The Descendants (7 page)

“Why are you pushing this guy?” I asked.

“He just seems like a good choice. I don’t know.”

“I think I’ll go with the New Yorkers,” I said, just to see her response.

“Interesting to see how that will turn out.” She flipped a page in her magazine. “I love that sink,” she said. “Look.”

I looked at the sink. “It’s just a basin. There’s no room to put anything.”

“Exactly. Gets rid of clutter, easy to clean. Sometimes the least practical makes the most sense.”

I saw the edge of her mouth curl up, and I laughed. She had a way of addressing one thing through something unrelated. “Joanie,” I said. “You’re something else.”

I LOOK AT
the highest bidder, a publicly traded firm out of New York that has offered almost half a billion dollars. I’m wary of giving New Yorkers this much land. It just doesn’t seem right, and maybe Joanie thought this, too; she wanted our land in the right hands.

I think of my father’s funeral, all the people vying for the front pews as though his death were the best ticket in town.

“People are just waiting for me to die,” he told me one day. We were sitting in his back room; he liked to rummage through his books, where he kept newspaper clippings.

“Keep living,” I said.

He flipped through a book about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and pulled a clipping from the pages to read to me: “‘A heavy downpour of rains reached a crescendo just about the time Princess Kekipi died. The Hawaiians said when rain fell at the time of a person’s death or funeral,
Kulu ka waimaka, uwe ’opu,
which means “The tears fall; the clouds weep.” The gods mingle their tears of affection with those who weep in sympathy and aloha.’

“It rains in November all the time,” he said, placing the clipping back in the book. “People were just waiting to get their hands on that land. They couldn’t, and now they’re waiting for me.”

It must be strange to know that people are waiting for you to die, and now the twenty-one beneficiaries don’t have to wait any longer because my father is gone. I want to go with Holitzer since he’s local, but choosing a higher bid from an outsider may make for a smoother transaction devoid of lawsuits. I don’t want to have to deal with this again further down the road.

I look at everything. I even try to decipher documents and letters from 1920, imagining what two people I’ve never met would want. The princess, the last in the royal lineage. My great-grandfather, that frisky white boy. What a scandal they must have caused. What fun they must have had. What love and ambition! What do you want, you lovebirds, you rebels? What do you want now?

I look at Holitzer’s portfolio and see exclamation points surrounding his name and think of Joanie going through all of my work. Passages are underlined for me with notes in the margins. I press my finger on a smiley face. Then I reach over to her side of the bed and open a koa box she keeps on her nightstand. The only thing in there is a necklace, a silver chain with a charm in the shape of a lopsided heart. I gave this to her years ago. She never wears it. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I get up and continue to look through her things—purses, shoe boxes, drawers, and pockets. Then I go to Alex’s room. Something in me needs to be quenched.

I look through my eldest daughter’s drawers, for divorce papers, perhaps. I look under the sink of her bathroom, behind the toilet, in between stacks of towels. I rifle through the pages of books and end up getting distracted by Alex’s childhood things: old stuffed animals (a monkey, a worm, a Smurf) and old books (
Ping, Ferdinand,
books I remember from my childhood, many about wayward animals with deep psychological problems). I find pictures of Alex with her friends at camp on the San Juans, sailing on Puget Sound, having campfires in front of tepees. I see a stack of yearbooks and read the copious notes telling my daughter to
stay cool.
Some notes take up an entire page and are written in a strange code:
Remember hot pants and dirty Christine! Poison ivy and BYOBucket! Are those ants??? Point, the van, that’s my mom’s favorite reindeer!

I imagine Alex reading these words as an old woman and not knowing what any of them mean. Girls take so much time organizing the past. There are various collages documenting Alex’s weekends with friends, yet the testimonials to good times seem to stop once she hits her junior year and goes off to boarding school. Joanie came into this room a lot, told me she was rearranging things, maybe turning it into a guest bedroom. I look in the jewelry box where Joanie found the drugs. She showed me a miniature Ziploc bag filled with a clear, hard rock.

“What is this?” I said. I never did drugs, so I had no idea. Heroin? Cocaine? Crack? Ice? “What is this?” I screamed at Alex, who screamed back, “It’s not like I shoot it!”

A plastic ballerina pops up and slowly twirls to a tinkling song whose sound is discordant and deformed. The pink satin liner is dirty, and other than a black pearl necklace, the box holds only rusty paper clips and rubber bands noosed with Alex’s dark hair. I see a note stuck to the mirror and pick up the jewelry box and move the ballerina aside. She twirls against my finger. The note says,
I wouldn’t hide them in the same place twice.

I let out a short breath through my nose.
Good one, Alex.
I close the jewelry box and shake my head, missing her tremendously. I wish she never went back to boarding school, and I don’t understand her sudden change of plans. What did they fight about? What could have been so bad?

I go back to the bedroom, ashamed to be looking for anything at all. My wife cared about the sale. She appreciated Holitzer. She thought this sale would change our lives. My wife had friends she met at Indigo. Gay men and models adore that restaurant. My wife kept things from the past. My wife had a life outside this home. It’s as simple as can be.

7

TUESDAY. TODAY IS
my date with the doctor, and I’m not going to run away. I’ve let the front desk know that I’m here.

“A slow but gradual recovery,” I imagine him saying. “When she comes out, she will need you. You will have to help her with the most basic things, everyday actions you take for granted. She will need you. Need you.”

Scottie and I walk down the hall. Her T-shirt says
MRS. CLOONEY,
and she’s wearing wooden clogs that ti-tap-ti-tap-ti-tap on every step. The hospital is so busy, you’d think they were having some kind of going-out-of-business sale. Scottie looks eager; her mouth is moving, and I think she’s rehearsing what she’s going to say to Joanie. This morning she told me she had a great story for Mom, and I’m excited to hear it. I guess I’ll need to talk to Joanie as well. I’ll need to relay to her whatever Dr. Johnston says to me.

When we get to the room, I see we have a visitor. A friend of Joanie’s whom I don’t know well. She’s been here before. Tia or Tara. She models with my wife. I remember seeing a picture of her in a newspaper ad. It must have been right before the accident. In the advertisement she was drinking bottled water and holding a straw purse with an expensive-looking diamond bracelet around her wrist. I didn’t read the print, so I didn’t know if the ad was for the bracelet, the water, the purse, or something else entirely, like a new condo development or life insurance. She was with a man, and they had three children of three different races who were pointing at something in the sky. I remember this because I said to Joanie, “Are these supposed to be her kids? They don’t look alike. What is this an ad for?”

Joanie looked at the paper. “Hilo Hattie. They like to represent Asians and hapas and Filipinos.”

“But the parents are white. They’re not creating a credible family.”

“Maybe they’re adopted.”

“That’s just stupid,” I said. “Why not have an Asian mom and a Filipino dad?”

“They never marry that way.”

“A hapa mom and an Asian dad.”

“They like white adult models and ethnic kids.”

“Well, what about the black man? I mean, why not throw in a black kid?”

“The few black people here are military. They’re not the target market.”

I closed the paper, annoyed by the entire conversation. “What the hell are they looking at, anyway?”

“Their glorious future,” Joanie said in a deadpan voice.

I started to laugh and she did, too, and when the girls came into the kitchen and asked what was so funny, we both said, “Nothing.”

THIS WOMAN FROM
the newspaper is getting settled on Joanie’s bed, and I don’t know what to do. I want to leave; I generally don’t like being with people here, but it’s too late. She sees us and smiles, then turns on a light with a remote control.

“Hi there,” I say.

“Hello,” she says.

I see her looking at Scottie in a sympathetic way that reminds me of how I looked at Lani. “Mind if we stay and watch?” I ask.

“Sure. I won’t be long.” She has a tray on her lap, and she picks up various identical brushes before settling on one and going to work on Joanie’s face, working around the tube. She dips the brush into a palette of gloss and dabs at my wife’s lips as if she’s some kind of French pointillist. Though I find this absurd, I have to admit that Joanie would appreciate it. She enjoys being beautiful. She likes to look luminous and ravishing—her own words. Good luck, I used to tell her. Good luck with your goals.

We don’t treat each other very well, I suppose. Even from the start. It was as though we had the seven-year itch the day we met. The day she went into a coma, I heard her telling her friend Shelley that I was useless, that I leave my socks hanging on every doorknob in the house. At weddings we roll our eyes at the burgeoning love around us, the vows that we know will morph into new kinds of promises: I vow not to kiss you when you’re trying to read. I will tolerate you in sickness and ignore you in health. I promise to let you watch that stupid news show about celebrities, since you’re so disenchanted with your own life.

Joanie and I were urged by her brother, Barry, to subject ourselves to counseling as a decent couple would. Barry is a man of the couch, a believer in weekly therapy, affirmations, and pulse points. Once he tried to show us exercises he’d been doing in session with his girlfriend. We were instructed to trade reasons, abstract or specific, why we stayed with each other. I started off by saying that Joanie would get drunk and pretend I was someone else and do this neat thing with her tongue. Joanie said tax breaks. Barry cried. Openly. His second wife had recently left him for someone who understood that a man didn’t do volunteer work.

“Stop it, Barry,” Joanie said. “Get ahold of yourself. This is just how we work.”

I agreed. When she told Shelley I was useless, I heard the smile in her voice and knew she was pretending to be irritated. Really, she wouldn’t know what to do without my uselessness, just as I wouldn’t know what to do without her complaints. I take it back. It’s not that we don’t treat each other well; it’s just that we’re comfortable enough to know that sarcasm and aloofness keep us afloat, and we never have to watch where we step.

“You are both so cold,” Barry said that night. We were at Hoku’s in the Kahala Resort, and Joanie was underdressed in jeans and a white low-cut top. I remember sneaking looks at her breasts. She always overdressed at casual restaurants and underdressed at nice ones. I remember she ordered the onaga and I ordered the kiawe pork chop.