“I don’t know what’s going on in your life that has led you to become such a nasty young girl.”
“Hey now,” I say. “She apologized. Kids are mean. They’re mean to show other kids that they shouldn’t be messed with, right?”
“She needs to learn to be the same person online as she is in real time,” Mrs. Higgins says.
“I agree.”
“She needs to know not to fight online. It’s one of the school’s rules.”
“Do you understand that, Scottie?” I say. I get down on my knees so that I’m at eye level with her, something Esther said she learned from a show about militant nannies. “You have to speak to people to their face.”
Scottie makes exaggerated nods, her chin craning to the sky, then coming down to her chest.
“She doesn’t get it.” Mrs. Higgins wears an angry smile that I don’t like. “She’s going to keep doing it. I can tell.”
“No,” I say. “It will be all right. It’s like the time Lani locked Scottie out of the house at her birthday party. It was a cruel thing to do, and you probably did it to show off, right?” I say to Lani.
Lani nods, then catches herself and remains still.
“Scottie sat out there the entire day,” I say.
“I didn’t know about that,” Mrs. Higgins says.
“You brought me cake,” Scottie says.
“You brought her cake,” I repeat. “Perhaps Lani should be the one to apologize, as it seems this incident was the catalyst for all this…‘evil’ was the word you used.” You’re dealing with an attorney, lady. I can go on and on, even in mismatched socks.
“I’m sorry,” Lani says.
Mrs. Higgins stands with her arms drawn tightly across her chest, frustrated by how the world has turned, as Scottie says.
I slap my thighs. “Good! Terrific. Lani, you should come over sometime. Come for a swim or a hike or something. Or scrapbook.”
“Okay,” Lani says. Scottie looks at me and scowls, but I know she’ll be appreciative of it later. You need friends who make you feel totally superior. “Again, Mrs. Higgins and Lani, sorry for the anguish and the tears. I hope to see you both again on better terms.”
Mrs. Higgins turns and walks back to the door.
“SYL,” Scottie says.
“SYL,” Lani says.
See you later. I get it. We walk to the screen door and I look at Scottie, for clues, perhaps. Just when I think I’ve figured her out, she surprises me with something else. While we’ve dealt with the technicalities of this problem, the problem is still here. Scottie was cruel and I don’t understand it completely. I don’t know if it’s a symptom of girlhood or a symptom of something much larger.
“I need to work on some things at home,” I say to Scottie as we put on our shoes, “but Esther says you have some class to go to. Voice class or something.”
“Voice class sucks,” she says. “She can take me to the beach. You said.”
I look around for Mrs. Higgins so we can say goodbye. I kneel down to tie my laces. I’m down here in a sea of shoes. Mrs. Higgins has a lot of sandals with scuffed soles. All of them have short heels the length of half a thumb. What’s the point? For some reason I hold a little heel in my hand. Some of Joanie’s heels are the length of a hand.
If Joanie dies before me, I wonder if I’ll ever be with another woman. I can’t imagine going through all of the preliminary stuff—the talk, the chatter, the dinners. I’d have to take someone places, explain my history, make jokes, dole out compliments, hold back farts. I’d have to tell her I’m a widower. I’m convinced Joanie would never have an affair. It just seems like too much trouble.
Mrs. Higgins stands over me. I let go of her shoe. She stares at me so fiercely, I worry she may kick.
“Good luck with the sale,” she says, and I stand and shake my head. I realize she’s not even angry with Scottie for what she did. She’s angry with Scottie for who she belongs to.
“So what happens?” she asks. “Why do you get all this money again?”
“Do you really want to know?” I stand and face her, and she takes a step back.
“Sure,” she says.
“Dad,” Scottie whines. “I want to go.”
I clear my throat. “Well,” I say. “My great-grandfather was Edward King. His parents were missionaries, but he went in a different direction. He became a banker and later the chief financial officer for King Kalākaua. He managed the estate of Princess Kekipi, the last direct descendant of King Kamehameha.”
I stop talking. Hopefully, I’ve lost her interest, but she raises her eyebrows and waits for me to continue.
“Should I get my scrapbook and show her?” Scottie asks.
“No,” I say.
“Yes,” Mrs. Higgins says.
Scottie opens the screen door and walks to the car.
“Okay, then what happened…Kekipi was supposed to marry her brother, a weird Hawaiian royalty tradition. Yikes. Just when they were about to tie the knot, she had an affair with her estate planner, Edward, and they married soon after. Annexation happened soon after, too, so marrying a haole businessman was pretty ballsy. Anyway, they had a lot between the two of them, and when another princess died, she left three hundred thousand acres of Kauai land to Kekipi as well as her estate.
“Kekipi died first. Edward got it all. Then Edward set up a trust in 1920, died, and we got it all.”
Scottie comes back and opens to the first page of the album. She ripped out a few pages from three local history books before I caught her, and she’s glued these in, making the album smell like cedar trunks. There’s Edward, hollow-eyed and serious. He has on knee-high boots, and his top hat rests on a table behind him. There’s Kekipi, which means “rebel,” her brown and flat, chubby face. Her bushy brows. Whenever I see her picture I think we would have hit it off. I can’t help but smile at her.
Mrs. Higgins leans down and looks at the pictures. “Then?” she asks.
“My father died last year, marking the termination and dissolution of the trust. And now, land-rich and cash-poor, we, the beneficiaries, are selling off our portfolio to…someone. I don’t know who yet.”
“And your decision will have a major impact on Hawaii’s real estate world,” she says in a tone of mock importance. I figure she’s quoting something she read in the paper. It bothers me that everything I just said, she probably already knew. I close Scottie’s book.
“Lucky.” Mrs. Higgins opens the screen door. I look over at the empty bench and picnic table and imagine Scottie sitting there alone.
“Can Esther take me to the club instead of voice?” Scottie asks. “You said we’d go to the beach. So can she?”
I look over Scottie’s head at Mrs. Higgins. “It’s what I inherited. Like it or not.”
“I’m sorry about your father,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say.
I wait to see if I can be excused, and when she doesn’t say anything more, I start to walk with Scottie to the car. I feel exhausted, as though I’ve just delivered a sermon, but my speech has put me in the right frame of mind. I’ll look through the buyers’ portfolios with the images of Edward and Kekipi in my head. And then I can stop thinking about it. I feel cold, with my mind preoccupied in business when Joanie’s lying there on a kind of long and uncomfortable red-eye flight.
“Can she? Can Esther take me to the club?”
“Sure,” I say. “Good plan.”
We get in and I start the car. “Are you going to be good to Lani?” I ask. I think of Tommy Cook, a pale boy with psoriasis; we used to tie him to a chair with bungee cords and put him in the middle of the road, then hide. Few cars would actually come down Rainbow Drive, but when they did, it always surprised me that the drivers would slow their vehicles and swerve around the chair. None of them ever got out of their cars to help Tommy; it was as though they were in on the prank. I don’t know how Tommy managed to let us catch him more than once. Maybe he liked the attention.
> “I’ll try,” Scottie says. “But it’s hard. She has this face that you just want to hit.”
“I know what you mean,” I say, thinking of Tommy, but realize I’m not supposed to empathize. “What does that mean?” I ask. “The kind of face that you want to hit. Where did you get that?” Sometimes I wonder if Scottie knows what she’s saying or if it’s something she recites, like those kids who memorize the Declaration of Independence.
“It’s something Mom said about Danielle.”
“I see.” Joanie has carried her juvenile meanness into her adult life. She sends unflattering pictures of her ex-friends to the Advertiser to put in their society pages. She always has some sort of drama in her life, some friend I’m not supposed to speak to or invite to our barbecues, and then I hear her on the phone gossiping about the latest scandal in an outraged and thrilled voice. “You are going to die,” I’ll hear her say. “Oh my God, you will just die.”
Is this where Scottie gets it? By watching her mother use cruelty as a source of entertainment? I feel almost proud that I have made these deductions without the blogs and without Esther, and I’m eager to tell Joanie about all of this, to prove that I was capable without her.
6
I STUDY THE bids—the plans, offers, histories, credos. I’m on our bed, and the house is quiet without Scottie and Esther. I thought I could just pick a buyer, but it’s not as simple as that. I want to make the best decision. I’ve got those pictures in my head and feel I have to choose on their behalf as well. The plans for the land are virtually the same: condos, shopping centers, golf courses. One wants a Target, the other a Wal-Mart. One wants a Whole Foods, the other a Nordstrom.
Michael Nasser, our attorney, wants us to accept an offer from Holitzer Properties. I know that a few cousins are pissed off because Holitzer didn’t make the highest bid, and Michael Nasser’s daughter is married to Holitzer’s chief financial officer. A few of the cousins balk at what seems to be an insider deal, but I’m thinking it would be good to choose a buyer who has a history here. I remember Joanie thought this as well. She surprised me by bringing it up frequently. She knew a lot about the buyers and the numbers, which shocked me. She was never interested in anything I was working on. When I tried to talk about cases at work, she would cover her ears and shake her head.
Many nights, when she would ask me what was happening with the sale, so uncharacteristically interested, my appreciation would turn into paranoia, and this was before I found the note. I wondered if she was planning to divorce me after I sold my shares. But if that were the case, she probably would urge me to sell to the highest bidder and not Holitzer.
“Just sell to Holitzer and move on,” she said one night. We were on the bed, and she was flipping through a magazine about kitchens. “The others could back out. And Holitzer is local. His family is from Kauai, comes from a working-class background. Holitzer’s your man.”
“Why are you pushing this guy?” I asked.
“He just seems like a good choice. I don’t know.”
“I think I’ll go with the New Yorkers,” I said, just to see her response.
“Interesting to see how that will turn out.” She flipped a page in her magazine. “I love that sink,” she said. “Look.”
I looked at the sink. “It’s just a basin. There’s no room to put anything.”
“Exactly. Gets rid of clutter, easy to clean. Sometimes the least practical makes the most sense.”
I saw the edge of her mouth curl up, and I laughed. She had a way of addressing one thing through something unrelated. “Joanie,” I said. “You’re something else.”
I LOOK AT the highest bidder, a publicly traded firm out of New York that has offered almost half a billion dollars. I’m wary of giving New Yorkers this much land. It just doesn’t seem right, and maybe Joanie thought this, too; she wanted our land in the right hands.
I think of my father’s funeral, all the people vying for the front pews as though his death were the best ticket in town.
“People are just waiting for me to die,” he told me one day. We were sitting in his back room; he liked to rummage through his books, where he kept newspaper clippings.
“Keep living,” I said.
He flipped through a book about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and pulled a clipping from the pages to read to me: “‘A heavy downpour of rains reached a crescendo just about the time Princess Kekipi died. The Hawaiians said when rain fell at the time of a person’s death or funeral, Kulu ka waimaka, uwe ’opu, which means “The tears fall; the clouds weep.” The gods mingle their tears of affection with those who weep in sympathy and aloha.’
“It rains in November all the time,” he said, placing the clipping back in the book. “People were just waiting to get their hands on that land. They couldn’t, and now they’re waiting for me.”
It must be strange to know that people are waiting for you to die, and now the twenty-one beneficiaries don’t have to wait any longer because my father is gone. I want to go with Holitzer since he’s local, but choosing a higher bid from an outsider may make for a smoother transaction devoid of lawsuits. I don’t want to have to deal with this again further down the road.
I look at everything. I even try to decipher documents and letters from 1920, imagining what two people I’ve never met would want. The princess, the last in the royal lineage. My great-grandfather, that frisky white boy. What a scandal they must have caused. What fun they must have had. What love and ambition! What do you want, you lovebirds, you rebels? What do you want now?
I look at Holitzer’s portfolio and see exclamation points surrounding his name and think of Joanie going through all of my work. Passages are underlined for me with notes in the margins. I press my finger on a smiley face. Then I reach over to her side of the bed and open a koa box she keeps on her nightstand. The only thing in there is a necklace, a silver chain with a charm in the shape of a lopsided heart. I gave this to her years ago. She never wears it. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I get up and continue to look through her things—purses, shoe boxes, drawers, and pockets. Then I go to Alex’s room. Something in me needs to be quenched.
I look through my eldest daughter’s drawers, for divorce papers, perhaps. I look under the sink of her bathroom, behind the toilet, in between stacks of towels. I rifle through the pages of books and end up getting distracted by Alex’s childhood things: old stuffed animals (a monkey, a worm, a Smurf) and old books (Ping, Ferdinand, books I remember from my childhood, many about wayward animals with deep psychological problems). I find pictures of Alex with her friends at camp on the San Juans, sailing on Puget Sound, having campfires in front of tepees. I see a stack of yearbooks and read the copious notes telling my daughter to stay cool. Some notes take up an entire page and are written in a strange code: Remember hot pants and dirty Christine! Poison ivy and BYOBucket! Are those ants??? Point, the van, that’s my mom’s favorite reindeer!
I imagine Alex reading these words as an old woman and not knowing what any of them mean. Girls take so much time organizing the past. There are various collages documenting Alex’s weekends with friends, yet the testimonials to good times seem to stop once she hits her junior year and goes off to boarding school. Joanie came into this room a lot, told me she was rearranging things, maybe turning it into a guest bedroom. I look in the jewelry box where Joanie found the drugs. She showed me a miniature Ziploc bag filled with a clear, hard rock.
“What is this?” I said. I never did drugs, so I had no idea. Heroin? Cocaine? Crack? Ice? “What is this?” I screamed at Alex, who screamed back, “It’s not like I shoot it!”
A plastic ballerina pops up and slowly twirls to a tinkling song whose sound is discordant and deformed. The pink satin liner is dirty, and other than a black pearl necklace, the box holds only rusty paper clips and rubber bands noosed with Alex’s dark hair. I see a note stuck to the mirror and pick up the jewelry box and move the ballerina aside. She twirls against my finger. The note says, I
wouldn’t hide them in the same place twice.
I let out a short breath through my nose. Good one, Alex. I close the jewelry box and shake my head, missing her tremendously. I wish she never went back to boarding school, and I don’t understand her sudden change of plans. What did they fight about? What could have been so bad?
I go back to the bedroom, ashamed to be looking for anything at all. My wife cared about the sale. She appreciated Holitzer. She thought this sale would change our lives. My wife had friends she met at Indigo. Gay men and models adore that restaurant. My wife kept things from the past. My wife had a life outside this home. It’s as simple as can be.
7
TUESDAY. TODAY IS my date with the doctor, and I’m not going to run away. I’ve let the front desk know that I’m here.
“A slow but gradual recovery,” I imagine him saying. “When she comes out, she will need you. You will have to help her with the most basic things, everyday actions you take for granted. She will need you. Need you.”
Scottie and I walk down the hall. Her T-shirt says MRS. CLOONEY, and she’s wearing wooden clogs that ti-tap-ti-tap-ti-tap on every step. The hospital is so busy, you’d think they were having some kind of going-out-of-business sale. Scottie looks eager; her mouth is moving, and I think she’s rehearsing what she’s going to say to Joanie. This morning she told me she had a great story for Mom, and I’m excited to hear it. I guess I’ll need to talk to Joanie as well. I’ll need to relay to her whatever Dr. Johnston says to me.
When we get to the room, I see we have a visitor. A friend of Joanie’s whom I don’t know well. She’s been here before. Tia or Tara. She models with my wife. I remember seeing a picture of her in a newspaper ad. It must have been right before the accident. In the advertisement she was drinking bottled water and holding a straw purse with an expensive-looking diamond bracelet around her wrist. I didn’t read the print, so I didn’t know if the ad was for the bracelet, the water, the purse, or something else entirely, like a new condo development or life insurance. She was with a man, and they had three children of three different races who were pointing at something in the sky. I remember this because I said to Joanie, “Are these supposed to be her kids? They don’t look alike. What is this an ad for?”
The Descendants Page 4
