Mosaic

The sink clogs whenever my father-in-law, Clyde, comes to visit. He flies in each year at the end of December, staying in our first-floor bedroom with the en suite because of his bad knee. My husband, Keone, works overtime for extra money; the holidays are busy, he tells me. He always does this when his father is in town. He leaves me. Without him, Lily, my stepdaughter, and I are tasked with entertaining Clyde. If it were just Lily and me, it would be lovely. But with Clyde around everything feels wrapped up and boxed in, like I’m a present waiting to be ripped open, sitting under the tree.

I’ve told Clyde not to put eggshells down the drain, but he’s done so anyway. He’s making fried rice for lunch, Lily’s favorite. She’s happy, which makes me happy, but between the bacon grease and the eggshells, our sink overflows. Then the downstairs toilet stops flushing. I think of calling Keone, but instead dial the plumber.

“I can be there in a few hours,” the plumber says, and I sigh, okay.

Lily hunches over the kitchen table as she eats. She is chubby and knows it, already self-conscious. She is six. I want to cast her in resin, press pause on her blossoming. She doesn’t realize she is growing, about to sprout into a younger version of her mother, Myna, the woman Keone married before me.

Myna passed when Lily was one, but I’ve seen the pictures. Keone keeps them in his closet, hidden under a pile of college-era sweaters he has no use for in Hawai`i. Once, when Keone was at work and Lily was sleeping, I stayed up flipping through the photos, stopping only when my eyes got so blurry I couldn’t see. There is a picture of Myna pregnant with Lily. She is laughing, bikini-clad, her round, naked belly catching the sun. My teeth ache looking at her beauty. I keep that photo in the drawer of my desk, and look at it on nights I get stuck in cycles of worry, obsession—the nights I cannot sleep. Lily is lucky. She’s not my daughter; she won’t have my thin hair or thick legs. She will be pretty, something I am scared to tell her, lest she someday use it against me.

Clyde’s chewing is loud and sloppy, like so many things he does. He likes hugging and giving wet, mustachey kisses on the cheek. Keone is the same: reaching, wanting to be close to me. When I first met him, nearly five years ago, he had just lost Myna, and was grieving, the sadness apparent in the deep line between his eyes. He was thirty-three. He stood in the corner of my art exhibit, studying a painting of a woman crying flowers. I did not know then of his constant need. How it would oppress me. I have never liked to be touched, preferring a love that sits by and appreciates, but he is always touching, always saying he loves me and waiting for me to say it back.

The smell of onions and bacon is thick in the air. Oil oozes from my pores. I open a window. I wipe spilt shoyu from the countertop and stack dirty pans beside the clogged sink. The water is gray, blanketed with grease.

Clyde adds his plate to the pile I’ve made.

“Sorry about the eggshells, Amy,” he says.

“It’s fine,” I say, even though it’s not.

I think of a bird I found, ten years ago, on Ocean Beach. I was twenty-two and working in San Francisco, living in the Sunset District with my aunt to save money. On early mornings I walked the shore and watched dawn patrol surfers snake waves, the salty spray settling like frost on the hair of my arms. That fall, a container ship got lost in the fog and spilled tens of thousands of gallons of fuel into the Bay. Hundreds of birds washed up on Ocean Beach, drowned in black sludge. I found one alive, and carried it home. I scrubbed it with soap, but it shivered and would not eat. When it died, I buried it in my aunt’s backyard, in a box I dug out of the recycling. I wonder if it is still there, decomposing.

Lily hands me her plate. She leans into me, an arm wrapped around my thigh.

“Did you get enough to eat?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer, looking up at Clyde, who stands by the stove. “Papa, can we play now?” she asks.

“Lily wants to play backgammon,” Clyde tells me.

When Keone and I married, Clyde gave us an antique set. I tell him I’ll get it, and summit the white carpet of the staircase to open the storage closet. The backgammon sits out of reach. I grasp for it, and my shoulder pinches as the game slides into my hands.

“Found it.” I say to Lily, who waits at the bottom of the stairs.

When I’m sure they have all the pieces I retreat to my art studio in the back, leaving the door open so I can hear them if they need anything. Listening to the whir of the fan and the click of backgammon chips, I glaze the tiles first, then move to the mosaic, breaking colored squares of ceramic to construct the protea that’ll soon grace the front of Lily’s first grade building.

When Lily was three, my cousin got married on Maui. We went, and stayed at a protea farm in Kula. The morning of the wedding, Lily and I woke early. Keone was still asleep, and I knew he was tired, so we left him, creeping out the sliding glass doors and into the fog. I held Lily’s hand until we were far enough from the house that we wouldn’t wake Keone. Then I let her go, and she ran down the rows of protea, laughing, until her skirt caught in a bush. I had to kneel in the mud to untangle her. When she was free, she kissed my cheek with her wet mouth and I stood, clutched my sweater to my chest, felt my heart squeeze. The sun rose and burnt off the fog, and Lily gathered flowers that, back in the room, she showed to Keone. He pretended to smell them, senses damp with sleep. Later that day she held the tired stems in her hands as we watched the bride walk down the beach. It reminded me of how she had looked months earlier, the flower girl at our wedding, how she’d pulled on my dress, one arm around Keone, the other around me.

I work at the mosaic until my hand cramps. In the kitchen, Clyde and Lily are still playing. I am surprised at Lily’s patience. Backgammon bores me. I fill a glass of water from the fridge and listen to Clyde, who is showing Lily something.

“This is how you’re supposed to play,” he says, as if the way Keone has shown her is wrong. In truth, it might be. Keone is always bending rules, remaking them to fit Lily. It is a point of contention for us—his inability to discipline, his tendency to leave bad cop to me. Clyde goes on. “If you leave a chip alone, it’ll be eaten.” He knocks her black chip away, and throws it into the rectangular box where it started. His white chip takes its place.

Lily looks at me. She is young, and only enjoys games where winning is easy. I know she wants to protest, so I nod for her to keep playing.

“Double fours,” Clyde says, after her dice settle. He looks at the board. “You skip your turn.”

Clyde rolls double sixes and gets half his chips in. I watch Lily’s frustration grow. It wrinkles her brow, presses the flower of her mouth flat. I sip my water. She rolls doubles again, but has nowhere to go. The felt pads squeak as she pushes her chair back.

“Can I go outside?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say, relieved. She’ll be happier in the garden. “But wear shoes, okay?”

She runs out the door.

Keone hasn’t done yardwork in weeks, and the front patio is buried in bougainvillea. The blossoms dry from red to brown and gray, clumping together when it rains. They hide all manner of things, from thorns to centipedes. Keone keeps saying he’ll rake them, but when he gets home from work he is too tired to do anything; he lies on the couch with his dirty fireman boots on, smelling of sweat and propane.

“You can’t let her give up when things get hard,” Clyde tells me.

“She’s six,” I say. I’ve never understood adults who need to beat children at games. “Backgammon won’t set the tone for her life.”

Clyde stares at me. My right hand balls into a fist as I wait for him to say something. He doesn't. Instead, he packs up the backgammon set.

I know Clyde doesn’t approve of me. He thinks my art is a joke, that all I do is spend Keone’s money. He hates that I can’t cook. The truth is, I can but don’t like to. I prefer to make salads and casseroles, things that don’t require watching, and when it comes to complicated recipes, like Myna’s beef perogies, I don’t have the patience. Sometimes, when Clyde’s trying to hurt me he’ll bring up Myna’s cooking. Myna owned a bakery, which is where she met Keone, and she made award-winning pies. When she died, Keone sold the shop to a Portuguese family. I went there once for a slice of cake. It was dry. I threw it away to save myself the calories.

Leaving Clyde, I walk upstairs to my office. I need to design the graphics for a new project: a stylized wave that will hang above Whole Foods. I also want to be away from Clyde, so I don’t say something nasty. For half an hour I drag lines, switch shades, trying to preserve the wave’s integrity.

When I can’t avoid it any longer, I open the envelope beside my computer. I take the papers out and spread them over my desk. There are so many, and the thought of reading them, which my lawyer says I should do, knots my stomach. I’m staring at the line where my name is written when I hear Lily trip up the stairs. I turn in my chair just as she walks through the doorway.

The color has fallen from her cheeks.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

There are no cuts or bumps, no bruising or scratches that I can see. Then I notice her big toe bleeding. At first I think she’s stubbed it, but then I see blood on the hallway carpet.

“Let’s go to the bathroom,” I say. I focus on keeping my voice steady.

Usually, Lily is too heavy for me, but today I pick her up easily. In the bathroom, I sit her down at the edge of the tub and put a towel under her foot. Blood wells up and over the lip of her toe—where the nail should be. Worry bubbles in my stomach and into my chest. I burp a mouthful of breakfast: oatmeal and smoothie. I have acid reflux. My doctor has told me to stop eating dairy and fried things, and I have, but it’s more than that; it’s triggered emotionally. For a moment I think that I should take her to the ER, but decide to call Keone—before he was a fireman, he was an EMT. He answers on the first ring.

“Are you okay?”

I never call when Keone’s working. My days are busy with my arts and Lily. Keone is the one who always calls, texts, leaves voicemails that say: it’s Keone, call me, like I don’t have Caller ID.

“Lily hurt her toe,” I tell him. “You’re on speaker phone,” I add, so he doesn’t say anything to scare her.

He asks how bad it is and I tell him it’s bleeding, that the toenail is gone but there doesn’t seem to be anything else wrong that I can see.

“Did she cut it on something rusty?” he asks.

“I dropped the bird bath on my foot,” Lily says, crying.

I didn’t know we had a bird bath. I’m always finding new things on our property. Recently, I tripped over a wheelbarrow in our backyard that Keone said was lost. The grass needs mowing, the trees and bushes trimming, but Keone won’t pay for a yardman.

“Where?” Keone asks.

“By the driveway,” she says. “Under the mock orange.”

Hidden in the same vines I asked Keone to get rid of yesterday.

“Why were you in there?” I ask. Lily knows she isn’t allowed in the bushes, where she could easily slip or fall without anyone knowing.

“I was making a potion,” Lily says. “I needed leaves.”

This isn’t the first incident we’ve had with potions. Two weeks ago, she ate mystery berries that made her throat swell. I had to take her to the ER, where they stabbed her with an EpiPen and gave us allergy medicine to grind up in her morning smoothies. She’s obsessed with magic. She thinks she’s a witch who’s yet to discover her abilities.

“It’s bleeding a lot,” I tell Keone.

“You need to apply pressure and elevate,” Keone says. His voice has flattened into professionalism. “Since she didn’t cut it with anything rusty, you can wrap it up at home.”

Rummaging through the drawers, all I find are Looney Toons band aids and Neosporin.

“Keone, where’s the gauze?” I ask.

“In the kitchen,” he says. “Drawer below the utensils, I think.”

“I don’t want to leave her,” I tell him, and Lily grabs my hand.

“I’ll call my dad and tell him to bring the wrap upstairs,” Keone says. I ask about Clyde’s knee and Keone pauses. “One trip up won’t kill him.”

Keone hangs up and I’m left holding Lily. I hear Clyde’s phone ring downstairs, the bass of his voice echoing. In the mornings, when he calls his friends back in Illinois, he shouts into the phone and wakes up Lily, who crawls into bed with Keone and me.

“I’ll be up in a sec,” Clyde calls to me.

Lily has never bled this much. She will be okay, but I’m afraid for her future. One day her mother was alive and the next she was hit by a car while crossing the street. Even if Lily grows up healthy, the world is predicted to flood and burn. And then there’s the business of Keone and me.

My phone rings as Clyde walks into the bathroom. It’s Keone.

“Hi,” I answer. “We have everything.”

“Should I walk you through it, or are you good?” he asks.

I look at Clyde, whose hands are empty. He’s put the gauze on the dirty floor. I bite my lip to stop from screaming.

“You don’t need to walk me through it,” I tell Keone. “But could you stay on the line? Please.”

Keone agrees. I pour peroxide over Lily’s toe, and it bubbles, frothing down her foot to mix with the blood on the white towel. Lily whimpers, perched on the bathtub’s edge.

“Hold tight, sweet pea,” I murmur.

Covering the wound with ointment, I place a small square of gauze on top and start wrapping the roll around the base, then up and around her big toe, across her small foot. There is dirt on her sole, and I realize she didn’t wear shoes. For a moment, I’m angry, the gauze pulling tight, but my worry is overwhelming. Lily has her shirt in her mouth. The bottom of it twists in her fists. I wrap until the roll of gauze runs out, then I tape it.

“It’s done,” I tell Keone. He says good. He tells Lily he loves her and I try to have her say it back but she hides in her shirt. He hangs up, making me promise to call if I need anything.

Clyde has disappeared, and I am alone in the bathroom with Lily. I can tell she’s tired by the way she breathes. She peeks up at me, over the stretched neck of her shirt. Her eyes are hazel, the color of her mother’s. A reminder that she is not mine, that if I leave Keone she will cease to be in my life altogether.

I pick her up. Without worry and adrenaline to help me, she’s twice as heavy. I struggle to her room and lie her on the bed. There is dirt on her cheek, and I lick my thumb to rub her skin clean. She holds her teddy bear and stares up at me.

“Can you sing?” she asks.

I do not have a good voice. In high school I took sculpture and glass blowing instead of band or choir. When Keone first told me he had a daughter, I worried I’d be the third wheel. I never thought the problem would be my love for Lily. The thought of leaving her breaks me.

“Sure, honey,” I say.

I clear my throat and sing the chorus of Hele On To Kauai, over and over until she relaxes with sleep. The teddy bear rolls from her arms and onto the floor. Placing it beside her, I tiptoe out the door, leaving it cracked so I can hear if she calls out. So I can sneak back in to hold her while she sleeps.

“Your office is nice,” Clyde says, sitting at my desk. “The view is pretty.”

He gestures to the green valley below as the hair on my arm stands. The creases of his palms are deep, and I realize Lily has his hands. When she was two and a half, I took her to a palm reader. She was sickly then, accident prone like she is now, and I worried often that she would be taken from me. The lady said she had fire hands and would be confident and hard working. She’d be restless in love, but ultimately happy. In response to my worry, she said Lily would be fine: her long life line signified strength. I look at the lines of Clyde’s hands and wonder if these things run in families.

“When are you telling Keone?” Clyde asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. I lean against the doorframe and close my eyes. “I don’t even know if I want it. I got the papers written to see if it was something I could do.”

“You’ll have to leave Lily,” Clyde says.

Opening my eyes, I reach for the papers. “Can I have them back. Please?”

He puts them on my desk. “I need to make some calls,” he says, and stands. I know he is lying. He called his friends this morning. But I step aside and listen to him clump down the stairs.

The picture of Myna has been taken out of its drawer. It lies on my desk, its corner creased. I stare at the messy stack of papers. I think of Lily’s small chest rising and falling with sleep, her cockatoo hair fresh out the shower, how she screams when running from waves on the beach. I picture her in Keone’s arms, the sunset turning them both golden.

I go back to Lily’s room. I don’t want to see Clyde or the clogged sink. Carefully, I slide Lily over and lay beside her. She twitches, and her lids roll back, cat-like.

“I love you, Amy,” she whispers.

Her breath is sweet with sleep.

I wake to the sound of Keone coming home. It is four in the afternoon; he's gotten off early. His car door shuts. The gate clinks open. I wait for him to come up the stairs to Lily and me, but instead I hear the low murmur of voices as he talks to Clyde.

I untangle myself from Lily. Outside the sliding door of Clyde’s en suite I listen.

“When she wrapped Lily’s toe it went white,” Clyde says. “It’s probably purple now. She had no idea what she was doing.”

“And the sink?” Keone asks.

"Lily was hungry,” Clyde says. “It got stopped while I was cooking.”

“Did Amy call the plumber?”

“If she did, they haven’t come,” Clyde says.

Taking a breath, I smile my way into the room. Clyde’s face pinches when he sees me.

“You’re awake,” Clyde says.

“Yes.” My voice is tight with anger. “And to answer your question,” I turn to Keone, “I did call the plumber. Hours ago.”

Keone sighs, as he does when we fight. He is tired, the line between his eyes deep.

“I guess we should order dinner,” he says.

“Let’s get Happy Days,” Clyde says. “I’m tired of Josés.”

I walk to the door. “Lily likes chow fun, so get her that,” I tell Keone.

Keone tells me to wait, but I leave the room. He follows me out through the living room, into the kitchen.

“What’s wrong?” Keone says.

“Your father is an asshole,” I tell him.

“He’s just old,” he says. “He’ll be gone in a few weeks.”

“You’re not here all day,” I say. “He drives me crazy.”

“What do you want me to do? Tell him to get a hotel? Fly back to Illinois?”

“I want you to stand up for me!”

The sink drips, sounding hollow as water hits water.

“You’ve been angry for weeks, Amy,” Keone says, and I’m surprised. I didn’t think he noticed. “Before my dad. What’s going on?”

I look at him. Into his crinkly blue eyes, at his hair that is too long, curling up silver. I want to tell him. About the picture. About the papers. That I cannot stand it. It’s not Clyde, but everything: I don’t have space; I can feel myself getting smaller, pruning myself to be the woman he wants. The mother Lily needs. But I can’t say it, not yet. So I turn, and when I do, he does not follow me.

I walk out into the flowerbeds. My feet are heavy and snap the soft laua'e fronds beneath me. When I find the bird bath it is overturned, dragged halfway out of the bleeding hearts. Wrestling it right side up, I find that it’s at least thirty pounds. I don’t know how Lily moved it, can’t imagine it falling on either of my own feet. Its edges are scalloped and cracked, made of fake marble that is actually concrete. Sitting next to it, I hope there are no centipedes. The wind blows, and the white mock orange petals spiral. Some of them gather in the dip of my skirt, between my folded knees. The sweet, crushed laua'e mixes with sharp citrus, and I stay there as the lights in my house turn on in the dark. Dishes clink as Keone rearranges things. The first star blinks. I wipe my face with my hands and stand. The mud squishes beneath my bare feet.

I will remember this as the day I leave Keone, though I won’t pack my bags until March and we won’t sign the papers until next December. I will move to San Francisco, marry again, and give birth to two boys of my own. Though it hurts me, I will try not to think of Lily, but one day, when I’m in the garden, watching my younger son scream through the sprinklers, Lily will friend request me and I’ll accept, hesitantly. She will message, asking to get coffee, and I’ll agree.

When I see her waiting, she’ll look just like Myna. Her blonde hair will have darkened to honey, and her round chin will be the only reminder of her six-year-old face. Seeing me, she’ll stand, so much taller than I imagined. Without thinking, I will hold out my hand, and she’ll take it, but not before pausing. I’ll know then that I’ve made a mistake—I should have hugged her. Sitting with a cup of tea, I’ll memorize how she tilts her head, tosses her hair, the way she dips her chin when emphasizing something. She’ll tell me she’s graduated from college with honors, that she’s moved to San Francisco for work. I’ll be proud, and immediately guilty, knowing I did nothing to help her. That, in fact, I’m someone who hurt her. At some point, I'll catch her looking at my wedding ring, so I’ll tell her of my new family, of the house we live in—my aunt’s. She’ll ask to see pictures and I’ll show her. When she looks at them, I will see it in her eyes: that dull, familiar ache. She has missed me.

I will pay for the coffee, and at the door of the café she won’t give me a choice—she will hug me. With my face in her neck, I will remember her six-year-old scent: rich and earthy with play, soapy fresh when clean. We’ll exchange numbers, and when she messages me two weeks later I will be in my studio, standing in front of my newest piece. Scalloping the last petal of a ceramic protea, shaping its round leaves.