Kalihi
For the first few days when I arrive home, my parents believe what I tell them, which is that I needed a break, that I’m on vacation, and will return to Portland soon. We have vacuous dinners together, full of easy pleasantries, where I’m able to lie about my life with Khadeja and Rika and they talk about uncles and cousins and different hānai family in the islands, gossip and trite news to fill the air. There’s katsu and teriyaki and saimin and Zippy’s chili, shave ice and Leonard’s Bakery and even the classics, poke and poi. Blue-sky noons when both parents are at work, I make my way through concrete Honolulu, the cacophony and open-market whirlwind of Chinatown, the quiet fury of the homeless city in Kaka‘ako, the polished bougie product of Waikiki. I’m home but I’m not home.
Khadeja calls me, over and over, I don’t answer. She starts calling Mom, Khadeja’s clever that way, street-smart, relentless, and while she calls less often as the weeks go by she doesn’t stop.
I visit the island like I’m a tourist. Arizona Memorial, Sea Life Park, Hale‘iwa, Aloha Stadium Swap Meet. Just to walk around in crowds, to have faces I don’t know and don’t want to caroming around in my mind, feel the collective rhythm of conflicting desires and states of being, to try and think of Hawai‘i as a place that I don’t owe anything to. I get sunburned like I never used to and then I get brown again the way I was, nothing else changes.
On the third week, Mom stops me as I leave the bathroom, my breath still cool and thick with toothpaste. “You have to talk to her,” she says, meaning Khadeja.
“No I don’t,” I say. “She doesn’t understand.”
“She wants to,” Mom says.
I shrug.
“You know,” she says, “since you’ve been back, I know you’ve visited some of the old places. Does it feel like it did when you were a kid?”
“When I was what?” I ask.
“When you were young.”
“I don’t remember that,” I say.
“Remember what?”
“Feeling young.”
For a moment it’s clear she thinks what I’m saying is ridiculous, and I believe another day or a different child—Dean or Kaui—and she’d say, Get it together, drama queen, with all her salt and thickness. But she pauses, she’s searching my face, the same way Khadeja had, but there’s something bigger in her, more insistent and unflinching, as if she can see the me I am now, but also all the versions of me that were here, with her, for so many years. “What’s happening?” she asks.
She doesn’t say anything, I don’t, either, at first, but then it all comes spilling out, what I had been learning to do with myself in the ambulance, how I’d been close to unlocking all the mechanics of human life, but at the same time starting to resent the patients, their weaknesses, how I’d been stupid and arrogant and wasted the life of a mother and child, that I’d left Khadeja and Rika behind.
“I hate this,” I say. “I hate what’s in me.”
“What’s in you,” she says. “What’s in you is a gift.”
“It should have been given to someone else,” I say, my voice louder. “You’re so grateful for it, maybe you should be the one to have it.”
A slanted smile on her face now, she won’t break her gaze with me. “You know, I could have left this place years ago, even after I met your father,” she says. “I could have gone to the mainland, too. Just like all three of you keikis. I had excellent grades.”
“Why didn’t you—” I start.
“Don’t interrupt me, Noa, not now,” she says. “I’ve been to the mainland, I’ve traveled to San Francisco and Chicago and New York City. There’s something here, in Hawai‘i, that’s bigger than all those Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous places. It’s what woke the night marchers. It’s what pulled you from the water and sent the animals to die with you, what gave you all these gifts.”
“Gods,” I say.
She shrugs. “That’s one name for it.”
“All the stories you told me,” I say. “Some ancient relative, floating above me in the clouds, turning into an animal when I need it, guiding my destiny. I don’t feel anything like that.”
“I don’t know the rules,” she says. “Listen. I’d lift it off your shoulders if I could, Noa. There are so many places and people that need what you have.” She seems more sure of herself the more she talks. “But I believe you can still be what’s needed.”
“It’s like you haven’t been listening,” I say. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”
The slanted smile she had earlier comes back, as if she’s in on a joke that someone told her behind my back. “So you’re done,” she says. “Fine. But tell me. You could have gone anywhere after what happened in Portland. So why did you come back here?”
“Free food,” I say, halfheartedly. “Free rent.”
She shakes her head, she knows, I didn’t even have to tell her. “It just felt right,” I say. “It felt like what I needed to do.”
“That feeling,” she says, “it’s something speaking, Noa. So listen.” She gives me a quick hug. “We’re glad to have you home.”
AND SO I LISTEN, I DO. I leave the concrete parts of the land, I find the parks and the valleys and the oceans, I let green and blue and gold songs scatter around me in the dawn and dusk in wild places. Illegal trails and vacant strips of sand, all the hidden places I knew about as a teenager, places kids would go to smoke a joint to the roach or play with each other’s bodies or realize a dare. I walk and I catch the bus and I hitchhike, crisscrossing the island, until it happens.
There’s a morning when I’m on the windward side, a steep trail somewhere between Makapu‘u Point and the tide pools after. There’s a slice of sand that plunges into midnight-blue water and I slip into it, let the current drag me into the deep. Ocean swells roll in above my armpits, rock against my shivering torso, the water below me clean and clear.
The pull had been strong, to come here, to get in the water, the call was almost its own gravity, it doesn’t take long before I see what’s been waiting.
The sun is just risen, and I can see four lashing shadows in the water, headed directly for me, slowing to a liquid glide as they close the distance. They are sharks, and for a moment my body shoots with fear, I should go, I should go, there’s still time, but another part of me is done with fleeing, and that part of me makes a stand. I tread water gently, and the sharks begin to circle.
They go clockwise, gray reef sharks, and I name their parts as they pass, snout, pectoral fin, dorsal ridge, caudal. Snout, pectoral fin, dorsal ridge, caudal. They circle sleepily, barely dancing their bodies. Their eyes find mine and my stomach wells with fear and excitement.
I reach a hand out, the circle closes just enough that I can touch each one as they pass, their bodies are ice-slick, thick with potential violence, and when I touch, something blooms at the point of contact, travels the length of my arm, a channel of feeling that is the same as what I felt when I worked in the ambulance, only now I don’t see inside anything, but rather outside myself: Waipi‘o Valley, its rivers, then lo‘i paddies of kalo stalks growing plump and green, swarming the valley bottom, and there my family is among it all, with many families, on the beach sand or along the river or standing among the trees. The figures of our bodies become shadows and warp and diminish into the paddies, the river, the bay, as if we are made of the same water, beating into the current with the same motion the sharks are making now, everything blending into the other, it all flows into me and I flow into it.
My eyes are open, the sharks are gone.
It’s just me, floating chest-deep in the ocean, cold water, warm sunrise, but I know where I have to go, where it all began of course, the valley.