The Descendants (24 page)

“I wish we lived in the old days,” Scottie says.

“We do,” Alex says. “We will.”

This makes Scottie quiet. I wonder what’s going through her head. Sid is going through all of the chips. Each bag is open on his lap. He hasn’t said a word the entire trip. I keep waiting for one of his idiotic musings, but it doesn’t come.

We begin to descend into Hanalei. “Look,” I say to the girls. “Look at that.”

I see the taro plantation below, warming in the sun. I imagine the valley doesn’t look much different than it did a hundred years ago. The ocean beyond is dark blue, and as we approach the bottom of the hill, the stretch of beach unfolds before us.
Look,
I almost say again, because I have this urge to make sure they’re seeing what will no longer be in our name. Why did Joanie go to that meeting? Why did she want Holitzer?

I try to think of more questions I could ask Ralph. I look back at the kids. “Sid,” I say. “You all right?”

“Doing good,” he says. “Thanks.”

26

THE GIRLS AND
Sid stand next to the marble pillars in the lobby. I’m asking to exchange the two rooms for a deluxe suite. We will all stay together. The girls are impressed. They look at each other and grin. They don’t realize I’m getting a suite because I don’t trust them. I check again to see if Brian Speer is a guest, but he’s not.

As we walk to the elevator, three girls walk toward us so quickly I’m afraid they might run us down.

“Alex!” they all scream. I notice my daughter wince before she yells back, “Oh my God! What’s up?”

“What are you doing here?” one asks. She has sunglasses straddling her head. A handbag swings on her elbow. She looks at Scottie and me as though what she fears is true: Alex is here with us, her family. Then she sees Sid. “Oh my God, what’s up?” She gives Sid a hug and then gives Alex a hug.

“What are
you
doing here?” Alex asks.

“Spring break,” says another girl, breaking from her cell phone, then going back to it: “Just bring your suit and a few going-out clothes. Not dressy. Just cute clothes.” She eyes me as she talks.

I take Scottie to sit on a nearby bench.

“You guys should totally meet up with us,” I hear the blonde say.

Alex nods. “For sure.”

I’ve never heard her speak this way. She’s usually so quiet and grumpy. This chirpiness is unsettling.

The girls’ voices get quiet and then escalate in volume and I hear: “I’m all, shut up!” from the blonde.

“Boo-ya,” the other girl says and laughs.

I look at Scottie, but she’s just as lost.

“There are, like, choke people down there, but you should go. We just went. You should fully go.”

“It’s so good to see you, doll. We miss you. You never come out. We’ll call your room tonight, then? Or, Siddy, do you have your cell?”

“Yeah,” he says. “But we’re probably just going to chill.”

“Oh, I’m sad,” one of the mascot girls says. She makes a sad face. “I’ll call anyway.”

Alex grins ecstatically, but her enthusiasm doesn’t seem real. I think it has less to do with her mother than with these girls. I wonder if mothers or involved parents do this all the time: watch their children interact with their peers, seeing things no one else does.

The girls strut past, waving their fingers at Scottie and me.

“Such bitches,” Alex says as we head to the elevator.

“Ho bags,” Scottie says.

“What does that mean, Scottie?” I ask.

She shrugs.

“Who taught you that?” I ask.

She points at her sister.

“They only asked me because Sid was with me,” Alex says.

“Can we go to the beach?” Scottie asks.

“Sure,” I say. “We’ll cruise the beach.” I look at Alex, but she stares ahead.

“You could have gone with them,” I say. “Your friends.”

“They didn’t ask,” she says.

I always thought Alex was one of the girls conducting the social scene. She has all the right equipment.

“The last time I hung out with those girls was at our house,” Alex says. “You must have been working in your room or whatever. Mom was wasted. She wanted to go dancing. I wouldn’t go, but my friends were all enthralled with her. So she took them. She just took them with her. Out dancing. And I stayed home.”

We stop on floors five, six, seven, eight, nine. I look to see all of the elevator buttons lit up. “Jesus, Scottie. Is this fun for you?”

“Sid’s the one who did it.”

“Are you serious?”

Sid laughs. “It’s funny.”

“Why didn’t you ever stop Mom?” Alex asks me.

We finally get off on the right floor. Alex walks out first and Scottie follows, saying, “Boo-ya, boo-ya, boo-ya,” down the hotel hall.

“I didn’t know how,” I say.

“You didn’t notice,” Alex says.

“But you’re talking about your mom. Why don’t you like those girls?”

“I like them,” she says. “They just don’t like me for some reason. They don’t think of me.” She seems deep in thought, and when she looks at me, her eyes are watery. “I’ve never understood it, really. They’ve just always made me feel bad. I don’t think I like girls.”

“Your mom didn’t, either.” I’m about to ask Alex what she sees in Sid. He’s walking ahead of us and holding something over Scottie’s head, making her jump up and down. He’s suddenly alive. I don’t ask what Alex sees in him because I’m afraid my disapproval will make her latch on to him even more. That’s how it works. I’ll have to pretend he doesn’t bother me and that I don’t want to drown him in the bay. Something about him isn’t right. Actually, a whole lot about him isn’t right, but not until today in the car did I feel unnerved by him. His silence was so strange.

ALEX IS ON
the balcony of our hotel room. I slide the glass door and step out of our air-conditioned room and into the warm air. She’s smoking a cigarette and I sit down and stare at it with long ing, not for smoking, necessarily, but for the memory of smoking. At eighteen I never would have fathomed that I’d be dealing with these sorts of problems someday. It would be so much easier to be a bad father. I’d love to smoke with my daughter, to sit here with an assortment of alcohol from the hotel mini-fridge, drinking from the bottles, then tossing them into the pool below. When I was young and on the verge of procreating, I thought kids would be like having my old college buddies back. We’d hang out and do stupid shit together.

“Put that out,” I say.

Alex takes a drag, then rubs the cigarette out on the bottom of her sandal, something I would have admired highly as a boy. A gesture like that almost assures me that she’ll be fine in this world.

“You could at least smoke Lights,” I say. “Like Sid.”

“I could,” she says. She puts her feet up on the railing and leans back in the chair so that she’s balancing on two posts. It reminds me of her mother. Joanie could never sit with all four posts on the floor.

“Mom’s okay,” I say. “I checked in, and she’s breathing well, doing well.”

“That’s good,” Alex says.

“You’re doing better with Scottie,” I say. “Thanks.”

“She’s still all messed up.”

“She’s just a kid. She’s okay. She’s not that bad.”

“It’s Reina,” Alex says. “She talks about her constantly. She told me Reina let a boy tongue her hole. That’s what she said: ‘tongue her hole.’”

“What’s happening to you children?”

“She told me Reina’s parents are letting her get a boob job when she turns sixteen because that’s when puberty ends.”

“That girl was too much,” I say. “I mean, did you get a look at her?”

I like talking about all the things that are wrong with another girl. I put my feet against the rail and slowly ease my chair off its front posts. The hotel is built into a cliff, and I look at the bay below, the dots of people, the whitecaps like stars in a dark blue sky. To the left, the Napali coast winds up into another horizon. Alex looks out at the dark sheet of ocean angrily, as though the sea is to blame.

“What about you, Alex? Are you okay? You’re not…using, are you?”

“Am I using? God, you sound like such a tool.”

I don’t answer.

“No,” she finally says. “I’m not doing anything.”

“At all?” I ask. “I smell pot. On Sid.”

“That’s Sid,” she says. “Not me.”

“You just stopped? Isn’t it hard? It’s an epidemic and whatnot.”

I realize we never even put her into rehab to make sure she stopped. She convinced us that she didn’t have a problem, and it must have been easier for me to forget how well she lies.

“It’s not an epidemic,” she says. “I mean, it is, but not for someone like me. I’m not all ghetto.”

“So you just stopped?”

“Yes, Dad. It’s not a big deal. Kids do drugs, then they stop. Besides, you sent me to boarding school, remember? I couldn’t get it anymore. I guess Mom knew what she was doing.”

I don’t know the proper way to respond to all of this. My mother would have burst into tears and wallowed in her room. My father would have sent me to the marines or shot me. Joanie sent her away, which seems just as bad, but what about me? I did nothing. No rehab, therapy, family discussions. Sending her off couldn’t have been the right thing for us, for me, to do, yet it was certainly the easiest. I looked into the conflict from a distance, excusing myself, as though Alex and Joanie were discussing prom dresses.

“I don’t do drugs anymore,” Alex says. “But I still think they were fun.”

“Why are you being so honest with me?” I ask.

She shrugs and puts her chair down. “Mom’s dying.”

A part of me knows Alex will be fine, better than fine. I believe her, even, that drugs were a phase, a passing trend. Perhaps I did nothing because I don’t have enough fear to be a good parent. I remember what it was like being a kid and being the son of my mother and father. When I was doing bad things, I knew, as Alex knows, that no matter how hard I tried, I’d never get into trouble. Maybe kids with money resent this exemption, and it makes them aspire to destruction at an early age. Someone will catch us. We can get out of it somehow. What we do won’t lead to the streets. I remember palling around with the boys and how our antics quickly turned into dinner-party anecdotes. This always made me feel like a failure, as if I didn’t have it in me to sink as low as others. I wonder if Alex feels this as well: like an unsuccessful loser.

“I’m proud of you,” I say, because dads on TV always say this after candid conversations.

She rolls her eyes. “Not much to be proud of.”

“Yes, there is,” I say. “You’ve figured it out. We shipped you off. Let the dorm mother handle it. And now you’re here. Helping me with Scottie. I’m sorry, Alex. I’m really sorry. Thank you for helping me.” She’s the new mother, I realize. She assumed the role in an instant. I imagine her in a cup, hot water pouring over her. Instant Mom.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says.

And that’s that, I guess. The King family drug talk.

We look out at the beautiful ocean, a view that must accompany thousands of awkward, sad, and beautiful moments.