To Paradise (42 page)

It had been raining on the morning your grandmother came to visit me, and I watched as she picked her way across the muddy expanse of grass to where I was lying on the tarp beneath the acacia. The tarp, once a ceiling, was now a floor, and I spent most of my day there, sleeping, waiting for one day to end and the next to begin. Sometimes Edward would try to rouse me, but that happened less and less frequently, and often he would vanish for what might have been hours or might have been days—even as I tried, I was less and less able to distinguish time—and I would be left alone to doze, waking only when I was too hungry to sleep. Sometimes I dreamed of that night in the house when we had heard Bethesda, and would wonder if he had been real or if we had summoned him from some other realm.

She stood over me for a few seconds before she spoke. “Wake up, Wika,” she said, and, when I didn’t move, she knelt and shook my shoulder. “Wika, get up,” she repeated, and I finally did.

She stared at me for a bit, and then she stood. “Get up,” she instructed. “We’re walking.”

I got up and followed her. She was carrying a cloth bag and a
tatami mat, which she passed to me. Although it was no longer raining, the sky was still gray, and there was no sun. We walked toward the mountain, and at the monkeypod tree, she gestured for me to unfurl the mat. “I brought us a picnic,” she said, and before I could look around, she added, “He’s not here.”

I wanted to tell her I wasn’t hungry, but she was already unloading the food: bento boxes of rice and mochi fried chicken and nishime, cucumber namasu, and cut muskmelon for dessert—all the things I had once loved to eat. “It’s all for you,” she said, as I began to serve her. “I already ate.”

I ate so fast and so much I gagged, but she never scolded me, and even after I had finished, she was still silent. She had taken off her shoes, which she’d placed neatly by the edge of the mat, and had stretched her legs out before her; I remembered she had always worn her nylons a shade darker than her skin. She was wearing a lime-green skirt printed with white roses, now very faded, that I remembered from my childhood, and as she looked up at the sky through the branches, leaning back her head and then closing her eyes, I wondered if she too—as I was occasionally able to myself, though with far less frequency—was able to appreciate the land’s difficult beauty, the way it seemed to yield to no one. Some yards away from us, the builders had finished their lunch break and were once again pounding and sawing; I had overheard one saying that the land was far too wet for a wooden house, and another disagreeing, saying the problem wasn’t the humidity but the heat. They had had to delay the foundation work, and then re-site it, when it had been discovered that the original location had abutted a swamp, which had been drained and then filled. For a while, we listened to the construction, and I waited to hear what she was going to say.

“When you were almost three, I took you to the mainland to see a specialist,” she began. “Because you didn’t speak. It was clear you weren’t deaf, which was what we first thought. But when your father or I said your name, you turned to us, and when we were outside and you heard a dog bark, you would get excited and smile and clap.

“You liked music as well, and when we played your favorite songs, you would even sometimes—not hum along, quite, but you would
make little noises. Still, you wouldn’t speak. Your doctor said we perhaps weren’t speaking enough to you, so we spoke to you constantly. At night, your father would seat you next to him and read the sports section to you. But since I was the one who was with you the most, I talked to you most of all. Ceaselessly, in fact. I took you with me wherever I went. I read books to you, and recipes, and when we were in the car, I’d tell you everything we were passing. ‘See,’ I’d say, ‘there’s the school you’re going to attend someday, when you’re a little older; over there, that’s the house your father and I lived in right after we got married, before we moved to the valley; up that hill is where your father’s high-school friend lives—they have a little boy just your age.’

“Mostly, though, I talked to you about my life. I told you about my father and my siblings, and how, when I was a girl, I wanted to move to Los Angeles and be a dancer, except of course that wasn’t the sort of thing that I would be allowed to do, and anyway, I wasn’t a very good dancer. I even told you about how your father and I had tried so many times to give you a sister, and each time, she slipped away from us, until the doctor told us that you would be our only.

“How much I talked to you! I was lonely in those days; I hadn’t yet joined the Daughters, and most of my friends from school had large families or were busy running their own households, and I was already estranged from my siblings. So I just had you. At times I would lie in bed in the evening and think of all that I’d told you and feel frightened that I had perhaps damaged you by telling you things I shouldn’t tell a child. Once, I became so worried that I even confessed to your father, and he laughed and took me in his arms and said, ‘Don’t be silly, pet’—he called me ‘pet’—‘he doesn’t even understand what you’re saying. Why, you could curse at him all day long and it wouldn’t make a difference!’ I swatted him on the arm and scolded him, but he just laughed again, and he made me feel a little better.

“On the flight to San Francisco, though, I thought again of how much I’d told you, and do you know what I wished? I wished you would never speak at all. I was afraid that if you did, you would tell someone the things I had told you, all of my secrets. ‘Don’t tell
anyone,’ I whispered into your ear as you lay asleep on my lap. ‘Don’t ever tell what I told you.’ And then I felt horribly guilty—that I should hope my only child never spoke, that I should be so selfish. What kind of mother was I?

“But at any rate, I didn’t have to worry. Three weeks after we came home—the San Francisco doctor had no greater insight than our own doctor—you began to talk, not just in single words but in whole sentences. I was so relieved: I wept with joy. Your father, who hadn’t been as concerned as I, teased me, but nicely, in that way he had. ‘You see, pet?’ he asked me. ‘I knew he was going to be all right! Just like his old man, didn’t I tell you? Now you’re going to pray for the day he
stops
talking!’

“That was what everyone told me—that I would someday pray for you to stop talking. But I never had to pray for that, because you were so quiet. And sometimes, as you got older, I wondered: Was I being punished? I had asked you not to say anything, and so you hadn’t. And then you said less and less and less, and now—” She stopped, cleared her throat. “And now we’re here,” she concluded.

We were both quiet for a long time. “For god’s sakes, Wika,” she said, at last. “
Say
something.”

“There’s nothing to say,” I said.

“This isn’t a life here, you understand,” she said in a rush. “You’re thirty-six; you have an eleven-year-old son. This place—what do you call it? Lipo-wao-nahele? You can’t stay here, Wika. You don’t have any skills, you or your friend. You don’t know how to cook for yourself, or take care of yourself, or, or—
anything
. You know nothing, Wika. You—”

Once again, she stopped speaking mid-sentence. She shook her head, quickly; she seemed to refocus herself. And then she stacked the now empty containers inside one another and placed them in her bag, and rocked back on the balls of her feet into a standing position. She stepped into her shoes, and picked up her bag.

I looked up at her, and she looked down at me. She would say something terrible, I thought, something so insulting that I would never be able to forgive her, and she might never be able to forgive herself.

But she didn’t. “Why am I worrying,” she said, coolly, as she studied not just my face but the whole of me, my unwashed T-shirt and torn board shorts and the patchy beard that made my cheeks itch. “You won’t be able to survive out here. You’ll be home before I know it.”

And then she turned and walked away from me, and I watched her go. She slid into her car; she put the bag of empty containers onto the seat next to her; she checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, running a hand along the side of her face, as if reminding herself that it was still there. Then she started the engine and drove away.

“Goodbye,” I said to her, as the car disappeared. “Goodbye.” Overhead, the clouds were turning gray—I could hear the foreman urge his crew to hurry, to finish their work before the rain came.

I lay back down. I closed my eyes. Eventually, I fell asleep, one of those sleeps that feel more real than waking life, so that when I woke—early the next day, Edward still nowhere in sight—I was almost able to convince myself that I could still begin anew.

In the end, my mother was wrong: I didn’t go home again. Not before she knew it, and not ever. Over time, Lipo-wao-nahele became where I was and who I was, although it never stopped feeling temporary, someplace intended only for waiting, though the only thing I was waiting for was the next day to begin.

All around us were signs that the land, never inhabited, would frustrate any attempts to be inhabited, and that any human accommodations it made would be temporary. The house, which was concrete and wood, was ugly and boxy and cheap; only your room was painted, with a bed and a mat on the floor and a light fixture in the ceiling—the other rooms had unfinished Sheetrock walls and, also at Edward’s insistence, plain cement floors.

Even you spent most of your time outdoors on your visits. Not because you liked being outdoors—or at least, not outdoors at Lipo-wao-nahele—but because the house was so bleak, so obviously hostile to human comfort. I looked forward to your visits, too. I wanted
to see you. But I also knew that when you were there, and for the days that followed, the food would be better and more diverse and plentiful. On the Thursdays before your visits, Uncle William would drive out with sackloads of groceries; I would keep the empty bags for our supplies. He would plug in the refrigerator—Edward didn’t like to use it—and unload the bottle of milk, the cartons of juice, the oranges and heads of lettuce and patties of beef: all the lovely supermarket goods I had once had whenever I wanted. If Edward wasn’t around, he’d sneak me a few bars of chocolate. The first time he had tried to give them to me, I had refused, but eventually I accepted, and when I did, tears came to his eyes, and he turned away from me. I hid them in a hole I’d dug behind the house, where they would keep cool and where Edward wouldn’t find them.

It was always Uncle William who came, never the clerk or some other functionary from the office, and I wondered why until I realized that it was because my mother didn’t want anyone else to see me, her son, living like this. Uncle William she could trust, but no one else. It was Uncle William, I presumed, who paid for the electricity and the phone line, Uncle William who paid for our fresh water. He brought us toilet paper, and when he left, he took our bundle of trash with him, as there was no garbage service in our area. When our blue tarp finally became so tattered that it resembled a spiderweb, it was Uncle William who brought us a new one, which Edward—for a time—refused to use, until even he had to admit its necessity.

Every time, before he departed for home, he asked me if I wanted to come with him, and every time, I would shake my head. One time, he didn’t ask, and I had been bereft when he left, as if that door too had finally shut, and I was truly all alone, stranded here by only my weakness and my stubbornness: two contradictory qualities, one canceling out the other, so that what remained was stasis.

By the third year, Edward was more and more often away. Uncle William had bought you a kayak for your twelfth birthday and had delivered it to Lipo-wao-nahele; it was a two-seater, so that you and I could go together. But you weren’t interested, and I was too tired, and so Edward commandeered it, and most days he would leave
early in the morning and paddle out, past the bay, rounding one of the outcroppings and disappearing. Sometimes he didn’t return until it was dark, and if there wasn’t food left over, I would have to eat what I could find. There was an apple banana tree on the eastern edge of the property, and there were nights in which all I had were those stubby green bananas, starchy and underripe, which gave me stomach cramps but which I was forced to eat. I had become like a dog to him; most days, he remembered to feed me, but when he didn’t, there was little I could do but wait.

We had few possessions, yet somehow the land always appeared to be littered with trash. There were always empty plastic bags, torn and useless, floating about; you had left one of the Hawaiian-language primers outside on one of your visits—intentionally or not, I couldn’t say—and its pages had become fat with water and then had crisped in the sun, and now crackled when a breeze passed over it; debris from projects we’d never begun (a pyramid of coral rocks, another of kindling) were stacked near the acacia. On your visits, you would pace, bored and disgusted, between the house and the tree, back and forth, as if you might walk something else—your friends, a new father—into existence. Once, Uncle William had brought a kite for me to give you on your visit, and although you tried, you could never get it airborne; even the wind had abandoned us.

When you left on Sunday, it was so painful that I couldn’t even get up from beneath the tree to see you to your grandmother’s car. The first time this happened, you called my name three times, coming over and shaking my shoulder. “Tutu!” you shouted. “There’s something wrong with him!”

“No, there’s not, Kawika.” Her voice was weary. “He just can’t get up. Say goodbye and come on now. We have to get home; Jane made you spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.”

I felt you crouch by my side. “Bye, Da,” you said, quietly, “I love you,” and then you leaned over and kissed me, your touch as light as wings, and left. Earlier that day, you’d come upon me holding the side of my face and rocking, which was something I’d begun doing because my tooth hurt so much. “Da, let me see,” you had said, your face worried, and then, when I finally, reluctantly, opened my
mouth for you, you had gasped. “Da,” you said, “your tooth looks—looks really gross. Don’t you want to come back into town and get it fixed?” And when I shook my head, groaning again at the pain such a simple movement caused, you sat next to me and patted my back. “Da,” you said, “come home with me.” But I couldn’t. You were thirteen. Every time you visited, it was a reminder of how time had spun forward; every time you left, it was as if time was slowing down again, where I had no future and no past, and had made no mistakes because I had made no decisions, and all there was was possibility.