Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  “I’ll bring you back here,” she says.

  Standing there looking at Khadeja I realize for the first time how tired I am, and how safe it is in her car, so I just get inside and lean back in the seat and let the car thump and glide through easy turns with the clouds sliding by the glass and the city just going and going until we’re at Noa’s apartment.

  We park across the street, the lawn’s trimmed all nice and sharp and the big picture window in front got the curtains closed. There’s no light behind it. We sit in the car and stare at the apartment and don’t say nothing and I feel my brother gone by the weight of everything he was holding up that’s coming down on me: Mom and Dad going broke in Hawai‘i, all the shit our family went through to get us out here, to opportunity, everything we already owed before we even got started. I turn the radio up a little bit, nod along to the beats, no way I’m gonna cry in front Khadeja, even though all around my eyes is hot and stinging.

  She wants to know why Noa left, that’s what she asks me now. I can’t figure out how for start, so I just tell her about everything I know about Noa, one big long rush of it, the sharks and him back home, kid like a legend, then from when we was at college and after, all I can talk about is whatever Noa told me on the phone or what I could figure out from talking with Kaui or Mom–them later. And all the while him having to figure out his abilities, the gods and what they wanted or whatever. The path he was supposed to take. The more I talk about it the more I realize he was probably way lonely. Lonely in a way that never made sense for me until I was in lockup.

  “If the one thing you are gets taken,” I say—I’m not even really thinking when I talk, the words is just coming through me like they was always there—“if the one thing you are, the part you always figured would be your best, if that gets taken away, the next day . . .” I shrug. “The next day it’s like you’re carrying around your whole future like a dead body on your back. Right in that place on your neck, between your shoulders. Hard for anything to feel right, when you’re like that. For Noa? After the ambulance, the pregnant lady that he lost?”

  I put a fist up against the car window, press the side of it on the glass. Cold and clean. I say, “It all had to hurt, something deep.”

  “Did he tell you that?” she asks me.

  “Nah,” I say. “Let’s just say me and Noa got some things in common.”

  We just watch his apartment a minute. Like he’s about to come out the front door or something.

  “I didn’t even know him that long,” Khadeja says. “That’s what I’ve been telling myself. But I can already tell he’s going to be stuck in me somewhere as long as I’m alive.”

  “Yeah, well,” I say, “used to be I thought he was a asshole.” She turns at me looking all shocked. I’m like, “Oh, what, he didn’t never do that thing where you start talking and then he interrupts whatever you’re saying to explain the thing back to you all dictionary-style? Like he’s an online assistant ready with all the facts and figures you’re too stupid to know?”

  She laughs. “Maybe once or twice.”

  It’s good, doing this. Makes it hurt less. Plus, it’s all true.

  “Once or twice, my left nut,” I say. “Shit was happening all the time when we was in high school.” I play with the switch for the car window, pushing and pulling just enough that the switch doesn’t start the window either way.

  “I don’t mean to insult you,” she says, “and I know I’m not part of your family and family has its own way of working inside, where no one else really sees it. But it seemed like a lot was expected of him. Maybe too much.”

  And I’m all, like, she thinks she’s better than us? Man, maybe her and Noa was meant for each other. “You’re right,” I say, “you don’t know nothing about my family.”

  “I didn’t say that, I said—”

  “I heard what you said,” I say. I’m about to blow up, part of me that right away wants to break things, make this a big fight. Same old Dean, Mom said. But I don’t this time. I fix myself.

  “Used to be I thought like that,” I say. “How it was Mom and Dad that pushed Noa too hard and that was what killed him. Then for a while I figured wasn’t no one that pushed Noa like he pushed himself, and it was probably just because he got such a big head that he messed up in the ambulance. But now”—I shake my head—“maybe it was all of that. Probably little bit of everything. Mostly it was just shitty luck.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  I grunt so she knows I heard her, but that’s all. A car goes by us in the street, haole lady with her hair all done up like a fancy vase and some toy dog yapping in her lap. The dog’s bow is the same sick bright pink as the lady’s jacket. When the car’s gone I ask if Khadeja seen it. She giggles.

  “She does not live around here,” she says. The street is empty for a minute, but then this guy that’s maybe a plumber or something drives up and parks and keys into the apartment next to Noa’s.

  “Long time I wished I had what Noa had,” I say. “You never knew what he was going for be in the end, you know? He was turning into, like, a superhero. Who doesn’t want that?”

  She doesn’t answer. I keep going. “But he’s gone,” I say. “And the rest of us is still here and hurting. That means we gotta do what we need to keep living.”

  She asks what that means, what I’m gonna do. I don’t tell her what I been doing since I been inside, how all the money I made was going back to the islands, straight into Mom and Dad’s bank account. And that was only when I was on the inside. Now that I’m out here, and can put in work with Justice for real? “I need to get to a phone,” I say.

  “You can use mine.” She digs her phone out her purse and hands it over toward me. I look at it a long time. Once this phone calls that one, there’s a record of it somewhere. “I better not,” I say.

  “Oh,” she says, and takes it back. She checks her watch. Clears her throat. “I should pick up Rika.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Better you let me get going.”

  She drives back to the big-and-tall, pulls up to the curb.

  “Are you gonna be around?” I ask her.

  “Around for what?” she says.

  “If I wanted for give you something. College money for Rika or whatever. Like how Noa woulda wanted.”

  She’s just thinking, staring at the street in front of us. Then she says she’ll be around, I can find her if I want. She leaves it that way and I let it hang.

  “Alright,” I say. “I guess that’s good enough.”

  While I’m sitting, I been thinking. I figure there’s no way my credit cards is still working. I’m nobody, is what that means. I dunno what I do now, but I know I can’t stay in this car anymore.

  I step out the car, close the door. When it thumps back into place, just like that the sky opens up and you gotta be kidding me, rain starts for come hosing down. I raise my hands, look up at the clouds.

  Khadeja rolls the window down a crack.

  “It’s always fucking raining,” I say to her. “When does this stop?”

  “Sometimes it seems like it never will,” she says, and puts the car in drive. “But then, all at once, summer comes. Wait until you see how it feels.”

  36

  KAUI, 2009

  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 c
lock.

  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. “Esp
ecially 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.