To Paradise

My bed is in the center of the room, which I knew because I’d heard my mother complain about it—Why, she wondered, was it in the center, instead of pressed up against one wall or another?—and yet I was glad of it, because it made the space easier to navigate. Here was the wall of windows that looked over the garden; here was the doorway to the bathroom where I was taken for my baths and showers; here was the door—locked—to, I imagined, the hallway. Here was a chest of drawers, on top of which were a few bottles, some heavy, some light, some glass, some plastic. I opened the top drawers and felt my shorts, my T-shirts. The floor was cold, tile or stone, but as I neared my bed, I encountered a different surface, which I recognized as a woven lauhala mat, satiny beneath my feet, the same kind as I’d had in my room back home. They kept the whole room cool, Jane used to say, and even though they splintered and shagged, they were easy to replace every few months.

After I found my way back to bed, I lay awake for a long time, for I had realized: What if I were to leave? If I could walk, was it not possible that other things would return to me as well? My eyesight, for example? My speech? What if I were to walk out of here one night? What if I were to come find you? Wouldn’t that be a surprise? To see you again, to hold you again? I knew that, in the meantime, I wouldn’t tell anyone, not until I’d practiced more, and, indeed, the walk, as short as it was, had left me panting. But now you know, too. I’m going to come find you—I’m going to walk there myself.

I had been walking as well the day I reencountered Edward. It was 1969, and I had had you for just four months—you weren’t yet a year old. A few times a week, I had Matthew drive us down to Kapi‘olani Park, where I’d push you among the monkeypod and shower trees; sometimes we’d stop to watch the cricket club play their matches. Or sometimes I’d walk you over to Kaimana Beach, where I used to linger to watch the fishermen.

Back then—and maybe even now—it was unusual to see a young man pushing a carriage, and sometimes people would laugh. I never said anything, though, never spoke back, just kept moving. So that morning, when I felt, rather than saw, someone stop to stare, I didn’t think anything of it, and it wasn’t until the person spoke my name that I too stopped, and then only because I recognized the voice.

“How’ve you been?” he asked, as if it had been just a week, rather than nearly a decade, since we had seen each other last.

“Pretty good,” I said, shaking his hand. I had heard he had moved to Los Angeles, where he had gone to college, and told him so, but he shrugged. “I just came back,” he said. Then he looked into the carriage. “Whose baby is that?” he asked.

“Mine,” I said, and he blinked. Another person might have brayed in astonishment, or thought I was joking, but he only nodded. I remembered that he had never joked, and never thought anyone else was joking, either.

“Your son,” he said, as if tasting the word. “Little Kawika,” he said, testing out the name. “Or does he go by ‘David’?”

“No, Kawika,” I said, and he smiled, slightly.

“Good,” he said.

Somehow it was arranged that we should go get something to eat, and we loaded everything into his beat-up car and drove to Chinatown, where we went to my twenty-five-cent wonton min restaurant. On the way, I asked about his mother, and I knew by his silence, the way his face twisted before he answered, that she was dead—breast cancer, he said. It was why he was home.

“I wish I had known,” I said; I felt as if I had been punched. But he shrugged. “It was slow, and then quick,” he said. “She didn’t suffer too much. I buried her in Honoka‘a.”

After that lunch, we began seeing each other again. It wasn’t as if we discussed it: He just told me he’d pick me up on Sunday at noon and we could go to the beach, and I agreed. Over the weeks and then months, we saw more and more of each other, until I was seeing him at least every other day. Curiously, we rarely discussed where he’d been, or where I’d been, or what we’d done in the years since we saw each other last, or why we had drifted apart in the first place. But although the past was not so much forgotten as it was excised, we were both careful—again, without ever discussing it—about not letting my mother discover our renewed communication. When he came, I would wait (sometimes with you, sometimes alone) on the porch if she was out, or at the bottom of the hill if she was home, which is where Edward dropped me off as well.

It’s difficult to remember what we discussed in those days. This may surprise you to hear, but it took me many months to realize that Edward had changed in some fundamental way—I don’t mean the kind of change we all experience when we move from childhood to adulthood, but that, in his beliefs and convictions, he had become someone I no longer recognized. Part of this, I’m embarrassed to say, is that, because he looked very much the same, I assumed he was very much the same. I knew, from television news reports, that the mainland was full of long-haired hippies, and while there were hippies in Honolulu as well, there was no sense of rage, of revolution. Everything came late to Hawai‘i—even our papers carried day-old news—and so, if you had seen Edward then, you wouldn’t have been able to immediately identify him as a political radical by sight alone. Yes, his hair was longer, fluffier, than mine, but it was always clean; the effect was less intimidating than it was merely pretty.