Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [54]
Out of nowhere, Alice said, “We’re going to lay him to rest here.” Then she waved a hand vaguely, as if to indicate the air.
Through the two squares of the ambulance window, Honolulu seemed to David no different from any other city in America, no island paradise, just another web-weave of overpass and underpass, of highways coursing past dilapidated buildings and streets without pedestrians. His face, his whole outer being, was like a shell. He rested his hand on Alice’s leg but wouldn’t look at her—at them. If he did, he feared he might disintegrate. From the airport they passed along a waterfront full of giant cranes and navy ships—it reminded him of Baltimore—and then onto the freeway, David realizing afterward that it was Pearl Harbor.
Fifteen minutes into their trip, however, the landscape changed and he spotted homes built into the lush mountainside around him, with bare black rock peeking out from them, the houses nestled into the trees white and rectangular, two-level, oddly plain, their wide windows seeming to catch the light of the brilliant blue sky, all of them oriented toward the Pacific sparkling off to his right. Though hardly mansions, they evoked an impossible luxury of hillside, altitude, ocean view, and a breeze that freshened the spirit just to see, all that and the owners’ belief that what they deserved in life could, coupled with determination, become real. Something so simple: I will live in Hawaii and see the ocean every day. The people who lived here must be smarter than me, David thought. They understood themselves well enough that they’d made such a life possible. He patted Alice’s leg, glanced at her and the child, then turned away again. My God. He wanted to apologize to her. To confess a crime. She lay holding their child and was still so utterly remote. Coming over a rise, looking past the paramedic through the windshield, he saw a giant hull of rock sloped at its tip like a scimitar, humped at its peak with a nape like some breeching sea creature, and then a whole land mass came into view, extending beyond the stacked towers and white beachfront hotels of downtown Waikiki that stood in elemental chiaroscuro—the prow of Oahu. That mountain, he realized, was the iconic Diamond Head, its slopes carved with runnels like dried clay a giant cat had gouged, the rock above unscathed and uninhabitable, so ancient compared to the man-made structures along the coast that it seemed wholly new and beautiful. Again David could make out houses built around the base, glinting like piled diamonds beneath low clouds that were as tall as mountains themselves. And he thought his own imagination for life had somehow failed him. It was so beautiful here it shamed you. And then it occurred to him that given what had happened to them, his wife lying next to him on a gurney with their dead baby, even now he was thinking the wrong thing.
He wanted to say something to Alice, but after gathering the courage and then looking at the two of them he was still afraid to speak. “What hospital are you taking us to?” he asked the paramedic.
The man was a native, heavyset, with skin the color of caramel, his long ink-black hair tied back in a pony tail. “Kaiser Permanente,” he said. As if it made any difference.
Upon arrival, the doctors took his wife to run some tests, and the child went with her. He wasn’t told how long she’d be gone, so in a daze he took a seat in the waiting room and stared at the television, his mind adrift. The local news reporters somehow looked the same. Anchorman, weatherman, sportscaster: all shades of different races but a universal type. Suddenly sure this was a dream, struggling for several moments to breathe, he thought of Alice’s story of choking. So much hope in the telling, he thought, even in a saga of such loneliness. Their conversation had been meant to exorcise misfortune such as this. It had been, he realized, a gathering before a leap of faith, kind of a long prayer. And he was sure his one bad thought—It doesn’t matter