Dark Water (3 page)

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

No sign that she’d even heard me.

“Did you make gooseberry pie again?” I asked, going for humor. My mother is an impulsive overdoer who gets her feelings hurt a lot. When I was in second grade, she made me a Pilgrim’s dress for Thanksgiving complete with white cap, and then I had to wear it to school. When I was in third grade, instead of buying cupcakes at the grocery store like everyone else, she made petit fours decorated with pink French buttercream frosting—not pink because she squeezed a little bottle of red dye but because she boiled beets in water and made her own natural dye, which naturally none of the eight-year-olds appreciated. And once, she read a short story by Chekhov about this Russian guy named Ivan Ivanovitch who’d wanted all his life to eat his own gooseberries, so he bought a farm and planted the berry bushes and tended them like they were his little babies for what seemed like a century, but once he finally, finally tasted the gooseberries, they were sour—nothing could
live up to his dream of the fruit. That’s the story. It’s all pointing to this moment when the fruit falls short of the
memory
of fruit. But my mom bought some canned gooseberries, the only kind you can get in California, and she made a gooseberry pie. (Gooseberries, if you don’t know, look like grapes, but they’re horrible.) I wouldn’t eat the pie, and neither would my father. It was a big letdown for her, even though I pointed out that this was the most Chekhovian result possible.

My mother sat dangerously still on the couch in her Talbots dress and her high-heeled shoes and didn’t answer me.

“I thought Dad was going to be here,” I said.

No movement from the couch.

“Was there a plane wreck?”

She shook her head.

“Are you sitting like that because Dad was killed?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than that.

She shook her head.

“Is someone else dead or hurt?”

More head shaking.

There’s this finger game my mom made up when I was little, a variation on “Here is the church, here is the steeple” or “Where is Thumbkin?” My mom figured out that when I wouldn’t talk to her, I would talk to “Mrs. Nelson,” which was just her thumb popped up between her curved fingers. Mrs. Nelson the Living Thumb sat there like a grandma tucked into her covers and talked me through things like the extraction of a rod from my wrist and third-grade recorder concerts and throwing up on the bus during a field trip to Birch Aquarium.

Feeling pretty stupid, but also certain that something had set the world on a diagonal so steep everything in it was about to go sliding and crashing to pieces, I let my thumbnail poke up through my fist and I set the fist on her knee.

I wiggled my thumbnail like it was a friendly earthworm.

My mother looked at the thumb and said, in a very slow and controlled voice, as if she were issuing instructions for bomb-defusing, “Your dad was here. He said he doesn’t love me anymore. He hasn’t loved me for ten years. He’s going to live in Phoenix now.”

I pulled my thumb back out because I was so shocked, and Mrs. Nelson disappeared for good. I think I couldn’t stand for Mrs. Nelson to know what had happened to us.

For reasons I can’t explain to you because at the time it just seemed like our fate, my father didn’t have to keep paying the mortgage on our four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath Spanish ranch. We were what my mother called “upside down” on the house, which means you owe the bank more than it’s worth. That was because my father had refinanced the house to get the money for the project in Phoenix that was now, somehow, only in his name. So we sold things. We sold the $2,500 living room set my dad had picked out a few years earlier. We sold the extra freezer, the sofa bed, and the extra television. In each case, we were upside down. Little by little we gave away or sold or threw out everything, and I imagined it all falling through the air as our house turned upside down. In time all we had were old quilts, my grandmother’s Singer sewing machine, one-tenth of my mom’s and my books
(because there were way too many of them to keep in Lavar’s house), and four boxes of Christmas ornaments. One night when I went to the movies with Robby (I remember what we saw—the Clause movie where Santa has to find a wife), my mother got drunk, which she never, never did normally, and smashed all the smashable Christmas ornaments with a croquet mallet. Then she burned her wedding pictures in the Weber grill.

A realtor who used to work with my dad sold the house, which I liked to picture with the pointed part of the roof as a balancing point and the door up high, so that nobody could get in. We didn’t get any money afterward.

W
hich is why Robby and I were sitting in Lavar’s decrepit cottage on Amiel’s first day of work. I put some tuna on the counter, opened it, and stared out the window. I carried around for the first time that day the sensation of Amiel being nearby, like he had one of those laser pointers aimed at me and the red dot of light moved wherever I moved. All I could see through the window, though, were avocado trunks and a couple of crows.

“Want some
le
crackers?” I asked.

Robby was sniffing the tuna like it had gone bad. He doesn’t look like my blood relative at all, which I guess is normal for cousins. He has his mother’s coloring, which is whitish, and black hair and gray eyes. His lips are just ridiculously pretty—kind of salmon and curvy the way a woman’s might
be, but he’s got a square jaw, blocky hands, and buff shoulders, so he doesn’t look like a wuss who collects Tintin figures.

“I just made it
le
yesterday,” I said. It was a thing we started doing back when our mothers got this idea that Robby and I should speak to each other
exclusively
in French, rendering me totally fluent and chic by, like, second grade and keeping Robby from the dreadful fate of growing up American. Robby was much better at Franglish than I was and could generally do more than “
le
” the heck out of things, but he wasn’t in the mood.

“What’s that terrible smell?” Robby said. He was looking through his glasses in a moderately disgusted way at my mother’s silkworms. My mom’s best friend, Louise Bart, gave my mom the worms because she noticed, while visiting us in our new old cottage, that my uncle had a pair of mulberry trees. A normal friend might have found this a great opportunity to make mulberry cobbler (which tastes like blackberry cobbler), but this friend, like my mother, is fatally interesting, so she said, “You could raise silkworms here!”

“We could?” I asked. “Why?”

“Because you have a constant source of food for them,” she said. “Full-grown mulberry trees.”

I meant “why would we
want
to,” but my mother didn’t need to ask. She’d gone with Louise to workshops on raising your own cotton, she’d learned to use a spindle one year, and she saw herself, I think, raising silkworms, processing the silk, and weaving it into priceless cloth that she could sell when the wolf came to the door.

Robby looked dubiously at the smooth white caterpillars crawling on the mattress of mulberry leaves my mother and I fetched for them three times a day. They munched big lacy holes until their pulsing bodies were strewn with green crumbs, then waited to be covered again, like children who have kicked off their blankets.

“Aren’t you worried they’ll crawl into your Caesar salad?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “they’ve been bred not to wander,” which is what my mother told me.

“You’d think they might try that with people,” he said more bitterly than I would have thought normal. He stared at them a little longer. “They smell kind of funky.”

“Don’t we all,” I said. I was pretty sure the house smelled funky all by itself, before we even moved in. “But they’re interesting, don’t you think?” I asked. Now that the caterpillars had molted into newer, larger skins five times, they were as big as my index finger and snowy white. A black line that looked like an artery pulsed just below the skin along their backs like the soft spot of a newborn baby’s head. “Do you hear that?” I asked.

Robby slumped without interest on the sofa back. “What?”

“Can’t you hear it?” It was a crackly-tap-tappy sound. I’d once thought it was the sound of twenty-five mouths chomping mulberry leaves, but it turned out to be all their little caterpillar feet grasping and ungrasping the leaves as they moved.

“Snap, crackledy, pop,” Robby said finally. “That is kind of
creepily interesting. I recommend checking your cereal bowl before you eat in the morning.”

I was disappointed that he didn’t appreciate the caterpillars, but I couldn’t really blame him. Not everyone likes a tray of devouring insects in the living room.

“I think I’ll go eat something at home,” Robby said.

“Well, why don’t you,” I said. “You big snob.”

“Stop calling me that.” But he didn’t leave. He just stretched full length on the sofa, which wasn’t easy because of the various pillows and magazines and remote controls that had been strewn all over it, and he put his arm across his forehead in this way that at first looked stupidly theatrical. But then he said in this seriously miserable voice, “
Cherchez la femme.
”

“
Cherchez la
what?”

“It’s just this French saying. If a guy’s behaving weirdly, look for the woman.” His face was whiter than usual, and sadder.

“Are you hiding a
le
woman somewhere?”

“No,” he said. “It’s my
le
dad. He has a
le femme
.”

It was a joking way to put it, but the air in the room had changed. It was all prickly and electrified now, like a wire. I didn’t pick up the tuna or finish opening the box of crackers.

“How do you know?”

“Because I
caught
him,” Robby said.

H
e said it happened two weeks ago when his mother was on her way to Paris and his dad was supposedly gunning his motorbike on trails. Robby wasn’t supposed to be home, either, because the Redlands Symphony orchestra was performing in the auditorium at the high school, and Robby, as a band member, was an usher who was going to audition afterward for a spot at the music camp the conductor was involved with somehow. Except that Robby got all the way to the high school, which is a twenty-minute drive from the ranch, and discovered he forgot the reeds for his clarinet. The band teacher is this cranky bearded man named Mr. Van der Does who is always telling Robby that what stands between Robby and success is a lack of commitment, because Mr. Van der Does, like my father, believes that disorganization is a sign that you don’t really care.

So Robby drove back to the ranch, trying to hurry so that at least he could hear the second half of the concert and do his audition, and he left the Ford Packrat parked on the dirt road that led from the house to the grove because he thought that’d be quicker. When he ran up the hill to the house, he noticed a strange car, but he didn’t give it a lot of thought—there was no extra parking for the guesthouse, so if somebody came to visit me or my mom, they parked in Robby’s driveway. So Robby opened the front door and went up the stairs to his room for the reeds, and then he looked in the mirror and saw that he’d sweated completely through his only white shirt. His room was next to his father and mother’s bedroom, and he decided to borrow one of his dad’s shirts, but the bedroom door was shut.

“It’s never shut during the day,” Robby said. “They don’t ever close it except at night when they go to bed.”

It struck him as odd, so Robby stood there for a second. He knocked. He heard noises—not voices, but shifting noises. His dad opened the door just a crack and came out, closing the door behind him. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked.

“I forgot my reeds,” Robby said. “I thought you went out on a ride.”

“I got a flat tire,” his father said.

“Can I borrow a white shirt? I got this one all sweaty, and I’m really late.”

Robby waited for Hoyt to open the bedroom door and walk into the room with Robby, get the shirt out of the closet, and hand it to him. But his father didn’t open the door. He stood in
front of it like a bad actor in a high school play. “Sure,” Hoyt said. But he still didn’t open the door.

“I’m really late,” Robby repeated.

“I think my dress shirts are downstairs,” Hoyt said. “In the laundry room.”

Robby turned and went downstairs, and his dad followed him, but there weren’t any shirts. “I thought your mother said she was going to iron them,” his dad said.

“Never mind,” Robby said. He walked out the front door, and he saw the strange car again. It was just an anonymous silver-green-gray Toyota, but he noticed the name—Avalon—because of our mock global launches of new cars: the Ford Estrogen, the Dodge Hootenany, the Honda Dust Bunny.

“Whose car is that, anyway?” Robby asked his dad. Hanging from the mirror was a red and white graduation tassel. Fallbrook High colors.

“I don’t know,” Hoyt said. “Maybe somebody visiting Pearl or Sharon.”

Some people can lie, and some people can’t. My father was a world-class liar, for instance. We never suspected a thing until the day of the Talbots dress. For some reason, though, Robby felt the off-ness of the conversation and looked hard into the Avalon as he walked past. He saw that the number on the tassel meant she’d graduated two years ago. He saw a sticker on the windshield that permitted the driver to park at Cal State San Marcos. He saw a tennis racket in the backseat. He said, “See ya,” and ran down to the truck with the box of reeds in his hand.

“I decided I would just pretend to leave,” he told me. “I would sneak back to the house and hide in the xylosma hedge and watch who got into that car. That’s when I called you, remember?” he asked.

I broke a cracker in half and shook my head. I walked over to the desk calendar where my mother used to write down what days my father would be home and when my after-school art classes were and where she now wrote down appointments with the attorney, the forensic accountant, and the court-mandated psychiatrist. Sunday, April 15, was blank.

“You were at Major Market,” Robby said. “You said your mother was asking Alfredo whether it was true that grocery stores throw away perfectly good produce.”