When they walk toward the store, I ask, “So, what did she say? At the meeting?”
“Oh, she was saying how it was ridiculous not to accept Holitzer’s offer. He had a solid plan and he was going to open up so many opportunities for Kauai and so on. And as the largest shareholder and last direct descendant, you’d appreciate everyone’s support because it was going to happen with or without our consent. That’s what she said. It kind of pissed people off. I don’t know about Holitzer, though. He isn’t the highest bidder. Don’t we want to go with highest bid? Doesn’t that make sense?”
“She liked his plan.” I look at Ralph, hoping for more clues. “She liked that he’d lease some land to the conservancy. And with the rest, he’s just selling off and subdividing, right?”
“And redeveloping when leases expire.”
“Sure,” I say. Her actions don’t make sense. All the buyers’ plans are pretty much the same. Everyone’s going to bring in new businesses, develop the land, develop homes, then sell the land and the homes. Why would she sneak off to a meeting behind my back? Why would she bully my cousins?
“I want to work with you guys, Ralph. You know that, don’t you? I know I have a big vote, but I’m not here to make people angry.”
“I’m heading to Princeville!” Ralph says.
“That’s right,” I say. He’s like a child.
“No way!”
I nod, not really knowing how to respond, but then I see that he’s talking into one of those little headpiece phones, and I feel immensely foolish. The girls come out of the shop with cartons of poke and plastic forks. Sid carries a few candy bars and about five small bags of chips. We continue on, driving past a few of my ancestors’ homes that have been turned into museums. I point them out to the girls. They’ve seen them before but look anyway. Ralph slows as we pass the estate, the tropical gardens, the tourists riding in carriages pulled by Clydesdale horses.
“It used to be a sugar plantation,” Scottie says.
“That’s right,” I say. I look at the house, thinking it strange that the ancient inhabitants have somehow shaped the lives of people they never met or even considered. Am I shaping the life of a bunch of people who haven’t been born?
“I wish we lived in the old days,” Scottie says.
“We do,” Alex says. “We will.”
This makes Scottie quiet. I wonder what’s going through her head. Sid is going through all of the chips. Each bag is open on his lap. He hasn’t said a word the entire trip. I keep waiting for one of his idiotic musings, but it doesn’t come.
We begin to descend into Hanalei. “Look,” I say to the girls. “Look at that.”
I see the taro plantation below, warming in the sun. I imagine the valley doesn’t look much different than it did a hundred years ago. The ocean beyond is dark blue, and as we approach the bottom of the hill, the stretch of beach unfolds before us. Look, I almost say again, because I have this urge to make sure they’re seeing what will no longer be in our name. Why did Joanie go to that meeting? Why did she want Holitzer?
I try to think of more questions I could ask Ralph. I look back at the kids. “Sid,” I say. “You all right?”
“Doing good,” he says. “Thanks.”
26
THE GIRLS AND Sid stand next to the marble pillars in the lobby. I’m asking to exchange the two rooms for a deluxe suite. We will all stay together. The girls are impressed. They look at each other and grin. They don’t realize I’m getting a suite because I don’t trust them. I check again to see if Brian Speer is a guest, but he’s not.
As we walk to the elevator, three girls walk toward us so quickly I’m afraid they might run us down.
“Alex!” they all scream. I notice my daughter wince before she yells back, “Oh my God! What’s up?”
“What are you doing here?” one asks. She has sunglasses straddling her head. A handbag swings on her elbow. She looks at Scottie and me as though what she fears is true: Alex is here with us, her family. Then she sees Sid. “Oh my God, what’s up?” She gives Sid a hug and then gives Alex a hug.
“What are you doing here?” Alex asks.
“Spring break,” says another girl, breaking from her cell phone, then going back to it: “Just bring your suit and a few going-out clothes. Not dressy. Just cute clothes.” She eyes me as she talks.
I take Scottie to sit on a nearby bench.
“You guys should totally meet up with us,” I hear the blonde say.
Alex nods. “For sure.”
I’ve never heard her speak this way. She’s usually so quiet and grumpy. This chirpiness is unsettling.
The girls’ voices get quiet and then escalate in volume and I hear: “I’m all, shut up!” from the blonde.
“Boo-ya,” the other girl says and laughs.
I look at Scottie, but she’s just as lost.
“There are, like, choke people down there, but you should go. We just went. You should fully go.”
“It’s so good to see you, doll. We miss you. You never come out. We’ll call your room tonight, then? Or, Siddy, do you have your cell?”
“Yeah,” he says. “But we’re probably just going to chill.”
“Oh, I’m sad,” one of the mascot girls says. She makes a sad face. “I’ll call anyway.”
Alex grins ecstatically, but her enthusiasm doesn’t seem real. I think it has less to do with her mother than with these girls. I wonder if mothers or involved parents do this all the time: watch their children interact with their peers, seeing things no one else does.
The girls strut past, waving their fingers at Scottie and me.
“Such bitches,” Alex says as we head to the elevator.
“Ho bags,” Scottie says.
“What does that mean, Scottie?” I ask.
She shrugs.
“Who taught you that?” I ask.
She points at her sister.
“They only asked me because Sid was with me,” Alex says.
“Can we go to the beach?” Scottie asks.
“Sure,” I say. “We’ll cruise the beach.” I look at Alex, but she stares ahead.
“You could have gone with them,” I say. “Your friends.”
“They didn’t ask,” she says.
I always thought Alex was one of the girls conducting the social scene. She has all the right equipment.
“The last time I hung out with those girls was at our house,” Alex says. “You must have been working in your room or whatever. Mom was wasted. She wanted to go dancing. I wouldn’t go, but my friends were all enthralled with her. So she took them. She just took them with her. Out dancing. And I stayed home.”
We stop on floors five, six, seven, eight, nine. I look to see all of the elevator buttons lit up. “Jesus, Scottie. Is this fun for you?”
“Sid’s the one who did it.”
“Are you serious?”
Sid laughs. “It’s funny.”
“Why didn’t you ever stop Mom?” Alex asks me.
We finally get off on the right floor. Alex walks out first and Scottie follows, saying, “Boo-ya, boo-ya, boo-ya,” down the hotel hall.
“I didn’t know how,” I say.
“You didn’t notice,” Alex says.
“But you’re talking about your mom. Why don’t you like those girls?”
“I like them,” she says. “They just don’t like me for some reason. They don’t think of me.” She seems deep in thought, and when she looks at me, her eyes are watery. “I’ve never understood it, really. They’ve just always made me feel bad. I don’t think I like girls.”
“Your mom didn’t, either.” I’m about to ask Alex what she sees in Sid. He’s walking ahead of us and holding something over Scottie’s head, making her jump up and down. He’s suddenly alive. I don’t ask what Alex sees in him because I’m afraid my disapproval will make her latch on to him even more. That’s how it works. I’ll have to pretend he doesn’t bother me and that I don’t want to drown him in the ba
y. Something about him isn’t right. Actually, a whole lot about him isn’t right, but not until today in the car did I feel unnerved by him. His silence was so strange.
ALEX IS ON the balcony of our hotel room. I slide the glass door and step out of our air-conditioned room and into the warm air. She’s smoking a cigarette and I sit down and stare at it with long ing, not for smoking, necessarily, but for the memory of smoking. At eighteen I never would have fathomed that I’d be dealing with these sorts of problems someday. It would be so much easier to be a bad father. I’d love to smoke with my daughter, to sit here with an assortment of alcohol from the hotel mini-fridge, drinking from the bottles, then tossing them into the pool below. When I was young and on the verge of procreating, I thought kids would be like having my old college buddies back. We’d hang out and do stupid shit together.
“Put that out,” I say.
Alex takes a drag, then rubs the cigarette out on the bottom of her sandal, something I would have admired highly as a boy. A gesture like that almost assures me that she’ll be fine in this world.
“You could at least smoke Lights,” I say. “Like Sid.”
“I could,” she says. She puts her feet up on the railing and leans back in the chair so that she’s balancing on two posts. It reminds me of her mother. Joanie could never sit with all four posts on the floor.
“Mom’s okay,” I say. “I checked in, and she’s breathing well, doing well.”
“That’s good,” Alex says.
“You’re doing better with Scottie,” I say. “Thanks.”
“She’s still all messed up.”
“She’s just a kid. She’s okay. She’s not that bad.”
“It’s Reina,” Alex says. “She talks about her constantly. She told me Reina let a boy tongue her hole. That’s what she said: ‘tongue her hole.’”
“What’s happening to you children?”
“She told me Reina’s parents are letting her get a boob job when she turns sixteen because that’s when puberty ends.”
“That girl was too much,” I say. “I mean, did you get a look at her?”
I like talking about all the things that are wrong with another girl. I put my feet against the rail and slowly ease my chair off its front posts. The hotel is built into a cliff, and I look at the bay below, the dots of people, the whitecaps like stars in a dark blue sky. To the left, the Napali coast winds up into another horizon. Alex looks out at the dark sheet of ocean angrily, as though the sea is to blame.
“What about you, Alex? Are you okay? You’re not…using, are you?”
“Am I using? God, you sound like such a tool.”
I don’t answer.
“No,” she finally says. “I’m not doing anything.”
“At all?” I ask. “I smell pot. On Sid.”
“That’s Sid,” she says. “Not me.”
“You just stopped? Isn’t it hard? It’s an epidemic and whatnot.”
I realize we never even put her into rehab to make sure she stopped. She convinced us that she didn’t have a problem, and it must have been easier for me to forget how well she lies.
“It’s not an epidemic,” she says. “I mean, it is, but not for someone like me. I’m not all ghetto.”
“So you just stopped?”
“Yes, Dad. It’s not a big deal. Kids do drugs, then they stop. Besides, you sent me to boarding school, remember? I couldn’t get it anymore. I guess Mom knew what she was doing.”
I don’t know the proper way to respond to all of this. My mother would have burst into tears and wallowed in her room. My father would have sent me to the marines or shot me. Joanie sent her away, which seems just as bad, but what about me? I did nothing. No rehab, therapy, family discussions. Sending her off couldn’t have been the right thing for us, for me, to do, yet it was certainly the easiest. I looked into the conflict from a distance, excusing myself, as though Alex and Joanie were discussing prom dresses.
“I don’t do drugs anymore,” Alex says. “But I still think they were fun.”
“Why are you being so honest with me?” I ask.
She shrugs and puts her chair down. “Mom’s dying.”
A part of me knows Alex will be fine, better than fine. I believe her, even, that drugs were a phase, a passing trend. Perhaps I did nothing because I don’t have enough fear to be a good parent. I remember what it was like being a kid and being the son of my mother and father. When I was doing bad things, I knew, as Alex knows, that no matter how hard I tried, I’d never get into trouble. Maybe kids with money resent this exemption, and it makes them aspire to destruction at an early age. Someone will catch us. We can get out of it somehow. What we do won’t lead to the streets. I remember palling around with the boys and how our antics quickly turned into dinner-party anecdotes. This always made me feel like a failure, as if I didn’t have it in me to sink as low as others. I wonder if Alex feels this as well: like an unsuccessful loser.
“I’m proud of you,” I say, because dads on TV always say this after candid conversations.
She rolls her eyes. “Not much to be proud of.”
“Yes, there is,” I say. “You’ve figured it out. We shipped you off. Let the dorm mother handle it. And now you’re here. Helping me with Scottie. I’m sorry, Alex. I’m really sorry. Thank you for helping me.” She’s the new mother, I realize. She assumed the role in an instant. I imagine her in a cup, hot water pouring over her. Instant Mom.
“Yeah, yeah,” she says.
And that’s that, I guess. The King family drug talk.
We look out at the beautiful ocean, a view that must accompany thousands of awkward, sad, and beautiful moments.
“Is everything okay with Sid?” I ask. “He was so quiet earlier.”
“He gets tired,” she says. “He didn’t have a nap, and he needs his nap.”
She looks over at me, obviously to see if I’m buying her story. She sees that I’m not. “He’s having a hard time right now,” she says.
“Oh, really? Well, so are we.”
“Just forget it,” she says. “How are we going to find this guy?”
I think about this for a while. For a moment I forgot about him, that he’s the reason we’re here.
“You two are going to take Scottie to the beach. I’m going to make more calls. We’re on an island, for Christ’s sake. There’s only about three degrees of separation here.”
She’s silent, thinking it over. She stands and holds out her hand to help me up. I realize I’m fascinated with her. She’s a person I want to know.
“We’ll find him,” Alex says, and the determination in her voice makes me think that she may have a few things to say to him as well.
27
HE’S BELOW ME. He’s on a working vacation, staying in one of the houses on the bay that I can probably see from this balcony. That’s all his office would tell me. Shouldn’t he be at my wife’s bedside? Shouldn’t I?
I stand on the balcony and look down at the coastline, then decide to put on my suit and head to the bay. I’ll look for the girls. I’ll look for Joanie’s lover, and maybe I’ll take a dip in the ocean and ride the waves on my stomach, as I did when I was a boy.
THE GIRLS AND Sid are sunbathing near the pier. I look at Scottie on her towel, her legs pressed together, her head tilted toward the sun. I want her to be playing in the ocean. It seems critical that sunbathing should be put off as long as possible.
I stand over her to block the sun. “Get up, Scottie. Throw a ball or something.”
She sticks her arm into the air. “I need some color.”
“What happened to your scrapbook? Why aren’t you doing that anymore?”
“It’s stupid,” she says.
“No,” I say. “It’s really great. I liked what you were doing.”
There’s something different about her. I realize it’s her breasts—they’re huge. I see that she’s stuffed her bikini top with wet balls of sand.
“What is that?” I say. “S
cottie. Your suit.”
She shields her eyes with her hand and looks down at her chest. “Beach boobs,” she says.
“Take that out of there,” I say. “Alex. Why’d you let her do that?”
Alex is on her stomach, with the straps of her top untied. She lifts her head toward Scottie. “I didn’t know. Take them out, stupid.”
Sid lifts his head. “Honestly,” he says, “big boobs look kind of fatty.”
“As Bebe says, boobs suck,” Alex says, “and Sid’s full of shit. He loves big boobs.”
“Who’s Bebe?” Scottie lets the sand fall out of her top.
“Character from South Park,” Sid says. “And I love small boobs, too, Alex. I’m an equal-opportunity employer.”
“You should scrapbook, Scottie,” I say. “I want you to finish it. You need to keep up with school.” She doesn’t believe my concern, I can tell. Scrapbook equals babyhood—she can see that now, and I’m sure it was Alex who made her realize it.
“Any luck?” Alex asks.
“Yes,” I say. “He’s here in Hanalei. Right here.” I look up at the green yards that stretch to the houses.
“Who’s here?” Scottie asks.
“The friend of Mom’s I told you about,” Alex says.
“The comedian?”
Alex looks at me. “Yeah,” she says. “The comedian.”
“Interesting, Alex,” I say. “Girls, want to take a dip?”
“No,” they both say.
“How about a walk? Maybe we’ll see the comedian.”
“No,” Scottie says.
Alex ties her straps while lying on her stomach, then flips over and sits up. “I’ll walk.”
“I was just going to say I changed my mind and that I want to go for a walk,” Scottie says. More sand spills out of her top as she stands. Sid gets up and jumps, butting his head at the air in front of him.
The Descendants Page 15