Finally, I had to interrupt him. “But what about Hawai‘i?” I asked, and then, when he drew out a map of Maui, I stopped him again: “O‘ahu, specifically.”
Once again, I was surprised. Along with our house in Manoa, there were two run-down apartment buildings in Waikīkī, and three consecutive storefronts in Chinatown, and a small house in Kailua, and even the church in Lā‘ie. I waited as Uncle William worked his way around the state counterclockwise from southern Honolulu, pitying him as I never had before for the caress in his voice, for the pride he took in this land that wasn’t even his.
But if I felt pity for William, I felt disgust for myself. What had I done to earn any of this? Nothing. Money, my money, did grow on trees: on trees, and in fields, and between blocks of concrete. It was harvested and cleaned and counted and stored, and whenever I wanted it, even before I knew I wanted it, there it was, stacks of it, more than I could ever know to desire.
I sat in silence as Uncle William talked, until, finally, I heard him say, “And then there’s the property in Hau‘ula,” at which I sat up and leaned toward him, looking at the map of the island he was lovingly gliding his fingers across. “Just over thirty acres, but a useless piece of land,” he said. “Too arid and too small for significant farming; too remote to be a good homestead. The beach is no good, either—too rough and too much coral. The road’s just dirt, and the state has no plans to extend asphalt out that far. No neighbors, no restaurants, no grocery stores, no schools.”
On and on he went, detailing the property’s flaws, until I finally asked, “Then why do we have it at all?”
“Ah,” he smiled. “It was a whim of your grandfather’s, and your father was too sentimental to sell it. Yes,” he said, mistaking my look for surprise, “he could be sentimental, your father.” He smiled again and shook his head. “Lipo-wao-nahele,” he added.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s what your grandfather called this land,” he said. “The Dark Forest, technically, but he translated it as the Forest of Paradise.” He looked at me. “You’d think it’d be Nahelekūlani, wouldn’t you?” he asked, and I shrugged. Uncle William’s Hawaiian was much better than my own; my grandfather had paid for him to study it when he was a college student and had just begun working for the family practice. “Technically, you’d be right, but your grandfather Kawika said it was lazy Hawaiian, tacked on, that it’d be akin to calling it, oh, Kawikakūlani.” Kawikakūlani: David of Heaven. He began to sing:
“He ho?oheno kē ?ike aku
Ke kai moana nui lā
Nui ke aloha e hi‘ipoi nei
Me ke ‘ala o ka līpoa
“You know that song, of course.” （I did; it was popular.） “？‘Ka Uluwehi O Ke Kai’： ‘The Bounty of the Sea.’ Lipoa: It sounds the same, doesn’t it? But it isn’t—here, the word is līpoa, and it refers to the seaweed. But your grandfather used lipoa, as in ua lipoa wale i ka ua ka nahele, ‘the forest dark with rain’—very beautiful, don’t you think? So, ‘Lipo wao nahele’： the Dark Forest. But your grandfather preserved the mana of the name: ‘the Forest of Heaven.’？”
He sat back in his seat and smiled, such a gentle smile, filled with the joy of understanding a language I didn’t speak and couldn’t properly comprehend. Suddenly I hated him—he possessed something I could not, and it wasn’t money but those words, rolling like smooth, shiny pebbles in his mouth, white and clean as the moon.
“Is there a forest out there?” I asked, finally, though I had been about to pose it as a statement: There’s no forest there.
“Not anymore,” he said. “But there once was, or so your grandfather said. He planned to plant it again someday, and it would be his paradise.
“Your father didn’t share his father’s appreciation for this land—he thought it wasn’t worth the bother. But he didn’t sell it, either. He always said it was because no one would buy it, it being so far out and so far from prime. Though I long suspected it was another form of sentimentalism. You know that the two weren’t terribly close, or at least that was what they’d both say, and yet I think that wasn’t really true. They were just too much alike, and both of them grew accustomed to this narrative, which seemed easier and more dignified than actually trying to close the distance between them. But I wasn’t fooled. Why, I remember…”
And then he was off, telling stories I had already been told: about how my father had wrecked my grandfather’s car and never apologized; about how my father had been a poor high-school student and my grandfather had had to make an additional donation to the school to ensure his graduation; about how my grandfather had wanted my father to be more of a scholar, whereas my father wanted to be an athlete. They were typical father-and-son problems, yet they felt as remote and uninteresting as something I might read in a book.
And behind this all were the words Lipo wao nahele, a phrase meant to be chanted, to be carried beneath the tongue, and although I was looking at Uncle William, smiling and nodding as he talked and talked, I was thinking of that land that was mine after all, where I had lain beneath an acacia tree and watched as, just a few yards away, Edward shucked off his shorts and shirt and ran, whooping, into the glittering water, and dived beneath a wave so large that, for a few seconds, it was as if he had been a victim of some kind of alchemy, and his bones had been turned to foam.
* * *
—
Finally, I had information to tell Edward: He may have discovered that the land belonged to me, but I was able to tell him what it had meant to my grandfather, the last person in our family to be addressed as Prince Kawika. Today I am embarrassed about how gratified I was by his excitement, to finally have something to give him and to have it be so enthusiastically received, with all the selfishness of the gift-giver.
It became a shorthand between us. Not quite a joke. But not something I thought I took seriously. I had little imagination, and he had less, but we began to speak of it as someplace real, as if, every time we mentioned its name, a new tree would begin to sprout, as if we were speaking the forest into being. Sometimes we would take you with us on our weekend road trips, and in the afternoons, after you and Edward swam, you would come lie by my side and I would tell you stories I remembered from when I was little, replacing every magic forest, every haunted glen, with Lipo-wao-nahele. The witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel,” which had so confounded me when I was a child, with its gingerbread walls and gumdrop-trimmed eaves （What was gingerbread? What were gumdrops? What were eaves?）， became a palm hut in Lipo-wao-nahele, its roof made of scallops of dried mango, its doorway a curtain of strings of crack seed, their salt-and-sugar perfume filling the witch’s kitchen. Sometimes I would tell you about it as if it were a place that actually existed—or, rather, I would let you believe it was anything you wanted it to be: “Are there bunnies there?” you’d ask （you were fixated on bunnies, in those years）。 “Yes,” I’d say. “Is there ice cream there?” you’d ask. “Yes,” I’d say. Was there a model train set in Lipo-wao-nahele? Was there a jungle gym you could have all to yourself? Was there a tire swing? Yes, yes, yes. Anything you wanted could be found in Lipo-wao-nahele, which was equally defined by what it lacked: bedtime, bath time, homework, onions. There was no room for things you hated at Lipo-wao-nahele. It was heaven as much for what it excluded.