Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

by T Kira Madden

  I see, she says. The girl is beautiful, she says.

  Your daughter, she’s beautiful, I agree. She looks like you. And like me.

  Perhaps, one day, maybe we could meet her? says my mother. Maybe for the holidays?

  The next day, we decide to meet in Washington Square Park. It’s two thirty P.M., New York University’s graduation day, so the entire park is bobbing with purple and silver balloons. Families grasp one another by the elbows—I’m so proud of you—the sun throwing stripes of light between them. I am holding my mother’s hand. A banjo player cries out and knocks his kick drum. We wait beneath the arc, circling, looking, my hand a visor over my eyes as my focus shifts from face to face. Will I know?

  How will we know? asks my mother. There are so many people.

  A child steps inside a wet circle of rope. A man lifts the rope with a stick, until the child is swallowed by a giant bubble. The girl looks calm like this, inside the wobbling rainbow. I wish I could crawl inside it, too. I’d take an extra layer of anything between me and the world right now, anything to soften the noise. The crowd thickens. The clapping, the drumming, the screaming, the stroller wheels, the voices all coalesce into a dented mirage of sound.

  And then I see her. And my mother sees her. And she sees us. And we see her. It’s impossible to say which comes first. It’s impossible to say much more than, We saw her. Hair that looks blue in the sun. The shape of her. My face in her face. My mother’s walk in her walk. The length of her arms. Her chin, the round cheeks. We all know it without knowing. She is mine, ours.

  The bubble splats in the air—a wad of liquid, bursting. Behind my sister, a blonde is taking a video on a camcorder. She is the flute player, Contestant number four, from Miami Lakes—my sister’s best friend. We all reach each other.

  Hi, is all we say.

  My sister.

  All of our arms reach out. We dampen each other’s shoulders. We don’t say much more, just, Hi, Hi, the three of us together like that. Our hair all blending. Our height exactly the same. The way it all somehow fits.

  Under a tree on the north side of the park, we sit and slide our shoes off, comparing our feet in the grass. The same unfortunate toenails. The ankles. The three of us cannot stop looking and commenting at one another’s faces. The slope of the nose, the ways in which our mouths move when we speak.

  Mother. Sister. Daughter. Mother.

  She was there all along. How did we miss her? How many times had we opened a door for one another in our lives? How many county fair Ferris wheels? Days rotating our towels on the same beach?

  Contestant number four, the flute player from Miami Lakes, takes a photograph of us on my camera.

  This’ll be the first photo I have where I look like the other people in it, says my sister.

  We walk the streets of SoHo and Chinatown for the rest of the day, holding hands. We stop on each corner and look up at the buildings. I explain our geography, the terra-cotta, this other home of mine, the one I’ve made for myself. I walk hunched beneath the umbra of these buildings every day, but today they are magnificent.

  That night, over dinner at a quiet restaurant, my mother begins telling my sister about Samuel. A Good Boy, she says, there was so much love there. I want you to know that you came from love.

  My sister nods, listening carefully, and I think this is what she must have looked like as a child. This very expression. This is what I missed.

  It’s funny, says my mother, I haven’t seen him in so long, but I can see him now, in you. You have his eyebrows. It’s like I can see him again.

  My sister begins to cry. My mother moves from next to me to my sister’s side of the table; she wraps her arms around my sister’s body. Baby girl, it’s okay, she says, rocking her. My baby girl, kissing her on the top of the head exactly like she would to me, like my mother had never missed any time like this, not a moment without her firstborn girl, her hiapo.

  JANUARY, 2018

  OAHU, HAWAI‘I

  I’m thinking of calling the piece Kuleana, I tell my cousin Sarah. We’re drinking beers outside Ala Moana. I’ve been here two weeks retracing my mother’s story—her school, the banyan trees, the shopping mall windows, those rocks behind her childhood home. I held each rock in my hand, as if the light tug of their weight could somehow collapse time, tell me more. Tomorrow, I’ll go back home.

  That sounds right, she says.

  What’s your interpretation of the term? I ask. Sarah was born and raised here, in Kalihi. She has a deeper understanding of the language than I do.

  When I was little, I used to think it meant chores, she says. But it’s much bigger than that. It’s a person’s greatest duty, or responsibility, or privilege.

  Right, I say. I think it applies, with my mother’s return to her past, her kids. The bigness of that.

  That’s not what I was thinking, she shakes her head.

  What were you thinking?

  It’s your mother’s Kuleana to be with her children, yes, that’s true, she says. But that’s not why the title works. That’s not the point of this story.

  What’s the point?

  Your Kuleana, she says. It is your Kuleana to tell it.

  This is a secret of my own.

  My father has been helping me write these pages. In my dreams, my father stands in our house. It is not burned or blackened or infelicitous, no melted pools of television screens, not yet. My rocking horse is still there, rocking. The air is clear. The dining room table shines. It’s all in one piece—this house—the way I’ve always imagined it could be. So is my father.

  Sometimes he says the things I wrote the way I wrote them. We play out the scenes. We have our script. Other times, he says, No, not quite, it didn’t happen like that. My dead father is always moving. I follow him.

  I wasn’t standing in the living room for that part, he says. The night of your middle school dance, I was standing right here, by the hall. He brings me to the mouth of the hallway; the light is on. He walks me back and forth through it, buttoning his shirt, tucking it in, rushing, getting ready for something. He disappears into the wall and reappears on the living room couch.

  You must get it right, he says. Remember the details, he says. He smooths a comb through his hair. It’s still wet from a shower. I sit down next to my dead father. No one prepares you for the dreams. I want to breathe in the shoulder of his shirt.

  I want to breathe in the shoulder of your shirt, I say, but I can’t remember it right. It’s all gone now, I say. The house. The details.

  He lights a cigarette. My father is never sick in my dreams. He is not plugged into tubes; he has no oxygen mask. Here, we are both breathing.

  What’s missing is always there, he says. He taps the center of my forehead three times.

  Relax, he says.

  There are so many ways to lose a person. There are so many revisions.

  But wait. There’s something else, Hannah says.

  We’re sitting in her truck in her driveway upstate. It is midnight, just after my twenty-ninth birthday, and the engine is turned off, the air soured with hay.

  It’s not what you think, she says. She rubs at the back of her neck.

  Hannah, who’d spent the past month with my family, housing two of my teenage cousins while I’d traveled through July. Hannah, who’d overheard something she should not have heard while I was gone, who’d jerked across a freeway to the side of the road when she’d heard it; she’d stopped and listened again. Hannah, who’d wanted to wait until after I came home to tell me herself, my hands in hers; she’d wanted to wait until after my birthday.

  I’m glad she found her sister, is what she’d heard, but where is the brother?

  What are you talking about? I say.

  I’m still trying to figure it out, she tells me.

  That night, in her driveway, I punch the truck’s window until I feel bone.

  Let me try this again.

  My family, we began with a mannequin.

&n
bsp; He was a full-bodied jewelry mannequin: fancy, distinguished. Those were the words we used. When I was two years old, my mother and I lived alone in a canary-yellow apartment in Coconut Grove, Florida. See my mother, single, the crimson-mouthed mistress of my father, a white man in downtown Miami who has been promising to leave his artist wife, his two handsome boys. We needed a man in our home, a figure bigger than us, to scare off all the other men who would come.

  This is the story I know.

  But let me go truer.

  Before my father arrives at our apartment, my mother sits the mannequin in a rocking chair near the front window. My mother and I like to change his socks together. We pull the bright patterns over his club feet, roll the bands up his calves. We’ll do this again years from now, for my father, just before he dies.

  Merit cigarettes, orange juice and vodka, money. I miss the grind of his voice. I miss the word when it was still golden: father.

  This here is your father.

  Hello, little one, I’m your father.

  My mother, a Chinese, Hawaiian, pocketknife of a woman, shot a man once. She’s already lost her own father, her islands, Samuel, a daughter, the gift of naming that daughter and holding her and tossing her into the air, the joy in that suspension.

  But then, there was another.

  There is always the point at which a story changes. A good story must always change its terms.

  I’m glad she found her sister, but where is the brother?

  Another missed period. Another month of nausea. Another month. Another talk on the living room floor between my mother and father as I squirmed in a crib.

  You can’t keep him, my father says. We’ve done this before.

  I can.

  We can’t.

  That’s how I imagine the scene going. That’s what I’ve been told.

  My mother kept carrying that baby. She thought my father would change his mind. The mannequin—he’d had a greater purpose. He protected me and he protected my mother as she grew, as she listened for noises at the window. I don’t remember pressing my ear to her stomach, saying Hello, but I did that.

  Sometimes we choose what to believe, sometimes we know it.

  Like this: Uncle Nuke was left on our curb one Christmas wearing a Santa hat. I was six. My mother went back out for him, the trash bags still waiting for pickup, but he was gone already. Off to another family, or little girl, who needed him. The truth is, I hadn’t missed him till now. I never even knew he was gone.

  I thought your father would change his mind once the boy was born, says my mother. I’d waited for that.

  These hushed years. These secrets of the body. To whom did they belong first? I want to find where it began and say, I’m here now, listening. I want to reach through the years and tell the women I’ve been lonely.

  My father stopped breathing on a cold, clear afternoon. October. The sun was out.

  My mother was making him soup.

  The story I’d rather tell: I make it out to the beach that day. My half brothers are there. And my half sister. My baby brother, too. We are all familiar to one another. We’re a family.

  Truer.

  My brother was born on January 27, 1990, in Miami, Florida. Before he was adopted, my parents named him. I was sent to Disney World when he was born, though I will never remember that. Baby boy. Beautiful, I know it. I never got to meet him.

  You could have told me, I say now, to my mother, all of this.

  My father, he married her. I wore a yellow dress. They kept me.

  Son, my father used to say.

  There once was a girl on a flying horse and everybody loved her.

  That’s the unfinished story.

  That’s all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Billie, it’s with you I start—I didn’t write that, Evan “Billie” Rehill did, and though Evan does not appear in this book, he’s spent years walking me over every bridge in New York to safer places. Thank you, EBR, for the matchbooks, the guts, every rabbit in every hat, and your unwavering belief and love.

  To Anne-E. Wood, for teaching me how to draw a house in that first writing class I ever took. I’ve been doing my best to live inside of it ever since.

  To Jin Auh, who is so much more than my agent and Spice Girls manager. Since the day we met you’ve reminded me that words are power, and the work you do to translate and advocate for that power is nothing short of sorcery. Thank you for always feeding me sweets, for your great laughs and wisdom. Thank you, too, Alexandra Christie, Jessica Friedman, and the superb Wylie Agency.

  To my editor, Callie Garnett. The way you have seen me and this book is a greater magic trick than any deck of I AM’s. Thank you for the privilege of seeing you, too—an acolyte, a poet, a precious stone, a dear friend. This book will always feel like ours. My sincerest gratitude to Barbara Darko, Nancy Miller, Marie Coolman, Cindy Loh, Sarah New, Nicole Jarvis, Laura Keefe, Tree Abraham, and the whole Bloomsbury family, for believing in a book that couldn’t be summarized easily or packaged sweetly.

  To those who have provided the time, space, warmth, and support to write these pages, I am so grateful: the MacDowell Colony (my safe haven in the darkest days, and the place this book was born), Hedgebrook, Tin House, Yaddo, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center (who treated a bedfellow like family), Todd Lawton and Jeff LeBlanc, and especially Cynthia LaFave and Paul Rapoli, for providing so many literal and figurative homes for me to write in, and for loving me like your own.

  To my beloved teachers, for your friendship and mentorship and words both in and out of the classroom: Suzanne Hoover, Nelly Reifler, Noy Holland, Jo Ann Beard, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jeff Parker, and Claire Vaye Watkins. To Mary Morris, who taught me everything from peeling a potato to structuring a story.

  Sometimes we are lucky enough to choose our family. That’s been the case with Ian “PTP” Carlos Mormeneo, Randie Kutzen, Jana Krumholtz, James Question Marks, Marisa Lee, Michaela Basilio Batten, Rick Moody, and Laurel Nakadate, all of whom have stood with me through every fire.

  I am so moved each day by the ferocious minds of my No Tokens family, including Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (for all the wonder), Justine Champine and Molly Tolsky (for Taco Trio, the best writing group in history), Annabel Everest Graham (for the saudade), Janelle Greco (for shaking ’em up), Lauren Hilger (for the heat, the poems, the oracles, the girls), Ursula Villarreal-Moura (for never forgetting me), Hannah Mulligan (for the ponies), Leah Schnelbach (couch-mate, soulmate, purple blazer dream machine), Carina del Valle Schorske (for the moves and the nudes), Samantha Turk (for every sacred word), and Scout Woodhouse (for the missives).

  To those who have listened, who have supported this book and supported me through the writing of this book by reading drafts and writing blurbs and offering me beds to sleep in and fish to eat, by sending postcards and saying Yes to every long walk and always asking How can I help? when I’ve needed it most, my gratitude is profound and enormous: Benjamin Schaefer, N. Michelle AuBuchon, Chelsea Bieker, Genevieve Hudson, Ruthie Crawford, Tatiana Ryckman, Jonathan Dixon, Mary Gaitskill, Allie Rowbottom, Kristin Dombek, Vincent Scarpa, Adam Dalva, Tony Fu, Shelly Oria, Melissa Febos, Meakin Armstrong, Karissa Chen, Bükem Reitmayer, Che Youn, Alisson Wood, Cal Morgan, Brigitte Hamadey, Jack Woods, Sarah Gerard, Kimberly King Parsons, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Julie Buntin, Lauren Groff, Matt Bell, Laura Lampton Scott, Gabriel Jesiolowski, Alexandra Ford, Kyle Kolomona Nakatsuka, and Team Jo Ann Beard. And to those who may or may not appear in this book, who gave me a past and helped me make my way back through it, thank you: Alyssa Banker Hiller, “Gabrielle,” Graham Heyward, Jennifer Abrams, Lisa Mendoza, Karen Purcell, Nicki Alpern, Nicole Polat, Paige Newberry, Maxwell Burns, and Nicole Betty.

  To Jac Martinez, for the light and shadows. For leaving flowers on the dashboard.

  To John Bean for the French lessons, the metaphors, and for always reminding me that No is a complete sentence. You’ve helped me find and therefore love myself in
ways I had forgotten.

  Excerpts of this book have appeared in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Minola Review, and Go Home!, thanks to the generous and vigilant editors who have stood behind my story: Erin Loeb, Hillary Brenhouse, Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Robin Richardson, Jisu Kim, and Jyothi Natarajan. Deep thanks, as well, to the photographers who have allowed me to reprint the moments they’ve captured in these pages: Bob Lasky, Don Seidman, Sherrie Helms Kukulski, and Jac Martinez. Aurore DeCarlo and Team Carrie Goldberg—this book is full of bad guys, but you good ones give me hope. Thank you for your tremendous dedication to justice, to truth, and to my safety during the writing of these pages.

  To Lynda Barry, Grace Paley, and Heather Lewis, whose work shook me alive and made room for the rest of us. Yours is the lake I most wish to feed.

  To my ‘ohana, both near and across oceans: the Maddens, the T’s, the Hedges, the Schaefers, the LaFaves, the Beresfords, the Gonzalezes, the Kamakawiwo‘oles, and the Lindenmuths (especially Mary-Beth, for the deep ruts). To Jeanne Kam and Tammie Anthony, for staying on the phone until I got it right. To Sarah Kamakawiwo‘ole, for your joy and your islands and all the right words. To Nikki and Kaitlyn “Kidd Jackson” Hedge, my lifelines and the most non-piece-of-shit humans in the world—I love you.

  Sharon and Peter Gelbwaks—you didn’t know that adopting my sister meant adopting me, too, but you’re stuck with me now. I’m so grateful for this new iteration of family.

  To my sister and first star, Marjorie Hokulani, for always finding me, and my beloved nieces, Katherine Ailani, Victoria Ululani, and Kensington Kamaya.

  To my brothers, the best men I’ve ever known: Shawn D. Madden and Blake Madden. For the laughs and the crabs and the jams and all those winding streets. Shawn, this book will always be titled Ghost Ride That Rainbow Whip in your honor. Blake, forever my hero and Soup King. Sweet love and fierce admiration to Tricia Murphy Madden, Tabitha Murphy Madden, and Tiffany Vergara Madden.