Page 60 of Talk Story

“Keone got the latest from his mom this morning.” I had lowered and brought the flag inside and folded it into its tidy triangle. “The state’s moving to formally claim Awawakapu as protected conservation land. There’s that federal backing through NAGPRA, so nobody can unwind it later. No developer, no shell company, no long-lost heir with a clever lawyer can try to take it away. It’s going to belong to everybody and nobody, exactly the way Pali wanted.”

Pua was quiet, the way she got whenever a situation brushed close to her family. “Good,” she said finally. “And my cousins?”

She hadn’t asked until now, so I hadn’t volunteered what Lei had told me weeks ago. “Victor and Madison are at a federal facility on the mainland. A white-collar one—cooking class and tennis, but it’s still prison and they’re still in it. Santos too.” I set the folded flag on the counter. “Victor’s pelvis healed but he walks with a cane now, I heard.”

“Karma,” Pua said, echoing Opal without knowing it. There wasn’t much to add to that.

A knock rattled the back door and then Keone let himself in, already in board shorts and a faded rash guard, his tan deeper than ever, a beach towel slung around his neck.

“Pau hana Friday, ladies.” He grinned at the both of us. “Water’s flat as a lake out there and the light’s perfect. Swim, Kat?”

“You read my mind.” I was already untying my postal apron. After a day on my feet sorting other people’s lives into little brass boxes, nothing in this world reset me like a swim in Ohia Bay. “Pua, you want to come?”

“No thank you.” But she smiled when she said it. “Go. I’ll close the rest. Bring me back some of that peace of mind you’re always finding out there.”

I changed in the K & K shack, scooped Tiki up, and Keone and I crossed the road down to the bay. The water took me into its arms with a first cool shock, and then quickly warmed as I swam out past the shallows, Keone beside me, the day sloughing off my shoulders with every stroke. We trod water out past the coral heads and gazed back at the green wall of Awawakapu Valley rising behind the town.

“You know what today is?” Keone asked, water beading on his lashes.

“Friday?”

“Six months.” He said it like it was nothing, but his eyes didn’t match that message. “Since we got engaged.”

“Best decision I almost didn’t make.”

He laughed. We were treading water and grinning at each other like fools when a voice called from the shore.

“Is it safe way out there?” Elle Beane stood at the waterline in a modest swimsuit, hugging her elbows, her toes in the foam where the waves spent themselves on the sand. Behind her came Pali Moku, wearing board shorts and an easy smile, carrying two pairs of slippers, a beach bag, and the relaxed contentment of a man who was no longer lonely and driven.

“Elle!” I swam toward her. “You’re going all the way in?”

“I’m contemplating it.” Elle and I had been working on our respective hang-ups—my thing about being touched, her thing about water—trading courage back and forth like a casserole dish neither of us could return empty. “Pali says he’ll take me out and he won’t let go.”

“I’ll never let go,” Pali confirmed, wading in beside her. The look that passed between them told its own story.

Pali was weeks from defending his doctorate—Dr. Emerson had taken him on after Patel’s seat came open, and the two of them had spent the past months up in the valley together, documenting the cave inscriptions Pali had fought to protect. There was a rightness to it all: the man who’d given up any claim to the valley was going to spend his career as its scholar instead. The record he’d hidden, he was writing for posterity.

Elle waded in, reaching her waist, gasping at each new inch, her knuckles white where she gripped Pali’s arm. Then, with the stiff bravery of the genuinely frightened, she moved behind him, wrapped both arms around his shoulders, and let her feet leave the bottom as he moved forward, swimming breaststroke so that she floated behind.

“Pali. I’m in the ocean. All the way in!” she exclaimed.

“You’re in the ocean,” he agreed gravely, towing her in a large careful circle while she laughed and shrieked. “And you’re safe with me.”

I watched a woman who couldn’t put her face underwater in a bathtub a year ago, go bobbing out into the deep blue on the shoulders of a man who would never let her go.

I had to blink and turn away, out toward the mouth of the bay—which is how I spotted the seal.

“Hey.” I went still, treading water. “Guys. Check what’s out on the rocks.”

At the far end of the little bay, where black lava tumbled down to a beach below the old church property, a sleek silver-gray shape had hauled out onto a flat ledge above the waterline. Round-bellied, whiskered, blissfully asleep in the last of the sun—this was a Hawaiian monk seal, one of around sixteen hundred left in all the world.

“Haven’t seen a monk seal on the beach here in years,” Keone said.

“Makena’s what the locals are calling her,” Pali said. “She’s been around for a bit.”

“I’ve never seen one before,” Elle said.

We trod water and watched this rare creature who’d chosen our small bay to rest in. Something about her—the peace of her demeanor, the way she’d parked right below church land that someone had started clearing recently—well, it gave me the faintest, oddest prickle. Chicken skin. Even with the sun warm on my shoulders.