After I found my way back to bed, I lay awake for a long time, for I had realized: What if I were to leave? If I could walk, was it not possible that other things would return to me as well? My eyesight, for example? My speech? What if I were to walk out of here one night? What if I were to come find you? Wouldn’t that be a surprise? To see you again, to hold you again? I knew that, in the meantime, I wouldn’t tell anyone, not until I’d practiced more, and, indeed, the walk, as short as it was, had left me panting. But now you know, too. I’m going to come find you—I’m going to walk there myself.
I had been walking as well the day I reencountered Edward. It was 1969, and I had had you for just four months—you weren’t yet a year old. A few times a week, I had Matthew drive us down to Kapi‘olani Park, where I’d push you among the monkeypod and shower trees; sometimes we’d stop to watch the cricket club play their matches. Or sometimes I’d walk you over to Kaimana Beach, where I used to linger to watch the fishermen.
Back then—and maybe even now—it was unusual to see a young man pushing a carriage, and sometimes people would laugh. I never said anything, though, never spoke back, just kept moving. So that morning, when I felt, rather than saw, someone stop to stare, I didn’t think anything of it, and it wasn’t until the person spoke my name that I too stopped, and then only because I recognized the voice.
“How’ve you been?” he asked, as if it had been just a week, rather than nearly a decade, since we had seen each other last.
“Pretty good,” I said, shaking his hand. I had heard he had moved to Los Angeles, where he had gone to college, and told him so, but he shrugged. “I just came back,” he said. Then he looked into the carriage. “Whose baby is that?” he asked.
“Mine,” I said, and he blinked. Another person might have brayed in astonishment, or thought I was joking, but he only nodded. I remembered that he had never joked, and never thought anyone else was joking, either.
“Your son,” he said, as if tasting the word. “Little Kawika,” he said, testing out the name. “Or does he go by ‘David’？”
“No, Kawika,” I said, and he smiled, slightly.
“Good,” he said.
Somehow it was arranged that we should go get something to eat, and we loaded everything into his beat-up car and drove to Chinatown, where we went to my twenty-five-cent wonton min restaurant. On the way, I asked about his mother, and I knew by his silence, the way his face twisted before he answered, that she was dead—breast cancer, he said. It was why he was home.
“I wish I had known,” I said; I felt as if I had been punched. But he shrugged. “It was slow, and then quick,” he said. “She didn’t suffer too much. I buried her in Honoka‘a.”
After that lunch, we began seeing each other again. It wasn’t as if we discussed it: He just told me he’d pick me up on Sunday at noon and we could go to the beach, and I agreed. Over the weeks and then months, we saw more and more of each other, until I was seeing him at least every other day. Curiously, we rarely discussed where he’d been, or where I’d been, or what we’d done in the years since we saw each other last, or why we had drifted apart in the first place. But although the past was not so much forgotten as it was excised, we were both careful—again, without ever discussing it—about not letting my mother discover our renewed communication. When he came, I would wait （sometimes with you, sometimes alone） on the porch if she was out, or at the bottom of the hill if she was home, which is where Edward dropped me off as well.
It’s difficult to remember what we discussed in those days. This may surprise you to hear, but it took me many months to realize that Edward had changed in some fundamental way—I don’t mean the kind of change we all experience when we move from childhood to adulthood, but that, in his beliefs and convictions, he had become someone I no longer recognized. Part of this, I’m embarrassed to say, is that, because he looked very much the same, I assumed he was very much the same. I knew, from television news reports, that the mainland was full of long-haired hippies, and while there were hippies in Honolulu as well, there was no sense of rage, of revolution. Everything came late to Hawai‘i—even our papers carried day-old news—and so, if you had seen Edward then, you wouldn’t have been able to immediately identify him as a political radical by sight alone. Yes, his hair was longer, fluffier, than mine, but it was always clean; the effect was less intimidating than it was merely pretty.
Neither of us worked. Unlike me, Edward had not finished his degree; he had, he eventually explained, dropped out at the beginning of his senior year and had spent the rest of the fall hitchhiking through the West. When he needed money, he returned to California and picked grapes or garlic or strawberries or walnuts, whatever was being harvested—he would never eat another strawberry in his life, he said. Now, back in Honolulu, he found short-term jobs. He helped a friend paint houses, or joined a moving crew for a few days. The little house he’d shared with his mother was a rental, the landlord an old Chinese man who’d fancied Mrs. Bishop, and he’d have to move out of it eventually, but he didn’t seem concerned about this, or his future. He seemed concerned about very little, and it reminded me of his childhood self-assurance, his complete lack of insecurity.
But it was toward the end of that year that I realized how truly different a person he had become. “We’re going to an event,” he said as he picked me up at the foot of the hill one evening, “to meet some friends of mine.” He didn’t offer any further information, and I, as usual, didn’t ask. But I could tell he was excited, even nervous—as he drove, he beat out a twitchy rhythm on the steering wheel with one finger.
We drove deep into Nu‘uanu, down a narrow, private road so shrouded by trees and so ill-lit that even with the headlights I had to hold up a flashlight to guide our way. We passed a series of gates, and at the fourth, Edward stopped and got out of the car; there was a key attached to a long piece of wire on the gatepost, and he unlocked the gate and we drove through, stopping again to close the gate behind us. Ahead of us was a long dirt driveway, and as we bumped along, I could see and smell that it was lined with clumps of white ginger, their flowers ghostly in the dusk.
At the end of the driveway was a large white wooden house, once grand, once well-maintained, that resembled my own, except parked in front of it were at least twenty cars, and even from outside, we could hear people talking, their voices echoey in the valley’s quiet.
“Come on,” Edward said.
There were perhaps fifty people inside, and after I had recovered from my initial shock, I was able to observe them more closely. Most of them were our age, and all of them were local, and some of them were clearly hippies, and many of them were standing around a very tall black man, whose back was toward me, so that all I could see was his Afro, which was large and thick and glistening. As he shifted, the top of his hair brushed against the bottom of the ceiling pendant light, making it sway, the light rocking about the room.
“Come on,” Edward said, again, and this time, I could hear the excitement in his voice.