Never would we imagine anything but our lives ending before yours. It could only be you to tug the sheet up to our neck and tell us it was okay, that we could go now, that we’d done everything required. It’s how a parent’s life should end. But it never will, not for us. Instead, we usher you first to the other side. This is what we do when we put you into the earth.
It’s not your body, of course. We’ll probably never have that. Instead it’s a lei of pū hala flowers in blazing orange, the biggest lei I can manage, strung so long with hala that it’s as solid and heavy as a book in my arms. To make the lei, I skewer each hala key and thread it through, the same as how your loss runs through me. Between them I string laua‘e fronds, to decorate, to make it spike and prickly against whoever touches it. So it goes. I pierce and slide.
It takes hours, me alone in our bedroom, but there are no tears. Just the work of my hands. Pierce and slide, keep stringing. That’s all.
When the lei is finished we drag ourselves into the car—your brother, your mother, and me—and head east, to the Kaiwi Trail.
Out of the car and down the paved trail we go, to the point where the grass grows gold with drought and the trees are short and lashed by wind. We leave the paved trail and the host of easily pleased hikers for the rougher stuff, thorns and thistles and a sandy wash that slopes down to the ocean and ends in the crumbling steps of a small lava field. Black ridges being lapped by waves, and the wind howling across our backs, where the saddle of the low mountains cradles the sun to sleep behind us.
We stand at the rockiest spot, all seafoam against the lava rock shore. There’s a pillar of rock that refuses to be worn down, Pele’s Chair. We stand at the base of the pillar and watch the waves roll in.
These days without you have been damaging your father. He talks to me less and less, spends more time drifting at night, walking like a stoned monk into the forests. Whispering his chants. There’s less joy in his body when he moves around the house. Less clarity. I am terrified that he’s leaving me.
But today he’s here, he’s made the hike with me, as has Dean. The three of us at the base of Pele’s Chair with the hala lei. I wish I knew the right song, the proper chant, the ways of the kahuna that might help this be more.
“Okay,” I say to Dean and your father. “It’s time.”
There’s a pause in all our breaths. Then one inhale together, a breath we lock up as long as we can. It escapes us. Then we step away, to where the lava breaks to soft soil. And there we scrape until the earth gives enough space to let the lei rest. It’s warm, it’s dark. It will keep you.
Do you remember the tiny curl of your fingers, the dimples on the backs of your hands in that first year of your life? The complete contemplation in those fingers as they wrapped around mine. Hours of your frogged arms and legs against my chest, both of us deep in sleep. Your downy cheek against mine.
Now we are on our knees, your father and brother and me, and we place the lei in the pit and the soil slides back over it like an eyelid closing that will never open again.
For a few days none of us want to do anything. Quiet blankets the house in Kalihi. We come, we go. Work and home. Cheap cereal. Saimin and fried eggs. Microwave pizza. Fast showers and stacks of bills past due.
Khadeja has been calling our house, the same as she has since you went missing. I don’t know how long the two of you were together, but there’s something fierce there. It’s good, knowing that you bridged that gap with someone, before you left. It’s difficult telling her. But, much like me, I get the sense she already knew the answer before she asked the question.
“Is there anything I can do?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “We put a lei in the earth for him. I’m sorry you weren’t here.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she says. “It’s just with Rika, my job . . . it’s not easy to move around, like it was before.”
“I know,” I say. “But we’ll always be here, if you ever want to come.”
“I understand.”
She’ll call again, or I’ll call her. We can keep this connection, let it be something.
Dean extends his plane ticket back to Spokane as far as he can, playing with the dates to minimize the fees, most of which we get waived for bereavement, until finally the date comes.
“I’m useless here,” Dean says. “Better I go back Spokane.”
“And what, toss more boxes?” I say.
He flinches. I already want to take it back.
“Won’t be that way forever,” he says.
“You can do at least as good here.”
“I cannot. You know how it is. Up there get plenty different ways for make money. Not like here.”
“This is your home,” I say. “Is money all that matters?”
“I can’t do nothing about how it is,” he says.
“This is your home,” I repeat.
He keeps his eyes so they don’t find mine. Out the window, at the floor, anywhere but where I can see him.
“I gotta go,” he says. There’s not much for him to carry in his bag, but he takes what he has. We drive to the airport.
More days go, blue and stiff and long. But there’s a morning I wake, Aloha Friday, after trade winds have blown apart the night’s storm. The leaves are wet and fresh and there’s a clean salt in the air, as it would be just after a wave breaking.
We don’t have to stay this way.
Your father and I coordinate our work schedules and get a Saturday off together. Then we call Crisha and Nahea, Keahi and Mike-guys, friends we don’t see as much as we should, call them down to Ala Moana, us with our hibachi, and we potluck with mac salad, fried rice, and Crisha gets us steak that we ginger right on the hibachi, Keahi brings two long blue cooler trunks of Kona and Maui Brewing like he’s royalty. In front of us, past the edge of the trees and down on the sand, small waves crumble and hiss in sandy blue. People play catch with their dogs, sleep on towels. Behind us there’s the peak of downtown buildings, glimmering office glass and clean white concrete we’ve never been inside and speculate about while we grill and get unsteadily mellow off the beers.
How many stories do we tell? How long are we laughing when Keahi can’t find an unlocked bathroom and is running up and down the frontage sidewalk with his hand clamped on his crotch? We nod our heads and wonder who that is on the radio, turn it up. We let the sun rain down on our brown bodies, get sea-washed salt in our hair and eyes, jump off the rocks into the torch-blue ocean like we’re young and tight-bodied.
There’s aloha yet, to keep the rest of us alive.
24
MALIA, 2009
Kalihi
Garkins Properties LTD
5142 Hinkleston
Place Portland, OR 97290
February 10, 2009
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Flores:
This letter is to inform you that one of our property tenants, Nainoa Flores, has an overdue balance of rent; as the cosigner for the tenant, you are now responsible for the amount owed.
The tenant is currently in breach of tenancy due to the accumulating size of the past due balance. This is the third such notice our offices have sent you. Unless full payment is received promptly, the tenant will be required to quit, vacate, and deliver possession of said property on or before the end of the month, February 28, 2009. Should the tenant fail to do so, we will take such legal action as the law requires to evict the tenant from the premises.
You are to further understand that we shall in all instances hold both the tenant and you, as a cosigner, responsible for all present and future rents due under your tenancy agreement.
Thank you for your cooperation.
25
KAUI, 2009
San Diego
Morning like an ice pick to the frost of my brain, I wake as always after a few hours knowing I need to keep moving. The couch I’m sleeping on is Saad’s, a guy I knew from the climbing gym, who I helped out with homework back in the day. I’ve been creeping in thr
ough the front door after dark with the borrowed key. Then morning, my alarm before he and his roommate are up so I can leave without seeing anyone.
Sometimes I take the floor instead of the couch. If I want something hard. Sometimes that’s what I deserve or what I want to make myself feel, my bones and something hard. It makes me feel like I’m camping, like I’m back in Indian Creek. Fingernails jammed to the quick with chalk and the grime of splitter cracks. Me and Van under nylon tent ceilings, right, huddled up against each other while the bears outside snuffle around our tents.
I’d dumpster-dove by the dorms and fished out a half-done bottle of Vicodin. I couldn’t believe the luck and I put as many in me as the Internet recommended. Took a ride on a warm syrup version of myself for hours, right?
Now. Up from the couch. Saad’s family is a million years ahead of mine. The place stinks of their wealth. The furniture shines like it’s been buttered. The drawer handles all thin and chrome. The doors are heavy and sit at whatever angle you leave them, glide open and closed the way I imagine the gates of a castle would. If someone were to ask me what money means this would be what I would say: The world feels like it will stay under you no matter what you do.
I check the fridge. Like something might have appeared overnight. Right. It holds a plastic-smelling pitcher of filtered water, a six-pack of Pepsi and nine beers, margarine and sriracha, a fogged jar of pickles, and polished, empty crispers. A box of baking soda gashed open in the corner. In the cupboards the same crackling bags of natural cheese curls and graham crackers, chocolate frosting and vegetable chips. These guys are barely better off than me.
I stop by a mirror. I mean I guess it’s worth looking every once in a while. There I am: natty Hawaiian hair that I start bunning up the minute I see it in the mirror, that nose thick and flat from bridge to tip, the muscles in my arms and legs looking softer. With my arms up I can see my middle and it is not flat. And even in San Diego I’ve lost some of my brown.
But I am here. I guess. Okay.
Everything has been wrong since the house party, Van, where I left her. I always feel tired even when I manage a complete night of sleep, right, and I’m afraid around every enclosed space I’m going to see her, or those boys, or someone else that knows. I have a feeling word has spread everywhere and people are already looking at me different, even people I don’t know.
Most school days I find my way to class without seeing anyone that knows for sure, and it’s easy enough to dodge everyone because I mostly chose morning classes. But some days it doesn’t matter, I still end up seeing Van or Katarina or Hao and have to dodge into the nearest building. I’m like a cockroach, right, scuttling into my dorm room when the lights are off, scuttling away when the morning comes, same for Saad’s place. Then in the back of the class, where I can see everyone in front of me. It’s been this way for maybe three weeks. But here’s the thing: I’m not even sure who knows what, since we were all faded and stoned.
But I know the most important what, I know what I am now. I wanted Van and when I couldn’t have her I left her to the animals, Connor and his friends. Until that moment I was certain I’d been moving forward—past Nainoa, past the ways my mom and dad have failed to understand or even want me, past the islands altogether. Now there is no direction but down.
I change for the first time in days and my shirt has layers of grime, light and salty, laked around the pits. I’ve got my climbing pack stuffed with underwear, tampons, toothpaste, my laptop, a flask spattered with a few last licks of whiskey. No razor or foam, though. At first I was like, I really need to shave all my hairiness. Like I’m some sort of good girl, right?
When I roll the fresh shirt over my head something happens. It’s not me in the mirror and I’m not in the bathroom. I feel myself standing on a grass plateau, all green swells and curling wind and those ancient women of hula. All of us in our pa‘u skirts of bristling kapa. I feel the scratches all along my waist and my body naked otherwise. Lei po‘o poking my forehead. My thick hair is miles long, reaching to my ass. My skin is dusted and salt-crusted and girded with gristly muscle. The ancients, hula: all those years since I’ve felt it this way. We are in the field, me and two lines of women, the pahu drum going like the fist of Pele in an earthquake. We dance and chant. The sky’s an upturned bowl of bright heat, more white than blue.
And then my phone rings and I come back to the Kaui of now. It’s Dean on the line. I mash the buttons to send him to voice mail. When I do I see that he’s called a few times already. But I don’t care. I’m not calling anyone anymore. Not Mom or Dad or Dean or Van or any of them.
Dean calls again, ugh. I can see this won’t stop. I pick up the phone.
“She finally answers,” Dean says.
“She does,” I say.
“Kill you to answer your phone? Could’ve been we were all on fire or something.”
“Are you on fire, currently?” I ask.
“Fucking right I am,” he says.
“Dean.”
“What?”
“I don’t have time for your boners. You would only call this much if you wanted something.”
“Why there’s gotta be something I want?” Dean asks. “Man, you’re just like Mom. Maybe all I want for do is talk.”
“Well, let’s talk, Dean,” I say. “Let’s chat. Let’s fraternize. Let’s holler back.”
He’s quiet a minute. “You drunk or something? And why are you whispering?”
“Stoned, actually,” I say. “And I’m whispering because I broke into someone’s house. Proud of me?”
He laughs. “Goddamn.”
I put the phone on speaker so I can finish fixing my hair, use the scraps of makeup I have to clean up my look at least a little. “So, what, you need something, right?”
“How come you never been calling Mom-guys?” he asks.
I look down at the floor where my shoes are. The puddle of my BO-infested shirt, the orange painkiller bottles peeking from my backpack’s open top. “There’s a lot happening over here.”
“I bet.”
“You have no idea,” I say.
“Yeah, well,” Dean says, “lot happening in Portland, too.”
“Portland?”
Before I can ask more, Dean starts in. He says they’re taking Noa’s stuff. He says Noa’s rent wasn’t paid and the next in line to pay it was Mom and Dad.
“You know what that means,” he says.
“You can’t just empty someone’s house if they don’t pay their rent,” I say. “There have to be court orders and things like that. It’s impossible to evict someone these days.”
“They called Mom.” Dean says it like a shrug.
Due process, I say. Tenant’s rights, I say. Reasonable opportunities to repay back rent, I say.
“Look who’s the house lawyer all of a sudden,” Dean says. “Law & Order marathons on cable, twenty-four seven,” I say.
“Shut up already,” Dean says. “You gotta stop clowning, this isn’t a joke.”
“Okay okay,” I say. “Calm down. Did you call a lawyer?”
“I don’t got time for fight, Kaui,” Dean says. “I gotta fix this.
Mom called me.”
The way he says that last part: Mom called me. As in, Let me handle it, right. As in, I finally get to be the good one. But there’s blame in it, I know. For me going back to school while he stayed and bushwhacked alone in the valley. I take in the room around me: boys’ razors crusted with old bloody foam; last year’s Swimsuit Edition magazine in the reading rack by the toilet, sopping bathmat crumpled in the corner. I see it all laid out before me, okay? This day and the day after. Me couch to couch, away from Van and Katarina and Hao. Living out of my backpack since the start of the semester. Drifting off into some rat’s existence because of what I’ve done, or didn’t do.
“Is Noa’s address the same?” I ask.
“Same as it always been in Portland,” Dean says. “Why?”
I hang up. I jam everyth
ing I own that’s on the floor back into my bag and tie my shoes. I leave Saad’s key in the mailbox on my way out.
26
DEAN, 2009
Portland
Used to be Noa had this way of making you feel stupid without even telling you what was stupid, like he could just talk about how steel gets made or what the Latin blah blah was for “nerve” and you didn’t even have to say nothing one way or the other, and still you came away feeling like he said you was a dumbass. And all morning I been thinking about what he’d be saying if he was here with me, looking through the windows of his apartment and checking the doors for the fifteenth time and being like, I’m locked out. Didn’t even think about how I’d need keys when I got the call from Mom and came busting down here off hitchhikes and bus rides, figuring, I don’t know, the door was going be wide open or the landlord would be here painting or some shit. Noa woulda had something for say for sure if he was here, but he’s not, and I still feel like a dumbass. I don’t even got another place for stay if I can’t get this door open.
Sharks in the Time of Saviours Page 21
