Casebook (42 page)

I added Princeton to my college list. I applied to Bard, Berkeley, and Princeton, early action. Professor Tin recommended that. This time, I pressed buttons.

Before Hector and I visited Princeton, the Mims received a diagnosis. The news stabbed me. I thought I’d caused her cancer. Right away, I blurted out that I’d called Eli two years ago and told him that she’d killed herself. My lips moved against the fabric of her shirt. Eli would have nothing on me now; I could purely hate him. But even that didn’t matter anymore. My face was in her shoulder so I couldn’t see. Finally, I lifted my head. She didn’t ream me out, she just looked incredibly sad, as if Eli had deformed me, me, her favorite.

When I got the letter from Princeton, I waited three days before telling them. I didn’t know how to explain. My test scores were high—purchased 800s, as my dad called them—but there was still the matter of my GPA.

When Hector and I had received the precious first copies of
Two Sleuths
, we’d talked about showing our parents. We wanted to, but great as the book looked, we wished it was about something else, something entirely made up, or at least from our lives, not my mom’s. We only had the Villain in a few pages at the beginning and his house as the place of last resort for the incorrigible animals whose lives were endangered and who needed a home. I’d hidden my copy under a mountain of comic books. For the first days, I took it out and held it when I was alone in the house.

I told my dad about Princeton and the book first. “Does your mother know about this?” he asked, sitting in the car, leafing through
Two Sleuths
. “It’s mostly a fantasy, but she might object to the notion of boys flying errant pets to a bigamist’s yard. I’m assuming you never did actually put animals on his lawn.” I’d had
to tell my father the whole story of Eli. He hadn’t known. I was surprised. “I never trusted him,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t like his hair.”

In the end, after the Mims read it, her only question was, “You got into Princeton because of a comic book?” She shook her head and laughed. “I stayed up reading it with the windows open, and I laughed and laughed.”

It took me years to understand that that was a generous reading of our book.

The Superboys wondered how the Villain’s lies were different from lies everyone told. And why his broken promise to love was worse than their own mothers’ and fathers’, who’d stood at altars and vowed to love each other until death did them part.

When I left, Ben Orion promised to take the Mims to treatments. He slept in her room sometimes. I guessed that she decided to lift her scruples about the future, probably for the obvious reason that there was none. I didn’t ask.

75 • The Woman Who’d Been Washed and Dried Many Times

That summer before I tried Princeton, Ella and I drove to Pasadena together. She waited in the car. I walked up Eli’s lawn alone, my chest fluttering. I didn’t know what I’d say. The wife opened the door. She looked middle-aged, not so different from my mom or Sare. She stood in a housedress and old-fashioned pointed white Keds. Her legs were bare, shaved only a few days ago so that five-o’clock-shadow bristles showed on her muscled calves.

“Is Eli here?” I asked.

“No, he’s out of town,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

“I’m Miles Adler-Hart. Do you know who I am?”

She first kept her public face, but when I said I was Irene’s son, she motioned me to sit down on the bright blue porch chair. She didn’t invite me inside. I’d glimpsed the living room, though; it had a blue-and-green color scheme, and a mod Escher-looking skewed plaid rug.

“What can I do for you?” she asked. It didn’t occur to me then that she might have been scared. She kept her hands folded together in her fabric lap.

Six years, I thought. I hadn’t prepared anything. I told her about the cabin her husband had taken us to. The Mims’s
family romance
. My Christmas lights. That key he gave us each to hold. The talk about rings and marriage. The delivered sofa.

“Did you know all this?” I said.

For a while she didn’t answer. Then she said, “What can I tell you? Marriages are complicated. They have long, deep roots. No one but the two people in a marriage can ever really understand. We have a fine marriage, but I know that there are places I can’t follow. Eli had a problem with lust.”

A problem with lust! “I’ll say,” I muttered. Just then, Pretzel the chihuahua ran through the bushes chased by the barky spaniel.

“Eli and your mother don’t have anything to do with each other now. There’s no other way that can be.” She stood up. “I have to pick up my son at football.”

“Does Hugo live with you?” The question just burped up.

She looked at me, startled. “No. He lives far away.” I noticed she didn’t tell me where, even the state. But Ben Orion had found Hugo’s address in New Jersey. For all I know, the Mims had sent him a white vase.

I told her about Eli’s last note, signed
Yours, always, always
.

“I’m sorry if Eli made promises to your mother that he couldn’t keep. He shouldn’t have. But I have a little boy who needs his father. You have a father, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have a great dad.”

“Well, be glad of that. You’re what, eighteen, nineteen? My son is twelve. I’m not going to say anything to Eli about this visit. He won’t contact your mother. He wouldn’t. He’s past all that now. And it sounds like you have what you need already. Try to be grateful.”

She opened the front door again to go inside, and I saw our parrot in a cage at the end of a neat hallway. A dog I didn’t recognize nudged against her hem.

“You sure have a lot of pets,” I said.

She smiled. “My husband calls me Saint Jean of the Animals.”
My husband!
Who says that? All the moms I knew called their husbands by their first names.

But the woman was right: I did have what I needed. Could the cure for suffering be the person picked instead of you? Jean seemed okay; she was prettier than she’d looked at a distance, and she loved her kid, I was sure, but she could live with someone who called her Saint Jean and let that make her happy, knowing that he’d harmed other people. She could forget about the uncollected promises he left littering the world.

The Mims couldn’t have, I didn’t think.

And Jean wasn’t who the Mims would have wanted to be. Marge was that. Marge, whom Eli had never appreciated.
What exactly is there to preserve?
He could keep his Saint Jean of the Animals.

I’d take Marge any day.

76 • The Right End

I bagged Princeton after seven months and came home. I didn’t tell anyone ahead of time. One day in winter, I took the shuttle to the Newark airport and bought a one-way ticket in cash. The most romantic moment of my life will always be that March Tuesday when I walked into the gold-lit playground of the nursery school where Ella worked in aftercare. It had been snowing gray sleet when I left that morning. It was a good thing I went to Ella first. I had two parents in two houses and not one of them was glad to see me home. The Boops didn’t care either way. Only Hound was happy. Later on, guys at the Aero threw a party. I felt like telling all the people walking around numb and bundled back in Princeton,
You know, you don’t have to live like this!

For two years then I worked and racked up money. Ella’s parents kept on her to get a degree. I had mine worried about my sanity. When the Boops were graduating, I thought I’d better get my shit together, and so Ella and I and Boop One all drove north to college in my car. We dropped her at the Farm and kept going to Berkeley, where Ella and I started like freshmen, three years late. We found a house to rent just over the Oakland border. The Aero people had already set me up with a job at the Pacific Film Archive, and so we began the life we’re still living today.

But I saw Eli—“my husband,” as I thought of him—once more when Princeton was already ancient history. I’d driven down to LA to help move Hector out of the sober-living place he’d been in
for eighteen months. I’d had a key made for our house. I thought it would do him good to live in the room where he’d crashed half his childhood. He’d been happy there. Boop Two was living in her old room with a bunch of animals. She was planning to go up to UC Davis for vet school in a year and then we’d need somebody to look after the place. Our mother had bought the house from Einar Nelson. He’d given her a good price.

Hector had become very clean. He woke up early his first day there, a Sunday morning, and scrubbed the whole kitchen with lemon and white vinegar. He told me those were the kinds of things they drilled you on in rehab.

I gave him these pages and told him he could do what he wanted with them. I’d talked to Kat and Philip and arranged with Hershel for Hector to take my old job.
Two Sleuths
was still selling; Hershel said he could promote Hector to manager if he liked the work. He could have gotten hours at the doughnut place, too, but he actually found work with a real bakery that he had to get up at four in the morning to go to and knead.

And with his fancy degree, he started school all over again at Santa Monica City College, the best community college in the country. And he told me he’d been lucky and found the right teacher the first time out. A cartooning class. At night. He walked in late to a room where a woman who looked like a guy from behind was writing on the blackboard:

The only tools required for this course are:

Paper

Pencil

Life

Those and these pages from me. He said he’s been reading them. He’s made notes and amendments. He changed all our names. He’s made private jokes. So it’s a collaboration again.

He told me, Remember how Sare used to say with a kind of
rueful grin that was so Sare,
Yes, beginnings are hopeful
? Well, this beginning feels hopeful.

When I was leaving to drive back up north, I stopped in Westwood at a Whole Foods parking lot where a bunch of cages had been set up to give away rescued pets. Boop Two had told me she thought she’d seen Eli there.

And sure enough, there he was.
My husband
. His wife wasn’t with him or his kid either, though by then Timmy would have been at the end of high school or in college. Eli sat on a foldout chair on the sidewalk. He looked older, small and fidgety. His khakis were frayed, washed too many times and yanked up with a belt. I felt guilty all of a sudden for the lie I’d told him. I wanted to keep walking. He probably wouldn’t recognize me, I thought. I could get away. Still. I stuck my arm out and said, “Miles Adler. Eli?”

He stood up to hug me and held on, pressing me hard. I wondered if he knew it was me who’d delivered animals to his yard. Then I thought: I never found out who ratted on my soup selling and I didn’t care at all anymore. I must have been the distant past for him. Maybe his son had read
Two Sleuths
along with a hundred other comics without a flicker of recognition. Hector and I had written
Two Sleuths
, we’d put mean scared animals on his lawn and watched the shadows of his family move inside the windows, but we couldn’t make him give the Mims the dream that he’d conjured and she treasured.
You and your family romance
. Dreams had expiration dates, too.

I couldn’t help but stare. His hair was still black. My father had told me that anyone his age who didn’t have gray in his hair was dying it.

“How are you?” he asked. We stayed standing there in the sun.

“I’m sorry I lied to you that time I said she’d killed herself. She never would have done that.”

“I understand,” he said before I was even finished. He was rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt. He said he loved this weather and
shuddered—you could see him literally feel the sun on his arms. The Mims wasn’t like that at all. I doubt that she’d ever even noticed warmth or light on her skin. Maybe together they’d had that kind of slow pleasure, on the few days she had away from us. I knew a little by now about the way time bends for two people in a room.

“Did she, did she,” he stuttered. “Did she find—” Then he stopped again.

“Do you mean happiness?” I asked.

He nodded, gulped, as if he couldn’t get the words out.

“Yeah. She found a guy who cherished her. She died in his arms.”

He nodded, absorbing that.

“I suppose she hated me.”

“I think she was grateful. Eventually.”

He opened his battered, creased wallet. He had two pictures and a license in it, and a few dollar bills. The kid looked like a normal-enough kid with acne. From behind that, he pulled out a picture of my mom. “Hers will be the last face I see.”

We exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses, but that was the last time I saw Eli. I never heard from him, up until now.

That felt like the right ending, though I’d lied to Eli again. Sort of.

Ben Orion remained my mother’s constant friend, through five years of chemo and remission. They never talked about marriage, so far as I know. There was a fizzy summer quality to the Mims during that time. It’s hard to explain, but some of what she got from Eli, that wide smile, a way of turning up a sleeve, wearing skirts and canting her leg, she kept. Every few months she came home carrying shopping bags, one dress for herself and one for each of my sisters. When she first had chemo, she didn’t wait for her hair to fall out; she shaved it. She told us on the phone from the salon and Boop One cried. But when the Mims walked in the door, Boop One said, right away,
Oh, I was wrong. It looks amazing
. Our mom, she claimed, had a great-shaped head. After the chemo, when her hair grew back, she kept it very short, half an inch at most.