The Descendants (36 page)

“This is good,” Alex says. “The chicken.”

The compliment fills me with pride. I feel like Joseph in her story, like I have learned to take care of someone. At the end of Alex’s story, Joseph burps Jesus, then rocks him to sleep. “Don’t cry, baby,” he says. “I’m here.”

WHILE THE GIRLS
clean up, I go to the den with a plate of dinner for Sid. When he sees me, he takes his feet off of the coffee table, and I notice he’s on the phone. I turn to give him privacy, but then I hear him say goodbye.

“Was that your mom?” I ask.

“Nope,” he says. He looks at the plate in my hands. I hand it to him.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You could have sat with us,” I say.

“It’s okay,” he says.

The lights from the television make his face blue then green then black. I think of turning on a light, but I see a termite walk across the screen and remember I have to keep us in the dark.

“Look,” I say. “I appreciate you staying out of the way, but forget it. Just act like you normally do. It was better that way.”

He puts his feet back on the coffee table. I can see mud in the treads of his soles.

“Is everything okay with you and Alex?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Why?”

“Scottie says you went off with those friends of hers.”

“Oh, please. Those girls are useless. I smoked them out.”

“Great, Sid. I’m so relieved you gave them drugs.”

“Sorry,” he says. “I forget you’re, like, a dad.”

“Why did your mom kick you out?” I ask.

“She didn’t like what I had to say.”

“Which was?”

“That my father getting killed was the best thing that ever happened to us. I didn’t mean it, but I said it.”

He looks at the food in his lap and picks up the chicken with his hands.

“Why would you tell her something like that?”

His lips are red from the barbecue sauce. He chews, and I wait for him to swallow, but it takes him a long time.

“Want to sit?” he asks with his mouth full.

I sit beside him and stretch my legs out on the coffee table, which is actually a large leather ottoman, because according to Joanie, actual coffee tables are passé. “Lara keeps a tray on hers. I like the way that looks,” she said.

“But it hardly holds anything,” I said.

“It looks nice,” she said.

I can’t remember what else we said about the ottoman. I guess that’s all.

I look at the television. In a crowded exercise studio, women step up onto benches and step down to the beat of music. The head woman says, “And one, and two, now squeeze.” She points to her ass.

Sid changes the channel. Images appear and disappear until he lands on a picture of a bearded man painting a picture of a meadow.

“This guy’s good,” Sid says.

“You know, Sid, Alex is having a hard time, too—”

He interrupts me before I can go on. “No kidding.”

“Maybe you should look after her as much as she seems to be looking after you.”

“She’s only with me because we don’t have to comfort each other,” he says. “Our shit cancels each other’s out.”

I think of my relationship with Joanie. Do people ever fall in love anymore?

“You were going to tell me why you would say such a thing to your mother who had just lost her husband.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he says.

“Sid, I’m asking you to tell me.”

“Fine,” he says. He picks something out of his teeth and takes a deep breath. “I have a friend, or I had a friend. Eliza. We were fifteen. Hung out a lot. She was one of the boys. That girl. I never messed around with her, even though I wanted to, and I think she did, too.” He wipes his mouth with the paper napkin, then balls it up and throws it toward the wastepaper basket. He misses. “I’ll get that,” he says. “Anyway, she slept over a lot, Eliza. Not in my room. She’d crash on the couch in the living room. Dad liked her, too. They’d always joke around. This one time my dad gave us beer, and we were so excited because our life passion, basically, was finding ways to get beer. But he whispered to me that it was a joke, it was near beer, but we’d test Eliza to see if she pretended to be drunk. As we drank the beers, Eliza laughed a lot more, she said dumb things, she even stumbled on the kitchen step. When my dad finally told her, she got really defensive, saying she would have acted the same way despite the beer, near or not.”

“She was embarrassed.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, it was lame, when I think about it now. So, the next time she came over, my dad made it up to her and offered the both of us good old-fashioned Budweiser. We drank outside on the picnic bench. Some of Dad’s friends came over and played poker. We went to my room and listened to music. We were both pretty trashed, which gave us a good excuse to make out, so we did. It was inevitable.” Sid smiles to himself. “I remember feeling this huge relief, like we could finally stop pretending we were just friends.”

I wonder if he feels this way about Alex. I wonder what they really are.

“So, we’re going at it, I mean, not literally. We’re just kissing, but you know, we’re pretty passionate about it. Pretty urgent, you know what I’m saying, and then out of the corner of my eye, I see something. It’s my dad standing in the doorway. She was on top of me on the floor, and we were fully dressed, but we were, you know, going through the motions. My dad was just watching, and when he saw me looking at him, it took him a moment to realize I could see him, because he was looking at the back of Eliza. I pushed her off of me, and he just sort of looked at us with this strange expression. Like he’d been caught. Eliza just sat there and I don’t know. I don’t remember what she did.

“Then my dad said, ‘Eliza. Better find your own place to sleep,’ and that’s all, and he stood there until she got up and walked past him and went to the couch downstairs. When she left, he looked at me but didn’t seem angry. He looked like he was the one who was embarrassed, who’d done something wrong. Then I went to bed. I was sort of happy but sort of bummed, too, because now he’d tell my mom, and Eliza probably wouldn’t be able to sleep over. She wouldn’t be just a friend anymore.”

Sid looks at the television for a while, and without ever taking his eyes away from it, he tells me the rest of the story in a flat, distant voice. It’s a voice I’ve never heard him use. He doesn’t use any slang or humor. He keeps his eyes on the painter, whose voice is also hushed and hypnotic.

Sid tells me about his father coming downstairs to Eliza, passed out on the couch. He tells me how she woke to find his father on top of her, to feel him kissing her, moving on her. He tells me how she avoided Sid the next day and for weeks after and how he thought it was because of him. Then, to sum it up, Eliza finally told Sid. Sid got angry. He didn’t believe her. Eliza didn’t care if he didn’t believe her. Then Sid believed her and hated his father, hated his mother for loving his father. His father died and Sid told his mother everything, about the beer, the kiss, about his father trying to take advantage of his drunk friend. His girlfriend. And that’s the story. That’s Sid’s story.

“Alex doesn’t know all that,” he says. “She just thinks my mom kicked me out because she’s upset.”

“Why haven’t you told her?”

“She’s busy,” he says. “Like you said.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because you asked,” he says. “And so you’ll stop looking at me like I’m about to open fire.”

“Did your mother believe you?” I ask. “When you told her?”

“Of course not.”

He goes through the channels once again. I see a giraffe, an animated sponge, someone welding, a bailiff giving a judge the thumbs-up.

“Why did you tell her? Why would you do it after he was dead?”

He settles on a station: a news anchorman reporting a deadly earthquake in Ethiopia, the ticker below reading,
Five days until the Oscars! Five days until the Oscars!

“Because I respect her,” he says. “He was never good to her. He made our house tense all the time.”

“But you’ve ruined her life.” I think of Julie. I imagine the news literally breaking or damaging her in some way.

“I haven’t ruined her life,” he says. “She’ll just know like I know. I still love my dad. We still have our life before the bad part. It doesn’t make everything about him bad, right?” He looks at me for the first time. “I’m not supposed to hate everything, am I?”

I try to fix my gaze on his, but I see his eyes watering. I’m not supposed to see him this way. Nobody is. I look at the anchorman.

“You’re supposed to feel however you feel,” I say. “You can miss him. You can love him.”

Out of the corner of my eye I see Sid look up at the ceiling. I stand up.

“Thanks,” I say. “I appreciate you telling me all that.”

“No sweat,” he says and clears his throat.

I tell him to keep the light off because of the termites and say good night. I walk back toward my room, an uneasy feeling making me rack my brain for something more to say, something that will make everything okay.
Don’t cry. I’m here.

At the doorway I turn around. “Are you warm enough in that room? There are extra blankets, you know. If you need them.”

“I’m fine,” Sid says. “I’m good.”

“Anything you’ve noticed on TV lately?” I ask. “Any keen observations, reflections?”

He rolls his eyes and holds down a smile.

“Go on, then,” I say.

“The cartoon diseases,” he says. “The commercials make herpes, foot fungus, you know, all those things, they make them into cartoon characters and have them yell and threaten and pillage the body. It’s weird. Have you ever noticed those commercials?”

“I’ve noticed,” I say.

He locks eyes with me. “They should just come out and say what they have to cure you. Those cartoons are disgusting. Just tell us how to get rid of what we have.”

He focuses on the TV again, and I leave him in the dark room.

39

DR. JOHNSTON WALKS
into Joanie’s room, and there’s another man at his heels who is smiling at my children in a way that frightens me. Before I left the hospital yesterday, I asked Dr. Johnston for help. How do I tell my youngest child that there is no hope?

“You mean she doesn’t know?” he asked.

“She knows,” I said quickly. I thought about Scottie kissing her mother and how it looked like she was trying to bring her to life. “It’s just that she still thinks there’s a chance. Even after I explained it all. Joanie’s hand moved, see. I guess I just don’t know what to do now.”

He sat behind his desk and I could tell he was forcing himself not to look at me, as though I had done something wrong. His disappointment in me was clear. I even swallowed my pride and told him about the sea urchin and the man-of-wars, though not about the masturbation movies or her posing in front of the mirror. He said he would talk to both of the girls and introduce us to a children’s therapist whom some found to be helpful.

The therapist’s eyelids are heavy, his mouth gently curled up. It’s as though he has taken a bong hit. His face is tan and freckled, sun-beaten, and his features are soft, so there’s not a lot you can really hold on to.