed with my hair in the thickening silence.

We headed to the beachfront buffet for an early dinner. Despite myself, I felt a brightening. I heaped my plate with exotic fruit and cheese. She ordered her first-ever Mai Tai and giggled at the purple paper umbrella hanging off the side. We had views of the waterlogged sunset and the rise of Diamondhead, the mountain flanking the eastern end of Waikiki Beach. My mother seemed happy. She smiled easily and didn’t push at me so hard. 

He would have loved that buffet, I knew she was thinking. The prime rib section especially. But she didn’t say it, and I was grateful. I slept soundly that night despite her soft snores. I draped my lei over the lamp on my nightstand so I could see it as soon as I woke up.

*

We’d just settled into our beach chairs the next morning when a man approached. He was 30-something, handsome, barefoot in blue swim trunks. His white button-down was blowing open in the breeze. I buried myself deeper in my book. 

“Can I interest you ladies in a sail?” he said, gesturing over his shoulder. Boats were anchored down the beach in the shallows, glistening in the sun. I glanced at my mother.

“Why not?” she said, without looking at me.

He offered his hand and she took it. I blinked. Then I scrambled up, vaguely worried about our stuff, and ran after her.

The catamaran was mid-sized, scrubbed to a blinding white. We waded into the waves to climb aboard with a few others, collected from their own seaside nests. We stowed our sandals in a protected corner and explored barefoot. Below the sails was a floorless section lined with rope netting. You could crawl onto the ropes and nestle in, as if you were lying in a hammock, while the sea slipped by beneath you. Without a pause my mother stepped on, laughing. So I did too, trying to balance, nervous and clumsy. We lay belly down and gripped the ropes with tight hands as we motored out. Splashes hit our faces as we picked up speed, past the swimmers and the kayaks and the surfboards to the line where the water changed from turquoise to a deeper blue.

With the rising sails and thudding snap of wind in canvas, the catamaran’s motion changed from steady motoring to a slow, deep roll. The land fell away. I relaxed my grip on the ropes. I flopped onto my back, hands tucked behind my head, but she never turned from the waves ahead. I lay there, adjusting to the rhythm of the sea and searching for seabirds in the arched sky.

The man wandered from passenger to passenger. I overheard his conversations on the breeze. He was from the east coast originally, he said. Someone else asked, Why Oahu?

“I needed a change,” he said. “I didn’t want to sit behind a desk anymore, and I didn’t have a reason to stay.”

His tone was smooth, placid even, but there was a pocket of bitterness in the back of his voice. I imagined a failed marriage, a business gone bust. Maybe dead parents. He was from somewhere else once, but then he changed it. I flopped back onto my stomach as the waves slipped by below my face and hands.

When we returned to shore I climbed off the catamaran and shuffled towards my towel and book.

“I’m going again,” my mother called out. I turned in surprise. She was still standing at the bow, hanging over the railing and smiling. I thought of laughing children in bright playgrounds, the way they swing on the monkey bars, how they call out for one more minute, just one more minute.

“Do you want me to come?”

“Nope. Go read your book. See you later!” She turned back toward the rope bed and climbed in without me.

I spent the rest of the morning alone, watching her come and go. Her hair was curly from seawater, her shoulders and cheeks burnt red and freckled. I realized she was an adventurer, and that I’d never seen it before. Or maybe she’d never been one before. I sat on my towel clutching my book to my chest, overwhelmed by the enormity of the earth.

*

My father used to take me on late night drives to nowhere. He’d turn the radio of his grey Oldsmobile all the way up, roll the windows all the way down, and we’d cruise down the main streets of Metuchen, my hometown. He loved to hear me sing, and I loved to do it, but I was shy. So he’d pick songs he knew I liked and he’d turn the volume up so high I’d end up singing along with abandon, thinking he couldn’t hear me over the blast. One time it rained but he kept the windows down anyway, even though the inside of the car got soaked and his cigarettes kept snuffing out. I stretched my fingers out into the storm as far as I could, feeling the mist soak my cheek and the hair along my face begin to curl, thinking that my dad was pretty cool, and that I was pretty cool, and that the only way to listen to music, ever, was so loud it thrummed down your spine and pulsed under your feet.

Every summer the three of us drove from New Jersey to Florida to visit my grandparents in Tampa. Their house was squat and low, with slatted windows, in a subdivision of other houses just like it. Lizards plastered themselves to the sidewalk, on the garage door, all over the stucco walls. I’d stare at them for long minutes, watching their eyes flicker and bead, then poke them gently with a plucked blade of grass. Then I’d aim straight for the pool out back. The browned grass was stubby under my bare feet, my skin sticky from thick Florida air. My father put on his trunks and headed towards the pool too, hollering in a wild war-whoop, and then he’d do a perfect handspring in over the side. He was always doing things like that—handsprings and backflips, walking across the backyard on his hands, feet in the air, like it was no big deal. I’d squeal and giggle in the far corner by the ladder, shielding my eyes from his spray.

“Get in, Teresa!” he’d yell to my mom, Brooklyn accent still thick after 20 years in Jersey.

“Johnny, no,” she’d complain happily, tucked into a chair in the sunlight with a book.

“Aw, come on, the water’s great,” he’d say, and she’d cave. She’d walk gingerly down the stairs into the cool water, clutching the railing. Then she’d float around the shallow end, tethered to a tube. He’d laugh and splash her; she’d shriek and blush. They’d been doing this dance since they were 14 years old, at the beach on Coney Island. They were dirt poor then, growing up in the bowels of old Brooklyn. She was from the Italian side of town, and therefore a hussy; he was Irish, so nothing but trouble. She had jet-black hair and a wide, teasing smile; he had sideburns, Buddy Holly glasses, and wore his jacket collar flipped up. The boys at the pool hall said she looked just like Annette Funicello from the Mickey Mouse Club, so he had to know her name. She was Teresa, she said. He was Johnny. He played pool and he drank and he smoked, but he played guitar and wrote poetry too, so she ran straight for him. During hot New York City summers, they scraped together some cash, took the G train to the end of the line, and got out at the seaside. They rode the Cyclone over and over until they got kicked off, or she begged for mercy, whichever came first. Then they lay on the sand, drinking beer and making out under a beach blanket.

“Johnny! Don’t get my hair wet!” she said in that Florida pool, uncomfortable with swimming, distrustful of water. He just laughed and swam away. I was watching, always watching. And then I’d dart toward him underwater, cling to him like a little starfish, swimming through and around his legs and arms. I begged him to pick me up, to hold me high in the air and then fling me back, shrieking, into the water. And he would, over and over. I felt at home underwater, buried in all that muffled blue softness. I sang to myself, capturing my notes into air bubbles and watching them float up and away. I stayed under for as long as I could, sneaking up for tiny breaths and pretending to be a mermaid, elegant and quiet. But no matter where I was my eyes, burning with chlorine, stayed locked on his torso and legs like a magnet. Like he was the pin in the earth around which I rotated.

*

The thing about cancer is that you grow up watching movies about it, reading books about it, and you get this idea that people with cancer die gently. That they just get quiet and thin, maybe, and kind of pale like a ghost, and in the end they just drift away. Like falling asleep.

I was 18 when my mother and I sat together one bright November morning and watched my father die of stomach cancer, and what I learned is that the process of dying is harder than anyone tells you it will be.

He vomited for months, every day, all the time, until nothing but yellow skin over skeleton was left. His skin dried up, then cracked and bled. He developed untreatable blood clots in his legs, and both of his feet turned black and gangrenous while he was still alive to watch them rot. I covered them with white sheets, let the sheets billow softly down, but he still winced when they drifted onto his dying skin. 

In his last days, despite the deepening fog of morphine, he cried and moaned and begged. My mother spent every minute lying next to him, curled around him, forgoing food, forgoing showers, always brushing his hair with the brush he liked best.

“My angel,” he said to her that last weekend, in a rare moment of lucidity. She wept.

I hung back, watchful and afraid. I considered singing for him, soft things like lullabies, but was too embarrassed. I wanted to say goodbye, to sit and talk, to tell him I loved him. That I was sorry for how we’d fought as I’d grown up and away from him, in the way kids do, but I was too self-conscious to do that either.

Instead of doing anything that mattered, I sat in the corner of their bedroom tucked into a ball, my chin on my knees, telling myself stories. The stench of my father’s rotting legs was just the tuna sandwiches my mother was making in the kitchen. The clogged rattle of his breathing was the coffee pot perking. That’s all. An ordinary day. Sometimes I held my breath and floated from room to room, staring out of windows and wishing it were over. On his last night alive I slept on the hardwood floor just outside of his room, afraid to go any closer or further away.

He died at home, in his bedroom. It was noon on a Sunday. My mother sat by his shoulders, still brushing his hair. I was holding his hand. And at the moment he died, when it finally happened, I laughed in a sharp burst of relief, and then I was ashamed.

I collapsed onto the couch an hour later, twitching every time I thought I heard him cry out. I stared into the skylight overhead, trying to unknot myself, thinking the only thing left to do was survive the rest of my life without him.

My mother wandered into the living room. Her gaze fell on me and cleared, as if seeing me for the first time in months. She sat on the couch and I rolled away to face the cushions. She stroked my hair.

“You’re all alone, aren’t you?” she said, in a kind of detached wonder.

“What are you talking about?” I said to the cushions.

“Well, your sister has a reason to keep moving. Her babies need her to get up every morning, to keep doing things like taking showers and eating and cleaning the kitchen. She has someone to take care of. And I have you to take care of. But you don’t have anything. You don’t have anyone. You’re completely alone.”

I closed my eyes, dizzy from change. After a minute, she got up. When the people came to take his body away, she didn’t want to watch. I took her to the basement, where she wouldn’t have to see. I held her hand until he was gone.   

*

In Hawaii, my mother and I were spontaneous. Indulgent. Desperate. We flew from Oahu to Kauai for the day, and she rented an electric blue Sebring convertible, then tossed me the keys. At her suggestion, we drove through the jungles where they'd filmed Jurassic Park.

My father had taken me to see Jurassic Park on my 12th birthday. At the sight of me in the theater, enraptured and gasping, he laughed. He took me to see it again the next day, and the day after that. I leaned against his arm during the scary parts, eating popcorn until I felt sick, my fingers swollen and salty. I spent the next few weeks at home pulling our World Book Encyclopedias down from the living room bookshelves. I felt scholarly with that heavy brown leather and gold etching on my lap, tearing through entries about paleontology and velociraptors. I decided to write Jurassic Park Two, not knowing Michael Crichton had beaten me to it. At Girl Scout camp that summer, while the other girls did crafts or learned to row a canoe, I sat at a picnic table alone with a notebook, scrawling dialogue and plotlines. Imagining what Costa Rica smelled like. 

My father smiled at my intensity that summer. He leaned against my bedroom door at night, cigarette in one hand, a whiskey in the other. “Time to get some sleep, baby girl,” he said.

“Maybe I should be a paleontologist!” I said from the covers, the encyclopedia heavy on my stomach. “Or an explorer.”

“Knock ‘em dead,” he said. He kissed the top of my head, still smiling.

My mother was less indulgent. When I hid from my chores by reading in the bathroom, she pounded on the door. “If you sit there too long, your intestines will fall into the toilet,” she called. When I stormed out, an issue of National Geographic in my hands, she was waiting with a can of Pledge and a feather duster. I dusted the living room bookshelves, lingering over the encyclopedias and singing under my breath. I took three times too long to do everything, which enraged her, but I didn’t care. I was busy. I was stomping through overgrown jungles in heavy muck boots, my hair pinned back, a splash of mud on my neck. All beauty and strength and nerve as I strode into the world.

*

We flew from Oahu to the big island next. She rented us a red convertible this time. We explored a coffee plantation, then hiked a volcano trail. The lava flowed thick and heavy, swollen snakes crawling over burnt earth. We listened to ukulele-based radio stations and fought over a map as the wind blew our curls around. We ate too many macadamia nuts. We went to bed a little early and slept a little late, in the manner of ladies who don't always sleep in luxurious beds and can't be bothered to climb out of them.

I drove the car now. I read the maps. I watched her when she fell asleep at night; checked her breathing, making sure. Then I snuck out of bed, left the hotel, and went for walks on the dark beach. The foghorn blare of distant ships drifted in from the sea. The twinkle of laughing and ice-clinking from the tiki bars behind me cluttered the night wind. I rested my head on my knees and let the warm wind blow over my bare shoulders. I wrote my name in the sand, then watched it disappear. 

I could say it was for her sake—that watchfulness, my silent protection—and that would be true. But the bottom of truth is a thick, slow-moving thing. She was all I had left.

*

After his death, she and I had rattled around in a house that felt vaulting and cold in fogs of private grief. We made dinner and did laundry and fed the cat and got on with things. And in the swirl of necessary pretending, I began to change. I became harder, more stone-like and private. Less likely to sing or write or play. I still tried to imagine the places I might someday go, to dredge up my old, sparkling wanderlust, but the effort fell flat. To leave would be to leave her.

She changed, too. She grew braver, and took control over our fumbling lives. She did the finances. She redecorated the house, moved couches and bookcases and painted the living room walls a bright canary yellow. She threw me a birthday party when I turned 19, and didn’t tell me for more than ten years about how she broke down in the bakery section of the grocery store, weeping when she didn’t have anyone to ask what cake I might like.

The following fall I entered my sophomore year but rarely went to class. I had a campus job singing at the university chapel, but I got fired. I’d stopped showing up for mass, abandoning the organist in the choir loft week after week. I didn’t want to hang out with friends or go to parties. I learned to pretend, to sit at the big cafeteria table like you’re supposed to, to laugh and talk in the expected ways, but I felt like a rag doll, my movements thick and slow. My nights were hot with nightmares in which he died over and over again as I watched.

Six months later my body fell apart. I gained 15 pounds on a frame that already could stand to lose 20. One February morning I discovered a rash on my leg. The campus doctor pronounced it ringworm and sent me away, ruined and disgusting, with a sad tube of cream. A few days later I woke up screeching with my eyes crusted shut. I peeled them open to a raging infection from not cleaning my contacts properly.

I was 19 years old, fat and diseased and bespectacled, and I tried very hard to care about all that but I just couldn't muster up a decent fuck about anything. Instead I went on a pilgrimage to the mall in search of the biggest, coziest sweatshirts I could find. I bought two giant hoodies with deep, soft pockets. I lived swathed in them, wrapping myself up in something warm and safe so I could feel small.

I ate an astonishing amount of Cheez-Its during this phase. I hid the empty bags under my bed.

One spring afternoon I was walking to the cafeteria with my roommate, cloaked in my trusty sweatshirt and 35 extra pounds, when I tripped over nothing and fell on the asphalt. I went down so hard and so fast that my arms didn’t break the fall, my knees couldn’t rise and catch me. I landed face down in a campus-shattering thud. My roommate, a cheerful girl with a high ponytail and a perky chin, kept walking, shaking her head in embarrassment, as I laid on the ground in a heap.

I should have been angry. I should have been humiliated. But instead I laid there a fraction too long, staring at the cracks in the sidewalk. I thought, maybe I can stay here and sleep. Maybe the ground would be easier to deal with for a while. Eventually I got up and headed back to bed. When my roommate came home I turned my face to the cinderblock wall as she giggled on the phone with her boyfriend. She was an alien, a normal-girl alien, living a normal-girl life ten feet away.

*

As the Hawaiian days wore on, my mother and I began sniping. She wanted to snorkel; instead of jumping at the chance I reminded her she was afraid to swim. I wanted to hike, and she was game, but then I walked too fast on the hills, leaving her behind and gasping. She tried to talk about my father; I shut her down again and again. I knew I was being a brat but my guilt only enraged me further, my sharp words sending her to the bathroom to cry, which I pretended not to notice.

On our last night we ate a silent, anticlimactic dinner and she went to bed early. I went to the hotel gift shop, bought a family-sized bag of Doritos, and read a book in bed, eating until my fingers were orange. At midnight I flung myself out of bed in a self-directed rage. Dressed in pajama shorts and a sweatshirt, wearing no bra or makeup, I stormed to the beach and sat in the shadow of a lifeguard chair.  

A cute boy appeared in the moonlight like a mirage. He seemed headed toward me but took a hard right at the last second. I stared ahead, skin prickling, while he asked an old man behind me the time. A moment later he was beside me again, hands in pockets, looking amiably at the waves. I glanced up. He smiled down.

 “Any chance you want company?” he said. “If not it’s totally cool, I just thought maybe I’d check just in case—“

I patted the sand. “Sit.”

His name was David. He was from Texas, a 22-year-old marine stationed on Honolulu. He was out with some buddies who’d gone clubbing, but he’d wandered off. He’d never wanted to be a marine. But his father had been one, and his grandfather too, and that was the Texas way: you pretended to be brave. He hoped there wouldn’t be a real war. He wanted to study philosophy someday. He was interested in people, he said, scooting closer. The things they do, how they fall in love and why.

He was almost certainly full of shit, but he seemed kind, was adorably nervous, and had killer brown eyes. He was the kind of boy you magic up in a daydream about Hawaii.

He told me I was pretty. Said I must be popular back home. I laughed. I told him about my parents, and how I felt old and lost. He understood. He wanted to be different than he was too.

As our conversation slowed, he went for it. Kind of.

“I wish I was the kind of guy brave enough to kiss the girl at the end of the night,” he said. He held his body very still, staring ahead at the waves.

My heart accelerated. I wanted, badly, for this boy to kiss me. Or I could just kiss him, of course. There was sand between my toes, a star-filled sky, a cute soldier who thought I was pretty. A portal had opened into a normal-girl life, the road ahead illuminated and clear. I wanted to fling my body through it.

Some terrible internal alarm blared instead. I’d been gone for hours. Was she checking my pillow for warmth? Calling the front desk to see if I was in the lobby? What if she was crying? A familiar heaviness descended. I felt powerless to fight it.

 “I have to go,” I said, patting his hand as if he were a puppy. “I’m sorry.”

I jumped up and quite literally ran away from him, sand flying beneath my heels, his stunned, pale face receding in the dark. At my hotel I paused to lean my hot back against a marble pillar. The beach roared darkly behind me. I saw myself as if from above: cowardly and pathetic, with bad hair and Dorito fingers. I wanted to punch the pillar, kick sand, throw a vase against the wall and watch it shatter.   

I ran back to the beach, but he was gone. I climbed the lifeguard stand and called his name, but he didn’t answer.  

My mother had been asleep the whole time.   

*

The next morning, a few hours before our flight home, I wrote the boy a letter. I said he was braver than he thought. I said courage was an inner brilliancy; that walking up to a strange girl to say hello seemed about as brave to me as a soldier in any war. I said I hoped he’d get back to Texas soon, and that war would never come. I said he’d make a great philosopher, and left my number. The letter was dated September 7, 2001.

I wanted to leave it on the lifeguard stand, just in case, but was too embarrassed to explain to the guards on duty. At breakfast, tortured and weepy, I admitted to my mother what had happened.

“Why in the world did you run away?” she said, mystified.

I poked at my pancakes and tried not to cry.  

She sighed, then reached across the table to smooth my hair behind my ear. When my guard was down she snatched the letter and walked to reception while I sputtered. She asked for a roll of Scotch tape, then kicked off her sandals and strode, warrior-style, across the hot sand. She spoke animatedly with the lifeguards, gesturing my way while I melted into the tablecloth. When they nodded, she placed the letter on the chair leg and wound the tape around it three times. Then she straightened, brushed off her hands, and gave me a giant thumbs up. I groaned. The sunlight gleamed off her black hair as she walked back with a wide smile. Despite myself I grinned back.  

*

An hour later we were loading our suitcases into a taxi when she disappeared. I ran into the lobby and found her on the phone at the front desk. 

"Is there space on Tuesday?" she was asking. "What about Wednesday?”

 What? I mouthed. She brushed me off. After a minute she turned to me. 

"I am not leaving yet," she said, her eyes firm. "I want to snorkel.”   

“You’re afraid to put your face in, mother,” I said. “That’s kind of required.”

“I know what snorkeling is.”   

“What about school?” I was due there on Thursday.  

“Since when do you care about school?” she said, looking exhausted. “Look. I’m old. I’m never coming back to Hawaii, and I didn’t snorkel yet. I’m staying.” She stepped back and regarded me. “You, however, are welcome to leave without me.”

This was turning into a stand-off: two stubborn women with their chins held high, a taxi meter ticking in the distance.

I blinked first. “I’m not leaving you in Hawaii, you crazy person.”

She turned to the desk. “We’re staying.” 

*

She got us a new room, bigger, that faced the ocean instead of the street. We ate one more beachside dinner. She ordered two Mai Tai’s and slipped me one. I stalked the beach that night hoping David would appear. When he didn’t, I found I didn’t mind too much. At least I had tried. I walked the shoreline for hours, feeling lighter somehow, my leg muscles relishing their fight through wet sand.

At the beach the next morning she grew quiet. I’d never snorkeled before either, but I knew to take charge. I sat her in the sand and put her flippers on her feet. She clutched my arm, taking plodding baby steps towards the water. She winced when the waves washed over her thighs.

“Oh come on, Ma,” I said. “It’s just water, you’ll survive.” I kept my tone light, teasing. She let go of my arm and waded in deeper, clumsy and slow. She gasped for air and got the snorkeling all wrong at first. We both did. Breathing feels unnatural underwater. You gasp at first, rhythmless and untrusting, certain you'll drown. But if you keep trying, your breathing slows. Everything slows. And colors begin to burst through the blue dark. I took off my snorkel and dove deep into a school of fish, watching them part around me in waves of flickering silver. I came upon a bed of starfish, clinging with all their might to the pale pink coral below. I thought about mermaids, about handsprings, about the windows down and the radio up. I surfaced just once, to tell her, to show her. But she was off on her own, already far away. Her head was underwater the whole time.