For two years after my youngest brother, Bryan, was born, my father called him George. Come here, George, he would call, holding out his arms to his third child, then running his fingers through Bryan’s softly curling hair. It wasn’t that my father couldn’t remember his name or that there had ever been the chance that Bryan would be a George. Rather my father called him George because, for the first few months of his life, Bryan was struggling to remain alive. Seriously burned over his entire body when a grossly negligent nurse immersed him in scalding water right after his birth, Bryan spent the early part of his life in continual and what can only be imagined as excruciating pain. He lost most of the flesh on the lower half of his body. There was an enormous chance that he would die. Even when it appeared that Bryan would be okay, my dad continued to call him George. As if “George’s” loss could be tolerated in ways that the loss of “Bryan” could not. It was only when Bryan, at the age of two, told my dad that his name was not George that my father began calling his son by name.

I have grown numb to the wavelengths below, overwhelmed by the endless blue, bewildered by the thought of waters deep enough to conceal mountain chains. Not since leaving the coast of California five hours ago have we had continent beneath us. Such oceanic dislocation is what makes coming upon the Hawaiian Islands so startling. Land was something we left behind, shed like a wet bathing suit, with the last bits of island clinging to the West Coast. Yet here it is again, quite literally in the middle of nowhere. The most geographically remote place in the world, the islands float, a strand of land pearls, adrift on the Pacific plate. And they appear out my window like a gift.

I love returning to these fragile, impossibly slight islands. I love the way my heart fills when I see them, read them letter-like from left to right: Kauai, then Maui, then Molokai. A familiar alphabet of land arranged on the chalkboard of the sea. Or perhaps I should be more honest here, say that I love the idea of my heart filling. I want my heart to fill. Then maybe I would be home.

When I was a child, the cupboards in our kitchen were always full of other people’s dry goods. Things my mother never would have bought at the commissary: raspberry Jell-O, dried manicotti shells, unfamiliar brands of baking powder. Refugees from the shelves of neighbors who had recently relocated to military bases in other parts of the country, they always had the feel of the exotic. I would marvel at how my mother would transform the tubes of pasta into something more familiar, slipping the Jell-O into a cake mix without my ever knowing it was there. Slowly the supply would dwindle and with it the memory of the family that had left the goods behind.

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