Setting
My dad still has the secret ranch on the Big Island. It looks like a banana plantation, but it isn’t. The banana plants don’t extend very far within the ranch’s perimeter. The bananas are a lie.
I am asked to reveal what I remember. I remember red dirt roads, steel gates, and signs painted with the words NO TRESPASSING. I remember the large holes in the ground, pits covered with blankets of grass. One of the holes was filled with sand so I could have a sandbox to play in. I remember the bananas — apple bananas, small and sweet. Lies can taste good. I haven’t been to the ranch in fifteen years.
Besides the bananas, my dad raises chickens and grows red ginger and marijuana. I’m not sure how large his drug operation is or how much money he makes. I know that he smokes a lot of pot, but not so much for recreational purposes. It’s more about testing his wares. He rolls joints. He doesn’t own a bong, hookah, pipe, chillum, vaporizer, scale, dugout system, grinder, or steamroller. He’s old school.
I currently live in Colorado and am about to graduate from an expensive liberal-arts college where students try their best to look dirty and poor. These kids love their pot accessories, and they like to make sure their apparatuses are unique. They buy pipes with unusual shapes and give them names such as the “Purple Devil” or the “Reverend.”
There are many types of potheads here: The hippie smokers tossing Frisbees out on the quad. The blunt-smoking variety sitting on porch steps, mouthing Eazy-E lyrics and dipping their heads in time to break beats. There are the wake-and-bakers, who roll out of bed and feed immediately, loading their devices as if preparing bowls of oatmeal. The most common type of smoker is the kind who lives by the clock, practitioner of the righteous 4:20 dorm-room bong hit.
What kind of smoker am I? I’m none of the above. For me pot is something else entirely. It’s my home, my original setting. It’s my father. It could have been my inherited trade. Like steel, or plastics, or blacksmithing, it’s all in the family; it gets passed on.
My dad used to send me samples from his plantation every now and then, reminding me he was still in business — delivering his message via shimmering buds, hairy and fat beneath the brown packaging and coffee beans, seriously reeking.
Choosing A Subject
I shouldn’t write about my father. In one of his novels, Charles Dickens creates a horrendous character modeled on his father. When people read the novel, though, they sympathize with the character. I don’t want to make that mistake.
I guess I’ll say that my dad’s Hawaiian, Tahitian, Samoan, et cetera — a mutt — but I won’t give him a name. I guess I’ll say that he no longer sends me packages because four months ago he was arrested, and he currently lives in jail. The prosecutor, Allen Bernard, wants me to reveal what I remember about the ranch: I tell him I remember red dirt roads.
When I was six, my mother had to leave my father. She admitted she needed essentials, like a BMW and white leather pants. She was twenty-five and past the slumming-it stage. It was time to return to her upper-middle-class roots, and she took me with her. We moved to Oahu and forgot.
Her name is Madeline. Maddie. She is what you would call a “go-getter.” She plans parties. That’s her job. She focuses on details. She wraps tent poles with ti leaves. She puts glitter in pools. Nothing is spared. To make up for those preschool years I spent in squalor, she treated me to good things: tennis camp, private school, a miniature horse named Rambo, a white Volkswagen Cabriolet. In our new life there were social ladders everywhere, and my mother climbed them with ease. I can’t imagine her living on the ranch: my bleached-blond mother in generic jeans gazing upon the fat of the land from her spot on top of the food chain. She says she was rebelling against her parents but grew tired of it because they weren’t watching and, in her words, “rebelling was so unfashionable. I always looked like an activist, or a feminist.”
When I ask her about our old rustic life, she tells me how cute I was, running around naked. My chore was to feed the chickens, and she says I would stand on a footstool to scatter the corn so the chickens knew who was boss.
Now she is married to a strapping banker. He’s heavy in the ass, a slurper of soup and a wearer of small running shorts. Hugh. He used to be an infamous lifeguard who entertained female tourists by saving them when they weren’t drowning. He was known for wearing slacks and collared shirts to the beach, and for a brief time in the late sixties the look caught on. Hugh influenced fashion trends.
Significant Details
My dad called me on some birthdays: my tenth, my thirteenth, my fifteenth. The conversations were always an exercise in call-and-response, similar to the blues, yet without the passion and distress, leaving only the humor and double meanings. I haven’t gotten a phone call in a long time. Before he went to jail there were just smelly packages with the occasional note. His last note read: “They got planes circling my property. Planes with heat detectors. I don’t use heat lamps, you lolos! Keep on circling! Aloha, Dad.”
The note also said that the police were destroying his crops, and that weed was decreasing in popularity due to the meth epidemic — in his words, “Locals like tweak now. Factory jobs. Pot, forget it.”
The prosecutor, Allen Bernard, wants me to testify against my father. I don’t know all the details, not even what he’s charged with, but I know Allen Bernard isn’t concerned with whether my father has sent me marijuana. He wants to know what I remember about the ranch. What was it like growing up there? What did the property look like? Were there pit traps covered with blankets of grass? Did I ever fall into one of these traps?
Apparently a little girl wandered off from her house and fell into a very big man-made hole. My dad got her out. My dad says he wasn’t aware of any marijuana growing on his three-hundred-acre property or of any holes. He would have filled them in if he had known of their existence. Allen Bernard is sure he did know of their existence, and he’s looking for me to help impeach my father’s testimony.
Allen Bernard doesn’t realize that I don’t know my father. He doesn’t realize because I’m too ashamed to tell him. He says there’s no stronger bond than the one between a father and a daughter, and that he understands if my memory isn’t “up to par.” “But you know what’s right and what’s wrong,” he says. “And you’ll do what’s right, because you love him.”
“Yes,” I say. “I love him.” I want to please Allen Bernard. There’s something about his voice that makes me want to wear an apron and cook meatloaf constantly. I tell Allen Bernard that I’m highly conflicted and tormented. “I don’t know if I remember holes in the ground. I remember the roads, the chickens. I was just a little girl.” I love our dramatic conversations. I imagine him on the other end of the phone: chestnut hair, a wad of gum on his tongue, fingers snapping for his assistant to hand him a notepad and pen. Sex-y.
“Does your father frighten you?” he once asked.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Bernard,” I said. “Very, very much.”
Regional Dialect
Since age six, I have seen my dad twice. He’s like a whale that way: rarely surfacing. My most recent sighting came the year I graduated from high school. My grandmother on his side invited me to their family reunion that summer — she said it was about time I met my relatives.
At the reunion my dad and I talked between rounds of drunken ukulele fun. He had an earring, a tattoo, and a beer. He was tan and muscled. He looked like someone I would make out with. That was weird. I asked if I could visit him, and he said, “Yeah. We’ll see.” I asked for his phone number. He said he’d give it to me later. I wondered why he didn’t want me around, why he didn’t invite me to the ranch. I could clearly picture myself there. I imagined living with him — being an outlaw, being wanted. Sometimes, in my fantasies, I brought my life on Oahu with me. In my imagination, it all worked out. My mother would be redecorating the ranch house, creating the illusion of space with mirrors and bold stripes. Hugh would be there, too, adding that special yucky something, a key ingredient, like baking soda. The banker, the decorator, the drug lord, and the child. An odd, yet functional, family unit.
At the party we ate sea urchins and opihi shells — creatures he had plucked from reefs earlier that day.
“Why don’t you want me to visit?” I asked.
“Here,” he said. “I got something for you.”
He searched through his backpack and brought out a jean jacket cut in a distinct eighties style, but not in a cool, retro sort of way. It was obviously from the children’s department, perhaps the young-teen racks. I put it on. The cuffs were at my elbows. The waistband was about five inches below my boobs. I turned up the collar.
“A cropped jean jacket,” I said. “I love it, Dad.” I wanted to say the word dad. His effort made me so hopeful. It made me feel normal. I didn’t care that the jacket was acid-washed, sold by Sears, worn by the New Kids on the Block. I thought that this must be what families did — buy each other bad gifts and say thank you. “Thank you, Dad.” I gave him a hug and pretended I was a girl with a good father. I asked for his phone number again, and he squeezed me hard and began to sing. He had a falsetto voice, beautiful and steady. He sang “The Queen’s Prayer,” a haunting, mournful song the last Hawaiian queen wrote in jail while the monarchy was being overthrown. I knew the English translation; in grade school we’d been forced to memorize it in chapel. “Forgive the sins of man,” the song said. “Your mercy is as high as heaven.” Was he sending me a message?
“Why are you singing this?” I asked.
“It’s what the band’s playing,” he said, and I heard the faint strumming. At the “amen” we stopped hugging. Our eyes were wet. We looked away from each other.
“Sad song,” I said.
“Going to get a beer,” he said.
I never got his number. I wasn’t angry with him, though I wanted to be. It’s hard to explain. Logically, I should have been upset. All I wanted then — and have wanted for some time now — was for him to want to see me. I have wanted to return to my original home. But at the reunion I wasn’t angry. I was drunk. I sat at the table and looked at the food: the black lumps of boneless bodies coming out of their hard shells. I felt my own body encased in that jacket, arms paralyzed by the unyielding sleeves, back pushing against the seams. I thought that maybe this was how life was supposed to be — nothing’s supposed to be contained. Outsides will stay the same, but the insides will grow and grow. Nothing will ever fit, and that’s the way everything will fit — by not fitting.
That night a little cousin introduced me to everyone as her “auntie” and kept trying to hold my hand. I walked around among the strangers, my family, thinking of liquids: the sperm that made me, his blood that’s in me, the sweat on this cousin’s small hand, all hidden. I had to talk pidgin or not talk at all with this side of the family in order for them to like me and not think I was some white bitch. Here’s a bit of conversation:
Them: “Keolani, girl, how you been? Long time no see, ah? You going schoo on da mainlan? Ho, you smart, ah? Like Erin Brockovich.”
Me: “Yeah.”
Minor Characters
Quotations from my boyfriend, Nathan:
“Families are like bony shoulders we’re supposed to be comfortable sitting on.”
“I am in love with you, K.”
“Do you want to have sex?”
I think Nathan loves my background, but not me, necessarily. He loves the fact that I’m in pain, though I’m not sure he believes my pain is real. He says my desire to see my dad and return home is a “classic plot” and that he understands my need to “journey into the heart of darkness.”
He wants so badly to be compelling, tries to distinguish himself by talking endlessly about Bakhtin and Foucault, Keats and sestinas. Doesn’t he know that all schoolboys are impassioned about the same things: oil, Tibet, Thelonious Monk, Fritz Lang? High-school boys were this way too — constantly repeating themselves — yet they were dumb and angry, masculine. But I can’t love them anymore. I have to love the Nathans, because I’m growing up. Lately, at the coffee shop, I force myself to eat the biscotti instead of the fudgy cookie. I have to take these small steps.
Nathan would hate this outline. He’d say that it’s clever, but that gimmicks are keeping me from true emotional discovery. “How does this self-deconstructing form explain your emotional life?” he’d ask. Perhaps I need his voice in my head.
Quotations from my friend Lydia:
“You’re crying ’cause your dad grows herb? Shit.”
“You’re crying ’cause your dad won’t give you his phone number? My dad used to hit me, OK?”
“You had a Mongoose bike and a Cabriolet. You want to know what I had? A doll made out of chicken bones.”
Lydia sits in front of Nathan and me in “Intergenerational Equity: Budgets, Debt, and Generation X.” She gives me perspective. She definitely has me trumped with the whole abuse-and-chicken-bones thing. She is the opposite of Nathan. I believe poignancy gives her hives. Hers is another voice I like to have in my head. Be distant, it says. Don’t articulate the thing that’s most upsetting. Allocate your scarce resources wisely. Use irony and an unorthodox structure. Make it funny. This will make more sense.
Quotations from my playwriting teacher:
“You have great experiences to recall from.”
“Take advantage of your pain.”
“Do you want to have sex?”
I interpreted his advice this way: Exploit your pain. Become phony and superficial, indifferent, like stage directions or the parentheses that contain them.
After a while I tore up these directions. There is nothing worse than comparing tragedies, competing. He said I had misunderstood; he’d meant that I could create art from tragedy. I could paint, dance, act, or write it into form. Begin with an outline, he said: a blueprint, a frame.
And then he added: “But don’t write about college. No one wants to read about life in college. And you’re not going to write about us, are you? Don’t write about us.”
I told him that I wouldn’t say a word, and I won’t — at least, not in this outline. But he has given me other advice that I plan on taking one day: “Give yourself permission to say anything you want; once it hits the page, it’s fiction.”
The last of the minor characters are my roommates Tim and Jolene. They’re amazing. They climb mountains as if they were apartment steps. I try to see life through their eyes — as something to belay across, row through. Their post-graduation plans include heli-skiing in Alaska, then moving to some large city (they’re not sure which one) to help homeless people.
They say, “I love you,” each time they part. I scoff at them. I envy them. They take turns doing each other’s laundry and paying for birth-control pills. They play board games and do fun runs, and they loved my dad’s packages, so I usually gave it all to them. I passed it on.
Scenes
When K. first gets to Colorado, she drives. She drives on icy roads. She drives on highways and over coiled passes. She reads the signs: I-25, Loveland Pass, Low Visibility, Snow Route. North, South, East, West. These words are exotic. These are real directions. In Hawaii, it’s either mauka or makai — “mountains” or “ocean.” She cannot stop driving. She can’t believe that you can drive for an hour and be in an altogether different place.
K. is flying home for Christmas. The flight attendant announces that she will be passing out pencils and scratch paper for those who want to play Halfway to Hawaii. Whoever guesses the time they’ll be halfway there, or comes closest, will win a bottle of champagne. The flight attendant tells them the exact time they left LAX. She tells them how fast they are going, and how much head wind they are encountering. She tells them the distance the flight covers, and when they are expected to arrive.
K. writes down the facts. She wants to win, and she tries to remember algebra equations from high school. She’s an econ major, for Christ’s sake — she should know this. Is it distance = rate × time? Then to find the time, distance must be divided by rate? She doesn’t know. She has no idea how head wind is supposed to figure in. Plus she forgets about time zones.
The answer is 5:27 P.M. Seat 12D is the winner. K. can see parts of him, the winner, from where she is seated. She can see his fingers drumming a beat on the armrest. She can see the top of his head, his brown hair gelled to one side, except for a single strand that points to the roof of the plane and trembles under the ventilation. When the flight attendant comes by with his reward, K. sees his hand grip the neck of the bottle.
“That should’ve been mine,” K. says, and the man turns to look back at her. He has good bone structure, whatever that means. He has the kind of face that winners and bankers have. K. smiles to let him know she’s joking. Ha, ha. She’s a funny girl. She’s full of wisecracks.
“Shoulda, woulda, coulda,” the man says, then turns to face forward.
K. looks at her watch and waits. At 5:27 she looks out her window, and for a minute she sees what halfway looks like: Ocean and air. No landmarks, nothing at rest. From the height of the plane, the ocean looks calm, inviting even. But she knows that up close it would be choppy and nearly impossible to swim in. Up close it would be exhausting.
What Does She Want?
Soon I will have a piece of paper saying that I majored in economics and minored in creative writing. I don’t know what I’ll do with this information. I’d like to follow in my parents’ footsteps. Pot grower and trophy wife are decent professions, practically recession-proof, and they have awesome fringe benefits.
Earlier this year, before the arrest, I called my mom and told her I wanted to see my dad. I asked for directions home. I’d never asked her for his phone number before, because I always wanted him to be the one who gave it to me; but this time I asked. She told me she thought visiting him wasn’t a good idea.
“You have a different life now,” she said. “Don’t you like what I’ve given you? What have I done wrong?”
My senior thesis explores Congress’s unwillingness to apply basic economic principles to drug policy, and how ignoring economic forces will prove impractical over the long term. This isn’t earth-shattering, but I enjoy its relation to my father’s career.
I told my mother I was going to see him to claim my inheritance, my trade, and that this wasn’t about who was the better parent. It wasn’t about love. This was about economics. This was about utilizing my BA.
Critical Moment
But it was about love. And forgiveness. I wanted to go to my father, sit him down, and tell him that I didn’t know half of me: I didn’t remember the ranch, the lessons in getting by, the importance of wearing camouflage. I didn’t remember how to speak pidgin, and I didn’t want to feel like a tourist when I was around his half of the family. I wanted to belong. I wanted to know that part of me. When he wouldn’t let me see him, it was as if an entire culture, an entire history, wouldn’t let me in.
So here’s what I wanted: I wanted access. I wanted post-graduation employment. I wanted to stand before him on my little painted footstool, evoking my old chore: feeding the chickens. I’d tell him that I wanted to start from scratch, and I’d say, “Should I feed the damn chickens, or should I tear them apart?”
I didn’t do that, of course, but I did get his number, and I did call. And I’m sure that, now that my dad needs me to be on his side, he regrets his half of our conversation, because whenever I think about that call, I think of Allen Bernard and my strong desire to please him. I think of how badly I want someone in this world to understand where I’m coming from.
Critical Answer
He said he no longer raised chickens.
He asked how I’d gotten his number.
“I’m resourceful,” I said. “I’m a good worker.” I prepared to launch into my Big Proposal. This was an important day for me; it was the day I would ask him if I could come home, and it was the day I would finally get an answer.
“I sampled the last batch,” I said.
“Good stuff, right?” he said.
“You should really consider growing pot that allows a functional high. You know — weed you can smoke during the day.” I reminded him of the people in factories, working long hours, how they’d switched to meth. I suggested he branch out to the States, target students and professionals. “Kids here look at this stuff as if it’s legendary, island lore,” I said. “Why not cultivate the romance? Kona Gold. Puna Butter. These are magical words to hippies in Saabs. The money they drop on an ounce is more than twice the price of an ounce of gold.”
“I only grow,” he said. “Do you need money?”
I was on the deck of my apartment, and Pikes Peak, a glimmering bulk of rock in the distance, was giving me courage. I had done my research. I continued: “No, I don’t need money. I would like to help you on the ranch. We can get to know each other. I studied economics. We can teach each other things. Tit for tat, or whatever. For example, I’m thinking, instead of growing plants the size of Christmas trees, we could try crossbreeding small, fast-growing plants in pots that can be quickly moved, so the narcs can’t pull them up.”
My father didn’t respond.
“We could even plant decoys,” I said.
I envisioned the house, remembered the tin roof. I imagined it rusting beautifully — the blues and red-oranges against the surrounding green banana and marijuana leaves. I imagined him greeting me, stepping from a small clearing between patches of tall ferns, carrying a stalk of red ginger. His hair would smell like mud, and walking beside him to the house, every now and then I would get a whiff, familiar, yet unfamiliar: the flat, plant scent of marijuana buds not yet plucked, ripening in the wetness.
Unexpected And Inevitable
I found out I had a stepmother. She was on the other extension, listening. After my last comment she said, “Stop suggesting things. You sound like one missionary. Next thing you know she going buy us out then name the ranch after herself.” Click.
“Wife,” my dad said. “Sorry.”
“Oh,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“She helps me out,” he said.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t care about learning the business. I was just trying to find a connection. Forget everything I said. I want to visit, and we can talk then. We’ll talk about anything you want to talk about.”
What came next is predictable. Everyone wants the person or the parent who is absent. Being scarce is the best way to be desirable, something I should have known from economics. Things are valuable when they’re hard to find. Marijuana and my father are essentially weeds: if legal or easily obtained, they’d be less valuable than corn. My distortion of basic supply-and-demand dynamics had rendered an otherwise worthless crop extremely precious. Like the drug war, I provided price supports for organized crime.
“I’m glad Mom took you,” he said to me. “You’re smart. You got one nice house, I bet. You can be someone someday. You don’t want this.”
“I don’t know what ‘this’ means,” I said. “Forget about my stupid pot suggestions. I just want to visit. That’s all.” I swallowed a pain in my throat. “What’s that noise?” I asked.
“Water boiling. I’m boiling peanuts.”
Boiled peanuts. I remembered eating them at the family reunion — the soft shells, the salty straw smell. The gulping sound of the boiling water made me feel breathless. It suggested someone exhaling underwater, drowning.
“Why can I hear the water? It’s so loud.”
“Phone picks up background noise. Mess with recordings, just in case, you know, someone went tap the line.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Keolani, girl,” he said, “you too good for this place.”
“No I’m not,” I said. “It’s where I’m from. Just one visit. Just one time.”
“Nah,” he said. “You know. The wife. Getting you here. Bumbye one hassle. Too dangerous.”
My father, I realized, was breaking up with me. “You make no sense,” I said. “I can barely understand your language. And my name is K. Just K.”
The secret ranch. The secret rain forest. I suddenly remembered the discarded buds of marijuana, using them instead of dolls in my sandbox. I’d hold their stems and make the buds kiss. I’d squeeze the awapuhi sap out of a red-ginger plant and wash their rough green skin with it. I’d have them talk to each other. One would say, “I’m not happy here,” and the other would say, “But it’s paradise.”
“Don’t send me anything anymore,” I said to my dad. “And don’t call.” I quickly realized my mistake: I didn’t have to tell him not to contact me. And he hasn’t contacted me since.
Now, thanks to Allen Bernard, I have the power to hurt him.
I also have the power to forgive him. I think of “The Queen’s Prayer”: “Your mercy is as high as heaven. Behold not with malevolence the sins of man but forgive and cleanse.”
Denouement
I retrieve my dad’s most recent package from my closet. I invite Tim and Jolene, Nathan and Lydia to join me in smoking the last of him. It’s my big finale. It’s cleansing time.
I sit next to Nathan on the living-room couch. Lydia takes the recliner. Tim and Jolene sit on inflatable sleeping mats. They wear identical outfits: fleeces and shorts, socks and Tevas.
Like me, Nathan doesn’t smoke very much, but unlike me he has poor pot etiquette. He makes bad jokes, says, “Like, groovy, man. Like, pass the ganja,” and he coughs for so long it scares all of us.
We talk about our post-graduation plans. Nathan is going to Nepal to get closer to his soul and to help those whom he sees as less fortunate. I imagine him bartering for their lesser fortunes on the narrow streets.
Lydia is going to Georgetown Law School. She takes the joint from Nathan and shivers as she inhales. “Reminds me of my ghetto youth,” she says.
Nathan rolls his eyes. “People just love to talk about when they were bad,” he says, “or the bad things that happened to them.”
I take the joint: suck, swallow, blow, pass.
“Wow,” Tim says. “That was elegant. You’re like the John Coltrane of smoking.”
“Lydia’s the Whitney Houston,” Nathan says. He imitates her quivering inhalation.
“All I want to do is eat salty foods,” Jolene says after she’s taken her turn.
“I know,” I say. “My dad is growing the wrong kind. I tried to tell him.”
“Your dad’s awesome,” Tim says. “Did he come to Career Day at your school?”
Everyone laughs. Nathan sounds like a sheep bleating. A stoned sheep bleating.
No one knows he’s in jail. No one knows I could help keep him there.
“Oh my God,” Nathan says. “Show them the yearbook.”
“No,” I say.
“Come on,” Nathan says.
Nathan always urges me to resist humor in my writing, and now he’s urging me to get the yearbook. He’s insisting on funny.
I get the yearbook and return.
It’s my mom’s yearbook from her senior year at Kalaheo High. I turn to her glossy, dreamy photograph. Her eyes sparkle; her blond hair is ironed straight. She wears a dress stamped with bold floral prints and a puka-shell necklace. Every senior picture floats above a quote meant to illustrate the person you are, or the person you want people to think you are. A saying to encapsulate you, circa 1972. The girl next to my mother, her quote says: “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I’d like to hold it in my arms and keep it company.”
The quote under my mother’s senior picture reads: “I’ve got a book of matches.”
“It doesn’t make sense without his,” Nathan says, and he flips through the pages and points to my dad. My dad wears a stiff palaka shirt and a puka-shell necklace. He looks so strong and young, ready to pounce right out of the page. The quote under his picture: “Come on, baby, light my fire.”
It shocks me every time. They don’t seem to be my parents. They could be my friends, a couple like Tim and Jolene, or Nathan and me, young and childless. I glance up, and everyone is laughing silently, and I feel ashamed.
“You just know they were stoned when they wrote that,” Tim says. “They were totally high.”
Epiphany
I think about my mother’s beautiful house, my bedroom and its sliding glass door with wood trim. Every morning I would wake to the sound of chattering birds and the looming green of the mountain range upon which Hawaiian tribes had battled. From my four-poster bed I’d inhale the scent of lychee bleeding through the wire screen behind the wooden jalousies. I would walk to the kitchen, where a woman named Lehua would be making me breakfast. This is where I belong. This is the place I love. I’ve always been embarrassed by my father, and he has been embarrassed by me. His half of me is extinct.
It’s not so much an epiphany as an admission of guilt. I do not have any other major insights or overwhelming feelings: the sky does not assume a white radiance, my soul does no slow swooning, and generous tears do not fill my eyes as I contemplate my failed attempts at merging my two halves into one. This merge seemed more critical than the decision I have to make now. Hurt him or help him? Was my father aware of the pits skirting his property? Well, yes, he dug them, of course. Do I remember falling?
I imagine the other little girl at the bottom of the hole. He could have buried her. That’s what the holes are for. I wonder if she saw earthworms squirming through the walls, if she rested on the bed of grass and looked at the sky and the passing clouds, a plane drifting by. I wonder if she held her pee, or if she let it go. I wonder if my father hesitated at all, or if he saved her right away and brought her home without thinking of the consequences. He saved me; or, rather, he got me out of the hole he’d made. He didn’t find me until it was dark, and I was very afraid.
My mother told Allen Bernard she remembers my having nightmares about falling into a hole. She didn’t tell him anything else. She has left that part up to me.
What will happen to my father? Will I testify against him? What do I tell? What do I omit? Will I keep telling this story, in one form or another, over and over again?
I just want someone to understand me.
I look outside at Pikes Peak, the falling sun, the sunset swept over the mountain. Reds and oranges, bruised yellows, dark silver clouds. The sky looks like rusting tin. This is as close as I’ll get to his home, my home, a place I truly don’t remember that well, Mr. Bernard, but I hope this outline helps.
“Begin with an Outline” is reprinted from House of Thieves (Penguin Press), a book of short stories by Kaui Hart Hemmings. © 2005 by Kaui Hart Hemmings. It appears here by permission of Inkwell Management.
