Red Spring

14x18 Acrylic

She was an artist. Her drawings and designs were exquisite. She was petite, five-two, or so. Maybe 120 pounds max. As a young adult she was stunningly beautiful. In art school they called her “Twiggy.” She came from a solid Honolulu family, dressed smartly, had the best schooling, a boatload of friends and an array of hope-filled opportunities. She pretty much had it all.

But then life happened and, at age 48, my mother died with her art still in her.

Other than the day she whacked me on my skull with a hard plastic hairbrush for harassing my sisters, I pretty much only have good memories of her. At least until, in the end, they turned sad.

At this point in my life, I’ve published 20 books for young readers. I’m proud of every single one of them, proud of all the effort I put into creating them, proud of all I’ve learned from them, proud of my work having been read by thousands of kids all over the world. But more than anything, writing fiction has been my education. Every novel, every short story, and every screenplay has something of my own life in them. I guess you could say that even though each piece is not about me, I am in every story. Writing has taught me about me, and has gently guided me into the person I am today.

A while back, I wrote a short story called “The Hurricane,” which appears in my short story collection, Island Boyz. At first, it was going to be a story about a hurricane. But as usually happens, the story became so much more along the way. Things came up in the writing that surprised me, caught me off guard, often thrilled me, and most certainly educated me. In the end “The Hurricane” turned out to be a story about a lightly-parented boy trying to navigate his way into the world on his own.

I also discovered that the story was very much about my mother.

The following is an excerpt from that story. It sums up the kind of relationship she and I had in my early years. The story is fiction.

Yet … it is not.

(From “The Hurricane”):

For my twelfth birthday my Mother got me a pair of ten-pound dumbbells and a booklet that showed how you could build your arms and chest big enough to beat up anyone who kicked sand in your face at the beach. And it only took six weeks.

Ho! I liked that!

You couldn’t tear me away from those dumbbells.

I worked like a dog before and after school, and sometimes put in a few hours on the weekends. Soon I actually began to feel the muscles in my arms and chest getting bigger. I was becoming invincible, though I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get in any fights at the beach.

But I did wonder about something: how come Mom got me the dumbbells? I’d never asked for them. In fact, I never once in my life even thought I needed bigger muscles. So why’d she buy them?

When I brought it up, she said, “Gee, I don’t know, Joey. It’s what your father would have gotten you ... isn’t it?”

I shrugged.

Who knows?

My father was a big fat blank spot. He and my mom split up before I was even born. I met him once when he came back to visit the islands. I liked him. He was nice to me. He was Mom’s height, and was dressed in shorts, T-shirt, and rubber slippers, like everybody else. But now he lived in Las Vegas with his new wife, Marissa. That’s about it.

I had a step-father, too, for about a year and a half. But he was killed by his best friend in a hunting accident. Now I live with Mom, Darci, my seven-year-old sister from my step-dad, and Stella, our teenage live-in babysitter. Me in a house of girls.

So, you could say my luck with dads wasn’t very good. The dumbbells were about that, I guessed – Mom trying to be a dad, too.

***

One night she came into my room. It was late, maybe nine o’clock, since she doesn’t even get home from work until around seven. She picked up one of the dumbbells, then sat down on my bed and started curling it. “Got your homework done?”

“Almost,” I said, but I hadn’t even thought about it yet.

“Things okay at school?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Mom nodded. “Good. You know, I bet Ledward can show you how to use these things.”

“Pshh,” I snickered. What did Ledward know? He was a tour bus driver, not a weight lifter. He was also Mom’s twenty-six-year-old boyfriend. She was thirty-one.

But Ledward was an okay guy. I liked him. He was Hawaiian-Chinese, and big as a house. But I didn’t want him or anyone else to know I was working on my muscles. It was embarrassing.

“I’ll ask him,” Mom said.

“What?”

“Ledward. I’ll ask him to show you how to use these weights.”

“Mom, all you do is lift them.”

“He’ll know, you’ll see.”

She put the dumbbell down and picked up my football, then tossed it up and down, kind of clumsily. What’s going on, I wondered? Why’s she out here?

“Hey, let’s go toss the ball around,” she said. “What say?”

I glanced out the window. It was pitch black.

“…Okay,” I said.

Outside, vague light glowed out from the house, enough to throw a ball around. The toads were croaking down by the canal that ran past our house at the bottom of our sloped, grassy yard. I stepped lightly, because sometimes they came up into the yard and dug down into the grass and hid there, and I didn’t like stepping on their bloated bodies.

“I thought I told you to mow the lawn today,” Mom said. But she didn’t sound mad.

“I ... I didn’t have time.”

Mom nodded. “Listen to me, Joey. It’s very important that you cut the grass first thing after school tomorrow, okay? Will you do that for me?”

“First thing?”

“Before I get home. It’s Friday, and I want the place to look nice for Ledward.”

“All right.”

“Thank you. Here. Catch.”

She quick-stepped back and tried to throw the ball like a quarterback on TV. It wobbled out and fell short. “Sorry.”

I jogged up and got it, then tossed it back.

We were only about twenty paces apart, and still she couldn’t make it. She was small, only a hair taller than me. I moved closer.

She tried again. This time the ball made it to me.

“You got a good arm,” I said.

We did that a few more times.

It was fun. We hardly ever did anything together. I didn’t know why she was doing this, but I wasn’t about to ask and ruin it.

Mom stopped throwing and started to cry. “What’s wrong?” I said, walking over. “Did I do something?”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “No … no … I just love you so much,” she said. “But I can’t even throw a ball with you.”

She tried to smile.

“What do you mean? You were just throwing it.”

“Am I a good mother, Joey?”

“A good mother?”

She put her hand on my cheek.

She hugged me.

Then handed me the ball, and went into the house.

(End of excerpt)

My mother and I had a lot of good times together. She was always happy to see me when I came home from the boarding school she sent me to. She rarely complained or criticized, and she was kind to everyone. She was generous to a fault and as supportive as she could be with all the disappointment and trauma in her life. I can come up with a thousand good memories of her.

But did I really know her?

It hurts me to say this, but no, I didn’t. I knew what had happened to her, the pressures and challenges life had sent her way, how she’d dealt with them, the sorrow that followed her around after losing two husbands, a divorce from a third who wasn’t accessible, and later an unsatisfying romance with a younger man. I could easily see the toll all of that took on her.

A week before the end, she drove two hours from Kailua-Kona to Hilo to pick me up from the airport. I’d just flown in from Los Angeles, where, after several years in the music business, I was finishing up a bachelor’s degree in education at Cal State, Northridge. My youngest sister was getting married, and I’d come home for that event. I was twenty-seven years old.

It was late at night when we left the airport and headed back around the island to Kona. Although I couldn’t see much out the window, I was happy to be back on the island, to be home. It felt good. I can clearly remember the headlights on the dark road ahead of us. It was a misty night, almost foggy. But the lines on the road were still clear enough to show the way. Mom and I talked for awhile, then rode in silence as she tried to navigate the murky road ahead. I thought she was falling asleep, because she kept drifting back and forth across the center line. I had visions of a car flying around a bend and hitting us head on.

Finally, I said, “Are you getting tired, Mom? Do you want me to drive?”

She didn’t answer. We drove another few minutes.

Then she said,“Do I look old to you?”

I turned to look at her. “What?”

“Do I look old? Do I have lines around my eyes?”

To be honest, she did look kind of worn out. I’d caught glimpses of it at the airport. Glassy eyes. A slight wobble in her walk. A happy-to-see-me smile … except for those almost haunted eyes.

“No, mom, you look good.”

She seemed to like that answer. We made it home without incident.

My sister’s wedding was an event that needs a story of its own. It was beautiful, in its unusual way, and also entirely whacky to me, something from another kind of life. But it was good to be home, succored by the island’s consistently perfect ambiance.

The second morning after the wedding — after my sister was happily off on her honeymoon, after a couple of quiet evenings at home, after falling asleep to the music of the everlasting surf outside my screened window — after all that … Mom was gone. She was 48 years old.

They called it an accidental overdose of prescription medications. Okay. Maybe. But I saw it differently. In my heart and soul, even to this day, I believe she died of a broken heart. That, too, deserves a story of its own … a long, way too emotional one that I’m not sure I can tell.

“Am I a good mother?”

“Do I look old?”

Mom, you were the best mother I ever could have hoped for. And you looked as old as you were, a young 48, not a minute more. Even through the staggering emotional challenges life sent your way, you were perfect. We weren’t a flawed or broken or dysfunctional family, as some might have said. We were just … different. Perfectly different.

It’s been a long while now, but my brother, my three sisters and I still miss her.

We always will.