Khadeja closed the distance to me in a few fluid strides, slipped a hand against my neck, so that her thumb rested just in front of my ear. “Nainoa,” she said again, as if trying to wake me up. I was still holding the handheld against my other ear, she reached for the arm that held it and gently closed her hand over my forearm.
I jerked my arm away. “Don’t,” I said, and pressed the handheld closer to my ear again, even as the static exploded and a voice calmly called out a call sign, acknowledged they’d take the call that came in about a bicycle-automobile interaction, possible C3 spinal fracture.
“Nainoa,” Khadeja said, and she was in front of me, no matter which way I turned, and she reached for the handheld again, this time she had a good grip, I pulled but she pulled back, and the unit slipped free and went spinning away like a top, thumping to the floor. She clutched me in a bear hug, her face buried above my clavicle.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.” When she could tell I wasn’t going to move—when I neither collapsed into her, reciprocating the embrace, nor pulled away—she raised her head and wiped away tears. “I can take you out of here,” she said. “Can I do that?”
I shot my arms out so hard they broke the hug completely, Khadeja stepped back, and I gripped her right biceps in my hand, began to crush. “What can you do?” I said. I gripped harder, she had no idea what I was, no idea, I gripped harder, imagining the burning and the squeeze, a blood pressure cuff gone too far, wanting to go all the way, for the veins and capillaries in her arm to pop, I wanted the pressure of my grip to transfer everything inside me into her, so that she could feel, but that was impossible. “You can’t do anything.”
She jerked her arm free. Her eyes went sharp and she tilted her head just slightly, glaring at me. Both of us taking big breaths, her gaze going from knifepoint to rounded stone to puddle as wetness gathered in her eyes and started draining in long runs down her cheeks, she didn’t wipe this time, just stared and stared. She righted her posture.
“Do that one more time and I’m gone,” she said, but the agreement was already between us before the words left her mouth, because she could see that I realized what a mistake it was, what a mistake I was, and that whatever violence had been in me had departed.
“Nainoa,” she said again. “I want to help you. Can we do that?”
But I didn’t answer, the colors came and went, run run fly eat flee eat sleep run fly there is my baby where is my husband here is my body wasting away on your gurney, and the mother and the child and everything I’d destroyed, Khadeja, you would never feel any of it the way I would, I am on an island in a dark ocean you will never be able to cross. I remained silent.
Khadeja’s face fell; she’d been angry, righteous even, but it was gone. She was trembling as she stepped backward, opened the front door, closed it gently on her way out. As soon as the door closed I stepped to it, leaned against its cheap, prickly grain, feeling her on the other side as she paused, then moved away from me, down the sidewalk, and into the street.
I was still standing there when evening came, the room growing colder and dimmer, I walked about and turned on the lamps, recognizing my living room more and more as the lights came up, the dilapidated couch and stacks of trash mail, the milk-crate shelves of books, and there beside them, the ‘ukulele.
Just as I did in our garage all those years, just as I did at Stanford especially on the hardest days, just as I did at Khadeja’s house, I went to music. I opened the ‘ukulele case, ran my hand along the instrument’s koa body, the colors flaming against the light of my living room, windows still open and thumping with moths, but October waiting in the air already.
I ran through a few scales to warm my knuckles and wrist, let the strings heat and ring. I started with the sort of songs that always made people living-room-excited, “Creep” or “As My Guitar Gently Weeps” or “Aloha ‘Oe,” but there was this version of “Kanaka Wai Wai” by Olomana I came back to sometimes, a solo one I learned from an uncle back home, I came to that one with floating fingers, strummed the strings harder, sang a little even, mine not a throat meant to sing at all but if there were a time to sing I suppose it was then. I could imagine the slack key accompaniments and the rich sad voices of true Hawaiian singers, I strummed and tried. I remembered the shreds of rain forest that made their way to us, from the palis all the way down along the gulch to the fences that separated warehouses, the gulch that barely trickled until the rains came, then roared. I remembered pink clouds above the Ko‘olaus at sundown, perfect temperatures by dinnertime, all of us kids at the table, farting and joking and ignoring our parents’ orders to eat, eat. I remembered Sandy Beach, the waves pitching up into sucking walls of water striped through with different shades of glassy blue, the concrete smack of the waves coming down but me and Dean diving deep, holding our breath, our skin hot and brown from the sun, our skeletons accepting what the tide did to us, and then the time Dean had held my ankle to force the competition to go on, and I’d almost drowned. With the memory of water came the sharks, the rough snout that split into a terrifying cave of teeth, but then the gentle gathering of me in its mouth, the hypnotic muscle of the shark’s body weaving through the water. I played and I remembered all of this, and the memories became a calling, not a voice but instead a very distant urge that set in my sternum and started to spread like medicine until it was pulling at my mind, directly.
Home. Come home.
I didn’t finish the song.
14
DEAN, 2008
Spokane
This one day I got a call from Noa I wasn’t expecting. Used to be we planned our calls, back when Kaui was doing like Mom said and making all us kids conference-call once in a while, You have to stay connected out there trust me the mainland will try and break you apart. Except on those calls, it was mostly Noa and Kaui trying for see who’s got the most Ph.D. vocabulary. Half the time I could put ’um on speaker and go back to cleaning my toenails or whatever while they jabbered away, forgot I was there.
But after things went bad at the university, Noa started calling me more. At first I didn’t know what he was doing. Wouldn’t even ask me about basketball or what I was gonna do next or none of that, the way everyone else did. He just started talking about his day.
He would say stuff he didn’t want to say while we was on the phone with Kaui. We’d talk about work and girls and all that. I think I was the first person he told when he’d started checking out Khadeja, and he’d call and say, Man, I went by their house and Rika was running down the hall naked, just got out of her bath and she’s trying to escape, and even though I’d spent all day with sick and broken people in the ambulance their house would light me up inside like a Roman candle. And we’d talk about Hawai‘i little-kid days, how we used to wrestle at the park like we was MMA champs, or the weird kids down the street that always smelled like fish and ate their boogers, how I used to make them give us candy and then split it fifty-fifty with Noa, partners in crime.
After a while it got so that on the calls Noa started slipping in these comments and questions about me, way after everyone else had stopped talking about my future. He’d say, There’s so much you can still do with your life. Maybe basketball isn’t the only thing. I’d be like, You don’t understand, if there’s no basketball, there’s no me.