I didn’t ask this. And I didn’t even protest too much when he gave first me and then you our new names. But you know—or I hope you know—that I didn’t let our name be taken from us. I hope you noticed that I only called you by the name he gave you when he was present, that at all other times, you were still my Kawika, and always will be. And I resisted in another small way as well—although I learned, eventually, to call him Paiea, in my head I continued to think of him, to refer to him, as Edward.
I am struck, now, telling you all of this, by how make-believe it was. We knew almost nothing of anything: nothing of history, nothing of work, nothing of Hawai‘i, nothing of responsibility. And the things we did know we tried to unknow: My great-grandfather’s sister, the one who had succeeded him as monarch after he had died prematurely, the one who was overthrown, the one with whom the kingdom died—had she not been a Christian herself? Had she not given power and wealth to some of the very men, Christian, white, missionary men, who had later taken her throne? Had she not watched as her people were taught English and encouraged to go to church? Had she not worn silk gowns and diamonds in her hair and at her throat like an English queen, had her black hair oiled and tamed? But these were facts that complicated our imaginings, and so we chose to ignore them. We were grown men, long past the age at which we should have been pretending, and yet we were pretending as if our lives depended upon it. What did we—what did I—think would happen? What did I think our pretending would amount to? The most pathetic answer is that I didn’t. I pretended because, when I was pretending, I had given myself something to do.
It’s not that we wanted something to happen—we wanted the opposite. The world was becoming less explicable to me the older you got. At night, I watched the news, the reports of strikes and protests, marches and the occasional celebration. I watched the war end, and fireworks exploding over the Statue of Liberty, the water beneath shimmering as if flooded with oil. I watched a new president be sworn in and images of a man in San Francisco who was assassinated. How was I going to explain the world to you when I couldn’t understand it myself? How could I let you go into it when all around us were terrors and horrors, nightmares from which I’d never be able to wake you?
But inside Lipo-wao-nahele, nothing ever changed. It was not so much a fantasy as a suspension—if I was there, then time would stop. If you never got older, there would never come the day when your knowledge surpassed mine, when you learned to look at me with scorn. If you never got older, I would never disappoint you. Sometimes I prayed time would start traveling backward—not, as Edward would have it, two centuries back, so I could see the islands as they once were, but eight years back, when you were still my baby and learning to walk, and everything I did was marvelous to you, when all I had to do was say your name and your face would open in a smile. “Never leave me,” I’d whisper to you then, even as I knew that my job was to raise you to leave me, that your purpose as my child was to leave me, a purpose I myself had failed to fulfill. I was selfish. I wanted you to always love me. I didn’t do what was best for you—I did what I thought was best for me.
But as it happened, I was wrong about that, too.
* * *
Kawika, something very important happened to me last night: I went outdoors.
For months, I was only able to walk around my room before losing my breath, not to mention my courage. And then, last night, for no particular reason, I pressed the handle of my room door and stepped into the hallway. One second, I was in my room, and the next, I was outside of it, and nothing had changed in that moment except that I had tried. It’s like that, sometimes, you know; you wait and wait and wait—because you’re frightened, because you’ve always waited—and then, one day, the wait is over. In that moment, you forget what it was to wait. This state that you’d lived in for sometimes years is gone, and so is your memory of it. All you have at the end is loss.
At the doorway, I turned right, and down the hall I went, running my right hand against the side of the wall to guide my way. Initially, I was so nervous I thought I might vomit, and every small noise I heard made my heart seize.
But then—I can’t say how far I’d walked, in length or minutes—something very strange happened. I felt a kind of elation overcome me, an ecstasy, and suddenly, as suddenly as I’d pressed on the door handle, I dropped my hand from the wall and stepped into the center of the hallway and began to walk with a swiftness and certainty I couldn’t remember ever experiencing. Faster and surer I walked, and it was as if with each step I was creating new stone beneath my feet, as if the building was growing up around me, and the hallway, if I never turned off it, would stretch on infinitely.
At some point, I turned right, reaching in front of me with my hand, and there, once again as if I’d willed it, was a handle. For some reason, I don’t know why, I understood that this door led to the garden. I pressed down on the handle, and even before I felt the door yield, I smelled pīkake, which I knew—because Mama had told me—had been planted all along the walls.
I began to walk through the garden. I had never thought I had paid much attention to its dimensions and paths while I was being pushed through it, but after almost nine years—I stopped when I realized this, my elation abruptly vanishing—I must have memorized its contours after all. So confident was I that for a disorienting moment I wondered if I could see again, if vision itself had changed and this was what it now felt like. Because although all I could discern was the same dark-gray screen I saw every day, it seemed not to matter. Up and down the paths I marched, and I never had to stop to grope before me, I never had to rest—though, if I had, I knew, intuitively, where the benches were.
At the far end of the garden there was a door, and I knew that if I turned its handle I would be outside—not just outside in the still, warm air but outside of this place, out in the world. For a while, I stood with my palm against the door, thinking of what I’d do, of how I’d leave.
Although then I realized: Where would I go? I could not return to my mother’s house. And I could not return to Lipo-wao-nahele. The first because I knew exactly what I’d find there, and the second because it had disappeared. Not physically, but the idea of it—it had vanished with Edward.
But, Kawika, you would have been proud of me. Once, I would have been dispirited by this. I would have lost my bearings, I would have lain on the ground and moaned for help, I would have put my arms over my head and begged, aloud, for the mountains to stack themselves atop me, for everything to stop moving so much and so fast. You saw me do this, many times. The first time it happened was the winter after we left for Lipo-wao-nahele, and I had been overcome by what I had done—how I had taken you from your home, how I had enraged my mother, how nothing had changed after all: How I was still a disappointment, and frightened, and how I hadn’t grown out of those traits but had instead grown into them, so that these qualities had not kept me from becoming someone else but in fact had become who I was. You had been visiting that weekend, and you had been scared, you had held my hand as you knew to do when I was having a seizure, and when it became clear that this was no seizure but, rather, some other kind of state, you had dropped my hand and run across the plain, yelling for Edward, and he had returned with you and shaken me, hard, yelling at me to stop acting like such a dummy, like such a baby. “Don’t call my father a dummy,” you’d said, so brave even then, and Edward had hissed back at you, “I’ll call him a dummy if he acts like a dummy,” and you had spit at him then, not to actually hit him but just to do it, and he had raised his hand. From my position on the ground, it looked almost as if he were trying to blot out the sun. And you, so brave, stood there, your arms crossed in front of you, even though you were only eleven, and you must have been terrified. “I’ll spare you this one time,” Edward had said, “because I respect my prince,” and if I had been able to laugh, I would have at his pomposity, at his pretension. But it would be a long time before I would think that, and in the moment, I was as scared as you were, except the difference was that I was supposed to take care of you, not just lie on the ground and watch.