You ran to the car, you got in the driver’s seat, you began to pound on the horn, which made sharp little bleats. “Take me home!” you yelled, and by that time you were crying. “Da! Da! Edward! Take me home!” Honk, honk, honk. “Tutu!” you shouted, as if your grandmother might emerge from one of the tents, “Jane! Matthew! Help me! Help me! Take me home!”
Another man would have laughed at you, but he didn’t—the one good thing about his lack of humor was that he wasn’t a humiliator; he took you seriously in his own way. He simply let you yell and shout for a few minutes, until you slumped out of the car, exhausted and crying, and then he picked himself up from beneath the acacia and came and sat down next to you, and you sagged against him, despite yourself.
“It’s okay,” I heard him say to you, and he put his arm around you and began stroking your hair. “It’s okay. You’re home, little prince. You’re home.”
* * *
—
What did you think of Edward? I never asked you, because I never wanted to know the answer, and anyway, it would have been a strange and impossible question for a parent to ask his child: What do you think of my friend? But now we’re both adults, and I can ask: What did you think?
I’m still afraid of the answer. You knew, knew long before I did, that there was something to fear in him, something to not trust. Even as a very little child, you would look from your grandmother to me to your uncle Edward on the occasions he stayed for supper, and although you were unable to articulate the tension between us all, of course you could sense it. You saw how silent I grew around him, you saw how I waited for permission to speak before I said anything in his presence. Once, when you were around ten, we were spending the day by the beach at Lipo-wao-nahele. It was late afternoon, almost time for us to leave, and I asked Edward if I could go relieve myself first. “Yes,” he said, and I did. It was unremarkable to me—I asked him whether I could do things all the time: Could I eat? Could I have seconds? Could I go home? The only things I didn’t ask him were things that involved you—and it wasn’t until I was tucking you into bed that night that you asked me why I hadn’t just gone, why I had needed permission. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell you, but then I couldn’t explain why it wasn’t, why you were wrong, why I hadn’t just gotten up and gone when I had wanted to—when I had needed to. It is a terrible thing for a child to have to realize that their parent is weak, too weak to protect them. Some children react with scorn, and some—as you did then—with sympathy. I believe it was then that you realized that you were no longer a child, that you had to protect me, that I needed your help. It was when you realized that you would have to figure things out on your own.
Sometimes Edward would give you lectures, clumsy versions of the ones Bethesda had given us. He would try for Bethesda’s poetry, his sense of rhythm, but aside from a few borrowed lines, which he repeated as punctuation—“America is a country with sin at its heart”—he was incapable, and his attempts were disjointed and repetitive, dull and circular. I would hear myself thinking this and feel guilty for my betrayal, though I never said it aloud, never said it to you. “No land is owned land,” Edward would say to you, forgetting, or perhaps ignoring, the fact of Lipo-wao-nahele, whose ownership was central to his fantasy of it. “You have the right to be whatever you want,” he’d say, although this too he didn’t mean—you would be a Hawaiian man, a young prince, as he called you, though he had little conception of what that meant, and neither did I. If you had said then, as you had every right to, that you wanted to grow up, marry the blondest woman you could, live in Ohio, and manage a bank, he would have been horrified, but would he have been horrified by your choices or by your ambition? How brave you’d be, to go all the way to Ohio, to leave behind all the privileges your name guaranteed you, to go where you might as well be Prince Woogawooga, foreign and laughable, your status vanished as soon as you climbed into your little coconut-tree canoe and pushed off the sandy shore of Ooga-ooga!
His idea of what Hawai‘i was, what we were as Hawaiians, was so shallow that, of all the things I am ashamed of today, it is that which affects me the most. Not the fact of it but that I blinded myself to it, that I allowed him to play, and that I sacrificed our lives for that play. All those years he tried to teach you Hawaiian, using an old primer stolen from the university library—you never learned, because he never learned. His lessons about Hawaiian history too were mostly invented, projections of what he hoped had happened rather than what actually had. “We are a land of kings and queens and princes and princesses,” he would say to you, but the truth was that there were only two princes on our land, and they were you and I, and that you cannot have a land full of royalty, because royalty needs people to revere them, or they cease to be royalty.
I would hear him give you these lectures and I would be unable to stop them. With each day, I felt myself less capable of undoing what I had allowed to happen. It was as if I had been delivered to Lipo-wao-nahele—I had not chosen to come there; I had been deposited there, as though some wind had blown me across the island and dropped me beneath the acacia tree. My life, where I lived, had become foreign to me.
It was the Sunday after I had failed to take you to robotics camp that we heard the car. We heard it, and then we saw it, jogging along the stony road. You had spent the last three days stunned by what had happened to you: On Thursday, the day you were to be at robotics camp, you had woken to find yourself still at Lipo-wao-nahele—I think you had hoped that it might be a dream, that you might wake up in your bed at your grandmother’s house—and had flung yourself down upon the ground and sobbed, actually striking your arms and legs against the earth like a parody of a temper tantrum. “Kawika,” I had said, creeping toward you （Edward was walking along the beach）， “Kawika, it’ll be okay.”
Then you had sat abruptly upright, your face wet. “How will it be okay?” you had shouted. “Huh? How?”
I had sat back on my heels. “I don’t know,” I’d had to admit.
“Of course you don’t know,” you’d snarled. “You don’t know anything. You never do.” And then you had returned to crying, and I had crept away. I didn’t blame you. How could I? You were right.
On Friday and Saturday, you lapsed into a silence. You wouldn’t leave the tent, not even to eat. I was worried about you, but Edward was not. “Leave him alone,” he said. “He’ll come out eventually.”
But you didn’t. And so, when the car arrived, you were slow to emerge from the tent, blinking in the sun and staring at it like it was a hallucination. It was only when Uncle William got out from behind the wheel that you gave a weak, animal cry, a kind I’d never heard from you before, and began running toward him, wobbly from dehydration and hunger.
He hadn’t come alone. Your grandmother was in the passenger seat, and Jane and Matthew, looking scared, were in the back. It was your grandmother who took you, pushing you behind her and standing between you and Edward as if he might reach out and hit you. “I don’t know what you’re playing at, I don’t know what you’re doing,” she said. “But I am taking my grandson, and I’m leaving with him.”