The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  I wondered if I’d find him, the way Marguerite was at the end—in the dark woods, the birds flying from tree to tree. Curled up on her side in a ball. In the past few weeks, though, I’d stopped thinking of Marguerite that way. I had a new picture in my head. She was a girl about my age. She was naked on a bed and looking straight at the camera, fearless. I saw her face—almost felt her around me. It was almost as if she were traveling on the plane with me, as though she were inside me, urging me on. She was making me go back and get him, not letting me wait until it was too late. She was pushing me to stop being scared and hesitant, too late and too passive. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. That was the phrase, wasn’t it? Marguerite wasn’t thrown from her horse anymore and on the ground. She was naked on a bed and looking at the camera. A girl like that wouldn’t wait. A girl like that wasn’t afraid. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything, Marguerite was telling me, until you decide to do it differently.

  TWENTY

  What Marguerite Left Behind

  After I’d called Tomas, my father and I quickly made plans, worked out various scenarios—we’d imagined how I would show up at Whitman’s house. We planned what I might say. How I would convince him to come back with me.

  Then I tried to sleep. But what if Whitman were already dead? Or what if he were dying right then—right at that moment? We hadn’t called my mother or Abuelita or Patricia either, for the same reasons, I guess, that Tomas was so unforthcoming on the phone. “You know the story,” he’d said. Where did Whitman’s personal business begin and end? Where do you draw the boundary lines in a family of people who weren’t used to them?

  Around five in the morning, I wandered into Dad’s bedroom to see how he was. A bedside lamp was still on. He was just lying there, on his side, with his back to the door.

  “Dad?”

  His green silk robe was rumpled and wadded under his armpits. The black velvet slippers had been kicked off. The sky outside was dark orange, as if the earth were burning. I stood next to the bed, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t move. “There’s something I should have told you about Whitman,” I said.

  “Like what?” I could see only the back of his head on the pillow. His voice sounded angry. It was as if everything about Whitman made him sad or angry now, as if this night, and all we were going through, were the very thing that Dad had worked hard all his life to make sure would never happen. “What is it, Inez?”

  “I have a bad feeling.”

  “About what?”

  “I should have told you before. Something Tomas told me. I didn’t want to believe it before, but maybe now I do.”

  “Oh, God. What?” He was shouting into the pillow—more angry than curious. When I finally told him, he stopped shouting, and then his back was moving in heaves, almost like he were sick. I’d never seen him that way—so sad, so overcome. Maybe what Tomas told me wasn’t true, I said. Maybe it wasn’t true—I’d been praying that it wasn’t. But I needed to talk about it and not keep it secret any longer. Dad was very quiet after that. And still. Almost as though this new piece of information had killed him. And I remember looking at the back of his head and wishing he’d just say what it was, the thing he was so scared of. We were all afraid of something, weren’t we, all terribly afraid, the kind of fear that drove us and pushed us toward things, and away from things. We were all terrified of something, and tried to wall it off, but pretending you weren’t afraid just made it worse. Mom and Bob were always talking about fear, almost belittling it. They’d both gotten that tactic from est, I suppose, but it made sense to me. Fear fed on itself. Whatever Dad was afraid of, I knew that Whitman and I were a part of it. Something had already happened, maybe a long time ago. It happened when he wasn’t paying attention. Whitman and I. We’d crept up on him. Hadn’t we? We’d snagged him somehow. He hadn’t figured on us, factored us in. And now we were everything to him—almost everything he cared about. We’d become almost as important to him as he was to himself. He’d figured out ways to get out of being a husband, but he’d never been able to stop being our dad.

  “I know what I did,” he said. “I know.”

  “What?”

  “I crushed him, didn’t I?”

  “You—”

  “He was so beautiful and strong, and he wasn’t like me—didn’t seem to want to be. Didn’t even try. I suppose that bothered me most of all. And then I crushed him and crushed him and crushed him until he was just a crushed boy. I knew what I was doing, and I went ahead with it anyway. That’s what we do to each other, isn’t it? Men. That’s how it is.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. While he was talking, I wanted to comfort him at first and say, Oh, no, you shouldn’t feel bad about that. Whitman was responsible for his own fate, wasn’t he? He made his life the way it is. Or maybe Patricia’s money had wrecked things—left him purposeless and lost, or just spoiled. But I stopped myself. I wasn’t sure that it was true either.

  “I knew,” Dad sobbed. “That’s the worst part. And I still did it.”

  How easy it is, when somebody you love is suffering, to forget the harder things, the miserable parts—what a fink he was, how suffocating his selfishness and vanity could be, his coldness, his intrusions, the way he seemed to put everybody else last and himself first. It’s funny how observing another’s pain can wash away things like that. You stop dividing and adding up. He wasn’t a white knight or a black knight anymore. Lying on his bed, he was overcome with worry and shame and almost a kind of madness, and I guess I saw another man emerging. He loved us, and we loved him, this gloomy, difficult, sweet, insightful, honest man. He cared—maybe too much—and was always wrestling with some piece of unhappiness, a man who felt like a failure unless he was lost in music or love. Adoration was like a drug to him, a craving, a need so deep it was almost endless, and because of that he’d made himself a wooden merry-go-round horse that rode in a circle while the women climbed on and off.

  I sat down on the edge of his bed. And then I crawled over on my hands and knees to his side. He stayed still. I pulled myself closer, pressing against him, wrapping my arms around his back. He didn’t move his head on the pillow, and for a long time he made no sound. Eventually—maybe fifteen minutes or thirty minutes later, I’m not sure—he spoke. It was completely real and not emotional, the way he usually talked—straight ahead: “What will we do if we’ve lost your brother?” he said. “That’s where I get caught, Inez. I’m afraid I won’t make it beyond that.”

  “Yes you will,” I said.

  The orange dawn was growing brighter. And I remember thinking that the edges of the windows seemed on fire.

  I got to the North Shore a little after lunchtime, if I’d been marking the day in terms of meals, which I wasn’t. Driving along the highway above the beach, I rolled down my window and tried to feel the beauty of the place, the sunshine, the deep blue sky, and the way the green cliffs hugged the road. The yellow sand at Waimea Bay was mostly gone, taken by storms, and the water was deep blue—the kind of luminous color that used to make me ache—and beyond at the horizon, a brilliant turquoise.

  What did all that beauty do, exactly? What was it there for? Everywhere in Hawaii there was something lovely to look at. And something new, something fresh and young. The faces of the North Shore girls walking from the beach. The crowds of guys in their cool sunglasses—the styles changed every winter like clockwork, exactly as the baggy swim trunks got longer, and then shorter, or the way the cool T-shirt was this way, the cool backpack like that, or the cool Walkman was this color, or da kine flip-flops were nylon now, a certain brand, a certain stripe running along the bottom. New music was better than the old—and anything was better than the Beach Boys. The new boards. The new shapes and sizes. A fin was put here, then down there—or split into two fins. When something was new, it seemed perfect and untouched and beautiful. Didn’t it?

  The door was unlocked at Whitman’s and slightly ajar. There were pile
s of dusty flip-flops on the porch, and it almost looked like a party must be going on. But it was quiet, except for the phone ringing. I wondered if it was Dad, seeing if I’d arrived. I went inside but didn’t answer the phone. I didn’t do anything or say anything, didn’t call out anybody’s name. I just walked into the dark house as quietly as I could.

  Whitman’s room was empty—the bed unmade, some sneakers on the floor. It was hard to tell how long it had been, except that the soil of the plants in his room was dry and pulled away from the edges of the pots. I walked out into the hallway, pushed open the door to the second bedroom, which Reggie, the marine, always rented, and it was empty. All the stuff that I’d seen last year—the bamboo bong, the ashtrays, the stacks of record albums that Reggie used to clean pot—was gone. Only a blue-and-white sticker was left on a bulletin board: RONALD REAGAN FOR PRESIDENT.

  I went to my old bedroom door, and for some reason I looked at the ceiling first to check if the scarf was still there. In a moment completely disconnected from anything real that was happening, I found myself happy to see that it was. And to see the plants, and the curtains, and pretty much everything else, as I’d remembered them. I’m not sure why it took me so long to see the dark-haired girl in the bed. She was so skinny and motionless. I guess at first I thought she was a lump, a pillow. I wasn’t sure she was breathing, so I walked up closer, but tentatively. Her eyes were shut. Her hands were closed up like the paws of a squirrel holding a nut. I reached out to feel her arm. It was warm. I felt a slow, faint heartbeat. She was alive, just asleep. I was glad of that. But when I tried to wake her up—and ask where Whitman was—she didn’t even flutter her eyes.

  What was going on? Who was she? In books and movies, people’s faces are slapped and eyes open. Mouths speak. A confession tumbles out. But in life it was always too hard. You slapped and nobody woke up. You asked, but only yourself. People knew things but didn’t speak of them—these weren’t secrets, they were just pieces of neglected information. I left the girl with her beating heart and sat down on the sofa in Whitman’s dark living room and thought about what to do. Fleas were jumping against my ankles. Then I heard something scurrying in the kitchen—rats, mice, lizards, jungle things—and I got up and went outside, where it was midday and still beautiful. And the sky was clear and the palm trees were glistening and shiny, and the breeze was clean.

  I walked out to the bench at the ridge of the property. Two kids were fishing on the rocks. There were more kids down the beach, carrying their pails and buckets. They were a mixed lot, those kids, all those locals—a quarter Hawaiian or half Japanese or half Filipino, or half something else: Portuguese, Chinese, Tongan, Samoan. They were jabbering in their halfspeak. “Da kine. Da bes. You nah like de kine eel—tas so fine.”

  “Inez?”

  Whitman was a ghost—more of a shadow of a person, an outline, a frame without contents or flesh. Against the beauty of the scene, he looked like a superimposed figure from hell. His body was gangly. His eyes were droopy, his fingernails dark. The side of his head was black and purple, almost as if it had been spray-painted, and his nose was swollen and scabbed on one side—a grotesque black scab. “A bad wipeout,” he explained. “Last week. Or maybe the week before.” Then he managed a pathetic smile.

  I tried to think of something to say that wasn’t immediately harsh and negative, that wasn’t “Why didn’t you call?” or “What the fuck’s wrong with you?” or “How could you do this to me?” but the only thing I could come up with was:

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “No doctors.” He shook his head.

  I grabbed his hand. He began to pull away, almost unconsciously—and I wondered how long it had been since somebody touched him. With my other hand, I felt the swelling on his arm that looked like a fresh insect bite. “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been shooting into my eyebrows mostly, so that won’t happen,” he said. “But I guess I got so fucked up I forgot.”

  No attempt to hide anything. That was good, I thought.

  “Who’s the girl in my bedroom?”

  “Don’t worry. She’s okay.”

  “I’m tired of not worrying.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement next door. Somebody had come out of Jerry’s house and was standing on the deck. “Jerry,” I whispered to Whitman. “I think he saw me.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Whitman said right away. “If he comes over, we’ll say we’re busy. We’ll tell him there’s been a family emergency. We’ll say Dad died or something.”

  He was already colluding with me, I thought. He was thinking ahead. He had a story. He was glad I’d come. Maybe he’d even been waiting for me.

  We walked back to the house and sat down in the living room. We didn’t bother putting on a light. I found a pack of cigarettes on a sofa cushion and lit one up—something I never did anymore.

  “You’re still smoking,” Whitman said.

  “Not really.”

  “It’s a method of keeping people away from you—with odor,” he said. “It’s like a form of bug repellent.” I wondered when he’d last brushed his teeth.

  “You’re reminding me of Dad,” I said.

  “Thanks.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Well, you know what Ooee says.”

  “What?”

  “The best people have the worst parents.”

  “Do they?” he said. “I like that. I think it might be true.”

  “He didn’t want us, that’s all,” I said. “Either of us.”

  “I know that.”

  “When we were born, he thought his life was over. We wrecked the perfection.”

  “I know that,” he said again. “I’ve always known.”

  Was I supposed to charm him into the car—or scream and threaten him? Was I supposed to be happy and jolly and make the whole thing look like fun, a big adventure, and tell him what a great brother he was—and how he’d saved me so many times that I couldn’t begin to count them? Could I love-bomb him into the car? I would have done anything that worked. But for some reason I decided to take Dad’s advice and just tell him the truth.

  “I came back to get you,” I said finally. “I never should have left Hawaii without you. But I was too afraid of what you’d say. And I was too messed up myself.”

  “You’re bringing me home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wasn’t it Christmas already?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Home where?”

  “Wolfback.”

  “Wolf bane.”

  I didn’t laugh. “Who’s the girl in my room?”

  “You.”

  We didn’t call Dad—we decided not to. Maybe that was the final payment we extracted after enduring a lifetime of him. At the airport we got tickets for the next flight, for later that night, a red-eye. We checked a few bags—the only thing Whitman cared about was his backpack and the stuff in it that he thought was keeping him alive. Tickets in hand, we drove into town, to a big Marriott to kill some time. Whitman kept cranking the window down on the old Valiant, like he needed the wind on his face to stay awake. He was drinking a beer, too. “Drinking and driving is a Hawaiian tradition,” he said.

  “I remember.”

  At the big Marriott, there were umbrellas in the colored drinks and soft Don Ho–type music, half-Hawaiian and half something else—watered down. Maybe that was a good thing. The whole world could use some watering down.

  “That was Sugar in my room,” I said. “Wasn’t it?”

  “Kennan.”

  We went to Tin Tin’s in Chinatown for dinner, and Whitman went into the bathroom with his backpack, then nodded off when the food came. “I like it here. I’m happy. Hawaii…” He could barely finish a sentence. “Of course, I’m needing more and more junk to keep that feeling going.”

  “I think you need a divorce,” I said.

  “From who?�
��

  “From junk.”

  “I thought you were going to say from Dad.”

  “That, too.” And then he laughed—a horrible new laugh. Only junkies laugh like that, or old drunks, almost as if something happens in their throats and disconnects their laugh from anything real inside them. The throat laughs. But it’s an empty-shell sound, unfeeling, not even attempting authenticity, a big show, a big fake machine gun of a laugh. Nobody should ever have to hear a brother sound like that. “Tell you what,” he said, really fake but with a serious face. “You go to college and I’ll get clean. Think how happy Marguerite would be.”

  “I’m already in college,” I said.

  “Oh, right.”

  It wasn’t hard getting him on the plane, except he’d wander off at the airport and I’d have to bring him back to the gate. The backpack somehow became my responsibility, and I was guarding it, and worrying about it, and wondering if I was going to be arrested, and always fretting that Whitman would need it, like one of those shaking people on TV. But it wasn’t really like that. He didn’t shake. He mostly slept. As it turned out, the flight home was the easy part. The rest was worse—the treatment programs that didn’t work, the halfway houses that couldn’t hold him, the dour predictions of specialists, and the sadness, the horrible sadness in Whitman’s eyes, like he’d lost everything that he cared about. The way my father fumbled around and couldn’t keep up the act anymore that he didn’t care about anybody but himself. When he gave up the act, he was mostly mad. But all his rage couldn’t really make a dent in Whitman.