Sandra Guarino was in a private room on the same floor. When I looked inside, the first thing I saw was a big red floral arrangement sent by her law firm. Sandra was lying in the bed very still, IV tubes in her arms and the mask of a respirator over her face. Her gown was a brighter shade of green than the ones the boys had been wearing, but it still looked like crap.
Then I saw Cathy Selkirk sitting by the window, her tiny frame dwarfed by the oversized chair. She had her knees pulled up to her and was staring out at the highway beyond.
“Hey. How’s Sandra?”
“Kimo.” Cathy got up and came over to me. Her head barely reached my breastbone. I held on to her as she started to cry. I felt my own tears welling up, but I pushed them back down.
I let her cry for a minute or two and then pulled back. “Come on, everything’s going to work out.” I sat on the window ledge. “Tell me about Sandra.”
“She hasn’t recovered consciousness yet.” She pulled a linen handkerchief from the pocket of her dress and I realized she was still wearing what she had worn to the party. She dried her eyes. “The doctors don’t know what to expect. They notified her parents and they’re flying in this afternoon from Oregon.”
“That’s good, right? You’ll have somebody here with you.”
“They never approved of me and Sandy. I’m afraid, Kimo. I’m afraid Sandy won’t wake up. I’m afraid her parents will come and they won’t let me see her. That they’ll-make decisions-that aren’t-what she’d want.”
“You don’t have a power of attorney, or medical authorizations or anything like that?”
“I have it all. You know how Sandy is-everything’s organized. But that doesn’t mean they’ll pay attention to it. I’m not strong like she is. I can’t stand up to her parents, the doctors-it’s too hard.” She sat in the big chair again, and she was so tiny that she looked like a small child. “It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? If we were able to get married then I wouldn’t have a lot of these problems.”
“I’ve got an idea.” I reached for the phone and called my brother’s office. After a couple of minutes on hold, listening to the weather guy’s pre-recorded voice promising sunshine and breezes, Lui came on. “Hey, brah. I’ve got a story for you.” I ran down Cathy’s situation for him. “It’s got a hook for you, tied into the bombing last night. You can keep running all that footage. You guys love all those explosions and fires and shit, don’t you?”
“Thanks for your high opinion of my job,” my brother said. “Let me talk to Cathy.”
They spoke for a couple of minutes and then she handed the phone back to me. “How’s Dad?” Lui asked.
“I haven’t gotten there yet. He’s next on my list.”
“Jeez, and they say I’m the son that doesn’t care. You’re in the goddamned hospital and you don’t even go to see him.”
“I’m getting there, I’m getting there.”
“Call me and let me know what you think.” He hung up and I turned back to Cathy.
“He’s going to send a crew to interview me,” she said. “I hate the thought of having our private lives on television, though.”
“Tell me about it.” I reached over and took her hand. “It’s what Sandra would do, though, isn’t it? Fight back?”
She smiled. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
I leaned back against the window and told Cathy what I had discovered so far. “Did you see anybody suspicious? Any sweaty-looking guy going into or coming out of the men’s room?”
She shook her head. “I was way too busy talking to people. You know how that goes. Sandy and I were trying to chat up the donors, make sure everybody was having a good time.”
Cathy smiled, and I looked at my watch. I’d been away from my desk for almost an hour, and I still had to see my father. “I’ve gotta go, sweetie. You have anybody to come stay with you?”
“Maria Luisa, Sandy’s secretary, she’s going to come over and sit with me for a while this afternoon, once she gets Sandy’s calendar cleared. The doctors are going to come back later for some more tests.”
I scribbled the number of my cell phone on a piece of paper and handed it to Cathy. “You need anything, you call me.” I handed her the number and then took her hand. “You know Sandra’s a fighter. She’s not going to let this get her down. You’ve just got to hold on, okay?”
It was good advice for all of us, I thought.
My father’s room was one floor up, and I climbed the stairs figuring I’d pop in, say my hellos, make sure nobody in the family had seen anything, and get back to work. But I couldn’t find his room number, and had to ask an orderly. “That’s in Intensive Care,” he said. “Through those double doors.”
As soon as I walked in I saw my mother and Aunt Mei-Mei, sitting together holding hands behind the glass wall of my father’s room. My mother had exchanged her fancy holoku from the night before for a pair of navy slacks and a magenta and white hibiscus-print blouse. Aunt Mei-Mei wore the same kind of modified cheongsam she always did, this one in a red silk print. I was struck by how much they looked alike, my father’s wife and the wife of his long-time best friend. Both of them were petite, with an elegant, china-doll beauty. And both of them were strong as steel underneath the pretty exterior.
My father was in an elevated bed, surrounded by high-tech monitoring equipment. His gown was open at the neck so that wires could connect to his chest. A single bony hand rested outside the beige spread, with a plastic tube tied into it. I stopped just outside the room and stared.
He had been kind of a mythical figure to us as kids. At six feet, he seemed like a giant, with broad shoulders and strong hands, scarred from years of hanging drywall, laying roofing tiles, digging ditches, whatever he had to do to get his buildings finished. He had a temper as strong as the sea on a blustery day, and yet I remember when I broke my arm surfing when I was eight how gently he’d carried me from the ocean to the car, and then into the hospital emergency room.
Now the tables were turned and I was healthy (well, reasonably) and he was sick. I couldn’t get over how frail he looked in the loose hospital gown. When had he lost so much weight? How come my brothers and I hadn’t noticed?
My mother saw me in the doorway and got up. I hugged her and hoped she wouldn’t notice me wince when her hands touched my back. I smiled over her head at Aunt Mei-Mei. “I’m so glad you’re here, Kimo,” my mother said. “Haoa was here this morning, but he had to go out and look at a job. Tatiana and Liliha just went for some lunch.”
“How is he?”
Her eyes were bright with tears but she made no move to wipe them away. “They’re doing tests. All kinds of tests. He was coughing so bad from the smoke when they brought him in, and they put him on this machine, it said his heartbeat was irregular, so they wanted to monitor him.” She looked over to him. “At least he’s sleeping now. He’s not very happy to be here.”
As if on cue, he woke up and looked around. When my mother and I walked into the room, he said, “Goddamn it, am I still here? When are they going to let me out?”
“Hey, Dad.” I walked over to him, then leaned down and kissed his forehead. His chin was grizzled with gray and black stubble. “Howzit?”
“I’d be doing a lot better if they let me out of here. Hospitals are terrible places. People die in them all the time.”
“You know why they have fences on cemeteries, don’t you, Dad? Because people are dying to get in.”
“This is no time for jokes. Maybe now that you’re here your mother will listen to reason. Lokelani! Kimo agrees with me. I should go home.”
“I don’t agree with you at all,” I said. “You belong right here in bed, where the doctors can keep an eye on you.”
“Useless! You’re all useless. I raise three boys and I can’t get one of them to stand up for me.”
“Well, he certainly doesn’t act sick,” I said to my mother. She and Aunt Mei-Mei exchanged grins. I sat on the edge of the bed next to my father. “Now Dad, you know we have to figure out what’s wrong with you.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me except an ungrateful family.”
“Yeah, and that’s what makes those squiggles on the heart monitor. You might as well face facts, pal, you’re not getting out of here until the doctors say you can, and until that nice lady over there in the chair agrees to let you back into her house. You got that?”
He stared at me, and I stared back. I won, of course. I mean, I’ve been to the police academy, after all. If I couldn’t outstare one sick old man, even if he was my father, then they ought to take away my badge. “Maybe another day,” my father said. “But tomorrow, I want to go home!”
“We’ll see. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a job I have to do.” I told them all about the progress of the investigation so far, and asked if they had seen anything suspicious.
“I was too busy watching what your father ate,” my mother said. “And your father, he was too busy eating.”
“Dad?”
“I don’t know that woman. I don’t know what she’s doing here.”
I had to laugh, and he didn’t appreciate it. “Can you imagine? This is what I do all day. Interview cranky witnesses.”
My mother smiled. My father said, “I always wondered what it was you did.”
“Dad.”
“I didn’t see anybody suspicious. Between your mother and your brothers, nobody let me alone for a minute.”
I sighed. “So, Aunt Mei-Mei, how’s Uncle Chin? Is he as disagreeable as this one here?”
“Uncle Chin a little better,” she said. “Jimmy with him. Make him smile.”
“That’s good.” I looked down the hallway and saw my sisters-in-law approaching. “Hey, here come Tatiana and Liliha.” I felt this funny pang then, seeing my brothers’ wives. Lui and Haoa couldn’t be here with my father, but they had wives who could. Partners in the world, who would stand by them and their families, helping out when things got tough. I wondered if I would ever have that. Somebody to be there for me, to hold me when the big storms came.