Edward had shrugged. “I don’t think that’s really up to you, lady,” he said, and I had stepped backward, despite myself. Lady. I had never heard my mother addressed so disrespectfully. “It’s up to your son.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Bishop,” she said, and to you, more gently: “Get in the car, Kawika.”
But you wouldn’t. Instead you looked around her, at me. “Da?” you asked.
“Kawika,” she said, “get in the car. Now.”
“No,” you said. “Not without him.” Him: You meant me.
“For heaven’s sakes, Kawika,” she said, impatient. “He doesn’t want to come.”
“Yes, he does,” you’d insisted. “He doesn’t want to be here, do you, Da? Come home with us.”
“This is his land,” Edward said. “Pure land. Hawaiian land. He’ll stay.”
They began to argue, Edward and your grandmother, and I turned my face to the sky, which was white and hot, too hot for May. They seemed to have forgotten that I existed, that I was standing there, a distance from both of them, the third point in the triangle. But I was no longer listening to them, to Edward’s pablum or your grandmother’s commands; instead, I was looking at Uncle William and Jane and Matthew, the three of them staring not just at the three of us but at the land itself. I saw them noticing the tents, the blue plastic tarp, the cardboard boxes. It had rained two nights before, and the wind had made one side of the tent you and I shared collapse, so that when I slept beneath it, the nylon covered me like a shroud. Our boxes were still damp, and the contents of them—our clothes and your books—were scattered across the field to dry; it appeared as if a bomb had exploded and everything had been tossed about. The tarp was muddy; from the acacia tree hung a dozen plastic bags containing our food supplies, protecting them from the ants and the mongoose. I saw what they were seeing: an unremarkable piece of scrubby land littered with ugly debris—plastic bottles and broken plastic forks, the tarp rustling in the breeze. Lipo-wao-nahele, but we had planted no trees, and the ones that were already there we were using as furniture. The place was now worse than unloved; it was degraded, and it was Edward and I who had degraded it.
They took you away that day. They tried to have me declared incompetent. They tried to declare me an unfit parent. They tried to take away my trust. I say “they,” because Uncle William was the one who was dispatched to （discreetly） talk to someone at Child Protective Services and then to consult an old law-school classmate of his, now a Family Court judge, but I really mean not “they” but “she”： your grandmother.
I cannot blame her now, and I couldn’t then, either. I knew that what I was doing was wrong. I knew that you should stay where you were, that there was no life for you at Lipo-wao-nahele. So why did I let it happen? How could I let it happen? I could tell you that it was because I wanted to share something with you, something that—rightly or wrongly—I had created for us, a realm in which I made decisions for you that I thought might help you in some way, that might enrich you in some way. But that would be untrue. Or I could tell you that it was because I had initially had hopes for Lipo-wao-nahele, for the life we might have there, and that I had been surprised when those hopes were unfulfilled. But that would be untrue as well.
The truth is neither of those things. The truth is far more pathetic. The truth is that I had simply followed someone, and I had surrendered my own life to somebody else, and that, in surrendering mine, I had surrendered yours, too. And that, once I had done so, I didn’t know how to fix what I had done, I didn’t know how to make it right. The truth is that I was weak. The truth is that I was incapable. The truth is that I gave up. The truth is that I gave you up, too.
* * *
—
By fall, we had come to an agreement. I would get to see you two weekends a month at Lipo-wao-nahele, but only if proper accommodations were built for you. You would otherwise reside full-time with your grandmother. If I challenged this in any way, I would be committed. Edward had raged about this, but there was nothing I could do; my mother was still able to circumvent certain processes, and we both understood that if there were a fight between us I would lose—I would lose you, and I would lose my freedom. Though I suppose, by that point, I had already lost both.
My mother came to talk to me just once more, shortly after we had both signed the agreement. It was November, a week or so before Thanksgiving—I was still trying to keep track of the days then. I hadn’t known she was coming. For the past week, a crew of carpenters had been building what would be a small house on the northern edge of the property, in the shadow of the mountain. There would be a room for me, a room for Edward, and a room for you, but furnishings would be provided only for your room. This was not an act of meanness—it had been Edward who had refused Uncle William’s offer, telling him we would sleep outside on lauhala mats.
“I don’t care where you sleep, as long as you sleep inside when the boy’s here,” Uncle William had said.
Our experiment was being tested, Edward said; we must not surrender. We would continue to live as our ancestors once had when you weren’t with us. When you were here, food would be delivered and we would eat it, but when you weren’t, we would catch or forage only, and we would cook it over a fire. We would grow our own taro and sweet potatoes; it was my responsibility to muck out the trench I had dug for our feces and to use it to fertilize our plants. The phone, which had been installed at great expense—there were no telephone lines in the area—would be unplugged once you left; the electricity, which Uncle William had somehow arranged with the state, would go unused. “Don’t you see they’re trying to break us?” he had asked. “Don’t you see this is a test, a way for them to find out how passionate we are?”
It had been raining on the morning your grandmother came to visit me, and I watched as she picked her way across the muddy expanse of grass to where I was lying on the tarp beneath the acacia. The tarp, once a ceiling, was now a floor, and I spent most of my day there, sleeping, waiting for one day to end and the next to begin. Sometimes Edward would try to rouse me, but that happened less and less frequently, and often he would vanish for what might have been hours or might have been days—even as I tried, I was less and less able to distinguish time—and I would be left alone to doze, waking only when I was too hungry to sleep. Sometimes I dreamed of that night in the house when we had heard Bethesda, and would wonder if he had been real or if we had summoned him from some other realm.
She stood over me for a few seconds before she spoke. “Wake up, Wika,” she said, and, when I didn’t move, she knelt and shook my shoulder. “Wika, get up,” she repeated, and I finally did.
She stared at me for a bit, and then she stood. “Get up,” she instructed. “We’re walking.”
I got up and followed her. She was carrying a cloth bag and a tatami mat, which she passed to me. Although it was no longer raining, the sky was still gray, and there was no sun. We walked toward the mountain, and at the monkeypod tree, she gestured for me to unfurl the mat. “I brought us a picnic,” she said, and before I could look around, she added, “He’s not here.”