Casebook (6 page)

18 • Speakerphone

The place I grew up didn’t feel like a beach town, except for a few bright afternoons of flash and mirrory reflection. Most of the time we lived cushioned in fog. Sare talked my mom into being on the committee for our end-of-year beach party. My mom didn’t do that kind of thing often. I treasured the day, for her; she loved being one of the moms.

Sare ordered Charlie and me to open the folding legs of rented tables and stake them into the Malibu dunes. My mom hung close to Sare. She turned shy and tentative here, a mystery.

The ocean had a film on its surface over the deep mess. Hector and I stalked in, letting the water adjust our legs to its temperature, the liquids inside and out the same. Twenty feet south, people from our class drifted, girls wearing bikini tops, their arms stretched out over the surface, and guys just in shorts doing lazy tricks, kicking water.

We didn’t have a chance with girls, and we knew it. Hector’s limbs still looked like antennae, and I could feel my fat. Tan fat was better than white fat, at least. I had dark skin. Charlie didn’t have a chance either, but he walked toward the girls, hands in his pockets, looking as if he were studying the glassy waves. Everyone got married eventually, even fat people, I thought. Marge Cottle was married until her husband died on her.

Philip Audrey stood laughing with my mom. A fan of hair blew over her cheek; I wondered if he thought she was pretty.

Hector could stand up on a surfboard. The waves always pulled me under. I had a catch of salt in my throat. This was one of those rare days I knew I’d remember later:
our western childhoods
. The fucking eternal boom of the surf. The Boops pranced at the fringe of foam with other little kids, their shrieks mostly lost in wind. I noticed my mom on her phone, pacing in the sand. She had a red phone then, big enough to see from a distance. Who was she talking to? I wondered. We were all here.

Most of the kids in our class bobbed in the water. Ella knelt on a board. She was known for having a beautiful older sister, but I thought Ella was cuter. I was the only one who thought that, and it occurred to me that if she knew, she might be grateful. But I couldn’t figure out how to ever tell her. Simon swiveled Ella’s board, tipping her into the water, her T-shirt getting drenched. Maybe it was okay that we weren’t them. We would be later. We would be in college. The Rabid Rabbits had started liking people, and now everything was messed up. Charlie liked Estelle, but she stood motionless like a deer by her mother. Zeke liked Leah, but today she’d declared herself in love with Simon. I liked Ella, but I wouldn’t tell anyone because I knew I didn’t have a chance. Nobody liked who liked them.

I ate a lot but still had that scooped-out feeling from being in the water a long time. I felt skinny, but I wasn’t. I loved soft cupcakes. I ate three. Hector liked the tougher kind.

Boop One stood at attention at the table for henna tattoos, arms
straight at her sides, while the woman pressed the patch on her arm. Ella lifted her blouse, and I saw she’d gotten a belly. That seemed terrible and sad. My mother stood with Sare, their hair wild. The Mims had gotten a tattoo on her ankle, a navy-blue chain of flowers. Sare had an anchor on her left shoulder.

Hector rode shotgun on the way home. The Boops fell asleep; a head bored into me. Then my mom’s phone went on speaker by mistake. It did that sometimes, in those early days of the technology.

“Just so if anything happened,” I heard Eli say, “she could tell Timmy.”

“I love you,” my mom said, in front of us. I blushed for Hector to hear. The Boops were out cold. I wasn’t shocked, it wasn’t that; if someone had asked me I would have said she probably loved Eli, but I’d never heard her say that out loud to anyone besides me and my dreadful sisters. Not even to my dad. They hadn’t been that kind of couple. I always liked that about them.

After the phone snapped off, she said that Eli had had an emergency operation. To take out a tumor in his pituitary gland.

“In DC?” I asked.

“Isn’t the pituitary gland in the brain?” Hector said.

“Yes, but it went well, and he’s recovering. His ex-wife is there.”

“Where does she live again?”

“Wisconsin. With Timmy and her parents.”

I wondered if my mom would go to Washington. We generally went to the hospital. Esmeralda’s son had had an operation from a pitching injury, and we drove in traffic to bring him a Game Boy my mom would never have bought for me. Eli was in the hospital for
brain
surgery. She probably had to go, but I didn’t want her to.

It was the kind of summer night I loved. At four in the morning, I heard my mom bounding up the stairs. She stomped out onto the roof where we were and woke us, her face not jolly. “Do you know how dangerous this is, Miles?”

We’d set up sleeping bags on the flat part of the roof and brought
up pillows and a box of graham crackers. It didn’t feel dangerous at all. From up here the curve of beach looked small, like a fishing village. Feathery tree boughs touched us.

Kat picked up Hector the next morning. She was wearing shorts and her legs looked the way legs were supposed to, tan with dips where you wanted dips to be. I didn’t know how I knew what legs were supposed to look like, but it surprised me how few did. Boop One’s did. Boop Two’s no way ever would.

The Mims didn’t go to Washington.

I felt bad for the guy. Eli loved her more than she loved him.

19 • Silence

I woke up the first day of vacation and found this on the blackboard:

BENIGHTED:
IN A STATE OF PITIFUL OR
CONTEMPTIBLE INTELLECTUAL OR MORAL
IGNORANCE

“That’s one I can think of some uses for,” I mumbled. “Two uses.”

The Mims had a will to improve us. Summer Sundays were going to be cleanup days, she announced. She chalked a quote on the blackboard:
SOME FRENCH SOCIALIST SAID THAT PRIVATE PROPERTY WAS THEFT. I SAY THAT PRIVATE PROPERTY IS A NUISANCE—ERDOS
.

She did battle with our closets. She bribed the Boops for try-ons that the other three hundred and sixty-four days they did for fun. Hives of clothes grew on the floor. She swacked open black garbage bags and made me twisty them and haul them to her car. At the end of the day, she asked, “Now, doesn’t that feel better?”

“No,” I said.

The Boops chorused. “No. No. Nooooooo.”

“Well,
I
feel better,” she said. “Next week, Miles, we’ll start on your shelves.”

But the next week, our dad took us to the pier. He loved bumper cars as much as we did and bought us ice cream at five o’clock. The light was just jelling when he bounded into the house, sniffing and scanning the kitchen. “What’s cookin’?”

My mom had the table set. The way Eli had looked at her, my dad looked at the food. But our parents laughed together. People don’t talk about how weird it is when your separated parents get along. They were still sharp and funny. My dad had seconds, then thirds, before shoving his chair out and saying good night. We hadn’t seen Eli for a while. While we loaded the dishwasher, I asked the Mims how he was.

“Better,” she said. “Definitely better.”

“He’s home from the hospital?”

The way she said
Mm-hmm
made me think she didn’t know. I wondered if they’d had a fight. Maybe because she hadn’t gone when he’d had that operation.

20 • Behind the Futon-Sofa

Then one day he showed up holding flowers. My father was usually the flower sender. I’d never before seen Eli with a bloom. My mom wasn’t expecting him, I deduced; she was wearing sweats, her hair up in the clip she wore at home. He just stood there with his flowers. They didn’t say anything to each other. They stared. Then his face fell onto her shoulder, his neck like a dinosaur’s. Bent. Dark. He might have been crying.

“Do you want to sit down?” she asked, and they sat on the futon-sofa Sare had lent us.

I happened to be hiding behind that. Not to spy. My camp duffel and all my gear were spread out on the kitchen floor, and hide-and-seek even with my benighted sisters had seemed more appealing than starting to pack. I’d hid. The Boops were seeking me. Then Hector was coming to get me for a movie.

I’d have to pop up like a jack-in-the-box behind my mom and Eli.

“I’m s-sorry.” The stutter again. “I had my first session with Dr. Wynn, and I told her I’d been crazy. I knew I was being too hard on you. She had my medical records, and she asked for a blood test. She suspected pressure from the tumor was causing the anxiety. She called me an hour later and said we had to do emergency surgery. I promise to do better. I’m going to keep seeing her. Sweetie, are you afraid to get divorced?”

Afraid to get divorced? Was it still possible they wouldn’t? I had a queasy feeling: I remembered the boy to whom those words would have fallen like the deepest balm. The gold of recovery. I could almost reach his feelings, but not quite; I was no longer that boy. I wasn’t sure I wanted my parents back together. I was used to things the way they were now. I’d already begun to be the man I would become. Halfhearted. About my parents getting back together. About Holland. About Eli. And the other side of half-heartedness was greed.

“I won’t push you so hard anymore,” Eli said.

The Boops ran panting into the room, saying they couldn’t find me. My mom and Eli stood to help them look.

I gave them a head start and then snuck up behind, shouting, “Boo!”

The doorbell rang; it was Hector and I had to go. His mom had started dating their surf instructor and he and Jules hated him. The surf instructor had a dog called Scout, and they didn’t like the dog either. We ran down to his mom’s car, late for
Batman Begins
. Bo, the Surfer, rode shotgun and Kat drove. I guess all VWs have those little vases, but Kat was the only person I ever knew who
always kept a flower in hers. That night it was a sprig of rosemary and one lavender stalk.

“Didn’t Eli just have surgery?” Hector asked. He had freckles on every inch of his body from surf camp and wore a twine ankle bracelet. “Did they have to shave his head?”

“His head’s already kind of shaved. The sides, anyway.”

“Is there a scar?”

I’d forgotten to look. Hector stayed at my house, and the next day my mom let us sleep, which was odd since it was the Sunday she intended to go through everything I owned. But when I blinked awake, I could tell it was late from the way the sun fell on the lawn. Gal scrabbled.

“Your mom let us sleep in till noon.” Hector jumped down from the top bunk. He slept in the top bunk at home, too.

“Wowza. That’s a first.”

We ventured out through the rooms, still in yesterday’s clothes. The kitchen looked itself. I heard thunks and rustles from my mom’s closet. We sauntered in and found a huge pile of clothes on her bed and my mom standing in sneakers and a dress before the mirror. Eli knelt there, tugging at the skirt of it.

“We’re cleaning out my closet,” she said.

I rubbed my eyes. “Does that mean mine gets a pass?” She surveyed the pile of shoes on her floor, sweaters melting on a chair arm.

Eli pinched the back of her dress like a seamstress. “Honey, this’ll take most of the afternoon, and then we should do something fun with the kids.” He pulled the shoulders of the dress in. Then he shook his head. “No, take it off. Giveaway.”

They spent all day in that closet. I stuck my head in; she was trying on a ruffled shirt. A huge clown face was Eli’s response. She pushed him back onto a pile of coats.

Later, we stepped in to say we were going out on our bikes. My mom had on white jeans. From the floor, he grabbed her ankle.

We took a long ride. Hector said, “I didn’t see any scar.”

“Ask him.” I shrugged.

By the time we got home, they had k.d. lang singing “The Air That I Breathe,” a song about cigarettes, and both of them were lying on the floor. “Guys, look at my closet,” the Mims said. “It’s a thing of beauty.”

“It’s a thing of empty, anyway,” I said. “What happened to all your clothes?”

She pointed to three ginormous garbage bags, marked
THROW
,
GOODWILL
, and
SEAMSTRESS
. Her closet had yards of room. A cluster of empty hangers. Not only that, the top of her dresser was bare.

Eli drove us in my mom’s car as the sun went down. He took the 405 onto a road that wound around a mountain, cutting into brush, where each dry leaf cupped gold. We ended up on a street that looked halfway between a mall and a ghost town.

“I love this,” my mom said, stepping into the dusty light. The restaurant was known for dumplings, just the kind of thing she liked, full of odd vegetables. We preferred dumplings that were fried. But Eli ordered a Coke, and so she let us, too. “Okay, it’s happened. I love LA now,” she said, walking outside after to a store that sold cream puffs. You could pick your own filling and sauce. The Boops chose ice cream inside; Hector and I made ours into warm éclairs. We were almost to the car when she shrieked. I thought she’d been stung. But it was only Eli; he’d pinched.

Eli didn’t seem—I don’t know—maybe as
special
as my dad, but he made her looser. I tried to explain. “You know why I like him? I can say it in one word.
Coke
.”

“He’s better than Surferdude,”
^*
Hector muttered.

After that day we didn’t see Eli for the rest of the summer.

My mom bragged about him, though. She told me he’d had a teacher in eighth grade who made him read a book every day.

“Sounds like a site,” I said. “Book of the Day.”

She laughed, which was good, because I had no intention of reading a book every day. The Mims wasn’t such a reader herself. She liked papers with equations.

One night in August I found her computer screen open to Dalmane addiction.

“What’s Dalmane?” I asked, my skin going raw chicken. Could my mother be an addict without me knowing? I made myself say, “So who’s addicted?”

“I told you Eli’s brother lost his job.”