The Descendants (40 page)

“Forgive me,” I say. “I love you. I know we did something right together.”

I have picked my moment. I don’t want to hug her because I know I won’t like the sensation of not being hugged back, and I don’t want to kiss her because I won’t be kissed back, but I do kiss her. I press my lips to hers and then I put my hand on her stomach because this seems to be the place where everything comes from, where I feel love and pain, anger and pride, and even though I wasn’t planning on doing it this way, I say goodbye. I lean over so my mouth is on her neck, our heads pressed together. Goodbye, Joanie. Goodbye, my love, my friend, my pain, my happiness. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

43

I FIX THE
gin and tonic and look over at the large window framing the mock-orange hedge, and below the window to the sofa, where Sid’s mother sits. She wears slacks and a blouse, and I can tell she isn’t used to dressing this way. She buttons her top button, then unbuttons it once again and fixes her necklace. I look away before she sees that I’m staring at her.

I figured that if Sid could do it, then so could I. He called Julie. I called his mother. That’s the way it works.

I take the drink back to her. I like that she’s having one. I’m having one, too, even though it’s freezing and I don’t want to touch the icy glass. It has been unusually cold all around the island these past few days, with hard rain, near-black clouds—the most perfect weather for now.

Mary cups her drink in her hands over her thighs. I realize I haven’t given her a coaster and she’s afraid to put the drink down on the wooden table. Her cocktail napkin is crushed in her hand, pieces of it pressed to the wet glass.

“You can put it down,” I say.

She looks at the long wood table in front of her, the heavy books:
Finding Paradise, A Sense of Place, World Atlas,
and
Law in America.
She hesitates and tries to salvage the soaked napkin but stops and puts the glass down. Perhaps she realizes she can do anything and act any way she wants. She doesn’t know my wife died two days ago. She, with her dead husband, her renegade son, is the winner here.

“I don’t usually drink,” she says. “Especially this early.”

“I know.” I can see Sid’s resemblance to her: the sharp nose and large eyes that slope downward.

“Has he been okay?” she asks. “Has he been good?”

I think of him smoking pot, cigarettes, slapping my daughter’s ass, moping, running his mouth, ruining Brian’s marriage, getting served, as Scottie says, by my father-in-law.

“Yes,” I say. “He has been surprisingly helpful.”

“I can pay you,” she says. “For groceries. For whatever he cost you.”

“Oh, no,” I say. “Don’t worry about that.”

She looks around at my house then through the screen door at the yard, the pool, the mountain. I look there, too, then ask her if she wants me to find out what’s taking him so long.

“Did he tell you why I kicked him out of the house?”

“He told me his dad died. He told me he missed his dad.”

“His father was difficult to live with,” she says. “But he took care of us. He loved Sid.”

“I’m sure he did,” I say.

“You must think I’m a horrible person for kicking him out.”

Her face looks tired. She looks older than she probably is.

“I don’t think that. Children are hard. Sometimes doing something like that is the only thing that works. Especially with Sid. He’s no walk in the park.”

“No, he isn’t.” She laughs, and it’s as though we’re admitting that we have hard children but wouldn’t want it any other way. I see that she has brought Sid one of those magazines he likes, the ones about girls on cars or girls on choppers.

“I need to tell him I believe him,” she says.

She looks behind me and I know he must be there, walking down the cobblestone corridor, past the pictures of us on the wall, past the table of sympathy cards, past the black Japanese planter that sounds like a gong when hit with a wooden spoon wrapped in a dish towel, which is the way Joanie would summon us to dinner. “Dinner!” she’d yell after the deep gong. “Dinner!”

“Hi, Mom,” Sid says.

She stands but stays where she is, in front of the sofa and behind the coffee table, protected. He’s beside me. I stand and give him a look of encouragement. I can tell he doesn’t want me to leave, but this isn’t my problem, it’s just a similarity we share, the need to come to terms with the dead and the people they truly were. We want to ascend, make our dead monarchs less powerful, stop them from directing our lives, even though I know this is impossible, because they’ve been ruling my life for centuries.

“Thank you for coming, Mary,” I say.

I walk away. I hear their voices. I want to think that I hear them embrace, but I’m sure I don’t hear that. An embrace isn’t audible.

Alex is standing by the gong and I lead her away.

“Are they speaking?” she asks.

“I think so.”

We pass the pictures of Joanie. I don’t look at them, but I know their sequence. Joanie on Mauna Kea with Alex on her shoulders, Joanie and me and friends dining at a rotating restaurant that made us all nauseated, Alex on her dirt bike riding through a banana plantation, Joanie on a boat in her bikini, Scottie leaning over the side pretending to throw up, Joanie in a canoe riding a wave, leaning over the ama to keep the boat from tipping.

SCOTTIE’S ON THE
daybed, under the quilt she has brought from her own bed. She’s watching television; it’s really all we’ve been doing these past two days. I take off my shoes and get into bed with her, and so does Alex. I lie back and watch a beautiful celebrity accept an award for playing an ugly woman.

I prop a few pillows under my head and pull up the covers. I could stay here forever. I notice that Scottie has taken up scrap-booking once again. Her book rests on her stomach and I pick it up and flip the pages. Time passes. Time passed. I see this from the photos—Troy at the club’s bar on the day of the man-of-wars, Alex in the pool, screaming at Scottie, her first day home. There are countless pictures of Sid doing mundane things. Sid sitting by the pool reading one of his car magazines, Sid eating chips, Sid taking a nap.

“Is Sid going home?” Scottie asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Are you still going out with him?” Scottie asks. “Even though he went off with the skanks?”

“We’re just friends,” Alex says, but in a moment of honesty, she adds, “I don’t know what we are. I think we’re together now.” She points to the book. “There’s a lot of him.”

“He’s photogenic,” Scottie says. She takes the book back and flips the pages, mesmerized with her work. She holds the album close to her and won’t let me flip. It’s like she’s the warden of our relics. Our curator.

Next page. An old picture of me in my office, surrounded by cutouts of the things that define me: a briefcase, a beer.

I’ll have to be there a lot now, the office, familiarizing myself with my own land, trying to make up for the years of neglecting the gifts bestowed upon us.

Scottie has placed me under my mother and father. Joanie is next to me, a picture from years ago, after her canoe race from Molokai to Oahu, taken before Scottie was born. It’s a true picture of health—her teeth, her skin, the glow on her face. She is young and pretty, happy, and I realize this was taken before we ever met.

I ruffle Scottie’s hair and she leans in to me.

“You’re our keeper,” I tell her. “Our family historian.”

“Mrs. Chun is going to say it’s not really a scrapbook. I don’t have fabric and words.”

“I like it just fine,” I say.

“Me, too.”

“What time are we going tomorrow?” Alex asks.

“Early,” I say.

“What if it’s still raining?”

“We’ll still go,” I say. “We need to.”

The ashes are in a box. The box is in a purple satchel, and whenever I see the satchel, I think of expensive liquor and then think,
No. They’re ashes. My wife’s ashes.

I’m still not sure how the girls said goodbye, what their moment was like, and I don’t want to ask because it will hurt me too much to know. They each went in alone. They each said something, then walked out and searched my face for some clear answer. Then we left the hospital and came home. Scottie turned on the TV in the den. Alex went to her room. I went to my room, but I couldn’t stay in that bed, so I went to watch TV with Scottie, and Alex was there lying next to her and I knew this was the best place to be. Joanie must have been waiting for us. After we all said goodbye, she died the next day.

Images of dead people who have worked in the film business flash on the screen. Some receive loud applause, others receive none.

Scottie’s toes tap against my shin.

“Your toes are cold,” I say.

She presses her entire foot against my shin and I shiver. “Stop it,” I say.

She lets out a hard laugh and I put my hand over her so that I’m touching the tops of both of their heads. It feels similar to the calculated and bashful move you make on first dates.

I remember walking with Joanie on the secluded beach in front of the Kahala resort. We’d just had lunch at Hoku’s, and we’d each had a glass of wine. I remember walking close to her, purposefully brushing her hand with my own, hoping that it would stick somehow, and then finally putting my arm around her and feeling so satisfied when she came in closer and stayed. The beautiful hotel was alongside us, and it felt as though we were on vacation, tourists in an exotic land. It’s strange to think that we had ever been shy around each other.

“I’m glad you didn’t sell the land,” Scottie says.

“Really?” I ask. “Why?”

“Because then we wouldn’t have it anymore,” she says.

“It will be yours one day,” I say. “Both of you.”

“That’s a lot to have,” Alex says.

Scottie flips to the last page of the book, and there are the two who started it all, Princess Kekipi and Edward King.

“Why are they at the end?” I ask. “Shouldn’t they be at the beginning?”

“I guess so,” Scottie says. She puts her hand on the princess’s portrait. “I’ll do it later.”

“It’s okay, though,” I say. “I sort of like them at the end.”

It’s funny that I think of them as the beginning, because they were also descendants of somebody, generations of prints on their DNA, traces of human migrations. They didn’t come out of nowhere. Everyone comes from someone who comes from someone else, and this to me is remarkable. We can’t know the people who are in us. We’ll all have our moment at the top of the tree. Matthew and Joan. We’ll be those two one day.

I drift off for a while. I don’t know how long, but when I open my eyes, the Oscars are still on and Alex tells me that Sid has gone and this makes me a little sad. Whatever the four of us had is over. He is my daughter’s boyfriend now, and I am a father. A widower. No pot, no cigarettes, no sleeping over. They’ll have to find inventive ways to conduct their business, most likely in uncomfortable places, just like the rest of them. I let him and my old ways go. We all let him go, as well as who we were before this, and now it’s really just the three of us. I glance over at the girls, taking a good look at what’s left.