Family Reunion (4 page)

“Then I think Dad was wise to marry you,” said Angus. “Because that is a valuable skill.”

Angus opened a roadside stand to sell scarlet and orange zinnias he cut in the back garden. For hours he sat surrounded by iced tea bottles, soup cans and pickle jars filled with water and flowers, holding a pink-striped beach umbrella over himself to keep off the sun. When cars did not stop at the rate he wanted, Angus changed tactics. He threw his umbrella down and rushed out into the road, arms waving frantically.

Of course they braked now. This adorable redheaded son of America probably needed either an ambulance or adoption. (Annette voted for adoption.)

The people in one car (New York plates) thought Angus's
zinnias were a free Welcome to Vermont gift and drove off without paying, telling each other how sweet it was up here in the country.

The people in the next car (New York plates) thought two dollars was an awful lot to ask for half-wilted zinnias and drove off without paying, telling each other what a shame it was that even here in Vermont children would try to rip you off.

Annette spent the day pretending she didn't know what Angus was doing. She had a scrap of yellow-and-blue fabric, which she held up to the kitchen windows and walls to see if she could live with it.

I spent the day being jealous of Angus for having the kind of personality that could get away with anything, and make up anything, and fear nothing.

“Angus!” yelled Annette. “It's getting late. Come on in to help with supper.”

Angus's idea of helping with supper was to put so much lighter fluid on the briquettes that the flames reached the roof. I was not surprised that Annette had stopped serving hamburgers and moved on to safer food items. “We'll have spaghetti and pesto sauce with fresh basil,” she said.

In New York you can get fresh basil any day of the year, twenty-four hours a day, but somehow in New York our hours would be more precious, and we'd just buy it made.

If we lived in Barrington, I thought, we'd have dinner at
Aunt Maggie's a lot, and Uncle Todd would cook on one of those huge outdoor grills, and we'd be assigned to bring the salad, because Aunt Maggie would figure that even an unstable family such as ours could throw lettuce into a bowl. After supper all the cousins would play a long, slow board game like Monopoly, which we cannot play even in Vermont because we get so determined to win that we turn into rabid beasts and Annette quits.

Angus stomped into the kitchen. “How can I get rich selling zinnias?” he shouted. “Dad ruined all the real chances of earning real money. I hate Vermont.” He slammed the door and kicked the table leg. “I don't want spaghetti, either! I want a tuna fish, peanut butter and Fluff sandwich.”

“That's disgusting,” said Annette.

“You're disgusting,” said Angus.

I wondered if the Perfects had conversations like this. I got the spaghetti box out of the pantry. Italian food is so comforting. That little slurp of spaghetti trailing into your mouth, the little flecks of sauce zinging across the table if you are Angus, who is a high-speed slurper—these can always be counted upon.

Angus yelled at Annette for marrying Daddy. Annette yelled at Angus for never cooperating, never trying, never even being human like normal twelve-year-old boys.

I put large handfuls of stiff spaghetti into the boiling water, poking it down with a wooden spoon. I questioned whether twelve-year-old boys were ever human or normal.

Angus yanked the peanut butter off the shelf and began slathering it an inch thick on bread as he told Annette what he thought of her.

“How about a knuckle sandwich?” I said to my brother, forgetting how strong he had gotten. I slugged him and he slugged me back, and then I was afraid for my life. I screamed for Annette to protect me, but of course she didn't feel this was her responsibility. I put the table between myself and Angus, who tried to flip the table and crush me with it. Glasses of Queen Anne's lace hit the floor.

“Stop it!” yelled Annette.

We didn't stop.

“At least don't fall into the boiling water,” she said. The phone rang.

I thought it was Daddy phoning from Canada, where he had gone on business. Each of us wanted to get our version of the fight in first, and we all dove for the phone. Annette slipped on a patch of Kool-Aid powder from when Angus had been trying to have a combination Kool-Aid and zinnia stand. Angus slipped in the lace water. I got the phone. But it was not Daddy.

“Granger Elliott here,” said a man's deep voice. “Annette Fletcher, please.”

Fletcher was Annette's maiden name, and Granger Elliott was her boss before she quit to marry Daddy. He'd been at the wedding. He knew her name was Wollcott now. I glared at the phone, and just to be difficult, I put him on speaker
phone instead of handing the receiver to Annette, who was on the floor recovering.

Nobody was as competent as Annette, Granger Elliott told her, and therefore us, because he thought his conversation was private. Nobody understood the job. Nobody could replace her. Wouldn't she please, please, please come back to him? She could name her price. He needed her.

Angus helped Annette to her feet. Angus righted the table. I picked up the glasses. Angus got a mop. I stirred the spaghetti. Angus used the mop.

At the office, I thought, nobody will demand tuna fish, peanut butter and Fluff sandwiches. Nobody will sell bomb shares. Nobody will row Annette into the middle of the lake just as a thunderstorm is boiling up, and then dive out and swim home, abandoning her, a woman who can't row, hates the water and feels the lake is out to get her. And then she's right.

My hand was bruised from belting Angus. Brett and Carolyn probably never beat on each other. Never even threw their dirty socks at each other. Probably never got the socks dirty to start with.

Angus opened a jar of Ragu tomato sauce, having a low opinion of pesto. It popped when he broke the seal, and he licked the inside of the cap. Angus likes his tomato sauce cold.

Of course Annette would go back to work. We'd have one mother overseas and a stepmother at the office. I'd be home
with Angus after school, fighting over television rights and snacks. Next summer we wouldn't be able to come to Vermont. We'd sell the summer place, because there wouldn't be a grown-up to stay there with us. For a week or two we'd get shipped to Barrington, where everybody would know we were visiting because our actual family didn't have time for us.

I ripped open a bag of potato chips so savagely that it burst and spewed chips all over the damp kitchen. Annette turned her back on the sight and clicked off the speaker phone. Of course we could still hear her end fine. “I'm willing to discuss it,” she told Granger Elliott in the voice of one who is willing to accept a handful of diamonds. “I can drive down to the city tonight, and first thing in the morning we can meet at the office and hammer out the details. We have to be done by noon so that I can drive back here for dinner tomorrow.”

She's not too eager, is she? I thought.

Annette hung up, and when she looked around the kitchen, I didn't think she was looking at us or the mess or the various dinner choices. She was looking for her car keys. “I'll call the Frankels next door,” she said. “They won't mind if you spend the night. Go get your sleeping bags.”

Angus hears only what he wants to hear. “Oh, good,” he said. “We're going to New York. I've always wanted to eat spaghetti in the car. I'll drink it from a glass.”

“You're staying here,” said Annette.

“You can't leave us here!” said Angus.

Annette was already on the phone with the neighbors, who were obviously going along with the plan. “Thanks a million. They'll be there in a minute,” said Annette.

“I'm going with you!” yelled Angus.

“No. I have things to think about. I don't need the two of you bickering in the backseat, demanding to stop at every McDonald's and changing the radio station every ten miles.” She found her purse, checked to be sure she had her ATM cards and credit cards and jingled her car keys. She was traveling light. “Finish your dinner,” she said, although nobody had started yet. “Then get your sleeping bags and go over to the Frankels'.”

Angus threw his zinnia money down. It spattered over the room, one quarter spinning madly in the center of the floor. “I hate you! You're always pushing us around. You won't even let us go to New York and it's our house there, not yours. When I grow up, I'll never come near you. Never!”

Annette shrugged.

Angus turned and ran out of the house. The screened door slammed so hard it bounced two times. Angus's feet pounded for a moment over the porch and steps, and then the sound was swallowed up in the deep grass. Annette put her hands over her eyes and took a deep breath. Then she
looked around at the chaos of the kitchen. Evidence of the food fight was everywhere.

“I'll clean it up,” I told her.

“Where do you think Angus went?” she asked.

“Outside behind a bush, waiting for you to leave so he can drink his spaghetti and fix his tuna peanut butter Fluff sandwich for dessert.”

I know it did not cross Annette's mind that we might want her to stay home with us. We told her daily that we would never miss her.

She drove off into the night.

The house seemed darker. I cleaned slowly. I love how things get clean, how they sparkle and shine. If only I could get my thoughts like that, bleached free of the sadness that was chewing on me right now. Outside, the lake lapped and the wind blew. An insect chorus screamed hoarsely.

There was nothing between me and the night except flimsy screens on open windows. I was desperate for company. “Angus!” I called. “Angus!”

He didn't answer. I tried again later, and he still didn't answer. I offered food, and he didn't answer. Angus was good and mad not to come back for food. I was afraid to close the windows and afraid to turn my back on the door, which I couldn't lock, because Angus had to get back in. I wrapped myself in the plaid football blanket for protection and turned on the TV for company. Lying on the sofa with
my spine pressed into the pillows, I tried not to think about the black gaping holes of the house, where darkness sat looking in at me.

“Shelley! Shelley!” Mrs. Frankel was shaking my shoulder. “Shelley, you and Angus were supposed to come over to our house ages ago. It's late. There isn't a light on in your entire house. How long have you been asleep? And where is Angus?”

We did not find Angus.

“Let's not get frantic,” said Mrs. Frankel, who was frantic. “He's got to be here. Let's stay very, very, very calm.” She skittered around our house, bumping into lights like a moth. She had been wearing a huge T-shirt in place of pajamas, over which she now had her beach robe. Finally she pulled on jeans and a pair of lime green linen summer sandals. She looked peculiar but comforting, the way people do when they have forgotten appearances and conventions. I hung on to my plaid stadium blanket and the Frankels.

Mr. Frankel drove the quarter mile to the village as if
Angus might be sitting on the curb. Our voices pierced the night—“Angus! Angus!”—but the night remained soft and warm and unworried, a facade of dark leaf and silent lake, behind which the blackness of evil crouched.

When he got home without finding Angus, Mr. Frankel put new batteries into his flashlight and walked along the shore, casting the beam over the water, as if expecting to see Angus's sneakers sticking up. He went down the docks, poking his light into rowboats. Neighbors emerged to help. “Angus?” they said, nodding, as if they had been expecting this sooner or later. “Has he run away?”

Running away was not Angus's style.

“Hitchhiking?” they asked.

I could imagine Angus hitchhiking. I could imagine him not caring in the least where he ended up. Or with whom. I could imagine him shrugging about any precaution, skipping anything sensible, laughing off any warning sign.

The police arrived quickly. A little boy vanished after midnight had not only brought the two on duty but also roused dozens of volunteer firemen and rescue workers from their beds, as if they expected the worst. But once I described us, it was clear that my family was the thing that was worst. Twelve-year-old boy, red hair, ninety pounds, ran away from home. Father out of the country, mother lives abroad, stepmother driving in the middle of the night to New York City, abandoned care of children to
neighbors they scarcely know, fourteen-year-old sister left in charge fell asleep.

“Broken family,” said the police, nodding. “New Yorkers.”

I flushed in the darkness of our yard. I felt responsible for the moral character of all New York City.

Mr. Frankel searched for Daddy's Montreal hotel phone number. I had Annette's cell phone number by memory, but I couldn't bear to give it out. She would be halfway there, having escaped our clutches, driving toward the salvation of her old life, and now she would be accused of abandoning her stepchildren.

The untouched spaghetti was congealed and pasty white. The jar of sauce lay on its side, telling all the world we were the sort of people who ate out of cans and whose parents didn't leave phone numbers. The volunteers were sent to search terrifying places. The trunks of neighbors' cars. The town dump. The trash alley behind the village stores.

DeWitt and his father and grandfather DeWitts showed up. They looked not at all alike, the grandfather tall and silvery and trim, the father short and stocky and dark, and my DeWitt just plain wonderful. Annette had been right. He was adorable. “You okay, Shelley?” he asked.

Nobody had worried about me. Angus's situation had taken up all the worry energy. “Kind of,” I said.

He touched my shoulder, just fingertips, just the slightest
suggestion of pressure, but I almost wept to have him there, a true ally. I did not permit myself to cry, though. It would have been unstable.

DeWitt said, “I know this is dumb, Shell; I know it was the very first place you looked. But…you did check the bomb shelter, didn't you?”

The following day was gray and misty. Daddy sat out on the dock talking on the phone with Annette, who seemed reluctant ever to drive back to Vermont and join us.

I had an early breakfast, and then I also had a late breakfast while Angus taped a PBS rerun that featured a rain dance. Then he watched it seventy-five times in a row until he had it memorized.

I e-mailed Joanna, sparing her no detail of the night before.

Joanna answered right away.

Daddy wants Annette back, I thought. And I knew that I wanted Annette back too, but I wasn't ready to say so. Especially to Joanna. I had planned to e-mail Marley and Bev and Kelsey, but I didn't stay online. I went downstairs and joined Angus for a few repetitions of the rain dance.

He was now taping the sound track of his videotape onto a cassette tape for his battery-operated radio. This was not a happy thought. A portable rain dance could quite easily become yet more portable public humiliation. I went down to the dock and sat with Daddy. It was drizzling now, but still hot out, and getting rained on in the heat is kind of fun. “When is Annette coming back?”

“She's about ten miles away, but I think her pace is slowing. She can probably hear the rain dance from where she is.” My father smiled at me. “I was proud of you last night, sweetie. Angus was a bum, but you kept your head.”

“No, I didn't. I fell asleep. It was DeWitt who kept his head.”

“Nice kid,” my father observed.

I had spent four weeks puttering around with DeWitt and hadn't really seen him. But after we found Angus, DeWitt
put his arm around my shoulder and left it there, not a touch, but a weight. “I'm the hero,” he told me contentedly. “I always wanted to be the hero.”

I studied him. Thin cheeks and sharp, aggressive chin, brown eyes beneath heavy brows, a grin that spread his narrow cheeks so that they fit his wide forehead after all. He smelled of coconut from his suntan oil. I usually showered off my oils and lotions before I went to bed, but DeWitt hadn't, and although I had seen him in a bathing suit plenty of times, the thought passed through my mind that he would be wearing less in the shower, and all of a sudden I was out of breath and had to step away.

“He is nice,” I agreed with Dad.

Rain dance music filled the air. Angus had climbed up onto the roof of the boathouse, where he was appealing to the gods of Vermont for water to combat a drought we were not having in the first place. The gods of Vermont must have found this irritating, because during a particularly frenzied period of stomping, Angus went through the roof. “Aaaaaagh!” he screamed. “My leg is broken!”

Daddy and I came running. He had actually gone only partway through the roof. Daddy grabbed the ladder that hangs lengthwise inside the boathouse. DeWitt told me once that it's to save people with in winter when they fall through the ice and you need to distribute your own weight safely on the thin ice from which you will rescue them, so
you slide out on the ladder and pull your drowning victim out of the frigid water. I didn't want to try it.

I was extremely jealous of Angus. All my life I have wanted a cast so I could be on crutches and hobble weakly and have my books carried by other people and be an object of attention and get funny signatures all up and down my plaster. The only consolation was that it was still summer. With any luck, Angus would have the cast off before school started and would thus gain no benefit from having gone through the boathouse roof.

However, once Daddy (on the roof) and I (inside the boathouse on the ladder) had pushed him all the way through, like Winnie-the-Pooh being shoved through Rabbit's hole by Christopher Robin, it turned out that all Angus needed was a Band-Aid.

“It rained, though,” said Angus proudly.

“It was already raining!” hollered Daddy.

Angus felt this was a mere detail, hardly worth notice. We looked up to find Annette standing there, looking at us. “I don't want to know,” she said. It wasn't a voice we'd heard her use before. Angus asked for permission to visit his bomb shelter for a few hours. It was granted. He probably could have gotten permission to live there permanently.

Daddy and Annette went inside the house. You could tell that they had serious things to discuss, and that you did not want to be part of it until you absolutely had to be. With excellent
timing, as if he'd been watching through his binoculars, DeWitt rowed over to rescue me. I clambered into his boat, and he pushed off again. We weren't ten feet from my dock when he said, “Well? Who is Toby?” “Toby?” I said.

“You did ask your father, didn't you?”

DeWitt pulled in the oars and rested them in the bottom of the boat. Now that his hands were free, he put them on my knees. I was wearing baggy shorts in gaudy yellow and orange, and a white T-shirt with alternating rows of tiny green trees and tiny red print saying christmasinvermontchristmasinvermont and so forth. I was smeared with lots of sun-protection lotion, and I had on a new pair of sunglasses with leopard-print frames. I felt mismatched, which was bad, but disguised, which was good.

“Well?” said DeWitt when we had gotten out to the middle of the lake.

“Well what?”

“Does he?”

“Does he what?”

“Does your father have another son?” “Oh. I forgot to ask.”

“How could you forget to ask your own father about the possibility of your own brother existing out there in a family that's not your own?” yelled DeWitt.

“Shhh! Don't yell! Sound carries.”

“Your problem is you don't yell enough, Shelley. You ought to be yelling at Angus and yelling at your father and yelling at Joanna and yelling and yelling and yelling!” DeWitt's hands on my kneecaps tightened, and he shook me, the way you shake people by the shoulders. It made the tiny boat rock, and we both laughed.

“I really did forget,” I said. “I'm sorry you reminded me. What if it's true? Because if it's true, Daddy abandoned that son.”

DeWitt felt that knowing the facts would make it possible to deal with them. In his family, they always made sure to set forth the facts thoroughly and carefully prior to continuing discussions. I didn't admit that my family was neither thorough nor careful. “The facts of my family are hard enough without adding more of them,” I said to DeWitt. “Anyway, if there is a Toby, then my father is a bad person, the kind of father whose black-and-white photograph hangs in post offices. Wanted: For Failure to Pay Child Support.”

“You don't know that he didn't pay,” said DeWitt. “You just know that he didn't have Toby at your house for any well-known holidays. But it does seem to me, speaking of course as just an outsider, that your father has made more than his share of major errors. I think—”

“He has not!” I yelled, thus satisfying at least one of DeWitt's requirements. I jumped up to get rid of DeWitt's
hands on my knees, and DeWitt jumped up to emphasize his point, and New Yorkers that we are, we forgot about being in a very small boat, and we flipped.

It's an effective way to get somebody's hands off your knees. We sank into the icy-cold water—because a northern Vermont lake is not toasty even in July—and came up sputtering and casting blame on each other, especially over my sunglasses, which were now trout property. Then we had to right the boat, which was hard, and get our two bodies back in, which was the most embarrassing exhibition of bad coordination in Vermont that year, and then bail it out and also rescue the oars.

“I guess that's what it is to be unstable,” said DeWitt, grinning. Lake water ran off his hair, got caught in his thick, wide eyebrows and became little brooks going down the sides of his cheeks. He looked different with his hair plastered down. Older and more interesting.

“I am not unstable,” I said sharply. I took the oars myself to ensure that we would row to my dock and not to his.

DeWitt leaned back dramatically, locking his hands behind his head to make himself a pillow. He stared up at the sky as if he were a young intellectual at an English university, punting down the river. I was very proud of my rowing. I also kind of liked the way my wet T-shirt fit. We reached our dock, and I handed him the oars and stepped out onto the splintery gray wood.