The Descendants (25 page)

“Is everything okay with Sid?” I ask. “He was so quiet earlier.”

“He gets tired,” she says. “He didn’t have a nap, and he needs his nap.”

She looks over at me, obviously to see if I’m buying her story. She sees that I’m not. “He’s having a hard time right now,” she says.

“Oh, really? Well, so are we.”

“Just forget it,” she says. “How are we going to find this guy?”

I think about this for a while. For a moment I forgot about him, that he’s the reason we’re here.

“You two are going to take Scottie to the beach. I’m going to make more calls. We’re on an island, for Christ’s sake. There’s only about three degrees of separation here.”

She’s silent, thinking it over. She stands and holds out her hand to help me up. I realize I’m fascinated with her. She’s a person I want to know.

“We’ll find him,” Alex says, and the determination in her voice makes me think that she may have a few things to say to him as well.

27

HE’S BELOW ME.
He’s on a working vacation, staying in one of the houses on the bay that I can probably see from this balcony. That’s all his office would tell me. Shouldn’t he be at my wife’s bedside? Shouldn’t I?

I stand on the balcony and look down at the coastline, then decide to put on my suit and head to the bay. I’ll look for the girls. I’ll look for Joanie’s lover, and maybe I’ll take a dip in the ocean and ride the waves on my stomach, as I did when I was a boy.

THE GIRLS AND
Sid are sunbathing near the pier. I look at Scottie on her towel, her legs pressed together, her head tilted toward the sun. I want her to be playing in the ocean. It seems critical that sunbathing should be put off as long as possible.

I stand over her to block the sun. “Get up, Scottie. Throw a ball or something.”

She sticks her arm into the air. “I need some color.”

“What happened to your scrapbook? Why aren’t you doing that anymore?”

“It’s stupid,” she says.

“No,” I say. “It’s really great. I liked what you were doing.”

There’s something different about her. I realize it’s her breasts—they’re huge. I see that she’s stuffed her bikini top with wet balls of sand.

“What is that?” I say. “Scottie. Your suit.”

She shields her eyes with her hand and looks down at her chest. “Beach boobs,” she says.

“Take that out of there,” I say. “Alex. Why’d you let her do that?”

Alex is on her stomach, with the straps of her top untied. She lifts her head toward Scottie. “I didn’t know. Take them out, stupid.”

Sid lifts his head. “Honestly,” he says, “big boobs look kind of fatty.”

“As Bebe says, boobs suck,” Alex says, “and Sid’s full of shit. He loves big boobs.”

“Who’s Bebe?” Scottie lets the sand fall out of her top.

“Character from
South Park,
” Sid says. “And I love small boobs, too, Alex. I’m an equal-opportunity employer.”

“You should scrapbook, Scottie,” I say. “I want you to finish it. You need to keep up with school.” She doesn’t believe my concern, I can tell. Scrapbook equals babyhood—she can see that now, and I’m sure it was Alex who made her realize it.

“Any luck?” Alex asks.

“Yes,” I say. “He’s here in Hanalei. Right here.” I look up at the green yards that stretch to the houses.

“Who’s here?” Scottie asks.

“The friend of Mom’s I told you about,” Alex says.

“The comedian?”

Alex looks at me. “Yeah,” she says. “The comedian.”

“Interesting, Alex,” I say. “Girls, want to take a dip?”

“No,” they both say.

“How about a walk? Maybe we’ll see the comedian.”

“No,” Scottie says.

Alex ties her straps while lying on her stomach, then flips over and sits up. “I’ll walk.”

“I was just going to say I changed my mind and that I want to go for a walk,” Scottie says. More sand spills out of her top as she stands. Sid gets up and jumps, butting his head at the air in front of him.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Just shaking off.” He thumps my back, then puts me in a neck hold and ruffles my hair. “Good work finding the guy,” he says. “That’s awesome.”

I dust him off me and shake my head. “You’re such a strange boy.” I start to walk away from the pier and the three of them follow me. I feel like a mother duck.

WE WALK UNTIL
there aren’t any more houses, all the way to the part of the beach where the current makes the waves come in then rush back out so that two waves clash, water casting up like a geyser. We watch that for a while and then Scottie says, “I wish Mom was here.” I’m thinking the exact same thought. That’s how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can’t experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too. Every day I kept track of anecdotes, occurrences, and gossip, bullet-pointing the news in my head and even rehearsing my stories before telling them to Joanie in bed at night.

It’s getting darker, and I’m worried that we won’t find him, that I won’t be able to ever do anything right for her. Even now, shouldn’t we be crying, paralyzed with grief? How are the three of us walking? I can’t help but think we don’t believe it yet; we’re used to being saved, to never falling into the depths. I feel guilty that Scottie doesn’t even know what’s truly happening.

“Can we swim with the sharks?” Scottie asks. “I read in our hotel magazine that they put you in a cage in the ocean and throw feed in the water and sharks swim right up to you. Can we?”

“Your mom got chased by a shark once,” I say.

“When?” Alex asks.

We turn around and walk back down the beach. Sid trails behind us, smoking a cigarette.

“She was surfing on Molokai and saw a shark beneath her when she was on a wave. She got down on her stomach so she wouldn’t fall and rode the wave closer to the shore.”

“How did she know it was a shark and not a dolphin?” Scottie asks.

“She just knew,” I say. “She said it was wide and dark under the water. The wave eventually flattened out. She kept paddling toward shore. She looked in the water and looked behind her and didn’t see anything. Then she looked back again and saw the fin.”

My girls are so quiet, I look to make sure they’re still there. Both of them are slightly behind me, their heads down, their feet shuffling through the wet sand.

“She kept going as fast as she could, not looking back. Instead of paddling all the way to shore, she headed to a sharp peninsula, and when she got close enough, she paddled right up onto the rocks.”

“And the shark bit the board!”

“No, Scottie. She never saw the shark again. She climbed up the rocks and walked back to the camp. That night we had fish and your mom sank her teeth into the flesh of the tuna and said to me and the Mitchells, ‘I could have been dinner today,’ and then she told us what had happened.”

At least this is the ending of the story she told her friends. In the real version of the story, she ran back to camp. The Mitchells were hiking to the waterfall and I was cooking the tuna. I was sitting beside the fire circle. I saw her from a distance, maneuvering over the slick black rocks. I knew something was wrong and stood up and walked toward her. Her posture was collapsed, her body shaking and her steps unsure. I saw her lean over and knew she was throwing up. When I finally got to her, I saw that she had the chills, her face was white and her bathing suit filthy, and there were scratches on her knees and thighs. I thought she had been attacked by someone and I started to yell. I don’t remember what I yelled. But she shook her head and then did something she had never done before. She sank down to the rocks, pulling me down with her, and then she lunged into my chest and wept. We were in the most awkward position on those rocks, but I remember not being able to move, as though the slightest movement might upset either her or the moment. Even though she was sobbing in my arms, it was a nice moment for me, to be stronger than her, to be needed by her, and to see her so fragile. At last she told me what had happened, and I smiled slightly because the way she delivered the story in between hurried breaths and sniffles made her seem like a child in my arms, waking from a nightmare, and only I had the wherewithal to show her that nothing was going to hurt her. I was there. Nothing was in the closet or under the bed.

“I thought that this was it,” she said. “I thought it was all over. I was so angry that it was time.”

“It’s not time,” I said. “You beat it. Here you are.”

Around the fire circle that night, she was back to her old self, posturing, acting, entertaining. She wouldn’t look at me. I wanted to ask her,
What’s wrong with saying you were afraid?

“I could have been dinner,” she said again at the end of the telling, and then she picked up her fish and tore into it with her teeth, and everyone, myself included, laughed. I enjoyed her performance, and the fact that I was the only person in the world who truly knew her. Imagining Brian knowing her this way, or her crying in his arms the way she cried in mine that day over twenty years ago, is unbearable.

“She used to tell that story all the time,” I say to the girls.

We are back to the part of the beach that’s populated with homes. People have brought down beach chairs and glasses of wine to watch the sunset. I search everyone’s faces, looking for him, no longer sure I can be so giving and forgiving.

“Why did she stop telling it?” Alex asks. “I’ve never heard it before.”

“I guess she got new stories,” I say.

The girls seem confused, perhaps stunned that their parents have done things they’ve never heard about.

“Like the one about streaking at Lita’s wedding,” Scottie says. “I like that story.”

“Or the one when the gorilla at the zoo reached through the bars and grabbed her,” Alex says. “Or the one about beating a wild boar with her shoe.”

“Or how the back of her dress was stuck in her panty hose for the entire party and she wasn’t wearing any underpants,” Scottie says.

“She thought all the men were whistling at her because she looked good,” Alex continues.

Now I understand why Scottie needed to create better dramas that were worth repeating. She was searching for a perfect offering, the promise of a legend. I look at my feet stepping on the sand. Nothing ever happens to me that’s worth repeating. Except perhaps these past few days.

Sid catches up to us, and I know it wasn’t a cigarette he was smoking. He’s totally stoned. His eyes are heavy and he has a stupid grin on his face. It pisses me off that he doesn’t even bother to hide it.

“What do you love about Mom?” Scottie asks me.

For some reason I look at Alex, as if for an answer. Her face is expectant.

“I love…I don’t know. I love the things we love together. Just the way we are with each other.”

Alex looks at me like I’m weaseling out of something.

“We both love to go out for dinner, for example. We love our bikes.” I laugh and then say, “We love the montages in romantic comedies. We admitted this to each other one night.” I smile and the girls look at me strangely. I wait for Scottie to ask me what a montage is, but she doesn’t. She looks almost angry.