Kids These Days (30 page)

“I'm coming,” I said, but I stayed still.

She knocked some more. “Come on,” she said.

“Yeah,” Delton said. “Open up.”

There was an escape plan on the inside of my door. In case of fire. Somebody'd hand-drawn a long red arrow telling me where to go, but the outline of the building was backwards from the way I'd pictured it, and I couldn't figure out whether the map was actually wanting me to run in the direction of the arrow as shown or if in fact I was supposed to go the opposite way. That, and the map had me in 304. I thought I was in 303. When I opened the door, I checked: 303. I had the wrong map.

“You've been sleeping,” Alice said.

“I was going in and out.”

“Cool hotel,” said Delton. She was wearing gray cutoffs and a tuxedo shirt. It was a huge relief to see her. I didn't know why. “Does it have a pool?”

“You can see it from the room,” I said.

“Does it have a diving board?”

“Come look for yourself.” I stood back from the door. “I have oranges, if you want any.”

“I hate oranges,” she said.

“You do?”

“If you'd grown up here, you'd hate them, too. Is there a soda machine anywhere?”

I said, “By the stairs, I think.”

“Can I borrow a dollar?” I gave her a few ones. “Either of you want anything?” she said.

I said, “How about a bucket of ice?”

She said, “How about a bucket?” I got the bucket from the bathroom, brought it back and handed it to her. “Coming right up,” she said, and walked off toward the stairs. I swung the latch around so the door would close but not shut. Alice came in and sat down, and there we were.

“That was graceful,” I said. “Her leaving us alone.”

“That's how she is.”

“She's taking it well?”

“She's not taking it at all,” Alice said. “She's ignoring it. Plus, she's convinced he'll be back in an hour. She thinks it's not a big deal.”

“You're mad at me,” I said.

“You know, I was trying not to be, but that's not working out so well.”

“This is not my fault,” I said.

“This part is. The me-rescuing-you-from-a-hotel-room is.”

“I don't need rescuing.”

“If all you have is a hundred oranges, you need rescuing.” She folded one leg up under her. She was looking everywhere in the room but at me. “Tell me you're not covering for him right now.”

“I'm not.”

“Are you stalling for him?”

I thought about that. I was, after all, in the Howard Johnson instead of at the police station, turning the car over so they could dust it for fingerprints. “He said he had things to take care of,” I said.

“What things?”

“He was talking about telling the cops about these guys on the commission who're selling illegal gas. He thinks he can trade that for some get-out-of-jail-free deal.”

She said, “You have to be kidding me.”

“I want to be,” I said.

“What else is there?”

“I don't know.”

“Bullshit. How could you not know?”

I wanted to crawl into the bed and sleep. I wanted to stand in the shower and use every one of the little prewrapped soaps, one after the other. “He already had the thing waiting on the runway,” I said. “The parachute. I don't know a hell of a lot more than you do.”

“But why are you
here
? Why didn't you come home?”

I wanted to make an apology out of something, knit it together somehow. I wanted to tell her about sickness and health. “I ended up here,” I said. “This is what happened.”

“Is this about the baby?”

“No,” I said.

She got up from her chair, walked over to the glass doors. “You know what we were doing when you called?”

“What?”

“Watching giraffes give birth. Online. It was some website Delton found.” She slid the door open, stepped outside, leaned over the railing. It felt dangerous. “They're so relaxed,” she said. “They just stand in the grass, and then they start breathing a little more deeply, and then, bang! Baby giraffe. Like it doesn't hurt at all.” She leaned out farther. “Did you park the car behind the Dumpster?”

“Yes.”

“You
hid
it?”

“I guess so.”

“I don't believe this,” she said. She was back inside now. “How could you be doing this?”

“Do you want to see the money?” I said.

“What money?”

“The box of money. The sixty thousand.”

“You were serious? That exists?”

I opened the little drawer in the desk. I'd been keeping the box in there with the Bible, which somehow seemed the right choice when I first walked in the room.

She said, “We have to go see Carolyn. We have to go over there right now.”

“It's not about the baby,” I said. “It's bigger than that.”

“There is no bigger than that,” she said.

I held the box out. “This?” I said. “This isn't?”

She sat down on a bed, leaned forward until her head was between her knees. Her hair nearly touched the floor. “It's all part of the same thing,” she said. “I don't know how you don't see that.”

“I tried to stop him.”

“Like hell you did.”

“That's not fair.”

She sat back up. “This doesn't have anything to do with fair. If this were fair, I wouldn't be here right now. We wouldn't be doing this.”

“I don't not want her,” I said.

Something played through her face I didn't recognize. “That's the best you can do?” she said. “That's what you spent your morning at Howard Johnson coming up with?”

Delton knocked on the door. She had the bucket of ice and two cans of a brand of ginger ale I'd never seen before. She went in the bathroom, came back out with three plastic cups in plastic sleeves. She poured one for each of us. I wondered how long she'd been out there—if she might have been listening behind the door. She said, “Don't worry, you guys. He pulls stuff like this all the time.”

She was wrong. She'd lived with him for fifteen years, and I'd worked for him for six weeks, and still I knew she was wrong. “Are you OK?” I asked her.

She took a long sip of ginger ale. She flashed me a too-big smile. “Are you?” she said.

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“Don't tell her that,” said Alice.

“Tell her,” Delton said. “Tell her everything.”

“What have you told her?” I asked Alice.

“Nothing,” Delton said. “She said you guys got pulled over or something, and then Dad took off.”

“That's about what there is,” I said. “That's the problem.”

And if you did pull the young man aside to have a talk with him, to speak as men speak, what would you say? Nic, she's fifteen. You're nineteen. Brainwise, yes, this still leaves her a good bit out in front of you, but that doesn't matter so much as you being
nineteen
. Finally there's no getting around that. You operate in an entirely different era. So come up with a good way to let her down easy, and then go to Dollar Night somewhere on your fake ID and find a nice girl your own age who will take you back to her dorm room and make you listen to her albums, who will take pity on you, who will invite you into her single bed. Do not be dating a fifteen-year-old child who, as soon as she wises up or ages six months, whichever comes first, will hopefully dump you on your ass for someone sophisticated enough for her. Get out before she realizes what the deal is with that whole Vespa – through – the – streets – of – St. Augustine thing.

And that's of course if she's lucky. If she's unlucky, you either do or don't speak with the boy, and he either ignores you or it makes no difference, and he lands at Dollar Night anyway, and without telling her, because that's what he's been doing all along. Not because he's vicious. Because he's nineteen. Or it's even less his fault: He's at a party one night, a party no parent in her right mind would let a fifteen-year-old go to, and for whatever reason she hasn't lied. She's asked for permission. They've said no. So there's Delton at home, or in her foiled-over room at the condo, and she's got three wishes, each one of them that she not be fifteen anymore. She doesn't yet know that it doesn't ever get any better. And while she's uploading adorable photographs of when Nic took her for that picnic at Fort Matanzas—there they are in sunglasses; there they are laughing, laughing—he's standing across the keg from a girl, a kind of quiet girl, and pretty, probably, because the new girl is always pretty. He finds out she's in Deaf Ed, too, that she has a deaf sister. Nic's stepbrother is deaf, of course, and what that's like is so hard to explain to someone who doesn't already know that he usually doesn't even bother. But she knows. So he tells her. And while they talk he's deciding no one has ever really
gotten
him like this before, which is what he explains to Delton over pancakes a couple of mornings later at the IHOP. At least he breaks up with her in person. At least he tells her at all. He's not vicious. But there's our little girl, pouring too much boysenberry syrup over her food, listening to this boy break up with her for someone she surely can't compete with, someone who can drive and vote and go to fucking
college
and even under certain circumstances probably even rent a
car,
and the thing is—the real problem is that her parents will have been right all along,
the whole time,
which more than anything else is what's going to play over her inner airwaves while she fails to fall asleep at night for the next ten weeks. They were right. He was too old. She was too young. They were right all along.

So let her change her name. Let her get a tattoo. Let her pierce what she does or doesn't want to pierce and let her date this boy four years older than she is, so much older that you probably lie about his age at parties so people won't judge you, won't score your parenting. It probably never matters what you tell her, how right you are or were, how clearly you could see this one coming the very minute it walked through the door. She was always going to do it. She is always going to do it all, and it doesn't make any difference: That's still your kid in there, hobbled by the world, completely by herself, and you cannot save her from any of it, and you never could.

The three of us stood on the doorstep, looking somber. Delton rang the bell and Carolyn opened the door, and we knew we'd screwed it up right away: She thought he was dead. She started saying no, no, and her legs went out from under her, and she caught herself on the wall, slid down to the floor. Alice went right at her, telling her it was OK, that
he
was OK, which was only true so far as we knew, but that was the only thing anybody could have said. Alice held her until she calmed down, caught her breath, and in that little space Alice was able to explain that he hadn't died, that he was only a fugitive, that everything would somehow be alright. The twins showed up in the hallway wanting to know what was going on. Delton took them away. Carolyn wiped her face with her sleeve. The little rug they had on the floor was all piled up underneath her. She pushed her hair out of her face. It was the same move I'd seen Alice make a thousand times. I was still standing in the door. I hadn't moved. I could smell the newness of the house. “A fugitive from what?” Carolyn wanted to know.

Alice wanted to call the police, wanted to tell them he was incapacitated, wanted to declare him a missing person. It was Carolyn who wouldn't do it. “He's not missing,” she said. “He's an asshole.”

I assumed we wouldn't have any need to call the police. I stood in the front of the house, in the big bay window, waiting for six or eight squad cars and a SWAT van to pull into Pelican Pines, roll down the empty road to the house. I had an idea about opening the door, putting my hands up. I had a speech that addressed my innocence. I could deliver it to the SWAT team and to Alice at the same time. The basic problem: I was trying to make sense of something that couldn't be made sense of. Mid, flying over the trees. Mid, master of the corner hustle. Mid, leaving Delton at Nic's house, and then leaving her with us, and the growing possibility that both of those moves had been the right ones.

Delton called Nic. The twins went out to the backyard to try kicking things off a stepladder. Maggie decided she wanted to swim. It took twenty minutes to get her suited and floatied and buoyed, by which time she no longer cared about swimming, but Carolyn sent her out there anyway, enlisted us to help watch her. The grass around the pool almost glowed green. The sky was more white than blue. It was hard not to think Mid was about to land in the backyard. Carolyn wanted to know if anybody wanted Bloody Marys. I said sure, what the hell. Alice said it hardly seemed like the time, and Carolyn ignored her. She made a pitcher of V8 and hot sauce and lemon juice, and she set out a bottle of vodka and some tall glasses. Delton came through and wanted one. Carolyn said no problem, but no booze. Delton poured herself a glass, and then she stared Carolyn down, very carefully topped her drink with an ounce or so of vodka.

“Olivia,” Alice said.

“Look,” Delton said. “Delton has two mommies.” It wasn't mean the way she said it, but it still hung in the air wrong. She looked a little sorry, and then she disappeared off into the house.

Carolyn watched her go. “I quit,” she said.

“You don't,” Alice said.

Carolyn poured a drink for herself. “You don't think I'm doing it right,” she said.

Alice said, “I didn't say anything like that.”

“An hour ago I thought he was dead, OK? Give me a few minutes, and I'll call the police. Give me half an hour of peace and we can call anybody you want.”

“That was Walter's argument,” Alice said. “Back at the hotel.”

“Let's just sit down,” Carolyn said. “Outside. Half an hour. You can set the clock.”

We got ourselves huddled in what shade there was from the table umbrella. Maggie paddled side to side across the shallow end, and the twins worked through an elaborately scored contest having to do with how high up the ladder the thing was that was being kicked, plus how far it went when you kicked it. Beach balls. Plastic flowerpots. There was a lot of subjectivity. Much disagreement. They seemed like kids. I said so.

“They are kids,” Alice said. “They don't seem like it. They are.”

“Be nice to him,” Carolyn said. “He was the last person to see Mid alive.”

“How is that funny?” Alice said.

“It isn't,” Carolyn said.

“That's not funny, either,” said Alice.

Carolyn worked on her drink. She stared off into the yard. She said, “Did he leave you money, too? A ton of cash in a box?”

“Oh, God,” Alice said. “Really?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I found ours this morning,” said Carolyn. “He's never coming back.”

I said, “He's coming back.”

Carolyn said, “How do you know that?”

I felt heavy in my chair. I said, “I just have a feeling.”

“A feeling,” Carolyn said. “You'd at least call, right? You'd have probably called every hour on the hour.”

“Who knows what he would have done?” said Alice.

“He'd have called.”

“Here's what I'd like to know,” Alice said.

Carolyn looked at her. “What's that?”

Alice said, “Did you know how fucked up he was before we moved down?”

Carolyn waited a long time before she answered. “I knew he wasn't right,” she said. “I didn't know this.”

“OK,” Alice said, and it was clear she was spinning a little bit. “That's fair. That's good. But could I ask you another question?”

I said, “Alice, hold on.”

“It's fine,” Carolyn said. “Let her do it.”

“
Let
her do it?” Alice said. “I get to decide what to do.”

I said, “That's not what she meant.”

Alice turned back to Carolyn. “How the fuck could you not know?”

Carolyn set her glass down on the table. “Maybe the same way you ended up pregnant without Walter really wanting to be,” she said. “I just went on ahead with my life.”

“Take it back,” Alice said.

“You take it back. I told you, alright? I told you almost from the moment you got here that he wasn't himself.”

“I thought you meant he needed help,” Alice said. “I thought you meant he might need a therapist. I had no idea you meant he was some kind of criminal mastermind.”

Carolyn said, “I did mean I thought he needed help.”

“He needs something.”

“He's not a criminal mastermind.”

“That's obvious now, isn't it?” said Alice.

“How about you back off a little?” Carolyn said. “Your husband's right here. We know precisely where he is. He's not gone. Mid's
gone
. Do you get that?”

“Wait,” I said. “Please.”

“Don't you fucking lecture me, Leecy,” Carolyn said.

Alice said, “You're the one sitting here doing deck chairs while—” She stopped. I knew she didn't mean this. I at least knew she didn't mean it this way.

“While what?” said Carolyn.

“Nothing.”

“Is it anything I can't figure out? Are you getting ready to point anything out to me that I can't figure out on my own?”

Maggie started splashing water out over the concrete. She looked like she was trying to empty the pool. “I wanted a baby,” Alice said, maybe to Carolyn, maybe to me. “OK? I wanted a child. I knew I was supposed to have a child.”

“And I thought he had things under control,” Carolyn said. “That's why I didn't say anything specific.”

“But why did you think that?”

“Because he always had before.”

Alice said, “Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“Do you know places where he could be?”

“Who are you, the police?”

“I'm your sister,” Alice said. “Why aren't you more worried?”

“I'm worried,” said Carolyn. “I'm plenty worried. But you don't know how it goes with him. You're sort of always worried. It's a little hard to tell the difference between this and anything else.”

“That just can't be true,” Alice said.

“It's been true,” Carolyn said. She leaned back in her chair. “Lately, anyway.”

One of the twins kicked the ladder instead of the flowerpot, and went down in a pile on the lawn. She was holding her foot. What rattled through my mind was that if he didn't come back—if we never saw him again, or if she never let him back in the house, then this was what our life would be. These kids. Carolyn. Alice and me on the sidelines, only partly able to help. “Mom,” the standing twin called, and Carolyn went to tend to her wounded child. She got down on one knee to assess the damage. She convinced Sophie-Jane to stand up, test it out, take a few limping steps. Carolyn told them to stop kicking things off the ladder. They complained. She backtracked, told them at least to be more careful, please, to stop kicking the ladder itself, and they said OK. Delton turned up in the back door. Carolyn saw her. She said, “If you drank that, I'm going to kill you.”

“There's a van,” Delton said.

“What?”

“In front of the house,” she said. “A van. Just sitting there.”

Carolyn got the twins to watch Maggie, and the rest of us went to the front window. Sure enough, there was a van, plain navy blue with tinted windows, parked across the street from the house, and down a sewer inlet or two. Why anybody would bother with secrecy in a neighborhood of a single house was beyond me, but there it was: An unmarked van. “Are they watching us?” Delton asked.

“Probably,” I said.

Alice said, “This is so far out of control.”

“We'll fix it,” I said.

“How?” she said.

“We will,” I said, but I had no idea. I just knew that was what you were supposed to say. You were supposed to say it would get better. You were supposed to believe that it would.

“We'll go get him,” Carolyn said. “We'll go looking for him.”

“I know where we can start,” said Delton.

“Where?” I said.

“Nic's place,” she said. “You can't find it. I got lost twice trying to get there last week—I mean, we got lost trying to find it when we went. When we went before.”

“You're grounded,” Carolyn said. “And your dad found it.”

“He had help. Also, I'm already grounded.”

“You were on restriction. Now you're grounded.”

“You need me to get you there,” she said.

“What makes you think that's where he'd be?”

“It's a great place to hide,” she said. “And doesn't it seem like him?”

Carolyn closed the blinds, and we all stood in the fake-dark of the room. “Fine,” she said. There was some new note in her voice, something worse. “We'll start there. Let's go.”

“I thought I was grounded,” said Delton.

“You are. Just not right now.”

“Excellent,” she said.

“Be quiet,” Carolyn said. “Go get your sisters ready.”

Delton aimed for the backyard. Carolyn looked at her watch. “I didn't even get my half-hour,” she said. Alice reached for her, but she slipped away, went off into the house. Alice picked up Carolyn's drink, wiped the table with her sleeve, and then she turned back around, pushed one slat of the blinds back up. “Still there,” she said. I thought about Mid being out there, checking things off some list, while we sat in his yard and yelled at each other and drank Bloody Marys and tried to make sure his kids didn't find new ways of maiming themselves. I took Alice's elbow, held on. I expected her to try to pull away, too, to shrug me off, but she held still, did not move at all.

We were in Carolyn's SUV, a monster of a thing, and Alice was riding shotgun. I was in the back with the kids. The whole truck smelled like Cheerios and ketchup and karate robes. Delton had her headphones in, and the twins were playing a video game with Maggie. I watched the back of Alice's head, plotted complicated ways to make things up to her—marching bands breaking into formation, spelling out her name.

The van didn't follow us. Carolyn, very much in charge and channeling what I hoped was not yet the ghost of Mid, had everybody put their heads down when we pulled out. I couldn't see how that would have made any serious difference. Still, I kept checking behind us, and we kept being alone. There'd been some talk of not bringing everybody, a conversation about danger and harm's way, but Carolyn shut all that down by saying that wherever we ended up, she was the only one getting out of the car. Alice and I were only there in case of emergency—and we couldn't be there in case of emergency if we were back at the castle watching the kids, so there we all were, the Swiss Family Robinson, marauding and search-partying in leather seats at fifty-five law-abiding miles per hour. Carolyn stopped at stop signs. She signaled to change lanes. A state trooper passed us on the right-hand side and we all waited for the lights, the siren. Nothing.

Once we were on the island and as far south as the second bridge, Delton leaned up between the seats to give directions. Turn there, she said. And there. We left the highway, rode inland. That one, Delton would say, but then change her mind. I was already lost. But she started claiming she recognized landmarks, took us through a few last turns, and finally eased Carolyn onto a sand-and-shell path. We drove a couple hundred yards before the road turned soft. “Put it in four-wheel drive,” I said.

“I don't know how,” said Carolyn.

“Walter?” Alice said.

“I don't know, either,” I said. “I just thought—”

Alice said, “Isn't there a button?”

“I thought so,” Carolyn said, looking at the dash.

Delton reached through, pulled a lever next to the shifter. A red 4 lit up on the stick. “It's that thing,” she said.

Maggie'd fallen asleep a couple miles back, and the twins were keeping quiet, looking out the windows on either side. They were zen. Carolyn let the truck inch itself forward, and even though it groaned through a few of the wetter patches, we seemed to be making it alright. That kid Robbie had been right that night—the road was not good, and I couldn't help feeling like we'd all have been better off to have Robbie or Hurley or somebody along with us. I was hard-pressed to name what expertise we might be bringing to this mission. Alice had been developing a heightened sense of smell, she'd been saying. The books said that was normal. So we had that and maybe not much else.