The Descendants (33 page)

THE NINE-FIFTEEN
flight is surprisingly full. Tourists have shopping bags of souvenirs to prove they were here. I imagine the hula-girl hood ornaments, the T-shirts and macadamia nuts, in their plastic bags. They’ll have gold bracelets embossed with their Hawaiian names and will go home and name their dogs or their children Lani and Koa. I thought we’d have a man as our keepsake to take to my wife, but we have no souvenirs, nothing to show for all of this.

The girls’ postures are collapsed. I swear Scottie has lost weight just in these past few days. She is sleeping next to me. The airline’s gray scratchy blanket is over her head like a hood and she looks sickly beneath it. Like a crack baby, or Death. I need to remember to feed the children. I need to make sure they wash and brush their teeth and go to doctors and get books for school. I need to get them to take on a sport and to have good friends and to study and read for fun. I need to tell them not to smoke or have sex, not to get into cars with strangers or friends who have been drinking. They need to write thank-you notes and eat what’s put in front of them. They need to say “yes,” not “yeah,” to put their napkins on their laps, to chew their gum with closed mouths. I need more time.

Alex asks, “What happened?”

I point at Scottie and put my finger to my mouth to get out of answering the question.

“She’s fine,” Alex says. “Tell me. When is he coming back?”

Sid leans forward. I stare ahead and feel their eyes on me. I don’t know what to say. This is like the problem I had with the shark story. I feel it’s imperative to hoard some information, letting the girls have a better impression of their mother. Yet I’m not sure which impression is more favorable—the one of Joanie in love and loved passionately and recklessly by someone else, or the impression of Joanie as deceived and desperate. She’ll never know the mistake she made, and I don’t know if this pleases me or makes me feel cheated.

“He was shocked,” I say.

“Was he sorry?” Sid asks. “I hope he was sorry, man. You could have told his wife, and you didn’t. I hope he knows how lucky he is. I would have told her everything. She deserves to know. Or else she’s going to be a dumb bitch for the rest of her life.”

“Calm down, son,” I say. “No need to get creepy.”

Alex places a hand on Sid’s leg, and I see his leg twitch. She’s got a good grip on him. I wonder what he’s so angry about. I remember, on the way over here, his concentration on the safety brochure. I take the laminated instructions out of the seat pocket, hoping to distract Alex and Sid. I look at the passengers getting onto a raft in an ocean with no land in sight. Their life vests are inflated. An Asian man has a slight smile on his face.

Alex looks over. “Their clothes aren’t even wet.”

I tap the picture of the plane floating in the sea.

“So, is he coming back to see her, or what?” Sid asks.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

Weak, vulnerable, pining, used. I wonder if, in Alex’s eyes, these things would make her mother more lovable, more human.

“I think he still loves Julie very much,” I say.

Sid scoffs: “Too bad.” He looks the other way as he says this, out the oval window of the plane. “If he loved her, he wouldn’t have fucked your wife.”

“Sid,” Alex says, and her voice is surprisingly calm. “Please shut up.”

“Yes,” I say, trying to match her patient tone. “Please.”

A chunk of Honolulu floats into view, and I can see lights coursing up the hills, then a blank dark space and another long row of house lights. It’s always strange to be reminded of other lives still moving along. For every light I see, there’s a person or a family, or someone like myself, enduring something. I feel the plane dropping, and then a wisp of cloud obstructs the view and makes our speed tangible.

“I think you should go home,” I say to Sid. “See your mom.” He stares out the window. “Sid. Did you hear what I said?”

“I can’t,” he says.

“Sure you can. She’s your mother. She wants you home.”

“She kicked me out,” he says.

I try to make eye contact with Alex, but she won’t look my way. Her hand is still on Sid’s thigh, and the two of them together are absolutely impenetrable. The runways stretch out beside us. We’re back to reality, miles and miles away from the slow and easy island.

35

I MEET THE
cousins at Cousin Six’s house. He’s called Cousin Six because at one point in his boyhood, he chugged six beers and then punched himself in the nose. He is now around seventy, and like him, his moniker is still going strong. He sits in the living room, which is similar to mine—sliding glass doors open to the backyard. Every time I see him, he tells me how he’d give soldiers surfing lessons in exchange for access to his favorite spot, which was blocked off during the war, so I’m out by the pool, trying to avoid him. He tells me about the soldiers as though it’s the first time he has ever told me, and it makes me sad and uncomfortable and a little angry.

I’m sitting at a table by the pool, with my pen perched over the documents and our statement to the press, but I haven’t signed a thing. My mind is elsewhere, of course. Any day now I will be a widower. The girls are waiting for me at the hospital, making up for our one night and two days away. I haven’t seen Sid since last night. I wonder what he expects from me. I thought of calling his mother, but then there would be another superfluous person in my life. There are so many people in my thoughts who shouldn’t be there. I put Sid and the girls aside. Today I must deal with birthrights.

A few cousins want to take the highest offer, not caring about the Wal-Mart replacing the taro patch, but the majority wants Holitzer, our only local bidder. I don’t like what’s happening. I want all this land to go to a good home, and I don’t like our decision, or any of the options in front of me, and neither would my father. Holitzer has won. Brian has won.

Other cousins are walking out to the patio. They wear shorts, Spooners, and rubber slippers and carry celebratory cocktails. Cousin Six’s wife is passing around a bowl of mochi crunch, which makes everyone’s breath smell like soy sauce.

“Eh, long time no see.” Hugh sits next to me with his documents. He carries a pen in his mouth.

“I just saw you last night,” I say. “On Kauai.”

“Was that last night? Boy.” He looks at the chair. “Will this hold me?”

I look at the well-worn seat made of plastic cords. I’ve sunk into my cords and can feel the impressions on the backs of my thighs. “It should hold,” I say.

He sits in the chair and I can hear the plastic stretch.

“It’s like an ass hammock,” he says, then begins flipping through the papers. “Out of our hands.” He smooths the paper and presses the end of the pen so that it clicks.

It’s all such a fluke, a stroke of luck. I look at the cousins standing around the pool. Their teeth are so white, their skin coloring like walnuts. What happened to me? Why am I not like them?

“Do you ever feel guilty about it?” I ask. “All of this.” I hold up the papers.

“No,” Hugh says. “I didn’t do anything.”

“I know,” I say, and he’s right. It’s like feeling guilty about your eye color. The only thing I feel guilty about is that my wife thought she was going to inherit another sort of life. She should have been with somebody more charismatic than me. Someone more powerful and loud, someone who eats really fast and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. I think of her entering Brian’s house on Black Point, which makes me think of Julie. I can imagine Joanie eyeing their home, making fun of Julie’s knickknacks or the art on the walls, perhaps planning the ways she would redecorate. I want to tell her to stop. It’s Julie’s home. Julie can light a barbecue.

“Joanie’s not doing well,” I say to Hugh.

His pen moves across the first page, and I see his childlike signature. It’s perfectly legible. He puts his hand over mine for a moment. His arm looks as though his skin has been pulled back. It’s raw and spotted. “She’ll be okay,” he says. “She’s a fighter.”

“No,” I say. “She won’t be fine. She’s going to die. We’ve taken her off the machines.”

I take a sip of Hugh’s cocktail because it’s there and I don’t have my own. Hugh’s the head cousin, the leader of the tribe, and he has always told us what to think and what to do. What we’re building, what we’re tearing down, and in this case, when we’re selling and to whom. I want to hear what he has to say about this, about my wife dying. I put his glass back down on the table.

He looks at the glass, then at me. “Have some more,” he says.

“That’s okay.” I stare at the papers, the pen that says
HNL TRAVEL
. “I can’t sign,” I say.

He takes his drink and shakes it, then brings it to his mouth. He takes a sip and spits out an ice cube. “He’ll take over our debt,” he says. “Just sign, go to your wife, done.”

“I don’t want it to go to Holitzer. I don’t want it to go to Brian Speer. We can get out of our own debt. I want to keep it.”

He frowns. “We need your approval to move.”

I shake my head. He’s not getting my approval. No one is getting anything from me.

“I can’t,” I say. “I won’t do it.”

I’m thinking of the princess. When she died, she wanted the land to be used to fund a school for children of Hawaiian descent. This was her spoken wish that she failed to put into a contract. I have no interest in this wish, in a Hawaiian-only school. There are already a few of them, and they’re completely elitist, not to mention unconstitutional. But now I find myself not wanting to give it up—the land, the lush relic of our tribe, the dead. The last Hawaiian-owned land will be lost, and I will have something to do with it. Even though we don’t look Hawaiian, even though our constant recombining has erased the evidence of our ethnicity, sharpening our flat faces, straightening our kinky hair, even though we act like haoles, going to private schools and clubs and not having a good command of pidgin English, my girls and I are Hawaiian, and this land is ours.