Betwixt (2 page)

Her father matched her silence. He was an affectionate man, and always told Ondine that he loved her, but living in a house
with two strong women made him quiet at times. He looked into
his daughter’s eyes as if he would be able to locate what made her so stubborn.

“We’re going to miss you.”

She pressed her hands into her knees and rubbed them.

“Dad —,” she managed to respond. “Don’t make me change my mind.”

“Then don’t do this, honey. There are lots of good programs in Chicago. The best school in the country is at the Art Institute
—”

How many times had Ralph Mason looked at her in just this way, trying to read what was behind her velvety eyes? He couldn’t.
Ondine was a normal young woman, a budding painter, a bratty sister (at times), a good daughter, a great friend to the people
she chose to trust. And though he had been there at her birth — delivered her, in fact — there was something untouchable about
the girl that even her own father could not get at.

She traced circles on the dining room table, where the Mason family had set their coffee mugs so many times before.

“Dad, I —”

She couldn’t tell him about the dreams she’d been having: the butterflies, the strange women. She couldn’t tell him about
the way the things she painted sometimes, if they were good enough, true enough, had a way of lifting off the canvas and floating
away.

“Nice bed head.”

Max Mason walked in the back door with Ivy. He was a solidly built thirteen-year-old — Ondine thought a little pudgy, though
he seemed to have slimmed down in recent months — and he was wearing his typical weekend outfit of a white hazardous waste–removal
suit. He had begged his father to get him one from Xelix, and Ralph, perplexed yet strangely moved by his son’s oddity, had.

“Yo, Pop! I’m ready!” Max’s round, wire-rimmed glasses had fogged up in the early June chill. That combined with his leftover
preadolescent tummy and his long arms and legs reminded Ondine of a jellyfish, all eyes and jiggling limbs. She watched her
father’s face lighten.

“All right, son.”

“Max, honey, are you ready to go?” Trish came out with yet another cup of coffee for Ondine, looked at her son, and shook
her head. “That suit’s going to be uncomfortable in the car.”

He shrugged and grinned, but he was staring at Ondine.

“What?” She tipped her chin and fingered a loosening braid.

“You’re actually sad.”

“Your dog stinks.”

“You are,” he retorted through a stuffed nose. “I can tell.”

“Honey.” Trish turned to Ralph. “Did you give her the folder?”

“Oh, right.” Ralph got up from the table and picked up the
manila folder containing numbers his daughter would never call, insurance cards she would never use. Ondine had not visited
a doctor since her childhood inoculations. She never had a sniffle, an ache or a pain, a bruise or a scratch. She took the
folder and wondered whether her father — like she did — hoped that, just once, she would come up with a scraped knee, or would
tell her parents her throat was sore and she didn’t feel well enough for school today. Or would fall and break something:
nose, collarbone, pinkie nail. Anything to prove she was indeed a creature of flesh, blood, and bone.

“Well —” Ralph put his cup down and twisted it so that the Xelix Labs logo squared with the edge of the table. Ondine knew
it was her cue. It was time for the Masons to leave. She looked at her family gathered there in the half-light of morning,
the maple behind them.

“Max, I will miss you,” she began slowly, getting up from the table. “And I will miss you, Mom, and I will miss you, Dad.”
She pronounced the words carefully, formally. “But I’m staying here.”

Her mother put her hand to her eyes again. Ralph looked out the window.

“Maybe you’ll come at the end of summer?” Max asked.

Ondine nodded. She thought of her butterfly, lifting soundlessly off the ceiling. Of the pale gelatinous tentacles of Max
the jellyfish, corkscrewing from an even whiter canvas.

“I’ll visit.”

Ralph cleared his throat. “Well, I guess we’d better get on the road then. Max, you ready?”

“Yeah, Dad. I’m all set.”

Ondine embraced her father, hugged her mother and kissed her neck — she smelled like wood and flowers — and felt she would
melt the whole time. She went over to her brother and put her arm around him even though he was bigger than she was. The shiny
white polyester of his silly suit crinkled in her grasp.

“Yeah, I’m sad, Max. I am actually sad. I’m human, aren’t I?”

F
OR TWENTY MINUTES SHE LAY ON HER BED.
There was movement downstairs — voices, footsteps, doors opening and closing — but she had said her good-byes. Ondine was
like that. Once a decision had been made, she tended not to look back, and her family knew her well enough to respect that.
Till then she liked to take time with her thoughts — like waking out of a dream is how they seemed to her. Ideas appeared
as if by paint-by-numbers. A bit here, a bit there. Then the whole thing would cohere and she’d have made up her mind. Until
then it was all just shapes and colors.

Ralph and Trish wouldn’t come up anymore. When she heard the garage door groan and the U-Haul back onto N.E.
Schuyler’s quiet morning street, she knelt on her bed and watched her parents drive away.

A bird chirped. It had started to rain. Ondine lay down again, feeling weirdly calm. It was a Saturday in early June. School
had ended a few weeks ago and she didn’t quite know what she’d do now.

She picked up her cell and dialed a number she knew by heart.

“Hey,” she began after a few moments. “Yeah, they just left.”

The person on the other end said something and Ondine sighed. “I don’t know, sad.” She switched the phone to her other ear,
leaning toward the window. “Yeah, maybe that is just the thing. Tonight though? So soon?”

She nodded. “All right. Call me at five. We’ll figure out what to do then.”

She lay back down underneath the butterflies and watched the pieces collect.

J
ACOB
C
LOWES WAS NOT AN UNFEELING MAN
, but the eighteen-year-old punk holding the dishwasher’s nozzle irked him. There he was now, thick black hair falling into
his eyes, spraying a plate. He worked too slowly. He smoked when Jacob wasn’t in the kitchen. Just then the room smelled of
cigarettes. Dishwashers weren’t supposed to care, he knew — Jacob had been a dishwasher once — but this one made his knees
watery with anger.

That goddamned name. Nix. Who the hell had a name like that?

“Nix!” Jacob yelled over the din of the industrial machine. The boy pretended not to hear him. “Nix Saint-Michael!”

Nix looked up, then down again.

Punk.
Jacob didn’t like the way Nix worked, eyes half closed, almost asleep, yet walking and waking. Holding the nozzle with one
hand, with the other — barely — a ceramic plate you’d think was heavy as plutonium.

“It’s clean, Nix. The plate is clean.”

Nothing.

In the beginning it had been that Nix was late. Now he was on time, but he moved so slowly that they were always running out
of soda glasses. So now they were giving refills to save glasses, and Jacob didn’t want to give refills. This wasn’t a goddamned
Friday’s,
for chrissakes. This was Jacob’s Pizza. This was the oldest New York–style pizza establishment in once-groovily bohemian,
now-gentrified Northwest Portland.

“Am I talking to myself? I believe there is a dishwasher here named Nix Saint-Michael, who I am trying to communicate with.
Earth to Nix. We need some goddamned soda glasses!”

“Pop.”

Nix spoke too softly for Jacob to hear him over the cranking hum and his thick black hair obscured his eyes, but Jacob could
see what his mouth was saying and it pissed him off.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s called pop here,” Nix repeated under his breath. “Never mind. Just give me five, man.”

“What do you think this is? A fucking old folks’ home?” Jacob ignored the correction. “I don’t have
five,
Nix. I don’t even have
one.
I need those soda glasses
now.
”

Jacob Clowes was used to punks. He spoke the language, knew that Nix wouldn’t respect him unless he was a bit of an asshole,
so he played it that way. He had been a punk himself. A
punk kid from Brooklyn who had moved out to Portland in the seventies. He had hated the rich yuppies once they started moving
in during the eighties, but the businessman in him — the one whose daughter, Neve, now attended that liberal (but still freakishly
expensive) private day school,
Penwick,
and whose wife, Amanda, a former experimental dancer/macrobiotic cook/Reiki healer who had discovered the joy of expensive
wine — depended on Jacob’s Pizza.

And tonight, like it or not, Jacob’s Pizza depended on Nix.

Anyway, he kind of liked the kid. He knew Nix squatted up in the park. He knew there were dark scenes in the family, somewhere
in Alaska. Nix wore long-sleeved black T-shirts, but Jacob could imagine the places where the boy cut himself. A lot of the
kids he had hired over the years were into that kind of thing. He may not have been able to change them, but he helped them,
gave them jobs, talked to them after their shifts, gave them rides home. Sometimes he and Amanda had them over for dinner,
and some of the girls babysat for Neve a few times when she was a kid.

There were always the ones that fell through the cracks, though.

“Hey, punk. I told you to get those glasses through the washer ten fucking minutes ago. What are you doing?”

Nicholas Saint-Michael did not look up. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. He liked Jacob. Jacob was, in fact, the best boss
Nix had ever had since he first started hauling spruce chips for
Frank Shadwell back in Sitka when he was nine years old. That was another life, though, and in this one, he knew better.

Jacob repeated himself. “What the hell are you doing?”

Nix kept his eyes down. He couldn’t look at Jacob. Physically couldn’t. The man had a light around him so bright Nix had to
keep his eyes closed or his back turned whenever his boss was in the room.

“What is going on?”

He set the plate down and let go of the handle of the spray nozzle.

“Man, I can’t do this job anymore.”

Even with his eyes half closed, Nix could see the light, blinding and painful as the sun, around the saggy sides of Jacob’s
faded black jeans.

“What did you say?”

“I said I can’t do this anymore.” He brought his hand to his brow to wipe back a slash of black hair, staring at the water
and the soap swirling. Jacob’s reflection shimmered in the sink, but the light wasn’t in the reflection — they didn’t show
up there, he’d noticed — and so he spoke to Jacob’s watery mirror image.

“Man, I just wash the dishes.”

“Yeah?”

Nix felt the man come closer, reach over the pool of water, pull the nozzle out of his hand. He let him, though he shrunk
back as Jacob’s hand approached.

“No, Nix. You act like a dishwasher. You assume the pose of a dishwasher. But a dishwasher you are not. A dishwasher would
wash the fucking dishes.”

“Right.” Nix’s eyes stayed on the water. He wanted to meet Jacob’s gaze, show him that he could do it, keep the job, make
the owner happy. The dude had tried. Nix knew he had tried.

He forced himself to look up.

“I’m just messing you up.”

“Messing
me
up?”

The man’s face had hardened into a mask of disappointment. The wide mouth a ruddy dash; his dark, close-set eyes flat under
frizzed black-brown eyebrows. And the fire all around him even brighter now, incinerating.

The closer they got the more they burned.

Nix looked away. “I can’t stay.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I can’t stay. I’m bad for you.”

Again Jacob moved closer and Nix watched a blazing hand approach his shoulder. He jerked away.

“What’s going on?”

How could he explain something he himself could not understand?

“Jacob, man. I’m no good.”

“Look, if you’re hooked on dust, kid, we can work something —”

“Naw, naw. That’s not it.”

These cloaks of light, Nix had seen them before. Lately they had gotten bolder, more violent. That girl up at the squat who
got her throat slit, dumped somewhere out toward Bend. The man Nix saw on the Burnside bus, killed in a holdup two weeks later.
All those people on the road down from Alaska.

It had happened to Frank Shadwell before Nix’s mother, Bettina, had done what she’d done. If Nix had stayed in Sitka, it would
have happened to Bettina, too. Now the light devoured Jacob, and Nix couldn’t look at him because he was afraid it was his
own mind causing the fire.

He shook his head and spoke to the floor.

“I gotta go.”

Jacob sighed. “Go take a break and smoke a cigarette or something and calm down. I’ll cover for you while you’re gone.” He
started to move behind the sink to take Nix’s place.