Keiki Kona

It was days after my Mother arrived home from the mental ward before she spoke to me. She was drunk a lot of the time. She kept in her bedroom. Finally she came out and I tried to say the nicest thing I could think of saying. I asked about the baby that was due.

I think it was Lani's mention of a younger brother that made want to know when mine would come. I wanted a younger brother to do things for, too.

Anyway, it was altogether the wrong question. If the word miscarriage had been used I wouldn't have known what it meant. Maybe my eidetic memory was slipping, but I don't think the word was used anyway. I think that as usual my Father couldn't talk about it, and my Mother hadn't been talking.

She screamed at me, blaming me for killing the baby. She said, "What do you think happened that day? Because of you my head was slammed into that wall! You think the baby was gonna live through that? What do you think happened!"

Then she raped me anally, screaming, "Let's hear you speak Hawaiian now! If I'm stuck with you, you little filth, you'd better entertain me!"

Later I had to deal with the idea that I killed the baby. If I did, I did it by taking revenge on my Mother. Taking revenge on her was proper, but I shouldn't have let my revenge cause the baby to die.

In order to correct the harm I'd done I had to give my Mother something equivalent to what I'd taken away from her. It didn't matter that I hated her. The law is, give back as you're given.

I remember the vision of the dog cut apart and put back together, and reanimating, and I thought, maybe I could make a little brother out of myself. It should be a little brother she could love. It occurred to me that since my parents were always wanting me to speak English around the house that the new baby should speak English. Why not begin with the English speaking part of me?

So I imagined separating off the English speaking part of me, and I started to call him Keiki Kona, my little one.

Keiki Kona didn't come to life right away. It took time. But when he did it was all at once. Suddenly I found myself in my body, but being moved by another person, who was younger and who didn't know my Mother raped me and didn't speak Hawaiian so he didn't know what 'ilio wahine 'ino meant. He was innocent and could make a fresh start with my Mother.

To make sure that my little brother stayed innocent and able to love Mother, I was determined to step in and take over whenever she was mean to us. So little brother would never have to know what having a vicious evil Mother was like. He would never even feel hated by her.

I told Lani and Lono about Keiki Kona a week or so before my 3rd birthday. The name was confusing to them. They wondered why I was giving him a Hawaiian name. They thought I was talking about a real new baby. Lani said that just Kona would make a fine name, by itself, because besides meaning "my" it can also mean "the leeward" side, i.e. the calm side, and that was a good name.

So I called little brother Kona.

When they asked why I didn't bring Kona to see them, I told them he's too young to go that far, and besides, he doesn't know any Hawaiian.