The Descendants (9 page)

We step into the hall. “Okay. Today’s the day. You’re going to talk to Mom.”

“I think I have an okay story.” She rises up on her toes and lifts her arms in the air so they form an O. She swings one leg back and forth. She takes ballet lessons because that’s what her sister used to do, but she doesn’t have the same grace or style. Her clog comes down hard on the floor.
Slap!
She looks at the ground then up at me.

“Settle down. Tell me your story.”

“Okay,” she says. “Pretend you’re Mom. Close your eyes and be still.”

I close my eyes.

“Hi, Mom,” she begins.

I almost say hello but catch myself. I keep still.

“Yesterday I explored the reef in front of the public beach by myself. I have tons of friends. My best friend is Reina Burke, but I felt like being alone.”

I open my eyes when I hear “Reina Burke,” then quickly close them again and tune back in to the story.

“And there’s this really cute guy who works the beach stand there. Reina likes him, too. His eyes look like giraffe eyes. So I went to explore the reef in front of his stand. The tide was low. I could see all sorts of things. In one place the coral was a really cool dark color, but then I looked closer and it wasn’t coral. It was an eel. A moray. I almost died. There were millions of sea urchins and a few sea cucumbers. I even picked one up and squeezed him like you showed me that one time.”

“This is good, Scottie. Let’s go back in. Mom will love this.”

“I’m not done.”

I close my eyes. I wish I could lie down. This is kind of nice.

“So I was squatting on the reef and lost my balance and fell back on my hands. One of my hands landed on an urchin, and it put its spines in me. My hand looked like a pincushion. It hurt really bad, but I lived. I survived. I got up again.”

I’m grabbing her hands, holding them up to my face. The roots of urchin spines are locked in and expanded under the skin of her left palm. They look like tiny black starfish that plan on making her hand their home forever. I notice more stars on her fingertips. “Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt? Why didn’t you say something? Does Esther know?”

“I’m okay,” she whispers, as if her mom is here and she doesn’t want her to hear. “I handled it. I didn’t really fall.”

“What do you mean? Are these pen marks?”

“Yes?”

I look closer. I press on the marks.

“Ow,” she says and pulls her hand back. “They’re not pen marks. They’re real.”

“Why did you lie just now?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t lie that much. I didn’t really fall.”

“So the urchin just jumped up and attacked you?”

“No,” she says.

“Well?”

“I slammed my hand into it. But I’m not telling Mom that part.”

“What? What do you mean you slammed your hand into it? Scottie. Answer me. Did Reina have something to do with this?”

She seems surprised and afraid of my anger. “I wanted to have a good story.” She points her foot out in front of her and tilts her head to the side.

“Don’t do that cute thing,” I say. “That’s not working right now.”

She brings her foot back.

“Didn’t it hurt?” I imagine the spines expanding, the blood, the salt in the wounds.
This is psychotic,
I’m tempted to say.
This is disturbed.

“It didn’t hurt that much.”

“Balls, Scottie. It killed. I’m floored right now. Completely floored. Where was Esther?”

“Do you want to hear the rest?” she asks.

I push my short fingernails into my palm just to try to get a taste of the sting she felt. I shake my head. “I guess.”

“Okay. Pretend you’re Mom. You can’t interrupt.”

“I can’t believe you did this to yourself. What made you—”

“You can’t speak! Be quiet or you won’t hear the rest.”

Scottie goes on to tell me her tale, and it has all the elements of a good story: visuals, crisis, mystery, violence. She tells me about the needles jutting from her hand and how she climbed back on the rock pier like a crab with a missing claw. Before she returned to shore, Scottie looked out across the ocean and watched the swimmers do laps around the catamarans. She says that the ones with white swimming caps looked like runaway buoys.

I don’t believe her. I’m sure she didn’t stop to gaze at the sea. She probably ran right to Esther or the club’s medic. She’s inventing the details, setting the stage, making a better story for her mother. Alexandra had to do the same thing—knock herself out to get some attention from Joanie. Or perhaps to take the attention away from Joanie. I guess Scottie is realizing what needs to be done.

“Because of Dad’s boring ocean lectures, I knew these weren’t needles in my hand but more like sharp bones—calcitic plates, which vinegar would help dissolve.”

I smile. Good girl.

“Dad, this isn’t boring, is it?”

“‘Boring’ is not the word I’d use. ‘Boring’ is the last thing that comes to mind.”

“Okay. You’re Mom again, so shut up. Then, Mom, I thought of going to the club’s first aid.”

“Good girl.”

“Sshh,” she says. “But instead, I went to the cute boy and asked him to pee on my hand.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yes, Mom. That’s exactly what I said to him. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. I told him I hurt myself. He said, ‘Uh-oh. You okay?’ like I was an eight-year-old.”

“Wait,” I say. “Time out. I am not your mother.”

“He didn’t understand,” Scottie continues, “so I placed my hand on the counter.”

“Scottie. I said time out. What is going on here? Are you lying right now? Tell me you’ve made this up. Tell me you’re just a very creative, imaginative, and remarkable young lady and that you’ve made this up.”

I’ve read about children starting to lie a lot around this age. I’m supposed to tell the child that lying can hurt people. “Listen,” I say. “This is a great yarn. We’ll tell it to Mom, but between you and me, are you telling the truth?”

“Yes,” she says, and unfortunately, I believe her. I don’t say anything. I just shake my head.

Scottie continues, cautiously at first, but then she plunges right back into her disaster. “He swore like a maniac. I won’t repeat what he said, and then he told me to go to the hospital. ‘Or are you a member of that club?’ he asked. He told me he’d take me there, which was totally sweet of him. He went out through the back of his stand, and I walked around to meet him. I told him what he needed to do, what would get the spines out, and he blinked a thousand times and used more curse words in all sorts of combinations. There was a piece of lint or something in his eyelash, and I almost pulled it out. He kept looking around for help, but we were all alone, and I repeated what he needed to do—you know. Pee. But then he said he saw something on
Baywatch
where a lifeguard sucked the poison out of a woman’s inner thigh. ‘But then she had this seizure,’ he said. ‘Her body was just bucking on the sand!’”

The way Scottie imitates his voice makes him sound illiterate.

“‘I’m not trained for this,’ he kept saying. ‘I just sell sunscreen, and there’s no way I’m going to piss on your hand,’ but then I told him what you, Mom, always tell Dad when you want him to do something he doesn’t want to do. I said, ‘Stop being a pussy,’ and it did the trick. He told me not to look, and he asked me to say something or whistle.”

“I can’t listen to this,” I say.

“I’m almost done,” Scottie whines. “So. To distract him while he peed, I talked about your boat races, but how you weren’t all dykey, and I told him that you were a model, but you weren’t all prissy, and that every guy at the club was in love with you but you only love Dad.”

“Scottie,” I say. “I have to use the bathroom.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’m done anyway. Wasn’t that hilarious? Was it too long?”

I feel sick. I need to be alone.

“It’s fine. It’s great. Go tell Mom what you told me. Go talk to her.”
She can’t hear you anyway,
I think.
I hope.

I walk down the hall, wishing someone could step in and give me some direction. Scottie shouldn’t have to create these dramas. She shouldn’t have to get hurt. She shouldn’t have to be pissed on, and the thing is, Joanie
would
think that story was hilarious. I think of her while we were dating. She loved creating dramas that involved pain, men, sex.

“We’re over,” she’d say countless times. “I can’t stay in every night and play house. I think we should see other people.” She never did. She stuck around, and she’d be soaring one moment and critical and miserable the next, but she’d never go. I wonder why she didn’t just go.

9

SCOTTIE IS SITTING
on the bed when I enter the room. The sight of her so close to her mother almost frightens me. A Polaroid of Joanie rests on the bed. Joanie with makeup. Her twenty-fourth day. I don’t like the picture. She looks embalmed.

“I don’t like that,” I say, pointing to it.

“I know,” Scottie says. She folds it in half, then crushes it in her hand.

“Did you talk?” I ask.

“I’m going to work on it some more,” Scottie says. “Because if Mom thinks the story is funny, what will she do? What if the laugh circulates around in her lungs or in her brain somewhere since it can’t come out? What if the laugh kills her?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” I say, though I have no idea how it works.

“I just thought I’d make it sadder. That way she’ll feel the need to come back.”

“It’s already sad.”

She looks at me, not understanding.

“It shouldn’t be this complicated, Scottie.” I say this sternly.

“Why are you yelling at me?”

“You need to talk.”

“I’ll talk when she wakes up,” Scottie says. “Why are you so mad?”

I can’t tell her I’m angry because I feel like I’m losing control. I can’t tell Scottie that I want to show her mother how well I handled her, that I’m returning her in better condition. I can’t tell her I don’t know why I feel this desperate need for her to talk to Joanie, as though time is running out.

I sit on the bed and look at my wife: Sleeping Beauty. Her hair seems slippery. It looks the way it did when she gave birth. I put my ear to where her heart is. I bury my face in her gown. This is the most intimate I’ve been with her in a long time. What drives you, Joanie? My wife the racer, the model, the drinker. I think of the note, the blue note.

“You love me,” I say. “We have our way and it works. You’re going to come out of this. Right?”

“What are you doing?” Scottie says.

I lift my head and walk to the window. “Nothing.”

“We need to go,” she says. “I need a new story.”

I tell her we can’t go yet. We have to wait for Dr. Johnston. Just as I say this, he enters the room, looking down at his chart.

“Hey, Scottie,” he says. “Hey, Matthew.” He looks up but doesn’t make eye contact. “I was calling to you yesterday. Did you see me?”

“No,” I say.

“Hi, Dr. J,” Scottie says. “I just told my mom the greatest story.”

Liar.
Why is she lying? “Scottie, why don’t you run down to the little store and get some sunscreen for the beach.”