Picture the mother, the wife, now the last bones of the family. Hard and old and cold, holding everything up. Let’s not call it hope. It is a labor of sorts; that is all. Picture her as she realizes she can no longer go to work, because of the father, the constant observation he needs, and her employment goes almost as quickly as his. No money from him, no money from her. This means, in the city, they are dead.
There’s only one place left to go, back to the Big Island, the land of your birth, where family still resides, your father’s brother and his successful business, extra buildings on his extra property that can house the diminished count of us.
If she doesn’t beg, exactly, there’s still a quiet resignation to the mother. There’s still a kneeling, and opening of the palms upward, asking for something to be placed in them. Hands that used to push and take and grip their own way through the world.
Picture what we’ve become without you, my son.
Can you see it?
29
KAUI, 2009
Portland
Because the arrest. Because the second cold police car, my brother in the back. Because I couldn’t enter the station, had to hide and peek every now and then at the white walls and the steady shot of the clerk’s stamp on paper, case closure after closure. Because the last talk with Dean, in person after his arraignment, when he’d kept his mouth shut about me—before I had to head back south—we sat in those plastic spine-stabbing chairs at the table, what could we say? Because our eyes filled with a wet history, and we knew there wouldn’t be another visitor until his release, if then. Because another punch of poverty, no way to make bail, seeing what we can’t do as a family, again and again and again. Because I had to watch while the guards corralled him back to his cell, through the thick blue-white doors, heavy with locks and screens. Because I walked the rain-gleamed Portland downtown. Because that night, the cold gnawing through all of me, because the only dry doorway was by a parking garage, because the backpack that held the last physical pieces of Nainoa’s life became my pillow, because the plunging in and out of sleep. Because the stabs of ache all along my side: hip, ribs, shoulder. Because again the dumpster diving, this time for food, no college throwaway painkillers, right? Because the shelter after, the steaming rows of bunk beds in the homeless shelter, the mutterings in the unlit corners, the hunting knife I stole from the locker, its duct-taped handle, gripping it under my pillow. Because the morning lines: dingy porcelain bathroom, watered oatmeal, small television picture jumping, cartoons. Because the mouse blackened the cat with dynamite, pounded the cat as a peg with the sledgehammer, buckshotted out the cat’s teeth, each one tinkling as a piano key. Because the phone call, after my mother telling me she had failed Dean, had failed all of us if this is what we were, because she said I had to go back to school—“You’re the only one now,” she said, “you’re all we have left.” “But I can’t go back,” I said. “Mom, I just want to come home. Can you get me home? I just want to come home.” Because she found the money somewhere, somehow, her own form of magic, I came back to Hawai‘i.
From the air the gas-burner-blue ocean pounds wave after wave into the crusted black slabs of lava on the Kona coast, little scoops of white-sugar sand beaches and coconut trees. The sun golden and everywhere and hot, even from inside the plane. We lower and we lower toward the ground. In the ocean below there’s an explosion of water and a humpback whale heaves itself free of the sea, vertical, twisting in the spray, two blue-gray dorsal fins and the smiling snout. Barnacles and knots of scabby skin. It twists and stretches as if it could keep going, right through the sky, never stop. But instead the water spins off it and dissipates into mist and the whale’s breach ends when it hits the water and throws up a giant sheet of foam.
A prickly feeling all along my arms and legs and I get chicken skin: This is it. This is Hawai‘i.
They meet me curbside at the airport, Mom and Dad rolling up in a pickup truck I don’t recognize, a white and lifted Tacoma with a rack in the bed and knobby tires. I’m sitting on a lava rock wall under a shady tree, close to one of the lei shops. Smell of plumeria and orchid. Pinks and purples and yellows. Mom hops out of the truck and comes around to the curb, looking me up and down. Like she needs to check and see if I’m damaged goods, right? I don’t ask her what her conclusion is. Finally she hugs me, holds on, longer than I expected. And I hug her back, longer than I expected. When I pull away Dad’s still sitting in the truck.
Mom lifts my backpack from the concrete. “Not much in here,” Mom says.
“What’s up with Dad?” I ask.
“He’s—” Mom stops. We both stare at him. He’s not really looking toward us. Off instead to the voggy sky. “You see him,” Mom says. “I don’t know.”
When I approach the window to get into the back seat of the truck’s cab Dad sees me. There’s a flicker of recognition, but it fogs over. He doesn’t smile or say hi or get up out of the truck. His lips are going, soft and smooth with some never-ending whisper.
“Fuck, Mom,” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her lips go flat, pressed hard on each other. “You think you could’ve done anything?”
“Maybe,” I say. “What have you done? Anything?”
She drops my backpack on the ground where she’s standing, ten feet back from the truck. “There’s space for you in the back seat,” she says, and goes around to her side.
The truck swings away from the airport, up the road toward Hualālai, distant volcano gone green and brown all the way to the cloud-scudded peak. Then we turn northwest and the road tracks the coast, the broad table of old black lava flows surrounding us. The ocean curling into the shore. Up the hills are the bristling thorns of kiawe trees, and after we drive far enough, the hills become the desert grass of Waikoloa, right? All the while Dad just going, lips whispering or quiet and eyes blinking out toward the island. The skin near those eyes striated with a tired sort of anxiety.
“Is he always like this now?” I ask.
“He still breaks through here and there.”
“Have you taken him to a doctor?”
“Good idea,” Mom says. “I’ve raised three kids and been an adult for most of my life, but I didn’t think of that. A doctor.” She says, “Let me write that down.”
“I just wanted—”
“They couldn’t do anything for him, Kaui,” she says. “Just tests. That was their idea. This or that drug for a few months, have him come back to get tested all the time. After I got the bill for the first visit I never went back.”
We pass through Waimea and it’s twenty degrees colder, fog and sideways rain from the wind, right? Like, people holding their hats and leaning their chests into the ripping gusts when they get out of their cars.
“Who takes care of him while you work?”
“I work nights,” she says. “When I go, Kimo checks on him every now and then.”
“You leave him alone?”
She shoots stink-eye at me. Then goes back to watching the road. Okay, the windshield wipers flap and squeak. “He’s usually asleep for all of it,” she says. “It’s the only way. Otherwise we don’t make any money.”