The plane out of Honolulu was a Cessna Caravan. The flight was forty minutes. The pilot was a woman in her fifties whose name I didn’t yet know, with grey hair in a braid down her back and the unhurried competence of someone who had been flying these islands for a long time. She hadn’t said much when I’d boarded at six.
We crossed open water at five thousand feet.
The ocean was the ocean. The trade winds came at the airframe from the east at a steady twelve knots, and the Cessna corrected without comment, and the morning light was the morning light at five thousand feet over the Pacific in March.
Ahi’koa came up under the right wing at six-forty-five.
The island was smaller than I remembered. I’d last seen it from the air in May of 1999, going the other way, in the back of a Coast Guard helicopter at sixteen with my mother’s sister holding my hand. I hadn’t been back since. Twenty-seven years.
The volcano was visible from twenty miles out—Mauna Keo, dormant shield, eight thousand four hundred feet at the summit, the green of the eastern flank lit by the sun coming over the rim. The harbor was on the south side. Pāhaku, the only town, was a small grid of streets leading inland from the harbor, with the AMRS marine research station at the western end of the harbor road and the airstrip at the southern edge of town.
We came in over the airstrip at seven.
The pilot brought the Cessna down in a single clean approach. She didn’t announce the approach over the cabin speaker. She didn’t have a cabin speaker. The runway was a strip of sealed tarmac about three thousand feet long, with the shoulder soft sand and the kiawe scrub at both ends. The Cessna touched down with the small careful weight of a small plane on a small runway in a steady morning wind.
We rolled to the small terminal building.
The pilot cut the engines.
She turned in her seat and looked at me.
“You’re Hina Akana.”
“I am.”
“I flew your father’s body off this island.”
I hadn’t been expecting that.
I’d been expecting the ride from the airstrip, the rental jeep, the drive up the harbor road to my grandmother’s house, the slow careful unpacking of the suitcase and the boxes the freight company had shipped ahead. I’d been expecting, somewhere in the first day, to encounter the fact that this island had been the island where my father had died. I hadn’t been expecting it from the pilot at seven AM at the airstrip.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Do not be sorry. I am telling you because you should know who I am before we go further. My name is Malia Kealoha. I was a student of your father’s at the field station in 1995. I had been flying for two years. He had been on the volcano for nine. When he died at the south-flank cliff in 1999 I was the pilot the Coast Guard called to bring him home to Honolulu. I flew him. I told my husband at dinner that night that I had flown my teacher’s body off this island. My husband said: tell his daughter when she comes back. I have been waiting twenty-seven years to tell you. I am telling you. There. It is done.”
I drank the air for a moment.
“Thank you, Malia.”
“Welcome home, kupuna’s-granddaughter.”
She got out of the cockpit. She unlatched the cargo door. She handed me my carry-on bag and the larger duffel from the cargo hold. She didn’t hug me. She nodded once. She walked toward the terminal building.
I stood on the tarmac with my bags.
The trade winds came across the airstrip from the east. The mountain was at my back. The harbor was somewhere ahead, through the kiawe and down the coast road. My grandmother had been dead for eight years. Her house had been waiting for me to come and claim it.
I’d come to claim it.
I picked up the bags.
I walked to the terminal.
The terminal was a single room with a counter, two benches, and a small standing fan. A young woman behind the counter handed me the keys to the rental jeep without making me sign anything. The jeep was outside in the lot, a Wrangler in faded green that had been on the island since approximately 2008 by the rust at the wheel wells.
I drove the harbor road into Pāhaku.
The harbor was a small commercial harbor. It served the inter-island fishing fleet, the local boats, and a once-weekly supply ferry. The ferry wasn’t in. Three fishing boats were tied at the long dock, and a Grady-White was tied at the short dock with the name Tūmoana on the transom in faded paint. I drove past the harbor at eight miles per hour because the harbor road’s posted limit was ten and the local custom, by the way the few trucks ahead of me were moving, was eight.
I drove past the AMRS station.
The station was a low grey building on the western breakwater. I’d been to the station once as a child—my father had brought me on a Saturday afternoon to show me the wet lab, and I’d been seven, and I’d touched a sea cucumber in a shallow tank and the cucumber had ejected its viscera into the water and the graduate student supervising had laughed for a long time. I hadn’t thought of that day in twenty years.
I drove past Lani’s general store on the corner of main street and harbor road.
I didn’t stop.
I drove inland three blocks to the small lane on the western side of the park where my grandmother’s house had stood since 1958.
The house was the house.
I parked in front. I got out. I went up the front walk. The plumeria tree at the corner of the lot was in bloom. The chickens at the edge of the yard looked at me. They weren’t afraid; they were sovereign. They watched me go to the door.
The key was under the third stone of the path.
It had been under the third stone of the path since I’d been twelve and my grandmother had told me, on the phone, where she’d moved it from the previous hiding place. I hadn’t used the key. I’d been told where it was. The telling had been the inheritance.
I let myself in.
The house smelled of old kerosene and dried plumeria.
I stood in the front room for a long while.
I had my bag at my hip and my keys in my hand and the morning light through the eastern window on the floor at my feet, and I’d come home to the house that had been waiting for me to come home, and the chickens were at the edge of the yard outside, and Malia had told me the thing I hadn’t yet known I’d been waiting to hear, and the volcano was at the edge of town with the moving thermal anomaly that USGS had sent me to investigate.
I had a job to do.
I had a house to live in while I did it.
The two were, until further notice, the two.
I set the bag down.