Perfect Family (23 page)

Boise International Airport was small and hot. Most of the people in the waiting area wore spanking-new microfiber clothing. Khaki zip off pants, fleece in purples and oranges. Several were talking on cell phones, shouting the way people used to shout on long-distance calls. Listening to the conversations while he waited for his bag, William knew they were wrapping up business before heading off on their white-water-rafting trips or their backpacking extravaganzas. The gear sat in heaps around the room. Big duffels, backpacks, life jackets, and camera equipment. He'd done his homework on Stanley. It was a mecca for river running on the Salmon at this time of year. The population was a hundred in the winter, tens of thousands in the summer.

Outside, it was blistering hot. Over a hundred at midday. William picked up his rental car, a compact, loaded his suitcase into the back, and took to the road. He had to jack up the air just to breathe. Once he was in the mountains, he could turn it down, open the windows.

He'd maxed out his credit cards to buy a ticket to Idaho at the
last minute and rent a car in Boise at the height of the season. He didn't care. He'd blow through his 401(k) if he had to. So what? But hell, his father was dead; he'd waited too long already. He wanted to talk to that woman, his father's widow, and go from there.

He hadn't called her back. He wanted to let her think he'd given up, so she wouldn't expect him. He'd ask around town first. With only a hundred people living there full-time, somebody would know where she lived. Then he'd just go over there. Ambush her.

As he drove, the landscape went from city to rural to mountains, with vast pastures of grazing elk. His ancestors had been from Idaho. Maybe they'd driven this road fifty years earlier. His aunts and uncles. Grandparents. Sure they had. It was the only route. Where had they come from? Anholt was German. Or Swedish, depending on what you read.

Larry Anholt.

Big-sky country.

Be careful,
Minerva had said.

 

Stanley was small, and once William got off the main drag, the roads were gravel. Ramshackle houses sat next to fancy cappuccino places, and it seemed to him that everything was made of raw redwood except for roofs, which were slick green metal. In the distance were the Sawtooth Mountains. He'd never even known about them, and they were something else. He'd bring Ruth here. She'd love it.

He pulled into the Stanley Mercantile. The Merc. The parking lot was a mess, with people in cars and trucks crisscrossing to get to the gas pumps, to get water, to get into the store. There were pickups with dogs in the beds. He counted seven or eight in one, plus more in the cab, hanging out the window in pairs, panting from the heat. There were bearded guys with leathery women. A sign at the CITGO said they'd fix a flat for fifteen dollars a pop. Another sign, for a sockeye fish hatchery, featured pictures of lurid red salmon and explained that this was what happened during spawning seasons to males and females alike. William took a postcard down from the rack
and wrote it right there before even paying for it:
I love this place. The sky never quits. I love you.

When he paid at the register for the card, the stamp, and a sandwich for dinner, he asked the clerk where he could camp. “Anywhere you want, so long as you don't get caught,” the kid said. He told William about some places down at the river and gave him directions. William drove the two miles out Route 21, hung a right onto a dirt two-track, and stopped the car in a clearing. He carried his gear down to the river, walked around for a while searching for a good site, and found one at a bend in the river, a distance from the only other tent there. He pitched his tent and changed into trunks. A path cut alongside the river, and he followed it, looking for slower water where he could safely go in. He swam against the current for a time, then let it carry him downstream for a hundred feet or so, and found a rock shelf to sit on, held there by the current. His father had learned to swim in this river. It was a nice feeling to be held in place by cool fresh water on a broiling late afternoon. His father's river.

 

The next morning he woke to the sounds of people. They weren't being careful about how loud they were. At first he wondered where he was and then remembered. He smiled. He opened the tent flap and peered out. The grass and the leaves were covered in a thin frost, and steam rose from the river. He threw on his trunks, crawled out of his tent, and headed toward the voices. At the bend, he stopped short. Seven or eight people were hurriedly taking off their clothes on the bank. One by one they plunged into the icy water, shrieked, and fled to the shore, where they dressed without even drying off.

“They've come every morning all week,” a voice behind him said, startling him half out of his skin. “Ed,” the man said, extending a hand. He was thin and small, with dark blond dreadlocks.

“William,” William said.

The swimmers were white as clams, except for their tanned faces and hands. They were laughing and shouting. After dressing, they ran back to a van idling near William's rental car and sped off.

“I saw you come in yesterday,” Ed said. “I'm camped up the river a bit, but you're welcome to stay where you are.”

“I won't be here long,” William said.

“Hiking?” Ed asked.

“Sure. These are some mountains.”

Ed grinned, showing a mouthful of perfect teeth.

“What about you?” William asked.

“This and that,” Ed said.

“You spend a lot of time here?”

“Born here. Winters, I work down at Ketchum, running a snowcat. Summers, I'm right here.”

“I'm looking for somebody,” William said.

“Who's that?”

“Larry Anholt,” William said.

“He's dead.” Ed studied William's face.

William affected surprise. “I'll look in on the family, then,” he said.

“That would be Mim,” Ed said. “Anholt's wife.”

“Kids?” William asked.

“Couple of girls in Ketchum. A son.”

“What's the son's name?”

Ed shrugged and laughed. “You think I'm the Census Bureau or something? Go ask Mim for yourself. The house is on Ace of Diamonds Street in town. The name is out front.”

 

The house was made of the same redwood as the other houses in town. It was small, with a porch on the front. William slowed when he drove past it the first time, around the block and then around the block again, preparing himself. When he got out of his car and started up the path, the front door opened, and a woman came out onto the front porch. She was heavyset, with short gray hair and a ruddy complexion. She wore plaid shorts, a dark sweatshirt, and she was barefoot.

“You Mrs. Anholt?”

She took a drag from her cigarette and nodded. “That's right,” she said. She tipped her head and blew a flute of smoke straight up.

“I'm William Carteret,” he said, extending his hand.

No sign of recognition crossed her face. “And?” She took his hand in a surprisingly weak grip.

“Larry Anholt was your husband, right?” He'd prepared what he wanted to say, how he'd say it. He wanted to be straightforward, to put her at ease, too. Even down to what he'd learned selling magazines one summer: Always stand on the bottom step so you'll be shorter and less threatening to the lady of the house.

“That's right,” she said.

“I don't want to be a problem.” He hadn't meant to say this, but he was trying to talk to her and take in the house at the same time, and it was the truth.

“What makes you say a thing like that?”

“I just don't intend any trouble.” He was blowing it. He could tell by the way she cocked her head.

“Don't, then.”

“I just recently learned—” he began again, back to script. “A couple of weeks ago, I learned from my aunt that my mother, Olivia Murphy, was married before she married Jasper Carteret, that I'm her son from that marriage. I'd never known that. The name of my biological father was Larry Anholt.” He was breathing hard, watching her face. She was hard to read, squinting at him into the sun and pulling on that cigarette.

“He never married her,” she said in a
so there
tone. He'd pictured sitting down with her, letting her get to know him slowly. But now he had the feeling that she could go inside and slam the door on him at any moment. He had to push on, play all his cards.

“Okay, look. There was a movie, a home movie that my mother kept. She's dead. I didn't tell you that. I was a baby in the movie, and it's possible that Lawrence Anholt had another child who would be a couple of years older than me, and if that's the case, he'd be my half brother. And I'm interested in finding him.”

“Full,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“He'd be your full brother.”

“No. My aunt said—”

“Your mother was his mother, too.” She stubbed out her cigarette in a dish on the rail and looked down at him. She was smirking a little, enjoying this. “You didn't know about that?”

He felt a loathing for her. She was making it up. She was vindictive as hell.

“She kept it a secret, did she?” Mim's voice rose as if she were about to burst into laughter. “Son of a gun—” She made a face, her mouth drawn down like the tragedy mask, ugly as sin. William remembered what Minerva had said about a woman who had come to the house with Larry years earlier. This was the woman. It had to be.

“Do you think I could have a glass of water?” he asked.

She considered the question for a few beats, then motioned to him to follow her inside and led the way through a mudroom with its mess of coats and boots and into a small, cramped living room where someone had tacked dollar bills to the ceiling so they fluttered on the current caused by the opening and shutting door. “Larry did that.” Mim stood looking up at the ceiling and grinning. William could only think about what she'd said. A brother. A full brother. Mim kept talking. “For a rainy day. He left everything to me. It's all in my name in the town hall, and you can go and check on that yourself. I'm the legal heir.”

“I don't want anything,” he said. “I'm just trying to find out about my real father, and now you say I have a brother.”

She ran a glass of water for him at the kitchen sink. “There's no jewelry. No money,” she called to him.

William accepted the water from her. He kept looking around at things, at the details of his father's house. It smelled of cigarette smoke. Years of it. There was a dark purple couch and a couple of wooden chairs. There were river paddles in makeshift racks on the walls. Several pairs of snowshoes hanging from a long peg. A calen
dar with a praying Jesus and then, the more closely he looked, pictures of Jesus here and there. Tiny framed ones and some larger, and a sagging tapestry of the Last Supper.

“Was he Catholic?” William asked.

“That's right,” she said. “We are.”

He checked out the rest of the room. A chain saw hung by its safety bar at the edge of the fireplace. Some books were stacked in the corner. His father had lived here. His brother. He still couldn't believe that. This was exactly what he'd wanted to see—his interest was benign—and yet he had to be careful. All he was to her was a threat. He didn't know how to make him trust her. He didn't know why she should.

“Do you have any pictures?” he asked. “Of my father or—”

“We don't go in for that. His name is Patrick. Your brother.”

Patrick. “He was raised here? You're his stepmother?”

“He was raised here,” she said.

“Where is he?” William asked. When she didn't respond, he took a chance. He reached for his wallet and checked inside. “I can give you a hundred dollars.”

“I heard you people were well off,” she said. “Owned some big company, is what I heard.”

“Not that big,” William said, then felt stupid. Big compared to this.

She took the money and stuck it in the pocket of her shorts. “That man stuck out like a sore thumb. With his car and his clothes.”

“What man?” he said.

“The man Patrick's mother ran off with.”

“And?”

“All this time you thought he was your real father. Hah,” she said.

“Do you know why—”

“Sure I know. She didn't want Patrick, that's why,” Mim said. She was moving toward the front door. Any second she was going to open it and tell him to leave, and he'd have to do it. “She didn't want Patrick.”

“How can I find him?”

“When I see him, I'll tell him you were looking for him.” She had a hand on the knob.

“When will you see him?”

“I'm done talking to you,” she said. “You had your water, now go.”

“But I paid you a hundred dollars,” William said.

“And you got your money's worth,” she said.

“Tell him I'm down at the river camping, It's a half mile out on Route 21, go right down a dirt road.”

“I know where it is.”

 

He bought a burrito and a bottle of lemonade at the Merc. He was starved. He sat on a bench eating, staring at people walking by, and wondering which ones knew Larry Anholt. Patrick. It was easy to spot the year-rounders. He looked for people in their thirties who might have gone to school with Patrick, and he felt again the bottomless sense of being a jerk. He threw the last of the burrito in a bin. The phone in the kiosk was available now, and he hadn't caught up with Denny Bell yet. One thing at a time. Again nobody answered. He tried the lake house. The girls might be there, but no one answered. He tried Ruth last, and she didn't answer either. He left a message: “Can you please call Denny Bell and find out what he wanted? Tell him I'm out of town.”

He drove back down to the river for his gear. Ed was nowhere around, so William went in for another swim. He found the same ledge from the day before and sat, feeling the weight of the water. The current pinned him to the rock. How could his mother have left a child behind? She'd lived for her children. It was the main thing about her.
She's so beautiful,
Ruth had said when she saw the film, and it was true. Beautiful but also slightly inept, not especially good at things. She'd had that very weird way of swimming, stiff as a board and her strokes very shaky. And all those years, watching her children at the water and not really knowing how to swim herself.
She had depended on William.
The girls want to go in
was all she'd have to say, and he'd be there with them, down at the water, supervising, counting heads over and over. He was their guardian when he was eleven, twelve, whatever. His mother never made a direct request. He must have been her other, more capable self. He taught the girls everything they knew about the water, because she couldn't. All because Larry Anholt had once dumped her in the deep end of a pool in the California desert, and she'd been terrified. She had been determined not to pass that terror on to her children.