To Paradise (43 page)

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.