The Descendants (41 page)

44

I STEER THE
small canoe and am doing a terrible job at it; we cut a crooked path through the ocean and the girls are tired from all the extra strokes. My Polynesian ancestors would be disappointed in me, in all of us. I don’t have the gift of wayfinding, of using the sun, stars, and swells to navigate the open ocean. Those skills and instincts have been lost.

“Should we just put them here?” Alex yells back. She’s in the first seat, and I can see the muscles rippling down her back.

“Swimmer, Dad,” Scottie says. “Swimmer!”

I see a white bathing cap bobbing toward us, but then it floats toward the catamarans.

“Let’s go past the break,” I say. “Out of the traffic.”

“Go straight, then,” Alex says.

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder. You need to predict when it will turn, and don’t overcorrect. You’re too slow.”

Joanie could steer straight. I’m pretty sure that’s what we’re all thinking.

I try to use the orange wind sock as my target. I can see the reef poking up in spots like jaws. The sun is a fuzzy glow under gray clouds. The water is dark, and the darker shapes of the rocks on the ocean floor seem to move beneath us. My paddle grazes a chunk of reef that’s pocked like a honeycomb, and I steer to the right to get us to deeper water. The ashes are in the bag and the bag is in my lap. Every now and then I’ll look down at my lap and experience a feeling of injustice. It isn’t right that she’s in my lap like this. I can barely feel her. I think of those burial options:
Be paddled off in a canoe and scattered!

Large swells move near the wind sock, yet they don’t break. One moves under us, and the canoe glides to its crest, then comes down hard. The nose slashes through the water, and as we approach the next wave, which seems bigger than the last, I push the bag of ashes more snugly between my legs. Scottie stops paddling.

“Keep paddling,” I say, my voice taking on a nervous pitch. We need our momentum to make it over so that the wave doesn’t take us back down with it. We climb the wave, spray shedding off it so I can’t see, and then we sail down its curved back, landing hard so that we all fly up off our seats.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say.

The girls are quiet and I can tell they’re worried. They plunge their paddles in deep, moving as much water as their little bodies can manage. Their wrists are submerged and they take quick strokes. We paddle longer than we need to, so that we’re far beyond the break. The water is even darker, and the rocks at the bottom of the ocean look like sleeping creatures. It seems too dark and cold and lonely to rest here for eternity, but I don’t say anything.

The girls stop paddling. I look at the stretch of Waikiki. It looks different each time I see it, though it hasn’t changed that much: lots of people, aqua water, surfers sliding down waves, sand white like bone china. It just means something different to me each time I see it. Today it means Joanie. Joanie’s beach.

I take the bag. It came with a silver scooper and I hold this in my hand, too, staring at it as if it’s a joke.

I’ve thought about how we should do this.

“Alex,” I say. “Come closer to your sister. Maybe sit on the ama.”

She turns around and steps over her seat and stands in the canoe, holding on to the sides for balance. She has piled her wet hair on her head so that it looks like a beehive, which makes me think of the reef.

“Here,” I say, holding the bag open and giving Alex the tiny shovel. She hesitates, then takes it, and her hand disappears in the bag. She brings out the sandy ash and some of it flies away. We watch the ash move like smoke, and then Alex points the shovel down so that the ashes fall densely in one spot, piling atop the water then slowly raining, darkening the ocean then disappearing.

Alex hands the shovel to Scottie, and I hold the bag open for her. To my surprise, Scottie takes the shovel and plunges it into the bag, moving it around as though searching for a prize. I would have thought she’d be afraid. She pulls out a mound of ash and flicks her wrist so that it flies through the air. We watch the water, and when we can’t see anything more, the girls look at me. Scottie’s teeth chatter, and there are bumps all over her skin. They both stand in the narrow canoe, catching their balance as small swells move our boat up and down. I think of all the ashes that must be beyond the break of Waikiki, all the flowers tossed to the departed, and I wonder where everything goes. I lower the shovel into the bag and feel the weight of her. I toss the ashes in the sea, and this hurts me in a way that’s almost physical. My throat hurts, my stomach and arms ache. Without my girls, I don’t know how I would behave right now. I can’t look at them without feeling light-headed. I know they’re crying right now, and I can’t look. If I look, I’ll fall apart. I take the bag and turn it upside down, and so much comes out that the ashes actually make a sound when they hit the water. We watch them drown, the gray ashes that are like coarse sand. The girls toss four plumeria leis, and we watch them float for a while, and then it seems we are done with our ceremony. The leis race back and cling to the side of the canoe. Scottie reaches down for them, then tosses them over the other side. We stare at the water for a while longer and then begin to look at one another as if to say,
Now what? When is it okay to go back?

Maybe when we can’t see the leis any longer. That’s when we’ll go back. Alex sits down in the first seat, and Scottie sits on the edge of the canoe and leans against the ama. We face the shore and watch our flowers. Farther in the distance, I see people on the terrace having breakfast and wonder if we should do that, too, instead of running home to hide. When I look back to the water, the yellow leis are gone. I take my paddle, but then I hear a whistle and turn to look toward the horizon. I see a boat, a booze cruise, with a bunch of shirtless guys wearing pink leis around their necks, visors on their heads, holding drinks in coconut shells. Isn’t it too early for this? Scottie sits in her middle seat and Alex shields her eyes and looks toward the boat. A series of waves slaps against our canoe, making us list back and forth.

“Whoo-hoo!” I hear them yell. “Whoo!” They wave frantically at us.

On the bow of the ship there are girls dancing. I hear the deep thumping of the music.

“Whoo! Yeah!” the boys yell. They hold up their drinks, as if in a toast to us.

We stare at them and they stare back, not understanding our quietness.

Alex starts paddling and Scottie follows, and the boys on the boat cheer wildly: “Paddle! Paddle! Stroke! Stroke!”

A boy with a yellow line of zinc running down his nose takes off his lei and makes to throw it. “Show us your boobs!” he yells, and everyone laughs.

I steer us around so we face away from them. The girls paddle. I don’t know what they’re thinking. I hope the last moment with their mother hasn’t been ruined for them. I feel as if I’m deserting her by paddling to shore.

“I still love you,” she said one night.

This was right before her accident. We had just turned off the lights, but I was falling fast and mumbled “Good night” in return. In the morning I turned to her, putting my head on her pillow, and I remembered what she’d said the night before and thought,
Still? Still love me?

I believe her, though. I believe that despite everything, she still loved me.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “The booze cruise. We had a nice last moment, though. I hope you guys are okay.”

“I think Mom would have liked that,” Scottie says.

“She’d probably show them her boobs,” Alex says.

Scottie laughs and I know Alex is smiling.

The girls paddle slowly, and Scottie stops and rests her paddle across the hull. Her back is hunched and she looks at her lap and I wonder if she’s crying. She turns, holding up her hand. “Mom’s under my nails,” she says.

I look, and yes, there she is.

Alex turns and Scottie shows Alex her fingers. Alex shakes her head and gives Scottie this look that seems to say,
Get used to it. She’ll be there for the rest of your life. She’ll be there on birthdays, at Christmastime, when you get your period, when you graduate, have sex, when you marry, have children, when you die. She’ll be there and she won’t be there.

I think that’s what the look says; whatever it is, her quiet statement seems to warm her and her sister. The girls begin to paddle again, and the rhythm puts me in a trance: Blades hit the water, slide along the hull, then arc back to the top, a mist of water flying through the air.
Splash, thunk, hiss. Splash, thunk, hiss.
I think of last night, of Scottie flipping through her book, how she peeled the picture of her mother out, then planted her below my ancestors.

“I’ll put her at the end,” Scottie said.

I looked at Joanie at the end. I didn’t think Scottie meant anything by this order. There is no order to her book, really, and it’s not a family tree. It’s the scraps of a moment in our lives, picked up and assembled, moments we want to remember and forget.

“The end,” Scottie said.

“The end,” Alex said.

Scottie closed the book.

I think of my wife at the end, her small photograph, a reminder, a keepsake, evidence of a life. It does seem fitting that she should have the final say.
What were her last words?
I wonder. I hate that I don’t know, but I suppose now, at the end, she gets the last word, whatever it is, and from her, my daughters and I will make our ascent.

I tell the girls to paddle faster, to get on this small wave that will carry us. They quicken their strokes and the wave picks us up and we glide over the reef and the dark shapes below. We must look like we’re enjoying ourselves, and one day we will. And even though the art of wayfinding has been lost to me, I try to steer us to shore in as straight a line as possible.

Acknowledgments

This novel is based on “The Minor Wars,” a story from my first book,
House of Thieves.
I’d like to thank
StoryQuarterly
for taking “The Minor Wars,” my first published story, and thank you to
Best American Nonrequired Reading
for reprinting it.

Many thanks to Kim Witherspoon and David Forrer for your support and hard work; to Laura Ford and everyone at Random House, I am so grateful for your enthusiasm and guidance. Dr. Frank Delen—thank you for your wisdom on coma patients and their families. I hope I got it right.

To my family in Hawaii, and to my reader and husband, Andy, whose wisdom on everything from wills and trusts to motorcycles helped me write this book. Thank you for your encouragement, counsel, and sense of humor, which always seems to make its way into my work.

Finally, a note on Hawaii’s present and past. I was inspired by historical facts and current events, yet this book is a marriage of reality and fiction, and fiction wears the pants in this family.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

KAUI HART HEMMINGS
is the author of the story collection
House of Thieves
and has degrees from Colorado College and Sarah Lawrence College. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and her fiction has appeared in
StoryQuarterly, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Sun, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004,
and
The Best New American Voices 2006.
She lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughter. Visit her website at
www.kauiharthemmings.com
.