To Paradise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There’s nothing to say,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually, as I knew you must, you stopped coming. You were getting older; you were becoming a man. You were so angry when you came out to Lipo-wao-nahele—angry at your grandmother, angry at Edward, but mostly angry at me. One weekend, one of the last before you stopped coming altogether, shortly after you turned fifteen, you were helping me harvest bamboo shoots, which you had discovered growing on the far side of the mountain two years earlier. They saved me, those bamboo shoots, though they had become too difficult for me to unearth. I was now so weak that Uncle William had stopped asking me to come back to town to see a doctor and had started sending one to me every month. He gave me some drops to keep my eyes from burning, and some drinks that helped make me stronger, and some salves for the insect bites on my face, and some pills to help with my seizures. A dentist came to pull my tooth; he packed the crater with gauze, and left me a tube of ointment to rub into the gum as it healed.

That day, I was very tired. My only job was to hold open an old rice sack so you could drop the shoots into it. After you’d finished, you took the sack from me and slung it over your shoulder, holding out your other hand for me to take so you could lead me back down the hill. You were as tall as I by this point, but much stronger; you held the tips of my fingers gently, like you were afraid of breaking them.

Edward was there that day but not speaking to either of us, and that was fine. I was nervous he might be angry with me, but you had long ago ceased caring what Edward thought of you, and long ago learned that you had nothing to fear from him—he too had disintegrated, although in a different way than I had. He was irritating, not dangerous, if he had ever been, and when you came to see us, you doled out our meals and handed them to us as we sat on the floor, reaching up to you like children, even though we were already—or only—forty, before finally sitting down yourself. Only Edward spoke during those meals, telling you old stories, worn stories, about how we were going to restore this island to what it had been, about how we were doing it for you, our son of Hawai‘i, our prince. “That’s nice, Paiea,” you’d sometimes say, indulgently, as if he were a repetitive child. Once, he looked at you, confused. “Edward,” he said. “My name is Edward.” But mostly he didn’t say anything, just kept talking and talking, until, finally, his voice faded and he stood and walked outside, to the beach, to stare at the sea. We had both become diminished—we had come to give the land life, but it had ended up taking life from us.

We went to the kitchen and you began making us dinner. I sat and watched you move about, putting the shoots aside so I could eat them when you had left, taking the ground pork out of the refrigerator. Even then my eyesight was vanishing, but I could still sit and watch you and admire how handsome you were, how perfectly you had been made.

Jane had been teaching you to cook—just simple things, like noodles and fried rice—and when you came to stay with us, you were the chef. Recently, you had learned to bake, and on this trip, you had brought fresh eggs and flour with you, as well as milk and cream. The next morning you would make me banana bread, you said. The previous two times you had come, you had been surly and snappish, but when you arrived this morning, you were merry and light, whistling as you unloaded the groceries. I was watching you, so full of affection and yearning that I could barely speak, when I suddenly recognized your state of happiness—you were in love.

“Da, will you put the cream and milk in the refrigerator?” you asked. “I have some more supplies to bring in.” When you were young, Uncle William had never sent you with supplies, but now he sometimes did, and I would watch as you unloaded rolls of toilet paper and bags of food and even, sometimes, cords of wood, while your grandmother sat behind the wheel of the car, looking out the window toward the sea.

You left, and I remained on my chair (our only chair), staring at the kitchen wall, wondering who you were in love with and if she loved you back. I sat there, dreaming, until you called me again—you had to beckon us both like dogs by then, the two of us obediently answering to our names, trudging toward you—and I followed you to dig up the bamboo shoots.

I was thinking of this, that morning, your dreamy, inward smile, as you muttered to yourself, reaching into the refrigerator for the peppers and zucchini you’d need for your stir-fry, when I heard you curse. “Jesus Christ, Da!” you said, and I focused my gaze to see you holding up the bottle of cream, which I’d forgotten to put away when you told me to. “You left out the cream, Da! And the milk! Now they’re ruined!”

You slammed the cream down in the sink and turned back to me. I could see your teeth, your bright black eyes. “Can’t you do anything? The only thing I asked you to do was put away the cream and milk, and you can’t even do that?” You came over to me, grabbed me by the shoulders, and started to shake me. “What’s wrong with you?” you cried. “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you do anything?”

I had learned, over the years, that the best thing to do when you were being shaken was not to try to fight back but to go slack, and so I did, letting my head loll on its stem, letting my arms go limp, and finally you stopped and pushed me so hard that I fell from the chair to the ground, and then I saw your feet running away from me, and heard the front screen door bang shut.

When you returned, it was night. I was still lying where I had fallen. The pork, left on the counter, had spoiled as well, and in the glow of the lamp, I could see little gnats swarming above it.

You sat down beside me, and I leaned against your warm, bare skin. “Da,” you said, and I struggled to sit up. “Here, let me help you,” you said, and put your arm behind me and helped me sit. You gave me a glass of water. “I’m going to make something to eat,” you said, and I heard you throw the pork into the garbage can, and then begin chopping vegetables.

You made us two plates of stir-fried vegetables with rice, and we both ate them right there, sitting on the kitchen floor.

“I’m sorry, Da,” you said, eventually, and I nodded, my mouth too full to answer. “I get so frustrated with you sometimes,” you continued, and I nodded again. “Da, can’t you look at me?” you asked, and I lifted my head and tried to find your eyes, and you took my head between your palms and brought it close to your face. “Here I am,” you whispered. “Do you see me now?” And I nodded once more.

“Don’t nod, speak,” you instructed, but your voice was gentle.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I see you.”

I slept indoors that night, in your room, in your bed: Edward wasn’t around to tell me I couldn’t, and you were going to go night fishing. “What about when you come back?” I asked, and you said you’d just climb in next to me, and we’d sleep side by side, like we used to in our tent. “Come on,” you said, “take the bed,” and although I should have argued with you, I did. But you never came to join me, to keep me company, and the next day, you were quiet and distant, the joy of the previous morning disappeared.

That weekend was the last time I ever saw you. Two weeks later, I was sitting on the tarp and waiting for you when Uncle William drove up, and when he got out of the car, his arms and hands were empty. He explained that you couldn’t come this weekend, that you had a school function, something you couldn’t miss. “Oh,” I said, “will he come next weekend?” And Uncle William nodded, slowly. “I should think so,” he said. But you didn’t, and this time Uncle William didn’t come to tell me, and it wasn’t until another month that he arrived again, this time with food and supplies, and a message: You weren’t returning to Lipo-wao-nahele, not ever. “Try to see it his way, Wika,” he’d said, almost pleadingly. “Kawika’s growing up, son—he wants to be with his friends and classmates. This is too hard a place for a young man to be.” It was as if he was expecting me to argue, but I couldn’t, because everything he said was true. And I knew what he meant, too: It wasn’t that Lipo-wao-nahele itself was too difficult a place to be; the difficult part was being with me, the person I had become—or perhaps always had been.

A lot of people think they’ve wasted their lives. When I was in college on the mainland, it had snowed one night, and the following day, classes were canceled. My dorm room overlooked a steep hill that led to a pond, and I stood at my window and watched as my classmates spent the afternoon sledding and tobogganing, sliding down the hill before slogging back up, laughing and holding on to one another in exaggerated exhaustion. It was evening before they returned to the dorm, and through my door, I could hear them talking about the day they’d had. “What have I done?” I heard one boy groan, in mock despair. “I had a Greek paper to write for tomorrow! I’m wasting my life!”

They all laughed, because it was absurd—he wasn’t wasting his life. He would go on to write the Greek paper, and then pass the class, and then graduate, and years later, when he was seeing his own son off to college, he’d say, “Have fun, but not too much,” and he would tell him the story of when he was in college, and the day he’d wasted sledding in the snow. But there’d be no real suspense to the story, because they would both know the ending already.

I, however, had wasted my life. Aside from you, the only thing I had ever accomplished was not leaving Lipo-wao-nahele. But not doing something is not the same as doing something. I had wasted my life, but you weren’t going to let me waste yours as well. So I was proud of you for leaving me behind, for doing what I was unable to do—you wouldn’t let yourself be seduced or fooled or spellbound; you would leave, and not just leave me, and Lipo-wao-nahele, but you would leave everything else as well: the island, the state, history, who you were meant to be, who you might have been. You would discard it all, and when you had, you would find yourself so light that when you stepped into the ocean, your footfall wouldn’t even sink but would instead skim atop the surface of the water: There you’d begin walking, east, toward a different life, one where no one knew who you were, not even yourself.

You know what happened next, Kawika, perhaps better than I do. It was some months after you left—Uncle William told me it was seven months—that Edward drowned, and while his death was declared an accident, I sometimes wonder whether it was intentional. He had come there to find something, but he hadn’t had the strength to find it, and neither had I. I was meant to be his audience, and yet I hadn’t been able to, and without me, he had given up as well.

It was Uncle William who found his body on the beach on one of his visits, and it was that same day—after the police questioned me—that he had taken me back to Honolulu and to the hospital. When I awoke, I was in a room, and I had looked up and had seen the doctor, who was repeating my name and shining a bright white light into my eyes.

The doctor sat next to me and asked me questions: Did I know my name? Did I know where I was? Did I know who the president was? Could I count backward in increments of six from one hundred? I answered, and he wrote my answers down. And then, before he left, he said, “Wika, you won’t remember me, but I know you.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “My name’s Harry Yoshimoto—we went to school together. Do you remember?” But it wasn’t until that night, when I was alone in my bed, that I did remember him: Harry, the boy who had eaten rice sandwiches, and to whom no one had spoken; Harry, the boy I was grateful not to be.

And this was the end. I never returned to our house in the valley. After a while, they brought me here. Eventually, I lost the eyesight that remained; I lost the interest, and then the ability, to do anything. I lay in bed and dreamed, and time blurred and softened, and it was as if I had never made any mistakes. Even you—now, I was told, at another school, on the Big Island—even you, who never visited, even you I could conjure nearby, and sometimes, if I was very lucky, I could even fool myself into pretending I had never known you to begin with. You would be the first Kawika Bingham not to graduate from the school—who knew what else you would be the first Kawika Bingham to do? The first to live abroad, maybe? The first to be someone else? The first to go somewhere very far away, somewhere so far that it made even Hawai‘i look close to someplace else?

I was thinking about this when I woke today, to the sounds of someone crying—crying, but trying not to, her breath coming out in hiccups. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Bingham,” I heard someone say. “But it’s as if he’s willing himself to go—we can only keep him alive if he wants to be.” And then the sound again, that desperate, sad sound, and the voice once more: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Bingham. I’m sorry.”

“I shall have to write my grandson—my son’s son,” I heard her say. “I can’t tell him this over the phone. Will I have time?”

“Yes,” the man’s voice said, “but tell him to hurry.”

I wished I could have told them not to worry, that I was getting better, that I was almost well. It was all I could do to keep from smiling, from shouting with joy, from calling your name. But I want it to be a surprise—I want to see your face when you walk through the door at last, when you see me jump out of bed to greet you. How surprised you’ll be! How surprised they’ll all be. Will they applaud for me, I wonder? Will they be proud? Or will they be embarrassed, or even angry—embarrassed that they’d underestimated me; angry that I had made them into fools?

But I hope they don’t feel that way, for there’s no time to be angry. You are coming, and I can feel my heart pounding faster and faster, the blood thrumming in my ears. For now, though, I’m going to keep practicing. I’m so strong now, Kawika—I’m almost ready. This time, I’m ready to make you proud. This time, I won’t let you down. All along, I had thought that Lipo-wao-nahele would be the only story I could tell about my life, but now I know: I’m being given another chance, a chance to make another story, a chance to tell you something new. And so tonight, when it’s dark, and this place is quiet around me, I’ll get up, I’ll retrace my route to the garden, and this time, I’ll let myself out through the back door and into the world. I can already see the treetops, black against the dark sky; I can already smell the ginger all around me. They were wrong: It’s not too late, it’s not too late, it’s not too late after all. And then I’ll start walking—not to my mother’s house, not to Lipo-wao-nahele, but to somewhere else, the same place I hope you’ve gone, and I won’t stop, I won’t need to rest, not until I make it there, all the way to you, all the way to paradise.