Lani

My sister's question blows a crater, a molten, unsealable hole, deep in my core. It reminds me of Channel 5 News, back when Guy Hagi would warn us. “It's coming, get out while you can,” he'd say, and we ignored him because it never rains when he says it will. But one night lava flowed from the mountain, sizzled into the sea, and turned downtown into black goop. That's how her question feels. 

Lani palms the butt of a ketchup bottle. As it slops onto her spam and rice, she asks again. “What's her name?” 

The bottle spits out the last bits, splattering rice. I don't poke fun at her for always ruining breakfast with ketchup, or need to ask who she's talking about.

I breathe in sea-salt and fried spam-grease, and watch the open window. Curtains billow in the breeze. Outside, above the tops of the mango trees, Kilauea bursts through the clouds. 

“Come on,” Lani says. “I know you know.” 

I shake my head, but I do, and so what. It's okay for me to know. But once Lani does, she’ll look the name up and find the one she's waited her whole life to see. She's not ready, she's too young.

A myna flies past the window and soars to a telephone wire, squawking. It stops before I get up to slam the window shut. That's all we hear these days, mynas and pigeons. 

But our neighbor Miss Yee once told us about Akepa. It had a low whistle and would sing into the noise of the mynas and pigeons, waiting for the same mele in response. 

“What happened to it?” Lani had asked.

“No answa,” Miss Yee said. “Wen die alone, da only one.” 

Now Lani swirls her spoon until the ketchup and rice mash into a glob of pink. She gives me a dim-eyed look, puffy, like when the air is thick and grey from volcano smog. 

“They poke fun at me at school.” Lani shoves her spoon into the rice. “Call me makemake ‘ole.” 

Her bottom lip trembles. She closes her eyes, and for a moment, I close mine too. A table, a chair, an open window, a kitchen—four walls held together by a creaky floor and ceiling, is now her waiting room. She needs an answer, a name.

She grips the silver soon, red dribbling down. “Come on,” she says. “Please.”

I knew this day would come ever since a mobile of a humpback whale family, the baby drifting in slow loops behind its mother, spun above her crib. One day she'd have questions. And the answers would dangle above her head, just out of reach.

Her world is swallowed up by mine, by my white parents with their California accents and hatred for each other. No one in our family looks like her. We look like the ones who churn burial grounds and beaches and forests of Akepas into hotels and military bases and golf courses. 

I step to the sink and scrape most of my plate off into the growling disposal, ‘cause I'm not hungry. Lani drifts beside me and does the same. We're silent, her question louder than the disposal. 

Months ago she stood beside me as we rinsed dirt from taro roots. Hers was pale. She shook it hard and called haoles “pololis,” starving gods never full no matter how much they take. “It's okay, you not like them,” she said. 

Hers stayed smooth, but poison milk seeped from my taro’s overly scrubbed skin. It stung my fingers before I plopped it into a pot of boiling water. Had to stick my fingers into an ice bath to stop the burn. That's what I hate about taro, how it bleeds if you scrub too hard before it's ready.

Now Lani's staring, waiting.

My jaw feels tight, my chest does too.

Her name is Hau’oli Kauhola, she's fifty-one, works at the outlet mall, has high-cheek bones and freckled cheeks like you. 

But I don't say it. Can't tell her how Mom and I checked out Hau’oli a month ago, and thank God, she still looks sober and just paid off her Tacoma. We scroll her social media when we're curious, but Lani’s never even seen a picture. What if Lani’s mom reaches out? Then relapses and breaks Lani’s heart? What if she doesn't? What if Lani loves her more than us?

Lani’s eyes burn into mine. They're not almonds like her mother's, but more round. Her father died years ago. Car accident on the highway, and Lani’s much older half-sister somehow contacted Mom to tell her. She told Mom he'd been looking for Lani since she was born, but the case worker wouldn't give him our names. Neither would her half-sister, to keep him from earning a restraining order or a kidnapping charge. Lani lives without her father’s name, but might carry his eyes. His hopes.

As for me, I was made from my mother’s womb, from my father’s seed. But Lani came the day the hibiscus in Mom's garden bloomed.

Through the window, I watch the dark mountain. They say bodies hide there, buried the traditional way, flesh burned, bones wrapped in ti leaf, and stuffed under the rocks. What I’d do to hide Lani’s pain, to bury it far from town. What I'd do to hide a name, to bury it forever.

Lani's still young, but old enough to know when I'm keeping secrets. And old enough to hate me for it.

The case worker had told Mom about Lani’s mother: about struggles with dope and bipolar disorder before the state plucked Lani from her mother’s arms at six weeks old and placed her into foster care. She told Mom about the many half-siblings scattered over the island like lehua seed in the wind. Mom made me swear not to tell. I meant it, at the time.

Footsteps creak down the hall—Mom. If I'm going to tell Lani, going to speak Hau’oli’s name, I've got to do it now. 

The world falls to a hush. Curtains flow in the breeze, ghost-like and slow. I open my mouth to say it, but Lani shuts her eyes and hums a mele. She does that when her nerves flare up.

I'll speak up, I'll answer Lani's question. But my words would only be noise against the low, sweet sound echoing in the walls of her kitchen-waiting room.