You and Dean and your father were gone, in fact no one was in the viewing cabin. Voices were rising out on the deck. I shifted Kaui from my lap—she complained—and I stood. The voices were clipped into basic commands: We’re going to make a turn, keep pointing, get the preserver. I remember feeling like the sounds were coming from the other side of a cavern, so far away and cotton-stuffed in my head.
I grabbed Kaui’s hand. She was still rubbing her eyes and complaining, but I was already bringing her with me as I climbed the stairs from the viewing cabin to the sundeck. Impossibly white. I had to shade my eyes and squint so hard I felt my lips and gums lift. People were gathered along the cabled rail of the slick white deck, looking into the ocean. Pointing.
I remember seeing your father and Dean. They were maybe thirty feet away from me and Kaui, and I was confused because your father was wrestling Dean back from the rail and Dean was screaming Let go, and I can get him. One of the deckhands in a white polo shirt and baseball hat pitched a red life preserver into the air, and it wobbled and wheeled out into the sky with the rope whipping behind.
Did I run then to your father? Had he pulled Dean off the rail? Was I gripping Kaui’s hand so hard it hurt her? I can assume, but I can’t remember. I only remember that I was at your father’s side then on the blazing-white deck, rising and falling with the waves, and all our family was there, except for you.
Your head was bobbing like a coconut in the ocean. You were getting smaller and farther away and the water was hissing and spanking the boat. I don’t remember anyone saying much of anything, except the captain, calling out from upstairs: “Just keep pointing. We’re turning. Just keep pointing.”
Your head went under and the ocean was flat and clean again.
There was a song playing from the speakers. A tinny, stupidsweet Hawaiian cover of “More Than Words,” which I still can’t listen to, even though I liked it once. The engines churned. The captain was talking from the wheel upstairs, asking Terry to keep pointing. Terry was the one who’d thrown the life preserver that was floating empty in the waves, moving away from where I’d seen your head.
I was tired of being told to point, being told to wait, so I said something to Terry. He made a face. Then his mouth was moving under his mustache, words back at me. And the captain was calling again from above. Your father started in, too, all four of us saying things. I think I finished talking with something that made Terry start, so that his face flushed around his sunglasses. I saw myself in those mirrored lenses, me darker than I thought I was, which I remember made me happy, and my shoulders from basketball, and that I’d stopped squinting my eyes. Then my feet were up on the railing and Terry’s eyebrows were raised and he started to open his mouth at me. He reached for me—I think your father did, too—but I leapt into the big empty ocean.
I hadn’t been swimming long when the sharks passed under me. I remember them first as dark blurs, that the water told me the weight of those animals, a shove of wake against my legs and belly. They passed me and all four of their fins punched the surface, knives on the summit of dark swells, cutting for you. When they reached where your head had been, the sharks dove under. I started to swim after them but the distance might as well have been to Japan. I dunked once to try and see. Underwater there was nothing but a vague darkness and froth where the sharks were. Other dark colors. Pink and chummy ropes rising from the froth—I knew those would be next.
I didn’t have any more breath. I broke the surface and choked in oxygen. If there were sounds, if I yelled, if the boat was closer, I don’t remember. I went back down. The water where you were was all churn. The shapes of the sharks were thrashing, diving, rising, something like a dance.
The next time I went for air you were at the surface, sideways, prone and ragdolling in the mouth of a shark. But the shark was holding you gently, do you understand? It was holding you like you were made of glass, like you were its child. They brought you straight at me, the shark that was holding you carrying its head up, out of the water, like a dog. The faces of those things— I won’t lie. I shut my eyes as they neared, when I was sure they were coming for me, too, and if everyone was yelling and crying out, as I imagine they were, and if I was thinking anything, I don’t remember any of that except the black of my closed eyes and my prayers without a mouth.
The sharks never hit. They passed again below, around me, wake like a strong wind. And then I opened my eyes. You were there at the boat, clutched to a life preserver. Your father reaching down for you—I remember how angry I was at how slow he went, all the time in the world, and I wanted to say, Are you a fucking pau hana county worker? Grab our child, our alive child—and you were coughing, which meant you were breathing, and there was no red cloud in the water.
This wasn’t just one of those things.
Oh my son. Now we know that none of it was. And this was when I started to believe.
2
NAINOA, 2000
Kalihi
Hear the blood hush, then rush, the thud of it coming along my knuckles. Cracked knuckles, swollen knuckles, bloody knuckles. Bloody knuckles used to hit and hurt, not because I wanted to but because my brother made me. This was New Year’s, Black Cat Crackers up and down the cul-de-sac, pop pop pop, whole families in green plastic chairs in their driveways, sidewalks smooched with char and red shreds of paper. The fireworks were going and Skyler and James went behind the garage to play Bloody Knuckles with Dean, and since Dean went, I went, and since I went, Kaui went.
Years already I’d been trying to understand what was inside me, while the rest of the world was trying to tear it out. Especially my brother sometimes. This was one of those nights where he hated me.
Skyler, James, both of them hapa Japanese, tall and round stinking teenagers. James with his braces, glittering and spitty. Skyler with his floppy hair and cheekfields of pimples. Both with their prep-style clothes, all Polo and Abercrombie. And there was my brother with his jaw-length twizzles of hair, baggy Billabongs and too-small Locals Only T-shirt, surfer-dark skin and pursed thick lips. So obvious we didn’t belong, but Dean was always trying to trade up: him and Skyler and James, their knuckles already blistered with blood, laughing and shaking the pain out of their hands.
“Miracle boy’s turn,” James said through his braces, nodding at me.
“Fully,” Skyler agreed, “I think so, yeah, Dean?”
All night my brother had been one-upping them both, James and Skyler. My brother running faster, swearing dirtier, the only one quick enough to cockroach a beer from the adults’ cooler. So cool, all for James and Skyler, since their families had glossy SUVs and heavy dark furniture in their high-ceiling houses, everything Dean wanted to be. But how could he get there, I bet he wondered, besides getting rich boys close enough that maybe he could absorb some of whatever they were that we weren’t.
And me and my brother both knew I was the only one that had done anything for us anyway, because of the sharks, what came after. We’d been on the news and in the papers and every time Mom and Dad had been talking about how poor we were. So then we were getting donation checks and clothing drives and even free food some places, from everyone that had seen and heard the stories Mom and Dad kept telling, how I was lucky to survive the attack but we were so broke that groceries and rent and bills were going to kill us instead.