Do you remember how it begins?
(Maybe:) You are four years old, lying on a cobblestoned floor. It is New Years. Outside, your mother is drinking. Audioslave plays loud enough to shake the shelves across the room that are covered in books you cannot read.
You can hear her through the closed door. You are tired, and this is not your home. So you get up from the deflated air mattress, push open the door. Walk down the hall full of adults to the back lanai, where your mother dances in a bikini. She is on top of a glass table. Someone who is not your father watches her.
The table bows as she moves. You get on a chair. Grab one of her ankles and tug.
She looks at you like you are smaller than small. Like you are the rat in the corner, and she is the dog, waiting. Her grip tightens around the champagne bottle’s neck. She gets down from the table. She pulls you back to the cold room.
Go to sleep, she says.
You tell her the music is too loud.
She says she’ll ask them to turn it down, but you know she won’t. You whine. You fight, if a fight is what happens when a thirty-year-old shoves a four-year-old to the ground. When she screams, you scream; she is drunk, reaching, when you feel her finger in the socket of your eye.
The man who is not your father drives you home in his old Bronco. You sit between him and your mother. The leather of the seat is cold beneath your legs.
You are lucky—it’s just a scratch. But on that ride home, you cry. Not because you want to. But because the tears are the only thing that makes the slice from your mother’s nail feel better. She sits beside you, her hand on your knee, hissing drunkenly at the man, who won’t stop looking at you, who is wondering if you are okay, and you blink and the naupaka passes and you blink and the skeletons of palm trees sway and you blink and when your eyes open, you are home. You don’t sleep, or you don’t think you do. At one point you close your eyes to the shape of something scurrying up the pakalana outside and it’s replaced by the shape of your mother.
She lies beside you. She is still drunk. She is fading, soon to be hungover.
Can I see? she asks.
You look at her and she looks at you. Part of her has disappeared overnight, blocked by the welt raised over your iris.
Oh, sweetheart, she says.
She holds you, and you let her. Her curls press against your face, thick with the sweat of dancing. You think of the swim you took before the party, the fear you felt when she dove into the dark sea. Sun seeps into your room, dappled through the glass of the louvers, and the first light of the new year falls in warm stripes across your face.
(Sometimes you wonder if it begins with you. If it begins, perhaps) On a morning when you are five, she drives you to school in the carpool lane.
Why are we on the wrong side? you ask, the tires beneath you growling.
She swerves, and tells you, it’s opposite day.
It’s spring. Or maybe it’s early summer. The shower trees bloom, their tart scent curling in the half-open car windows. Sometimes, on the weekends, when she is not lifeguarding, on the days she does not drink, she takes you to the park at Wai’alae Iki, where she chases you up and down the freshly mown field, where you pump your legs—higher, higher—on the swing, where you gather sprays of pistachio-shelled flowers in peachy sherbet, gold and pink.
In the car, a bagel rests on your lap. It’s burnt, toasted too long. You pick at the crisped edges and they flake, dusting your denim skirt like the psoriasis on your dad’s pillow.
What’s a carcinogen? you ask, the new word doughy, your mouth full with it.
Did you learn that from your dad?
You did so you don’t answer. You scratch at the burnt bread, searching for the soft center. When she takes the bagel from your hands, she doesn’t look at you, doesn’t brake as she throws it, spinning out the window like a frisbee into the long grass of the median where it bounces once and then is gone.
At the next stoplight, she turns to you.
You are so ungrateful, she says. (Many therapists later, you are still working to unlearn this.)
Her face is blank, but the birthmark on her neck pulses, blooming. The rest of the car ride is silent, and when she drops you off, you wave goodbye to a tinted window.
The worst part is how you think you need her. How you believe her. (How, even now, decades later, and thousands of miles away, she is the one you wish you could call—when you’re sick, when you’re stressed, when you scroll through the phone of the girl you’re dating and realize that you were right, she’s fucking your roommate.)
At eight, you realize she does not know everything.
Sick, home from school, you watch the second season of Stargate Atlantis. Your mom’s taken the day off, but instead of resting, she’s doing chores—right now, she’s out in the yard, raking up curls of dead mango leaves.
Your dad calls to check on you. How you feeling? he asks.
You say you feel fine.
What’s your temp?
You wonder if you should tell him about earlier, how she had you mop the floors, crawling under the kitchen table to make sure every spot was clean. When she’d taken your temperature after, the plastic thermometer was cold and hard against your tongue. She wouldn’t let you see the number when it beeped.
Mom says the thermometer’s broken, you tell him. (Did you believe her?)
Over the phone, you hear a door open. I’m coming to get you.
It is fifteen minutes to the valley he lives in, but he’s at your mom’s in ten. She asks why he’s come.
We’re going to the doctor, he says.
For the first time, she doesn’t stop him. Instead, she watches him help you from the couch, follows as he walks you to his truck. When he closes the door, you roll down the window and lean your forehead against the frame.
Call me, she says. She is scared. She cups your cheek.
At the doctor’s, you find out your fever is a hundred and six. You have pneumonia. They keep the office open after hours to give you an IV. Over the next few weeks, your dad sleeps on the floor besides your bed, waking every few hours to give you medicine. In the mornings, you sit in the big armchair in the living room and lean forward as he taps your back, working out from your spine to the edges of your ribs. You cough tissues full of mucus that is green and rubbery, wet and growing inside you like the toys your mother used to buy, the ones you’d watch expand in bowls of water, leaving them overnight to find pterodactyl or triceratops, fully-formed and slimy. It is hard for you to speak without coughing. But there, in the stale apartment with your father, you feel safe, and when one day you wake up and your bag is packed for school, you don’t want to go, knowing that if you do, you won’t come back, or at least, you’ll only be back once a week. But you go because there is nothing else to do. Your father has taken too many shifts off from the fire station, and besides, you are better. When your mother picks you up from school, you smell her, and the smell is stronger now—pine and salt and something else, something rotting, sweet.
(Could this have been the beginning? Instead of leaving, could you have stayed? Could you have grown up there, with your father, woke up to fried rice in the mornings, and never had to worry about having to dodge a bottle whipped at your face? It is not until college that you realize your father could have fought for you. That he is the one who let you leave. It was easier for him to choose his new girlfriend, to make her his wife. Easier to raise two sons with her than to face his mistakes. And because of this, no matter how often he and your stepmother say you are welcome, you know you cannot stay. You will never belong to them the way you belong to your mother. You will never know who you might have been if the ending had been changed.)
(If it begins, perhaps it is with your mother made unfamiliar. A product of the weeks spent at your father’s, and of the day you were made to leave. Maybe it is something that grows from then to now, widening to fill the space of all the days between.)
There are the weekends you spend with your father and his girlfriend. There are the nights you spend at friend’s sleepovers. There is the school trip in sixth grade.
This is where you meet Kaya. She is funny, and sweet, with black hair thick as a rope (hair that you can still feel now, slipping through your fingers when you fuck your girlfriend, yanking her head back by the braids). She has cheeks you’d love to reach out and trace. At night, Camp Pālehua is cold. You and Kaya and the six other girls take sleeping bags to the floor of your cabin, where you eat chips stolen from the cafeteria and spin the bottle. The days are filled with archery and hiking. You take pictures, lots of them (some you still have, backs sticky from the tape you used in your childhood room). Time rolls out, smooth, before you, and for the first time your future feels like something you can see.
You spend an entire day crossing Kīlauea Caldera. The sun is hot for your descent, and you are grateful when you finally stop to eat. Kaya is in your lunch group, and you sit with her and four other twelve-year-olds around a gnarled ‘Ohi’a tree.
Are those ʻŌhelo? you ask, pointing to the small berries that grow in red globes, ornamenting the green shrubs gathered beneath the ‘Ohi’a.
Eat one and see, one of the boys says.
So you stand and take a handful, even though you know you should not, having been told by your mother how they are sacred to Pele, and you put it in your mouth. You chew, and you swallow, and you wait.
Were you right? Kaya asks, and you nod.
Sitting, you bite into your sandwich, the white Love’s bread sweet after the tart berries. It loosens your puckered mouth. Joining the berries in your stomach—the berries that are the flesh, the bones of Ka ‘Ōhelo, Pele’s sister—the sandwich does not give you any comfort. You find, after your first swallow, that you cannot eat. The teachers tell everyone to pack up lunch, and as you cross the second half of the Caldera, you get what you asked for. You bear the brunt of Pele’s anger, and are not surprised to find that it is much like your mother’s. The storm builds, and during your last mile, it breaks. It is cold enough there, on the top of the volcano, that it is not rain, but hail. The small balls of ice gather in your collar, in your hair, in the space between your socks and shoes. There, they melt in the heat from your body, so when you get to the bus you are shivering, soaked with sweat and sky.
That night, you lay in the bunk below Kaya, hot with fever, but you do not cry. (Part of you still believes that you deserved this. That in this, at least, your mother was right.)
The next day you leave. On the way out, your class stops one last time to sightsee. Trailing behind Kaya, you take a lava rock path out of the parking lot. The rainforest opens to a field. You walk over cinder and through clouds. Mist hangs over everything. At the end of the path, there is a lookout. Leaning against the metal railing, you warm your fingers, cold from elevation, in the steam that rises from fractures at the Caldera’s edge. A gust of wind blows, clearing the clouds, and just then, Kaya takes your hand. You forget Pele and your mother. Together, you look out at the Caldera, where, years ago, lava first sprung, pushing itself free.
Though Kaya is your first secret, your teenage years are full of them. There is the money for field trips that you use to buy weed from the forty-year-old next door. There are the sleepovers you plan at your girlfriend’s house so you can spend the night fucking. There is the boy you bring home for your mother to meet, not telling her you are dating his sister. At parties, you drink, but you tell yourself that you will not take it too far (which now, in your late twenties, as you wake up on the front lawn of the house you rent in Los Angeles, you realize is a lie).
You are seventeen when you let yourself slip.
(When you ask for the beginning, this is the one she will give.)
You leave your phone on the counter, and when you come back, she is scrolling. She reads a text out loud.
Just checking to see if you’re okay. Let me know if you need anything. I love you.
It is the most recent text, one from your girlfriend, Shelley. It is the one that lit up your phone while you were peeing. With each word your mother reads, her hand tightens around your phone, and as you watch her, you feel the ghost of her fingers wrap around your throat. You reach for your phone, but she holds it behind her.
Do you love her? she says.
Like your love is something to be ashamed of. Like you are someone to be shamed.
What could you possibly need from her? Why, she asks, wouldn’t you be okay?
You remember her dragging you through the sand by your hair. How, once, she stopped on the freeway to yell at a woman who’d been tailgating. The strike of her belt, cool air rushing in with a sting. It is hard to breathe.
She drops your phone in the trash and walks out of the house to the yard, where she kneels in front of the green ti. She starts on the old leaves first. They are dry and shriveled, separating from the stalk without a sound. Soon they are gone, and she goes for the still-green leaves. They come off in handfuls—snapping, sappy. When you fish your phone from the bottom of the trash, it is slippery with the watery whites of eggs, rimmed in the brown of decomposing arugula.
◆
She Says, in a Letter: I love you. No matter what. I hate that you’re so far away. I raised you the best I could; I didn’t know any better. I hope you can forgive me. I know the mistakes I made.
It feels, more and more, like you’re pushing me from you. Whatever. I have no idea. I hope you can remember that I love you—I want the best for you—I accept you—that’s right, even now. I pray that you’re alright. I pray that your journey has substance. I pray that life’s worth living. That’s what I work for every day.
Your Dad Says, on the Phone: You’re grown now. She shouldn’t have this power over you. You can’t let her make you feel this way. If you want, write her a letter. That way, you can say what you need to without her getting in the way.
◆
(But still. It’s not just what you’ve been told. But still. Like all good stories, there are gaps in the truth. There is space between what’s seen and unseen.)
In your childhood, there are moments of joy. There are mornings you hike Hawai`i Loa’s switchbacked ridges, through rusted soil and whispering ironwoods, to the very top, where, by your mother’s side, you stand atop everything. There are afternoons you circle the gardens of Koko Crater, searching for the last wiliwili, stopping to measure the cactus’ spine against your hand, standing beneath the leaning acacia, palms on its flaking trunk, marveling at how its feathered leaves filter everything green.
There is that sunset on the beach. The dinner spread over fraying towels, your mother’s face limned with the last of the day. She turns to you, hands full of gyro, fingers laced in prayer, her pinky holding the last falafel, that’s about to slide free.
Do you remember the good times? she asks. There is mint in her teeth. When you were little, we planted cosmos in the front yard. We gathered caterpillars from the crown flower, and gave them milky leaves to eat. We went to the beach like this every morning, before I had to go to work. She puts the gyro down. She is crying. You were a good baby. So still I could paint your nails in your sleep. I did everything for you. You are everything to me.
As she speaks, outlines of other memories take shape. Her reading to you in bed, feet on your pillows, head where your feet should be. Her hands supporting the mango picker while you stole the neighbors’ crop, so when you hooked the heavy fruit, it wouldn’t bring the basket crashing down, but lower it slowly, sure and steady. The sprinklers she put up in the yard, ones you screamed and ran through while she shot you with the hose, because when you were five it was the only way you’d let yourself be cleaned.
(And sometimes, when you forgive her, you imagine this as the beginning. You imagine this as what sets you and your mother free.)
(You know it is constantly beginning. You know that, in some ways, it is ending. That it ended that night.) You are twenty-one and back home, after four years at university. You are making your mother dinner. She picks the fight—criticizing your dicing—but you are the first to yell. When she throws your glass at your feet it shatters, and the pop sounds just like the fireworks did on that night when you were four.
She follows you as you back out of the kitchen and into the living room. She holds the mop in hand, winding up to swing. But the handle is too long; it hits the floor, gets stuck in the drywall of the ceiling. When she finally follows through, you have your hand out. the plastic snaps in your palm. So you push her like she pushed you and she falls too easily. You realize she is old now. You realize she is weak.
She looks up, and you see yourself how she sees you. You see her how you saw her seventeen years ago—from the cobblestoned floor, on your knees. You want to help her, but instead you run—out the door and to the front yard, where you sit on the zoysia, blades like a bed of nails beneath your thighs. Before you, the Cosmos sway, bald from the late summer rain. The sky darkens through the curved leaves of the plumeria tree.
◆
What would your mother say if she found you now—twenty-nine and half-drunk on the grass, eyes swollen from a hangover, maybe from puking. You listen to the cars on Fairfax. When your roommate walks out on his way to work he sees you lying on your back. He stops for a moment and looks about to speak. You remember his hand on your girlfriend’s back at the bar last night. You remember her laughing, head thrown back, the way his fingers traced her jaw, thinking you wouldn’t see. You turn on your side and hear him walk to his car, start it. He leaves.
In front of your house there is a rose bush. It is an explosion of pink. One of its flowers hangs in front of your face, petals jeweled in dew, some of them fallen to the grass, where they lie like cups—overturned and on their sides and right side up, holding nothing but air and the light of morning. You think of your mother in her garden. You think of your mother waving at you to come, come into the water! as she jumped through waves. You think of her letter, and wonder what—if—you will write back. You get up to break the rose from the bush. You peel its petals back one by one—letting them fall around your feet like a wreath. When you get to the rose’s yellow center, it stares up at you like an eye. You let the naked center fall to the grass. There, it lies in the indent that your body made.
Soon, the petals will be raked up by the yardman, scooped into the green garbage where they will be taken with the rest of the yard trimmings to be made into mulch and soil, to be spread in a park or another yard where they will line new flowerbeds, be patted down around the sapling of a tree. When you begin again, it will be here. You will begin again as me.