Your father turned toward the trees at the end of the path. From the industrial lots came the sound of metal slicing over itself, the crack of a pallet dropping in the dirt.
We stood and went on along the path, the graves at regular intervals, shin-high piles of rocks and scrap metal. The last cairn before we reached the trees was topped with a half-buried plastic robot, something you had built in one of your incredible science classes at Kahena. The robot was a sun-scalded blue, scoured with animal marks.
I bent and touched it. “This is Nainoa’s,” I said to your father. It looked like a few brown scabs of blood were clinging to the inside of the robot’s arms. What I smelled coming off the cairn was mostly a rocky smell, but underneath, faintly, something of old wet leather and rotting cotton.
“Some of the other stuff, from before, that was from our garage, too, I think,” your father said. “Had an old gear from his first bike.”
The trees were as close as they were going to get without us going into them. There was a dizzy feeling starting in my head.
It wasn’t as dark as I had expected inside, the trees were low with sun breaks. As we walked the dizzy feeling I’d had expanded, running down my skull along each rung of my spine and throat, into my chest. My eyes felt fogged, blurred, and when I opened them wide again, I snatched your father’s hand, as if I might fill with whatever I was feeling and float away.
We stopped. There was a clearing on the other side of the trees and you were there, sitting in the grass, your knees kinked up with your elbows resting on them, fingers playing at the air between your ankles, as if you were waiting to be picked up after school.
“Thank God,” your father said. “I thought maybe he was back here playing with hisself.”
I told him to stop, which never works with your father.
“No, it’s okay, I got a few friends that was like that back in the day. Did I tell you about how John-John tried with his dog’s—”
“Augie, shut up.”
There was a mess in the sky. A dark shape wobbled through the break in the trees, flapping and tumbling, and smacked into the earth right next to you. A feather fluffed through the air. The shape rose—I saw that it was an owl—and dragged itself toward you, a few sloppy heaves of its bulk before it collapsed at your feet, chest up. We watched that chest swell and shrink, slower and slower.
You closed your eyes and put your hands on it.
“Is he,” your father said.
The owl’s breathing slowed again, and again. It was such a paper-light thing. Your face tightened and furrowed, sweat rolled down the line of your jaw. The dizziness in me surged. I was weightless, I was in the sky, beating my arms, only they weren’t arms, they were the stringy muscle and soaring sheets of feathered wings. I rocketed into the sky, all blue everywhere but for the knobbed ridges of the Ko‘olaus getting smaller beneath me. Everything was air, fringed in golden light, and I rose toward the sun like I was riding the fastest elevator, surging and expanding, until everything I was seeing popped, like the lightest bubble.
I was back in the trees, standing with your father, and in the cradle of your hands, the owl had stopped breathing. Without shifting from your kneeling position, you yanked the owl’s body up by the wing and pitched the whole body hard back into the grass. A leg flopped crookedly in the wrong direction.
“Shit!” you called out once, your voice warbled and breaking, the true voice of a boy. You clutched your head in both hands and wailed at the ground.
“Don’t,” your father said, lurching in one crackling rush from our hiding spot, before I could stop him. “Don’t!”
You turned at the sound, your face snotted and flushed. As your father moved forward, you scrambled back.
“Don’t touch me,” you warned, and your father froze in a crouch, arms outstretched to gather you up. Our gazes locked, then moved apart, and I turned mine again to the owl. One wing was jutting up from the limp mess of feathers, and tufts of fluff fluttered when the breeze came through. I wasn’t even a little sad, as I’d expected I should have been; instead I was filled with the echoes of what I’d felt and seen just before, golden and rising.
“We just wanted to make sure you was safe,” your father said.
You stood, went to the owl.
“Nainoa,” I said, because you seemed small and guilty of something, black-brown hair shorter than your brother’s with that side part you used to have, and you were still in your white polo and navy school pants, your right arm across your body, gripping the biceps of your hanging left. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” you said. That was when I saw the trowel, you must have brought it from our garage. You yanked it from the ground and began digging.
“Do you want help?” your father asked.
“You can’t help me,” you said.
And so your father came back to me. We didn’t stay to watch you dig the rest. It didn’t seem right.
We stood outside the trees, by one of the cairns.
“Did you feel anything in there?” I asked Augie.
“Felt like I was flying,” Augie said. “Might as well it was right into the sun.”
My mind was just catching up with what we’d felt, what we’d seen. “Augie, my God, how long has he been seeing things like that? Doing things like that?” I wanted to count the graves, to consider how many animals you’d lived their last breaths with, how many times you’d tried, and failed, to make a difference. How many other things you might be seeing and feeling without us, all of it like running into a wall over and over. The thought that we’d be able to help you through this, to guide you to what you were supposed to become, was total stupidity; along with what we’d been asking you to perform for us, in our home, with the desperate neighbors we’d subjected you to, the stories we told you about what we thought you were. It came unspooling from me as we stood there.
“I use whatever I can find,” you said. “When there aren’t enough stones.”
You’d come up behind us while we did our own thinking. You had more to say, and if we’d asked, if we hadn’t, it didn’t matter; you kept talking. Waved the trowel at the grave we were considering. “This was a dog,” you said. “Some poi dog, like I couldn’t tell what kind.”
You said you’d found it down there when you were out messing around along the canal, skipping stones and taking a break from everything. The dog had been hit by a car. Probably one of the shipping trucks or construction monsters that were always grinding and shuddering along the canal. After it had been hit, the dog dragged itself, all its broken parts, to the clearing. I can only imagine the jammy trail of its insides it must have left along the ground.
You said that you’d tried to fix it, that when you’d laid hands on it, for the first time you felt something important: all the broken places in its body. It was like a puzzle, you said, and all you had to do was put the pieces back together. But you worked in one place and another would start to die. Then you’d turn to that place and the part that you fixed before would be unraveling itself, and on and on, until finally you lost. “I was the dog at the very end,” you said, and started shivering. “I was running on this bright road. Paws ticking into the mud, my body this bouncing knot of muscles. It was like I was dumb with happiness, I don’t know … I ran and ran and ran, but everything got weaker and weaker, until I was just … floating into darkness.”