He used to walk home this way every day from school, but now everything appeared much smaller than he remembered. His old high school and the baseball field looked faded and run-down, and the bleachers where he sat with Maile, his high school girlfriend, sagged in the distance. All those weekends spent with her at the beach or Wailuku River, along with Wilson, Mano, and other high school friends, smoking and drinking whatever could be pilfered from their parents without getting caught. Daniel tried not to think of Maile when he was in Chicago, but here, she was everywhere. She’d been the only girl for him back then. The last he’d heard from her was a card she’d sent after his mother passed away. She was living in Honolulu and engaged to be married. All at once, his mother was gone and so was Maile. He had no right to hope for anything from her, but he’d still felt grief-stricken.

Daniel picked up his pace. After so many years living in Chicago, his body still hummed with the traffic and noise bouncing off the tall buildings. A part of him had been apprehensive about returning to Hilo, anxious that he wouldn’t be able to adjust to the unhurried island quiet, only to arrive in the midst of a different kind of turmoil and chaos with Mauna Loa’s eruption. He was quickly reminded that the island was just as volatile and unpredictable as anything a big city could offer.

What Daniel didn’t miss about Chicago was the cold. He still felt the icy wind against his cheeks, chapped raw and red, his fingers so cold he could barely get his key in the door. He had shivered through so many frigid winters dreaming of warm Hilo mornings that smelled sweetly of papaya and guava, pikake and ginger flowers. It was what he longed for most when he walked along the shore of Lake Michigan bundled up like an Eskimo during the long, dark winters that felt like a scentless, icy purgatory. His first winter there, he couldn’t imagine how people lived in such cold.

Instead, Daniel had returned to a gray veiled sky of smoke and ash and the scent of sulfur that was finally being carried away by the warm trade winds. Still, he felt calmer to be home, away from Chicago and the turbulence of the hospital, the knot in his stomach loosening. Daniel walked toward downtown, along ghostly streets that were once lined with new markets and small restaurants opened by the influx of workers coming for the plantation work.