Prior to Mother's arrival, I loaded Mary and the boys into our rented Nissan and drove down to the golden beach that encloses Kailua Bay, into which the heavy rains of Maunawili drain. On the edge of the sea, I gathered my family around me and constructed a ceremony that mimicked the ritual my mother and I would later enact—just the two of us, for in her grief that is how she preferred it—on this same beach on a windswept morning exactly one week later, as the sun spackled the eastern sky gold and green above the azure blue bay.
        I scooped up a handful of dry sand, then instructed Mary and the boys to do the same.
        “These grains of sand in our palms represent the spirit of your grandpa Heller,” I told the boys. “Grandpa loved life, but life was never easy for him. He wanted everything life had to offer, but he didn't really want it for himself. He wanted it for your grandma, for me, and finally for you. He worked hard and made many sacrifices. If he hadn't done these things, I never would have gone to college. And your mother and I probably never could have made the life for us that we've all enjoyed so far.”
        “That's right,” Mary said.
        We joined our free hands, and I led everyone into the gently lapping water, up to my knees.
        “Grandpa always went his own way in life. Now we're going to lower our palms into the sea and release Grandpa's spirit, so it can go wherever it wants to go.”
        Without another word, we lowered our palms into the undulating blue water and watched the grains darken, disperse, then disappear.
        I never met Tim Pantaleoni and don't know what kind of man he was. Nevertheless, through the images of my father that I carry in my head, I can't help but imagine the life he might have lived. At the time of his disappearance he was thirty-three, the age my father was when I was born, when the future was a bewildering maze of choices, a labyrinth of possible paths. Tim Pantaleoni was never found. I like to think his spirit endures in the green depths of Maunawili, wandering through the tangled web of the living, breathing forest, occasionally crossing the trail where an alert hiker might catch a glimpse of his faint ethereal body, if the light is just right. And on hot, sultry days, when the blazing tropical sun lifts moisture from Kailua Bay and the tradewinds carry it inland to the mountains, filling the vast green bowl of the valley with a steamy mist, I picture the spirit of my father moving simultaneously through the same dense forest, never following the established trail, hiking ever deeper into the green unknown, examining each leaf and stone with the seasoned vision of the experienced searcher, taking it all in, missing nothing.

                                3