Overnight Visitation

At 2:07 a.m. the shoulder of Kamehameha Highway was gravel and old windshield glass, and Kimo was running on it barefoot toward a flashlight that kept jabbing at the oncoming lane.

Sonny Akana, from two houses down, was at the hydrant in boxers and one rubber slipper, holding her by the wrist.

“She was on the line, brah. Right on it.”

Pua was three. Honu pajamas, one sleeve shoved up. She stood with her back to the houses and her face to the water, which at that hour was a sound past the road and nothing else. The Kāne moon was still below the horizon, a thinning crescent due before dawn.

Kimo lifted his daughter. She folded against him without waking, heavy and agreeable. Her feet were cold and gritty on his stomach.

“I locked it,” he told Sonny. Sonny hadn’t asked.

He had locked it. At 10:30, he'd thrown the deadbolts and checked the knobs on his front and back door before going to bed. Then at 2:04, he had woken to the highway inside the house and found her bed empty, the front door standing open to the yard.

His Tutu had been dead since February. Her moon calendar was still on the refrigerator because nobody had told it. Every night of the Hawaiian lunar month had a name, printed under the date, and that night was Kāne. Tutu always opened the doors on Kāne. Kimo had shut and locked both, because he had a three year-old and a highway and he was done holding the door for a parade.

The next morning, before he’d picked the road out of his feet, Kimo stood at the front door and tested the deadbolt.

It caught.

He locked it. Unlocked it. Locked it again.

The police got what they could see: a three-year-old asleep on the shoulder of a state highway, an open door, a father in board shorts claiming he’d locked it. Family court got the same things in a binder. In mediation, Kristy said she believed him.

“You meant to lock it, Kimo. I believe you meant to.”

Pua was seven before the court allowed her another overnight at her father's house.

Kimo had worked Board of Water Supply crews for eleven years. He could find a leak under four feet of road by putting his ear to a steel rod, but his paycheck could not afford anything in Kāneʻohe with a door that shut, so he still stayed in Tutu’s house.

The Koʻolau went straight up behind it, close enough that clouds snagged on the ridge and rained on the roof and nowhere else. Out front, three wooden steps came down to a strip of crab grass, then the shoulder, and then Kamehameha Highway. The ocean was across the road. You heard it more than you saw it, under the trucks.

Kimo could have told you exactly how many Pua-sized strides it was from the bottom step to the white line, which was not a thing he had meant to learn.

He kept a current moon calendar taped on the refrigerator where Tutu had kept hers, at the height of her eyes, which was the middle of his chest.

The first overnight in four years fell on Kāne.

He’d asked to move the date. Kristy had already traded two night shifts at the hospital to make the weekend work.

“I’m not moving them again for your grandma’s moon nights.”

“They’re not hers.”

“Then whose are they?” She gave him a second to say it. “Nobody’s making you take the night, Kimo. Take a day vis–”

“I want the night.”

They arrived at 6:30, Kristy in her scrubs, badge flipped backward on its lanyard, Pua already talking. Kimo closed the front door behind them and threw the bolt. Kristy brushed past him in the entryway, walked straight down the hall to the back door, and tried its deadbolt. Then she retraced her steps to the front door, unlocked it and opened it two inches. Her phone chimed in her pocket: FRONT DOOR OPENED. Kimo watched her read it, close the door, lock it, try the knob.

The court order said exterior doors locked overnight, sensors live and shared to her phone, no guests.

Kristy crouched in the doorway and held Pua longer than Pua had planned. Pinned against the scrubs, Pua talked into her mother’s shoulder the whole time.

“—and I’m cracking them, I get to crack—”

Kristy looked at him over Pua’s head. She stood up.

“Doors,” she said to him, the way other people said goodnight.

Her car was barely off the shoulder when Pua turned around.

“How many eggs, Daddy?”

“Two.”

“Four.”

“Who’s eating four eggs?”

“I’m cracking four. You can eat them.”

“You’re cracking one. I’ve seen you open a yogurt.”

She took this with the dignity of a person who had, in fact, worn a yogurt.

“Two. And if there’s shell I get it out.”

“With what?”

“With the shell. The big piece scoops the little piece. It’s on YouTube.”

“And what am I doing?”

“You watch the toast.”

“Shoots. It’s a plan.”

He made shoyu chicken, the one thing he couldn’t ruin. Then she ran the hall the way he used to, back door to front door and back, slapping each one like a base.

The house had been laid out along one straight hall, the back door at the mauka end under the mountains and the front door at the makai end facing the highway. With both doors open, you could stand on the back step and see the ocean through the house. Pua’s room was near the back. The kitchen opened off the side of the hall, but a short return wall stood at the kitchen doorway, and Tutu’s chair sat at the end of the table behind it.

From that chair you could hear the whole hall and see none of it.

After her bath, Pua called from her room.

“Daddy. Come look!”

She sounded like she was sitting across from him. He could hear the gap in her teeth from the kitchen, but had to get up, go around the wall, and walk down the hall to see her.

A gecko was on the inside of her window screen, eating a moth.

“He’s eating it alive,” Pua said, thrilled and appalled.

“That’s how they like it.”

“Mom said no guests.”

“Mom meant people.”

Back in the kitchen he looked at the calendar.

On Kāne, Tutu had opened the doors. Not the screens. She left those shut but unlatched, and the tradewinds played them all night. The solid doors, front and back, she propped open with two bricks. She carried the shoes and slippers off the hall floor and stood the laundry basket in the tub, clearing the hall the way she put out the rubbish: without discussion and annoyed if you were standing where the bin needed to go.

“They was coming through here before had one house,” she’d told him. “Mauka to makai. Same as the water. Leave their road clear.”

He remembered one of those nights often. He was maybe seven, standing in the dark kitchen beside Tutu in her chair, her hand on his shoulder and thumb in the hollow by his collarbone. There was grit under his bare feet on the linoleum.

Something was going down the hallway. Not loud, but there was no mistaking it. The floor gave it away, board by board.

He opened his mouth to call out, and the thumb pressed.

“Wait,” Tutu said, barely above a breath. “Let them pass.”

The front screen eased shut against its frame. When the house had been quiet long enough, she wiped his feet with a dish towel and walked him back to bed.

Tonight both doors were shut and bolted, and when Pua’s door opened he heard all of it from the kitchen sink: the glass knob, the dry tick of the latch, the short complaint of the hinge.

He was around the return wall before she was all the way out.

“Howzit?”

“Daddy, can I have water?”

He brought it to her in a cup with faded grapes around the rim. She drank two sips and handed it back like a receipt.

“If you need anything else, just call me. Don’t get up. Call.”

“Okay.”

He’d gotten as far as drying the pot when she called again through the closed door.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah.”

“Can we go Zippy’s instead?”

“You fought me for those eggs.”

“I want a Napple.”

He laughed into the dish towel.

“Shoots. Zippy’s it is.”

When she’d settled, Kimo stood at the front door with his hand on the deadbolt Kristy had tested.

Four years ago, Kimo had locked both doors, gone to sleep, and woken up to find his daughter on the side of Kam Highway. He’d been over it so many times it had stopped feeling like a memory and started feeling like instructions.

Locked. Asleep. Highway.

So: not locked. And not asleep. Tutu's way, with him awake in her chair. He'd be the deadbolt.

He looked down the hall at Pua’s door. Shut. He had heard the knob, the latch, the hinge from the sink. If she opened it, he would hear.

The sensors were two white tabs each, one on the frame and one on the door, and a mobile app that chimed his and Kristy’s phone when the tabs came apart. But all the app knew was whether the sensors were touching. With the doors still shut, he pried the frame piece loose on the front, set it against its magnet on the door, and bound the two together with electrical tape. He did the same in back.

Then he opened both doors and set Tutu’s bricks against them.

When he checked his phone, the app still said FRONT DOOR: CLOSED. BACK DOOR: CLOSED.

He left the screens shut and unlatched them. The house took in the highway. Tires, salt and exhaust, the surf underneath. The trades came in off the water and ran the hall.

He moved the slippers out of the way and stood the laundry basket in the tub. He made coffee. He had worked main breaks all night on less.

Then he took Tutu’s chair in the kitchen.

He would stay awake. If Pua’s door opened, he would hear it, and he would go to her.

At 2:20, his phone lit up on the table.

You awake?

He sent Kristy a picture of his coffee.

Unfortunately.

Bring me one when you bring Pua tomorrow. And check the eggs for shell.

Eggs are out. She renegotiated. We’re going to Zippy’s.

Of course she did. Two sugars.

I know. See you tomorrow.

He set the phone face up beside the cup.

At 2:40 the refrigerator cut out, and the kitchen got bigger.

A car came around the point and went away north. The back screen ticked in its frame and settled.

Then it creaked again, longer, the spring stretching.

A floorboard took weight.

Something small and bare on the wood.

Pua.

He was half out of the chair.

But he hadn’t heard her door.

Earlier, he had heard her latch from the sink like it was in his own hand. This sound came from the back screen door, and the floor on the mauka end of the hallway.

Mauka to Makai. Tutu’s road.

He could see the front door standing open to the highway, the one time he’d done it his own way.

Two steps around the wall would show him the hallway. He could stand. Nothing was holding him.

Another board took weight.

Kimo had Pua’s name in his mouth. Tutu’s thumb said wait.

Her door hadn’t opened.

His hands found the edge of the seat and locked around it. Without deciding to, he turned one ear toward the hall the way he leaned over a valve box.

A bare heel scuffed the wood, one step closer to the highway.

Nothing.

Long enough to think it had stopped, or gone, or never been.

Then the floor outside the bathroom.

Then the soft one past the end of the kitchen wall, an arm’s length from him.

He knew the hallway in steps. Three to the front screen. Two.

The front screen opened.

Its spring stretched through the note it had made his whole life and slapped shut.

It shivered against the frame and stopped.

Kimo moved.

He went down the hallway to Pua’s room.

Her door was open.

The bed was empty.

He ran.

The front screen was the whole length of the hall away. He hit it with his shoulder and took the three steps in one, crabgrass wet under his feet, then gravel.

A pickup sat on the shoulder with its hazards going. The driver was standing in his own headlights, phone to his ear.

“—seven? Eight? She’s standing right on the line. No, I don’t see anybody with her—”

Pua stood on the same patch of shoulder, at the hydrant, facing the water.

Kimo carried her back onto the grass. She was cold through her shirt and heavier than at three, but she folded against him the same way.

Her eyes were open and not looking at anything.

He said her name until it worked.

She blinked at the hazards, then looked at him.

“Why didn’t you come with me?”

“Come where, baby?”

She smiled at Kimo and didn’t answer.

By the time the cruiser’s lights were washing the hydrant blue, she was shivering and properly awake. When he asked again, she frowned as if the question were his.

The officer’s flashlight went from the hydrant to the house, where both doors stood open behind their screens, and back to Kimo.

“Sir, were your doors locked?”

Four years ago Kimo had said yes and kept saying it. He looked at the house and didn’t say anything.

The police had already called Kristy. She called him from the car. When she hung up, his screen went back to the app he’d left open.

FRONT DOOR: CLOSED. BACK DOOR: CLOSED.

Still wearing her scrubs when she arrived at 3:30, Kristy passed Kimo on the front steps and stopped at the door.

The two white pieces of the sensor sat together on its edge under black electrical tape. She had stood there at 6:30 and opened this door and watched her phone tell her the truth.

She swung the door shut and open again.

Her pocket stayed quiet.

“You made it lie to me.”

Kimo had the rest ready, Tutu and the hall and the chair, and every piece of it came back around to the same two strips.

Pua was on the top step, wrapped in a patrol-car blanket, the bottoms of her feet black from the road.

“Are we still going Zippy’s?”

“We’re going home,” Kristy said, and did.

The officer photographed the tape with a little ruler beside it. By Friday the overnights were suspended in a document that used the word circumvented twice. Because it was the second time, somebody wanted a sleep study, and in November Kimo sat next to Kristy in a room at Kapiʻolani Hospital while a pediatric sleep specialist wearing a cardigan over her scrubs went through the results.

“Sleepwalking at her age is common. Most kids grow out of it. It’s not the behavior that’s dangerous. It’s the environment.”

She said environment like it had a speed limit.

“It can run in families. Mom? Dad? Any history?”

“Not mine,” Kristy said.

Kimo was already shaking his head.

Then he was back in Tutu’s kitchen. The night came back to him the way it always did–already in progress. His bare feet on the linoleum. Tutu’s chair. Her thumb in the hollow of his shoulder.

He’d had that night his whole life. The screen door easing shut, the hallway, the dishtowel.

He went looking for the part before.

Getting out of bed. Finding Tutu awake.

There wasn’t any.

There was only the kitchen, the hallway, and how hard she held on.

Four years ago, Kimo had locked both doors. He would have sworn to it in any room in the state, because he had. He had locked them and gone to sleep. Whatever happened after that, he’d been asleep for.

He knew the feel of that bolt, the small resistance and then the give.

It turned both ways.

It took one hand, a quarter turn, the same as locking it.

His hand had been doing that since he could reach it.

The specialist had her pen up.

“Dad?”

The box for family history was about an inch tall.

By March the overnights were back, with conditions. A chain at the top of each door, higher than Pua could reach. A chime in the house to match the one on Kristy’s phone. A bell on Pua’s doorknob that rang if you looked at it.

And twelve dates, excluded at the mother’s request.

Kimo took the court order to the refrigerator.

The first date was Kāne.

The second was Kāne.

He went down the column.

All twelve.

He didn’t call her.

On the first Saturday back, the bell on Pua’s door rang at 6:10 the following morning, and she came down the hall already saying eggs. She cracked four and most of a fifth shell into the bowl.

He watched the toast.

Kimo taped the order to the refrigerator beside the moon calendar, at the height of Tutu’s eyes, and bent to read them both.