The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (21 page)

"It was ... a lot." I laugh, maybe a little
hysterically. "Okay, this was beyond a lot. Fifty bucks is a lot."

"Look, I didn't give you my last dime or
anything. I just spread it around. Got rid of it--gave it to people it made me
happy to give it to. This is the best decision I've ever made. You've got to
understand that. I
wanted to.
Trust me, I've never felt better. Here. You
want to sit?" He pushes out the chair across from him with his foot.

"My dad's over there." My dad, apparently a
skilled lip-reader, raises his arm and waves.

"Your dad. You mentioned him." Richard Howards
arcs his arm, gestures my father over. Dad winds his way to us, balancing the
dish of onion rings and our glasses. Keiko follows, even though I doubt she's
supposed to be in this part of the restaurant. No one seems to mind.

Dad holds out his hand. "William Skye. Will.
I'm the dad."

"Richard Howards. I guess you played a part in
my being here. Maui--I heard the word, and it was ...
yeah."

"Well, at least the hamburgers are good," Dad
says.

"Oh man, the best. Hey, pup," he says to Keiko,
who sits down politely. "I'm sorry you went to the trouble of flying out here,
though," he says to me. "If you're trying to give me my money back, I don't want
it."

"It was very generous ... ," Dad
says.

"You say "generous," but you think "crazy,"
right? Or that I want something? I don't, okay? That's exactly it--I don't want
anything. I don't want anything anymore. Just this." He gestures to the air in
front of him, the right-now air. "Here, it's enough. A

156

cheeseburger is enough." He lifts the second
half of his hamburger, shakes it a little in Dad's direction. "If you moved out
here, you understand why I am too."

"I didn't give away two and a half million
dollars when I came. Of course, I didn't have two and a half million dollars,"
Dad says.

The waitress comes, offers Richard Howards a
refill, which I guess they really do have. I smile at her--I'm always especially
nice to other restaurant workers. When she leaves, Richard Howards leans forward
on his elbows. "So, you may know this. But I started this little computer
company," he says. "Zeus?"

Dad's eyes widen, and I have one of those
shock-moments, when you actually stop breathing. Even Dad, who thinks a "hard
drive" is something that happens only when there's bad traffic, knows that Zeus
is one of the biggest search engine companies around.

"So, you've heard of it," he says.

"I thought your name sounded familiar," Dad
says.

"Listen, it was great at first. But a lot of
things that you think will widen your world can eventually imprison you. Right?
Am I right? A marriage, some relationship, a job, a
concept
--success,
religion? Can start to swallow you whole, if you let it. You don't watch out for
your spirit, and before you know it,
bam.
You're in service to this
it.
I don't know if I'm making sense."

"To me you are," Dad says.

"You end up feeling like you've been put in a
box. And then a smaller box yet. You can't even breathe."

"Yeah, I remember I lost sight of my ability to
just go for a
walk.
To watch the sky and be a human being," Dad
says.

Richard Howards nods. "I know. You can't even
remember

157

who you once were. I wanted out so bad but I
didn't know how. I couldn't see beyond the walls. I don't know why. I'm a smart
guy. But I couldn't get loose from the way I was seeing and the way I was
living. The top flaps of the box were open all along for me to escape, but it
seemed ... impossible."

"Well, you lose the energy for escape. Until
the balance tips somehow and it's finally harder to stay where you are--," Dad
says.

"Exactly."

"Than to make that change."

"Exactly right."

"What happens is, you become a slave to another
person's need, to other people's idea of what you should be. And hey, I wasn't
anywhere near where you were. But, you listen to all the outside noise, and your
own voice just doesn't have a chance," Dad says. "A lesson for you, In." He
waggles his finger at me.

"It feels like a hundred years ago already.
Lifetimes. I feel giddy with freedom," Richard Howards says. He looks it too.
Younger, maybe? He is swirling a fry in a splotch of ketchup, pops it into his
mouth. He's a different guy from the one who sat so very still at Carrera's,
sipping that black coffee, staring outside.

"I'm glad you two understand each other," I
say. There's a small scritch of irk lying somewhere near my surface, though.
Dad's leaving meant leaving Mom, Severin, Bex, and me. Dad's box was a house
with us in it.

Dad and Richard Howards look at each other for
a moment, a man's moment, not too long to be intimate, long enough to convey the
fact that they're not alone. "I don't want that money," Richard Howards says.
"I'm not going to let another person or a group of people box me into who I'm
supposed to be. Getting rid

158

of this money--it's the emotional equivalent of
dropping it from a skyscraper and letting it rain down. I'm having the time of
my life giving it away."

"It was a bit of a shock," Dad says. "For
Indigo."

"Was it too much? I was thinking, the taxes
alone ... Does it feel like a burden?"

I think of Mom, and Mrs. Olson with her liver
spots and her cross necklace. I think of all those little envelopes on our
kitchen table, with their narrow tissue-paper windows. Those envelopes, so
heavy, and sometimes so feared that Mom would leave them unopened. I noticed
that. The way she'd open the ones from school, or from magazine subscriptions
she'd never order, or from Bomba. But she'd take those ones with the
tissue-paper windows and set them aside, like they might burn her fingers if she
touched them too long. Menopause was not her real problem, I knew. The money is
not a burden. It is the end of all burdens. "It didn't seem right to take," I
say.

"I'm giving freely. If you gave it back, it
would hurt my feelings."

"I don't know how we could ever repay you," Dad
says.

"Listen. Indigo? Just promise me one thing. Let
it make you bigger, not smaller. Okay? Right? That's repayment
enough."

I just look at him, and he's smiling at me, and
I suddenly feel this largeness, this solemn swell of the momentous. This is
real. And I'm not in shock anymore, I'm just... overcome. I blink. I could burst
into tears right here, I think, into the now salty napkins. But the moment is
too important even for that, held still in the tiny space of time between now
and then, before and after. We're quiet, but Jimmy Buffett is singing about
wasting away in Margaritaville and there's a burst of laughter from a table of
six,

159

and a guy shouts, "And she wasn't even dressed
yet!" and there's more laughter. But in my world, this world, there's the Vespa
guy and Dad and Keiko and me, and my heart, which is trying its best to hold the
fullness of unimaginable gratitude.

"Why me?" I say. Dad takes my hand and gives it
a squeeze. My eyes prick with tears.

"That's exactly why, Indigo Skye," the Vespa
guy says. "You ask 'Why me?' instead of 'Why not me?'"

160

9

Richard Howards invites us back to his house
after he finishes his lunch. He has rented a motor scooter, not quite his orange
Vespa back in Washington State, but he is obviously right at home on it. His
shirt flaps as he drives. When we get back to Dan Shugman's place, there's a
golf cart parked in the driveway, and some old guy who turns out to be Dan
Shugman himself.

"Just seeing that you've got everything you
need," he says. "And dropping off those extra keys I promised. Hey,
William."

Dan Shugman's wearing crispy white old-guy
shorts and a plaid shirt. He's got bright blue eyes and silver, straight
Republican hair. But his twinkle is nonpartisan. You can tell he thinks the
world is a fine place to play within. I like Dan Shugman right off.

"Come on in." Richard Howards is happy. "Dogs,
too. My humble abode." He steps aside.

"Not too humble," Dan Shugman says. We step in,
and the room is wide and bright. The windows look over a pool, and beyond, the
sea. It feels good in here. I could sit and look out this window forever. "Looks
so odd without the furniture," Dan Shugman says. "We had a piano over there." He
points to the large windows. You can see the round indents from the piano legs
still in the carpet.

"It's a beautiful place," I say.

"Now you won't worry that I gave away my last
dime and am sleeping in a dim room on a thin mattress."

161

"I hereby stop worrying," I say. Keiko sits by
my heels.

"You play the piano?" Dad asks Dan
Shugman.

"Hell, no. No one played. Stupidest thing in
the world, having pianos you don't play and dining room tables you don't sit at
and china you look at."

"Big jewelry you never wear, or maybe worse, do
wear," Richard Howards says.

"You've got an ex-wife," Dan Shugman
says.

"And ex-jewelry," Richard Howards laughs. He's
standing in front of the refrigerator. There's not much in there, I can see.
Bottles of Henry Weinhard's Private Reserve, some cans of 7UP, several Styrofoam
containers of leftovers. He hands Dad and Dan a beer, me a 7UP. I crack open the
top, take a cool sip.

"I got some ex-diamonds," Dan Shugman says.
"The wife would pick 'em out and I'd write the check." Dan Shugman's thumb and
forefinger make pen squiggles in the air.

"Ex-exercise equipment," Richard Howards
says.

"Amazing the shit you accumulate," Dad says.
He's happy here too. "We have a teak hook to hang bananas on. At what moment in
your life do you think you gotta have a teak hook to hang bananas on?" He takes
a swog of beer.

"Right about the time you buy the 'I Heart My
Pekinese' golf sweater," Dan Shugman says. "Sorry, all, but I've got to
run."

Out the front windows I can see Dan Shugman
drive away in his golf cart. We sit in Richard Howards's empty living room and
talk until Dad finishes his beer and we come to that winding-down place, that
feeling of a battery run down, when you know it's time to go. Dad and Richard
Howards are pals now. Dad's promised to show him the place with the best Scotch
in town. Richard Howards shakes Dad's hand and gives him a clap on the
back.

162

"See, Indigo Skye?" Richard Howards says. "You
give it up and it all comes your way."

I guess it's true, because the Vespa guy is as
light as a soda bubble. You can feel the good air in and around him. He is a
wide sky, the same wide sky he can look at every morning and every night now. I
nod. He takes my hand and we shake, and then I give up on that and give him a
hug. You never know, you see, when or where you will stumble on a sudden
connection, a lifelong bond with another human being. A hundred people can sit
down in a booth and it will be eggs and toast. And another one, just one, will
sit down and will change your life, be monumental with just coffee.

"Thank you," I say. The words are so
small.

"Thank you," he says. "If it weren't for you, I
might still be ingesting four thousand toxic chemicals."

"Stay away from those nasty things," I
say.

"Never again," says the Vespa guy.

The next day, my plane doesn't leave until late
afternoon. There's one more thing Dad wants to do with me, he says. So we put on
our swimsuits that morning, leave Jennifer behind with her magazine and her
Special K. Keiko's got to stay behind, because we'll be in the water. Dad's got
the gear in his trunk already.

The beach where Dad finally parks is spotted
with Dr. Seuss-ish beings with masks and snorkels and flippers, bodies of
various shapes--large, bloated stomachs and tiny flat ones, muscled brown chests
and bright pomegranate shoulders, noses smeared with streaks of white lotion.
It's an I-don't-care beach, a beach of equals, a beach with a higher purpose
than showing one perfect body to another perfect body. In the water the backs of
people

163

float along the surface, the underside of
flippers making an occasional showy flap, the curve of snorkels pointing
skyward.

I'm a little afraid of snorkeling, I admit.
There's a very rational (I think) fear of trying to breathe underwater, and then
the strangeness of oversize feet, and the occasional bursts of salt water in the
mouth, and the coordination of all of the above. I did it once before when
Severin and Bex and I visited, and even Bex, who's not the best swimmer, was
paddling around fine while I was busy repeating the
don't panic, don't
panic
mantra. I could stay under there only awhile before I'd flail around
with the sudden splashy realization that I was doing something
unnatural.