22

“Can I meet my mommy?” It was the last time I’d ever mention her so casually. My father had made lunch, then served us each a dish of ice cream. I must’ve been nine at the time.

His spoon jangled inside the empty bowl. With a hard exhale, he rose and carried all our dishes to the sink.

“Put your good shoes on,” he said. “I’ll make a phone call.”

Together, we took a silent drive. Up the Pali Highway and over the Ko‘olaus, we passed through clouds and a minute or two of rain. On the other side of the tunnels, the sky cleared. We had a view of the Windward Coast, looking down at both the Kaneohe and Kailua bays, the narrow spit of land between them. Though my young eyes must have traveled that road before, it would be my first lasting memory of that high panorama.

My father parked the car along a street in Kailua town and we climbed out. I followed him to the front door of the house, not understanding why we were there, and too scared to ask.

An older haole woman answered the doorbell. She was fat, with falsely red hair, wearing a frowsy muumuu. My jaw dropped open once I saw her, incredulous that she could be a possible relative of mine.

My father spoke to this woman in tones too hushed for me to understand.

She smiled and said, “Malia?” in a louder voice. “Come on in.”

I looked to my father for confirmation. He nodded.

We followed the woman into her house.

“My baby!”

I was blindsided by another woman and smothered inside a tight embrace. The arms that wrapped around me smelled of mint and smoke.

“You’ve gotten so big.” The words were muffled into my shoulder.

I didn’t see my mother’s face until she let go and held me out at arm’s length.

“You look just like me,” she said.

This wasn’t true, but it made a nine-year-old me happy. She was pretty: dark skin, defined features, long, wavy hair. She wore all black clothes, including a small military-looking hat, which seemed stylish to me at that time. Behind her stood that older haole woman, along with a man I presumed was the woman’s husband.

“I’m your mama.” She smiled hard, grinding a piece of gum between her back molars.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

The other adults all laughed aloud.

My mother put her hands on my shoulders and looked up at my father, who stood behind me. “Can I be with her alone for a minute or two?”

I turned around to face him as well.

He nodded, not having spoken a word aloud since we’d entered.

*   *   *

My mother led me to a covered carport at the side of the house. She closed the door and leaned over my shoulder, placed her head next to mine. “Look!” She pointed with her index finger. “See that gecko?” The dark outline of a lizard shone against the off-white of the patio table.

“Watch this,” my mother whispered. With three quick paces, she crept up toward the table. Her flattened hand slapped down upon the lizard’s rear half. “See that!” she shouted.

I joined her at the table. The lizard ran away in a jerking blur.

“Look at the tail.” My mother pointed with her other hand. “He let it go!”

On the table, the small black length of reptile flesh—now free of the body—squirmed and twisted, forming curlicues and sidewinders. I squealed with delight.

My mother let out a loud, cackling laugh. She swept the tail away with the back of her hand and put an ashtray and cigarettes down on the table. “Have a seat.”

There was a refrigerator out in the carport, and she opened two Coca-Colas—a treat my father never allowed me. She smoked cigarettes while we talked, the gum grinding in her mouth the entire time. I remember seeing the name Kools printed on her cigarette pack. For years afterward, I thought that was a Hawaiian word.

She asked me unremarkable questions about school and hobbies, how often I saw my Tutu, her mother. If anything underhanded went on—any attempt to get dirt on my father or how he raised me, to leverage any kind of custody for herself—it was too subtle for me to notice.

I don’t remember the substance of the conversation so much as the soda and the cigarettes. But toward the end, she scooted her chair a bit closer to mine and put a hand on my knee.

“Listen to me, Malia. This is important.” Once she stopped smiling, thick lines showed at the sides of her face. “You’ll hear bad things about me as you grow up. Plenty of them are true; I’ve made mistakes. But keep this in mind: I love you very much, and I do the best I can. Okay?”

I nodded. She took me back inside and we said our good-byes.

*   *   *

I didn’t know it at the time, but the haoles were a couple of evangelical Christians who had met my mother through a church. She’d enjoyed a short period of recovery while staying with them. I never understood how my father knew that she was there, especially at the moment I asked to meet her.

That was the last time we spoke of her in my father’s house. The rest I picked up from rumors, eavesdropping, and a few candid questions at Tutu’s.

My father was good about keeping my mother’s mother in my life. I often spent Sundays and holidays in her Makiki home, eating big meals and visiting with uncles and cousins I knew moderately well. During middle school and high school, Tutu came to all of my volleyball games, and cheered louder than any parent.

In hindsight, my understanding is that my mother was a full-time alcoholic, and opportunistic in her use of other drugs, depending on the company she kept. My father supported her initial attempts to beat the disease. The final reason for my parents’ split, according to Tutu, was not addiction, but infidelity. My mother ran off with another man not long after I was born. Tutu described him as “one haole motorcycle man.” To my younger mind, that description conjured up an image of a part-human, part-machine lover straight out of science fiction—some bionic Caucasian cyborg with chrome arms and wheels for legs, able to steal my mother away faster than anyone could stop him. They spent time together on the mainland but eventually split up. My mother went back to Hawai‘i, but not back to her husband and child.

I’m almost certain that I spotted her a couple of times in my teenage years. Once was on my way back from surfing in Waikiki. Obviously drunk, a woman cackled loud near the far end of Kalakaua Street. I turned and saw a leathery-skinned, red-eyed Hawaiian lady. She hung from the arm of a shirtless haole with an ugly handlebar mustache. I was with friends, on our way back to the zoo parking lot, and insisted we cross the street.

The last time was downtown, near the bus stop on Fort Street. I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk, her back to one of the storefronts, lifting her head and then dropping it back down to her knees. She was older—her hair a tangled mess, lines so deep in the skin of her face that they looked like they’d been etched there with a chisel. She wore rubber flip-flops. Her toenails were long, yellow, and crooked.

I considered approaching her, maybe saying hello. For most of my youth, I’d been angry and resentful over her abandonment. Those emotions left me once I saw her in that state. What I felt then was pity, followed by something more like repulsion, or fear. I told myself that it wasn’t her at all—just another homeless woman. Again, I walked away and caught the bus elsewhere.

She died the summer before I went to college. Tutu and her side of the family tried to protect me from the details. I aggressively eavesdropped on their conversations. My uncles mentioned several times that she was found “half inside, half outside” a minivan left in Kapiolani Park. I heard that phrase repeated through closed doors and thin walls, as if there were some enigmatic explanation wrapped up inside it somewhere.

At nineteen, I took some comfort in that image: my mother half inside an icon of American domesticity and half on the street, caught between two worlds, being birthed by the automobile.

The official cause of death was listed as alcohol poisoning. As a college freshman in the months that followed, I would pay special attention to that topic during the mandatory information sessions. Almost everything I learned about it could be distilled down to this single fact: Alcohol poisoning has as much to do with copious drinking as it does with the lack of anyone close by to call for help.

My father sent me to the funeral with Tutu. Having prepared many years for the event, the family members shed few tears. Afterward, we went to the Makiki house for a long afternoon of eating and talking, less festive than normal.

My father picked me up later that night. More than any emotion related to grief or mourning, I felt excited about my first year of college, doubly ready to leave an island that suddenly seemed unbearably small.