Honoka‘a
This night is one of those nights where there’s no sleep and I say to myself: I’m not thinking of San Diego, of Van. But what is it, then, that wakes me. There’s a feeling in my belly, cool and thick, like I swallowed concrete, right? A weight of failure, of leveling off, of climbing to the peak and seeing there’s nothing next but descent. Small farm. Broke family. Single and lesbian, or not, who even knows. Half a college degree.
The house is mostly shadow. But okay, I love that about where we live. No light pollution choking out the spokes and spills of stars, the natural black balm of late night. I step quiet through the small hallway outside my bedroom. Feel the bits of sand on the floor stick to my feet. Minty-blue glow of the oven clock.
The screen door to the lanai is wide open, which it never is. The ripe, shit-seedy smell of pakalolo drifts in through the gap, spreads in my nose. There’s Mom. Sitting on a chair with her feet up in it. Like, her big body folded in on itself, elbows on her knees. She has a joint lazy-pinched in one hand. Smoke twirling up from the embers.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I ask.
She shifts her head. “This small-ass house, and you’re still always surprising me,” she says. “I just got back from my shift.”
I slide the screen door closed behind me. “Nowhere to go when you get home,” I say.
“Truer words never spoken.”
I sit like her, folded forward. Hug my knees. “Let me have a hit.”
Mom looks over at me. She gently opens her mouth and a curtain of smoke slow-rises from her lips. Tumbles over her nose and bloodshot eyes. “No,” she says. “I’m not stoned enough yet.”
Okay, I’m about to snatch the joint from her hand and cram it whole into my mouth, fire and all, when she laughs. She passes it over. “Should’ve seen the look on your face,” she says. “It was like you were about to rob me with a knife.”
I pull the pakalolo into me, let it creep down the tube of my throat. Heat the sacks of my lungs and make everything expand. Lift. Mellow.
“You’ve always been tita like that,” Mom says, taking the joint back. “At least I did one thing right.”
She smokes a deep one, right? The tip of the joint pulses orange white orange, the fire breathing all on its own. Coqui frogs go on with their drippy whistle song in the green outside.
“You know,” I say, “I didn’t know you smoked.”
She chuckles. “Lots you don’t know about me,” Mom says. Smoke tusks from her nose.
“You’re not the only one,” I say.
“Really?” Mom says, fake-shocked. She passes the joint back. “My daughter has secrets?”
“What started it?” I ask.
“What started what, the secrets?”
I nod to the joint in my hand. “Smoking out.”
“Boys.” She laughs. “I was fifteen, at a football game. Parking lot with my two friends and their boys, plus all their friends. I think I was the only one who hadn’t smoked out yet.” She plops her hands on the crown of her head, right? Leans back in her chair, tilting it up on two legs. “God, there was this one surfer boy there, passing the joint. You only had to see him from behind to get horny. That ass.”
“Jesus, Mom,” I say. “Not when did you smoke the first time, although great, I love thinking about you having teenage sex. I meant what started you smoking up tonight?” I don’t really need to ask, though. She’s got Nainoa’s ‘ukulele right by her feet. I drag another deep hit from the joint and my fingers go thick with heat from the burning. I pass the joint back to her.
“Your brother sent us some money,” she says.
“Dean?” I ask. “Money? But he’s—”
“You’re smart, Kaui,” she says. “Think about it for a second.”
Mom sits the chair legs back down. Looks out over the side of the lanai, the pitch into darkness and the float of headlights every so often going by in the distance, out by the road, tires exhaling long on the pavement. Trees nearby us lean and clatter.
“We failed you kids,” Mom says. “Big-time.”
“No,” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “I thought maybe if we got you all to college. If we got you all to the mainland.” She waves with her left hand in the vague direction of everything behind us. Other hand holding the joint. “But now look.”
“Maybe it wasn’t you,” I say. “You ever think that?”
She snorts. “Even I’m not that stoned. Everything you are now is because of us.”
“You think that?”
“I do,” she says. “Dean was only ever a basketball player. We didn’t push him hard enough to be anything else. Noa died because”—she clears her throat—“we didn’t understand what he needed. When he came home . . . Maybe we never understood.”
The joint burns down in her fingers. She barely notices.
“What about me?” I ask.
“You’re here,” she says, like it’s obvious. “Taking care of your parents.”
“Only until things are better,” I say.
“I think,” she says, “things are better.”
I laugh. “What, just now all of a sudden?”
“It was a lot of money from Dean,” she says. “Not enough to buy our own place or anything. But the bills are going to be paid for a little bit. When does the next semester start? You could take a few summer makeup classes—”
“I’m never going back,” I say.
She’s thinking a second. The joint must be cooking her fingernails. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” she says. “That was the same thing your brother said.”
“Like you understand, anyway,” I snap.
“Well,” she says, “explain it to me.”
“Maybe I don’t want to tell you,” I say.
“This isn’t easy,” Mom says, “having you home. It took everything we had just to get you to the mainland.”
I don’t say anything, right? Not for a long time. There’s no place to start. Even if the memories weren’t lockjawing me, which they are. “I left a friend,” I manage to say. “Left her in the worst place.”
Mom nods. She says okay. She says she understands that. Meanwhile I’m sitting there, jerking back against sobs that keep coming and I try to clamp down. I tell her about the party. Van. But once I start, once I’m opened, I don’t close: I tell about the culvert, the sleep piles we’d make in dorm rooms. The perfect nights of drinking and drugs and dancing and hollering. How all our outdoor trips felt, the brittle frigid clench of mountain summits at dawn. The ageless hot dust of canyons gold with trapped sunlight. The shit Van would get us in. Dares, velocity, climbing, risk. But it comes back to the party again and again in my head and so I tell her about it. The party, the room.
“I wanted to leave her,” I say. I say it again. I wanted to leave her. I wanted to hurt her.
“Those boys,” I say. I palm tears from my cheeks. “Those boys were like fucking wolves and I left her.”
The house pops and creaks and flexes around us. It’s blue and dark out there. I ask Mom if love ever made her feel alone. If it ever made her feel like she was starving in a room full of food.
She laughs. “Only every day.” She leans over to me, across the gap between us, so that the side of her head touches mine. Okay, I can feel the bone, the scratchy shift of hair on hair. We lean in to each other more and more heavily. I’m, like, ugly crying, I think. Tears run down me. She whispers something, but I can’t hear the words.
“I never thought I’d be the type of person who would do that to someone,” I say. “Now it’s exactly what I am. Forever.”
Mom nods. “It’s always like that.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Whenever I’ve made a choice in my life, a real choice . . .” She leans back from my head. Touches my shoulder just for a second. “I can always feel the change, after I choose. The better versions of myself, moving just out of reach.”
It’s exactly what I think. So there’s nothing to say. I saw at my nose with my forearm. Palm more tears from my eyes.
“I’m always losing better versions of myself,” she says. “I don’t know. You just have to keep trying.”
She cries then. We both do for a few minutes. “God, I’m tired of crying,” she says, finally. Stands and juts her head toward the kitchen. “You want a beer?”
“I want fifteen,” I say, laughing. And I wipe my face again and again. “Let’s just split one.” She goes. I hear the fridge smooch open and closed. She comes back and sets a beer bottle down next to my ankle and then gently lifts the ‘uke onto her lap.
She asks do I ever think about dying. About what’s there, on the other side.
“Of course,” I say. “Especially since Noa.”
“And?”
The answer doesn’t come as quickly as I thought it would. “Most of the time it feels like there’s nothing after this,” I say.
“That part doesn’t matter,” Mom says. “Or it doesn’t scare me. If there’s something on the other side or not. It’s the getting there, you know? That last minute when you’re leaving, still living in this world even as it’s closing up around you. You have to do that part alone.”
I don’t have anything to say.
“I thought about doing it, you know,” she says. “When Augie was at his worst, just after Noa.”
“Shit, Mom,” I say.
“That’s right,” she says. “Razors, pills. Kimo’s hunting rifle. A rope from the ceiling.”
It’s like she’s naming old friends, people she’s spent a lot of time with. Part of me wants to know how far she went. If she had the thing in her hands. “I’m glad you didn’t,” I say.
She laughs. “Gee, thanks.” She shifts in her chair and almost drops the ‘uke, right? A lurching move to catch it.
I jut my chin at the ‘uke. “You ever play it?” I ask.
She considers what she’s holding. Like the idea had never occurred to her.
“I only know maybe one or two songs,” she says. “Better your father.”
“He’s asleep,” I say. “And anyway I don’t think either of us would want to hear whatever he plays these days.”
Mom’s thinking. I bet she feels what I feel. That something is turning in us. What we are to each other. After all this time away, the island can still never be anything but my home, and I can never be anything but her daughter.
She starts playing the ‘ukulele.
There’s a pop and chuck to the song. Off-tune chords a little bit. It’s sad and slow. Or it feels that way; but she keeps going and it catches in my throat and my fingers and my hips. I stand and it begins: a hula. I don’t understand what’s happening. My body does not feel like my own, it feels as if I’m just a passenger in the shell. The song Mom plays isn’t made for hula, it’s too slow and choppy. I lose the beat and move away across it and come back and lose it again. But something keeps moving me. Stop, I want to tell Mom, but something won’t let me speak. My hands drift and ripple and harden. My hips roll with my bent knees. The chords chuck. Mom’s fingers are picking up speed, adding second and third notes along with the chords so something thick and intricate is rising from the strings.
I don’t understand, I want to say again, but I still can’t speak, right? Something keeps sucking the sound from my throat.
Mom moves the song to another. She starts slapping a beat on the body of the ‘ukulele. Slapping and rolling her knuckles on the body like it’s an ipu. Then she goes back and jams out a few chords. So hard I worry the strings will snap. Then while they’re still ringing in the air she’s slapping the ‘ukulele body again, tapping and slapping and rolling.
The song has become kahiko. The ancient hula form.
And the song asks: What are we doing here. In this land.
In my mind I see: Water finding its way from the top of rain-pounded gulches in the mountains to the leaves of green kalo in the valley. To the thirsty earth. I see fish and flower beds and symbiosis. My hands in that same soil, tilting the balance ever so slightly, and the green roaring back.
The song asks again: what are we doing here. Take the balance we’re building at the farm, I say. Say it with my hands and hips in the hula. The song is asking and I answer. Make my palms flat and press them down through the air as I rock my hips and step slowly, and turn back. I’m not working hard but I’m dizzy, motion-sick. Something is in me. Mom goes harder on the ‘ukulele. She’s slapping and knuckling the body. She’s hitting chords and notes all over the strings, right? It’s the farm, I answer, it’s the land, what we can be and what the islands can become. In the hula I pluck from the air like I’m plucking kalo. I sweep down and across my body like rain through the dirt and rivers. The old ways again, land feeding, land eating. That old hum. I pivot on my heels. Mom goes on, the song is swelling with a rainstorm of notes and a beat that’s turning before our eyes. I’ve never seen her play like that, so fast and precise; it’s not sad anymore. I see my hands as I sweep with them. My hands. Stained again to the quick, this time with soil instead of the climbing chalk they’d been dirtied with in San Diego. I roll my hips and shoot my feet out and back to the beat. I drop to my knees and turn my arms each way before setting them down. I bow. Mom strikes the last notes, faster than the notes she started with.
There’s a rip tide of silence. I slam my ass back into the chair. Like, almost break it, almost fall over. The sensations of where I am start to creep back into recognition. The coqui frogs go.
“Mom?” I ask. “What just happened?”
Her eyes are larger and whiter than before. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never played that before in my life.” She cradles the ‘ukulele back down to her lap. Opens her hands and wiggles her fingers. As if to be sure they’re still there.
I ask her did she see it, too. Did she feel it.
“Yes,” she says.
I think of all the other hula that had been in me. From that first night, the cafeteria, to college and Van, to this. Alive alive alive, goes my heart.
“Kaui,” Mom says slowly, “what is happening on that farm?”