The Presence

CHAPTER 3

Michael stared down at the islands that had finally appeared out of the endless expanse of sea. Three months! Three whole months! What was he supposed to do here for three months? A couple of weeks, sure! But three months? He could barely believe his mother had actually yanked him out of school just as he was about to make the track team. Still, he sort of knew why she’d done it.

It was the black eye and the cut on his arm that had made up her mind. If he’d just managed to give Slotzky the slip that day …

But he hadn’t, so now here he was, out in the middle of the ocean! He didn’t know anybody at all, and he’d never really been very good at making friends, always afraid that his asthma would get in the way. So what was he supposed to do while his mom was working the dig? From what she’d said, there wasn’t even a city on Maui — only a couple of little towns, and they weren’t even going to be living in one of them! On the other hand, the islands did look beautiful, and there was always the possibility that maybe his mom would finally let him learn to scuba dive. Even now, he could remember his father promising to take him diving as soon as he was strong enough to pick up the tanks. But then …

A vision of the burning airplane in which Tom Sundquist had died filled Michael’s mind, and he felt the familiar sick sensation that still came into his stomach whenever he remembered that morning when his whole life had literally blown up in front of his eyes. And now, just when it seemed like things were starting to go okay, his mom had made him come out here! “Will you at least let me learn to dive?” he asked, peering out the window at the islands below.

There was a bleakness in her son’s voice that twisted Katharine’s heart. It hadn’t been as easy as she’d hoped to convince him that this was going to be a great adventure. Still, Michael had finally accepted the fact that they were going to go, and switched from trying to talk her out of the trip to attempting to convince her he should be allowed to go scuba diving. Rather than refuse outright, she’d taken the coward’s way out. “We’ll see,” she now said yet again, wondering how much longer she could put off the inevitable confrontation that would occur when she finally told Michael she hated the idea of his risking his life under a hundred feet of water. But when he winced at her equivocation, she knew he’d already figured out what her final answer would be. Now, trying to steer him away from the subject, she leaned across her son and looked out the window.

A chain of islands lay spread beneath the plane. The day was perfectly clear, and a snowcapped mountain peak glistened against a sky that was somehow even bluer than the sea. As the plane began its descent, the islands grew clearer, and then the pilot’s voice came over the intercom, identifying them.

“To the right of the plane, we’re getting a terrific view of Oahu today, while passengers on the left can see the peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii. In a few minutes we’ll be able to look down into the craters of both Mauna Loa on the Big Island and Haleakala on Maui. I doubt any of you will have trouble figuring out which one is the active volcano.”

As the plane descended, Katharine glimpsed the smoke boiling up from one of the active vents on the flanks of Kilauea, but then her attention was diverted by the pilot’s voice.

“As we make the turn around Maui, passengers on the right side of the plane will be able to see the southwest coast of the island, with the resort areas of Wailea and Kihei stretched along what many people — myself included — believe to be the best string of beaches in the state. For those of you who are visiting, may I be the first to wish you aloha. For those lucky enough to live here, welcome home.”

The plane swept lower and banked into the final turn. Through the window Katharine could see the coastline winding up toward Lahaina, and then the wildly rugged, green-clad buttresses of the West Maui mountains came into view. Below, a carpet of green spread across the valley floor.

The plane touched down, slowed, and turned to taxi up to the long, low building that housed the airport at Kahului. Michael was out of his seat the moment the DC-10 came to a stop, working his way around Katharine’s legs in his anxiety to retrieve their carry-on bags from the overhead compartment. Three minutes later, Katharine stepped out of the plane and felt the first naturally warmed air she’d experienced in months. She walked quickly through the jetway into the gate area. Michael was already outside the glass doors, and when he turned, she could see the wide grin on his face. She took a deep breath as the doors slid open in front of her, and as the fragrant air filled her lungs, a single word came into her mind.

Soft.

It was the only word to describe the caress of the gentle breeze.

Soft.

“We’re sure not in New York anymore, are we?” she heard her son say.

She glared at him with an expression of exasperation that was only slightly exaggerated. “I don’t believe it! We’re in paradise for three months, and all you can say is it’s not New York?”

“Come on, Mom! I didn’t say it was terrible! Actually, the weather’s not too bad. It’s—”

But Katharine was no longer listening to him, for she’d spotted a familiar figure at the far end of the long walkway.

A figure she hadn’t seen since graduate school, but whom she nevertheless recognized instantly.

Rob Silver.

He was as lithe and muscular as he’d been twenty years earlier, but his face had weathered into a rugged handsomeness, and his mop of unruly hair had grayed slightly. His eyes, however, sparkling as they fixed on her, were every bit as blue as she’d remembered them. As he dropped a sweet-smelling lei over her shoulders, he echoed aloud the words that had popped into her head the minute she’d seen him: “My God, you’re even more gorgeous than I remembered!”

While she tried to cover the flush that had come into her cheeks, he stuck his hand out to her son. “Hi,” he said. “You must be Michael. I’m Rob Silver.”

Michael hesitated, his eyes moving from Rob to his mother. He frowned, as if trying to puzzle something out, and when he at last took the hand that had been extended to him, Katharine could sense his reluctance. “Nice to meet you,” he said.

As they headed toward the baggage area, Katharine knew that despite his words, Michael wasn’t sure if he was pleased to meet Rob Silver or not.

She suspected that he was leaning toward “not.”

“They actually pay you to work out here?” Katharine asked as Rob Silver turned his dusty Ford Explorer onto a four-lane highway that seemed to lead straight up the vast mountain that made up the southeastern half of Maui. The car’s windows were wide open, and though the trade winds were blowing, the breeze held none of the bite of the harsh winter gale that had been lashing through the streets of Manhattan when they’d left the day before.

Rob gave her a mischievous glance. “Can I take that as an offer that you’ll work for free?”

“Fat chance,” Katharine replied. “I’m a poor working mother, remember? The happily starving student you used to know is long gone.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Rob drawled. “Doesn’t seem to me like you’ve changed at all.” Catching the look that came into Michael’s eyes in the rearview mirror — a look made up of equal parts suspicion and disapproval — Rob dropped the flirtatious note from his voice. “Actually, I’m not sure what’ll happen when I’m done with my project out here. I’ve got some feelers in at the university, but I suspect there are at least ten people I’d have to kill to get to the top of the list.”

“How much longer does your grant run?” Katharine asked.

In the backseat, Michael turned and gazed out the window at the cane fields that lined both sides of the road, tuning out the conversation droning on in the front seat. Couldn’t they ever talk about anything but money? Sometimes it seemed like that was the only thing his mother and her friends were really interested in.

Except for Rob Silver. From the moment he’d seen the way Rob Silver looked at his mother, Michael was pretty sure he knew what that man was interested in. And he was very sure that Silver and his mother hadn’t just been friends back in college. He’d also understood that as far as Rob Silver was concerned, nothing had changed.

Funny how his mother hadn’t said anything about that when she’d been trying to convince him that coming to Maui was such a great idea. Now, as the Explorer rolled through the fields, he was beginning to understand what she’d meant. Sure it was great for her — she got a good job, and plenty of money, and a man he could tell she was interested in, based on the way she’d looked at him at the airport.

So here he was, in a place where he didn’t know a single soul except his mother, and with only about three months of school left. Too much for him to talk his mom into letting him skip the rest of the year — he’d already tried that one — but not enough to give him time to make any friends, despite what his mother had said. He could still hear her: “Of course you’ll make friends. It’s not like New York. It’ll be easy.”

But it wouldn’t be easy. Easy? Michael wished his mom could understand how hard it really was to meet a whole new bunch of kids. Kids who might not like him. Or who might make fun of him the way they used to when he was sick all the time. Well, he wasn’t sick anymore, so maybe things would be different. Maybe he wouldn’t be quite as lonely as he thought. He sure hoped not.

His reverie was interrupted by the sight of a great plume of smoke billowing off to the left. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Sugarcane fire,” Rob Silver explained. “They burn the fields to make it easier to harvest the cane. That way they’re not hauling a lot of extra vegetation around. You’ll get so you automatically close the windows whenever you see it.”

“How come? It’s gotta be half a mile away.” Just then a blob of black soot blew in the open window, smearing across Michael’s shirt as he tried to brush it away. As he heard Rob laughing in the front seat, he felt his face redden.

“It’s called Maui snow,” Rob told him.

As the car climbed the flank of Haleakala, the cane fields were replaced by pineapple, and a few miles farther on, the pineapple, in turn, gave way to pastureland. But they were pastures that looked nothing at all like the farms of upstate New York. Here the pastures were an emerald-green, and dotted with jacaranda trees covered with lavender flowers.

A few miles farther on Rob turned off to the left. “That’s where you’ll be going to school,” he said, tipping his head toward a cluster of buildings that lay off to the right. Peering out the window, Michael saw a campus that bore no resemblance to the school he’d attended in New York. Instead of a huge brick block of a building with a fenced-in, asphalt-paved lot next to it that served as an athletic field, this school consisted of a group of single-story buildings shaded by enormous trees, set in a spacious lawn. Beyond were a baseball field, basketball and tennis courts, and a full track as well as a football field.

Half a dozen guys were on the track, and as they drove past, Michael studied their speed and pacing, measuring his own abilities against the runners’.

His mother turned in the front seat. “Do I get credit for being right about them having a track team?”

Michael tried to suppress the grin that was threatening to lighten his mood, but failed miserably. “I guess so,” he admitted. “And I guess I can’t really say the school in New York had a nicer campus, can I?”

“Hallelujah!” Katharine exclaimed. “Maybe there’s going to be life after New York after all.”

Less than a mile farther on they came to a tiny town. “This is Makawao,” Rob said. “It used to be a cowboy town, but now it’s the New Age capital of Maui. More different kinds of therapy than there are residents. All the most interesting people live up here, myself included.” As the Explorer slowed to make a right turn, Katharine looked to the left and saw a two-block-long stretch of false-fronted buildings that looked as though they’d come out of a Western movie.

“Are they real?” she asked.

Rob nodded. “They’ve been fixed up, but they’re pretty much the way they were when they were built. Except instead of selling saddles and bridles, now they have herbal teas and homeopathic remedies.”

Just beyond Makawao, the street they took narrowed and wound steeply up the mountainside in a series of hairpin curves. Soon the tropical growth around the town yielded to groves of eucalyptus, then pines and cedars began cropping up. “Where are we going?” Katharine finally asked.

“To your house,” Rob replied. “I found a place for you pretty close to the site. It’s not very grand, but the school bus stop is only about a quarter of a mile away.” He glanced in the rearview mirror once again. Michael, if he was even listening, said nothing, and when Rob looked over at Katharine, she only shrugged. “I hope you’ll like it,” he said.

“It seems like it’s kind of far away from everything, doesn’t it?” Michael asked from the backseat. “I mean, I can’t drive, and it seems like it’s an awful long way from the town, doesn’t it?”

“How about a bicycle?” Rob suggested.

Michael gazed out at the steepening road. “That might work going downhill, but how do you get back up again? You’d need about fifty gears, wouldn’t you?”

Rob winced as he realized Michael had a point, and that when he’d looked at the house, he hadn’t thought about how Michael might get around. “Maybe I goofed,” he admitted. “Actually, I guess I just picked the one I liked best. So if you hate it, you can find something else. Okay?”

Michael shrugged, but didn’t say anything more.

Emerging from the cedars, they slowed for yet another hairpin curve, and finally turned onto a long, narrow, eucalyptus-shaded lane. Along both sides were scattered a few small, weathered wooden houses. After a quarter of a mile they came to the end of the lane, where a narrow driveway had been cut through a fence constructed entirely of eucalyptus logs stacked between the trunks of still-living trees. Inside the fence was a shady clearing, in the middle of which stood the most charming house Katharine had ever seen.

A single story, it was completely surrounded by a wide veranda. The roofline over the porch broke and became slightly steeper as it rose to a peak over the center of the house. Even at first glance Katharine could see that the building was perfectly rectangular, each face of the roof pierced by a small dormer. The posts and beams that supported the veranda were all adorned with latticework that gave the house a Victorian aura, despite its essentially Polynesian architecture.

Inside, there was a large living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. Outside the kitchen an area of the veranda had been closed in to make a makeshift laundry room.

Beyond the house, and the eucalyptus grove, a pasture spread down the mountainside like an undulating carpet, broken here and there by stands of eucalyptus and a few jacarandas. Beyond the pasture, the vista widened to include both coasts of the island, the valley that separated them, and the West Maui mountains, their wind-and rain-eroded flanks carved into a rugged wilderness.

Katharine stood on the veranda, exulting in the cool, eucalyptus-perfumed air. The sun was lowering in the western sky, birds were singing, and everywhere she looked there was a rainbow of colors provided by a lush profusion of tropical flowers.

She turned to Michael, who was just coming out of the house, a folder clutched in his hand. “Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”

Michael glanced at the view, and she could see him struggling to resist the beauty of the panorama spread beneath them. But finally he gave up and shook his head. “Okay, so maybe I was wrong,” he said. “Maybe this isn’t the worst place in the world after all. Okay?”

“So you don’t hate your old mother?”

“I don’t hate you,” Michael replied, smiling at her exaggerated expression of relief. “And you’re not old. Okay? And if you really want me to throw in the towel and agree you were right about this whole idea …” He let his voice trail off as he held out the folder. “Can I sign up for it?” he asked. “Please?” His voice held a plaintive note, half hopeful, half already resigned to the answer he expected.

Katharine took the folder. She knew, even before she looked at it, that it had to be an advertisement for scuba-diving classes. Her first instinct was to refuse flat out, but before she could speak, Rob appeared in the doorway behind Michael.

“It’s really very safe,” he said. “Hundreds of tourists do it every day, from little kids to people in their eighties.”

Katharine looked up from the brochure, briefly meeting Rob’s gaze before turning to Michael. Memories churned in her mind — nightmare memories of her son waking up in the middle of the night, gasping for air, barely able to breathe. What if he had an attack while he was fifty feet underwater? What would he do? If anything happened to him …

It was as if Michael had read her mind. “I’m not gonna drown, Mom. And I’m not going to have an asthma attack, either. I promise.”

Still Katharine hesitated, but then she remembered something else: Michael’s father, who had fallen in love with scuba diving long before his son had been born. Tom Sundquist had loved skiing, surfing, and skydiving, and half a dozen other sports that terrified Katharine. And if he were here now, she knew exactly what he would say. Taking a deep breath, she spoke the words that Tom could not: “Go for it. You only live once, right?”

Michael, with a gleeful war whoop, gave her a bone-crushing hug, then disappeared into the house to set up a scuba lesson.

Rob spread his hands apologetically. “Maybe I shouldn’t have picked up that brochure—” he began, but Katharine shook her head.

“I’m glad you did, Rob. He hasn’t been at all happy about this move. Maybe this will help.”

“I think I know where he’s coming from,” Rob said. “What is he, fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Sixteen.”

“Tough time for a boy. I was just about his age when my mom met my—” Falling silent, Rob seemed to fumble for a moment, then awkwardly changed course: “Well, with a kid that age, you just have to cut him a little slack, you know? Part of him wants to try new things, but part of him doesn’t want anything to change.”

In her own mind Katharine finished the thought that Rob himself had been unwilling to say. When my mom met my stepfather, he’d been about to say. As the sun began to drop toward the horizon she stood on the veranda, gazing at him.

Rob’s blue eyes searched her face.

Neither of them spoke.

Neither of them had to.

It was nearly two A.M. when Katharine awakened from a restless sleep. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, but as she realized the traffic noises of New York had been replaced by the quiet sounds of chirping insects, and the parched air of the apartment had been displaced by a soft tropical fragrance, she remembered. Getting out of bed, she shivered in the chill of the high altitude as she pulled on a thick terry-cloth robe. On the veranda, she found that Michael had awakened and come outside, too. She stood quietly next to him for a moment, gazing up into a sky strewn with more stars than she’d seen since she had been in Africa. Finally she reached out and put her hand on Michael’s shoulder. “It’s not really so terrible, is it, sweetheart?”

Michael hesitated, then shrugged, and when he spoke, there was more pain than anger in his words. “No, it’s not terrible. In fact, it’s beautiful. But it’s just that things were finally going good in New York, Mom. I mean, really good! And what if I can’t make friends out here, or can’t get on the track team, or—”

“Or what if you just give it a chance?” Katharine broke in. “Tomorrow you go scuba diving, so it isn’t all so awful, is it?”

They stood quietly in the darkness for a few more minutes, and Katharine finally decided that his silence was at least better than the answer he could have given. When he didn’t pull away from her good-night kiss, she decided that maybe, after all, things were going to be all right.

Michael, though, remained leaning on the veranda railing for a long time after his mother had gone back to bed, a confusion of emotions warring inside him. He hadn’t meant to complain to his mom, and he was a little ashamed to have revealed his fears like some big baby. But he was still scared of facing a whole new school on Monday. And how was he going to live all the way up here for a whole three months?

Couldn’t they at least have found a place at the beach?