Page 5 of Big Island Sunrise
“Mom?” Kai’s voice went from sleepy to panicked in an instant. “MAMA?!”
“I’m here.” She pushed the door open wider and stepped into the dim cave of the hotel room.
“Hi.” He sank back into the pillows, right back to sleepy. She sat on the edge of the bed and pushed his hair out of his eyes. He was long overdue for a haircut.
“Good morning, kiddo.”
“Can I watch YouTube?”
Emma flinched inwardly but kept her voice steady as she said, “No, not just yet.”
He made an overblown sound of disappointment and pushed her hand away. She sighed and stood, picked up the room service menu and looked at it without really reading it.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“No!” He burrowed beneath the covers. “I want to watch YouTube!”
She let the menu fall from her hand and drifted back to the balcony.
When Kai was a baby, she wouldn’t even allow him to be in the same room as a television set. She’d maintained a strict no-screens policy for years.
Eventually she had eased up, and good educational shows had worked their way in slowly, heartwarming stories and beautiful art and animal facts galore. They had used them as a jumping-off point for other things.
Life was different then.
Even the light was different, golden sun streaming through the kitchen windows.
Adam would come home from a shift and they’d throw themselves at him, eager to pull him down the rabbit hole of whatever they were exploring that week, show him the square numbers that Kai was building with magnatiles or the new books they had read ten times over.
The past few months, it was every man for himself. Kai watched endless hours of YouTube videos that sucked him into the blocky, low-res world of Minecraft. And Emma counted the day as a success if he was still alive and fed by the end of it.
It seemed like trying for anything else, like getting out the door to the library or their homeschool group, just ended in a screaming fit or tears.
And she didn’t have the energy for any of it.
She knew that parenting was all about connection. She knew what her son needed: unconditional love, empathy, and steady boundaries that gave him a feeling of predictability and safety.
She just didn’t have anything left to give.
He needed her to be twice the parent she had been before. Instead she was a shell of herself, disconnected and impatient.
Some coherent corner of her mind knew that all of her small slip-ups day after day were making things worse, leaving him feeling more lost and alone in his grief than ever, but she didn’t know how to claw her way back from where she was now.
That’s why they were here. A fresh start, away from their house haunted with memories and the deadening routines they had fallen into.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” she asked through the open door.
“No!”
“Why not?”
Kai poked his head out of the blankets and glared suspiciously at the white mist that drifted across the balcony. “We’reinacloud.”
“It’ll burn off soon.” Emma’s voice was chipper, but she couldn’t keep it up for long. It was impossible to keep her own spirits up, never mind shift the stormy expression on Kai’s face.
Well, there was one easy way.
“You can watch TV for a little while,” she told him, “and then we’ll walk to get some breakfast.”
