How will we know? asks my mother. There are so many people.
A child steps inside a wet circle of rope. A man lifts the rope with a stick, until the child is swallowed by a giant bubble. The girl looks calm like this, inside the wobbling rainbow. I wish I could crawl inside it, too. I’d take an extra layer of anything between me and the world right now, anything to soften the noise. The crowd thickens. The clapping, the drumming, the screaming, the stroller wheels, the voices all coalesce into a dented mirage of sound.
And then I see her. And my mother sees her. And she sees us. And we see her. It’s impossible to say which comes first. It’s impossible to say much more than, We saw her. Hair that looks blue in the sun. The shape of her. My face in her face. My mother’s walk in her walk. The length of her arms. Her chin, the round cheeks. We all know it without knowing. She is mine, ours.
The bubble splats in the air—a wad of liquid, bursting. Behind my sister, a blonde is taking a video on a camcorder. She is the flute player, Contestant number four, from Miami Lakes—my sister’s best friend. We all reach each other.
Hi, is all we say.
My sister.
All of our arms reach out. We dampen each other’s shoulders. We don’t say much more, just, Hi, Hi, the three of us together like that. Our hair all blending. Our height exactly the same. The way it all somehow fits.
Under a tree on the north side of the park, we sit and slide our shoes off, comparing our feet in the grass. The same unfortunate toenails. The ankles. The three of us cannot stop looking and commenting at one another’s faces. The slope of the nose, the ways in which our mouths move when we speak.
Mother. Sister. Daughter. Mother.
She was there all along. How did we miss her? How many times had we opened a door for one another in our lives? How many county fair Ferris wheels? Days rotating our towels on the same beach?
Contestant number four, the flute player from Miami Lakes, takes a photograph of us on my camera.
This’ll be the first photo I have where I look like the other people in it, says my sister.
We walk the streets of SoHo and Chinatown for the rest of the day, holding hands. We stop on each corner and look up at the buildings. I explain our geography, the terra-cotta, this other home of mine, the one I’ve made for myself. I walk hunched beneath the umbra of these buildings every day, but today they are magnificent.
That night, over dinner at a quiet restaurant, my mother begins telling my sister about Samuel. A Good Boy, she says, there was so much love there. I want you to know that you came from love.
My sister nods, listening carefully, and I think this is what she must have looked like as a child. This very expression. This is what I missed.
It’s funny, says my mother, I haven’t seen him in so long, but I can see him now, in you. You have his eyebrows. It’s like I can see him again.
My sister begins to cry. My mother moves from next to me to my sister’s side of the table; she wraps her arms around my sister’s body. Baby girl, it’s okay, she says, rocking her. My baby girl, kissing her on the top of the head exactly like she would to me, like my mother had never missed any time like this, not a moment without her firstborn girl, her hiapo.
JANUARY, 2018
OAHU, HAWAI‘I
I’m thinking of calling the piece Kuleana, I tell my cousin Sarah. We’re drinking beers outside Ala Moana. I’ve been here two weeks retracing my mother’s story—her school, the banyan trees, the shopping mall windows, those rocks behind her childhood home. I held each rock in my hand, as if the light tug of their weight could somehow collapse time, tell me more. Tomorrow, I’ll go back home.
That sounds right, she says.
What’s your interpretation of the term? I ask. Sarah was born and raised here, in Kalihi. She has a deeper understanding of the language than I do.
When I was little, I used to think it meant chores, she says. But it’s much bigger than that. It’s a person’s greatest duty, or responsibility, or privilege.
Right, I say. I think it applies, with my mother’s return to her past, her kids. The bigness of that.
That’s not what I was thinking, she shakes her head.
What were you thinking?
It’s your mother’s Kuleana to be with her children, yes, that’s true, she says. But that’s not why the title works. That’s not the point of this story.
What’s the point?
Your Kuleana, she says. It is your Kuleana to tell it.
This is a secret of my own.
My father has been helping me write these pages. In my dreams, my father stands in our house. It is not burned or blackened or infelicitous, no melted pools of television screens, not yet. My rocking horse is still there, rocking. The air is clear. The dining room table shines. It’s all in one piece—this house—the way I’ve always imagined it could be. So is my father.
Sometimes he says the things I wrote the way I wrote them. We play out the scenes. We have our script. Other times, he says, No, not quite, it didn’t happen like that. My dead father is always moving. I follow him.
I wasn’t standing in the living room for that part, he says. The night of your middle school dance, I was standing right here, by the hall. He brings me to the mouth of the hallway; the light is on. He walks me back and forth through it, buttoning his shirt, tucking it in, rushing, getting ready for something. He disappears into the wall and reappears on the living room couch.
You must get it right, he says. Remember the details, he says. He smooths a comb through his hair. It’s still wet from a shower. I sit down next to my dead father. No one prepares you for the dreams. I want to breathe in the shoulder of his shirt.
I want to breathe in the shoulder of your shirt, I say, but I can’t remember it right. It’s all gone now, I say. The house. The details.
He lights a cigarette. My father is never sick in my dreams. He is not plugged into tubes; he has no oxygen mask. Here, we are both breathing.
What’s missing is always there, he says. He taps the center of my forehead three times.
Relax, he says.
There are so many ways to lose a person. There are so many revisions.
But wait. There’s something else, Hannah says.
We’re sitting in her truck in her driveway upstate. It is midnight, just after my twenty-ninth birthday, and the engine is turned off, the air soured with hay.
It’s not what you think, she says. She rubs at the back of her neck.
Hannah, who’d spent the past month with my family, housing two of my teenage cousins while I’d traveled through July. Hannah, who’d overheard something she should not have heard while I was gone, who’d jerked across a freeway to the side of the road when she’d heard it; she’d stopped and listened again. Hannah, who’d wanted to wait until after I came home to tell me herself, my hands in hers; she’d wanted to wait until after my birthday.
I’m glad she found her sister, is what she’d heard, but where is the brother?
What are you talking about? I say.
I’m still trying to figure it out, she tells me.
That night, in her driveway, I punch the truck’s window until I feel bone.
Let me try this again.
My family, we began with a mannequin.
He was a full-bodied jewelry mannequin: fancy, distinguished. Those were the words we used. When I was two years old, my mother and I lived alone in a canary-yellow apartment in Coconut Grove, Florida. See my mother, single, the crimson-mouthed mistress of my father, a white man in downtown Miami who has been promising to leave his artist wife, his two handsome boys. We needed a man in our home, a figure bigger than us, to scare off all the other men who would come.
This is the story I know.
But let me go truer.