Strong Like the Sea, стр. 63

But here?

The schedule should be bolted to the wall in our house. Not copied and carried with us. We’re always tied to it, and I’m sick of it. Sick and tired of being ruled by a stupid piece of paper that’s more important than seeing Mom’s tree.

“So . . .” I lick my lips. Do I really dare say it?

Another tree flashes by.

Yep. I dare. “How about we don’t go to the other places?”

“What?” Dad glances from the road to me and back again.

“You know, like we could stop and go back, and see the rainbow tree—and when we get to the next stop, we could stay there and look around, like without a time limit. We could walk around.” If Mom were here, she’d have held my hand and walked all over the trails by the volcano center, and especially around the Black Sands Beach with the turtles. That’s what we do. We walk. We look. We notice. And we take our time!

“Sorry hon, sunset’s at 5:50 p.m., and we can’t stay another day.”

It’s so unfair. I finished Mom’s challenge that she made for me. So why can’t I have a choice in what we do? A familiar heat swirls inside, but this time, I don’t want to push it back down. Why do I have to pretend it’s fine when it’s not? That stupid schedule is ruining everything! “But I didn’t get to look at the tree at all. Maybe Mom wanted me to see it. How do you know? What’s the point of all this if we miss the thing she wanted me to see?”

“Alex, we’ve got a schedule to keep—”

“Can’t I be more important than the calendar for once? “We might be racing all over for nothing.”

“It’s not for nothing!”

I flinch at Dad’s sharp tone as his hands open and close on the steering wheel like he wants to bend it. He takes a deep breath and tries again.

“True, I don’t know exactly what your mom wanted you to see. It was never the plan to do this without her. But when the unexpected happens, we do the best we can. That’s why I’m trying to cover all the bases. I know her end goal—our final stop. And we’re almost there, but we don’t have much time.” His voice cracks, and I glimpse how tight he’s holding on to control.

My heart cracks a little to match. He told me once that having a schedule anchors him when he’s tossed in a sea of chaos and uncertainty. If he’s holding on this tight, he must feel the same tempest inside as I do.

Auntie pats my shoulder. “What? Don’t want see the whole island in one day? Don’t worry. Your dad knows what he’s doing. Patience.”

After that, Dad and I drive in silence, both of us trying to get salt out of our wounds, while Auntie and Uncle tease and murmur in the back seat. I’m not mad at him, not really. But we dance around this fissure where Mom ought to be—but isn’t—and sometimes it fills up with all the things we don’t say until it swells into a boil and spills over, venting our hurt and frustration.

He needs me to pretend, I know. But it’s hard to stuff all the feels back where they go when this hollow ache keeps spitting them back out. Auntie pats me on the shoulder and hums a tune, and I remember she and Uncle are trying hard too. They came all this way to be with me and Dad. For Auntie, I’ll try one more time to be strong.

When we pull into Pohoiki Park, Dad sweeps around to my side of the car and opens my door with an extra twirl of his hand. “Welcome to the newest black sands beach in Hawaii. You can walk around and look all you want . . . as long as you’re back in the car in twenty minutes.”

I look from his tired eyes to his offered hand, then reach out and take it. I can be strong for him too. “Gee, thanks, Dad. Twenty whole minutes?”

“For you? Twenty and a half.” Dad lifts my hand to his lips and makes kissy-noises as if I were a princess, and I laugh, dart out of reach, and wipe it off on my shirt.

Even though we both know he’s totally putting on a show, I smile with him, and hold on to Auntie’s advice that it will turn out okay.

We walk onto a side road and I follow the yellow lines down the center, hopping from one to the next until the last one disappears under lava rock where a thirty-foot wall of lava marched right over the pavement and swallowed whatever came next.

I squint up at the top, but I already know what it looks like up there—same as all the lava fields we already drove over. “Where did this road used to go?”

“This road led to many good places.” Auntie gazes at the rock as if she had X-ray vision to see right through. “Ahalanui Warm Springs Park, Kapoho tide pools, homes, orchid farms—some of the best flowers in all of Hawaii.”

Dad’s phone rings and he glances at the screen, twice. “Uh, I need to get this. Matthew? Can you tell Alex about the park?”

“Sure.” We walk to a shady area beside the road where lava gobbled up trees and grass and ate half a picnic table—but left the other half stuck part in, part out of a solid wall of rock.

“Whoa.” I duck to look underneath, but the table isn’t hardly scorched at all. How’d that—

“What do you mean, oversight?” Dad paces far down the road. “How long ago?”

Uncle’s gentle hand turns me from Dad as we walk through the park and out to the boat dock. He points toward the lagoon at the base of a ramp. “One of the last people to escape got out right over there.”

“I thought everyone was evacuated?”

“Everyone else was, but it’s hard to leave a life’s