The Swallow's Nest

5

No one knew exactly which ancestors had passed their genes to Lilia or her four brothers. From their mother’s side they were Hawaiian, Filipino and Samoan. From their father’s they were Chinese, along with a large dose of the UK. International bloodlines weren’t unusual on the island of Kauai, where she’d been raised. Neither were they atypical in the South Bay area of California where she had moved at age eighteen to care for her aunt.

Now looking at her oldest brother, Eli, who had picked her up from the airport in a four-seater beach buggy, she remembered a game they had played as children. Each sibling had imagined that ancestors long departed had personally chosen him or her as a favorite. Their personal guardian angels.

Eli had always claimed their Samoan great-grandfather had chosen him. He was big-boned and substantial, with the darkest coloring of any of the Swallow siblings, although that was never easy to document because of the hours each child spent in the sun. As a teen he had come home sporting an intricate Samoan shoulder tattoo, and since then he had added to it until now most of one muscular arm was covered.

Eli owned a shop that gave tours and rented buggies, like the one he was driving today, and he swore the more Polynesian he looked, the more business he attracted. Some of his steadiest customers were female. When he’d threatened to knot a lavalava around his waist and show up for work bare-chested, his wife, Amber, had put her foot down. Business was fine just the way it was.

Eli was a man of few words, so Lilia knew he was waiting for her to tell him why she had come home with such short notice. He would never ask outright.

“Do you remember what we used to pretend about our ancestors?” she asked.

“You thought you were descended from some English princess or maybe a Chinese courtesan. I don’t think you knew what that meant.”

“It was all about the palaces. There was a book in the school library with amazing photos. I wanted to live in one.”

“California doesn’t have a lot of palaces.”

“Kai decided he was all Hawaiian, remember? That was the year he borrowed his first ukulele from Uncle Ike.” Kai, who sang and played beautifully, was the second oldest Swallow, followed by Micah and then after Lilia, Jordan. Lilia was the only girl, and for the first five years of her life she had been treated almost exactly like her brothers, including short haircuts, hand-me-down clothes and freedom.

“We had a great childhood.” As she spoke she envisioned baby Toby, whose childhood so far was anything but, and unexpectedly her voice caught.

Eli glanced away from the two-lane road to search her face. “You didn’t say what’s what with Graham.”

She had debated this question since she boarded the plane to Honolulu, and then during the hours she had waited for the final flight to Kauai. She had managed to get home, but not on the best schedule. She was exhausted and still too emotional to trust herself.

“Graham’s last two CT scans were clear.”

“Yeah, I knew that.”

“Our relationship took a bad turn, Eli. I’m guessing it won’t take a good one again.”

He didn’t say anything for miles of tropical foliage and red dirt fields that had once grown sugarcane and pineapples and now nurtured a variety of crops. She tried to focus on distant mountains instead of her pain.

“Marriage, it’s hard.” Eli gave one definitive nod, as if that said it all.

“Yours still good?”

“Oh yeah, she puts up with me, with everything, Amber does. But three kids under ten? Not much time to think about anything else.”

“Would you want something different?”

“Nobody’s life is perfect. Good is a lot to hope for, and we have more than that. We work together, raise our kids, put food on our table. We’re thankful.”

She remembered the teenage Eli, who for a school project had memorized a Samoan grace and made everyone in the family sing it for months before meals. He was the Swallow who attended church most regularly, who faithfully tithed and volunteered whenever he was needed. He was a good man, and Lilia wasn’t surprised he was the one who had volunteered to drive her home.

“Good would be good enough for me. That’s really all I wanted.” She stared out the window. “I never asked for more.”

He continued the conversation, which was a sign he was worried. “Illness takes a lot out of a family. Amber’s brother nearly died in that accident, remember? For a while her mom and dad split up over it.” Amber’s brother had wrapped his car around a kukui tree after too many beers at a graduation party. He still walked with a cane.

“Does illness make a man forget his marriage vows?”

He whistled softly, and that was all she got until they passed through the quaintly scenic town of Kapa’a, ten square miles that were large enough for a few stoplights, a variety of shops and hotels, and stretches of palm tree–lined beaches. In English Kapa’a meant solid, and the solid little town had been built on rice, pineapples and now, tourism.

Out of town Eli followed a winding two-lane road past one-story houses screened by extravagant clusters of oleander and banana trees, along with chain-link or concrete block fences. In the past decades the area had built up steadily, but homes, by mainland standards, were still modest, even though in the islands the most substandard housing was expensive.

Roosters crowed, a familiar sound, and Eli waited patiently at a one-lane bridge until traffic coming from the other direction had crossed. She could see the Sleeping Giant, a mountain that had shadowed her childhood. Her family had owned the land and house they lived on for generations and watched the landscape change to suit new residents. This still felt like home.

“Graham is hard to know,” Eli said at last. “But one thing I always figured? He loves my sister.”

“Words mean so little.”

“You’re taking time to think?”

“I don’t expect anything to change. But that’s why I’m here.”

“Will you move back? If you decide to leave him?”

She had asked herself the same question on the plane. Family surrounding her would be wonderful, and she loved her childhood home. But everything else she loved was in California. Her house, her friends, Swallow’s Nest Design, her small but thriving interior design business. While she could run her website from Kauai, she would be forced to scale down. Her online store and design consultation would be impossible because the cost of travel and shipping would be prohibitive. Opportunities here would be different, but they wouldn’t suit her needs or talents nearly as well.

She put the other reason into words. “I think I was born with island fever. I love the mainland, but I would come home more often. I missed coming home so much this past year. I didn’t think I could leave Graham.”

“Be sure you have all the facts straight, Lilia.”

“I heard the facts directly from him. And saw the proof.” She gave up pretending she could keep what had happened a secret. “He has a son, Eli. He claims it was a one-night stand, but he used the trust fund we needed to pay his medical bills to support the baby’s mother. Then Graham let me nurse him back to health for a year without telling me.”

He whistled again. Then he surprised her. “He was afraid to lose you.”

Anger was white-hot and immediate. “Why would you say that? It’s just as likely he didn’t tell me because he needed me when he was sick!”

“I say it because I’ve seen the way he watches you.”

She couldn’t let that pass, and she told him something she hadn’t told anyone else, because she had always been able to share her secrets with Eli. “Do you remember the last time we came here? Before we found out about the cancer? Graham and I had talked about having a baby of our own very soon. Then he came here and saw little Jonah.”

Jonah was Kai’s youngest son, a particularly beautiful child, who at birth had resembled his Georgia peach mother, rosy-skinned and blue-eyed.

She spoke faster. “Jonah had grown so much and suddenly he looked like an island baby. And Graham was shocked. He didn’t know babies’ skin color deepens, or that their eyes can change colors. Suddenly Jonah looked like our Polynesian ancestors, not his haole mother, and will probably look more like them as he grows up. Graham never said so, but I think he took a look at our beautiful nieces and nephews, with their rainbow diversity, and realized his baby might look like them because, hey, I’m Hawaiian, too. Like the rest of you. Same gene pool, right? So to spare himself that possible calamity, his baby’s mother is blonder than he is!”

Eli slowed because they had almost reached their destination. “I’m not surprised you’re angry.”

“I don’t think you believe me.”

“I believe everything you’ve said, but this man married you when his parents disapproved. He showed every sign of wishing he was Hawaiian, too, not wishing you were more like him.”

“Well, now he has a son who looks like him. And the baby has come to stay.”

He turned into the long unpaved driveway leading to their parents’ house. “The baby’s mama?”

“She dropped that little boy in my arms and announced he was Graham’s, then walked away and left me holding him on my own front porch.”

He surprised her and stopped, turning in his seat to look at her. “I know you hurt. I wish I could make that better.”

“Please, don’t be condescending.”

“It’s just that I understand better than you think.”

“How could you?”

He grimaced. “Amber kept a secret from me, too. Aleki is not my biological son, but nobody else knows it, although I think Mama suspects. Amber was pregnant when I married her. I knew she had been in a bad relationship before we met, but for months before we married she didn’t tell me she was pregnant. Then when hiding it was impossible, I wrestled with the pregnancy, the deception, the responsibility. Everything.”

She was stunned that in a family as close as theirs, this had been kept a secret. “But you married her anyway and never told us?”

“I married her, maybe because of the baby. By then I loved her and didn’t want her to go through that alone. And when he was born I loved Aleki as much as I love our other children. And after a while I didn’t hold Amber responsible for the hard choice I had to make. The whole thing? It made me think about what really mattered.”

Then he surprised her, because Eli was rarely demonstrative. He touched her braid, hanging limply over one shoulder, then he gave it a slight tug. “Maybe that’s what you’ll need to think about, too.”

6

Ellen Randolph had been wealthy all her life, so she knew for certain that having money did not automatically make anybody happy or widen their world. Protecting one’s assets was a cheerless, thankless task, and the narrower one’s world, the easier it was to stay at the top of it.

Having lived with Douglas Randolph for thirty-six years, she knew the view from the top was limited, too. Every single day as chairman of the Randolph Group, Douglas acted on his conviction that a wider view was an unnecessary distraction, and every single day he got wealthier and more rigid.

This morning Douglas stood in their designer kitchen, with its custom rosewood cabinetry and enameled lava countertops and pinched his features together in disapproval.

“I don’t quite know what you expect me to do about this, Ellen.”

She had caught her husband right before he headed for his corporate offices in Oakland, and from long experience she knew that this was exactly the wrong time to bring up anything personal. But truthfully there were no good times. Douglas was 99 percent business and only 1 percent father-husband-lover, and mentioning their son’s name at any time of day wasn’t just a distraction, it was an act of treason.

For Douglas, removing Graham from his life had been a business decision, and his business decisions were evenly divided between pragmatic and spiteful. He was not a man to cross, and Graham had crossed him one time too many. The spiteful Douglas would never forgive his son, and Ellen knew better than to ask him to.

But he still had to know the latest news.

Her tone was solicitous, more personal assistant than wife, which was the way he liked it. “I don’t expect you to do anything. I just thought you had to know that apparently we have a grandson.” She played her ace. “In case someone mentions it. I know how you hate to be taken by surprise.”

He made the same noise low in his throat that he made whenever he was skeptical or didn’t want to admit anybody else had a point. “And the person who told you the story is reliable?”

“Jenny Lurfield’s daughter is a friend of Graham’s, and she was at the party to celebrate his better health. She told Jenny about the baby.”

“Well, you have a little spy network everywhere, don’t you? You should have gone into the CIA instead of marrying me.”

“I needed the bigger challenge.” She moved on before he processed that. “I’m going to see Graham this morning. I just thought you should know.”

“Don’t expect anything from me. I don’t want to hear about this again, you understand? This has nothing to do with me. Nothing Graham does has anything to do with me. I thought that was clear.”

“You are the master of clarity. And now that I’ve let you know, I’ll keep the rest to myself.”

“What rest? I would like you to ignore this scandal and hold up your head if it’s mentioned. Can’t you do that?”

“Do you mean am I capable of doing that? Of course I am.”

“Don’t play games!”

She didn’t back away, not even when he stepped forward. At sixty Douglas remained a force to be reckoned with, in full possession of all his hair and a trim waistline, still erect and broad-shouldered, but Ellen had learned long ago that he would never raise a hand to her no matter how loud his voice. He intimidated by attitude and gesture.

She was nearly his height, and now she met his eyes, which were blazing with anger. “I’m just going to visit Graham today and see what I should do next. My head’s always up, but I’m not nearly as adept at ignoring our only child as you are.”

“You coddled him. If you had ignored that boy a little more when he was growing up, then maybe I wouldn’t be so ashamed of him now.”

The problem was just the opposite. She’d spent Graham’s childhood ignoring him. Between her own lack of experience, her inability to dredge up what she thought were appropriate maternal feelings, and her desire to please and placate her husband, hadn’t she ignored her son’s all-too-fragile development until he had finally developed without her and gone in his own direction?

She chose her words carefully. “Your son almost died this year. He’s still not out of the woods, and now he has a child and, as I understand it, his wife has fled. If I could ignore that, then I would be less than human.”

“Watch what you say to me.”

She wondered why. Years of watching every word and placating Douglas had gotten her right to the place where she was standing.

She turned away. “I won’t bother you with whatever I find. I just told you what you need to know.”

“More than I need to know.”

“Douglas, if I were you, I would prepare a response in case anybody else brings it up.” Then despite a lifetime of training she added: “Something between passing out cigars and what you’ve said here.”

The sound of angry footsteps disappeared slowly down the hallway until the door to the garage slammed. Today he was driving himself to work. At the last minute his driver had taken a personal day, and Douglas was fuming about that, as well. She was afraid that between the son in trouble and the absent driver, the driver bothered him more.

When she looked back on her fifty-eight years, after she peeled away the superficial layers that first jumped to mind, deleted all the social events she had helped with for charity, deducted all the money that Douglas had donated to causes that propped up his financial interests? When she did all that, hoping for some sign that deep inside she was a good woman? She found next to nothing.

But today, no matter what Douglas said, she was going to see Graham and the baby.

Upstairs in the master bedroom she stared out the window and considered what to wear. The Randolphs’ house on Belvedere Island had priceless views of Sausalito and the Golden Gate Bridge, but she was too preoccupied to notice. Casual was probably in order, but casual in her closet meant expensive resort wear, nothing particularly baby proof. She remembered how, as a newborn, Graham had spit up on everything until she had asked the nanny to feed and burp him before she picked him up herself.

Had she really been that concerned about appearance and so little concerned about bonding with her son?

She chose gray pants and a matching knit top that she planned to donate to the Tiburon Thrift Shop. These days she needed brighter colors anyway. Her hair was carefully blond, like Graham’s, her face as young as the best plastic surgeon in San Francisco could make it. She still saw inevitable signs of aging.

She wondered if Douglas ever looked at her long enough to see them, too.

The drive to San Jose would probably take at least two hours, unless she waited until well after rush hour. She decided not to wait, and not to call Graham. If he wasn’t home she would settle somewhere and wait. She didn’t want to risk having her son tell her that he didn’t want to see her. She wasn’t sure what she would say to him, but her Tesla practically drove itself, and even in heavy traffic she would have time to plan. She told herself she would be ready.

Two and a half hours later, the drive hadn’t worked any magic. By the time she drove into the Willow Glen neighborhood in the south part of San Jose, she still didn’t have a speech prepared, and worse, she was lost. So much time had passed since she had visited her son and daughter-in-law that she had to pull over and set her GPS to find their house. Two turns and a few minutes later she parked on the right street, but she didn’t get out of the car. She gazed up and down the block.

Willow Glen was charming in a way that the fabulously beautiful Belvedere was not. The houses were small, cozy and individual. She had never studied architecture, but she didn’t need a college course to see that a number of styles and eras were represented here.

Yards were small, most carpeted in flowers or shrubs instead of grass. Graham and Lilia’s house was one of them, asymmetrical beds of roses and perennials, a bench and a birdbath. While she didn’t really like her daughter-in-law, she had to give Lilia credit for making the most of the tiny Tudor cottage she had inherited from an aunt. A brick walkway wound its way up to a brick porch. A vine, probably wisteria, ran from one side to the other along the front. These days the house was painted a subtle pine green. The door was ivory and the trim a bright seashore blue. Everything was too quaint, too picturesque, to suit Ellen. But she could see the appeal.

She blamed herself for Lilia. In a way she had been the one to introduce the girl to her son. Lilia’s mother, Nalani, had been the house manager for the Randolphs’ estate on Kauai’s North Shore. Douglas had bought the seven-acre property as an investment, but he had been in no hurry to sell, hoping for a zoning change that would let him subdivide and make a significant profit. So the family had visited there several times a year, and Nalani had both cared for the property while they were away and acted as housekeeper and occasional cook when they were in residence. She managed other properties, too, and when the house had to be opened in a hurry, her five children often pitched in, a family business of sorts.

On one of those occasions, ten-year-old Lilia was introduced to eleven-year-old Graham. And from that point on, until the year that Douglas forcibly broke up the friendship that had formed between Lilia, Graham and later Carrick—who had often visited the estate with the Randolphs—Lilia and Graham had taken far too enthusiastic an interest in each other.

To this day Ellen wondered if the grown-up Lilia had stalked Graham to renew their “friendship.” Both claimed their meeting years later, at a party in Berkeley where he’d been a student in the architecture department, was accidental. But the heir to the Randolph Group was an extraordinary catch. For all the laid-back, not-the-way-we-do-things-in-Hawaii attitudes that Lilia laid claim to, Ellen still wondered if the girl had known Graham would be at that party and traveled all the way from San Jose to reacquaint herself with the man who could make her life so much easier.

Of course it certainly hadn’t turned out that way.

Ellen had delayed long enough. She tucked her handbag under her arm, got out and locked the car before she started up the street, then the walkway. She’d considered bringing gifts, but that had seemed hopelessly positive. She wasn’t sure if she was here to celebrate or commiserate. Graham had survived cancer and now had an illegitimate son to deal with. Celebration would have to wait for more details.

At the front door she rang the doorbell and heard music. Not chimes, but snatches of a song. She shook her head and waited, trying again when nobody answered the door. She was just beginning to plan where she would wait when it opened.

Graham was so pale, so clearly exhausted, that for a moment she wasn’t sure this was her son.

“Graham?” She stretched out a hand and touched his arm. “Are you all right?”

He raked fingers through hair too short to need grooming. “What are you doing here?”

“Word gets out. I heard about...” She shrugged. “I heard you have a son. I heard Lilia left you.”

“And you swooped right in. Here to gloat?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why?”

“To see if I can help, I guess.”

He faked a laugh. “Cancer didn’t spur you on, but the baby did. I’ll have to think that one over.”

Early in his life Graham had learned to be cool and polite, to combat his father’s sarcasm and criticism with aloof good manners. She had never heard him be so dismissive.

“Nobody knows better than you do why I had to stay away,” she said.

“Actually I don’t know. I figure you’re an adult, and unless I missed something, my father doesn’t chain you to a chair when he’s not around.”

“I didn’t come here to fight or defend myself.”

“So tell me again why you did come?”

“I’d like to see my grandson. If it’s true that I have one.”

“Oh, it’s true. But he’s actually sleeping. For once.”

“You look like you’re going to fall over. Let’s go inside.”

“Please, keep your voice down. He’s upstairs, but God knows what wakes him up and sets him off.”

“You were a monster for your first few months.”

“How nice he inherited that particular trait.” He stepped aside and swept his hand behind him to usher her in.

The house was anything but tidy. Signs of a party were still in evidence. Crumbs on the floor, dishes on the dining room table, a congratulations sign hanging askew. Clearly Lilia wasn’t here. Ellen’s daughter-in-law loved order. Whether Ellen liked Lilia’s design ideas or not, the house was always picture perfect. Never fussy, but comfortable and welcoming. Anything that looked out of place was meant to be.

She followed Graham through the house, through a kitchen piled with dirty dishes, and into the sunroom. She thought the room must have been an addition because she didn’t remember it from her last visit. It was small but flooded with light, and the tropical-style furniture, old-fashioned rattan with a glass table on a coral stand, probably made Lilia feel right at home. She picked up a floral cushion from the floor and placed it on the love seat before she sat.

Graham dropped down to a chair in the corner and closed his eyes. He looked so beaten. She searched for something to say.

“You cried for the first three months of your life. Even a professional baby nurse wasn’t sure what to do with you. And me? I felt so completely inept. It seemed like I should know the magic key, that you should have emerged with instructions. Everybody told me not to worry, that crying was normal, but I was sure it was my own fault. Something I’d eaten in pregnancy, a glass of wine I had before I realized you were on the way. Bad genes.”

At that he opened his eyes. “Really? Bad genes? I thought the Randolphs and the Grahams were perfect in every way, that you and my father thought I was some sort of genetic mutation.”

“Not even close to being perfect.”

“There’s nothing you can do here to help. I have to deal with it. I brought this on myself.”

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Why?”

“Maybe there’s something I can do.”

“Unless you can zoom back in time and keep me from acting on the worst impulse I’ve ever had, then no.”

“You had an affair?”

He gave a bitter laugh. “Nothing that interesting. A one-night stand. Right between what sounded like a death sentence and chemo.”

“Oh, Graham...” She didn’t know what else to say.

“Toby is the result. As you can imagine, Lilia is not happy about it.”

“She’s gone?”

“In Kapa’a with her family. I don’t know if she’ll be back for more than packing and shipping.”

She wanted to be angry at Graham’s wife. He was still recovering, and Lilia had abandoned him to handle everything on his own. But how could Ellen fault her? For the past year her daughter-in-law had shouldered every possible burden, with no help from anyone except the long-distance support of her own family.

“Did you really think you could keep the baby a secret from Lilia? Or were you waiting until you felt you could cope with the fallout?”

“I don’t know, Mother. I was trying to stay alive. Half the time I was so sick I couldn’t remember where the bathroom was.”

“And you were ashamed. You’re a good man. You would be.”

“You have no idea what this kind of shame feels like.”

She did, but it wasn’t helpful to admit that now. She was saved from trying, because a wail began somewhere in the distance. She put out her hand when Graham started to rise. “He’s upstairs?”

“A friend gave me some kind of contraption for him to sleep in. He’s in our room.”

“I’ll get him.”

“Do you know what to do?”

“Has it changed that much in thirty years?”

“Did you know what to do then?”

The question should have hurt, but both of them knew that Graham’s childhood had been managed by competent professionals, and she had looked on from the sidelines. “I do know how to change a diaper.”

“I think he looks like me.”

“Then he’s a beautiful baby.”

“He should have dark hair and brown eyes like the mother I didn’t give him.”

“I’ll bring him down. Will he need a bottle?”

“I’ll get one ready.”

The upstairs must have been expanded in her years away because the wail was coming from a room she didn’t remember. She followed the sound, opened the door and saw a small mesh-sided crib beside a queen-size bed. She picked up a beautiful hand-stitched quilt from the floor and folded it carefully, setting it on a chair before she dared go to the baby.

And then it was like looking at the infant Graham again.

She reached down and scooped him up, holding him against her breasts. Time stood still, although the baby didn’t. He arched his tiny back and screamed, just the way his father had.

“Well,” she said when she could speak, “Hello, Toby. I’m your grandmother.”

The baby was not impressed. She laughed. “I know. I know!” She looked around and saw a box of diapers on the floor. She set him carefully in the center of the queen bed, grabbed a baby blanket from the floor and tucked it under him before she stripped off his little footie pajamas, then took out a diaper. He screamed as she changed him, but she hummed loudly, and she thought that the screaming paused from time to time as he listened.

His clothes were dry, so she pulled them back on and folded the blanket snugly around him until he looked like a burrito. She smiled and kissed his forehead. “Let’s get you something to eat.”

Downstairs she found her son with a bottle ready. “When was the last one?” she asked.

“When he was hungry.”

“They always seem hungry when they’re screaming, but overfeeding can cause problems, too.”

“So I’m told.”

“Good. You have help?”

“I have a few friends who are still speaking to me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“The baby’s mother?”

“Is not among them.”

“You haven’t spoken to her?”

“She won’t take calls or texts from me. She probably feels like she’s on vacation.”

He stretched out his arms, but she shook her head. “Let me.” She held out a hand for the bottle. He shrugged and gave it to her.

She settled Toby into her arms, propping him carefully because she remembered being told that keeping the head high might help. Toby sucked at the bottle’s nipple like he hadn’t been fed in weeks.

“He’s beautiful, and yes, he looks remarkably like his father. I never quite knew what to do with you, but I did appreciate what a gorgeous little boy you were.”

“Why did you have me?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

It took her a while to answer. Toby had taken enough formula that she decided to burp him, despite his protests. Frequent burping was something else she remembered. “I wanted to feel connected to somebody. I saw women with their husbands and children and knew they had something I didn’t. Your father was always busy—”

“Not to mention rigid and controlling.”

“Let’s not talk about that.”

“Why start now?” He closed his eyes again.

“I believed having you would make us a real family.”