[BL] Thaw

***

The house was still when Heke opened his eyes, which meant he had done it again — woken before the alarm, before the children, before Hana’s soft exhale shifted into something conscious. He lay in the dark and listened to the rain.

It was always raining in Hilo. This was not a complaint. He had grown up with it, had learned to tell its moods the way other men read weather by looking at the sky. This morning it was the patient kind — steady and unhurried, the kind that had been going since before midnight and would still be going at noon. It fell on the tin roof and it fell on the banana leaves in the yard and it found its way into the red dirt and disappeared. He listened to it and felt something unknot slightly in his chest, the particular ease that came from a sound being exactly what it was supposed to be.

He turned his head.

Hana was asleep beside him. She slept on her side facing away, her dark hair loose across the pillow, one hand curled near her face. She was twenty years old and she looked younger in sleep, softer, some of the careful practicality she wore like a second skin gone quiet for a few hours. He watched the slow rise and fall of her breathing.

He loved her. This was true and it was not enough and he had been carrying the gap between those two facts for two years now, which was exactly how long they had been married. It sat in him like a stone he could not put down and could not stop being aware of. He loved her the way you love someone who has been nothing but kind to you, someone who deserves far better than the specific inadequacy you bring to every morning. He loved her and when she reached for him in the night something in him went careful and distant, like a lamp turned low, and she would feel it — he knew she felt it, she was too perceptive not to — and she would not say anything, and he would hate himself quietly until he fell back asleep.

He got up before she woke. He always got up before she woke.

***

The kitchen was small and smelled of rain and the previous night’s rice. Heke moved through it without turning on the light, navigating by the gray pre-dawn that came through the window above the sink. He had made this route enough times that his body knew it — three steps to the stove, reach left for the matches, the particular resistance of the gas knob. The blue ring of flame appeared. He filled the pot from the tap.

The house was a plantation-style worker’s cottage, built decades ago for men who no longer lived here, who had worked the sugar fields before the fields changed hands and changed again. The walls were thin. The floorboards had opinions about being stepped on. Heke had learned which ones to avoid outside the room where his sons slept.

He went to the door of their room and stood in the frame for a moment.

Koa and Liko. Four and two. Koa slept with his fists clenched, already a fighter in his dreams; Liko had somehow migrated entirely sideways and was on the verge of falling off his small mat. Heke crossed the room without waking either of them and adjusted Liko back toward the center. The boy made a sound and settled. Heke stood there a moment longer than necessary.

He turned before the feeling in his chest could become something he had to manage.

***

He walked to the harbor in the rain.

The route took twenty minutes and he knew every inch of it — past the low storefronts on Kamehameha Avenue, past the fish market that wouldn’t open for another hour, past the old hotel where the soldiers had stayed during the war and where a different kind of soldier stayed now, men in their postwar bewilderment who drank and gambled and sent money home to the mainland. The war had ended two years ago and Hilo had not entirely decided what to do with itself afterward. The military presence sat on the edge of the town like a guest who had overstayed but no one knew how to ask to leave. There were jeeps on the roads that had not been there before 1941. There was a new way the haole officers looked at the town — assessingly, as though calculating what it was worth.

Heke kept his eyes forward and walked.

He was twenty-one years old, though he did not think about his age often. His father had been Hawaiian and his mother had been born to a family from Guangdong Province who had come to the islands two generations ago, and he had grown up understanding that he existed in a particular kind of in-between — not haole, not Japanese, not Filipino, not the specific Hawaiian the missionaries had spent generations trying to reshape, but a version of Hawaiian that absorbed other things and remained itself. His grandmother had spoken Hawaiian to him when he was small. He still heard the language in his head sometimes, certain words that had no precise equivalent in English, words that described relationships between things rather than naming the things themselves.

He had not been to school past the eighth grade. There had not been money, and then there had been work, and then there had been the war taking what was left of the world’s attention. He did not think of this as deprivation. He thought of it as the shape of things.

The harbor appeared at the end of the street, gray and wide in the morning rain. The water of Hilo Bay was darker than the sky, moving in its patient way, indifferent to weather or hour or the collection of men who worked its edges for wages. The docks extended out into it — wooden platforms on pilings, wet and salt-scoured, smelling of fish and machine oil and the particular brine of deep water. A cargo ship had come in overnight and sat at the far dock like a gray building, its lines running up into the fog.

Mateo was already there, rolling a cigarette under the overhang of the equipment shed.

“You’re early,” Mateo said.

“Same as you.”

Mateo was Filipino, forty years old, had been working the Hilo docks for longer than Heke had been alive. He was the kind of man who gave very little away and expected the same courtesy in return, which was why he and Heke had gotten along since Heke’s first week. He lit the cigarette and looked at the ship.

“Mainland freight,” he said. “Lot of it. Going to be a long one.”

Heke nodded. He set down his bag and looked at the water. The rain made rings on its surface out past the dock, thousands of them overlapping, and for a moment he watched them with his full attention, the way you could lose yourself in a pattern if you let yourself, the way a pattern could become a kind of rest.

He looked away before he had to explain why he was standing there staring at nothing.

***

The work was the best part of the day. He meant this without irony.

There was a clarity to it that nothing else in his life possessed — the weight of a crate was exactly what it was, the rigging either held or it didn’t, a man either did his job or he didn’t, and the math of it was simple and physical and left no room for the particular noise that lived in his chest during all the other hours. He moved cargo for eight hours and his body was good at it, lean and efficient, and he could do it largely without speaking, which was a mercy.

The other men on the dock were a particular mix that Hilo produced: Hawaiian men, Japanese American men who had come back from the 442nd with the posture of people who had done more than they would ever be thanked for, a few Portuguese men from the old families, two young Chinese American brothers from Honolulu working the summer. They worked in the usual way men worked together when they had no reason not to — competently, without sentiment, occasionally with humor of the kind that didn’t require explanation.

Heke worked and he watched, which was a habit he could not seem to stop. He watched the way men moved and the way they talked and the way they were with each other, the comfortable roughness of men in each other’s company, the particular ease of it. There was a man from the ship crew — a mainlander, tall, with a way of gesturing when he talked that used his whole arm — who stood on the deck directing the offload, and Heke found his eyes returning to the man without choosing to, caught by something he could not name and did not try to name, only noticed it happening and looked away and let the work fill the space where the noticing had been.

This was something he was practiced at. The noticing, and the looking away. It had been going on since he was fourteen and had understood, with a clarity he immediately buried, what it meant that he watched the boys in the swimming hole at Wailuku River rather than the girls. He had buried it as thoroughly as a body and kept it buried with everything he had. He was married. He had sons. He was a man who did his work and came home and was a good husband and father and none of the rest of it existed.

It didn’t exist. He didn’t let it exist.

He lifted a crate and carried it to the warehouse and set it down and went back for another.

***

At midday the rain eased. This happened sometimes — a brief relent, twenty or thirty minutes where the sky went a lighter shade of gray and you could see to the top of the bluff above the town. Heke ate his lunch on the dock with his feet hanging over the edge, looking at the water.

He heard footsteps on the boards behind him and the particular gait told him who it was before he looked — unhurried, slightly irregular, the gait of a man who moved through the world at his own pace and made no apologies for it.

“Alama,” Arthur Sato said, and sat down next to him.

Arthur lived three houses down from Heke. He was thirty-four, Hawaiian-Japanese, and worked at the university — though what exactly he did there he described in ways that grew vaguer the more specific the question. Research, he said. Medical research. Government-adjacent, he said, in the tone of a man who had signed papers. He wore good clothes that he treated carelessly and read books in multiple languages and kept unusual hours and had no wife, no explanation for no wife, and none of the neighbors pushed the question because there was something in Arthur’s particular stillness that made pushing seem like a mistake.

He had started talking to Heke two years ago, when Heke and Hana first moved into the neighborhood. He had come over with a papaya from his tree and stayed for an hour and they had talked about nothing in particular and when he left Heke had sat in the kitchen afterward with the feeling of having been seen in some way he couldn’t identify and wasn’t sure he wanted.

He was used to Arthur now. He was used to Arthur showing up in unexpected places and sitting down and not requiring anything.

“You look tired,” Arthur said.

“I worked all morning.”

“Different kind of tired.”

Heke looked at the water. “I’m fine.”

Arthur opened his own lunch — rice and some kind of fish wrapped in cloth, a thermos of tea. He poured tea into the cap and held it out. Heke took it and drank.

“How’s Hana?”

“Good,” Heke said. “She’s good.” He handed back the thermos cap. “The boys are good.”

“Good,” Arthur said, and there was no irony in it, just acknowledgment, the way he absorbed information without making much of it.

They ate in silence for a while. Below them the water shifted against the pilings. A frigatebird hung in the air above the bay, not moving, just suspended there on the wind with the particular arrogance of birds who knew they were beautiful. Heke watched it.

“I got some new equipment delivered yesterday,” Arthur said. “From the mainland. Some of it is — ” He stopped and considered his words. “Some of it is very new.”

“What kind of equipment?”

“The kind I can’t fully describe in public.” He said this without drama, as a simple statement of fact. Then: “I keep thinking I should have you over. Show you the house, at least.”

Heke looked at him.

Arthur was looking at the water. His profile was calm and unrevealing, the way it usually was, the way Heke had decided was just his nature. There was nothing in the offer that was unusual — they were neighbors, Arthur had said it before, it was a simple social gesture.

“Sure,” Heke said.

“Sometime,” Arthur said.

“Sure,” Heke said again.

The frigatebird let the wind carry it away and disappeared into the gray sky. The rain started again, soft at first and then resumed.

***

He stopped at the fish market on the way home and bought aku and stood for a moment under the tin overhang while the afternoon rain intensified, watching the street. A woman from the church hurried past with a newspaper over her head. Two boys on bicycles went past in the other direction, laughing at something, already soaked. A military truck moved slowly through the intersection with the patient authority of something that owned the road.

Heke watched the truck until it was out of sight.

He thought, not for the first time, about what it would mean to be a different kind of man in a different kind of place. He thought about cities he’d never been to — Honolulu, San Francisco, places where you could be anonymous, where the particular weight of everyone knowing your name and your father’s name and your business could lift for a while. He didn’t know what he would do with that kind of anonymity. He had no picture of it that was specific enough to want. It was more like a sensation than a destination — the abstract possibility of air.

He walked home.

***

Hana was in the kitchen when he got back, Liko on her hip and Koa sitting on the floor with a collection of stones he had been curating for weeks. She turned when Heke came in and her face did the thing it always did — a warmth that was genuine, that he had never once doubted was genuine, which was its own particular form of burden.

“You got aku,” she said, and shifted Liko to her other hip.

“Market still had some.”

“Good.” She reached for it. He gave it over and she unwrapped the paper and looked at the fish with the focused attention she gave to anything practical. “I’ll make it with the ginger.”

Koa looked up from his stones. “Papa.”

“Keiki,” Heke said, and crossed the room and crouched down and the boy immediately began showing him the stones in a specific order that apparently had logic to it, explaining each one. Heke listened to all of it. He could listen to his sons for hours and feel nothing that required management — only a clean, uncomplicated love that lived in his chest without ambivalence, a love that was entirely what it was supposed to be.

Liko reached for him from Hana’s hip, leaning with the demanding confidence of two-year-olds. Heke took him and stood with him and Liko immediately grabbed at his ear.

“He found a frog today,” Hana said, working at the counter. “In the yard.”

“Big?”

“Enormous. He screamed. Then he wanted to keep it.”

Heke looked at Liko, who appeared entirely unbothered by the memory. “Did you scare the frog?”

Liko considered this question seriously and offered no answer.

They moved around the small kitchen in the familiar choreography of married people, setting out bowls and rice and the fish when it was done, calling Koa to wash his hands, finding the specific cup Liko preferred and not the other one. The rain was steady on the roof. The kitchen light was yellow and the window above the sink was dark with evening clouds. It was a scene he could look at and recognize as something a man should feel lucky for.

He tried to feel lucky for it. He was good at this.

After dinner he washed the bowls while Hana put the boys to bed. He could hear her voice from their room — low and musical, the particular tone she had only for the children, stories in the mix of English and Korean words she used with them, her own mother’s language folded in at the edges. He stood at the sink and listened.

When she came back to the kitchen she leaned in the doorway and looked at him.

“They’re out,” she said.

“Good.”

“Koa wants to go to the beach this Sunday.”

“I can take them.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then: “Come sit outside.”

He dried his hands and followed her.

***

The back step was under the overhang of the roof and mostly dry. She had brought two cups of tea and they sat with them in the evening, the yard in front of them, the rain turning the red dirt dark and the banana leaves bright. A gecko moved across the wall above them with its usual disregard for gravity.

They sat in the comfortable silence of people who had shared space long enough to stop requiring noise from each other. She tucked her feet up and wrapped her hands around her cup and looked at the rain.

Hana was this: practical and perceptive and quietly funny when she chose to be. She had come to Hawaiʻi with her family from Korea by way of Scotland and the specific combination had made her someone who could be at home in many places without fully belonging to any of them, which perhaps was why she had recognized something in Heke when they met, some similar quality of in-between. She was a good mother and a capable woman and she had never once raised her voice at him, and sometimes that seemed to him the saddest thing he knew.

She deserved someone who turned toward her rather than someone who had to remember to.

He drank his tea.

“Heke,” she said.

Her voice had a particular quality when she said his name that way — not sharp, not accusatory, just careful. Like she was picking up something she wasn’t sure how to hold.

He waited.

The rain came down in the yard and the gecko disappeared around the edge of the overhang and somewhere down the street someone’s radio was playing — a Hawaiian song, an old one, the kind with steel guitar that seemed made out of the particular feeling of being somewhere you couldn’t leave.

“Are you happy?” she said.

She asked it simply. Not as an accusation. Not with any particular weight behind it, or none that was visible. She looked at him with her clear, dark eyes and waited for his answer the way she waited for most things — without pushingHeke had the sensation of a floor giving slightly beneath him, not collapsing, just registering the weight.

He looked at the rain.

He thought about saying of course. He had said it before — variations of it, the natural response, the response that cost nothing and kept the floor steady. He was good at the natural response. He had been constructing them since he was fourteen and had understood what he was and what the understanding would cost him.

Of course. I’m fine. We’re fine.

The rain kept coming. The steel guitar from the radio down the street reached the end of its phrase and began again.

He sat with the question and could not bring himself to answer it, and Hana watched the rain beside him, and neither of them said anything else, and the silence between them was the kind that meant they would have to come back to it.

***

He walked to the harbor alone after she went to bed.

He did this sometimes — not often, not on any schedule, but when the house felt too much like a life he was living carefully rather than living, he would get up and walk to the water. The docks were quiet at night. The cargo ship had its lights on and somewhere on it men were doing overnight maintenance, voices occasionally drifting across the water, but the dock itself was empty.

He sat on the edge with his feet above the water and he looked at the bay.

Hilo Bay at night was not beautiful in any obvious way. It was a working harbor. The smell was of commerce and sea life and salt and the specific residue of the ships that came and went. But the water moved in the dark with the same patient indifference it had always moved, the same water that had been moving over this harbor for longer than any name had been attached to it, longer than any of the different people who had looked at it from this spot, Hawaiian and Chinese and haole and Japanese and Korean and all the people in between, all of them sitting with their various weights looking at the water that did not require them to be anything.

He let himself sit with the question she had asked.

Are you happy.

He had been born in this town and he had grown up in this town and he had buried something true about himself in this town and he had found a good woman who did not deserve a man who had to perform his own marriage. He had two sons he loved cleanly and completely. He had work that made his body useful and tired. He had a neighbor who sometimes sat beside him without requiring anything. He had the rain, which was always the rain.

Happy was not the question, exactly. He knew men who were not happy and said nothing and lived that way until they were old. That was not particular to him. That was just the shape of a life, often.

The question was whether this was what he had in him. Whether performing the shape of a life was the same as living one. Whether the thing he had buried at fourteen would stay buried for forty more years if he kept his hands over it.

He looked at the water.

He did not know.

He sat on the dock in the warm Hilo night with the rain settling around him and the bay moving beneath him, and he did not know, and he was twenty-one years old, and he did not yet understand how long that particular not-knowing could last.

He would learn.

***

End of Chapter One