CHAPTER 3

 

.3.

Twice a week, I had dinner with my parents. The old O’Neill house was a Craftsman-style fortress of books and quiet, hidden where the humidity of the valley started to pick up the scent of mountain ginger. My mother, Diana, met me at the door, eyes wide with the kind of worry that only a woman who paints the sea can have for a son who keeps jumping into it. She’d seen the paper. Her Ray was a hero. I managed to dodge her questions with a kiss on the cheek and a promise that I was still in one piece, but the real gauntlet was waiting in the study.

If bookish were a person, it would be my father. Professor David O’Neill sat behind a desk that was more paper than wood, the air around him smelling of old vellum and dust.

“What your mother told me, is it true?” he asked, spectacles half-way down his nose.

“Yes.”

He sighed, a long, weary sound that seemed to lament the state of the modern world. “Honestly, Horatio. Why?”

“What do you mean, why? The fellow was drowning!”

My father blinked. He looked at me as if I’d suddenly started speaking a dead dialect he hadn't mastered. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about, father?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“I’m afraid it isn’t.”

He exhaled, as if my lack of discernment were a continued cause of unnecessary mental and physical effort. He didn't mention the rescue, the millionaire, or the fact that I’d spent my 3 AM wrestling with the tide. He just tapped a finger on a stack of journals.

“Your mother tells me you’re writing a—" He paused, the word seemingly catching in his throat like a hairball. “Something akin to what that Biggers fellow writes.”

I felt the familiar itch of frustration. To him, Earl Derr Biggers and his Charlie Chan mysteries were a plague on the literary landscape, a cheapening of the Hawaiian islands into a backdrop for blood and clues. He’d never read a word of them, of course. Men like my father didn't need to read a book to know it was beneath them.

“It’s a story, Dad. People like stories.”

“People like the circus, too, Horatio, but we don't live in a tent.” He adjusted his spectacles. “To take the history of this place, the complexity of our position here, and reduce it to… a murder mystery? It’s beneath the O’Neill name. It’s sensationalism. It's the sort of thing that belongs in a drugstore, not a library.”

I looked at him – so clean, so dry, so utterly untouched by the salt water still stinging the back of my throat. He didn't care that I’d saved a life. He was only afraid I’d save the wrong kind of literature.

“Maybe the world is sensational,” I said, my voice flatter than I intended. “Maybe sometimes, things just happen that don’t fit into a history lecture.”

He looked back down at his books, the conversation over as far as he was concerned. “Just try not to embarrass your mother. She already spends enough time worrying about your physical safety; don't make her worry about your intellect as well.”

I turned toward the dining room, the smell of dinner calling from the hallway. I was the story, all right – but in this house, I was a story he didn't want to read.

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