Our mother added, “The money we save, we can spend on fancy restaurants and Hawaiian shirts.”
“A bed is a bed,” my father said. “Do we care about an ocean view from thirty stories up?”
“Or a huge TV we won’t watch?”
Entering the office, I knew we didn’t have a chance. I elbowed Sammy.
“Can we buy souvenirs?” Sammy asked my father.
“Of course, my darlings. We’ll fill our suitcases with fake spears, puka-shell necklaces, tiki tumblers, and polished driftwood.”
“Deal,” Sammy said.
“Deal,” I said.
A bulging rack of brochures next to the reception desk advertised scuba lessons, hot-air balloon rides, sunset cruises, helicopter rides, luaus, river raft trips, volcano expeditions, and an adventure through a pineapple plantation on an antique train.
Mom said, “It’s like a menu from Hop Sing’s. Everybody gets to pick a dish.”
I chose a sunset luau with fire dancers; my brother picked scuba lessons and swimming with sea turtles. Mom said she just wanted to sit in a beach chair and read Tolstoy. My father’s choice was dinner at Roy’s restaurant in Kaanapali. We ate dragon rolls, short ribs, and blackened ahi tuna. I still remember the sweet-and-sour honey taste of the ribs but for the life of me can’t remember what a dragon roll is.
Days were spent on the beach, swimming in the warm Pacific, snorkeling, eating poke lunches we bought in Lahaina. In the evening, we went to movies and scoured the souvenir shops in the Kaanapali mall. I still have my wind-up hula dancer. Sammy smashed his shell collection in one of his meltdowns, and I never had a chance to ask my mother if she finished Anna Karenina.
For my father, one of the pleasures of the Kapalua Beach Motel was getting to know Ernie Saldana, the man who called me out of the blue to tell me I was a giant step closer to changing my life. Ernie was a retired police officer from Los Angeles, vague on details of his rank or experience—“Let’s just say I did stuff,” he told me later when I pressed him for details. Later, when I was a cop, I assumed he was in internal affairs, connected to the Rampart corruption scandal of the late 1990s that began when an officer was caught stealing cocaine from a department property room. The following investigation uncovered crimes by LAPD officers, including the framing of suspects and connections to violent street gangs. If Ernie Saldana had a hand in sending any of those cops to prison, he wouldn’t be eager to talk about it.
In exchange for taking care of security, Ernie received a free room in the motel. There wasn’t much to do; he patrolled the property at night accompanied by Dufus, his standard poodle. Ernie was a big man. He’d played football at Cal State and looked like he still could. His presence on the grounds was enough to discourage wayward local kids from breaking into rooms. He didn’t call the cops when he did catch one. Ernie just found out who their parents were. The threat of telling them was usually enough. He ferried cash deposits to the bank in Lahaina, did background checks on new hires, and played chess with my father. I would sit next to my father and watch them play. At first, my father would tell me where to move his piece, and whisper in my ear the reason for the move: “I will let him take my knight, but it will double his pawn and he will regret it in three more moves.” Eventually, he let me make my own moves. It’s how I learned the game and got to be pretty good; it also cemented my own friendship with Ernie. One of these days I will tell Lieutenant Hagen that it was Ernie Saldana, not Angie Dickinson, who was my inspiration to become a cop. But that would mean telling her who I am and what I am doing on her police force.
Another memory: the drive from JFK, our Maui sunburned skin still peeling, clothes too thin for the cold of upstate New York. We lived in a two-story wood-frame house in Grahamsville, population less than a thousand people and a hundred miles too far from New York City to commute. Grahamsville was pure country; it had a gas station with one pump, a general store where you could find canned ham, hunting magazines, Powerball tickets, antifreeze, and, occasionally the New York Times. For everything else, there was a Walmart in Ellenville, fifteen miles away. It was dull but picturesque and had no amenities. There was a local joke the boys learned:
Tourist: “What is there to do here in the summer?”
Native: “There’s fishing and fucking.”
Tourist: “What about the winter?”
Native: “No fishing.”
Our house straddled a flat acre off the main highway, fifty yards up a dirt road my father called the damn thing. In the spring the road, the damn thing, turned to mud. By August, the mud dried out and even a gentle wind kicked up fine dust that coated cars and colored white sneakers brown. In winter, our neighbor Harry Dill plowed the snow so our cars could come in and out. Periodically, my father promised he would pave the damn thing, but he never got around to it. The house was a one-story ranch with nothing to distinguish it from any of the others built by Rondout Construction in the late 1950s, except for the sign that read dr. martin karim, general medical practice. The front door led into our living quarters, a side entrance opened into my father’s medical suite. He made house calls, turned no one away for lack of money or insurance. Often, farmers paid him in produce. We were never short of fresh vegetables, eggs, apples, and, in the summer, corn off the stalk. His suite had a small waiting room with a couch, a few chairs, a playpen, and a box of toys for the kids. The magazines were Scientific American, Jack and Jill, Time, and National Geographic.
Our mother, Gloria, was his nurse, paramedic, receptionist, and bookkeeper. She had a gift of calming children facing vaccinations, and she knew how to set a broken arm, do an EKG, and take X-rays, developed in a bathroom that doubled as a darkroom. As a rural doctor, my father was on call 24/7. If one of his patients was in an emergency situation, they either came to his office or he went to their house. Our meals were interrupted by house calls, vacation plans were canceled because a baby was about to be born, and we grew up knowing that our own family needs came in second. My father was aware of this, so when my brother, Sammy, was born, he started commuting to Albany Medical College to complete his board training in gynecology. As he was finishing, a young doctor just out of his residency in family medicine wanted a small-town practice. My father sold him all his medical equipment, closed his office, and took a job at Planned Parenthood in Albany, and we began to experience a normal life. There were adjustments, of course. My mother had to find a job, and the house felt a lot bigger without the medical suite, but for the first time, we had our father to ourselves on weekends—he could help coach Sammy’s soccer team and drive me to swim meets—and if we missed the bus, he could drive us to school. And there would be family vacations.
But most important, since I was too old to share a bedroom with Sammy, my father’s medical office was converted into a living space for me. My bathroom still smelled of X-ray film developer, and I was occasionally awakened by a knock at the side door: a car crash survivor with a bleeding skull, a woman holding a sick baby, or a man with chest pains who hadn’t heard the news that my father had given up his practice. I gave directions to the hospital emergency room in Ellenville to all of them. There was always a part of me that believed in vibes and ghosts. Living in a former medical suite, where lives had been saved, wounds sewn up, and bad news delivered, I slept fitfully, even though I was separated by only a few yards from my parents. I heard their conversations, their ambient life humming in nearby rooms. I was called to meals that had already begun. At night, I retreated to my apartment to sleep. The space was mine. I had my own entrance. I could smoke cigarettes, sneak in a boyfriend, play my music as loud as I wanted.