To Paradise

You know what happened next, Kawika, perhaps better than I do. It was some months after you left—Uncle William told me it was seven months—that Edward drowned, and while his death was declared an accident, I sometimes wonder whether it was intentional. He had come there to find something, but he hadn’t had the strength to find it, and neither had I. I was meant to be his audience, and yet I hadn’t been able to, and without me, he had given up as well.

It was Uncle William who found his body on the beach on one of his visits, and it was that same day—after the police questioned me—that he had taken me back to Honolulu and to the hospital. When I awoke, I was in a room, and I had looked up and had seen the doctor, who was repeating my name and shining a bright white light into my eyes.

The doctor sat next to me and asked me questions: Did I know my name? Did I know where I was? Did I know who the president was? Could I count backward in increments of six from one hundred? I answered, and he wrote my answers down. And then, before he left, he said, “Wika, you won’t remember me, but I know you.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “My name’s Harry Yoshimoto—we went to school together. Do you remember?” But it wasn’t until that night, when I was alone in my bed, that I did remember him: Harry, the boy who had eaten rice sandwiches, and to whom no one had spoken; Harry, the boy I was grateful not to be.

And this was the end. I never returned to our house in the valley. After a while, they brought me here. Eventually, I lost the eyesight that remained; I lost the interest, and then the ability, to do anything. I lay in bed and dreamed, and time blurred and softened, and it was as if I had never made any mistakes. Even you—now, I was told, at another school, on the Big Island—even you, who never visited, even you I could conjure nearby, and sometimes, if I was very lucky, I could even fool myself into pretending I had never known you to begin with. You would be the first Kawika Bingham not to graduate from the school—who knew what else you would be the first Kawika Bingham to do? The first to live abroad, maybe? The first to be someone else? The first to go somewhere very far away, somewhere so far that it made even Hawai‘i look close to someplace else?

I was thinking about this when I woke today, to the sounds of someone crying—crying, but trying not to, her breath coming out in hiccups. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Bingham,” I heard someone say. “But it’s as if he’s willing himself to go—we can only keep him alive if he wants to be.” And then the sound again, that desperate, sad sound, and the voice once more: “I’m sorry, Mrs. Bingham. I’m sorry.”