Emily & Einstein (17 page)

I forgot about being a dog. I gave no thought to the elusive old man. No consideration for what the future held. I ate and ate, and when the tabletop was clear, I nosed my head into the box, inch by inch, finishing off the last few morsels.

After I licked the bottom of the box clean, I lifted my head and was startled by the unexpected darkness. I jerked my head to the right, then to the left, but still everything was dark. I yelped, my intellect shoved aside by the sheer staggering force of Einstein’s baser instincts.

I scrambled to my feet on the kitchen tabletop, lost to the unwieldy darkness. I swung my head, unable to see a thing as I tried to remove what I only half understood was the box. I barked and whimpered, dancing over the table, mindless of my hard, curving nails clawing into the wood, certain the damned cartoon leprechaun was attacking me.

The bowl and spoon crashed to the floor, followed by the sugar bowl. The salt and pepper shakers went next as I growled and bucked until finally the box fell free. For reasons I can’t now explain, I felt the need for retribution. I pounced on the box, chewing and ripping the cardboard and thin plastic liner like a diabolical fiend ravenously trying to satiate some hunger. My raw pulse of terror had morphed into something more insidious. I was mindless and craven, but I felt heady with power. Eventually I won, the box decimated, as much of it swallowed as shredded.

I leaped down from the table to the chair, then the floor, skidding in the spilled sugar and broken china. But I didn’t miss a beat. I found my way into the open pantry and consumed whatever I could get my muzzle and paws on. Cupcakes covered in plastic wrap. Homemade cookies in pastry boxes. I fought and chewed and ripped inside the cool darkness.

It was sometime later when I heard the front door open.

“Einstein?” Emily called out. “Jordan?”

By then the battle was over and I was laid out on the kitchen floor, my stomach distended in misery. I could hardly hear much less move, certain I was dying all over again. What had I done?

My half-working senses made out the sound of Emily finding my leash in the gallery.

“Einstein? Where are you?”

Then the sound of her hurrying down the hallway.

I didn’t see her enter the kitchen, but I was vaguely aware of her shoes skidding to a halt when she hit the smears of buttercream icing, melted chocolate chips, and by that point who knew what on the floor. She gasped.

Some measure of relief hit me, the idea that Emily was home, that I wasn’t alone; she would take care of me. But the relief was short lived when I moved an inch and had the sudden sensation that I was going to explode.

I won’t go into detail, but rest assured, everything that went in came out again from both ends of my wiry body.

“Einstein!” Emily squeaked.

I was a mess for hours. Thankfully Emily couldn’t have been more efficient, a regular Florence Nightingale. If I hadn’t been so miserable, I might have felt badly about the whole thing. As it was, me being a dog and all, by midnight when I finally started to recover I barely remembered the incident. Water under the bridge and all that. Emily and Jordan didn’t get over it as easily.

“I told you not to leave the cereal out!”

“I didn’t come here to play servant!”

“I never expected you to be a servant! I asked you to make sure you didn’t leave food out.
You
asked to walk Einstein. And I’m paying you to do that! You never even bothered to ask if you could stay here. You just showed up, unannounced!”

“Oh, I see. Now I need an invitation to stay with my sister when I come to town. I knew I should have stayed with my dad.”

“Then why didn’t you?” Emily snapped.

Hmmm, my always-tactful wife had had it.

“What?” she continued. “Did you forget to arrive with inappropriate gifts? Is that why you stayed away from your dad’s? No anatomically correct male dolls for your eight-year-old sister? Or old editions of
National Geographic
with naked tribeswomen for your thirteen-year-old brother?”

Now this was interesting.

Jordan stiffened. “I’m not fifteen anymore, Emily.”

“No, you’re twenty-two and last I heard you had moved on to telling them to rebel against their parents.”

“I’m just trying to get them to think!”

“Sure, that’s your motive. Whatever the case, even I know parents generally don’t appreciate other people telling their kids how to think.”

“Unless they’re you, in which case it’s fine to tell people how to think, right Em?”

My wife blinked then searched for calm. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Then don’t.”

I could practically hear my wife’s teeth grind. If she was smart she would mention the pretty huge fact that since Jordan’s arrival the girl hadn’t cleaned up after herself, had left food out, had ruined my coffee table. And excuse me, if Jordan hadn’t left the cereal and milk out I never would have gone crazy. There was only room for one person/being/dog to be waited on around here. And that would be me.

“Why didn’t you stay with your dad?” Emily asked, this time with a soft sigh. “Why are you really here?”

In the past if my wife had asked Jordan this, the girl would have gotten huffy and gone on about Emily always thinking the worst of her. Of course, minutes later she generally followed up her complaints with a request for money. I expected this day to be no different. Hadn’t she already said as much? But Jordan was nothing if not full of surprises.

“Well,” she said, her embarrassment gone, an excited smile crossing her face, “if you really want to know, I’m writing a book!”

Emily’s expression went blank. Even I knew Emily hated the myriad friends and strangers who hit her up to publish what invariably turned out to be less than literate accounts of odd personal contretemps disguised as fiction.

Jordan saw it too. “I knew it! I knew you wouldn’t be happy for me!”

“Jordan, of course I’m happy for you, it’s just…”

“It’s just what?”

“Have you written the book yet?”

Scoff. “Not all of it. Do you think I’m that naïve? First, I’m going to get money for it, then write it. I’ll get an advance based on my proposal.”

I noticed Emily’s temple started to throb.

“Good for you, Jordan. Good luck.”

“That’s it? Good luck? You’re an editor. You’re my sister. The least you could do is help me.”

I watched Emily’s temple, fascinated by the way I could sense blood pounding through the veins.

“Fine, write the book and then I’ll tell you what I think.”

“Like I said, Em, I’m not going to write the freaking thing first.”

“It is rare that an unpublished author with no particular credentials gets published without first writing the book, or at least a good portion of it.”

“You’re just saying that so you don’t have to help me. Figures. You never want to help me!”

“That isn’t true.”

“Then prove it. Just listen to what it’s about. How hard is that?”

They stared at each other for a moment before Emily said, “All right. What’s it about?”

Jordan’s ire burned out as quickly as it had ignited, and her excitement rushed back. “It’s about Mom!”

Even I was thrown by this. Emily rarely spoke about her infamous mother.

“What are you talking about, Jordan?”

The younger sister launched into an excited if somewhat erratic spiel about a biography/memoir of the great Lillian Barlow and what it was like to live with her. “Everyone who knows she was my mom wants to know what she was like. I’m calling it
My Mother’s Daughter
. Isn’t that great?”

You’d think Jordan had shot Emily between the eyes.

“I was thinking about it and it occurred to me,” Jordan continued, “that it would be totally awesome if you, as her other daughter, edited it!”

Silence. Then, “I can’t do that,” Emily said, her voice strained.

Watching Jordan from my vantage point as an uninterested, though keen, observer brought home the fact that my sister-in-law was a living roller coaster of emotion. Up, down, zinging every which way.

“You can’t or you won’t?” Jordan fired back.

“It’s a conflict of interest.”

“Only if you want it to be. Just read what I have. It’s not that long.”

Emily shook herself. “No.”

“I knew it! Ever since I was little you always had a book in your hand. You were always reading something. Big books, little books. Long-as-hell books! But you won’t even read my short proposal!”

Emily turned away and Jordan visibly tamped down her anger.

“Aw, Em, don’t be that way. Just read a little bit. It’s not like it’s going to take up tons of your time.”

“I said no.”

Emily left the room. Jordan was wise enough not to follow.

*   *   *

For two of the three days it took my stomach to recover from the unfortunate Lucky Charms episode, Emily and Jordan barely spoke. They came and went, passing carefully in the narrow hallways like ships in the Panama Canal. This would have been fine with me, but while they were ignoring each other it spilled over and they ignored me too.

During this time I became consumed by a new understanding. I had to find a way to fix my own life since clearly the old man was no help. Emily couldn’t do it; she could hardly help herself. Jordan was worthless—not that I would have turned to her anyway. And even if I could figure out how to use the telephone, I doubted a call to my lawyer would produce more than a hang up.

Which left my mother. She might be a harridan of the first order, but she was a harridan who could get things done. Stat. I had no clue what exactly she could do, but it occurred to me that if anyone could solve this whole dog dilemma it was Althea Portman. She was the only person I knew who could make magic happen. Hadn’t she gotten my wealthy father to marry her? Then later, the woman with virtually no art credentials had landed her very own one-woman show at one of the city’s most prestigious art galleries. Wasn’t that a feat worthy of a magician? If I wanted her to make some magic happen for me, I had to find a way to get her to the Dakota and make her realize Einstein was me.

Easier said than done.

But the solution came an hour later when one of the building’s staff members slipped a notice under the front door. My eyes might not have been the best, but they were good enough to make out the big red block letters that spelled out
LATE
. The maintenance fees for my apartment hadn’t been paid since my unfortunate demise.

Maintenance in Manhattan co-ops is a staggering expense. My maintenance at the Dakota was more than most people spent on their mortgage. Not that I ever gave it a thought when I was a man. My accountant took care of all that. So I couldn’t understand why he had let it go now.

I went in search of more information. On the desk in Emily’s room I found a letter from Gruber, Hartwell, and Macon. Through a series of eye squints, head cocks, and a basic understanding of how the Vandermeer Regal Portman world worked, I deduced that now that I, me, Sandy was dead, under the prenuptial agreement the apartment would be turned over to the Portman family estate. No news there.

I continued to snuffle through my wife’s papers using my squint-and-head-cock thing until I figured out that the Portman Family Trust had advised Emily that they would not pay the maintenance on the apartment until she vacated the premises.

Hmmm. This was a dicey move, as far as I saw it. What would stop the Dakota from taking legal action against the estate for not paying?

I had never given much, if any, thought to how much Emily made working as an editor. But standing there I realized that my wife wasn’t the type to let bills go unpaid and would have taken care of the fees if she’d had the money. At the back of my mind, I had a half-formed thought that she had probably spent a fortune saving me, him, Einstein, whatever. But again, I wasn’t big on guilt.

What I was big on was self-preservation and I wondered what would happen if I found a way to pay the past-due bills.

If I could have I would have smiled. I had no doubt that if I foiled my mother’s plan, Althea Portman would storm back over here faster than a cab speeds down Broadway in the middle of the night with no traffic. Then I would get my chance to prove my identity to my mother.

The only thing I had to do was determine how to pay the maintenance and figure out what would convince my mother that I was her son.

emily

I know my sister Emily loves me. But I also know that she believes she was the good one, the one who did everything right while I broke all the rules, disregarding everyone but myself. But life isn’t as black and white as she believes. Sometimes there is more to a person’s need for white picket fences than safety, just as sometimes there is more to a person’s rebellion than the need to lash out against rules.

—
EXCERPT FROM
My Mother’s Daughter

chapter seventeen

Einstein stood in the gallery in that odd way he had of anticipating my arrival. But this time he wasn’t waiting to be taken out or given a treat. His teeth were clamped onto a maintenance fee late notice.

My own mouth fell open. “Where did you get that?”

He shook the notice at me in answer.

“I can’t believe you went through my things!”

He barked, the slip falling to the ground.

I walked over and snatched up the notice. “This is none of your business.”

He growled.

I glared. “So you live here too. I get that. But until you have the ability to cough up this kind of money, keep your mouth shut.”

He glared right back.

Then we both jumped when someone spoke. “Uh hum.”

We whirled around to find Jordan standing in the open doorway, her backpack slung over her shoulder. She glanced from me to Einstein, her face scrunched in disbelief. “I’d say you’re losing it, Em, talking to a dog, and all. But I swear he’s talking back. You two are way too weird for me.”

With a grimace, she headed for her room.

Einstein glared at Jordan. “Brat,” I’m sure he barked at her.