We had sex in her room one night when her roommate was out. She had to tell me what to do, and how, and at first I was embarrassed, and then I felt nothing at all. Afterward, I thought about the experience: It had been neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but I was glad I had done it and glad it was over. I felt I had crossed some important threshold, one that marked me as an adult even as my daily life belied it. If it had been less enjoyable than I had assumed it would be, it had also been easier, and we met for a few times more, and it made me feel like my life was moving forward.
* * *
—
Now comes the part you know, Kawika, which is also the hard part.
Of course Alice knew who my family was, but it seemed she hadn’t realized its full implications until she had returned home. By the time the letter arrived at the firm, I had had the first of my seizures. Initially, I assumed they were headaches: The world would quiet and flatten, and shifting fields of color—of the kind we used to see together after we stared at the sun and then shut our eyes—would float across my field of vision. When I came to, it might be a minute later or an hour, and then I would be woozy and disoriented. After I was diagnosed, I lost my driver’s license; from there on, Matthew would have to drive me, and if Matthew was unavailable, my mother.
So I cannot quite remember the exact sequence of events that brought you home to me. I know your grandmother told you that your mother had effectively abandoned you, writing to Uncle William and telling him that someone had to come retrieve you because she was leaving Minneapolis again, this time to study in Japan, and her own mother was in no position to take care of a baby. Later, Uncle William told me that, while Alice had contacted the firm, it was your grandmother who, upon receiving evidence that you were in fact a Bingham, offered your mother money. Alice, your mother, countered with a different sum, one that Uncle William warned your grandmother would necessitate selling the house in Hāna. “Do it,” she told him, and she didn’t need to explain why: You would be the heir of the family, and there was no guarantee that I would ever produce another. She had to take the opportunity she was presented. A month later, Uncle William flew to Minnesota and had the papers countersigned; when he returned, it was with you. It was an echo of my mother’s own alleged origins, though neither of us ever acknowledged that.
I cannot say which version was true. I can say she had never told me—not that she was pregnant, not that she had given birth. She disappeared from my life after the end of the 1967 school year. I do know that she is indeed dead—she married at some point in the early seventies, to a man she met while a student in Kobe; they were killed in a boating accident in ’74. But as for why neither she nor her family ever made contact with you—I can only imagine it was because the terms of arrangement she made with your grandmother prohibited it.
You cannot be bitter about this, Kawika—not bitter toward your grandmother, or toward Alice. One wanted you very badly, and the other hadn’t planned on becoming a mother.
I can also say that you are and always were the joy of my life, that having you made me feel I might have something to contribute after all. You were still a baby when I got you, and in those years when you were learning to roll over, and sit, and walk, and talk, my mother and I were in harmony—because of you. Sometimes we would sit on the floor in the sunroom, watching you kick your legs and babble, and as we laughed or clapped at your efforts, we would sometimes catch each other’s eye, and it was as if we were not mother and son but husband and wife, and you were our child.
She was always proud of you, Kawika, as I was and as I am. She still is, I know it—she’s just disappointed, because she misses you, as I miss you too.
And here I must restate that I never blamed you for leaving me. I was not your responsibility; you were mine. You had to find your way out of a situation you should never have been in at all.
Over the years, I kept waiting for the day you would ask about your mother, but you never did. I’ll admit that I was relieved, although, later, I came to realize that you might not have asked because you wanted to protect me, because you were always trying to protect me, when I was the one who should have been protecting you. Your apparent lack of interest in your mother was the subject of a fight I had with your grandmother, one of the few times I stood up to her. “It’s strange,” she had said, after a parent-teacher conference we had attended, in which your teacher had mentioned that she didn’t know anything about your mother, “strange how incurious he is.” She was implying that this meant you were slow, somehow, slow or tepid, and I barked at her. “So you want him to start asking?” I demanded, and she shrugged, slightly, not lifting her eyes from her quilting ring. “Of course not,” she said. “I just think it’s odd that he doesn’t.” I was furious with her. “He’s just a little boy,” I said, “and he believes what you told him. I can’t believe you’re complaining about the fact that he trusts you, that you’re trying to make it sound like a flaw.” I got up and left the room, and that night, she had Jane prepare rice pudding, your favorite, which I knew was her way of apologizing to you, even though you would never know that it was an apology.
Eventually, it became easy for us to pretend that you’d never had a mother at all. There was a Japanese folktale that you had liked me to tell you, about a boy who was born from a peach and found by an old childless couple. “Read me ‘Momotaro’ again,” you’d say, and then, when I had, “Again.” After a while, I began telling you a version about a boy, Mangotaro, who was discovered inside a mango hanging from the tree in our yard, and how that boy grew up to have many adventures and make many friends. The story always ended with the boy leaving his father and grandmother and aunt and uncle and going far away, where he would have new adventures and make new friends. I knew, even then, that my job was to remain, and yours was to leave, to go somewhere I would never see, to have a life of your own.
“What happens next?” you’d ask when the story was over, and I’d kissed you good night.
“You’ll have to come back and tell me someday,” I’d say.
* * *
Kawika: It happened again. I had a dream that I was standing, and not just standing but walking. My hands were extended before me, like a zombie, and I was shuffling one foot and then the other. And then I realized that, again, I wasn’t dreaming but really walking, and I began to concentrate, using my hands to touch the walls, edging my way around the room.
My bed is in the center of the room, which I knew because I’d heard my mother complain about it—Why, she wondered, was it in the center, instead of pressed up against one wall or another?—and yet I was glad of it, because it made the space easier to navigate. Here was the wall of windows that looked over the garden; here was the doorway to the bathroom where I was taken for my baths and showers; here was the door—locked—to, I imagined, the hallway. Here was a chest of drawers, on top of which were a few bottles, some heavy, some light, some glass, some plastic. I opened the top drawers and felt my shorts, my T-shirts. The floor was cold, tile or stone, but as I neared my bed, I encountered a different surface, which I recognized as a woven lauhala mat, satiny beneath my feet, the same kind as I’d had in my room back home. They kept the whole room cool, Jane used to say, and even though they splintered and shagged, they were easy to replace every few months.