Chapter 1
Late one July morning, Grady’s older brother, Donny, texted him a screenshot of the ad for the caretaker job.
Caretaker wanted, Hawai‘i. Independent & resourceful. Valid driver’s license required. Carpentry skills a plus. Housing provided. Salary TBD.
[email protected]
Grady laughed. Wtf that Craigs list?
Yeah ima serious dude, Donny replied. email him.
Instead, Grady called his brother. It rolled over into voicemail, which meant Donny was probably trying to find a place to talk in private. He was four years older and lived in a halfway house not far from Portland, Maine, a few hours south of where Grady was on the Mid Coast. A minute later, Donny rang back.
“Where’d you see that job listing?” Grady asked, voice low so he wouldn’t wake their mother, who worked the hospital night shift as an LPN.
“Just now, waiting room.” Donny was midway through two years’ probation for fentanyl possession and had to take a weekly piss test. “I’m fucking serious—one of us should live in Hawai‘i. And you need to get out of Mom’s house. And—shit, I gotta go—”
The call ended. Grady shoved the phone into his pocket and walked out onto the back deck. His brother could be a major pain in the ass, but he had a point. Grady had been living with their mother since early April, just weeks after the lockdown—almost three months now. Their father was long gone—he’d killed himself when Grady was five. The suicide was like a black drain they’d been circling ever since, though only Donny got sucked down it.
Before the pandemic hit, Grady had worked as a finish carpenter, most recently on a long-term gig for a couple of Masshole plastic surgeons from Marblehead, husband and wife building their dream home on Sennebec Pond. Quartz kitchen countertops, a Japanese toilet with a heated seat that had its own temperature control. Who needed that shit?
The job ended abruptly when the wife got COVID. Grady and the other crew had to isolate for two weeks. Grady definitely felt bad about that. They all needed the work. One guy had just bought a new truck, another had twins on the way. No one got sick, but by the time quarantine ended, all the other building sites had shut down, too. As an independent worker, Grady could collect unemployment, but after his application was bounced twice for no frigging reason, he gave up. His stimulus check went to back rent and two overdue truck payments. So he moved back home.
Now it was July and there was no work other than side jobs. Helping his friend Zeke load his delivery truck with firewood, or taking down trees decimated by venomous browntail moth caterpillars. Clearing brush from the Mic Mac Campground so that rich COVID refugees from Boston and New York could park their RVs and go hiking in the state park while they pretended to quarantine.
Grady scrutinized the screenshot again. Caretaker wanted, Hawai‘i. The only person he knew who’d ever been to Hawai‘i was a heating contractor in Rockland. He’d taken his wife and two young kids and lived on one of the Hawai‘ian Islands for a year.
“The kids went barefoot the whole time,” he’d told Grady after he returned. “Walked to school barefoot, ate coconuts from our backyard. Me and Lisa surfed every day. It was frigging heaven.”
Grady couldn’t remember the last time he’d walked barefoot anywhere except indoors. There were no sand beaches in this part of Maine, and the grass was filled with ticks. What would it be like to live someplace he wouldn’t have to dig his truck out of a foot of snow—or ice, or mud—for half the year? He didn’t know anyone in Hawai‘i, but then he’d hardly seen anyone in Maine since the pandemic began. Last time he’d run into his ex-girlfriend Rachel was six months ago. She’d been accepted into the PhD program in archaeology at Boston University. And oh, yeah, she’d gotten married.
After that, he’d dated a girl he met on Bumble, but they’d had nothing in common except the facts they were twenty-eight and single and lived within twenty miles of Rockland. Maine was great if you had money and a partner, but otherwise it was lonely as hell. He sure as shit wasn’t going to find money or a girlfriend during a pandemic.
What the fuck, he had nothing to lose. He went to his childhood bedroom and opened his laptop, checked the screenshot again, and emailed firemanta.
Chapter 2
The following afternoon, he’d just cracked a PBR and logged into World of Warcraft when an email alert flickered in the corner of his laptop screen.
Hi Grady,
Is there a time we could talk this evening? Also, please send a copy of your résumé.
Best regards,
Wes Minton
“Fuck me.” Grady reread the message. Did he even have a résumé? He logged out of WOW, grabbed another beer, and made a list of the carpentry jobs he’d worked on for the last eight years. He found a résumé template online and went to the White Mountains Community College website.
We’re training New England’s Future Outdoor Leaders!
He’d finished only two years at WMCC before he failed his wilderness solo and his money ran out, but maybe this guy wouldn’t bother to check. He cut-and-pasted info from the site.
Studied outdoor recreation and tourism at foremost college, skills in sea kayaking, wilderness medicine, mountaineering, scuba diving, rock climbing. He’d never actually gone scuba diving but figured that might be useful in Hawai‘i. He could always learn.
He sat for a minute, then added Certified EMT. Which was true—he’d taken EMT classes after he dropped out of WMCC, though he’d only briefly worked as a first responder when he was twenty-two. The local ambulance company had paid for his classes, paid for his textbooks, and offered him a job once he’d completed his training. He’d started a bit nervous, though not much. While the sight of blood bothered him, it didn’t make him pass out. Same with protruding bones. He practiced box breathing and other ways of staying calm under pressure and always felt jacked from adrenaline as soon as he stepped into the ambulance. He successfully performed CPR a few times, tended to some rollover accidents. He felt pretty confident that he’d at last found a job he could, if not excel at, at least perform without fucking up. That had ended when he got the call involving Kayla MacIntosh.
He saved his document and got another beer. He hated this kind of stuff, hated thinking about Kayla. He was a terrible liar, unlike Donny, though maybe Donny wasn’t so great either, since he always seemed to get caught. But lying came naturally to his brother, whereas it always made Grady anxious, even stupid white lies, like this résumé. Which looked decent, though it would be easy for someone to make a call to WMCC and learn that he’d never graduated. And probably his EMT certification had expired.
But what the hell. He sent the résumé to Wes Minton, logged back into WOW and played for a couple hours. Around midnight, he received a new message from firemanta.
Hi Grady,
Are you free to talk now?
Wes
Cursing, Grady pushed the line of empty beer cans into a wastebasket. He shouldn’t have finished the half rack. What time was it in Hawai‘i? He went into the bathroom and hurriedly washed his face, slicking back his damp hair. He’d shaved this morning, so he didn’t look too derelict. He returned to his room and replied.
I can talk now.
Within seconds, an email with a Zoom link appeared. When Grady clicked on it, a dazzle of light and color filled the screen—green, yellow, red, blue, orange, with a dark blur in the center.
“Grady. Good to meet you.”
Grady blinked. The colors were palm trees, gigantic ferns, a trailing vine that looked like a burning pink fuse. In the middle of it all was an older white man’s face, tanned and ruggedly youthful, though his dark shaggy hair was mostly gray.
“Hi.” Grady adjusted the light on his desk. “Yeah, uh, nice to meet you.”
“What time is it there?”
“Almost one a.m.”
“Ooof.” Minton winced. “Sorry about that. Thanks for taking the time. I’m Wesley Minton. Wes. Okay if we go over a couple things?” Wes leaned forward, his face blotting out the brilliant garden. “You’ve done a lot of carpentry and construction, right? What about caretaking?”
“Sure. Some of the people I worked for, they’re only here a couple months in the summer. I keep an eye on their houses the rest of the year.”
“And you’re an EMT? Ever performed an appendectomy on yourself?”
“What?”
“Guy I know, a heart surgeon, he had to do that in Alaska. You’ll be on your own a lot. You okay with that?”
Grady couldn’t tell if this guy was joking, but before he could answer, Wes asked, “Ever been to Hawai‘i?”
“No.”
“Really?” Wes looked stunned, like Grady had confessed he’d never driven a car. “Well, it’s amazing. Different now, because of the pandemic, but that’s good. No tourists. I don’t see any references here.”
Grady flushed. “Oh, yeah, sorry. I can get you those tomorrow morning.”
“No worries. I’ll run a background check. Maine—what’re your numbers like there?”
“Not too bad.”
“You’ll have to quarantine for two weeks—no screwing around, we don’t want to take a chance on you getting sent back home. You okay with that?”
Grady started to reply but stopped. Was this guy actually going to hire him? He nodded cautiously.
“Yeah,” Wes continued, “if you violate quarantine, they’ll arrest you and send you back to the mainland. Can you handle four-wheel drive?”
“Sure. Would I need to bring my own tools?”
“No, I’ve got everything here from the last guy. You have any questions, Grady? You travel much?”
“I went to Disneyland once with my family.”
“You have a family?”
“I was a kid, I went with my mom and my brother.”
“So no significant other? I forgot to mention that. You’ll have your own house, but it’s compact—it’s not really set up for a couple.”
Grady’s throat grew tight. What the fuck was he doing? Before he could say anything more, Wes clapped his hands.
“Okay, look, you’ve got my email. After I run the background check, we’ll figure out the details of salary and your airfare. Sounds good?”
Grady stared at him. “Sounds good,” he said at last.
“Excellent. Talk to you soon,” said Minton, and the screen went black.
Chapter 3
Grady got himself some water, pulled on his Sea Dogs hoodie, and stepped outside. The air was cool and smelled of balsam fir and rugosa roses. The moon was just past full. Around him stretched woods and fields, the homes of kids he’d grown up with: farmhouses, mobile homes, a few scruffy back-to-the-land DIY homesteads like Zeke’s. He slapped a mosquito whining in his ear and tilted his head to stare at the moon, remembering how he and Donny used to camp out here when they were teens, a stolen bottle of Dewar’s hidden under their sleeping bags. How they’d do a shot every time they saw a shooting star.
Would you even see the same stars in Hawai‘i? Weren’t there different constellations in the Southern Hemisphere? But he didn’t know if Hawai‘i was in the Southern Hemisphere. His only impressions came from old surfing movies. Jurassic Park had been shot there, right? And Lost? He’d watched that show all during middle and high school, even when it made no sense to him, which was most of the time.
Still, the island setting had been beautiful. He and Zeke and Donny had gotten into arguments over whether it was all real or just CGI. As a young teenager, Grady had wanted it to be real. Not the story or the characters but that place, with its empty beaches and empty sea and air that, even on their crappy little TV screen, seemed to shimmer with something he couldn’t put a name to. A threat, maybe, even though that was a weird thing to wish for; the thought that the wider world might be very different from the little he’d seen of it. His rich clients always told him, as an adult, that Maine wasn’t the real world. Marblehead was the real world, and places like New York City and Greenwich, Palm Springs and Winter Park and San Francisco. Grady had always thought they were just pissing smoke.
But what if they were right? He didn’t believe he was living in the Matrix or some crazy shit like that, like the weird conspiracies Zeke spouted. But what if life was actually different in New York or California?
Here was his chance to find out if all those rich people had been lying, the way they lied about getting him a check end of next week. Donny or Zeke would give their left nut to fly to Hawai‘i, especially now. Grady would be crazy not to go.
From somewhere at the edge of the yard, a barred owl called.
Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?
Grady stared into the oaks, their branches skeletal and leafless from the damn browntail caterpillars. He watched a ghostly shape emerge and then drop to the high grass, before rising like a cloud of smoke to disappear.
Chapter 4
The flight to L.A. was barely a third full—solo travelers like himself, a few couples, two families with small kids. Everyone was masked, which made Grady feel like he was trapped in an airborne hospital waiting room. He had the window seat in an otherwise empty row, staring down as Boston gave way to sprawl, the rumpled green of the White Mountains, then nothing as clouds overtook the airplane.
He wadded up his hoodie and tried to sleep. After an hour he gave up, his long legs cramping. There was no food or beverage service. Zeke had picked him up at 2 a.m. and driven him to Logan, but nothing had been open in the airport when Grady arrived. Now he had a frigging caffeine headache.
Rubbing his eyes, he lowered his tray table and pulled down his mask, popped a few ibuprofen. Ate half of the turkey and cheese sandwich he’d made the night before, drank some water. When he checked the moving map on the screen above his tray table, they were only above Pennsylvania.
Groaning, he sank back, knees bucking against the seat in front of him. He took out his cell phone and spent a few minutes reading a guide to the island’s wildlife and outdoor activities he’d downloaded. A lot of fishing but also hunting, wild boar and some kind of deer, both introduced by earlier waves of settlers. Maybe he’d get a gun and a gun license.
He closed the brochure and scrolled through the messages he’d received from Wesley Minton in the days before he left. There was no further mention of a background check, so he assumed he’d passed, only a flurry of texts about his flight itinerary, the address of where Grady would be staying—Hokuloa Road, no street number—and the name and cell-phone number of someone named Dalita Nakoa.
Dalita will pick you up at the airport.
She will get any groceries you need, text her list when you arrive LAX.
Be sure to fill out health arrival forms and take ibuprofen before you land on the island.
They will check your temp at airport.
Use Dalita’s name as your emergency contact.
Was Dalita Wes Minton’s wife or girlfriend? Why use her name and not his own? Because she was the one meeting him at the airport? He hadn’t mentioned being married, or anything else.
When Grady had Googled Wesley Minton, he didn’t find much. Some kind of hedge fund guy who made his nut and moved to Hawai‘i. He was involved with a bunch of environmental groups. The Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, the Island Nature Trust, and the Hokuloa Wilderness Foundation. The same three images of Minton kept popping up—a generic corporate headshot and two photos of him at charity benefits, one a big environmentalist bash on the island, the other a Planned Parenthood benefit in Honolulu.
In the first photo, Minton wore a Hawai‘ian shirt and a very long lei made out of green leaves. He stood beside a tall, beautiful Hawai‘ian woman who looked like a model. Grady recognized her name—Maxine Kaiwi.
LOCAL PHILANTHROPIST WESLEY MINTON MAKES LANDMARK DONATION TO PRESERVE ISLAND WILDERNESS
The photo was dated twenty years ago, though Minton looked pretty much the same. He must’ve been in his mid-thirties when it was taken, not much older than Grady was now. Lucky bastard.
Grady stared at the moving map. They’d only just passed Pittsburgh. How frigging big was Pennsylvania? He closed his eyes and thought of his last conversation with his mom the night before, the two of them sitting on the back porch.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she’d asked. “You don’t know anyone there. You’ll be very alone.”
“It’ll be fine. I’ll meet people—”
“You’re going to be in quarantine. And you don’t know anything about this man.”
“I know he’s bought my plane ticket and given me a job, which is more than I have here, okay?” He tried to keep his voice level. “I just want to get away for a while. I’ve never been anywhere. I’ve never done anything except carpentry. You’re always telling me I should aim higher. So I’m doing it. I’ll be fine. At least it’s the same country.”
“It’s five thousand miles away.” His mother’s face tightened, a sign she was fighting tears. “Once you’re there, I’ll never see you again.”
“You will definitely see me again,” said Grady, and leaned over to give her a quick hug.
But as he finished packing, he wondered if he’d miss any of this, all of this, when he was gone. He wondered if he’d ever come back.
Chapter 5
He woke in the plane’s window seat with a crick in his neck and a headache from the citrusy reek of hand sanitizer. As he pulled down his mask to draw a few furtive breaths, the pilot announced they would be landing soon. Across the aisle, a woman grabbed her companion and pointed out the window.
“Those aren’t clouds,” she exclaimed. “It’s smoke from the fires.”
Wildfires or not, they landed without a problem. By the time he finally found his gate, the island flight was preboarding. As the line inched toward the Jetway entrance, he felt light-headed with nerves but also a strange relief. He was going to a place where he knew no one, which meant no one knew him except as the person on his résumé: competent and experienced. He felt like he did driving late at night, when his attention would drift then abruptly shift back to the road, and he’d wonder, Am I dreaming? Am I really here?
Including the flight attendants, there were thirty-three people on a flight meant for over three hundred. As he waited for takeoff, he texted a grocery list to Dalita Nakoa.
Tomatoes, ground beef, beer (PBR), chips, salsa, bread, crunchy peanut butter, potatoes. Beer.
Dalita replied with a thumbs-up and an emoji of a brimming beer stein. The cabin crew closed the doors, someone made a terse announcement—five and a half hours flight time, no meal or beverage service, remain masked and seated as much as possible. The plane took off, the coastline receding behind them until all Grady saw was water.
Boredom overwhelmed his anxiety, and he fell asleep. He didn’t know what time it was when he woke. His phone still showed Pacific time. The plane had no in-flight entertainment, not even an in-flight magazine. Outside his window was an unbroken field of blue, no hint of where the sky ended and the sea began. There was no turbulence, just the loud background hum from the engines. The few passengers were sleeping or staring at tablets and phones.
Across the aisle from him, a young woman gazed at a laptop, smiling. Long, dark, curly hair framed a round face, half hidden by a blue mask with yellow stars. She had deep-set dark eyes behind oversized glasses and wore dangling earrings. She laughed out loud at something she was watching, glanced aside and saw him looking at her.
Before he could turn away, her eyes crinkled in a smile. He smiled in return, even though he knew she couldn’t tell, and she turned back to her laptop.
He stared out his window again. The girl reminded him of Kayla MacIntosh, though this girl was Asian, maybe biracial, and Kayla had been pale-skinned, with gray-green eyes. Still, both had dark, curly hair and a warm gaze, and it felt like years since a girl had looked at him the way Kayla had, the way an old friend might.
They’d been in kindergarten together, the two of them paired up to tend the monarch butterfly eggs they’d collected from the milkweed patch behind school. After that they were inseparable. Kayla had moved after fifth grade, but in high school they were in the same English class.
By then Kayla was a skinny goth, her dark hair dyed green and her eyebrows stitched with silver rings and safety pins. She didn’t seem angry so much as sad: mostly she just listened to angry-sounding music. They’d acknowledge each other in the halls. Sometimes she smiled, sometimes Grady did. A couple of times they hung out in the parking lot after school, sharing a jibbah—a joint—and talking about stuff they’d done as kids: school trips on the ferry to Islesboro, watching seals in Rockport Harbor. Kayla always had good weed. After high school, they fell out of touch. The last time he’d seen her had been when he was an EMT.
The call came in from Rockland, a 911 from a woman who said she was suicidal and had taken an overdose of prescription painkillers. Grady and Amy and Cameron, his team that night, raced to a run-down single-wide on the south side of town. The door was open, and Grady rushed in first, armed with Narcan, a stomach pump, and a defib. He halted, shocked to recognize Kayla lying on the couch, her eyes slits. Her green-dyed hair had reverted to dark curls, and the piercings were gone, all except a tiny diamond nose ring.
“Kayla,” he stammered, fighting panic as he fumbled for the Narcan. “Kayla, can you tell me what medications you took?”
She didn’t need to tell him—he saw the bottle of alprazolam on the side table, along with a quart of Gilbey’s, nearly empty. Her eyes fluttered closed, her mouth parted so she looked like the girl who’d lain on the floor mats beside him in kindergarten, the two of them refusing to sleep during naptime.
He’d pulled her upright, stuck the nozzle of the Narcan dispenser into one of her nostrils, and pressed the trigger, holding her as he counted off two minutes before administering a second dose. He never stopped chanting her name.
“Kayla, come on, Kayla, hang on, we’re here, come back, Kayla, look at me…”
He felt her die, knew the moment she was gone by the way her body relaxed and the sigh that left her mouth, all gin and cough syrup.
He quit the EMS after that, ignored the concerned phone messages and emails from his supervisor.
“It’s terrible, but this is part of the job, Grady. I know what happened with your dad, and I know that must make this even harder for you. Take a couple of days off. Call me back when you get this.”
Grady never did call back. He gave his notice. He knew he couldn’t hack being an EMT, living with the constant replay of Kayla’s extinguished eyes. Like those three matches he took on his failed wilderness solo, never catching fire.
Chapter 6
Grady angrily yanked down his window shade. This was his chance to start over, leave all that shit behind. He grabbed his phone, scrolling until he found a photo he’d saved of the island. Its eastern section was taken up by a dormant volcano, the west by mountains and a shield volcano. Between them stretched a narrow coastal plain. Hokuloa was on the southeastern coast, a remote, thumb-shaped bulge projecting into the Pacific. The airport was near the island’s main city, Li‘ulā, nestled on the coastal plain’s south shore. He’d shown the photo to Zeke and said, “Doesn’t it look kinda like a dog’s head?”
“A dog’s head?” Zeke laughed. “Dude, you’re getting outta here just in time.”
Thinking of Zeke made him feel better. Zeke was a prepper who believed you could survive anything, even the apocalypse, with a good knife, good weed, and fresh water. “A knifeless man is a lifeless man,” he’d been saying since they were in sixth grade. Grady’s was in his checked bag, along with his Leatherman and carpenter’s square, a few T-shirts, a white button-down, and a flannel shirt, a pair of heavy-duty work gloves, and his work boots.
He stuck his phone into his pocket. With a yawn, he stood and stepped into the aisle, stretched his legs and raised his arms to see if he could touch the ceiling.
“Does your neck hurt?”
He looked around in surprise. In the row across from his, the young woman stared at him. A thick paperback book was open on her tray. He squinted to read the title: The Pale King. It sounded like George R. R. Martin’s stuff, which he liked.
He pointed at the book. “Is that any good?”
“Not really. It keeps putting me to sleep.”
He wasn’t sure if this was a joke or not. “Really?”
She nodded, laughing, and went on. “Yeah. And I always get a headache when I fall asleep on a plane. Do you?”
He hesitated. He could lie and say yeah, that happened every time. Better than admitting this was only the second airplane trip he’d ever taken, right? Still, Grady knew guys who’d never been south of Fenway. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never fallen asleep on a plane before.” The girl laughed again, and he felt his face grow hot. “But, yeah, I do kinda have a crick in my neck.”
It felt weird, talking to a stranger for the first time in months, especially a woman. It’d usually take at least two beers before he could begin a conversation this easily at Three Tides or the Rhumb Line.
Now he felt cut off from that version of himself, like he’d rolled a new character in the middle of a WOW raid. He glanced down, saw the girl had on flip-flops with big pink plastic flowers on them. Her toenails were painted silver.
“This is my first time,” he said. “To Hawai‘i.”
“Ohhh…”
She unbuckled her seat belt, scooted into the end seat in her row. After a moment, he did the same, so they could talk across the aisle.
“You will love it,” she said, lowering her voice as though telling him a secret. “The first time I visited, it was like…” She stopped, staring not at him but at the floor. At last she lifted her head and adjusted her glasses. “It’s kind of like the first time you look at the Milky Way through a telescope. Have you ever done that? Or strong binoculars.”
Grady nodded. “Binoculars, yeah. It was cool.”
“Right. It’s like that—I mean, you can actually see the Milky Way there. It’s clearer than just about anyplace on the planet. That’s why they have those massive telescopes on Haleakalā. The air is so clear. On the island, it’s like that with everything—the ocean, the mountains, the rain forest.” Her expression grew dreamy. “You just…see more.”
Grady nodded politely. This sounded like the kind of stoned revelation Zeke occasionally shared. “Do you live there now?”
“No. I’m going to stay with my girlfriend, Raina—she lives in Makani. But I’ve been a few times—I live in Century City, outside L.A., so it’s only a five-hour flight. I’m doing postgrad work at UCLA—microbiology—but it’s all online now. Why should I be in L.A.? Where are you staying?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, I know where I’ll be, but I don’t know anything about it. A place on Hokuloa Road.”
Her eyes widened. “Really? On the peninsula?” He nodded. “Wow. It’s supposed to be incredibly beautiful out there. But hard to get to. It’s where that billionaire lives—he owns all that land and made it into a wildlife refuge, so nobody can visit. I didn’t think anyone lived there, except him.”
“That’s where I’m going. I’m the new caretaker.”
“Really.” Her brow furrowed as she gave him a look he couldn’t unpack. “You hear a lot of stories about that place. Ghost stories—you know, like the spirit dog on the Road to Hana. Or choking ghosts, and the Nightmarchers.”
“Or Phantom 309,” said Grady, playing along, “that trucker with the eighteen-wheeler who picks you up then disappears.”
She laughed. “I don’t know that one. All I’m saying is, Hokuloa can be really intense. Be careful after dark—there’ve been a bunch of accidents on tha. . .
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