Casebook (15 page)

Eli was telling the story of his dog. In Texas, he’d rescued or stolen a dog, depending on how you saw it. The dog had looked
scared. He’d been abused. They’d found him tied up in a small West Texas town. “I picked him up, he was trying to bite. I got him in the car and drove away. That was how I got my dog.”

“You and Jean,” the Mims corrected.

“She would have just walked by.” You could tell he thought that was treachery.

“You
stole
a dog?” I said, remembering Rebel, Hector’s lost pet.

“I suppose I did.”

I shot a look at my mom. This didn’t bother her? He
stole
a pet.

Before the sand ended in a parking lot, there was an old playground, the metal equipment now faded and peeling, the colors worn to plain steel on the monkey bars in places where hands held on. In its corner stood a concrete-floored shower. Eli turned the knob and leaned under the spurt of water so his hair flattened on his forehead like Herman Munster’s. With the ancient cracked soap bar from the public dish, he soaped his whole head: hair, face, ears, eyes. The Boops screamed when he soaped his eyes. He did it again, getting his shirt wet. I lagged back; Steve Martin the guy wasn’t. I missed Hector all of a sudden. I couldn’t whine to him about this, though; he’d already moved twice to not-as-good places.

I held the football on my lap in the backseat. We’d ended our game without a winner. Like in Cottonwoods Elementary, where we’d never been allowed to keep score. A thousand games and nothing mattered. Then, all of a sudden, this year counted. Grades that would go on our permanent records. Divorce. Moving. Everything was ending.

I felt like secret scores had been kept all along, and I’d lost and never known.

My mother drove the long way around, not to pass our old house.

Our first night in the new place, Eli slept on the futon couch.

Late at night, I heard the Mims say, “But she’s allergic.”

She sure was. We’d all seen Boop One’s body go reptile with bumps the size of golf balls, gunk streaming out of her nose. No one would want her kid to be like that.

“She can get shots,” he said. “They
do
work.” Was that all he could offer us?

I kept my hands at my sides that night in the strange room. The walls came so close, it felt like a ship’s cabin. From my bed, I could reach out and touch almost everything. A chalky light fell onto my comforter; morning, and I hadn’t slept at all.

I heard the noises of beginnings: water in pipes, the kettle whistling. Then my mom laughing, again and again, as if she couldn’t stop. Happiness! I bolted up. Hers, not mine. I pulled on sweats and went out. Eli was flat on his back on the floor, her head on his chest. He seemed to be tickling her.

She choked out, “Oh. Oh.”

It seemed so easy for them to laugh. She didn’t used to be happy when we weren’t. They didn’t startle when they saw me. They looked up, sweet-faced. I thought they owed me guilt. What happened to his
million dollars
?

“Hungry?” my mom asked.

“Not yet.” I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Just then, it came to me, why he wanted my sister to get shots. He planned to move in his dog! The dog he’d stolen! Would that kid roommate with me because it was male? I still hadn’t ever seen it. I’d met Haskell, Holland’s kid. A little nightmare. Way worse than the Boops. And from what my mom said, this kid didn’t even sleep through the night.

Eli finally stood to go, and my mom said “Wait” and ran to the bathroom. She returned with her electric toothbrush. She tucked it into the pocket of his shirt. But that was expensive! She’d gotten me one already, because I had braces, but the Boops didn’t have one. She spent too much money on him! That watch. Also, she’d given him sunblock before. Little useful things. Not that the toothbrush was so little.

39 • Will You Melt?

But nothing terrible came true. Eli didn’t move in with his insomniac kid and hive-inducing dog. He said good-bye that day and flew back to Washington with our toothbrush, leaving us to ourselves in the new house. That was a relief. The next weekend, we took a hike with Hector’s family, and my mom broke off a branch of sycamore on the trail and hung it on the wall with small nails when we got home.

Marge, who lived around the corner, came over carrying a bowl of batter. The smell of baking found me in my room.

“I can only have one,” she was saying in the kitchen, spreading a muffin with whipped butter and spun honey, both new delicacies to us. “I’m on a cleanse.”

“What’s a cleanse?”

“It’s what they used to call a diet.”

My mom shot her a look. We didn’t talk about dieting in our family. After their mutual terror of pedophiles, my parents’ second-worst fear was anorexia.

Eli returned every week to teach a class Marge had arranged for him. He and my mom washed walls and painted, the days we slept at our dad’s. With a sander, they stripped the windowsills down to wood.

When I walked in after tennis one day, a stranger was kneeling in the fireplace. He was an electrician, he explained; my mom had talked the landlord into letting her install a gas pipe so we could turn on fire with a key. “Oh,” I said. He showed me how it worked. That was when I learned that we were renting. Another yank.

We could lose this house, too.

But we made fires every night that spring. Saturdays, she assigned us chores. Because the house was smaller, she told us, Esmeralda would come only once a month now.

Sundays, we hiked with the Audreys. The Mims found a papery wasps’ nest and set it on our mantel.

The first time Sare visited, she walked backward. “This sure came together fast! Think of how we agonized in the old place. Here, it’s all turning out right.” She went from station to station, where my mom had hung things on nails in the wall. A fire broke over itself. There was nothing on the mantel but that branch with the nest.

“Well, I was intimidated there.”

“That was the great house,” Sare said. “And you were the glamour couple.”

They both laughed, a bad way.

Once, my mom was driving us home from school through a huge storm when Eli called and it went to speakerphone. You could hear rain pelting the car on all sides, like drums.

“It’s really pouring,” she said. “I don’t know if I can run.”

“What will happen?” he said. “Will you melt?”

But I didn’t want her running in this. My father never would have suggested that any of us go out during inclement weather. This guy wanted my sister drugged for allergies and my mom to run through a storm while pieces of trees fell, clumps of palm wood, and she could get hit by lightning.

40 • The Double

We had tennis matches Tuesdays and Fridays. My mom learned I was playing first court when Sare called her from our second game, at a school that looked like a country club.

The Friday of a week we’d already been whupped by Brentwood, we took a bus to Polytechnic, leaving early for the long ride. The bus went through an old WPA tunnel into Pasadena and finally stopped under ancient trees, their thick roots running above the ground. There was nothing public-looking about this park: the
benches were ornate, new-painted green, and in the distance, old men in white shorts and caps played bocce ball.

Pulling on a sweatband, I started against their third-court player. Here, you felt the heat. My hair dripped water. I should shave my head, I thought as I beat their guy easily, trying not to run. Then I had a break and watched Charlie and Zeke. Our team looked bendy, our timing slightly off. We played close, tight matches, and it all came down to me, playing against their number one, and he stood a foot and a half taller.

On our fourth game, it was deuce; I got a point off of him, and he asked for a break. The air felt powdery, hot but settled. A brown line smudged the horizon. There were mountains here, backing the view. He went to get a towel from his bag. The sun began to pull in as I watched him pour a bottle of water over his head.

My scalp itched and I wondered if I had lice, as I did every time my head itched. Lice liked my hair. I’d forgotten to pack water. Every morning, in the rush to the car, my mom yelled,
Remember sunblock
and
Did you put a thermos of water in your racket bag?
I always mumbled
It’s all good
, sitting in the car stony, half awake. So now I wandered off toward an old drinking fountain outside the courts, held the lever down, and let the little arc of water splash my face. Water from water fountains has the same pipe smell everywhere, and that weird mineral taste. The identical stain on the porcelain. When I pulled my head up, I saw a guy in the distance who looked like Eli, with hair like that. This guy was with a woman and a little kid between; they were going
one-two-three-swoosh
, the way all parents do, I guessed, with all little kids, and then I thought, Well, no, not all parents with all kids. Like a bell ringing in the distance, I remembered the Boops. They didn’t get that. And then,
It couldn’t be Eli, he lives in DC
. But it really kind of looked like him. That weird square hair, the white shirt.

I broke into a run, following them, but they were pretty far ahead. I stopped when I started hyperventilating and saw them in the distance, bending down to put the kid into a car. Then I jogged
back to my team. My friends stood waiting. “Two minutes more, and they were gonna call it,” my coach said. “Bus gets here, we have to forfeit.”

I served. Their Number One guy returned. We rallied, and then I hit the ball long. I served again and double-faulted.

I couldn’t recapture my concentration and I lost the game for us all.

That night I jumped to answer the phone.

“Are you in DC?” I blurted, when it was Eli.

“Yes. And, well, you, you had tennis today. How was your game?”

“I lost,” I said. I had the strange feeling of something vibrating, like the floor before an earthquake. I handed the phone to my mom.

“You know Eli’s brother?” I asked when she got off. “Are they twins?”

“No,” she said. “The brother’s older.”

“Do they look alike?”

“Not especially, Eli says. Why are you thinking of Hugo?”

The rest of the season, my tennis was for shit. I choked up, even though I kept my eyes trained on the green rectangles. The coaches never knew why their first-court player lost it. The last day of school, I stayed to clean out my locker. At the bottom, old lunches still in their bags had seeped and grown into something like soil. I had to get paper towels to carry clumps of the gunk to the trash can.

“Aren’t you tempted to just close the locker door and leave?” Hector said.

“Yes.” But I kept returning and transferring the gooey slime. I had a foot and a half to go. I hadn’t told Hector about Pasadena yet. This was the first thing I hadn’t told him since his parents’ divorce.
By now I was pretty sure it hadn’t been Eli. Anyway, though, I wanted to tell him. About Eli stealing the dog, too. I just remembered that.

Charlie and I still hit balls to the Specials on Mondays. They kept improving, but now there were new Specials, beginners. The coach told us people had heard about the team because we were doing a good job. But the new Specials didn’t know anything. Their wrists wobbled with the weight of the rackets, and they chased after the dropped, wiggling Day-Glo balls like kids going after a faster puppy.

“Retardeds,” Zeke’s nanny whispered.

We hit balls to them and chased down the ones that looped over the high fence. One night, I was hunting down a ball that had gone into the park and I saw a guy who looked like Eli from the back: the white shirt again, that hair. I sped up, ran, huffing; I caught him this time, tagged the papery back of his shirt. But when the guy turned around, it wasn’t him at all. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I had to say. “I thought you were someone else.”

Eli called that same night from DC when my mom was out taking food to a geometrician in the hospital. I’d met the guy; he worked on fractals. Ferns and mountains, as I thought of them. Later on, when she got home, she and Eli talked for hours. Or I should say, he talked. She
mm-hmmed
the way she did when Boop One whined. When I picked up the extension, he was saying if he wasn’t jealous, he’d feel like he didn’t love her well enough. I tried to remember what the fractal guy looked like. He’d seemed pretty old.

My dad hadn’t been jealous. Did that mean he didn’t love her well enough? I thought of the time something had been outside our back window. It had sounded like an animal dying.

Eli couldn’t bear to lose her; I didn’t know if that was good or not.

My dad had lost her and my dad definitely had not died.

41 • Overhearing My Own Business

One morning when I blinked awake, I saw Eli on a ladder in the backyard, hanging the tire swing from our old house. The tree here was better for it—it had a thick branch and clear space around. I stayed in bed, reading comics, and every once in a while, a sister flew past my window, higher than we’d gone before.

My mother knocked maniacally at eleven.

“Stop raping my door.”

“Get up. We’re going out. It’s late.”

“Where you going?”

“We’re shopping for silver.” They thought it would be nice to have silver forks and spoons, she said. Eli was going to buy us a set to use every day. He was big on the everyday thing.
Your life with your kids is now
, he’d said.

“Eggs in the ref,” she told me, “and there’s bread for pb and j.”

I batted my eyes. “You’re not going to
make
breakfast for me?”

“Miles, you’re fourteen. We’re dropping Jamie at the pound.”

Batting had always worked before. I blamed Eli. They gallivanted out to shop. It no longer even seemed weird that Boop One had friends and Boop Two volunteered with animals by herself. I blamed Eli for her having that job, too.

I was still in bed when they returned. The store carried five types of silver, and they hadn’t liked any, they said in the kitchen. I was sure that wouldn’t be the last I’d hear about it. A smell came under my door. Toast. All of a sudden I felt starved. I heard the
thwack
of a knife. I expected my mom to open my door, a sandwich on a plate in her hand. But she didn’t. I had to force myself up.