To Paradise

PART II

My son, my Kawika—what are you doing today? I know where you are, because Mama told me: New York. But where in New York, I wonder? And what are you doing there? She said you were working in a law firm, though not a lawyer, but you mustn’t think I’m any less proud of you for that. I visited New York once, did you know that? Yes, it’s true—your papa has some secrets of his own.

I think about you often. When I’m awake, but also when I’m asleep. All of my dreams are about you in one way or another. Sometimes I dream about the time before we went to Lipo-wao-nahele, when we were together in your grandmother’s house, and we used to take our midnight walks. Do you remember those? I would wake you up, and we’d sneak outside. Up O‘ahu Avenue to East Manoa Road we’d go, and then up Mohala Way, because one of the houses there had a trumpet bush in its front yard that fascinated you, do you remember this? It had pale-yellow flowers, the color of ivory, that grew upside down and looked like the bell of a cornet. At least that’s what people said. You didn’t agree, however. “The upside-down tulip tree,” you used to call it, and I could never see it any other way after that. Then down Lipioma Way we’d go, and over to Beckwith, and then down Manoa Road, and then home. It’s funny—of all the things I was scared of, I was never scared of the dark. In the dark, everyone was helpless, and, knowing that, that I was just like everyone else, no less, made me feel braver.

I loved those walks of ours. I think you did, too. We had to stop them after you told your teacher about them—you were falling asleep in class, and your teacher asked why, and you told her it was because of our nighttime walks, and your teacher called me in to see her and I got in trouble. “He’s growing, Mr. Bingham,” she said, “he needs his sleep. You can’t be waking him up in the middle of the night to go on walks.” I felt foolish, but she was kind to me. She could have told your grandmother, but she didn’t. “I just want to spend more time with him,” I told the teacher, and she looked at me in the way that people often did, that made me realize I’d said something wrong, something queer, but finally she had nodded. “You love your son, Mr. Bingham,” she said, “and that’s a wonderful thing. But if you really love him, you’ll let him sleep.” I was embarrassed then, because of course she was right: You were just a child. I had no right to wake you and take you from your bed. The first time I did so, you were confused, but then you grew to expect it, and you would rub your eyes and yawn, but you never complained—you would put on your slippers and take my hand and follow me down the path. I never had to tell you not to tell your grandmother; you already knew not to. Later, I told Edward that I had gotten in trouble with the teacher, and why. “You dumbass,” he said, but in a way so that I knew he wasn’t mad, just frustrated. “They could’ve called Child Services and taken Kawika away for that.” “Could they have?” I asked. It was the worst thing I could imagine. “ ’Course they could’ve,” he said. “But don’t worry. When we go to Lipo-wao-nahele, you can raise Kawika however you want, and no one can say anything about it.”

What else do you remember? All I can do is remember. I can see, a little, but just light and darkness. Do you remember how we used to go to the Chinese cemetery and sit near the monkeypod tree at the top of the hill? We’d lie right on the grass, with our faces turned up to the sun. “Keep your eyes shut,” I’d tell you, but even though we did, we could still see a field of orange, little blobs of black flickering across it like flies. After I told you how vision worked, you asked me if you were seeing the back of your eye, and I told you that maybe you were. Anyway, it’s like that—I can see color and those blobs, but not much else. When they take me outdoors, though, they put sunglasses on me first. This is because, according to one of the doctors here, I should still be able to see—there’s nothing wrong with my eyes, as such, and so they need to be protected. Until recently, your grandmother used to bring pictures of you, which she’d hold in front of me, so close that the paper tickled against my nose. “Look at him, Wika,” she’d say. “Look at him. Stop this nonsense. Don’t you want to see pictures of your son?” Of course I did, and I tried, I tried hard. But I could never see more than the outline of the square of paper, maybe the dark of your hair. Or maybe it wasn’t a picture of you at all that she was showing me. Maybe it was a picture of a cat, or a mushroom. I couldn’t tell the difference. The point is that I never see everything new; everything I see I’ve seen before.

But although I can’t see, I can hear. Most of it doesn’t make much sense to me, not because I can’t understand it, exactly, but because I’m so often asleep that it’s difficult for me to keep track of what I’m actually hearing and what I’m imagining. And sometimes when I’m trying to figure it out, I fall asleep again, and then, when I wake next, I’m more confused—assuming I can recall what I was trying to sort out before I fell asleep, I by then don’t know whether I really heard what I thought I heard, or whether I had been hallucinating. Your being in New York, for example: I woke with the strong feeling you were there. But were you, really? Had someone told me that, or had I invented it? I thought and thought, so hard that I could hear myself begin to whimper with frustration and confusion, and then someone came into my room, and then there was blankness. When I woke again, I remembered only that I had been upset, and it wasn’t until later that I remembered why. I had no way to ask whether you were in New York or not, of course, and so I just had to wait until someone—your grandmother—came to visit me again, and hope that she would mention you. And eventually, she did come, and said that she’d gotten a letter from you, and that the weather in New York was hot, hot and rainy, and that you wanted me to get better. Now I suppose you’re wondering how I knew that this was actually happening, that I wasn’t dreaming it, and the answer is because that day I could smell the flowers your grandmother was wearing. Do you remember how, when the pakalana vine was in bloom, she’d send you to the side of the house to pick a few clusters, and then she’d put them in that little silver brooch she had, the one shaped like a vase that could actually hold a few blossoms? That was how I knew it was real, and also that it was summer, because pakalana only blooms in summer. It’s also why, whenever I think of you, and New York, I smell pakalana.

I don’t know how long you’ve been away. I think it must be a very long time. Years. Maybe even a decade. But then I realize that, if that’s so, it means that I’ve been here, in this place, for years, maybe even a decade. And then I can hear myself beginning to moan, louder and louder, and thrash my arms and legs, and piss myself, and then I can hear the sound of people running toward me, and sometimes I hear them say my name: “Wika. Wika, you need to calm down. You need to calm down, Wika.” Wika: They only call me Wika. No one here calls me Mr. Bingham unless your grandmother is visiting. But that’s fine. It never felt right, being called Mr. Bingham.

But I can’t calm down, because now I’m thinking about how I’ll never get out of here, about how my life—my entire life—has been spent in places I can’t escape: Your grandmother’s house. Lipo-wao-nahele. And now here. This island. I could never really leave. But you did. You got away.

And so I keep making the sounds I can, slapping away their hands, wailing over their attempts to soothe me, and I keep doing it until I feel the medication entering my veins, warming my body, calming my heart, delivering me back to a state of forgetting.

—

I want to talk to you, my son, my Kawika, though I know you will never hear me, as I will never be able to say any of this aloud to you, not anymore. But I want to talk to you about everything that happened, and try to explain to you why I did what I did.

You have never visited me. I know this, and yet I also don’t. Sometimes I’m able to pretend that you have visited me, that I’m just confused. But I know you haven’t. I don’t know what your voice sounds like anymore; I don’t know what you smell like. The image I have of you is from when you were fifteen, and leaving me after one of our weekends together, and I didn’t know—maybe you didn’t, either, maybe you still loved me a little then, despite everything—that I would never see you again. Of course this makes me sad. Not just for my sake—but for yours as well. Because you have a father who is both alive and yet not, and yet you are still a young man, and a young man needs his father.

I can’t tell you exactly where I am, because I don’t know. Sometimes I imagine I must be on Tantalus, high up in the forest, because it’s cool and rainy and very quiet, but I could also be in Nu‘uanu, or even in Manoa. I do know I’m not at our house, because this place doesn’t smell like our house. For a long time I thought I was in a hospital, but it doesn’t smell like a hospital, either. But there are doctors and nurses and orderlies, and they all take care of me.

For a long time I didn’t leave my bed at all, and then they started making me. “C’mon, Wika,” a man’s voice would say. “C’mon, bruddah.” And I could feel a hand on my back, helping me sit, and then four hands on me, two wrapped around my waist, lifting me up and setting me down again. Then I was being pushed, and I could feel that we had left the building, I could feel the sun on my neck. One of the hands tipped my chin up; I closed my eyes. “That feels good, doesn’t it, Wika?” said the voice. But then he let go of my chin and my head flopped forward again. Now when they take me around the building or out to the garden, they strap something around my forehead so that my head stays in place. Sometimes a woman comes and moves my arms and legs and talks to me. She bends and straightens each limb, and then she rubs me before turning me onto my stomach and kneading my back. There would have been a time when that would have made me embarrassed, to be lying there without any clothes on and with a strange woman touching me, but now I don’t mind. Her name is Rosemary, and as she massages me, she talks about her day and her family: her husband, who’s an accountant; her son and daughter, who’re still in elementary school. Occasionally, she’ll say something that makes me realize how much time has passed, but then, later, I get confused because—once again—I don’t know if she actually said it or if I just made it up. Did the Berlin Wall fall, or did it not? Are there now colonies on Mars, or are there not? Did Edward triumph after all, and has the monarchy been restored, and I named king of the Hawaiian islands, and my mother the queen regent, or has it not? One time she said something about you, about my son, and I became agitated and she had to buzz for help, and since then she’s never mentioned you again.

Today I thought of you as they were feeding me my dinner. Everything I eat is soft, because sometimes I think too much about swallowing and then I start panicking and gagging, but if I don’t have to chew I think about it less. Dinner was congee with preserved egg and scallions, which is one of the dishes I used to have Jane make you when you were sick—one of the dishes she made me when I was a child. It was one of my father’s favorites as well, although he liked his with boiled chicken.

I think Jane is dead. Matthew, too. No one has told me this, but I know, because they used to come visit me and now they don’t. Don’t ask me how long ago, or how; I wouldn’t be able to tell you. But they were old—older than your grandmother. I once overheard her telling you that her father had given her Jane and Matthew as a wedding present: two servants from her father’s household that would help her run her own. But that isn’t true. Jane and Matthew were in the house well before your grandmother joined it. And besides, by that point her father didn’t have the money for a single servant, much less two, much less two he could give away. And if he had, it’s unlikely he would have given them to her, when legally she wasn’t even related to him by blood.

I never knew what to do when I heard your grandmother tell you things that weren’t true. I didn’t want to contradict her. I knew better. And I wanted you to trust her, and to love her—I wanted things to be easier for you than they were for me, and that meant having a good relationship with her. I worked hard to make that happen, and I think I succeeded, which means I didn’t completely fail you; I made sure your grandmother loved you. But now you are grown, grown and safe and living in New York, and I feel I can tell you the truth.

I will say this for your grandmother: She took nothing she had for granted. What she had she had fought for and earned, and her life was dedicated to ensuring it never slipped away from her. She raised me to feel the opposite, and yet there were times I think she felt resentful that I did, even though it had been her intention. She never resented my father for it, and yet she resented me, because I was partially hers, and I should therefore be aware of how precarious my position was, because then her own anxiety would feel less lonely. We often end up resenting our children when they achieve what we’ve wished for them—although this isn’t my way of saying that I resent you, even though my only wish was that you grow up and leave me behind.

About my father I have little to say that you don’t already know. I was already eight, almost nine, when he died, and yet I have few memories of him—he is a blurred, jovial presence, sporty and hearty, swinging me up in the air when he came home from work, dangling me upside down as I squealed, trying and failing to teach me how to hit a ball. I wasn’t like him, but he didn’t seem dissatisfied with me, the way I knew my mother to be from almost the time I had a sense of her opinions at all; I liked reading, and he would call me “Professor,” never sarcastically, even though what I liked to read were just comic books. “This is Wika, the reader in the family,” he’d introduce me to acquaintances, and I would feel embarrassed, because I knew that I was reading nothing important, that I didn’t really have the right to call myself a reader. But it hadn’t mattered to him; if I had ridden horses, I would have been the Rider, and if I had played tennis I would have been the Athlete, and it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had distinguished myself or not.

Most of the money had been spent by the time my father joined the family firm, and he didn’t seem interested in replenishing its coffers. We’d spend weekends at the club, where we’d have lunch together—people stopping by our table to shake my father’s hand and smile at my mother; the slice of coconut layer cake, soapy-sweet and shagged like a carpet, that my father always ordered for me at the end, despite my mother’s protestations, placed in front of me—before my father joined his golf game and my mother sat with her stack of magazines beneath an umbrella near the pool, where she could watch me. Later, when Edward and I were becoming friends, I would stay quiet as he talked about going to the beach on the weekends with his mother; they would pack containers of food and spend all day there, his mother sitting on a blanket with her friends, Edward running into the water and then back out, in and then out, until the sky began to darken and they packed their things to leave. The club was near the ocean—when you were on the course, you could see stripes of it through the trees, a band of glinting blue—but we would never have thought of going there: It was too sandy, too wild, too poor. But I never said this to Edward; I said I loved going to the beach as well, even though, when we started going together, part of me was always thinking about when we could leave, when I could take a shower and become clean again.

It wasn’t until my father died that I realized we were rich, and by then, we were far less rich than we had been. But the kind of wealth my father had possessed wasn’t of an obvious kind—our house was large, but it was like everyone else’s, with a wide porch and a large, crowded sunroom, and a small kitchen. I had all the toys I wanted, but my first bike was secondhand, a hand-me-down from a boy on the next street. We had Jane and Matthew, but our meals were simple—rice and meat of some kind for dinner; rice and fish and eggs for breakfast; a metal bento box I took to school for lunch—and it was only when my parents entertained, and the candles were lit and the chandelier was cleaned, that the house looked grand, and that I was able to recognize that there was something stately in its simplicity: the dark, shining dining-room table; the smooth white wood of the walls and ceiling; the vases of flowers that were replaced every other day. This was in the late ’40s, when our neighbors were laying linoleum over their floors and replacing their dishware with plastic, but ours was not, as my mother said, a house of convenience. In our house, the floors were wood and the cutlery was silver and the plates and bowls were china. Not expensive china, but not plastic, either. The postwar years had brought new wealth to the islands, new things from the mainland, but here again our household did not indulge in what my mother considered trends. Why would you buy expensive oranges from Florida when the ones from our yard were even better? Why should you buy raisins from California when the lychee from our trees were even sweeter? “They’ve gone mainland mad,” she would say about our neighbors; she was dismissive of what she saw as their gullibility, in which she saw a kind of self-loathing for where we lived and who we were. Edward was never able to see that aspect of her, her fierce nationalism, her love for her home—he saw only the inconsistency with which that pride was expressed, the way she scorned other people for wanting the latest music and food from the mainland while also wearing the pearls she had bought in New York, the long cotton skirts that she ordered from her dressmaker in San Francisco, where she and my father had made annual trips, a habit she continued after his death.

Twice a year, the three of us would drive out to Lā‘ie, on the North Shore. Here there was a small coral-rock church for which my great-grandfather had been the benefactor since he was a young man, and it was from here that my father would distribute envelopes of money, twenty dollars for each adult, to celebrate my great-grandfather’s birthday and then the day of his death, by giving a gift to the people of the town his grandfather had loved. As we approached the church, turning off the road onto a dirt path, we would see the townspeople clumped around the door, and as my father climbed out and advanced toward the building, they would bow. “Your Highness,” they would murmur, these big dark people, their voices unnaturally soft, “welcome back, King.” My father would nod at them, offer his hands to be taken and squeezed, and inside, he would distribute the money and then would sit to listen to the best singer among them, who would sing a song, and then someone else, who would chant, and then we would get into the car and drive back to town.

These visits always made me uncomfortable. I felt, even as a young boy, as if I were a fraud—what had I done to be called “Prince,” to have an old woman, so old that she spoke only Hawaiian, bow before me, her hand clenching the head of her cane so she wouldn’t fall? On the ride home, my father was cheery, whistling the song that had just been performed for him, while my mother sat by his side, straight and silent and regal. After my father died, I had gone with her alone, and although the townspeople had been respectful, they had acknowledged only me, not her, and although she was always polite to them, she didn’t have my father’s good humor, or his ability to make people far poorer than he feel like his equal, and the occasion took on a strained quality. By the time I was eighteen, and expected to discharge this duty myself, the entire enterprise had begun to feel anachronistic and condescending, and from then on, my mother just sent an annual donation to the local community center, for it to distribute in whatever way benefited its members. Not that I was capable of being my father, anyway. That was what I had told her—that I wasn’t a substitute for him. “You don’t understand, Wika,” she had said, wearily, “you’re not his substitute. You’re his heir.” But she hadn’t contradicted me, either: We both knew I couldn’t equal my father.

Things changed after he died, of course. For my mother, the changes were more profound and threatening. Once his debts had been paid—he had liked to gamble and had liked cars—there was less money left than she had assumed. She had also lost with him a sense of security in who she was—he had legitimized who she always claimed to be, and without him, she would forever be defending her right to call herself nobility.

But the other change was that my mother and I were left with only each other, and it wasn’t until my father had left us that we both realized that it was he who had provided us our identities: She was Kawika Bingham’s wife; I was Kawika Bingham’s son. Even now that he was gone, we still defined ourselves in relation to him. But without him, our relation to each other seemed more capricious. She was now Kawika Bingham’s widow; I was Kawika Bingham’s heir. But Kawika Bingham himself no longer existed, and without him, we no longer knew how to relate to each other.

—

After my father’s death, my mother became increasingly involved with her society, Kaikamahine kū Hawai‘i. The group, whose members referred to themselves as the Daughters, was open to anyone who could prove noble lineage.

My mother’s own claim to noble blood was a complicated subject. Her adopted father, who was a distant cousin of my father’s, had been noble: He, like my father, could trace his family all the way back to before the Great King. But my mother’s origins were more opaque. As I grew older, I would hear various stories about who she was. The most common was that she was in fact her adopted father’s illegitimate child, and that her mother had been a fling, a haole cocktail waitress who’d returned home to America soon after giving birth. But there were other theories as well, including that she was not only not noble but not even of Hawaiian blood, that her mother had been her adoptive father’s secretary, and that her father had been her adoptive father’s manservant—her father had been known to prefer hiring haoles, because he liked to show off that he had the stature and money to have white people work for him. When she occasionally spoke about her adoptive father, she would say only that he was always kind to her, though from someone—who, I don’t know—I must have gotten the sense that, while he might have been kind to her, it was in a vague sort of way; he was strict with his own children, his daughter and his son, because he expected more from and for them. They had the power to disappoint him, but they also had the power to please him. They were embodiments of him in a way my mother was not.

Marrying my father had quieted most of the rumors—his origins were inarguable, unimpeachable—but with his death, I believe she felt she was once again on the defensive, alert and attuned to any challengers. It was why she did so much work with the Daughters—why she hosted their annual fund-raisers, why she led committees, why she chaired charity initiatives, why she tried, in all the ways appropriate for her imagination and her era, to be the ideal Hawaiian woman.

The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.

When Edward first met my mother, he was careful and polite. It wasn’t until later, when we became close again as adults, that he became suspicious of her. She couldn’t speak Hawaiian, he pointed out (neither could I; aside from the few phrases and words we all knew, and a dozen songs and chants, I spoke only English and some French). She didn’t support the struggle. She didn’t support the return of the Hawaiian kingdom. But he never mentioned, as others had, how light-skinned she was; he was lighter still, and if you hadn’t grown up on the islands, you wouldn’t know to look past his hair and eyes to see his Hawaiianness, a secret hiding just beneath. By that point, he had grown envious of my own appearance, my own skin and hair and eyes. Sometimes I’d look up to catch him staring at me. “You should grow your hair out,” he said to me, once. “More authentic that way.” It bothered him that even then, when everyone was wearing their hair long, I still wore mine as my father had worn his—tidy and very short—because it was woolly and dense, and if it got too long, it puffed out around my head.

“I don’t want it to look like an Afro,” I said, and he sat up from his usual slouch, leaning forward.

“What’s wrong with an Afro?” he asked, giving me that unblinking stare he sometimes did, when his eyes darkened, turned a deeper blue, and I began to stammer, as I did when I was nervous.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong with an Afro.”

He leaned back and gazed at me for a long moment, and I had to look away. “A real Hawaiian wears his hair big,” he said. His own hair was curly but fine, like a child’s, and he wore it tied back with an elastic band. “Big and proud.” He began calling me Accountant after that, because he said I looked like I should be working in a bank somewhere, counting other people’s money. “Howzit, Accountant,” he’d say in greeting when he came to pick me up. “Business good?” It was a taunt, I knew, but at times it felt almost loving, a term of affection, something only we shared.

I never knew what to say when he criticized my mother. By this time, it had long ago been made clear that I could never make her happy, and yet I couldn’t help but feel protective of her, even though she’d never asked for my protection, and, indeed, I had none to give her. I would like to think, in retrospect, that part of what made me uncomfortable was his implication that there was only one way to be Hawaiian. But I hadn’t been sophisticated enough to think in those terms back then—the idea that my race compelled me to be one way or another at all was so foreign that it would have been like telling me that there was another, more correct way to breathe or swallow. I now know that all around me there were people my age who were having those very conversations: how to be black, or Oriental, or American, or a woman. But I had never heard those conversations, and when I finally did, it was in Edward’s company.

So instead I would just say, “She’s Hawaiian,” though even as I said it I could hear it sounded like a question: “She’s Hawaiian?”

Which is maybe why Edward answered as he did.

“No, she’s not,” he said.

But let me go back to when we first met. I was ten at the time, recently made fatherless. Edward was new that year. The school admitted new waves of students in kindergarten, fifth grade, seventh grade, and ninth grade. Later, Edward would curse the fact that we’d attended this school when we could have attended the school that only admitted students with Hawaiian blood. Our school had been granted by the king’s charter but was founded by missionaries. “Of course we didn’t learn about who we are and where we came from,” he’d said. “Of course we didn’t. That damn school’s entire mission was to colonize us into submission.” And yet he’d gone there as well. It was one of the many examples of things in my and Edward’s shared life that he would come to hate or be ashamed of, and my refusal or inability to be equally ashamed—though I was ashamed of plenty of other things—came to infuriate him, too.

I attended the school because members of my family had always attended the school. On the high-school part of the campus there was even a building called Bingham Hall, one of the first structures the missionaries had built, named for one of the reverends who would later marry the crown princess. Every Kawika Bingham who had attended the school—my father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather—posed for a photograph or drawing in front of the building, standing beneath the name, which had been tapped into stone.

No one from Edward’s family had ever attended the school, and it was only—he told me—because of a scholarship that he was able to go at all. He told me these things matter-of-factly, without self-pity or embarrassment, which I found remarkable.

We became friends slowly. Neither of us had any others. When I had been younger, there were some boys whose mothers wanted them to befriend me because of who my father was, who my mother was. It makes me cringe even now, the memory of one of them trudging across the playground toward me, introducing himself, asking if I wanted to play. I always said yes, and there’d be a lackluster game of catch. After a few days of this, I’d be invited to his house; Matthew would drive me if they didn’t live in the valley. There, I’d meet the boy’s mother, who would smile at me and serve us a snack: Vienna sausages and rice, or bread and passion fruit jam, or baked breadfruit with butter. There’d be another, silent game of catch, and then Matthew would drive me home. Depending on how ambitious the boy’s mother was, there might be another two or three invitations, but eventually they would stop, and at school, the boy would bolt toward his real friends at recess, never looking at me. They were never cruel to me, they never bullied me, but that was only because I wasn’t worth bullying. In the neighborhood, as I told you, there were boys who bullied me, but I grew used to that as well—it was a kind of attention.

I was friendless because I was boring, but Edward was friendless because he was strange. He didn’t look strange—his clothes weren’t as new as ours, but they were the same clothes, the same Hawaiian shirts and cotton pants—but he had, even then, a kind of inwardness; he was somehow able to suggest, without ever saying it, that he needed no one else, that he knew something that none of the rest of us did, and until we did, it wasn’t worth his trying to have a conversation with us.

It was early in the school year when he approached me one recess period. I was sitting, as I always did, at the base of the giant monkeypod tree, reading a comic book. The tree was at the top of the field, which sloped gently toward the southern end of campus, and as I read, I could watch my classmates—the boys playing soccer, the girls jumping rope. Then I looked up and saw Edward loping toward me, but something in his air made me think he was just walking in my direction, not that I was his destination.

Yet it was in front of me that he stopped. “You’re Kawika Bingham,” he said.

“Wika,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“Wika,” I said. “People call me Wika.”

“Okay,” he said. “Wika.” And then he walked off. For a moment, I felt uncertain—was I Kawika Bingham?—and then I realized I was, because he had confirmed it.

The next day, he returned. “My mother wants you to come over after school tomorrow,” he said. He had a way of speaking in which he looked not at you but at a point beyond you, which meant that when he finally did turn his gaze directly to you—as he did now, waiting for my answer—it felt particularly intense, almost interrogatory.

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

The following morning, I told Matthew and Jane that I was going to a classmate’s house after school. I told them quickly, quietly, as I ate my breakfast, for I knew, somehow, that my mother would not approve of Edward. This may have been unfair—my mother was not dismissive of people with less money than she had, at least not in a way I would have recognized at the time—but I knew I couldn’t tell her.

Matthew and Jane looked at each other. All of my other play dates had been arranged by the boys’ mothers with my mother; I had never arranged one on my own. I could tell they were happy for me, and trying not to make me self-conscious.

“You need me to come get you afterward, Wika?” asked Matthew, but I shook my head—I already knew that Edward lived near the school, which meant I’d be able to walk home, as usual.

Jane got up. “You’ll want to bring something to give his mother,” she said, and went to the pantry for one of her jars of mango jam. “Tell her she can send back the jar with you when she’s done and I’ll refill it next season, all right, Wika?” That seemed very optimistic—mango season had just ended, so, in order to get a refilled jar, Mrs. Bishop would have to count on her son and me remaining friends for another year. But I only said thank you, and put the jar in my backpack.

Edward and I were in adjoining classrooms, and he waited for me at the building’s exit. We walked in silence through the middle-school campus, and then hopped over the low wall that encircled the school. He lived just a block south of this wall, in the middle of a poky street I’d often driven down with Matthew.

My first thought was that the house was charmed. The street was lined with small, single-story shops and businesses—a dry-goods shop, a hardware store, a grocer—and then, suddenly, as if conjured, was a tiny wooden house. The rest of the block was denuded of greenery, but looming over the structure was a large mango tree, so domineering and leafy that it seemed to be protecting the little building from sight. Nothing else grew in the lawn, not even grass, and the concrete path leading to the front porch had buckled from the tree’s roots, one of which had split a paving stone in two. The house itself was a miniature version of the kind you saw in my neighborhood—a plantation house, as I learned to call them, with a wide lanai and large windows shaded by metal awnings.

The next surprise was the door itself, which was actually closed. Everyone I knew kept their doors open until they went to bed; there was only the screen door, which you banged through as you entered and exited. I watched as Edward reached down the front of his shirt and drew out a key, which dangled from a cotton string that hung around his neck, and unlocked the door. He slipped off his zoris and walked in, and I waited, stupidly, for an invitation before I realized I was to follow him.

Inside, it was close, and dark, and after relocking the door, Edward went around the living room, cranking open the jalousies to let in the breeze, though the mango tree blocked all the light. But its shade also kept the house cool and heightened its sense of bewitchment.

“Do you want a snack?” Edward asked, already walking to the kitchen.

“Yes, please,” I said.

He returned to the living room a few moments later with two plates, one of which he gave to me. On it were arranged four soda crackers, each with a daub of mayonnaise. He sat down on one of the rattan couches, and I sat on the other, and we ate our snack in silence. I had never had mayonnaise on crackers before and wasn’t sure I liked it, or even if I was supposed to like it.

Edward ate his crackers quickly, as if it were a chore to be dispensed with, and then stood again. “Do you want to see my room?” he asked, and again, he asked almost sideways, as if he were addressing someone else in the room, although there was only me.

“Yes,” I said.

There were three closed doors to the left of the living room. He opened the one on the right, and we entered a bedroom. This room too was small, but it was also cozy, like the lair of a harmless animal. There was a narrow bed with a striped blanket on it, and strung across the ceiling from one corner to the opposite were chains of bright-colored construction paper. “My mother and I made those,” Edward explained, and although later I would remember how remarkable his tone was—so matter-of-fact, almost proud, when we were coming to an age in which announcing you made crafts, much less with your mother, was inadvisable—what I thought then was how foreign the idea was of making anything with your mother, especially something that you would hang from your ceiling, deliberately transforming your room into someplace messier and stranger than it had to be.

Now Edward turned and retrieved an object from the drawer beneath the table next to his bed. “Look at this,” he said, solemnly, and held out a black velvet box about the size of a deck of playing cards. He opened the hinged lid, and inside was a medal made of coppery metal: It was the seal of our school and, on a scroll beneath, the words “Scholarship: 1953–1954.” He flipped it over to show me his name engraved on the back: Edward Paiea Bishop.

“What’s it for?” I asked, and he made a small, impatient sound.

“It’s not for anything,” he said. “They gave it to me when I got my scholarship.”

“Oh,” I said. I realized I was supposed to say something, but couldn’t decide what it might be. I didn’t know anyone else who was on a scholarship. In fact, until I had met Edward, I didn’t even know what a scholarship was, and had had to ask Jane for an explanation. “It’s nice,” I said, and he made the sound again.

“It’s stupid,” he said, but when he replaced the box in its drawer, he did so tenderly, smoothing his hand across its furred surface.

Then he reached into another drawer, this one tucked beneath his bed—over time, I would realize that, although the room was minute, it was as well-organized and efficient as a sailor’s berth, and that whoever had arranged it had accounted for all of Edward’s interests, all of his needs—and retrieved a cardboard box. “Checkers,” he said. “Want to play?”

As we played game after game of checkers, mostly in silence, I had time to consider what was most unusual about Edward’s house. It was not its size, or its darkness (though, curiously, the dim made it not gloomy but snug, and even as the afternoon stretched on, there was no need to turn on a lamp), but the fact that we were there all alone. In my house, I was never alone. If my mother was at one of her meetings, there was Jane, and, sometimes, Matthew. But Jane was always there. She was cooking in the kitchen, or she was dusting in the living room, or she was sweeping the upstairs hallway. The farthest she strayed was to the side of the house, to hang the laundry on the line, or, occasionally, to the driveway, to bring Matthew, who was washing the car, his lunch. Even at night, she and Matthew were only a few hundred feet away, in their apartment above the garage. But I had never before been to a classmate’s house where there was no mother. You didn’t expect to see a father—they were creatures who materialized only at dinnertime, never in the afternoon—but the mothers were always there, a presence as reliable as a couch or a table. Sitting there, on Edward’s bed, playing checkers, I had the sudden notion that he lived by himself. I had a vision of Edward making himself dinner on the stove (I was not allowed to touch the stove in my house), eating it at the kitchen table, washing the dishes, taking a bath, and putting himself to bed. There had been plenty of times when I had resented the lack of any true, meaningful privacy in my house, but suddenly the alternative—an absence of people, nothing but time and silence—seemed horrible, and it seemed to me that I should stay with Edward as long as I could, for when I left, he would have no one.

But as I was thinking this, there was a sound of the door opening, and then a woman’s voice, bright and cheerful, calling Edward’s name. “My mother,” Edward said, and for the first time, he smiled, a quick, bright grin, and climbed off the bed and hurried into the living room.

I followed, to see Edward’s mother kissing him, and then, before he could say anything, approaching me with her arms held out. “You must be Wika,” she said, smiling. “Edward’s told me so much about you,” and she pulled me close.

“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Bishop,” I remembered to say, and she beamed and squeezed me again. “Victoria,” she corrected me, and then, seeing my face, “or Auntie! Just not Mrs. Bishop.” She turned to Edward, her arms still wrapped around me. “Are you boys hungry?”

“No, we had a snack,” he said, and she smiled at him, too. “Good boy,” she said, and yet her praise seemed to include me as well.

I watched her as she went to the kitchen. She was the most beautiful mother I had ever seen, so beautiful that if I had encountered her in another context, I would never have associated her with motherhood at all. She had dark-blond hair twisted into a bun at the base of her head, and her skin was a dark gold as well—more light-filled than mine, but darker than her son’s—and she wore what was in those days considered a low-cut dress of pink cotton, with white bands at the sleeves and throat, and a full skirt that spun around her legs as she moved. She smelled delicious, like a combination of fried meat and, beneath that, the gardenia blossom she wore pinned behind her ear, and she didn’t walk but twirled through the little house as if it were a palace, someplace expansive and dazzling.

It was only when she said that she hoped I was staying for dinner that I looked at the round-faced clock above the sink and realized that it was almost five-thirty, and I had told Matthew and Jane I’d be home an hour ago—never would I have assumed I would have wanted to stay at another boy’s house for so long. I could feel myself entering that stage of distress I often did when I knew I had done something wrong, but Mrs. Bishop told me not to worry, just to call home, and when Jane picked up, she sounded relieved. “Matthew will come get you now,” she said, before I even had a chance to ask if I could stay for dinner (which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do, anyway). “He’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“I have to go home,” I told Mrs. Bishop, when I had hung up, “I’m sorry,” and she smiled at me again.

“You’ll stay next time,” she said. She spoke in a slight singsong. “We’d like that, right, Edward?” And Edward nodded, though he was already moving about the kitchen with his mother, removing things from the refrigerator, and seemed to have forgotten I was still there.

Before I left, I gave her the jar of mango jam in my bag. “This is for you,” I said. “She”—I knew not to clarify that “she” was the housekeeper, and not my mother—“said you could give it back to me when it’s empty and then she’ll refill it next season.” But then I remembered the tree outside, and felt foolish, and was about to apologize when Mrs. Bishop pulled me close again.

“My favorite,” she said. “Tell your mother thank you.” She laughed. “I may need to ask her for the recipe—every year I swear I’m going to make jam, and every year I never do. I’m such a klutz in the kitchen, you see,” and she actually winked at me, as if she were letting me know a secret that no one else was privy to, not even her son.

I heard Matthew’s car pull up outside, and said goodbye to them both. But on the lanai, I turned and looked through the screen door and saw the two of them, mother and son, in the kitchen making dinner. Edward said something to his mother and she tipped her head back and laughed, and then reached over and rubbed the top of his head, playfully. They had turned the kitchen light on, and I had the strange sense that I was looking inside a diorama, at a scene of happiness I could witness but never enter.

—

“Bishop,” said my mother, later that night. “Bishop.”

I knew, even then, what she was thinking: Bishop was a famous name, an old name, almost as famous and old as our own. She was thinking that Edward was someone like us, and yet I knew he wasn’t, not in the way she meant.

“What does his father do?” she asked, and as I admitted I didn’t know, I realized that I hadn’t thought about his father at all. Part of this was, as I have said, because fathers were shadowy presences in all of our lives. You saw them on weekends and in the evenings, and if you were lucky, they were benevolent, distant beings, with an odd piece of candy for you, and if you were unlucky, they were chilly and remote, dispensers of whippings and spankings. My understanding of the world was very limited, but even I somehow comprehended that Edward didn’t have a father—or, more accurately, that Mrs. Bishop didn’t have a husband. The two of them, mother and son, were so complete together, cooking in that miniature kitchen, she playfully butting her hip against his side, he dramatically skidding to the right, his mother laughing at him, that there was no room for a father or a husband: They were a matched set, one female, one male, and another man would simply disrupt their symmetry.

“Well,” my mother said, “we should have them over for tea.”

And so, the following Sunday, they came. They couldn’t come on Saturday, I heard Jane tell my mother, because Mrs. Bishop had to work her shift. (“Her shift,” my mother echoed, in a tone that conveyed some meaning I couldn’t quite interpret. “All right, Jane, tell her Sunday.”) They arrived on foot, yet weren’t hot or flushed, which meant they had taken the bus and had walked to our house from the closest stop. Edward was wearing his school clothes. His mother was wearing another full-skirted cotton dress, this one hibiscus-yellow, her dark-blond hair in its knot, her lips painted a cheery red, even more beautiful than I’d remembered.

She was smiling as my mother approached her. “Mrs. Bishop, such a pleasure to meet you,” she said, to which Mrs. Bishop responded, as she had to me, “Please, call me Victoria.”

“Victoria,” my mother repeated, as if it were a foreign name and she wanted to make sure she was pronouncing it correctly, but she did not reciprocate the offer, though Mrs. Bishop seemed not to expect it.

“Thank you so much for having us over,” she said. “Edward”—she turned her beam to her son, who was looking at my mother with a steady, serious expression, not quite suspicious, but alert—“is new this year, and Wika has been so kind to him.” And now she turned to look at me, with that little wink, as if I had done her son a favor by talking to him, as if I had departed from my busy schedule in order to do so.

Even my mother seemed slightly taken aback by this. “Well, I’m very glad to hear Wika has a new friend,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”

We filed into the sunroom, where Jane served us shortbread, pouring the women coffee—“Oh! Thank you—Jane? Thank you, Jane, this looks delicious!”—and Edward and me guava juice. I had seen other acquaintances of my mother grow silent and awestruck in this room, which to me was simply a room, sunlit and dull, but to them was a museum of my father’s ancestors: the scarred wooden surfboard my great-grandfather, known as the Portly Prince, had ridden in Waikīkī; the daguerreotypes of my great-great-grandfather’s sister, the queen, in her black taffeta gown, and a great-great-cousin, an explorer who had a building at a famous university named for him. But Mrs. Bishop seemed unintimidated, and looked about herself openly, with genuine delight. “What a lovely room this is, Mrs. Bingham,” she said, smiling at my mother. “My entire family has always been great admirers of your husband’s family, and how much he did for the islands.”

It was exactly the right thing to say, done simply and well, and I could tell my mother was surprised. “Thank you,” she said, a bit stiffly. “He loved his home.”

For a while, my mother talked to Edward, asking him if he liked his new school (yes), and if he missed his old friends (not really), and what his hobbies were (swimming, hiking, camping, going to the beach). When I became the parent of a young boy myself, I was able to appreciate Edward’s composure, his apparent unflappability; as a child, I was eager, too eager, to please, smiling desperately through conversations with my parents’ friends, hoping I wouldn’t shame them. But Edward was neither ingratiating nor awkward—he answered my mother’s questions straightforwardly, without any pandering or apology. Even then, he possessed an unusual dignity, one that made him seem invincible. It was almost as if he didn’t care about anyone else, and yet that would suggest that he was aloof, or proud, and he wasn’t either of those things.

Finally, my mother was able to ask about Mr. Bishop: Certain members of the Bishop family had been distant cousins of my father, the way that all the old missionary families who had married into Hawaiian royalty were distant cousins—was it possible that there might be a connection?

Mrs. Bishop laughed. There was no bitterness in that laugh, no falsity: It was a sound of pure merriment. “Oh, I’m afraid not,” she said. “I’m the only Hawaiian, not my husband.” My mother looked blank, and Mrs. Bishop smiled again. “It was quite a shock for Luke, a haole boy from a small town in Texas whose father was a construction worker, to understand that, here, his last name made him something special.”

“I see,” said my mother, quietly. “So is your husband in construction as well?”

“He could be.” Again, the smile. “But we just don’t know, do we, Edward?” Then, to my mother, “He left long ago, when Edward was a baby—I haven’t seen him since.”

I can’t say, of course, that men didn’t leave their families all the time in the early fifties. But I can say—and this was true even decades later—that to have your husband or father leave was something shameful, as if the responsible party was the abandoned, the wife and children. If people spoke about it, they did so in whispers. But not the Bishops. Mr. Bishop had left, but they weren’t the losers—he was.

It was one of those rare moments in which my mother and I were united in our discomfiture. Before the Bishops left, we learned that Sunday was Mrs. Bishop’s day off; the other six days, she worked as a waitress at a busy diner a few blocks from their house called Mizumoto’s, which my mother hadn’t heard of but Jane and Matthew had, and that she was from Honoka‘a, a tiny town, a village, really, on the Big Island.

“What an extraordinary woman,” my mother said, watching as mother and son turned right at the end of our driveway and walked out of sight toward the bus stop. I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment.

I agreed with her—she was extraordinary. They both were. I had never encountered two people who seemed less abashed by the circumstances of their lives. But whereas that lack of apology manifested itself in Mrs. Bishop as an irrepressible buoyancy, the kind of cheer that exists only in the rare people who have never felt embarrassed for who they are, they were realized in Edward as a defiance, one that in later years curdled into anger.

I see this now, of course. But it took me a long time. And by that point, I had already given up my life, and therefore your life, for his. Not because I shared his anger—but because I craved his certainty, this strange and wondrous notion that there really was a single answer, and that, by believing in it, I would cease to believe everything that had bothered me about myself for so long.

And now, Kawika, I will skip forward a number of years. First, though, I want to tell you about something that happened to me yesterday.

I was lying in bed as usual. It was the afternoon, and hot. Earlier in the day they had opened the windows and turned on the fan, but now the breeze had died, and no one had returned to switch on the air-conditioning. This occasionally happened, and then someone would enter the room, exclaiming at how hot it was, scolding me a bit, as if I had the ability to call out for them and had simply refused to do so out of stubbornness. Once, they had forgotten to turn on the air-conditioning at all and my mother had made a surprise visit. I had heard her voice, and her feet marching in, and then I heard her march back out again, and return a few seconds later with an orderly, who was apologizing again and again as my mother rebuked him: “Do you know how much I pay for my son to be looked after? Get me the manager on duty. This is unacceptable.” I was humiliated hearing this, being so old and still in my mother’s care, but also comforted, and I fell asleep to the sound of her anger.

Normally, the heat didn’t bother me so much, but yesterday, it was oppressive, and I could feel my face and hair becoming damp; I could feel sweat trickling into my diaper. Why won’t someone come help me? I thought. I tried to make a sound, but I of course couldn’t.

And then something very strange happened. I stood. I cannot explain how this happened—I have not stood for years, not since I was rescued from Lipo-wao-nahele. But now I was not only standing, I was trying to walk, trying to move toward where I knew the air-conditioning unit was. As I realized this, however, I fell, and after a few minutes, someone came into the room and started making a fuss, asking me why I was on the floor, and if I’d rolled out of bed. For a minute I worried she might strap me down, as has happened before, but she didn’t, just buzzed for help, and then another person came in and they returned me to bed and then, thank goodness, switched on the air conditioner.

The point, though, is that I had stood; I had been standing. It felt both foreign and also familiar to be upright again, even if I trembled for a long time afterward because my limbs were so wasted. Last night, after I had been fed and washed and the space was dark and silent, I began to think. It had been luck that no one had seen me standing, because if they had, there would have been questions, and my mother would have been called, and there would have been tests, the sorts I had had when I first came here: Why would I not walk? Why would I not speak? Why would I not see? “You’re asking the wrong questions,” my mother had snapped to someone, a doctor. “You should be asking why he can’t do those things.” “No, Mrs. Bingham,” the doctor replied, and I could hear an edge in his voice. “I am asking exactly the right questions. It’s not that your son can’t do these things—it’s that he won’t,” and my mother had been silent.

Now, however, I realized: What if I could learn how to walk again? What if every day I practiced standing? What would happen? The thought scared me, but it was exciting as well. What if I was getting better after all?

But I meant to continue my story. Throughout the remainder of fifth grade, Edward and I saw a lot of each other. Occasionally, he came to my house, but more often, I went to his, where we would play checkers or cards. When he came to my house, he’d want to play outside, as his yard was too small to toss a ball in, but he soon realized I wasn’t much of an athlete. The strange thing, though, was that we never seemed to grow closer in any meaningful way. Boys that age may not exchange intimacies or secrets, but they do become more physical with each other: I remember you at that age, how you would tussle on the grass with your friends like little animals, how much of the fun you had with them was getting dirty together. But Edward and I weren’t like that—I was too fastidious, and he was too composed. I sensed, early on, that he would never be someone I could relax around, and I didn’t mind that.

Then came summer. Edward went to the Big Island to stay with his grandparents; my mother and I went to Hāna, where we at the time had a house that had been in my father’s family since before annexation. And by the time school had resumed, something had shifted. Friendships at that age are so fragile, because who you are—not just the physical dimensions of you but the emotional ones, too—change so dramatically from month to month. Edward joined the baseball team and swim team and made new friends; I reverted to my solitude. I now suppose I must have been sad about this, but, curiously, I remember no feelings of sorrow, no feelings of anger—it was like the previous year had been a mistake, and I had known that things would at some point return to normal. Also, it wasn’t as if there was any animosity—we had only drifted, not split, and when we saw each other across campus or in the hallways, we would both nod or wave, gestures you’d make across a wide sea, where you knew your voice couldn’t carry. When we reunited more than a decade later, it felt somehow inevitable, as if we had both drifted for so long that we were bound to find each other again.

There are, however, two encounters from those years apart that stood out for me. The first took place when I was around thirteen. I had overheard an exchange between two girls in my grade. One of the girls, it was well-known, had a crush on Edward. But her friend disapproved. “You can’t, Belle,” she hissed. “Why not?” Belle asked. “Because,” said the first girl, her voice dropping, “his mother. She’s a dancer.”

Since he had matriculated, Edward was occasionally the subject of—not rumors, because they were all true, but stories. Eventually, we came to learn who the scholarship students were, and their parents’ occupations were sometimes whispered from child to child, all mimicking the voices their own parents used to discuss the newcomers. Edward had no father, and his mother was a waitress, but he was spared from outright ridicule: He was good at sports, and moreover, he didn’t seem to care what people said, which was partly what motivated the stories—I think the other students hoped that they might provoke him to react, but he never did.

At least he wasn’t Oriental. This was in the years of the quota, when only ten percent of the school’s population was Oriental, even though the territory’s actual population was around thirty percent. Most of the Orientals who did attend arrived, in some cases, having never worn shoes, just rubber slippers. They were all on scholarships, identified by their public-school teachers as promising and bright, and subjected to multiple tests before they gained admission. Their parents worked on the island’s final sugarcane plantation or in the canning factories, and on weekends and in the summer, they worked there, too, cutting cane or picking pine, as they called it, in the fields, loading it onto the trucks. There was a boy, Harry, who had begun at the school in seventh grade whose father was a night-soil collector, someone who cleaned out the plantation outhouses and transferred the human feces there to—where, we didn’t know. It was said he smelled like shit, and although he too always sat alone at lunch, eating his rice sandwiches, I never thought of introducing myself to him: I looked down on him as well.

Hearing about Mrs. Bishop made me miss her. Indeed, she was what I missed most about my friendship with Edward: the way she held me by the shoulders and then pulled me in for a hug, laughing; the way she kissed me on the forehead when I left their house for the evening; the way she told me she hoped she’d see me again soon.

I had never listened to the talk about Edward, but now I did, and after a few weeks, I learned that, while Mrs. Bishop was still a waitress at Mizumoto’s, she was now also dancing three nights a week at a restaurant called Forsythia. This was a popular place near Mizumoto’s, a hangout for union men of all ethnicities. Matthew’s brother, of whom he was very proud, was a union representative for the Filipino cannery employees, and I knew he sometimes went to Forsythia, because occasionally Jane would beckon me into the kitchen after school and, with a flourish, present the restaurant’s yellow bakery box, in which would sit a guava chiffon cake, its surface a glossy rose-pink.

“From Matthew’s brother,” she’d say—she was proud of him, too, and pride made her even more generous. “Have a big slice, Wika. Have more.”

I didn’t understand why I wanted to see her so badly. But one Friday afternoon, I told Matthew and Jane I had to stay late to help paint sets for the annual school play, and then I cycled over. Forsythia (much later, I would wonder who had chosen this name, as it wasn’t a plant that grew in Hawai‘i, and no one knew what it was) was at the end of a row of small, mostly Japanese-owned stores of the sort that surrounded the Bishops’ house, and though its stucco exterior had been painted a bright yellow, it was designed to resemble a Japanese teahouse, with a peaked roof and small windows cut high into the walls. In the rear of the building, though, near one of the corners, there was a long, skinny window, and it was to here that I quietly wheeled my bike.

I sat down to wait. The kitchen entrance was a few feet away, but there was a dumpster, and I hid behind that. A Hawaiian music group performed here on Fridays and the weekends, playing all the big-band standards, music my father had liked to listen to—“Nani Waimea,” “Moonlight in Hawai‘i,” “Ē Lili‘u ē”—and it was after the fourth song that I heard the guitarist announce, “And now, gentlemen—and some ladies, yeah?—please join me in welcoming the lovely Miss Victoria Nāmāhānaikaleleokalani Bishop!”

The crowd cheered, and I looked through the window to see Mrs. Bishop, in a close-fitting yellow holokū printed with white hibiscus, a lei of orange puakenikeni around her head, her hair coiled into a bun, her lips scarlet, ascend to the small stage. She waved to the audience, which was clapping, and I watched as she danced to “My Yellow Ginger Lei” and “Pālolo.” She was a beautiful dancer, and although I didn’t speak more than a few words of Hawaiian, I understood the lyrics from watching her movements.

It occurred to me as I watched her, her face lit with happiness, that, although I had always liked her, part of me had wanted to see her degraded in some way. “Dancing,” in my classmates’ voices, had sounded so sordid, something a desperate woman would have to do, and something in me had craved witnessing it. Watching her now, queenly and elegant, was both a relief and, as much as I hated to admit it, a disappointment—I realized that I resented her son after all, that I wanted him to have something to be ashamed of, and that I had wanted that something to be his mother, who had always been kind to me, kind in a way her son could never be. She was not dancing because she had been forced to out of circumstance—she was dancing because she loved to dance, and although she dipped her head graciously at the crowd’s applause, it was also clear that her joy was separate from their approval.

I left before her set was over. But in bed that night, I lay awake thinking of the night I had departed the Bishops’ house for the first time and had turned back to see them in the kitchen together, laughing and talking in the house’s warm yellow light. Now I revised that memory: They had put a record on the player, and Mrs. Bishop, still in her Mizumoto’s uniform, was dancing, and Edward was strumming his ukulele, playing along. Outside, in the tiny yard, were crowded all of Edward’s and my classmates, and all of the patrons from Forsythia as well, all of us watching and clapping, though mother and son never turned to acknowledge us—to them, there was only each other, and it was as if we didn’t exist.

—

That was the first incident I wanted to tell you about. The second occurred three years later, in 1959.

It was August 21, and the school year had just begun. I was in tenth grade, almost sixteen. Now that we were in high school, I saw more of Edward than I had in the previous years, when we had been assigned to single, different classrooms. Now we moved from teacher to teacher, and sometimes we were in the same class. His earlier spell of popularity, when it had been discovered he could play sports, had tempered, and now I mostly saw him around the same three or four boys. As always, we nodded at each other in passing, and sometimes we even spoke a few words if we were in proximity—I think I messed up on that chem test. Oh, me too—but no one would have identified us as friends.

I was in English class when the intercom crackled and the principal’s voice, rapid and emotional, started speaking: President Eisenhower had signed a bill granting Hawai‘i statehood. We were now officially the fiftieth American state. Many of the students, and my teacher, began clapping.

We were given the rest of the day off in celebration. For most of us, this was a formality, but I knew that Matthew and Jane would be excited; they had lived in the territory for thirty years—they wanted to be able to vote, which was not something I’d considered.

I was walking up toward the campus’s western gate when I saw Edward heading south. The first thing I noticed was how slowly he was moving; other students were passing him by, talking about what they were going to do with their unexpected free day, but he appeared to be sleepwalking.

I was nearing him when he suddenly looked up and saw me. “Hi,” I said, and then, when he didn’t respond, “What’re you going to do with your day off?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer, and I thought that he perhaps hadn’t heard me. But then he said, “This is horrible news.”

He spoke so quietly that I at first thought I’d misheard him. “Oh,” I said, stupidly.

But it was like I’d tried to argue with him. “It’s horrible news,” he repeated tonelessly, “horrible.” And then he turned from me and kept walking. I remember thinking he looked lonely, even though I’d seen him alone many times and had never associated his aloneness with loneliness, the way I did with mine. This time, though, something felt different. He looked—though I wouldn’t have had the word for it then—bereft, and although I couldn’t see his face, there was something about his back, the slump of his shoulders, that, had I not known better, would have made me think he had just suffered a terrible loss.

—

I understand that that incident, knowing what you do of Edward, might not seem particularly notable. But it was uncharacteristic of the Edward I knew—admittedly not very well—back then. However, I would have known—through him or through gossip—if he had expressed any strong sentiments about native Hawaiian rights, even given the fact that the very idea of native Hawaiian rights had not yet been invented. (Now I can hear Edward saying, “Of course it had been invented.” So, all right: It had not yet been named. Named, or popularized, not even on a small scale.) There were a few boys in our grade who were interested in politics—one, whose father was the territorial governor, even got it into his head that he would one day be president of the United States. But Edward was not one of them, which made what happened later all the more surprising.

I should add, though, that Edward was not the only person who was upset that day. Back home, I found my mother sitting in the sunroom, quilting. This was unusual, as she was typically with the Daughters on Friday afternoons, volunteering at a food kitchen that served Hawaiian families. When I entered the room, she looked up, and we stared at each other in silence.

“They let us out early,” I said. “Because of the announcement.”

She nodded. “I stayed home today,” she said. “I just couldn’t bear it.” She looked down at her quilt—it was a breadfruit pattern, dark green on white—and then back up at me. “This doesn’t change anything, you know, Kawika,” she said. “Your father should still be king. And someday, you should still be king, too. Remember that.”

It was a strange mix of tenses, a sentence of promises and grievances, reassurances and consolations.

“All right,” I said, and she nodded.

“This changes nothing,” she said. “This land is ours.” And then she looked back at her quilting ring, my signal that I was dismissed, and I went upstairs to my room.

I had no strong feelings about statehood. I thought of it as falling under the broad roof of “government,” and I had no interest in government. Who was in charge, which decisions were made—none of it affected me. A signature on a piece of paper was irrelevant to the facts of my own life. Our house, the people within it, my school: These things wouldn’t change. My burden was one not of citizenry but of legacy; I was David Bingham, my father’s son, and all that went with it. I suppose, looking back on it, I might even have been relieved—now that the islands’ fate was settled, it would perhaps mean that I would no longer bear the responsibility and obligation of trying to correct a history I had no hopes of changing.

—

It would be another decade, almost, before I returned to Edward’s orbit, but in those years, many things happened.

The first thing is that I graduated—we all did. Most of my classmates went to college on the mainland; it was what we had been groomed to do, after all—it was the entire point of the school. We were to go away and get our degrees, maybe do a bit of traveling, and then we would return after college or law school or medical school and get jobs in the most prestigious local banks and law firms and hospitals, which were owned or founded by our relatives and ancestors. Quite a few of us would go into government, leading the Departments of Transportation or Education or Agriculture.

At first, I was among their number. The dean had directed me toward an obscure liberal-arts school in the Hudson Valley of New York, and in September 1962, I left home.

It quickly became clear that I was not meant for the college. It may have been small, and expensive, and unknown, but the other students, most of whom were from rich but vaguely bohemian New York City families, were somehow much more sophisticated and much better educated than I was. It wasn’t that I had never traveled, but my travels had been oriented toward the East, and none of my new classmates seemed to care about the places I’d been. They’d all traveled to Europe, some of them every summer, and I was soon made aware of my own provinciality. Few of them knew that Hawai‘i had been a kingdom; more than one asked if I lived in a “real” house, by which they meant one made of stone, with a shingled roof. The first time, I hadn’t known how to reply, the question was so ludicrous, and stood there blinking until the other person moved away. The references they made, the books they quoted, the vacations they took, the food and wine they preferred, the people they all seemed to know—all of it whirred past me.

The strange thing, though, is that I didn’t resent them: I resented where I had come from. I cursed my school, where generations of Binghams had gone, for not better preparing me. What had I learned there that was useful? I had taken all the same subjects my new classmates had, but so much of my education, it seemed, had been taken up with learning Hawaiian history and bits of Hawaiian language, which I couldn’t even speak. How was that knowledge meant to be useful to me, when the rest of the world simply didn’t care? I didn’t dare bring up who my family was—I sensed that half of them wouldn’t believe me, and the other half would mock me.

I knew this for certain after the variety show. Every December, the college presented a series of brief sketches by different students satirizing various professors and administrators. One of the sketches was about the school’s president, who was always talking about recruiting students from new countries and unlikely places, trying to convince a Stone Age tribe boy—Prince Woogawooga of the Ooga-ooga, was his name—to attend the school. The student playing the tribe member had darkened his skin with brown shoe polish and wore an oversize diaper; on either side of his nose was taped one half of a cardboard bone, so that it looked as if the length of it had pierced though the bridge. On his head he wore a mop, its ropes dyed black and tied back from his face.

“Hello there, young man,” the student playing the president said. “You look like an intelligent young person.”

“Ooga booga, ooga booga,” hooted the student playing the tribesman prince, scratching beneath his arms like an ape and bouncing from foot to foot.

“We teach everything that a young man needs to learn in order to be considered educated,” the president continued, stoically ignoring the tribesman’s antics. “Geometry, history, literature, Latin; and, of course, sports: lacrosse, tennis, football, badminton.” And here he held out a badminton ball to the tribesman, who immediately stuffed it into his mouth.

“No, no!” cried the president, finally flustered. “This is not for eating, good man! Spit it out at once!”

The tribesman did, scratching and jumping, and then, after a pause during which he looked at the audience, his eyes opened wide, his mouth, which had been circled with red lipstick, stretched taut, he made a lunging leap at the president, trying to take a bite out of his cheek.

“Help!” shouted the president. “Help!” The two began to run around the stage, the tribesman’s teeth coming together in a sharp wooden click as he bit down on air, cackling and whooping as he chased the president into the wings.

The two actors returned to the stage to loud applause. The audience had been laughing the entire time, in an exaggerated, obscene way, almost as if they’d never laughed before and were just learning how. Only two of us were silent: me, and an upperclassman from Ghana whom I didn’t know. I watched him watching the stage, his face still and clenched, and realized he thought it was about him and his home, but I knew it was about me and mine—the cardboard palm trees, the ferns tied in clumsy bunches around the savage’s ankles and wrists, the lei made of cut-up plastic straws and newsprint flowers. It was a cheap, coarse costume, cheaply and coarsely made, dismissive even in its ridicule. This is what they thought of me, I realized, and later, when Edward first mentioned Lipo-wao-nahele, it was this night that I remembered, the sensation of watching, frozen, as everything I was, and everything my family was, was brutally dismembered, stripped naked, and pushed onto the stage to be howled at.

How could I have remained there, after that? I packed a bag and took a bus south, to Manhattan, where I checked in to the Plaza, the only hotel whose name I knew. I sent a telegram to my uncle William, who managed my father’s estate, asking him to wire me money and not tell my mother; he sent one back saying he would, but he wouldn’t be able to keep this from her forever, and he hoped I was being smart.

I spent the days walking. Every morning, I went to a diner near Carnegie Hall for breakfast, where I could have fried eggs and potatoes and bacon and coffee for far less than I’d have to pay at the hotel, and then I walked north or south or east or west. I had a tweed coat, expensive and handsome but not quite warm enough, and as I walked, I breathed on my hands, and when I could bear the cold no longer, I would find a diner or coffee shop and go inside to have a hot chocolate and get warm.

My identity changed with the neighborhood I found myself in. In midtown, they thought I might be black, but in Harlem, they knew I wasn’t. I was spoken to in Spanish and Portuguese and Italian and even Hindi, and when I answered, “I’m Hawaiian,” I would invariably be told that they or their brother or cousin had been there after the war, and asked what I was doing up here, so far from home, when I could be on the beach with a pretty little hula girl. I never had an answer to these questions, but they didn’t expect one—it was all they knew to ask, but no one wanted to hear what I had to say.

On my eighth day, though—Uncle William had sent me a telegram that morning saying that my mother had been alerted by the bursar’s office that I had left school, and was instructing him to send me a ticket home, which would be waiting for me that evening—I was walking back to the hotel from Washington Square Park, where I’d gone to see the arch. It was very cold that afternoon, whipping wind, and the city seemed to mirror my mood, which was gray and bleak.

I had walked north on Broadway, and as I turned east on Central Park South, I almost stumbled into a beggar. I had seen him before; he was a squat, dark, beaten man, always on this corner, in a much too long black coat—he held before him with both hands an old-fashioned felt bowler, the kind that had been fashionable thirty years ago, and which he shook as people passed. “Spare a dime, sir?” he would call. “Spare a nickel?”

I was passing him, about to murmur my regrets, when he saw me, and as he did, he suddenly snapped, soldierlike, to his full height, before bowing at the waist. I heard him gasp. “Your Highness,” he said, to the pavement.

My first reaction was shame. I looked around me, but no one was staring at us; no one had seen.

He gazed up at me, his eyes wet. I could see now that he was one of mine, one of us: His face was one I knew in shape and color and form, if not in its specifics. “Prince Kawika,” he said, his voice slurry with emotion and alcohol; I could smell it on him. “I knew your father,” he said, “I knew your father.” And then he shook his hat at me. “Please, Your Highness,” he said, “please give something to one of your subjects, so far from home.”

There was nothing sly in his voice, only beseechment. Only later, back in my room, would I wonder why he was so far from home, how he had ended up begging on a street corner in New York, and if he had really known my father—it was possible, after all. For true royalists, which this man seemed to be, statehood was an insult, a loss of hope. “Please, Your Highness, I’m very hungry.” His hat was dark, and I could see only a few coins inside, sliding around in the bowl of shiny felt.

I took out my wallet and hurriedly gave him everything I had—about forty dollars, I thought—and then I hurried on, moving away from his cries of thanks. I was Prince Woogawooga of the Ooga-ooga, except, instead of running after someone, I was running from him, as if he would pursue me, this man who called himself my subject. He was hungry, and he would open his mouth, and when he closed his jaws, I would be within them, my head being chewed to bits, waiting for the play to be over.

—

I went home; I enrolled in the University of Hawai‘i, which the graduates of my school only attended if they were poor or had poor grades. Upon graduating, I was given a job at what had been my father’s company, except it wasn’t actually a company, insofar as it produced nothing, sold nothing, and bought nothing—it was a collection of my family’s remaining real-estate holdings and investments, and aside from Uncle William, who was a lawyer, and an accountant, there was a clerk and a secretary.

Initially, I showed up every day at eight. But within a few months, it became clear that my presence was superfluous. My title was “estate manager,” but there was nothing to manage. The trust was conservative, and a few times a year, some stocks would be bought or sold and the dividends reinvested. A rabbity Chinese man was contracted to gather rents from the various residential properties and, if the renters refused to or were unable to pay, a Samoan, enormous and terrifying, was sent on a follow-up visit. The trust’s goals were deliberately unambitious, because ambition entailed risk, and after the resolution of my father’s debts, the focus was on maintenance, on providing enough for my mother and me to live on, and, if they planned correctly, my great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren as well.

Once it became clear that the firm would totter on whether I was there or not, I began taking long breaks. The offices were downtown in a beautiful old Spanish-style building, and I would leave at eleven, before the lunch crowds, and walk the few blocks to Chinatown. I drew a salary, but I lived modestly—I would go to a restaurant that served a bowl of pork-and-shrimp wonton min for a quarter, and after paying I would wander the streets, past the hawkers arranging their pyramids of starfruit and rambutan, past the apothecaries with their bins of shriveled roots and dried seeds, their rows of glass jars filled with a cloudy liquid and curls of herbs and different unidentifiable animal paws, shorn of their fur. Nothing ever changed in Hawai‘i; it was as if every day I walked onto a stage set, and every morning, long before I woke, it was unfurled, swept clean, and readied for me to pass through it again.

Of course I was lonely. Some of the boys who I had been able to pretend were my friends in high school came back to town as well, but they were busy with graduate school or their new jobs, and much of my time was spent as it had been when I was a child: in my bedroom at my mother’s house, or in the sunroom watching television on the little black-and-white set I had bought with some of my salary. On weekends, I went to watch the fishermen at Waimānalo or Kaimana; I went to the movies. I turned twenty-two, and then twenty-three.

One day when I was twenty-four, I was driving back to town. It was late in the evening. By this time, I had stopped going to work entirely, phasing myself out of the life of the office until I simply never returned. No one seemed upset or even surprised by this; it was my money, after all, and it continued to come to me in the form of a paycheck, every two weeks.

I was driving through Kailua, which was at the time a very small town, with none of the stores and restaurants it would have a decade later, when I passed a bus stop. Two times a month, I drove around the entire island, one week going east, the next, west. It was a way to pass the time, and I would sit on the beach near the stone church in Lā‘ie, where my father had once handed out money, and look at the sea. The bus stop was beneath a streetlamp, one of the few on the road, and seated at its bench was a young woman. I was driving slow enough so that I could see she had dark hair pulled back from her face, and wore a printed-orange cotton skirt—in the light, she appeared to be glowing. She sat very straight, her legs together, her hands folded in her lap, her purse strap looped over one wrist.

I don’t know why I didn’t just drive on, but I didn’t. I turned around in the road, which was deserted, and returned to her.

“Hello,” I said, when I was close to her, and she looked back at me.

“Hello,” she said.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’m waiting for the bus to town,” she said.

“The bus doesn’t run this late,” I said, and for the first time, she looked worried.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I have to get back to the dorm or they’ll lock the doors.”

“I can drop you off,” I offered, and she hesitated, looking up and down the dark, empty road. “You can sit in the back seat,” I added.

At this she nodded, and smiled. “Thank you,” she said, “I’d be very grateful.”

She sat the same way as she had at the bus stop: erect and poised, her eyes straight ahead. I studied her in the rearview mirror. “I’m a student at the university,” she finally said, as if by way of an offering.

“What year are you?” I asked.

“A junior,” she said, “but I’m only here for the year.”

She was on an exchange program, she said; the next year she would return to Minneapolis, and graduate from her college there. Her name was Alice.

I began seeing her. She lived in one of the girls’ dormitories, Frear Hall, and I would wait in the lobby until she came down. Every Wednesday, she took weaving lessons in Kailua with an old Hawaiian lady, for which she always wore a modest, knee-length skirt and her hair pulled back. Otherwise, she wore jeans and let her hair loose. I could tell from its texture and the shape of her nose that she wasn’t entirely haole, but I didn’t understand what she actually was. “I’m Spanish,” she said, but I knew from my time on the mainland that “Spanish” could sometimes mean Mexican, or Puerto Rican, or something else altogether. She talked about her studies, and how she had come here because she wanted to be somewhere warm for once in her life, but had grown to love it, about how she wanted to go back home and become a teacher, and about how she missed her mother (her father was dead) and little brother. She talked about how she wanted a life full of adventure, about how living in Hawai‘i was a little like living abroad, and someday, she would live in China, and India, and, when the war was over, Thailand, too. We talked about what was happening in Vietnam, and about the election, and about music; in each case, she had more to say than I did. Sometimes she asked about my life, but there wasn’t much to tell. And yet she seemed to like me well enough; she was very gentle with me, and when I made mistakes, fumbling for too long with her clothes, she placed my hands on her shoulders and unbuttoned her dress herself.

We had sex in her room one night when her roommate was out. She had to tell me what to do, and how, and at first I was embarrassed, and then I felt nothing at all. Afterward, I thought about the experience: It had been neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but I was glad I had done it and glad it was over. I felt I had crossed some important threshold, one that marked me as an adult even as my daily life belied it. If it had been less enjoyable than I had assumed it would be, it had also been easier, and we met for a few times more, and it made me feel like my life was moving forward.

—

Now comes the part you know, Kawika, which is also the hard part.

Of course Alice knew who my family was, but it seemed she hadn’t realized its full implications until she had returned home. By the time the letter arrived at the firm, I had had the first of my seizures. Initially, I assumed they were headaches: The world would quiet and flatten, and shifting fields of color—of the kind we used to see together after we stared at the sun and then shut our eyes—would float across my field of vision. When I came to, it might be a minute later or an hour, and then I would be woozy and disoriented. After I was diagnosed, I lost my driver’s license; from there on, Matthew would have to drive me, and if Matthew was unavailable, my mother.

So I cannot quite remember the exact sequence of events that brought you home to me. I know your grandmother told you that your mother had effectively abandoned you, writing to Uncle William and telling him that someone had to come retrieve you because she was leaving Minneapolis again, this time to study in Japan, and her own mother was in no position to take care of a baby. Later, Uncle William told me that, while Alice had contacted the firm, it was your grandmother who, upon receiving evidence that you were in fact a Bingham, offered your mother money. Alice, your mother, countered with a different sum, one that Uncle William warned your grandmother would necessitate selling the house in Hāna. “Do it,” she told him, and she didn’t need to explain why: You would be the heir of the family, and there was no guarantee that I would ever produce another. She had to take the opportunity she was presented. A month later, Uncle William flew to Minnesota and had the papers countersigned; when he returned, it was with you. It was an echo of my mother’s own alleged origins, though neither of us ever acknowledged that.

I cannot say which version was true. I can say she had never told me—not that she was pregnant, not that she had given birth. She disappeared from my life after the end of the 1967 school year. I do know that she is indeed dead—she married at some point in the early seventies, to a man she met while a student in Kobe; they were killed in a boating accident in ’74. But as for why neither she nor her family ever made contact with you—I can only imagine it was because the terms of arrangement she made with your grandmother prohibited it.

You cannot be bitter about this, Kawika—not bitter toward your grandmother, or toward Alice. One wanted you very badly, and the other hadn’t planned on becoming a mother.

I can also say that you are and always were the joy of my life, that having you made me feel I might have something to contribute after all. You were still a baby when I got you, and in those years when you were learning to roll over, and sit, and walk, and talk, my mother and I were in harmony—because of you. Sometimes we would sit on the floor in the sunroom, watching you kick your legs and babble, and as we laughed or clapped at your efforts, we would sometimes catch each other’s eye, and it was as if we were not mother and son but husband and wife, and you were our child.

She was always proud of you, Kawika, as I was and as I am. She still is, I know it—she’s just disappointed, because she misses you, as I miss you too.

And here I must restate that I never blamed you for leaving me. I was not your responsibility; you were mine. You had to find your way out of a situation you should never have been in at all.

Over the years, I kept waiting for the day you would ask about your mother, but you never did. I’ll admit that I was relieved, although, later, I came to realize that you might not have asked because you wanted to protect me, because you were always trying to protect me, when I was the one who should have been protecting you. Your apparent lack of interest in your mother was the subject of a fight I had with your grandmother, one of the few times I stood up to her. “It’s strange,” she had said, after a parent-teacher conference we had attended, in which your teacher had mentioned that she didn’t know anything about your mother, “strange how incurious he is.” She was implying that this meant you were slow, somehow, slow or tepid, and I barked at her. “So you want him to start asking?” I demanded, and she shrugged, slightly, not lifting her eyes from her quilting ring. “Of course not,” she said. “I just think it’s odd that he doesn’t.” I was furious with her. “He’s just a little boy,” I said, “and he believes what you told him. I can’t believe you’re complaining about the fact that he trusts you, that you’re trying to make it sound like a flaw.” I got up and left the room, and that night, she had Jane prepare rice pudding, your favorite, which I knew was her way of apologizing to you, even though you would never know that it was an apology.

Eventually, it became easy for us to pretend that you’d never had a mother at all. There was a Japanese folktale that you had liked me to tell you, about a boy who was born from a peach and found by an old childless couple. “Read me ‘Momotaro’ again,” you’d say, and then, when I had, “Again.” After a while, I began telling you a version about a boy, Mangotaro, who was discovered inside a mango hanging from the tree in our yard, and how that boy grew up to have many adventures and make many friends. The story always ended with the boy leaving his father and grandmother and aunt and uncle and going far away, where he would have new adventures and make new friends. I knew, even then, that my job was to remain, and yours was to leave, to go somewhere I would never see, to have a life of your own.

“What happens next?” you’d ask when the story was over, and I’d kissed you good night.

“You’ll have to come back and tell me someday,” I’d say.

Kawika: It happened again. I had a dream that I was standing, and not just standing but walking. My hands were extended before me, like a zombie, and I was shuffling one foot and then the other. And then I realized that, again, I wasn’t dreaming but really walking, and I began to concentrate, using my hands to touch the walls, edging my way around the room.

My bed is in the center of the room, which I knew because I’d heard my mother complain about it—Why, she wondered, was it in the center, instead of pressed up against one wall or another?—and yet I was glad of it, because it made the space easier to navigate. Here was the wall of windows that looked over the garden; here was the doorway to the bathroom where I was taken for my baths and showers; here was the door—locked—to, I imagined, the hallway. Here was a chest of drawers, on top of which were a few bottles, some heavy, some light, some glass, some plastic. I opened the top drawers and felt my shorts, my T-shirts. The floor was cold, tile or stone, but as I neared my bed, I encountered a different surface, which I recognized as a woven lauhala mat, satiny beneath my feet, the same kind as I’d had in my room back home. They kept the whole room cool, Jane used to say, and even though they splintered and shagged, they were easy to replace every few months.

After I found my way back to bed, I lay awake for a long time, for I had realized: What if I were to leave? If I could walk, was it not possible that other things would return to me as well? My eyesight, for example? My speech? What if I were to walk out of here one night? What if I were to come find you? Wouldn’t that be a surprise? To see you again, to hold you again? I knew that, in the meantime, I wouldn’t tell anyone, not until I’d practiced more, and, indeed, the walk, as short as it was, had left me panting. But now you know, too. I’m going to come find you—I’m going to walk there myself.

I had been walking as well the day I reencountered Edward. It was 1969, and I had had you for just four months—you weren’t yet a year old. A few times a week, I had Matthew drive us down to Kapi‘olani Park, where I’d push you among the monkeypod and shower trees; sometimes we’d stop to watch the cricket club play their matches. Or sometimes I’d walk you over to Kaimana Beach, where I used to linger to watch the fishermen.

Back then—and maybe even now—it was unusual to see a young man pushing a carriage, and sometimes people would laugh. I never said anything, though, never spoke back, just kept moving. So that morning, when I felt, rather than saw, someone stop to stare, I didn’t think anything of it, and it wasn’t until the person spoke my name that I too stopped, and then only because I recognized the voice.

“How’ve you been?” he asked, as if it had been just a week, rather than nearly a decade, since we had seen each other last.

“Pretty good,” I said, shaking his hand. I had heard he had moved to Los Angeles, where he had gone to college, and told him so, but he shrugged. “I just came back,” he said. Then he looked into the carriage. “Whose baby is that?” he asked.

“Mine,” I said, and he blinked. Another person might have brayed in astonishment, or thought I was joking, but he only nodded. I remembered that he had never joked, and never thought anyone else was joking, either.

“Your son,” he said, as if tasting the word. “Little Kawika,” he said, testing out the name. “Or does he go by ‘David’?”

“No, Kawika,” I said, and he smiled, slightly.

“Good,” he said.

Somehow it was arranged that we should go get something to eat, and we loaded everything into his beat-up car and drove to Chinatown, where we went to my twenty-five-cent wonton min restaurant. On the way, I asked about his mother, and I knew by his silence, the way his face twisted before he answered, that she was dead—breast cancer, he said. It was why he was home.

“I wish I had known,” I said; I felt as if I had been punched. But he shrugged. “It was slow, and then quick,” he said. “She didn’t suffer too much. I buried her in Honoka‘a.”

After that lunch, we began seeing each other again. It wasn’t as if we discussed it: He just told me he’d pick me up on Sunday at noon and we could go to the beach, and I agreed. Over the weeks and then months, we saw more and more of each other, until I was seeing him at least every other day. Curiously, we rarely discussed where he’d been, or where I’d been, or what we’d done in the years since we saw each other last, or why we had drifted apart in the first place. But although the past was not so much forgotten as it was excised, we were both careful—again, without ever discussing it—about not letting my mother discover our renewed communication. When he came, I would wait (sometimes with you, sometimes alone) on the porch if she was out, or at the bottom of the hill if she was home, which is where Edward dropped me off as well.

It’s difficult to remember what we discussed in those days. This may surprise you to hear, but it took me many months to realize that Edward had changed in some fundamental way—I don’t mean the kind of change we all experience when we move from childhood to adulthood, but that, in his beliefs and convictions, he had become someone I no longer recognized. Part of this, I’m embarrassed to say, is that, because he looked very much the same, I assumed he was very much the same. I knew, from television news reports, that the mainland was full of long-haired hippies, and while there were hippies in Honolulu as well, there was no sense of rage, of revolution. Everything came late to Hawai‘i—even our papers carried day-old news—and so, if you had seen Edward then, you wouldn’t have been able to immediately identify him as a political radical by sight alone. Yes, his hair was longer, fluffier, than mine, but it was always clean; the effect was less intimidating than it was merely pretty.

Neither of us worked. Unlike me, Edward had not finished his degree; he had, he eventually explained, dropped out at the beginning of his senior year and had spent the rest of the fall hitchhiking through the West. When he needed money, he returned to California and picked grapes or garlic or strawberries or walnuts, whatever was being harvested—he would never eat another strawberry in his life, he said. Now, back in Honolulu, he found short-term jobs. He helped a friend paint houses, or joined a moving crew for a few days. The little house he’d shared with his mother was a rental, the landlord an old Chinese man who’d fancied Mrs. Bishop, and he’d have to move out of it eventually, but he didn’t seem concerned about this, or his future. He seemed concerned about very little, and it reminded me of his childhood self-assurance, his complete lack of insecurity.

But it was toward the end of that year that I realized how truly different a person he had become. “We’re going to an event,” he said as he picked me up at the foot of the hill one evening, “to meet some friends of mine.” He didn’t offer any further information, and I, as usual, didn’t ask. But I could tell he was excited, even nervous—as he drove, he beat out a twitchy rhythm on the steering wheel with one finger.

We drove deep into Nu‘uanu, down a narrow, private road so shrouded by trees and so ill-lit that even with the headlights I had to hold up a flashlight to guide our way. We passed a series of gates, and at the fourth, Edward stopped and got out of the car; there was a key attached to a long piece of wire on the gatepost, and he unlocked the gate and we drove through, stopping again to close the gate behind us. Ahead of us was a long dirt driveway, and as we bumped along, I could see and smell that it was lined with clumps of white ginger, their flowers ghostly in the dusk.

At the end of the driveway was a large white wooden house, once grand, once well-maintained, that resembled my own, except parked in front of it were at least twenty cars, and even from outside, we could hear people talking, their voices echoey in the valley’s quiet.

“Come on,” Edward said.

There were perhaps fifty people inside, and after I had recovered from my initial shock, I was able to observe them more closely. Most of them were our age, and all of them were local, and some of them were clearly hippies, and many of them were standing around a very tall black man, whose back was toward me, so that all I could see was his Afro, which was large and thick and glistening. As he shifted, the top of his hair brushed against the bottom of the ceiling pendant light, making it sway, the light rocking about the room.

“Come on,” Edward said, again, and this time, I could hear the excitement in his voice.

The crowd began to stir as a single organism, and we found ourselves being moved from the entryway and into a large open space. Here, as in the first room, there was no furniture, and some of the floorboards had cracked and split from the moisture. In this room, above the chatter, I heard a roaring, like an airplane passing overhead, but then I looked out the window and realized the sound was coming from a waterfall at the bottom of the property.

After we had all settled ourselves on the floor, there was a nervous silence, one that seemed to lengthen and deepen. “The fuck’s happening?” someone, a guy, asked, and was shushed; someone else giggled. On and on the silence went, and finally, the shuffling and whispering quieted, and for at least a minute, we sat there, together, mute and immobile.

It was then that the tall black man picked himself up from where he’d been sitting in the middle of the crowd and loped to the front of the room. The combination of his height and our position on the ground, staring up at him, made him seem towering, an edifice rather than a man. He was not so black—I was darker than he was—nor was he exactly handsome: His skin was shiny, and he had a patchy beard and a smattering of pimples across his left cheek that made him look more childlike than I think he’d have preferred. But there was something indisputable about him; he had a wide, gap-toothed smile that he could make look either goofy or fierce, and long, liquid arms and legs that he bent and twisted into shapes as he moved, so that you were forced to not only listen to him but to watch him as well. But it was his voice that really captivated: what he said, but also how he said it, gentle and low and furred; his was a voice you’d like to hear telling you how much he loved you, and why, and how.

He began with a smile. “Brothers and sisters,” he said. “Aloha.” The crowd clapped then, and his smile widened, sleepy and seductive. “Aloha and mahalo for bringing me to this beautiful land of yours.

“It seems particularly right to me that we should be at this house tonight, for do you know what I was told the name of this house is? Yes, that’s right, it has a name, that’s something all fancy houses do, I guess, all over the world—it’s Hale Kealoha, the House of Aloha: the House of Love, the House of the Beloved.

“And that’s particularly interesting to me, because I too am named after a house: Bethesda. Who of you here remember your Bible, your New Testament? Ah, I see a hand in the back; there’s another. You, sister in the back, tell me what it means. That’s right, the Pools of Bethesda, Bethesda meaning the house of mercy, the pools being the place where Christ healed a crippled man. So here I am: the House of Mercy in the House of Love.

“I was asked to come, not just here, tonight, but to your islands, your home, by my good friend, the brother sitting all the way to the right, Brother Louis. Thank you, Brother Louis.

“I’m ashamed to say this now, but when I was invited to come here, I thought I knew everything about what this place was. I thought: pineapples. I thought: rainbows. I thought: hula girls, swaying their hips back and forth, all nice and sweet. I know, I know! But that’s what I thought. But within a few days, even before I left California, I realized I was wrong.

“I’m also ashamed to say that I didn’t even want to come here, not at first. You know, what you have here, I thought, is not reality. It’s not part of the world. I live near Oakland—that is part of the world. You see what’s happening there, what we’re struggling against there, what we’re fighting against there: the oppression of the black man and woman, the oppression that’s gone on since America was founded and will go on and on until it burns down to the ground and we begin something new. Because there is no fixing what America is—there is no way to do work around the margins and say justice has been restored. No, brothers and sisters, that’s not how justice works. My mother worked as a nurse’s aide in what they used to call the Houston Negro Hospital, and she would tell me stories of the men and women who came in with heart attacks, about how they’d be gasping for breath, about how their nails would turn blue because they weren’t getting enough oxygen. My mother would be told by the senior nurses to massage her patients’ hands, to get the blood flowing through the extremities, and as she did, she’d watch their nails turn pink again, and feel their hands warm up with her touch. But one day she realized that this wasn’t solving anything—she was making their hands prettier, maybe even work better, but their hearts were still sick. Nothing had really changed after all.

“And in the same way, nothing has really changed here. America is a country with sin at its heart. You know what I’m talking about. One group of people sent away from their land; another group of people stolen from their land. We replaced you, and yet we never wanted to replace you—we wanted to be left where we were. None of our ancestors, our great-great-great-grandparents, ever woke up one day and thought: Let’s sail halfway around the world, be part of a land grab, pit ourselves against some other native peoples. No way, no how. That is not how normal people, decent people, think—that is how the devil thinks. But that sin, that mark, never goes away, and although we didn’t cause it, we are all infected by it.

“Let me tell you why. Imagine that heart again, but this time swiped with a smear of oil. Not cooking oil but motor oil, the thick, gluey black kind, the kind that sticks to your hands and clothes like tar. It’s just a small bit of oil, you think, and eventually it’ll get washed away. And so you try to forget about it. But that isn’t what happens. What happens instead is that with each beat, with each thump of your heart, that oil, that little mark, spreads and spreads. The arteries carry it away; the veins carry it back. And with each journey through your body, it leaves a deposit, so that eventually—not right away, but over time—every organ, every blood vessel, every cell, has been tainted by that oil. Sometimes you can’t even see it—but you know it’s there. Because by this time, brothers and sisters, that oil is everywhere: It’s coating the inside of your veins; it’s lining your large intestine and liver; it’s slicking your spleen and kidneys. Your brain. That little bit of oil, that little splotch that you thought you could ignore, it’s now everywhere. And now there is no way to clean it out; the only way to clean it out is to stop the heart altogether—the only way to clean it out is to burn the body pure of it. The only way to clean it is to end it. You want to eliminate the stain, you’ve got to eliminate the host.

“Now. Now. What does this have to do with us here in Hawai‘i, you might be saying. The country, you might be saying, is not a body. The metaphor doesn’t hold. But doesn’t it? Here we sit, brothers and sisters, in this beautiful place far from Oakland. And yet it’s not far at all. Because here’s the thing, brothers and sisters: You do have pineapples here. You do have rainbows. You do have hula girls. But none of those things are yours. Those pineapple fields Brother Louis took me to see? Who’re they owned by? Not by you. Those rainbows? You have them, but can you see them for those high-rises going up, those hotels and condominiums in Waikīkī? And who owns those buildings? Do you? How about you? Those hula girls—those are your sisters, your brown-skinned sisters, and yet you’re letting them dance…for whom?

“This is the dissonance of living here. This is the lie you’ve been fed. I look at all of you here, your brown faces, your kinky hair, and then I look at who’s running this place. I look at who your elected officials are. I look at who runs your banks, your businesses, your schools. They don’t look like you. So: You’re poor? You got no money? You want to go to school? You want to buy a house? And yet you can’t? And why? Why do you think that is? Is it because you’re all stupid? Is it because you don’t deserve to go to school, to have someplace to live? Is it because you’re bad?

“Or is it because you’ve let yourselves sleep, because you’ve let yourselves forget? You live in a land not of milk and honey but of sugar and sun, and yet you’ve become drunk on it. You’ve become lazy on it. You’ve become complacent on it. And what’s happened, while you surfed and sang and swayed your hips? Your land, your very soul, has been taken from you, bit by bit by bit, right beneath your brown noses, while you watched it happen and did nothing—nothing—to stop it. Anyone watching you would think you wanted to give it all up. ‘Take my land!’ you said. ‘Take it all! Because I don’t care. I won’t stand in your way.’ ”

He took a breath then, rocked back on his heels, swiped a red bandanna across his forehead. The crowd had been utterly still, but now a hiss sizzled in the air, like a flock of insects, and when he spoke next, his voice was kinder, softer, almost placating.

“Brothers and sisters. We have something else in common. We are both from lands of kings. We both were kings and queens and princes and princesses. We both had wealth, handed down from father to son to grandson to great-grandson. You all are lucky, though. Because you remember your kings and queens. You know their names. You know where they’re buried. It’s 1969, my friends. Nineteen sixty-nine. That means it’s only been seventy-one years since your land was stolen by the Americans, seventy-six since your queen was betrayed by the American devils. And here you are—not all of you, mind, but enough of you, brothers and sisters, enough of you—calling yourselves American. American? You believe that ‘America is for everyone’ bullshit? America is not for everyone—it is not for us. You know that, don’t you? In your hearts and in your souls? You know that America despises you, don’t you? They want your land, your fields, and your mountains, but America don’t want you.

“This land was never their land. Legally, it’s barely their land. This land was taken. That is not your fault. But letting it stay taken? Well, that is your fault.

“You’ve let them buy you off, brothers and sisters. You’ve let them promise that they would give you some of your land back. But look around you: You know that there are more of you in prison than anyone else here? You know that there are more of you in poverty than anyone else? You know that there are more of you that go hungry than anyone else? You know that you die younger, that your babies die sooner, that you die in childbirth more than anyone else? You are Hawaiians. This land is yours. It’s time to take it back. Why are you living on your land like tenants? Why are you scared to ask for what’s yours? When I walk through Waikīkī—as I did yesterday—why are you smiling, thanking these white devils, these thieves, for coming to your land? ‘Oh, thank you for visiting! Aloha for visiting! Thank you for coming to our islands—we hope you have a good time!’ Thank you? Thank you for what? For making you beggars in your own land? For turning you, you kings and queens, into jesters and clowns?”

Again, that hiss, and the audience seemed to recoil as one, leaning away from him. Throughout this part of the speech, he had grown quieter and quieter, but when he spoke again, after letting the silence hang in the air a few unbearable seconds, his voice was strong once more.

“This is your land, brothers and sisters. It is up to you to reclaim it. You can do it. You must do it. If you don’t do it for yourself, no one will. Who should respect you if you don’t ask for respect?

“Before I came here, before I came to visit your land—your land—I did some research. I went to the public library, and I started reading. And although there were a lot of lies in the books, as there are in almost all books, my brothers and sisters, it doesn’t matter, because you learn how to read between the lies; you learn how to read the truth that lurks behind those falsehoods. And it was there, in my reading, that I found this song. I know many of you will know this song, but I’m going to recite to you without music, in English, so you can really hear the words:

“Famous are the children of Hawai‘i

Ever loyal to the land

When the evil-hearted messenger comes

With his greedy document of extortion—”

He had only said the first line when the singing began, and although he’d said he wanted us to listen to the lyrics, he clapped his hands together when the melody started, and then again when the first person, his friend Brother Louis, stood to dance. This was a song we all knew, written shortly after the queen was overthrown. I had always considered it an old song, even though, as Bethesda had said, it wasn’t so old at all—there were people alive today who would have heard it played by the Royal Hawaiian Band shortly after it had been written; there were people in the room whose grandparents would have remembered seeing the queen in her black bombazine, waving to them from the palace steps.

Now he stood and watched us, his smile wide again, as if he had willed all of this to happen, as if he had brought us back to life after a long hibernation and was witnessing us remember who we were. I hadn’t liked the pride on his face, as if we were his clever children and he our tireless teacher. Each stanza was sung once in Hawaiian and then again in English, and I hadn’t liked how he recited along with the translation, referring to the sheet of paper he’d taken from his pants pocket.

But mostly, I hadn’t liked the look I’d seen on Edward’s face when I had glanced his way: rapt as I’d never before seen him, his fist raised in the air like Bethesda’s, practically bellowing the song’s most famous lyrics, as if there were before him an audience of thousands, and all of them had gathered to hear him say something they had never heard before. ʻAʻole aʻe kau i ka pūlima Do not fix a signature Maluna o ka pepa o ka ʻenemi To the paper of the enemy Hoʻohui ʻāina kūʻai hewa With its sin of annexation I ka pono sivila aʻo ke kanaka And sale of the civil rights of the people ʻAʻole mākou aʻe minamina We do not value I ka puʻu kālā a ke aupuni The government’s hills of money Ua lawa mākou i ka pōhaku We are satisfied with the stones I ka ʻai kamahaʻo o ka ʻāina The wondrous food of the land.

If you were to ask my mother what happened next—not that I can, and not that anyone else would—she would say it was sudden, a complete surprise. But that isn’t true. Though I can also understand why she might feel that way. There were years of apparent inactivity followed by—without warning, she would probably say—a rupture. One night, you and I were there in the house on O‘ahu Avenue, lying in our beds; the next night, we were not. Later, I know, she would discuss our departure as a disappearance, something abrupt and unexpected. Sometimes, she would characterize it as a loss, as if the two of us were buttons or safety pins. But I knew it was more of a vanishing, a bar of soap smoothing and rounding itself into nothingness, diminishing beneath her fingertips.

There was another person, however, who would have agreed with my mother’s characterization of the events that followed, and ironically, that person was Edward. Later, he would say that he had been “transformed” by that night at Hale Kealoha, that it had been a kind of resurrection. I believe he felt that. On the ride back to town that night, we had been mostly silent, me because I was uncertain what I thought about Bethesda and what he had said, Edward because he had been so thunderstruck by it. As he drove, he would occasionally strike the steering wheel with the heel of his hand, bursting out with a “Damn!” or “Man!” or “Christ!,” and had I not been so unsettled, I might even have thought it was funny. Funny, or alarming—Edward, who showed so little excitement about anything, capable only of expulsions of sound, rather than speech.

Bethesda’s lecture had been recorded, and Edward procured a copy. In the weeks that followed, we would lie on the mattress in the bedroom he was renting from a family in the valley, listening to it again and again on his reel-to-reel, until we both had it memorized—not just the speech itself but the audience’s angry gasp, the creak of the floor as Bethesda shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the crowd’s singing, faint and tinny, atop of which Bethesda’s occasional claps were like explosions.

And yet, even after that night, it took some months for me to realize that something irrevocable had changed for Edward. I had never known him (insofar as I knew him at all) to be a dabbler or a bounder, someone who vaulted from one enthusiasm to another, so it wasn’t as if I witnessed his increasing interest in Hawaiian sovereignty and thought it was just a phase—rather, I’m convinced that he hid something of his transformation from me. I don’t believe it was because he was being duplicitous; I think it was because it was precious to him, precious and personal and also to some degree unfathomable, and he wanted to nurture it in private, where no one could see it and comment on it.

But if I could date the beginning of his different self, it was probably in December 1970, about a year after we listened to Bethesda in that house in Nu‘uanu. Even then, my mother was largely unaware that Edward had reentered my life—he still dropped me off at the bottom of the hill; he had still never come to the house. Before I got out of the car, I’d ask him if he wanted to come in, and every time, he’d say no, and I’d be relieved. But one night, I asked and he said, “Sure, why not?,” as if accepting were a regular occurrence, based on nothing more than his mood.

“Oh,” I replied. I couldn’t pretend he was kidding—as I’ve said, he didn’t kid. And so I got out of the car and he, after a second, followed.

As we walked up the hill, I grew more and more anxious, and when we reached the house, I mumbled something about needing to check on you—on the days I brought you with me, I’d sit in the back seat and hold you in my arms—and sprinted upstairs to look at you, asleep in your bed. We’d recently moved you into a little bed of your own, low to the ground and surrounded by cushions, because you were an active, squirmy sleeper and sometimes rolled off the futon and onto the floor. “Kawika,” I remember whispering to you, “what should I do?” But you didn’t answer, of course—you were asleep, and you were only two.

By the time I returned downstairs, my mother and Edward had already encountered each other and were waiting for me at the dinner table. “Edward tells me that you’ve reacquainted yourselves,” she said, after we’d served ourselves, and I nodded. “Don’t nod, speak,” she said, and I cleared my throat and made myself speak.

“Yes,” I said.

She turned to Edward. “What are you doing this Christmas?” she asked, as if she saw Edward every month, as if she knew enough about how he normally spent Christmas to understand whether this year’s celebrations would be typical or unusual.

“Nothing,” he said, and then, after a pause, “I see you have a tree.”

He spoke neutrally enough, but my mother, already suspicious of him, and therefore alert, straightened. “Yes,” she replied, also neutrally.

“That’s not very Hawaiian, is it?” he asked.

We all looked at the tree in the corner of the sunroom. We had a tree because we always had a tree. Every year, a limited number were imported from the mainland and made available to buy at great expense. There was nothing special about it except its sweet, uriney scent, which for many years I associated with the entire mainland. The mainland was asphalt and snow and highways and the fragrance of pine trees, the country trapped in perpetual winter. We took no particular pains in decorating it—indeed, it was Jane who did most of the ornamentation—but this year it seemed more interesting than before, because now you were here, and old enough to pull on its branches and laugh when you were scolded for doing so.

“It’s not a matter of being Hawaiian or not Hawaiian,” my mother said, “it’s tradition.”

“Yes, but whose tradition?” Edward asked.

“Why, everyone’s,” she said.

“Not mine,” Edward said.

“I should think it is,” my mother said, and then, to me, “Please pass me the rice, Wika.”

“Well, it’s not mine,” Edward repeated.

She didn’t respond. It wasn’t until many years later that I was able to appreciate my mother’s equanimity that night. There was nothing obviously argumentative in Edward’s tone, but she had known anyway, known long before I had—I hadn’t grown up with anyone challenging who I was or what I deserved, but she had. Her right to her name and her birth had always been questioned. She knew when someone was trying to provoke her.

“It’s a Christian tradition,” he finally said into her silence. “Not ours.”

She allowed herself a small smile, looking up from her plate to do so. “So there aren’t such things as Christian Hawaiians, then?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Not if you’re a real Hawaiian.”

Her smile grew wider, tenser. “I see,” she said. “My grandfather would be surprised to hear that—he was a Christian, you know; he served in the king’s court.”

He shrugged again. “I’m not saying there aren’t such things as Christian Hawaiians,” he said, “just that the two are in opposition to each other.” (Later, he would repeat the same thing to me, extending the point past what he knew firsthand: “It’s like how people always talk about the black Christian experience. But don’t the blacks know that they’re celebrating the tools of their oppressor? They were encouraged to be Christian so they would think something better awaited them in the afterlife, after years of being abused. Christianity was a form of mind control, and it still is. All that moralizing, all that talk of sin—they swallowed it, and now they’re kept imprisoned by it.”) When she still said nothing, he kept talking. “It was Christians who took away our dance, our language, our religion, our land—even our queen. Which you should know.” She looked up then, startled, as did I—no one had ever before confronted my mother like that—and he stared back at her. “So it just seems bizarre that any true Hawaiian could believe in an ideology whose practitioners robbed them of everything.”

(Real Hawaiian, true Hawaiian—it was the first time I would hear him use those phrases, and soon I would be sick of the terms, as much because I felt accused by them as because I didn’t understand them. All I knew was that a real Hawaiian was something I was not: A real Hawaiian was angrier, poorer, more strident. He spoke the language, fluently; he danced, powerfully; he sang, soulfully. He was not only not American, he would be angry if you ever called him that. The only thing I had in common with a real Hawaiian was my skin and my blood, though later, even my family would become a deficit, proof of my accommodationist tendencies. Even my name would be deemed not Hawaiian enough, even though it had been the name of a Hawaiian king—it was the Hawaiianization of a Christian name, and therefore not Hawaiian at all.)

We might have sat there, frozen, forever had my mother not looked over to me—no doubt in anger—and gasped. “Wika!” I heard her say, and when I opened my eyes next, I was in my bed in a darkened room.

She was sitting next to me. “Careful,” she said, when I tried to sit, “you had a seizure and hit your head. The doctor said you should stay in bed for another day. Kawika’s fine,” she continued, when I began to speak.

For a while, we were silent. Then she spoke again. “I don’t want you to see Edward anymore, do you understand me, Wika?” she asked.

I could have laughed, I could have scoffed, I could have told her that I was an adult, that she could no longer tell me who I could talk to or not. I could have told her that I found Edward alarming as well, but exciting, too, and that I was going to keep seeing him.

But I did none of those things. I simply nodded, and closed my eyes, and before I fell asleep again, I heard her say, “Good boy,” and then felt her lay her palm on my forehead, and as I lost consciousness, I had the feeling that I was a child again, and that I was being given the chance to live my life all over, and this time, I would do everything correctly.

I kept my promise. I did not see Edward. He called, but I didn’t come to the phone; he stopped by the house, but I made Jane say I wasn’t there. I stayed inside and I watched you grow. When I went out, I was anxious: Honolulu was (and is) a small town on a small island, and I was always afraid I would encounter him, but I somehow never did.

Nothing changed for me in those three years I was in hiding. But you changed: You learned to speak, first in sentences and then paragraphs; you learned to run, and to read, and to swim. Matthew taught you to climb up to the lowest branch of the mango tree; Jane taught you how to tell a juicy mango from a fibrous one. You learned a few words in Hawaiian, which my mother taught you, and a few in Tagalog, which Jane taught you, but only in secret: Your grandmother didn’t like the sound of the language, and you knew not to speak it in front of her. You learned which foods you liked—like me, you preferred salt over sugar—and you made friends, effortlessly, in a way I had never been capable of doing. You learned to call for help when I had one of my seizures, and then, when I emerged from it, to come pat the side of my face, and I would grab your hand in mine. These were the years when you loved me the most. You could never love me more than, or even as much as, I loved and love you, but in that period, we were closest in mutual affection.

You changed, and so did the rest of the world. Every night on television there was at least one report about the day’s protests: First there were people protesting against the war in Vietnam, and then there were people protesting for blacks, and then for women, and then for homosexuals. I watched them on our little black-and-white set, those swaying, shifting masses of people in San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., and New York, and Oakland, and Chicago—I always wondered if Bethesda, who had left the island directly after his speech, was in one of those crowds. The protestors were almost always young, and although I too was young, not yet thirty in 1973, I felt much older—I didn’t recognize myself in any of them; I felt no affinity for them or their struggles or their passions. It wasn’t just that I didn’t look like them; it was that I couldn’t understand their fervor. They had been born with access to and an understanding of extremes, but I had not. I wanted time to slip past me, one year indistinguishable from the next, you the only calendar I had. But they wanted to stop time—stop it, and then speed it up, making it go faster and faster until the entire world burst into flames and would have to start over.

There were changes here, too. Sometimes there would be stories on TV about the Keiki kū Ali‘i. This was a group of native Hawaiians who, depending on which member you asked and on which day, were demanding either Hawai‘i’s secession from the United States, or the restoration of the monarchy, or nation-within-a-nation status for native Hawaiians, or the creation of a Hawaiian state. They wanted Hawaiian language classes to be mandatory in schools, and they wanted a king or queen, and they wanted all haoles to get out. They didn’t even want to call themselves Hawaiian anymore: Now they were kanaka maoli.

Watching these reports always felt like an illicit activity, and fear that one of them might air while I was in the room with my mother made me stop watching the early-evening news altogether. I only did so when I knew she’d be out of the house, and even then, I kept the volume low, so if she came back early I’d be able to hear her and turn off the television. I’d sit close to the set, ready to switch it off in a flash, my palms tacky with sweat.

I felt oddly protective—not of my mother but of the protestors, those wild-haired young men and women, my peers, chanting and raising their fists in an imitation of the Black Power members. I already knew what my mother thought of them—“What fools,” she’d murmured, almost sympathetically, after the end of the first segment that had aired and which we had watched together, in mesmerized silence, a year ago, “they don’t even know what they want. And how do they think they’ll get it? You can’t ask for the restoration of the monarchy and a new state at the same time”—and I for some reason didn’t want to hear her insult them further. I knew this was irrational, in part because I didn’t disagree with her: They did look ridiculous, in their T-shirts and big hair, breaking into ragged chants and song when the camera turned to them; their spokespeople could barely speak proper English, yet they stumbled in Hawaiian, too. I was embarrassed for them. They were so loud.

And yet I also envied them. Except for you, I had never felt such ardor for anything. I looked at those men and women and I knew what they wanted—their want was greater than logic or organization. I had always been told that I should try to live my life with happiness, but could happiness give you the zeal, the energy, that anger clearly could? Theirs was the kind of avidity that seemed to override any other desire—if you had it, you might never want again. At night, I’d experiment with pretending I was one of them: Could I ever be that incensed? Could I ever desire something so much? Could I ever feel that wronged?

I could not. But I began trying. As I have said, I had never before much considered what it meant to be Hawaiian. It was like considering being male, or human—they were things I was, and the fact that I was them seemed always to be enough to me. I began wondering if there was in fact another way to be, if I had been wrong this entire time, if I was somehow incapable of seeing what these other people seemed to see so clearly.

I went to the library, where I read books I had already read about the overthrow; I went to the museum, where my great-grandfather’s feather cape was displayed in a glass case, donated—the cape and the case—by my father. I tried to feel something—but all I could feel was a faint sense of amused disbelief that it was not the haoles who were doing things in my name but these activists themselves. Keiki kū Ali‘i: the children of royalty. But I really was a child of royalty. When they talked of a king who would be someday restored, they meant me, by rights, and yet they didn’t know who I was; they spoke of the king returning, yet they never thought to ask the king himself if he would want to return. But I also knew that what I was would always be more significant than who I was—indeed, what I was was the only thing that made who I was significant at all. Why would they ever think to ask me?

They wouldn’t, but Edward would. I’ll admit that, while I was too cowardly to speak to him, I was always looking for him. I squinted at the television, scanning the gang of protestors trying to infiltrate the governor’s office, the mayor’s office, the university president’s office. But although I saw Louis—Brother Louis—once or twice, I never saw Edward. Yet I always believed that he was there anyway, just out of camera range, leaning against a wall and surveying the crowd. In my imaginings, he even became something of a leader, elusive and evasive, bestowing his rare smile like a blessing on his followers when they did something to please him. At night, I dreamed of him standing in a shadow-filled house much like Hale Kealoha, giving a speech, and when I woke, I was astonished and full of admiration for him, his eloquence and elegance, until I realized that the words I had been so captivated by were not his but Bethesda’s, now recited back to myself so many times that they had become a hymn of my subconscious, like the state anthem or the song that Jane had sung to me as a boy, and which I now sang to you: Yellow bird, up high in banana tree / Yellow bird, you sit all alone like me…

So, when I finally did encounter him, I was only surprised it had taken as long as it had. It was a Wednesday, which I know because every Wednesday, after dropping you off at school, I took a long walk, all the way to Waikīkī, where I sat beneath one of the trees in Kapi‘olani Park we had sat beneath together when you were a baby, and ate a package of crackers. Each package had eight crackers, but I’d only eat seven; the last I’d crumble into ash and feed to the mynah birds, and then I’d get up again and keep walking.

“Wika,” I heard someone say, and when I looked up, there he was, walking toward me.

“Well, well,” he said, smiling. “Long time, no see, brother.”

The smiling was new. So was the “brother.” His hair was even longer now, almost blond in parts from the sun, and twisted into a bun, though strands of it floated around his head. He was tanner, which made his eyes look lighter and brighter, but the skin around them had wrinkled, and he had lost weight. He wore a faded aloha shirt, bleached a pale blue, and cutoff jeans—he looked both younger and older than I’d remembered him.

What remained the same was his lack of surprise at encountering me. “You hungry?” he asked, and when I said I was, he said we should walk to Chinatown and get some noodles. “Don’t have the car anymore,” he said, and when I made a sound of concern, or sympathy, he shrugged. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ll get it back. I just don’t have it now.” His left incisor was stained the color of tea.

The biggest change was his new volubility. (In those first six months of our most recent reacquaintance, I was always measuring what was different in him and what was familiar, which invariably led to the same unnerving realization: I didn’t know who he was. I knew a few facts, I had a few impressions, but the rest I had conjured, making him into whoever I needed him to be.) Over lunch, and then the following months, he talked more and more, until there were days when we would drive for hours (the car, which had vanished mysteriously, had reappeared just as mysteriously) and he would talk and talk and talk, and at times I would stop listening altogether, just lean my head back against the seat and let his words wash over me, as if it were a boring news report on the radio.

What did he talk about? Well, first, there was how he talked; he had adapted a kind of pidgin inflection, except because he hadn’t grown up speaking pidgin—he was a scholarship boy, after all; he wouldn’t have gotten into the school if his mother hadn’t been vigilant about his speaking standard English—it sounded artificial and weirdly formal. Even I could appreciate how rich and robustly casual pidgin sounded when spoken by natives: It wasn’t a language for exchanging ideas but one for trading jokes and insults and gossip. But Edward made it, or tried to make it, a language of instruction.

He didn’t need to ask if I understood the way things were—he knew I didn’t. I didn’t understand why our fate as Hawaiians was linked to black people’s fate on the mainland (“There are no black people in Hawai‘i,” I reminded him, echoing my mother’s statement as we watched a news report about some protest among blacks on the mainland one day. “There are no Negroes in Hawai‘i,” she had announced, the ghost of what she didn’t bother to say next—Thank goodness—hovering in the air between us). I didn’t understand how we’d been used as pawns, or his argument that the Orientals were taking advantage of us—many of the Orientals I knew and saw were clearly poor or, at the very least, far from rich, and yet, to Edward, they were as much to blame as the haole missionaries for the disappearance of our land. “You see them now, buying houses, opening businesses,” he said. “If they’re poor, they won’t stay poor forever.” Yet it seemed impossible to separate the Orientals and the haoles from who we were—every Hawaiian I knew was also part Oriental, or part haole, or both, or in some cases, like Edward’s (though I did not say this), mostly haole.

One of the most difficult concepts for me to understand was this idea that I, and my mother, belonged to an us at all. Those thick brown men, slow-moving and massive, whom I saw drunk and dozing in the park: They may have been Hawaiian, but I felt no kinship toward them. “They’re kings too, brother,” Edward reprimanded me, and although I didn’t say it, I thought of what my mother would tell me when I was young: “Only a few people are kings, Wika.” Perhaps I was like my mother in the end, though I meant no harm; she would have seen those people as unlike her because she thought them beneath her, while I saw them as unlike me because I was scared of them. I wouldn’t deny that we were of the same race, but we were different sorts of people, and that was what divided us.

I had assumed all along that Edward was a member of Keiki kū Ali‘i—in my dreams, as I have said, he was not only a member but their leader. But that turned out not to be true. He had been a member, he told me, but he had soon afterward left. “Bunch of ignoramuses,” he scoffed. “Didn’t know how to organize themselves.” He had tried to teach them what he knew about organizing from his time on the mainland; he had pushed them toward being more expansive, more radical in their approach. But they had wanted only small things, he said: more land set aside for poor Hawaiians, more social welfare programs. “That’s the problem with this place—it’s too provincial,” he often said. For, as appalled as he would be if this were pointed out to him, he too could be a snob; he too thought himself better.

I had played an unwitting role in his disenchantment with the group, he said. It was he who had pushed for the restoration of the monarchy, he who had introduced the language of secession and overthrow. “I told them, I already know the king,” he said, and although it was less a compliment than a statement of fact—I would be king, after all; would have been king—it was as if he’d praised me anyway, and I felt my cheeks grow warm. Yet talk of secession and overthrow had proven, he said, too intimidating for most of the members, who feared it would jeopardize their chances to earn other concessions from the state; they quarreled, and Edward lost. “A shame,” he told me now, letting his fingers flutter out the car window. “They’re so small-minded.” We were on our way toward Waimānalo, on the eastern coast, and as he zagged down the road, I stared out at the ocean, a wrinkled sheet of blue.

We had meant to stop at a plate-lunch place Edward liked just before Sherwood Forest, but we instead drove on. At some point I had a seizure, and I could feel my head slumping against the seat and hear the sound of Edward’s voice, even though I couldn’t distinguish his words, and the sun throbbed behind my eyelids. When I woke, we were parked beneath a large acacia tree. The car smelled like fried meat, and I looked over to see Edward staring back at me and eating a hamburger. “Wake up, lolo,” he said, but good-naturedly, “I got you a burger,” but I shook my head, which made me dizzier—I was too nauseated to eat after one of my attacks. He shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, and ate the other burger, and by the time he was done, I was feeling a little better.

He had something to show me, he said, and we got out of the car and began walking. We were somewhere in the very northern part of the island—I could tell by how empty it was. We were standing in a large plain of sun-dried, unshorn grass, and around us was nothing: no houses, no buildings, no cars. Behind us were the mountains, and in front of us was the ocean.

“Let’s go to the water,” Edward said, and I followed him. On our way, we walked across a bumpy, silty dirt path; there was no paved road in sight. As we went, the tall grasses grew sparser and thinner and eventually gave way to sand, and then we were on a beach, where waves lapped against the shore and withdrew, again and again.

I cannot describe to you what made it seem so foreign. Perhaps it was the lack of people, though back then there were still places on the island where you could go and be alone. Yet there was something that felt especially isolated about this area, isolated and abandoned. Though I was unable—and am still now not able—to say why: Here was sand, grass, mountain, the same three elements you would find all over the island. The trees, palms and monkeypods and halas and acacias, were the same as we had in the valley; the stalks of heliconia were the same. And yet it was different in some unexplainable way. Later, I would try to tell myself that I had known from the moment I saw this land that I would return to it, but that was fiction. What is more likely is the opposite: That, given what happened there, I’ve begun to remember it differently, as a place that felt meaningful, when at the time it hadn’t struck me as special at all, just a piece of unoccupied land.

“What do you think of it?” Edward asked, finally, and I looked up at the sky.

“It’s pretty,” I said.

He nodded, slowly, as if I’d said something profound. “It’s yours,” he said.

This was the kind of thing he’d taken to saying, gesturing out the window at beaches, where kids ran up and down the sand, lofting kites in the air, or at parking lots, or on our walks through Chinatown: This land is yours, he’d say, and sometimes he meant it was mine because of who my ancestors were, and sometimes he meant it was mine because it was also his, and the land belonged to us because we were Hawaiians.

But when I turned, I found he was staring at me. “It’s yours,” he repeated. “Yours and Kawika’s. Here,” he continued, before I could speak, and pulled from his pocket a piece of paper, which he quickly unfolded and presented to me. “I went down to the property records office in the state building,” he said, excited. “I looked up your family’s records. You own this land, Wika—it was your father’s, and now it’s yours.”

I looked at the paper. “Lot 45090, Hau‘ula, 30.3 acres,” I read, but I was suddenly unable to read anything else, and I handed it back to him.

I was at once very tired and thirsty; the sun above us was too hot. “I need to lie down again,” I said to him, and felt the ground beneath me crater and then sink, and my head fall, as if in slow motion, into Edward’s palms. For a while, there was silence. “You big lolo,” I heard him say at last, but as if from far away, and his voice was fond. “You dummy,” he said, “you dummy, you dummy, you dummy,” repeating the word like a caress, while above me the sun stopped in its path, turning everything around me a bright, unyielding white.

Kawika: I can now walk all the way around my room without getting tired. I keep the wall on my right and use my hand to guide me: The walls are stucco and cool and bumpy, and I can sometimes convince myself I’m feeling something living, like the skin of a reptile. Tomorrow night I’ll attempt walking down the hallway. Last night I tried the handle for the first time, assuming it was locked, but it depressed easily in my hand, so easily I was almost disappointed. But then I remembered that I had something new to try, and that with each night I was able to prove myself able to walk farther and farther, I was getting closer to you.

Your grandmother came to visit me today. She talked about the price of pork, and her new neighbors, of whom she clearly disapproves—he’s Japanese, raised in Kaka‘ako; she’s haole, from Vermont; they’re both research scientists who got rich manufacturing some sort of antiviral—and a blight that’s infected the ‘ōhai ali‘i tree; I had hoped she might have news of you, but she didn’t. It’s been so long since she’s mentioned you, and sometimes I worry that something’s happened. But this is only during daylight—somehow, at night, I know you’re safe. You may be far from me, maybe too far, but I know for certain that you’re alive, alive and healthy. Recently, I’ve been having a dream of you with a woman; you two are walking down Fifty-seventh Street, just as I once did, your arms linked. You turn to her and she smiles. I can’t see her face, only that she’s dark-haired, like your mother was, but I know she’s beautiful, and that you’re happy. Maybe this is what you’re doing right now? I like to think it is.

But this is not what you want to hear. You want to hear about what happened next.

The day after my trip to Hau‘ula, I went to visit Uncle William, who was surprised to see me—it had now been more than five years since I had stopped by the office—and asked him if he could explain to me, in detail, the family’s real-estate holdings. It now seems absurd, even shameful, that I had never asked him before, but there was no reason for me to be concerned. There was always money when I needed it; I never had to consider its origins.

Poor Uncle William was delighted that I was expressing an interest in the trust, and he began detailing what land we had and where. It was far more than I had expected, though all of it was modest. There were seven acres outside Dallas, two parking garages in North Carolina, ten acres of farmland outside Ojai. “Your grandfather bought cheap land on the mainland all his life,” said William, as proud as if he had bought it himself.

Finally, I had to interrupt him. “But what about Hawai‘i?” I asked, and then, when he drew out a map of Maui, I stopped him again: “O‘ahu, specifically.”

Once again, I was surprised. Along with our house in Manoa, there were two run-down apartment buildings in Waikīkī, and three consecutive storefronts in Chinatown, and a small house in Kailua, and even the church in Lā‘ie. I waited as Uncle William worked his way around the state counterclockwise from southern Honolulu, pitying him as I never had before for the caress in his voice, for the pride he took in this land that wasn’t even his.

But if I felt pity for William, I felt disgust for myself. What had I done to earn any of this? Nothing. Money, my money, did grow on trees: on trees, and in fields, and between blocks of concrete. It was harvested and cleaned and counted and stored, and whenever I wanted it, even before I knew I wanted it, there it was, stacks of it, more than I could ever know to desire.

I sat in silence as Uncle William talked, until, finally, I heard him say, “And then there’s the property in Hau‘ula,” at which I sat up and leaned toward him, looking at the map of the island he was lovingly gliding his fingers across. “Just over thirty acres, but a useless piece of land,” he said. “Too arid and too small for significant farming; too remote to be a good homestead. The beach is no good, either—too rough and too much coral. The road’s just dirt, and the state has no plans to extend asphalt out that far. No neighbors, no restaurants, no grocery stores, no schools.”

On and on he went, detailing the property’s flaws, until I finally asked, “Then why do we have it at all?”

“Ah,” he smiled. “It was a whim of your grandfather’s, and your father was too sentimental to sell it. Yes,” he said, mistaking my look for surprise, “he could be sentimental, your father.” He smiled again and shook his head. “Lipo-wao-nahele,” he added.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That’s what your grandfather called this land,” he said. “The Dark Forest, technically, but he translated it as the Forest of Paradise.” He looked at me. “You’d think it’d be Nahelekūlani, wouldn’t you?” he asked, and I shrugged. Uncle William’s Hawaiian was much better than my own; my grandfather had paid for him to study it when he was a college student and had just begun working for the family practice. “Technically, you’d be right, but your grandfather Kawika said it was lazy Hawaiian, tacked on, that it’d be akin to calling it, oh, Kawikakūlani.” Kawikakūlani: David of Heaven. He began to sing:

“He hoʻoheno kē ʻike aku

Ke kai moana nui lā

Nui ke aloha e hi‘ipoi nei

Me ke ‘ala o ka līpoa

“You know that song, of course.” (I did; it was popular.) “ ‘Ka Uluwehi O Ke Kai’: ‘The Bounty of the Sea.’ Lipoa: It sounds the same, doesn’t it? But it isn’t—here, the word is līpoa, and it refers to the seaweed. But your grandfather used lipoa, as in ua lipoa wale i ka ua ka nahele, ‘the forest dark with rain’—very beautiful, don’t you think? So, ‘Lipo wao nahele’: the Dark Forest. But your grandfather preserved the mana of the name: ‘the Forest of Heaven.’ ”

He sat back in his seat and smiled, such a gentle smile, filled with the joy of understanding a language I didn’t speak and couldn’t properly comprehend. Suddenly I hated him—he possessed something I could not, and it wasn’t money but those words, rolling like smooth, shiny pebbles in his mouth, white and clean as the moon.

“Is there a forest out there?” I asked, finally, though I had been about to pose it as a statement: There’s no forest there.

“Not anymore,” he said. “But there once was, or so your grandfather said. He planned to plant it again someday, and it would be his paradise.

“Your father didn’t share his father’s appreciation for this land—he thought it wasn’t worth the bother. But he didn’t sell it, either. He always said it was because no one would buy it, it being so far out and so far from prime. Though I long suspected it was another form of sentimentalism. You know that the two weren’t terribly close, or at least that was what they’d both say, and yet I think that wasn’t really true. They were just too much alike, and both of them grew accustomed to this narrative, which seemed easier and more dignified than actually trying to close the distance between them. But I wasn’t fooled. Why, I remember…”

And then he was off, telling stories I had already been told: about how my father had wrecked my grandfather’s car and never apologized; about how my father had been a poor high-school student and my grandfather had had to make an additional donation to the school to ensure his graduation; about how my grandfather had wanted my father to be more of a scholar, whereas my father wanted to be an athlete. They were typical father-and-son problems, yet they felt as remote and uninteresting as something I might read in a book.

And behind this all were the words Lipo wao nahele, a phrase meant to be chanted, to be carried beneath the tongue, and although I was looking at Uncle William, smiling and nodding as he talked and talked, I was thinking of that land that was mine after all, where I had lain beneath an acacia tree and watched as, just a few yards away, Edward shucked off his shorts and shirt and ran, whooping, into the glittering water, and dived beneath a wave so large that, for a few seconds, it was as if he had been a victim of some kind of alchemy, and his bones had been turned to foam.

—

Finally, I had information to tell Edward: He may have discovered that the land belonged to me, but I was able to tell him what it had meant to my grandfather, the last person in our family to be addressed as Prince Kawika. Today I am embarrassed about how gratified I was by his excitement, to finally have something to give him and to have it be so enthusiastically received, with all the selfishness of the gift-giver.

It became a shorthand between us. Not quite a joke. But not something I thought I took seriously. I had little imagination, and he had less, but we began to speak of it as someplace real, as if, every time we mentioned its name, a new tree would begin to sprout, as if we were speaking the forest into being. Sometimes we would take you with us on our weekend road trips, and in the afternoons, after you and Edward swam, you would come lie by my side and I would tell you stories I remembered from when I was little, replacing every magic forest, every haunted glen, with Lipo-wao-nahele. The witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel,” which had so confounded me when I was a child, with its gingerbread walls and gumdrop-trimmed eaves (What was gingerbread? What were gumdrops? What were eaves?), became a palm hut in Lipo-wao-nahele, its roof made of scallops of dried mango, its doorway a curtain of strings of crack seed, their salt-and-sugar perfume filling the witch’s kitchen. Sometimes I would tell you about it as if it were a place that actually existed—or, rather, I would let you believe it was anything you wanted it to be: “Are there bunnies there?” you’d ask (you were fixated on bunnies, in those years). “Yes,” I’d say. “Is there ice cream there?” you’d ask. “Yes,” I’d say. Was there a model train set in Lipo-wao-nahele? Was there a jungle gym you could have all to yourself? Was there a tire swing? Yes, yes, yes. Anything you wanted could be found in Lipo-wao-nahele, which was equally defined by what it lacked: bedtime, bath time, homework, onions. There was no room for things you hated at Lipo-wao-nahele. It was heaven as much for what it excluded.

What was I doing? These were the years when you were five, six, seven, eight, still young enough to believe that, because I told you wonderful things, I was wonderful as well. Back then, it seemed not just harmless but helpful. It made me feel, for the first time in my life, like I might be a king after all. Here was this land that my grandfather thought was paradise, and so why should I not agree? Who was I to say that he might not be right?

You may be wondering what your grandmother thought of all this. When she discovered I was with Edward again—and of course she was going to discover it, that was an inevitability—she didn’t speak to me for a week. Though such was the power of Lipo-wao-nahele that, as I remember it, I didn’t even care. I had a different, bigger secret, and that secret was a place where I would feel invincible, where I for once would feel like I belonged, where I would never feel shame or apology for who I was. I had never rebelled as a child, not ever, and yet I had still disappointed her, because I had never been able to be the son she had wanted. But I hadn’t done that on purpose, and if I’m to be honest, there was a thrill in defying her, in being the agent of her dismay, of inviting Edward back to our house, my house, to have him at our table, my mother a hostage.

We began driving out there every weekend, Edward and I, and although the first time we went I was deflated, thinking only of Uncle William’s dismissals (a useless piece of land), Edward was so excited that I let myself become excited as well. “Here’s where my offices will be,” he said, pacing out a square around the acacia. “We’ll keep the tree and build the courtyard around it. And there is where we’ll build the school, where we’ll teach the kids only in Hawaiian. And there’s where your palace will be, near that monkeypod tree. See? We’ll situate it facing the water, so when you wake you’ll be able to see the sun rise over the ocean.” The following weekend, we spent the night there, camped out on the beach, and after the sun had gone down, Edward scooped up a dozen of the tiny firefly squid that had washed onto shore, and skewered them on ‘ōhi‘a branches and roasted them for us. The next morning, I woke early, before Edward, and looked toward the mountains. In the dawn, the land, which normally looked so scorched, appeared lush and soft and vulnerable.

Now, however, I can see that Lipo-wao-nahele meant different things to us—different, but the same as well. It was, for both of us, a fantasy of usefulness, our own usefulness. Edward had inherited a small amount of money from his mother, enough to rent a single-room cottage on a Lower Valley property owned by a Korean family about a five-minute walk from me; he had an occasional job painting rooms for a construction crew. I didn’t even have that—after you left for school for the day, I had nothing to do but wait for you to come home. Sometimes I helped my mother with simple things, like stuffing envelopes with solicitations for the Daughters’ annual fund-raiser, but mostly I just waited. I read magazines or books, I took long walks, I slept. I hoped for my attacks in those days, for they would prove that my inactivity wasn’t laziness or driftiness but a necessity. “Are you taking it easy?” my doctor—my doctor since childhood—would ask me at my appointments, and I would always say I was. “Good,” he would say, solemnly, “you mustn’t overtax yourself, Wika,” and I would promise him I wasn’t.

We were inessential in every way. I to you and my mother; the both of us to Hawai‘i. That was the irony—we needed the idea of Hawai‘i more than it needed us. No one was clamoring for us to take over; no one wanted our help. We were playacting, and because our pretending affected no one—until, of course, it did—we could be as indulgent as we wanted. The things we convinced ourselves! That I would be king, that he would be my first adviser, that in Lipo-wao-nahele we would rebuild the paradise my grandfather had supposedly dreamed of, though he certainly couldn’t have dreamed that someone like me would be his representative. In reality, we did nothing—we didn’t even try to plant the forest he wanted.

The difference between us, however, is that Edward believed. He was rich in belief; it was all he had. Lipo-wao-nahele was a retreat and a pastime for him just as it was for me, but it was something more, too. Looking back, I can understand how Edward needed to be Hawaiian, or at least this idea of Hawaiian he had created. He needed to feel that he was a part of some larger, greater tradition. His mother was dead, and he had never known his father; he had few friends and no family. To be Hawaiian was not a political imperative for him but, rather, a personal one. Yet here, too, he was unconvincing to others, kicked out of Keiki kū Ali‘i, unwelcome (or so he said) in the Hawaiian-language classes he tried to take, expelled from the hālau because a painting job had meant he would miss too many practices. This was his birthright, and even here he was unwanted.

But at Lipo-wao-nahele, there was no one to tell him no, and no one to tell him that his way of being Hawaiian was incorrect. There was only me, and sometimes you, and we believed whatever he said. I was the king, but he was the leader, and over the years, those thirty acres were being reclassified in his mind from metaphor to something else. It would be his kingdom after all, and we his subjects, and no one would be able to deny him ever again.

—

The first step was changing our names.

This was 1978, a year before we left. He had already changed his, the previous year. First he had become Ekewaka, the Hawaiianization of Edward, and a strange and awkward name to say aloud. I had been relieved when he told me he was changing it again, to Paiea, his middle name. “A real Hawaiian name,” he said, proudly, as if he had thought of it himself, instead of merely remembering that it had been there all along. Paiea: the crab, and Kamehameha the Great’s given name. And now Edward’s, as well.

I should have anticipated his wanting to change our names too, but somehow, like so much else, it never occurred to me that he might ask for something so large. “A Hawaiianization of a Christian name is still a Christian name, just in brownface,” he said. It was clear that he had learned this term, “brownface,” recently, because uncertainty softened his voice a bit as he said it.

“But it was the king’s name,” I said, in a rare show of resistance, though I wasn’t arguing so much as I was bewildered. Was the king not Hawaiian enough, either?

“That’s true,” he admitted, and looked momentarily confused. Then his face cleared. “But we’re going to begin again out in Lipo-wao-nahele. Your blood gives you a right to the throne, but we’re going to begin a new dynasty for it.”

He had begun keeping a list of what he considered “true” Hawaiian names, those that predated Western contact. But he bemoaned how few there were, how they had gone almost extinct from lack of interest. It had stupidly never occurred to me that a name, as much as a plant or a creature, could vanish from lack of popularity, nor did I quite see the point of Edward’s quest: You couldn’t force a name back into existence. A name was not a plant or an animal—it flourished from desire, not need, and therefore was subject to all the fickle attentions of humans. Had the old names disappeared because, as he claimed, they had been banned by the missionaries, or had they disappeared simply because they couldn’t withstand the novelty of the Western ones? Edward would have said that both arguments began in the same place: They had been shoved aside by the interlopers. But shouldn’t a name that was meaningful be meaningful enough to hold its place, even in the face of insurrection?

I didn’t ask this. And I didn’t even protest too much when he gave first me and then you our new names. But you know—or I hope you know—that I didn’t let our name be taken from us. I hope you noticed that I only called you by the name he gave you when he was present, that at all other times, you were still my Kawika, and always will be. And I resisted in another small way as well—although I learned, eventually, to call him Paiea, in my head I continued to think of him, to refer to him, as Edward.

I am struck, now, telling you all of this, by how make-believe it was. We knew almost nothing of anything: nothing of history, nothing of work, nothing of Hawai‘i, nothing of responsibility. And the things we did know we tried to unknow: My great-grandfather’s sister, the one who had succeeded him as monarch after he had died prematurely, the one who was overthrown, the one with whom the kingdom died—had she not been a Christian herself? Had she not given power and wealth to some of the very men, Christian, white, missionary men, who had later taken her throne? Had she not watched as her people were taught English and encouraged to go to church? Had she not worn silk gowns and diamonds in her hair and at her throat like an English queen, had her black hair oiled and tamed? But these were facts that complicated our imaginings, and so we chose to ignore them. We were grown men, long past the age at which we should have been pretending, and yet we were pretending as if our lives depended upon it. What did we—what did I—think would happen? What did I think our pretending would amount to? The most pathetic answer is that I didn’t. I pretended because, when I was pretending, I had given myself something to do.

It’s not that we wanted something to happen—we wanted the opposite. The world was becoming less explicable to me the older you got. At night, I watched the news, the reports of strikes and protests, marches and the occasional celebration. I watched the war end, and fireworks exploding over the Statue of Liberty, the water beneath shimmering as if flooded with oil. I watched a new president be sworn in and images of a man in San Francisco who was assassinated. How was I going to explain the world to you when I couldn’t understand it myself? How could I let you go into it when all around us were terrors and horrors, nightmares from which I’d never be able to wake you?

But inside Lipo-wao-nahele, nothing ever changed. It was not so much a fantasy as a suspension—if I was there, then time would stop. If you never got older, there would never come the day when your knowledge surpassed mine, when you learned to look at me with scorn. If you never got older, I would never disappoint you. Sometimes I prayed time would start traveling backward—not, as Edward would have it, two centuries back, so I could see the islands as they once were, but eight years back, when you were still my baby and learning to walk, and everything I did was marvelous to you, when all I had to do was say your name and your face would open in a smile. “Never leave me,” I’d whisper to you then, even as I knew that my job was to raise you to leave me, that your purpose as my child was to leave me, a purpose I myself had failed to fulfill. I was selfish. I wanted you to always love me. I didn’t do what was best for you—I did what I thought was best for me.

But as it happened, I was wrong about that, too.

Kawika, something very important happened to me last night: I went outdoors.

For months, I was only able to walk around my room before losing my breath, not to mention my courage. And then, last night, for no particular reason, I pressed the handle of my room door and stepped into the hallway. One second, I was in my room, and the next, I was outside of it, and nothing had changed in that moment except that I had tried. It’s like that, sometimes, you know; you wait and wait and wait—because you’re frightened, because you’ve always waited—and then, one day, the wait is over. In that moment, you forget what it was to wait. This state that you’d lived in for sometimes years is gone, and so is your memory of it. All you have at the end is loss.

At the doorway, I turned right, and down the hall I went, running my right hand against the side of the wall to guide my way. Initially, I was so nervous I thought I might vomit, and every small noise I heard made my heart seize.

But then—I can’t say how far I’d walked, in length or minutes—something very strange happened. I felt a kind of elation overcome me, an ecstasy, and suddenly, as suddenly as I’d pressed on the door handle, I dropped my hand from the wall and stepped into the center of the hallway and began to walk with a swiftness and certainty I couldn’t remember ever experiencing. Faster and surer I walked, and it was as if with each step I was creating new stone beneath my feet, as if the building was growing up around me, and the hallway, if I never turned off it, would stretch on infinitely.

At some point, I turned right, reaching in front of me with my hand, and there, once again as if I’d willed it, was a handle. For some reason, I don’t know why, I understood that this door led to the garden. I pressed down on the handle, and even before I felt the door yield, I smelled pīkake, which I knew—because Mama had told me—had been planted all along the walls.

I began to walk through the garden. I had never thought I had paid much attention to its dimensions and paths while I was being pushed through it, but after almost nine years—I stopped when I realized this, my elation abruptly vanishing—I must have memorized its contours after all. So confident was I that for a disorienting moment I wondered if I could see again, if vision itself had changed and this was what it now felt like. Because although all I could discern was the same dark-gray screen I saw every day, it seemed not to matter. Up and down the paths I marched, and I never had to stop to grope before me, I never had to rest—though, if I had, I knew, intuitively, where the benches were.

At the far end of the garden there was a door, and I knew that if I turned its handle I would be outside—not just outside in the still, warm air but outside of this place, out in the world. For a while, I stood with my palm against the door, thinking of what I’d do, of how I’d leave.

Although then I realized: Where would I go? I could not return to my mother’s house. And I could not return to Lipo-wao-nahele. The first because I knew exactly what I’d find there, and the second because it had disappeared. Not physically, but the idea of it—it had vanished with Edward.

But, Kawika, you would have been proud of me. Once, I would have been dispirited by this. I would have lost my bearings, I would have lain on the ground and moaned for help, I would have put my arms over my head and begged, aloud, for the mountains to stack themselves atop me, for everything to stop moving so much and so fast. You saw me do this, many times. The first time it happened was the winter after we left for Lipo-wao-nahele, and I had been overcome by what I had done—how I had taken you from your home, how I had enraged my mother, how nothing had changed after all: How I was still a disappointment, and frightened, and how I hadn’t grown out of those traits but had instead grown into them, so that these qualities had not kept me from becoming someone else but in fact had become who I was. You had been visiting that weekend, and you had been scared, you had held my hand as you knew to do when I was having a seizure, and when it became clear that this was no seizure but, rather, some other kind of state, you had dropped my hand and run across the plain, yelling for Edward, and he had returned with you and shaken me, hard, yelling at me to stop acting like such a dummy, like such a baby. “Don’t call my father a dummy,” you’d said, so brave even then, and Edward had hissed back at you, “I’ll call him a dummy if he acts like a dummy,” and you had spit at him then, not to actually hit him but just to do it, and he had raised his hand. From my position on the ground, it looked almost as if he were trying to blot out the sun. And you, so brave, stood there, your arms crossed in front of you, even though you were only eleven, and you must have been terrified. “I’ll spare you this one time,” Edward had said, “because I respect my prince,” and if I had been able to laugh, I would have at his pomposity, at his pretension. But it would be a long time before I would think that, and in the moment, I was as scared as you were, except the difference was that I was supposed to take care of you, not just lie on the ground and watch.

Anyway—I did not fall to the garden floor; I did not weep and wail. I instead sat with my back against one of the trees (I could feel it was a skinny little banyan) and thought about you. I understood then that my job was to keep practicing. Tonight I had navigated my way through the garden; tomorrow, or perhaps next week, I would try to leave this property. Every night I would go farther. Every night I would get stronger. And one day, someday soon, I would see you again, and say all this to you in person.

You remember the day we left. It was the day after you graduated from fourth grade. You were ten. In June, you would turn eleven.

I had packed a bag for you, which I had stored in the trunk of Edward’s car. Over the previous two months, little things had been disappearing from your room—underwear and T-shirts and shorts and your favorite deck of cards, one of your skateboards, your favorite stuffed animal: the plush shark you were too embarrassed to admit you still occasionally slept with, which you kept hidden beneath your bed. You didn’t notice the clothes, but you did notice the skateboard: “Da, have you seen my skateboard? No, the purple one. No, I looked—it’s not there. I’ll go ask Jane again.”

I had packed food as well, tins of Spam and cans of corn and kidney beans. A saucepan and a kettle. Matches and lighter fluid. Packages of crackers and instant noodles. Glass jugs of water. Every weekend, we took a little more. In April, we’d set up the tarp and hidden the tents beneath a pile of coral rocks we lugged from the sea. “Later, we’ll build a real palace,” Edward said, and as always when he said such things, such improbable things, I remained silent. If he meant them, I was embarrassed for him. If he did not, I was embarrassed for me.

Here my story joins your own, and yet there’s so much I don’t know about how you felt and what you saw. What did you think that afternoon we arrived at Lipo-wao-nahele and saw the tents—one for me and you; one for Edward—arranged under the acacia, the tarp stretched taut between four metal poles we’d scavenged from the abandoned cement plant on the western side of the island, the cardboard boxes of our food and clothes and supplies beneath it? I remembered you smiling, a little uncertainly, looking from me to the tarp to Edward, who was unloading the hibachi grill from his car. “Da?” you had asked me, looking up into my face. But you hadn’t known what to say next. “What is this?” you finally asked, and I pretended I hadn’t heard you, though of course I had—it was only that I didn’t know what to say.

That weekend, you played along. When Edward woke us early Friday morning to recite a chant, you did so, and when he said that, beginning that day, the three of us were going to take Hawaiian lessons together, that this would be a place where only Hawaiian was spoken, you looked at me, and when I nodded, you shrugged, acquiescent. “Okay,” you said.

“ ‘Ae,” he corrected you, sternly, and you shrugged again.

“ ‘Ae,” you repeated.

Most of the time, you were inscrutable, but I watched bemusement scud across your face, and amusement, too. Did Edward really expect you to fish for your food? Were you really to learn to cook it over the fire? Would we really go to bed at eight, so we could wake with the dawn? Yes, it seemed; yes, and yes. You were smart even then, you didn’t challenge him—you knew as well that he didn’t play, that he didn’t have a sense of humor. “Edward,” you once said, and he didn’t look up, he pretended he hadn’t heard you, and I watched as a kind of understanding came over you. “Paiea,” you said, and he turned: “ ‘Ae?”

I think it was because you were never able to trust my abilities as a father that you learned early that people would not behave as they should, and things were not what they appeared. Here we were, your father and his friend, whom you had known since you were a baby, and we were having a fun beachside camping trip. And yet was this really what it seemed? No one had said anything about fun, and, indeed, there was something toilsome about your time at Lipo-wao-nahele, even though here you were getting to do everything you liked to do—fish and swim and climb up the edge of the nearby mountain, foraging for greens. But something was amiss—something was wrong. You couldn’t articulate how, but you sensed it.

“Da,” you whispered to me the second night, as I blew out the candle in the hurricane lamp between us. “What’re we doing here?”

I took so long to answer that you poked me, gently, in my arm. “Da?” you asked. “Did you hear me?”

“We’re camping, Kawika,” I said, and then, when you were silent, “Aren’t you having a good time?”

“I guess,” you said, reluctantly, finally. You weren’t, but you couldn’t explain why you weren’t. You were a child, and the problem isn’t that children don’t possess the full range of emotions that adults do—it is only that they don’t possess the vocabulary to express them. I was an adult, I did have the vocabulary, and yet I too couldn’t explain what was wrong about the situation, I too couldn’t express what I was feeling.

That Monday was the same: the Hawaiian lessons, the long hours of boredom, the fishing, the fire. I saw you staring at the car at odd moments, as if you might be able to call it like a dog, have it come revving to your side.

On Thursday, you were to begin attending a camp where you’d learn to build robots. You were so excited about this camp: You had been speaking of it for months, rereading the brochure, telling me about the kind of robot you were going to build—it’d be called the Spider, and it’d be able to climb up to the tops of shelves and retrieve things that Jane couldn’t reach. Three of your friends would be attending as well.

The day before, you said to me, “What time are we leaving?” And, when I didn’t answer you, “Da. Camp starts at eight tomorrow morning.”

“Talk to Paiea,” I finally said, in a voice I didn’t recognize.

You stared at me, disbelief on your face, and then got up and hurried over to Paiea. “Paiea,” I heard you say, “when are we leaving? I have camp tomorrow!”

“You’re not going to camp,” Edward said, calmly.

“What do you mean?” you asked, and, before he could answer, “Edward—I mean, Paiea—what do you mean?”

Oh, how we both wished Edward were teasing, were capable of teasing. But although I knew he was not, I never believed, truly believed, until it was too late, that he would always do exactly what he said he was going to do—yet he was the least secretive person I knew, the least conniving. What he said he was going to do was what he did.

“You’re not going,” he repeated. “You’re staying here.”

“Here?” you asked. “Where?”

“Here,” he said. “At Lipo-wao-nahele.”

“But that’s make-believe!” you cried, and then, turning to me, “Da! Da!” But I didn’t say anything, I couldn’t, and you didn’t try harder with me—you knew I would be of no use, of no help—before swiveling back to Edward. “I want to go home,” you said, and then, when he too didn’t respond, your voice took on a hysterical edge. “I want to go home. I want to go home!”

You ran to the car, you got in the driver’s seat, you began to pound on the horn, which made sharp little bleats. “Take me home!” you yelled, and by that time you were crying. “Da! Da! Edward! Take me home!” Honk, honk, honk. “Tutu!” you shouted, as if your grandmother might emerge from one of the tents, “Jane! Matthew! Help me! Help me! Take me home!”

Another man would have laughed at you, but he didn’t—the one good thing about his lack of humor was that he wasn’t a humiliator; he took you seriously in his own way. He simply let you yell and shout for a few minutes, until you slumped out of the car, exhausted and crying, and then he picked himself up from beneath the acacia and came and sat down next to you, and you sagged against him, despite yourself.

“It’s okay,” I heard him say to you, and he put his arm around you and began stroking your hair. “It’s okay. You’re home, little prince. You’re home.”

—

What did you think of Edward? I never asked you, because I never wanted to know the answer, and anyway, it would have been a strange and impossible question for a parent to ask his child: What do you think of my friend? But now we’re both adults, and I can ask: What did you think?

I’m still afraid of the answer. You knew, knew long before I did, that there was something to fear in him, something to not trust. Even as a very little child, you would look from your grandmother to me to your uncle Edward on the occasions he stayed for supper, and although you were unable to articulate the tension between us all, of course you could sense it. You saw how silent I grew around him, you saw how I waited for permission to speak before I said anything in his presence. Once, when you were around ten, we were spending the day by the beach at Lipo-wao-nahele. It was late afternoon, almost time for us to leave, and I asked Edward if I could go relieve myself first. “Yes,” he said, and I did. It was unremarkable to me—I asked him whether I could do things all the time: Could I eat? Could I have seconds? Could I go home? The only things I didn’t ask him were things that involved you—and it wasn’t until I was tucking you into bed that night that you asked me why I hadn’t just gone, why I had needed permission. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell you, but then I couldn’t explain why it wasn’t, why you were wrong, why I hadn’t just gotten up and gone when I had wanted to—when I had needed to. It is a terrible thing for a child to have to realize that their parent is weak, too weak to protect them. Some children react with scorn, and some—as you did then—with sympathy. I believe it was then that you realized that you were no longer a child, that you had to protect me, that I needed your help. It was when you realized that you would have to figure things out on your own.

Sometimes Edward would give you lectures, clumsy versions of the ones Bethesda had given us. He would try for Bethesda’s poetry, his sense of rhythm, but aside from a few borrowed lines, which he repeated as punctuation—“America is a country with sin at its heart”—he was incapable, and his attempts were disjointed and repetitive, dull and circular. I would hear myself thinking this and feel guilty for my betrayal, though I never said it aloud, never said it to you. “No land is owned land,” Edward would say to you, forgetting, or perhaps ignoring, the fact of Lipo-wao-nahele, whose ownership was central to his fantasy of it. “You have the right to be whatever you want,” he’d say, although this too he didn’t mean—you would be a Hawaiian man, a young prince, as he called you, though he had little conception of what that meant, and neither did I. If you had said then, as you had every right to, that you wanted to grow up, marry the blondest woman you could, live in Ohio, and manage a bank, he would have been horrified, but would he have been horrified by your choices or by your ambition? How brave you’d be, to go all the way to Ohio, to leave behind all the privileges your name guaranteed you, to go where you might as well be Prince Woogawooga, foreign and laughable, your status vanished as soon as you climbed into your little coconut-tree canoe and pushed off the sandy shore of Ooga-ooga!

His idea of what Hawai‘i was, what we were as Hawaiians, was so shallow that, of all the things I am ashamed of today, it is that which affects me the most. Not the fact of it but that I blinded myself to it, that I allowed him to play, and that I sacrificed our lives for that play. All those years he tried to teach you Hawaiian, using an old primer stolen from the university library—you never learned, because he never learned. His lessons about Hawaiian history too were mostly invented, projections of what he hoped had happened rather than what actually had. “We are a land of kings and queens and princes and princesses,” he would say to you, but the truth was that there were only two princes on our land, and they were you and I, and that you cannot have a land full of royalty, because royalty needs people to revere them, or they cease to be royalty.

I would hear him give you these lectures and I would be unable to stop them. With each day, I felt myself less capable of undoing what I had allowed to happen. It was as if I had been delivered to Lipo-wao-nahele—I had not chosen to come there; I had been deposited there, as though some wind had blown me across the island and dropped me beneath the acacia tree. My life, where I lived, had become foreign to me.

It was the Sunday after I had failed to take you to robotics camp that we heard the car. We heard it, and then we saw it, jogging along the stony road. You had spent the last three days stunned by what had happened to you: On Thursday, the day you were to be at robotics camp, you had woken to find yourself still at Lipo-wao-nahele—I think you had hoped that it might be a dream, that you might wake up in your bed at your grandmother’s house—and had flung yourself down upon the ground and sobbed, actually striking your arms and legs against the earth like a parody of a temper tantrum. “Kawika,” I had said, creeping toward you (Edward was walking along the beach), “Kawika, it’ll be okay.”

Then you had sat abruptly upright, your face wet. “How will it be okay?” you had shouted. “Huh? How?”

I had sat back on my heels. “I don’t know,” I’d had to admit.

“Of course you don’t know,” you’d snarled. “You don’t know anything. You never do.” And then you had returned to crying, and I had crept away. I didn’t blame you. How could I? You were right.

On Friday and Saturday, you lapsed into a silence. You wouldn’t leave the tent, not even to eat. I was worried about you, but Edward was not. “Leave him alone,” he said. “He’ll come out eventually.”

But you didn’t. And so, when the car arrived, you were slow to emerge from the tent, blinking in the sun and staring at it like it was a hallucination. It was only when Uncle William got out from behind the wheel that you gave a weak, animal cry, a kind I’d never heard from you before, and began running toward him, wobbly from dehydration and hunger.

He hadn’t come alone. Your grandmother was in the passenger seat, and Jane and Matthew, looking scared, were in the back. It was your grandmother who took you, pushing you behind her and standing between you and Edward as if he might reach out and hit you. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, I don’t know what you’re doing,” she said. “But I am taking my grandson, and I’m leaving with him.”

Edward had shrugged. “I don’t think that’s really up to you, lady,” he said, and I had stepped backward, despite myself. Lady. I had never heard my mother addressed so disrespectfully. “It’s up to your son.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Bishop,” she said, and to you, more gently: “Get in the car, Kawika.”

But you wouldn’t. Instead you looked around her, at me. “Da?” you asked.

“Kawika,” she said, “get in the car. Now.”

“No,” you said. “Not without him.” Him: You meant me.

“For heaven’s sakes, Kawika,” she said, impatient. “He doesn’t want to come.”

“Yes, he does,” you’d insisted. “He doesn’t want to be here, do you, Da? Come home with us.”

“This is his land,” Edward said. “Pure land. Hawaiian land. He’ll stay.”

They began to argue, Edward and your grandmother, and I turned my face to the sky, which was white and hot, too hot for May. They seemed to have forgotten that I existed, that I was standing there, a distance from both of them, the third point in the triangle. But I was no longer listening to them, to Edward’s pablum or your grandmother’s commands; instead, I was looking at Uncle William and Jane and Matthew, the three of them staring not just at the three of us but at the land itself. I saw them noticing the tents, the blue plastic tarp, the cardboard boxes. It had rained two nights before, and the wind had made one side of the tent you and I shared collapse, so that when I slept beneath it, the nylon covered me like a shroud. Our boxes were still damp, and the contents of them—our clothes and your books—were scattered across the field to dry; it appeared as if a bomb had exploded and everything had been tossed about. The tarp was muddy; from the acacia tree hung a dozen plastic bags containing our food supplies, protecting them from the ants and the mongoose. I saw what they were seeing: an unremarkable piece of scrubby land littered with ugly debris—plastic bottles and broken plastic forks, the tarp rustling in the breeze. Lipo-wao-nahele, but we had planted no trees, and the ones that were already there we were using as furniture. The place was now worse than unloved; it was degraded, and it was Edward and I who had degraded it.

They took you away that day. They tried to have me declared incompetent. They tried to declare me an unfit parent. They tried to take away my trust. I say “they,” because Uncle William was the one who was dispatched to (discreetly) talk to someone at Child Protective Services and then to consult an old law-school classmate of his, now a Family Court judge, but I really mean not “they” but “she”: your grandmother.

I cannot blame her now, and I couldn’t then, either. I knew that what I was doing was wrong. I knew that you should stay where you were, that there was no life for you at Lipo-wao-nahele. So why did I let it happen? How could I let it happen? I could tell you that it was because I wanted to share something with you, something that—rightly or wrongly—I had created for us, a realm in which I made decisions for you that I thought might help you in some way, that might enrich you in some way. But that would be untrue. Or I could tell you that it was because I had initially had hopes for Lipo-wao-nahele, for the life we might have there, and that I had been surprised when those hopes were unfulfilled. But that would be untrue as well.

The truth is neither of those things. The truth is far more pathetic. The truth is that I had simply followed someone, and I had surrendered my own life to somebody else, and that, in surrendering mine, I had surrendered yours, too. And that, once I had done so, I didn’t know how to fix what I had done, I didn’t know how to make it right. The truth is that I was weak. The truth is that I was incapable. The truth is that I gave up. The truth is that I gave you up, too.

—

By fall, we had come to an agreement. I would get to see you two weekends a month at Lipo-wao-nahele, but only if proper accommodations were built for you. You would otherwise reside full-time with your grandmother. If I challenged this in any way, I would be committed. Edward had raged about this, but there was nothing I could do; my mother was still able to circumvent certain processes, and we both understood that if there were a fight between us I would lose—I would lose you, and I would lose my freedom. Though I suppose, by that point, I had already lost both.

My mother came to talk to me just once more, shortly after we had both signed the agreement. It was November, a week or so before Thanksgiving—I was still trying to keep track of the days then. I hadn’t known she was coming. For the past week, a crew of carpenters had been building what would be a small house on the northern edge of the property, in the shadow of the mountain. There would be a room for me, a room for Edward, and a room for you, but furnishings would be provided only for your room. This was not an act of meanness—it had been Edward who had refused Uncle William’s offer, telling him we would sleep outside on lauhala mats.

“I don’t care where you sleep, as long as you sleep inside when the boy’s here,” Uncle William had said.

Our experiment was being tested, Edward said; we must not surrender. We would continue to live as our ancestors once had when you weren’t with us. When you were here, food would be delivered and we would eat it, but when you weren’t, we would catch or forage only, and we would cook it over a fire. We would grow our own taro and sweet potatoes; it was my responsibility to muck out the trench I had dug for our feces and to use it to fertilize our plants. The phone, which had been installed at great expense—there were no telephone lines in the area—would be unplugged once you left; the electricity, which Uncle William had somehow arranged with the state, would go unused. “Don’t you see they’re trying to break us?” he had asked. “Don’t you see this is a test, a way for them to find out how passionate we are?”

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.”