The Descendants

by Kaui Hart Hemmings

  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.

  “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.