Emilie Richards - The Swallow's Nest

“Graham’s last two CT scans were clear.”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

“Our relationship took a bad turn, Eli. I’m guessing it won’t take a good one again.”

He didn’t say anything for miles of tropical foliage and red dirt fields that had once grown sugarcane and pineapples and now nurtured a variety of crops. She tried to focus on distant mountains instead of her pain.

“Marriage, it’s hard.” Eli gave one definitive nod, as if that said it all.

“Yours still good?”

“Oh yeah, she puts up with me, with everything, Amber does. But three kids under ten? Not much time to think about anything else.”

“Would you want something different?”

“Nobody’s life is perfect. Good is a lot to hope for, and we have more than that. We work together, raise our kids, put food on our table. We’re thankful.”

She remembered the teenage Eli, who for a school project had memorized a Samoan grace and made everyone in the family sing it for months before meals. He was the Swallow who attended church most regularly, who faithfully tithed and volunteered whenever he was needed. He was a good man, and Lilia wasn’t surprised he was the one who had volunteered to drive her home.

“Good would be good enough for me. That’s really all I wanted.” She stared out the window. “I never asked for more.”

He continued the conversation, which was a sign he was worried. “Illness takes a lot out of a family. Amber’s brother nearly died in that accident, remember? For a while her mom and dad split up over it.” Amber’s brother had wrapped his car around a kukui tree after too many beers at a graduation party. He still walked with a cane.

“Does illness make a man forget his marriage vows?”

He whistled softly, and that was all she got until they passed through the quaintly scenic town of Kapa’a, ten square miles that were large enough for a few stoplights, a variety of shops and hotels, and stretches of palm tree–lined beaches. In English Kapa’a meant solid, and the solid little town had been built on rice, pineapples and now, tourism.

Out of town Eli followed a winding two-lane road past one-story houses screened by extravagant clusters of oleander and banana trees, along with chain-link or concrete block fences. In the past decades the area had built up steadily, but homes, by mainland standards, were still modest, even though in the islands the most substandard housing was expensive.

Roosters crowed, a familiar sound, and Eli waited patiently at a one-lane bridge until traffic coming from the other direction had crossed. She could see the Sleeping Giant, a mountain that had shadowed her childhood. Her family had owned the land and house they lived on for generations and watched the landscape change to suit new residents. This still felt like home.

“Graham is hard to know,” Eli said at last. “But one thing I always figured? He loves my sister.”

“Words mean so little.”

“You’re taking time to think?”

“I don’t expect anything to change. But that’s why I’m here.”

“Will you move back? If you decide to leave him?”

She had asked herself the same question on the plane. Family surrounding her would be wonderful, and she loved her childhood home. But everything else she loved was in California. Her house, her friends, Swallow’s Nest Design, her small but thriving interior design business. While she could run her website from Kauai, she would be forced to scale down. Her online store and design consultation would be impossible because the cost of travel and shipping would be prohibitive. Opportunities here would be different, but they wouldn’t suit her needs or talents nearly as well.

She put the other reason into words. “I think I was born with island fever. I love the mainland, but I would come home more often. I missed coming home so much this past year. I didn’t think I could leave Graham.”

“Be sure you have all the facts straight, Lilia.”

“I heard the facts directly from him. And saw the proof.” She gave up pretending she could keep what had happened a secret. “He has a son, Eli. He claims it was a one-night stand, but he used the trust fund we needed to pay his medical bills to support the baby’s mother. Then Graham let me nurse him back to health for a year without telling me.”

He whistled again. Then he surprised her. “He was afraid to lose you.”

Anger was white-hot and immediate. “Why would you say that? It’s just as likely he didn’t tell me because he needed me when he was sick!”

“I say it because I’ve seen the way he watches you.”

She couldn’t let that pass, and she told him something she hadn’t told anyone else, because she had always been able to share her secrets with Eli. “Do you remember the last time we came here? Before we found out about the cancer? Graham and I had talked about having a baby of our own very soon. Then he came here and saw little Jonah.”

Jonah was Kai’s youngest son, a particularly beautiful child, who at birth had resembled his Georgia peach mother, rosy-skinned and blue-eyed.

She spoke faster. “Jonah had grown so much and suddenly he looked like an island baby. And Graham was shocked. He didn’t know babies’ skin color deepens, or that their eyes can change colors. Suddenly Jonah looked like our Polynesian ancestors, not his haole mother, and will probably look more like them as he grows up. Graham never said so, but I think he took a look at our beautiful nieces and nephews, with their rainbow diversity, and realized his baby might look like them because, hey, I’m Hawaiian, too. Like the rest of you. Same gene pool, right? So to spare himself that possible calamity, his baby’s mother is blonder than he is!”

Eli slowed because they had almost reached their destination. “I’m not surprised you’re angry.”

“I don’t think you believe me.”

“I believe everything you’ve said, but this man married you when his parents disapproved. He showed every sign of wishing he was Hawaiian, too, not wishing you were more like him.”

“Well, now he has a son who looks like him. And the baby has come to stay.”

He turned into the long unpaved driveway leading to their parents’ house. “The baby’s mama?”

“She dropped that little boy in my arms and announced he was Graham’s, then walked away and left me holding him on my own front porch.”

He surprised her and stopped, turning in his seat to look at her. “I know you hurt. I wish I could make that better.”

“Please, don’t be condescending.”

“It’s just that I understand better than you think.”

“How could you?”

He grimaced. “Amber kept a secret from me, too. Aleki is not my biological son, but nobody else knows it, although I think Mama suspects. Amber was pregnant when I married her. I knew she had been in a bad relationship before we met, but for months before we married she didn’t tell me she was pregnant. Then when hiding it was impossible, I wrestled with the pregnancy, the deception, the responsibility. Everything.”

She was stunned that in a family as close as theirs, this had been kept a secret. “But you married her anyway and never told us?”

“I married her, maybe because of the baby. By then I loved her and didn’t want her to go through that alone. And when he was born I loved Aleki as much as I love our other children. And after a while I didn’t hold Amber responsible for the hard choice I had to make. The whole thing? It made me think about what really mattered.”

Then he surprised her, because Eli was rarely demonstrative. He touched her braid, hanging limply over one shoulder, then he gave it a slight tug. “Maybe that’s what you’ll need to think about, too.”