“I wanted to leave her,” I say. I say it again. I wanted to leave her. I wanted to hurt her.
“Those boys,” I say. I palm tears from my cheeks. “Those boys were like fucking wolves and I left her.”
The house pops and creaks and flexes around us. It’s blue and dark out there. I ask Mom if love ever made her feel alone. If it ever made her feel like she was starving in a room full of food.
She laughs. “Only every day.” She leans over to me, across the gap between us, so that the side of her head touches mine. Okay, I can feel the bone, the scratchy shift of hair on hair. We lean in to each other more and more heavily. I’m, like, ugly crying, I think. Tears run down me. She whispers something, but I can’t hear the words.
“I never thought I’d be the type of person who would do that to someone,” I say. “Now it’s exactly what I am. Forever.”
Mom nods. “It’s always like that.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Whenever I’ve made a choice in my life, a real choice…” She leans back from my head. Touches my shoulder just for a second. “I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.”
It’s exactly what I think. So there’s nothing to say. I saw at my nose with my forearm. Palm more tears from my eyes.
“I’m always losing better versions of myself,” she says. “I don’t know. You just have to keep trying.”
She cries then. We both do for a few minutes. “God, I’m tired of crying,” she says, finally. Stands and juts her head toward the kitchen. “You want a beer?”
“I want fifteen,” I say, laughing. And I wipe my face again and again. “Let’s just split one.” She goes. I hear the fridge smooch open and closed. She comes back and sets a beer bottle down next to my ankle and then gently lifts the ‘uke onto her lap.
She asks do I ever think about dying. About what’s there, on the other side.
“Of course,” I say. “Especially since Noa.”
“And?”
The answer doesn’t come as quickly as I thought it would. “Most of the time it feels like there’s nothing after this,” I say.
“That part doesn’t matter,” Mom says. “Or it doesn’t scare me. If there’s something on the other side or not. It’s the getting there, you know? That last minute when you’re leaving, still living in this world even as it’s closing up around you. You have to do that part alone.”
I don’t have anything to say.
“I thought about doing it, you know,” she says. “When Augie was at his worst, just after Noa.”
“Shit, Mom,” I say.
“That’s right,” she says. “Razors, pills. Kimo’s hunting rifle. A rope from the ceiling.”
It’s like she’s naming old friends, people she’s spent a lot of time with. Part of me wants to know how far she went. If she had the thing in her hands. “I’m glad you didn’t,” I say.
She laughs. “Gee, thanks.” She shifts in her chair and almost drops the ‘uke, right? A lurching move to catch it.
I jut my chin at the ‘uke. “You ever play it?” I ask.
She considers what she’s holding. Like the idea had never occurred to her.
“I only know maybe one or two songs,” she says. “Better your father.”
“He’s asleep,” I say. “And anyway I don’t think either of us would want to hear whatever he plays these days.”
Mom’s thinking. I bet she feels what I feel. That something is turning in us. What we are to each other. After all this time away, the island can still never be anything but my home, and I can never be anything but her daughter.
She starts playing the ‘ukulele.
There’s a pop and chuck to the song. Off-tune chords a little bit. It’s sad and slow. Or it feels that way; but she keeps going and it catches in my throat and my fingers and my hips. I stand and it begins: a hula. I don’t understand what’s happening. My body does not feel like my own, it feels as if I’m just a passenger in the shell. The song Mom plays isn’t made for hula, it’s too slow and choppy. I lose the beat and move away across it and come back and lose it again. But something keeps moving me. Stop, I want to tell Mom, but something won’t let me speak. My hands drift and ripple and harden. My hips roll with my bent knees. The chords chuck. Mom’s fingers are picking up speed, adding second and third notes along with the chords so something thick and intricate is rising from the strings.
I don’t understand, I want to say again, but I still can’t speak, right? Something keeps sucking the sound from my throat.
Mom moves the song to another. She starts slapping a beat on the body of the ‘ukulele. Slapping and rolling her knuckles on the body like it’s an ipu. Then she goes back and jams out a few chords. So hard I worry the strings will snap. Then while they’re still ringing in the air she’s slapping the ‘ukulele body again, tapping and slapping and rolling.
The song has become kahiko. The ancient hula form.
And the song asks: What are we doing here. In this land.
In my mind I see: Water finding its way from the top of rain-pounded gulches in the mountains to the leaves of green kalo in the valley. To the thirsty earth. I see fish and flower beds and symbiosis. My hands in that same soil, tilting the balance ever so slightly, and the green roaring back.
The song asks again: what are we doing here. Take the balance we’re building at the farm, I say. Say it with my hands and hips in the hula. The song is asking and I answer. Make my palms flat and press them down through the air as I rock my hips and step slowly, and turn back. I’m not working hard but I’m dizzy, motion-sick. Something is in me. Mom goes harder on the ‘ukulele. She’s slapping and knuckling the body. She’s hitting chords and notes all over the strings, right? It’s the farm, I answer, it’s the land, what we can be and what the islands can become. In the hula I pluck from the air like I’m plucking kalo. I sweep down and across my body like rain through the dirt and rivers. The old ways again, land feeding, land eating. That old hum. I pivot on my heels. Mom goes on, the song is swelling with a rainstorm of notes and a beat that’s turning before our eyes. I’ve never seen her play like that, so fast and precise; it’s not sad anymore. I see my hands as I sweep with them. My hands. Stained again to the quick, this time with soil instead of the climbing chalk they’d been dirtied with in San Diego. I roll my hips and shoot my feet out and back to the beat. I drop to my knees and turn my arms each way before setting them down. I bow. Mom strikes the last notes, faster than the notes she started with.
There’s a rip tide of silence. I slam my ass back into the chair. Like, almost break it, almost fall over. The sensations of where I am start to creep back into recognition. The coqui frogs go.
“Mom?” I ask. “What just happened?”
Her eyes are larger and whiter than before. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never played that before in my life.” She cradles the ‘ukulele back down to her lap. Opens her hands and wiggles her fingers. As if to be sure they’re still there.