Page 72 of Big Island Sunrise
She put a hand over her mouth, holding back the torrent of emotion that seemed to always be just below the surface these days, a storm roiling beneath her skin. She looked out the window again, standing quiet for a long time.
“Go ride a bike,” Emma said gently. “Don’t make it into anything more than it is. You deserve to have some fun.”
“Okay.” Lani pulled on a pair of shoes and ran out the door before she could change her mind.
Emma was right. She had to keep living her life.
When Tenn saw her running towards him with shoes on her feet, his smile was sun-bright.
“Ready?” He handed her a tall, icy bottle filled with liliko’i cane juice. She unscrewed the top and gulped it down, leaving only the core of ice rattling in the bottle. Then she climbed up into the cab of Tenn’s truck.
“Ready.”
22
Emma
It was a gray-sky morning, with thick clouds that camouflaged the dawn.
Emma looked out her bedroom window at the misting drizzle, wanting nothing so much as to go back to bed for a week or two.
No good could come of a day that started with a dead kitten… and lately, every day started off just like that. It had gotten to the point that she dreaded opening the bathroom door in the morning.
She didn’t know what she was doing wrong.
They had taken the kittens to the vet, cleaned their goopy eyes, dosed them with antiparasitics, and fed them around the clock. She had even borrowed a heating lamp from Tara, the kind used for newly hatched chicks, to make sure the kittens didn’t get too cold overnight. They had perked up enough to play and purr.
But despite her best efforts, they kept dying.
One by one, they faded away. Every morning she would wake to find a new one gone, and the others would mewl pitifully, scratching at the sides of the box and demanding her attention. She had taken the survivors to the vet a second time and paid another three hundred dollars just to be told that there wasn’t anything more they could do.
They were so far gone when she found them, the vet tech said helplessly.
She had done everything that she could.
Losing kittens in and of itself was a gut-wrenching thing. But Kai’s grief made it a hundred times worse. It was like each small death cracked open the bottomless reservoir of pain and confusion that he had struggled with since losing his dad.
He cried for hours when the first kitten died, the little white one that was even smaller than the others. He wailed when he found his mother burying the second. After that, when he woke in the morning to see the litter reduced by one, he crawled back into bed to cry.
The night before, the fluffy black kitten had been lethargic. She had refused a bottle, and Emma knew in her heart that the tiny cat wouldn’t last the night. Still, she had hoped. But she got up before dawn and found her already gone.
The orange kitten was the only one left. He cried so pitifully when left alone that she’d put a sweatshirt on backwards and nestled him into the hanging pouch created by the hood.
He curled up over to her heart and promptly fell asleep, peaceful as a baby in a sling.
She walked outside to bury the latest unfortunate, and that’s when she saw her garden.
It was ruined.
She watched in fascination as a huge sow squeezed beneath the fence and a line of adorable black piglets followed her out of the garden. She didn’t shout or try to hurry them along. The damage was already done.
The pigs had routed up every bit of sweet potato, every corm of taro.
And her tiny, fragile seedlings were collateral damage.
She’d planted all of the dozens of types of heirloom seeds that Toni had sent in the mail. There had been multiple varieties of collard greens, varicolored tomatoes, cucumbers and flowers and radishes and long beans. Even a rainbow of carrot varieties that were supposed to do well in the heat and humidity of Hawai’i.
Sowing those seeds had been such a comfort to her. Starting something of her own, something new and deliberate.
