Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [71]
Agreeing, he took her camera. The parents stood formally, a boy before each of them. Would sights such as these, he wondered, always make them sad?
“Should we take your picture?” the woman asked.
David looked at his wife.
She flexed her ankle and then, for the first time in weeks, regarded him with something approaching warmth.
“Yes,” she said.
She got up and stood next to him. He took off his pack. Before he knew what was happening, she put her arm around his waist. It almost made him jump, he was so startled by her touch. Gently, he rested his arm on her injured shoulder.
If you were to look at the picture, he thought many months later, you’d think they were happy.
They left the lookout and within the hour were making the descent to the beach. They could see it in flashes as they switchbacked down the terraced trail, though it was like looking over a terrace without railings, the sheerness of the drop scaring them back from the edge. The shape of the valley leading to the beach was like an arrowhead driven between the cliffs, treacherous work going down. David, wary from his earlier stumbles, was extra careful. But even with the utmost caution he still slipped, the rocks coming out from under him when he leaned too far back, so he had to sit down and skid to a halt. He fell three separate times but continued without pause, urged on by the promise of a break in this labor, of food, a relief from the weight of their packs. We’ll never make the campsite, he thought. They stopped only once, at a wooden sign that was painted brown, the letters yellow. At the top, in white, was a skull and crossbones; at the very bottom, a stickman swimming in a red circle with a red slash through it. WARNING. MORE DROWNINGS OCCUR AT HANAKAPI’AI THAN AT ANY OTHER BEACH IN KAUAI. DO NOT SWIM UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Beneath this warning were five sets of marks adding up to twenty-three.
But Hanakapi’ai didn’t look deadly at all, in fact seemed positively benign. At the last leg of the descent the trail was broken by a river of boulders—oblong, gray, and smooth, as small as bird’s eggs or as big as cars—that ran down to another terraced formation, a six-foot face they had to climb down to get to sand. Like Ke’e, the place was crowded with day hikers, more serious folks resting from the eight-mile round trip to Hanakoa Valley, and several hard-core expeditionists on their way back from Kalalau. The beach was much wider than it had seemed from above and easily three hundred yards long, with a giant cave at the far end, its mouth open to the sea. In the cliff wall beside it, people had stashed their backpacks and boots and hung their socks and damp shirts to dry, the hikers themselves lying in the cave’s shade or sitting where the waves broke and cooling off in the spray. Ahead, parallel to the water, was a gigantic tidal pool as long as a football field. In spite of the warning sign, maybe twenty children were swimming in the ocean beyond it.
“How do you feel?” David said.
“I’m tired,” Alice said. “My shoulder hurts.” She was sitting on a nearby rock, her pack at her feet, an energy bar in her hand. She chewed as if it were a nearly impossible exertion, then took out her water container and drank. “And I’m hot.”
“I’m hot too,” he said.
“I didn’t think it would be this hard.”
“I didn’t either,” he lied.
But she no longer seemed angry, and this elated him. The burst of confidence reminded him that he’d swum in lagoons but hadn’t yet been in open surf. If they turned around, this might be his last chance. “It doesn’t look so bad,” he said.
He looked at her, then back at the water, and she looked with him. From here the waves appeared no bigger than those he’d swum in before.
“I’m going to go in,” he said.
“It said you shouldn’t. That it’s dangerous.”
“I’m sure it is. But look at the kids.” He could hear them laughing. “I’m going to cool off.”
She gazed at the water longingly, then finished her energy bar.
“Do you want to come?” He stretched out his hand to her, emboldened that she’d touched