But then I notice Augie. He’s not standing with her anymore, she’s given him space, and so he’s standing off by the aquaponic section, the huge, crowded bins of growing kalo. He does a strange thing then: he leans over, pressing his forehead gently against one of the elephant-ear leaves, and as I watch he leans farther and farther into the plant, until the whole front of his head has disappeared into the stalks.
There’s a feeling, a deep green feeling, and a music. I feel myself lifting, it’s almost as if I’m in my body and outside it at the same time. Something’s happening.
“Augie,” I say, starting to walk toward him, even though I know he won’t answer, it’s pointless, “what is it?”
Augie holds a hand up, his head still lost in the stalks and shadow, the leaves draped over his shoulder as if consoling him. But when he holds the hand up, there’s something about the gesture, two fingers barely apart, two other fingers closed, that’s more deft than he’s been for quite some time. A controlled looseness, is what it is. Faculties. He pulls his head back out.
“Babe,” he says.
I almost trip on myself. Babe, a word he hasn’t said in such a long time, so long I’d forgotten what it meant to hear it. We had always had us, Augie and I, and our time together had always felt like a braiding, a braiding of our essences against each other tighter and tighter no matter what was being torn down around us. More than anything, what I’d missed most all these months was that feeling, and I realized it was the feeling of home.
“Babe,” he says again. As if we’d never missed each other all this time. “I gotta show you something.”
I want to speak but say nothing. I step closer to him. His hand grasps my arm just above the elbow and pulls me into the kalo—and when my forehead touches the leaves I feel it.
It’s the same as what was there last night, in the song with Kaui, buzzing through my bones when I played the ‘uke. Where I touch the leaves and stalks, I feel a thousand voices, chanting. Yes. I grasp the stalks, I bury my face with Augie. The chanting and the singing. I know the language even if this is the first time I hear it this way, a language of righteousness and cycles, giving and taking, aloha in the rawest form. Pure love. The chant grows in numbers, the way talk at a large gathering of people shifts from individual conversations into a babbling hum, so that what I’m touching now is more than voices, more than a chant, it’s a hum of energy, and I can feel the hum extending into everything around us: the kalo in the field, I feel its green hunger for sunlight and the clamp and flex of its body against the damp soil and the way it is drinking tongues of water that find their way to it from the fish, and the fish, the trill and beat of their tails, a constant rock this way and that as their bodies muscle their dance through the water, then the mud on the edges of the tank and past it the grass, all of it raising up and feasting on the sun, the heat, the rain. It echoes back until it’s almost too much to bear, too much to fit into one mind. I’m starting to lose myself in it, it’s raging around me, it’s starting to drown ideas I have even about myself, where I am, my name—
Augie’s rough hand pulls me back from the leaves. There he is, examining me, his eyes gentle and full, the way they used to be. All of him is there. “You felt ’um?” he asks, and I tell him yes, yes, of course I did.
“Been there this whole time, yeah,” he says. “You didn’t know.”
“What’s been there?” I ask.
“All of that,” he says. “All of it.”
I realize, finally, what it’s been like in his head all this time, how if this is what has been in there, in its most loud and central form, roaring over every part of his mind … it would unmake him. How it started slowly and came on bigger. That he felt it on O‘ahu while I didn’t, that there’s something Kaui felt, too, something that she awakened on the porch, her and Noa’s ‘ukulele, and now here we are. She unlocked it. This place, this land, unlocked it. A wall of chanting sound storming over everything else, a demand from the island to be realized—no, released—this way. This is just the start, isn’t it, but this is everything, all of it from the beginning. Stick me in the heart with a spear, the way I understand Nainoa for the first time. It must have been so lonely, all his life, with all of this.
“Augie,” I whisper.
“What?”
“Right now,” I say, “is it you?”
“I don’t understand,” he says, but I don’t need him to answer. I can see. Oh my Augie, I kiss him. Push right into him and feel his chest, the way the muscle has thinned to a shallow dish over ridged bone, but still it thuds with blood and breath—I press mine against his, and our teeth click as I shift my mouth over my Augie, let my lips slide sloppy into place, us breathing together. He’s here right now, all of him, and it is enough. Something is released.
“Oh my God,” I say, pulling back from the kiss, and I laugh. “Your breath stinks.”
38
KAUI, 2009
Honoka‘a
We beat our run out on the road. And the road it beats us back. The chopping pattern of our running shoes on the blacktop, me and Dad on our eighth mile, and with each stride the earth drives back into our bones and muscles. Sugarcane and eucalyptus scroll by and occasionally, farther out in the fields, there are rust-cancered mill houses and zinc storage-sheds getting swallowed by leaves. Scrubby green unused farmland tilts down toward the faraway cliffs. Okay, and then beyond, the blue ocean flickers with whitecaps from the trade winds. We keep running and we keep hurting, right? Through our toe bones. Through the knots of our calves and the stiff bands of our thighs. All the way up through our bellies goes the beat. Tff tff tff is the sound. Each time we stride now there’s a sort of gasping from both of our throats. I bet that’s the wrong way to run, losing breath like that. But I don’t care about being wrong. Or losing breath. I just want to go.
Okay, still running, me and Dad, just like we did at the start when I came home. Back when I figured maybe just running would make him better. You run hard enough and long enough and everything inside is muted under the torrent of your body moving blood and oxygen and your head buzzes bright. Back when I first came home I was ready to get lost with Dad. And I did some days. Some nights.
Then the hurt unlocked itself, Dad and the land. Now whole days go where he’s like he was before. There’s no muttering, okay? There’s no set of staring eyes, as empty as the rusted sheds we’re running past. There’s no shitting himself or wandering off into the dark green. No. We have all of him now: Pull my finger, he ordered at dinner on Saturday. And after our run yesterday morning he said: I been running so hard I think your mom gonna die.
Who, by the way. Mom. It hasn’t been since my hanabata days that I’ve seen her like she is now. For a while a part of her had given up. She’d lost everything and was only continuing to wake up because it’s what she’d always done. Or maybe she thought there was something in Dean and me that she could live for. I don’t know about that. But I do know Noa will always be her favorite; it wasn’t even about Noa, really, or at least not just the person. For Mom, Noa was a son but he was also the legends that came with him. How those contracted everything that hurt us—the broke years, the move to the city, the shit jobs she and Dad had—into a single point of purpose. And that purpose was so big she didn’t have to understand it to know she had an important part to play. Big destiny is a thing you get drunk on.