I lay back down. I closed my eyes. Eventually, I fell asleep, one of those sleeps that feel more real than waking life, so that when I woke—early the next day, Edward still nowhere in sight—I was almost able to convince myself that I could still begin anew.
* * *
—
In the end, my mother was wrong: I didn’t go home again. Not before she knew it, and not ever. Over time, Lipo-wao-nahele became where I was and who I was, although it never stopped feeling temporary, someplace intended only for waiting, though the only thing I was waiting for was the next day to begin.
All around us were signs that the land, never inhabited, would frustrate any attempts to be inhabited, and that any human accommodations it made would be temporary. The house, which was concrete and wood, was ugly and boxy and cheap; only your room was painted, with a bed and a mat on the floor and a light fixture in the ceiling—the other rooms had unfinished Sheetrock walls and, also at Edward’s insistence, plain cement floors.
Even you spent most of your time outdoors on your visits. Not because you liked being outdoors—or at least, not outdoors at Lipo-wao-nahele—but because the house was so bleak, so obviously hostile to human comfort. I looked forward to your visits, too. I wanted to see you. But I also knew that when you were there, and for the days that followed, the food would be better and more diverse and plentiful. On the Thursdays before your visits, Uncle William would drive out with sackloads of groceries; I would keep the empty bags for our supplies. He would plug in the refrigerator—Edward didn’t like to use it—and unload the bottle of milk, the cartons of juice, the oranges and heads of lettuce and patties of beef: all the lovely supermarket goods I had once had whenever I wanted. If Edward wasn’t around, he’d sneak me a few bars of chocolate. The first time he had tried to give them to me, I had refused, but eventually I accepted, and when I did, tears came to his eyes, and he turned away from me. I hid them in a hole I’d dug behind the house, where they would keep cool and where Edward wouldn’t find them.
It was always Uncle William who came, never the clerk or some other functionary from the office, and I wondered why until I realized that it was because my mother didn’t want anyone else to see me, her son, living like this. Uncle William she could trust, but no one else. It was Uncle William, I presumed, who paid for the electricity and the phone line, Uncle William who paid for our fresh water. He brought us toilet paper, and when he left, he took our bundle of trash with him, as there was no garbage service in our area. When our blue tarp finally became so tattered that it resembled a spiderweb, it was Uncle William who brought us a new one, which Edward—for a time—refused to use, until even he had to admit its necessity.
Every time, before he departed for home, he asked me if I wanted to come with him, and every time, I would shake my head. One time, he didn’t ask, and I had been bereft when he left, as if that door too had finally shut, and I was truly all alone, stranded here by only my weakness and my stubbornness: two contradictory qualities, one canceling out the other, so that what remained was stasis.
By the third year, Edward was more and more often away. Uncle William had bought you a kayak for your twelfth birthday and had delivered it to Lipo-wao-nahele; it was a two-seater, so that you and I could go together. But you weren’t interested, and I was too tired, and so Edward commandeered it, and most days he would leave early in the morning and paddle out, past the bay, rounding one of the outcroppings and disappearing. Sometimes he didn’t return until it was dark, and if there wasn’t food left over, I would have to eat what I could find. There was an apple banana tree on the eastern edge of the property, and there were nights in which all I had were those stubby green bananas, starchy and underripe, which gave me stomach cramps but which I was forced to eat. I had become like a dog to him; most days, he remembered to feed me, but when he didn’t, there was little I could do but wait.
We had few possessions, yet somehow the land always appeared to be littered with trash. There were always empty plastic bags, torn and useless, floating about; you had left one of the Hawaiian-language primers outside on one of your visits—intentionally or not, I couldn’t say—and its pages had become fat with water and then had crisped in the sun, and now crackled when a breeze passed over it; debris from projects we’d never begun （a pyramid of coral rocks, another of kindling） were stacked near the acacia. On your visits, you would pace, bored and disgusted, between the house and the tree, back and forth, as if you might walk something else—your friends, a new father—into existence. Once, Uncle William had brought a kite for me to give you on your visit, and although you tried, you could never get it airborne; even the wind had abandoned us.
When you left on Sunday, it was so painful that I couldn’t even get up from beneath the tree to see you to your grandmother’s car. The first time this happened, you called my name three times, coming over and shaking my shoulder. “Tutu!” you shouted. “There’s something wrong with him!”
“No, there’s not, Kawika.” Her voice was weary. “He just can’t get up. Say goodbye and come on now. We have to get home; Jane made you spaghetti and meatballs for dinner.”
I felt you crouch by my side. “Bye, Da,” you said, quietly, “I love you,” and then you leaned over and kissed me, your touch as light as wings, and left. Earlier that day, you’d come upon me holding the side of my face and rocking, which was something I’d begun doing because my tooth hurt so much. “Da, let me see,” you had said, your face worried, and then, when I finally, reluctantly, opened my mouth for you, you had gasped. “Da,” you said, “your tooth looks—looks really gross. Don’t you want to come back into town and get it fixed?” And when I shook my head, groaning again at the pain such a simple movement caused, you sat next to me and patted my back. “Da,” you said, “come home with me.” But I couldn’t. You were thirteen. Every time you visited, it was a reminder of how time had spun forward; every time you left, it was as if time was slowing down again, where I had no future and no past, and had made no mistakes because I had made no decisions, and all there was was possibility.
Eventually, as I knew you must, you stopped coming. You were getting older; you were becoming a man. You were so angry when you came out to Lipo-wao-nahele—angry at your grandmother, angry at Edward, but mostly angry at me. One weekend, one of the last before you stopped coming altogether, shortly after you turned fifteen, you were helping me harvest bamboo shoots, which you had discovered growing on the far side of the mountain two years earlier. They saved me, those bamboo shoots, though they had become too difficult for me to unearth. I was now so weak that Uncle William had stopped asking me to come back to town to see a doctor and had started sending one to me every month. He gave me some drops to keep my eyes from burning, and some drinks that helped make me stronger, and some salves for the insect bites on my face, and some pills to help with my seizures. A dentist came to pull my tooth; he packed the crater with gauze, and left me a tube of ointment to rub into the gum as it healed.
That day, I was very tired. My only job was to hold open an old rice sack so you could drop the shoots into it. After you’d finished, you took the sack from me and slung it over your shoulder, holding out your other hand for me to take so you could lead me back down the hill. You were as tall as I by this point, but much stronger; you held the tips of my fingers gently, like you were afraid of breaking them.