“Why is the island so noisy?” Daniel had once asked his father as they walked along the Wailuku River. He was a boy of five and had so many questions.
“The island voices are talking to us,” his father had answered.
Daniel studied the pale white zigzag caterpillar scar that ran along his father’s left side squirming toward his back, a fall onto jagged lava rocks when he was a bit older than Daniel. He wanted to reach out and touch it, make it disappear. He thought his father suddenly looked sad.
“What are they saying?”
His father shrugged. “Things you wouldn’t understand.”
Daniel grew hot with impatience. He’d wanted his father to explain it to him. Tell me. He could still taste the words on the tip of his tongue, but his father’s quiet moment of attention had vanished and he’d turned away.
The following year he was gone. If the island voices were what told his father to leave them, then they were the same voices that had called Daniel back home.
* * *
Daniel stood stunned at the railing of the steamer, heart racing as his eyes followed the billowing smoke erupting from Mauna Loa. Moments later, it was followed by the bright blood orange curtain of lava that shot upward toward the darkening sky. Daniel felt the boat rock beneath his feet as a horn blew and passengers filed onto the deck to watch the erupting volcano. This was a homecoming Daniel hadn’t expected, though eerily coincidental, since he’d been born in the early hours of another Mauna Loa eruption, in 1907. When he heard the steamer’s engine reverse, the rumbling quieted, and he hoped they wouldn’t turn around and head back to Oahu. He was so close to home. He thought of Uncle Koji and his Hilo Aunties, realizing that this might be exactly like all the boyhood stories Koji had told him, how the island could rise at any time and remake itself, destroying all that was man-made.
Daniel watched the surge of lava rise and fall, rise and fall, until the molten liquid pooled and flowed down over jagged lava rock like streaming tears, hot and blistering.
It was as beautiful as it was terrifying.
7
Waiting
Koji stood just inside the screen door of the Okawa Fish Market. A good two hours had passed since the first eruption, and everyone remained indoors waiting for news from the geologists at the Volcano Observatory Center. Outside, the air thickened with heat and the noxious smell of rotten eggs. Wilson and Mano hadn’t returned yet, leaving Koji to wonder if Daniel’s steamer laid waiting just outside the bay, or if it had returned to Oahu. He knew Daniel wouldn’t be happy about turning back so close to home. Koji was reminded of a younger Daniel, so smart and curious, asking questions that he wasn’t always able to answer.
Over the years, Koji had remained the closest thing Daniel had to a father. As boys, Koji and Franklin Abe were once as close as brothers. Whenever he and Razor could get away from the plantation, they’d spend all their free time down in Hilo with Franklin, who always took the lead with his smooth-talking, easy ways. He was a good-looking hapa: a mix of Japanese, Portuguese, and Filipino on his mother’s side, while full-blood Japanese on his father’s side. When they were young, he seemed invincible. But when Franklin’s mother unexpectedly died, and his father returned to Japan and remarried, he was seventeen and chose to stay in Hilo. Frank had always been restless, but it seemed to intensify from then on, and later it was Koji who remained a constant presence in Mariko’s and Daniel’s lives after Franklin had abandoned them.
* * *
Through the screen door of the market, Koji saw a glimmer of light moving through the hazy darkness, growing sharper as Gus Yamamoto’s boy came into view, flashlight in hand. Gus had a phone at his gas station down the street, and Koji hoped his son was bringing news the locals at the market had been waiting for.
He pushed open the screen door and the boy dashed in.
“The geologists at the observatory just called,” he announced, his voice rising with importance. “They say the lava is flowing toward Mauna Kea volcano and away from Hilo town.”
The news was met by rousing cheers from the waiting crowd of locals, but he didn’t see Razor.
Koji looked at the faces of his longtime friends, their anxious air lightened by the news. They never took the island for granted. They lived on sacred ground. What Koji loved most about his Hilo family was their toughness, generations who had withstood so many hardships and disasters. Even through the difficulties of the Depression, Hilo’s local community had maintained their everyday lives, fishing, hunting, and bartering to make ends meet. They were survivors.
“We dodged another bullet, yeah,” Samuel said, handing him a beer from behind the koa counter.
Koji nodded. “Lucky this time.”
“Now let’s hope the boys arrive soon,” Nori added.
Koji heard the worry in her words. The room hummed as voices rose with relief and laughter. Before Koji could respond, he turned toward the whine of the screen door opening and watched as Daniel stepped into the market just ahead of Wilson and Mano, the three of them talking and joking like boys again. Wasn’t Koji once that young and full of spirit? Nori and the aunties were the first to pull him into their hugs. Koji stepped back to steady himself when a smiling Daniel turned his way. It was her smile, just a glimpse, but enough that he felt the warm rush of the past return to him.
8
In the Quiet
It was late by the time Daniel returned home from the market. He stepped inside the green bungalow for the first time in more than two years, closed the door, and stood a moment in the quiet of the darkened room. In the air warm as breath, the slight scent of his mother’s perfume lingered, or so he imagined. Before his mother died, she told him to scatter her ashes in the wind from Pilani Point. “Finally get to see the world, yeah,” she’d said. She smiled and Daniel could only nod his head, his throat so dry he could hardly speak. Tonight she was the only one missing at the party, the only one who would forgive all his mistakes. When Daniel switched on the light to see the spare and comfortable living room, a small part of him still hoped his mother would be standing there waiting for him.
All night at the party, laughter and words had flowed with the ease of music. Seeing his Hilo family again, Daniel realized just how much he had missed them. He was happily slapped on the back and pulled into tight hugs by the locals as the room suddenly vibrated with their energy, Mauna Loa momentarily forgotten. Daniel knew every inch of the market, having crawled as a baby across the wood plank floor of the vast room, racing along in diapers with Mano. Born weeks apart, they were as close as twins growing up. Here he was, surrounded by the Hilo aunties and Uncle Koji, so unlike the cold or curious stares directed his way in Chicago, where he hated the whispers, the occasional remarks that followed him as he walked down Michigan Avenue or Rush or Division Streets, “Slanty Eyes,” or “Chop Suey Louie,” or “Ching Chong Chinaman go home.” His blood boiling, gut pulling, he had pushed past the insults and kept going.
No use in causing trouble.
At the university, where he’d been the lone Oriental in his medical school class, the voices were more inquisitive yet just as invasive “Where are you from?” his classmates asked, “China? Japan? Philippines?” They were more interested in what he was instead of who he was. He’d gone from a town where everyone knew him to a city where no one did.