Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(71)

I see, she says. The girl is beautiful, she says.

Your daughter, she’s beautiful, I agree. She looks like you. And like me.

Perhaps, one day, maybe we could meet her? says my mother. Maybe for the holidays?

The next day, we decide to meet in Washington Square Park. It’s two thirty P.M., New York University’s graduation day, so the entire park is bobbing with purple and silver balloons. Families grasp one another by the elbows—I’m so proud of you—the sun throwing stripes of light between them. I am holding my mother’s hand. A banjo player cries out and knocks his kick drum. We wait beneath the arc, circling, looking, my hand a visor over my eyes as my focus shifts from face to face. Will I know?

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.