Keira closed her eyes, not eager to see either of them. It wasn’t fear of what they’d say to her that had her ready to bolt from the room, but the heavy weight of guilt she felt. Luka had gone with her to rescue Kona. He’d gone willingly, eagerly, but he’d gone because Keira had called him. He’d gone because, like Keira, he wanted to rescue Kona. That wasn’t an excuse. Luka had still ended up dead and Keira didn’t think Kona’s family would thank her for leading Luka to that death.
A screech from the large metal door that opened to the visitor’s area brought Keira’s attention away from the Admin desk and when she saw Professor Alana walking towards her, several thoughts came at once. The first was that the woman looked older. The death, the burden of burying your own child and the empty future of another seemed to wear on her; it was written in the unkempt wrinkles on her linen shirt and the loose fitting hang of her worn jeans. She had always walked with her chin uplifted, shoulders back and her stance elegant, but the woman who caught her eyes, who slammed the door shut behind her, slumped her shoulders, took sloppy steps toward Keira.
“You have a lot of nerve coming here.” Professor Alana swatted at her eyes, brushing back the hair falling from her loose bun. Keira didn’t jerk away from her when the older woman gripped her elbow, or when she pulled her toward the back of the lobby. “He doesn’t want to see you.”
She wouldn’t believe it. In all honesty, Keira didn’t care if Kona hated her right then. She knew telling him about the baby would change things. She knew him; she knew how he’d blame himself for Luka’s death. He needed a glimmer of hope and Kiera wanted to give him that. “I don’t care, Professor Alana.” She twisted out of the woman’s grip and stepped away from her. “I need to talk to him.”
The woman lifted her eyebrows, her gaze working over Keira’s face and then she sighed, sitting on the plastic chair to her left before she opened the purse on her lap. “This is about that baby.” She kept her eyes downcast, her fingers rustling through her purse until she withdrew her checkbook. A swipe of her pen and the woman tore out a check, shoving it at Keira without a word.
Five hundred dollars. Alana thought her grandchild’s life was worth five hundred dollars. She spotted the Memo and Keira crumbled the check between her fingers.
“To fix Kona’s lapse in judgment?”
“What else would I call this?”
Keira’s heart would not soften, despite the bags under the professor’s eyes or the dark circles that told her sleep had not been easy for her. She understood the heartache, felt echoes of her own father’s death in the shadows beneath Professor Alana’s eyes, but she wouldn’t be written off. She would not let her mother or Kona’s decide the course of their lives. He had a right to know about their baby. Despite his possible anger at her, despite the gut-wrenching loss she knew he must be feeling, he still had to know that hope would come to them.
“I don’t want your money. Take this.” She waved the wrinkled check back at the professor, then slipped it in her back pocket when the woman only glared at her, top lip twitching.
Suddenly Professor Alana grabbed Keira’s arms and shook her twice. “I will not let some stupid bitch ruin my son’s future. You say a word to him about that damn baby and I will destroy you, little girl. I promise you that.” Her fingernails bit into Keira’s skin and she tried to break away, to pull out of the woman’s touch. “You’ve already taken one son from me, you will not take Kona!”
“Kaikamahine, enough.” Koa came behind Professor Alana, pulled her away from Keira and as he held his daughter against his chest, patted her back, the old man’s kind eyes went glassy and soft. He gave Keira a weak smile, an expression Keira thought was forced, but sincere. “Kona’s waiting, little one, go see him. He needs to see a friendly face.”
Keira walked away from Kona’s family, then, from the small sobs working out of his mother’s chest and the gentle kindness softening his grandfather’s features. But she couldn’t help thinking, as she walked through that metal door that the guilt she felt would swallow her whole.
Three a.m. that morning a wiry Dominican kid from the Seventh Ward decided Kona had a softer pillow than him. He knew the score. At age fifteen, he’d landed in juvie, after a couple of scrapes that had him at the wrong in of the NOPD’s knuckles. So when the kid jerked Kona’s pillow out from under him as he slept, Kona took it back. He took it back after he broke the kid’s nose and fractured his jawbone.