The Descendants (35 page)

Be part of a living coral reef after you have gone!

Aloha burials at sea—be paddled off in a canoe and scattered!

Shoot your ashes into Earth’s orbit!

Release ashes from a hot—air balloon to the four winds!

Go out as part of a firework display!

The last one doesn’t have an exclamation mark. It says,
Have your loved one’s remains mixed with the soil of a living and very beautiful bonsai tree. A bonsai tree that grows and will live for hundreds of years with simple care.

At the bottom is a name, Vern Ashbury, and a phone number that I can call for pricing information.

“What’s that?”

I turn to see Alex. She sits down next to me.

“I don’t know,” I say. “An ad for something.” I put it facedown on the other side of me so she can’t see it. I close my eyes again.

“That was bad,” she says. “You shouldn’t have done that. Scottie’s upset. She’s just a baby.”

“She’s not a baby.”

“She is now,” Alex says.

“I need to go home.” I sit up and open my eyes. “I need to talk to Sid. I have things to do.”

“Why do you have to talk to Sid?”

“Why did he get kicked out?”

“You’ll have to ask him,” she says.

“I’m asking you.”

“I don’t know why,” she says. I believe her.

“We don’t have time for him, Alex. I’m sorry he’s hurting, but I don’t have time for it. You tell him to stay out of the way, not to put his shit before ours. Especially if he’s hurting your feelings.”

“Fine,” she says. “Whatever.”

She reaches across my lap for the ad. I watch as she reads the options.

“Are you kidding me?” she says. “Vern Ashbury. Christ. I guess I like the bonsai one. It’s sad.”

“I know,” I say. “What have you told Scottie? Does she know what’s happening?”

“Just now, the hand. She thinks it means something. She thinks Mom might get better.”

“Okay,” I say.

“No,” she says. “Not okay. Really not okay. You need to talk to her, Dad. You yell at her for not knowing, for not behaving properly, but she doesn’t know what’s going on. Don’t put me in charge of her anymore. She needs you.” Alex stands and walks away.

“Where are you going?”

She doesn’t acknowledge me, and I follow her, leaving the burial options behind. We pass the popular patient’s room, and it seems even lonelier than the bare ones. The balloons are slowly shriveling; a few of the flowers in the vases are bowing toward the floor, and a lei hanging on a doorknob reveals its white string between the withered plumeria.

A woman is standing at the end of the bed. “I’m just a volunteer,” she says to the patient. “I’m not allowed to touch you.”

Alex walks to the elevators across from the gift shop.

“I found you in there.” I gesture toward the shop, and it takes a moment, but then she sees the postcards.

“Great,” she says. “Isn’t that great.”

“I bought them and threw them away.”

“Thanks,” she says.

I look down the hall, hoping to see Scottie, but she isn’t there. She’s still in the room. I’ll have to get one girl and leave the other one behind.

I choose Scottie, the baby, the one who shook in my arms. The elevator opens. A man shuffles out, hooked to an IV. I find myself wishing he’d hurry up and I think of Sid, his guilty impatience with slow people even when they’re weak.

“Meet me at the car,” I say to Alex. “I’ll go talk to Scottie.”

I’M EMBARRASSED
to see her. I know I should apologize, but she needed to do it. She needed to touch her.

When I near the room, I hear Scottie say, “I have a really good eye.” I stop in the doorway. She is talking to her mother. I back away a little, but I can’t walk away. I want to watch. I want to know what she says. I see her curled into her mother’s side; she has maneuvered Joanie’s arm so that it’s around her. I catch myself thinking,
She’s alive.
I almost can’t bear seeing Scottie in her mother’s embrace.

“It’s on the ceiling,” I hear Scottie say. “The most beautiful nest. It’s very golden and soft-looking and warm.”

I look up and see it, too, except it isn’t a nest. It’s a browning piece of banana, the remnant of our game still stuck to the ceiling. The game Joanie and I used to play, and now a game my daughter and I will play.

Scottie props herself on an elbow, then leans in and kisses her mother on the lips, checks her face, then kisses her again. She does this over and over, an exquisite version of mouth-to-mouth, each kiss expectant, almost medicinal, and I know she still has hope. I let her go on with this fantasy, this belief in magical endings, this belief that love can bring someone to life. I let her try. For a long time I watch her effort. I root for her, even, but after a while, I know that it’s time. I need to step in. I need to teach Scottie the proper names of things. I need to tell her the truth.

I knock on the door. “Scottie,” I say.

She stays under her mother’s arm, her back toward me. I sit on the edge of the bed and lie down to put my head on her back and listen to her breathe. “Scottie,” I say.

“What, Dad,” she says, and I tell her everything that’s happening and everything that will happen, and I feel like the cruelest person in the world. But I fulfill my responsibilities as best I can, and when I’m finished, we stay there for what seems like a long time, her head on Joanie’s chest, my head on her back, moving up and down with her short, sobbing breaths. Her little body is like a flexed muscle, tense and stressed, still resisting, and I know she doesn’t completely believe it. How could she?

38

TONIGHT THE GIRLS
and Esther and I sit together at the dining room table, something we haven’t done in a long time, not counting Thanksgiving and Christmas. Esther has never sat with us before.

“How long has it been?” I ask. “Since we’ve done this?”

“Christmas,” Alex says.

There’s a story Alex wrote when she was young, and every Christmas Eve we read it aloud to the guests at the table and then reveal the author. The story is about Joseph, his perspective of the night Jesus was born. He asks the wise men and the farm animals how to take care of a baby, and they each have advice. By the end of the story, Joseph is ready for Jesus and even swaddles the baby, a trick he learned from the donkey. This past Christmas, when Joanie stood to read the story, Alex snatched it from her hand. I don’t think any of the guests noticed that Joanie was about to do anything except our next-door neighbor, Bill Tigue, who thought she was going to read a prayer. He bowed his head and closed his eyes. Christmas was the time Alex saw her mother enter the home of another man. That shouldn’t count as the real last time, and I suppose tonight doesn’t count, either, since we aren’t and never will be completely together.

“Well,” I say. “Cheers.”

No one lifts a glass. Esther is having a beer. She grips her can with both hands and holds it in her lap.

“Doesn’t Sid want to eat?” I ask. Sid is watching TV in the den, and no one has mentioned him, which makes me feel bad. I wonder if Alex has told him to stay away from me.

“He’s fine,” Alex says.

We eat the dinner I have cooked: a salad, barbecued chicken, rice, and broccoli with hollandaise sauce. I keep waiting for someone to say the meal is good and have to hold myself back from asking. “Well, we’ll save some for him. If he wants it.”

Esther picks things out of her salad with her fork—the tomatoes, the avocados—and pushes them to the edge of her plate. The girls have drizzled shoyu on their rice. Esther’s is topped with a pat of butter.

“Have you called their schools?” Esther asks. “They been missing days.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Alex, when you go back?”

“She’s not going back,” I say.

“Ay,” she says. “You in trouble. I tell you. Pretty soon.”

“Could you please complete a sentence?”

She shakes her head. “If only. If only.”

“Esther, what do you want to say? Do you want to stay? Why don’t you just say that?”

The girls stop eating. Ever since I made them hold their mother’s hand, they look at me in a way that makes me feel like a different man. They look at me like I’m their father.

“I want to stay,” Esther says. “There. I complete a sentence.” She puts her finger into the mouth of the beer can.

“Fine,” I say. “Then stay.”

She gives me no indication that she’s pleased. The girls seem indifferent.

“I want to get up now,” Esther says. “I don’t want to eat this way here.”

“Okay,” I say.

She starts to clear her plate.

“Just leave it,” I say. “I’ll clean up.”

“No, I still eat.” She takes her plate and her beer and pushes the swinging door of the kitchen. Moments later, we hear a crowd of people say, “Wheel! Of! Fortune!”

A gecko croaks in the rafters.

“I’m not going back to HPA?” Alex says.

“No,” I say. “You’ll stay here.”

A termite climbs the ball of my rice. “Ever notice how Sid’s always putting things in his mouth?” I ask. “His hair, shirt, wallet?”

“Like a toddler,” Alex says. “I know.”

I notice another termite climbing up my water glass. They have found us. There’s a blaze of light over our table. The girls pick them out of their food. Scottie fiddles with a few on the table, tearing off their wings.

“They look like maggots,” she says.

Our home has everything a termite could ever want: moisture, humidity, reservoirs of wood. If they keep coming, I’ll have to fumigate the house, envelop it with a tent and let them inhale poison. Where would we go? I imagine us out on the streets. Alex flicks one from her rice and Scottie lifts one off her chicken; the red sauce has ruined its wings. I get up and turn off the lights, then turn on the lights in the pool. They’ll follow the light and drown.

I sit back down in the dark and we continue to eat. In the dark, I can hardly tell the girls apart. One of them burps. Both of them laugh.

I take a sip of my wine and the glass reminds me of my mother, what I did for her one Mother’s Day when I was very young. I made her breakfast in bed. I placed lettuce in a red wineglass, then poured in granola and milk. I thought this was so sophisticated of me, something that a mother would truly want: cereal with an elegant garnish. When she saw her gift, she laughed, and at the time I thought she was laughing with delight. I watched her eat her granola in the pretty glass, green lettuce soaked in milk. When the girls were younger, I wondered what silly things they would get for me, how they would interpret my desires, but their gifts were always safe. Just cards, really.

“How come you’ve never made me crazy things for Father’s Day?” I ask the girls.

“You don’t like clutter,” Alex says.

“You don’t like junk,” Scottie says.

“Well, I like it now,” I say. “Just so you know. I like clutter and junk.”

“Okay,” Scottie says.