Perfect Family (24 page)

A lot was coming back to him. Nice things. Sometimes he'd catch her staring at him, and he'd ask if something was the matter, and she'd smile and say,
Oh, nothing.

He'd been at the lake the weekend his mother died. Just him and his sisters. He was still working the nine-to-five at Aetna back then, dating his old girlfriend Virginia, the one he'd met in his senior year at Trinity. He'd been in the water with Isabel. He was teaching her to swim, and what a little pistol she was in the water. Not even three at the time, and he'd been sidestroking alongside her as she dog paddled to the raft, her delighted little face just breaking the water, straining with effort but happy as ever. It would have been just about then that, alone in her room, his mother had died.

The ganglia at the base of his mother's brain were malformed, a rare and silent condition she'd apparently had since birth, undetected. The ganglia ruptured while she was drying her hair, sitting on the edge of the tub and leaning over so her hair hung almost to the floor. William had seen her do it many times, her hair like liquid silver, swirling under the hot air of the blow dryer.

They should have sold the Steele Road house. The day it happened, they should have put it on the market, taken whatever they got for it, and cleared out. But old Jasper said that was out of the question. You didn't run from pain. Oh no? Then what did Jasper call running off in the middle of the night with his mother and him? If they'd sold the house, Pony would still be alive today.

He had a brother. Patrick Anholt. He should have called Ruth
right away. She could have Googled him. He didn't need Mim to find him. He was hungry again, and cold. He should have saved the last of that burrito. He'd go into town and find a place to eat. He'd call Ruth from one of the pay phones in the parking lot in front of the Merc. He'd ask her to Google Patrick Anholt in case there was something. He'd ask her to look him up in the White Pages. But darkness fell quickly under a sky like that, and he swam back across the river and scrambled up the bank to the path. He hadn't brought a flashlight and had to feel his way through the underbrush along the path, back to the spot where he thought he'd pitched his tent. Normally, in a strange place, he would have made mental notes about the path, but he hadn't done that today. It had never even occurred to him to do it because he hadn't expected to be gone any time at all, and now he'd spent a couple of hours. He finally found his campsite. The night was so dark he had to make sure he was in the right place by feeling for the smooth-knobbed hiking stick he'd left propped up against the front flap. He'd lost interest in going into town, in getting dressed at all. He put off his hunger and crawled into his sleeping bag instead. He was exhausted from the trip, from the day. He had purposely not put on the fly, so he could lie on his back looking straight up at the sky, which was dense with stars, millions of layers thick and millions of miles away. It helped to make him feel the proportion of things, the enormity of the sky and the insignificance of everything on earth, and did it matter where one person had come from at all?

He woke to the shouts of the swimmers again. He crawled from his tent, wrapped a towel around himself, and went down the path. The swimmers were hopping out of their clothes on the shore. One of them told him to come on in, and William waded into the river with them. They were older than he'd thought at first, in their fifties and sixties. Seventies, even. They were doing something Jasper Carteret would never do. Having fun.

After they left, he swam some more, then wrapped the towel around himself and headed back to his tent, paying attention to the
path and to the turns it took. When he came upon his campsite, he saw that a man was squatting a few feet from his tent, his elbows resting on his knees, a Padres cap shading his eyes. William stopped walking. The man made no move to stand. He stayed beside the tent as though it were William and not he who was the intruder. William recognized a familiar grin from under the brim of his baseball cap. The man reached up to the bill of his cap and cocked it back to reveal his face.

William was looking into the eyes of Keith Brink.

William did a double take at Keith's familiar black shirt, his black Levi's, his bola. What went through his mind first, at the speed of light, was that Jasper had died and Keith was the messenger. But he killed that thought fast, because no one knew where William was. Ruth knew he was in Stanley, but not about his campsite by the river. Only Ed knew that. And Mim.

“You were looking for me?” Keith bounced on his haunches, grinning.

It was all some big practical joke. William looked wildly around, half expecting his family to come out shouting.

“I'm Patrick Anholt.”

William might as well have been in a total whiteout for the sense he could make of where he was and what was happening. The disbelief. The belief. He could not connect what he saw with what was being said, with what he knew. Patrick Anholt. Mim had said, “His name is Patrick.”

“I'm your brother.”

“You're Keith Brink.”

“Right, and I'm the brother.”

Don't open your mouth
, William told himself; it was the only strategy he knew. Call it lockdown. Call it anything. The point was to give himself time to get his head around any of it.
Do what's real first.
He'd left his clothes in the tent, and he went inside to get them; he was on autopilot. To get dressed, he went around the back, where he didn't have to look at Keith Brink. His mind raced. He had to concentrate on putting on his shirt, doing everything slowly, not saying a thing, stepping into his pants, pulling on his socks and a sweatshirt.

“You can call me Keith if it would be easier,” Keith yelled to him.

William came back to the front of the tent, shook out his towel, and laid it across the bush to dry. He brushed his teeth using the water in his Nalgene bottle.
Not calling you anything,
he thought. He spat into the grass. Everything in him, every synapse, firing in an attempt to understand. Failing. A week ago William was Jasper Carteret's son. Now he was nobody. Now Keith Brink was his brother.

“You came looking for
me,
man,” Keith said with the petulance of a whining kid, as though what this was about was who had come looking for whom. “You came to my house. You talked to Mim.”

William screwed the lid back on his water bottle and replaced it inside the flap to his tent. He felt the red strike of anger and pushed it away. He told himself to count to ten. And then count again. He took a few steps toward Keith for a better look. He found in Keith's face the same slight underbite. The same angular chin. Why hadn't he seen that before? He stepped away, held open his hands.

“I wanted to know my mother's people. Is that so wrong?” Keith said.

His mother,
William thought.
His mother was my mother.
“Are you for real? There are better ways to do that than lying your way in.”

“Bad timing, man. What can I say? I got to Hartford right around the time Pony died.”

“But you said you knew her. You spoke at her funeral.” He was standing over Keith now, looking down.

Keith evaded William's eyes. He poked in the ground with his finger. He looked up. “I always thought you didn't come looking for us because you didn't give a shit. Why would you come looking for people like us when you had the good life?”

“Why use a different name?” William asked. “Why lie about everything?”

“I never meant to, I swear. It just happened. Keith Brink is the name of a kid I knew in Little League. I always liked the name. Brink. You know, brinksmanship and all that. Getting to the edge. Keeping your nerve. You can understand that.”

“Don't tell me what I can understand.”

“You're my brother. That counts for something.”

“Sure as hell counts for Mira.”

“We can go up to the Merc right now and call her long-distance,” Keith said. “Ask her yourself. I never touched her.”

“Why did you lie about it all?” William threw his head back and looked up at the sky. The big sky. The everywhere sky.

“Look. You're not going to take a swing at me, are you?”

William pulled a folding chair from in front of the tent and dropped it a distance from Keith Brink. He sat down. “Start talking.”

“You have another chair?”

“No,” William said.

“Okay, okay.”

While Keith settled himself against a tree, William took the guy's measure. They had the same body type, but Keith was heavier. Running to fat, from the tug at his shirt. Not muscle. So he'd be slower in a fight. William had the agility.

“I was six when I found out,” Keith said. “It was January, cold as hell. My dad was shoveling the walk up to the house. I had a snow fort down at the street that I made from what they plowed up, six, eight feet of the stuff. I wasn't supposed to do that, so I hid while my dad was out there. He didn't know I was in it. He kept saying,
‘Livvy.' I saw him dig in, pitch the snow, and say it again. ‘Oh, Livvy.'”

“He called her Livvy?” William said, remembering the photograph and
Livvy 1968
written on the back.

“I made the mistake of asking Mim what ‘Livvy' meant. Big mistake. When Mim found out my dad was saying her name, she said, ‘Livvy is the name of that whore of a mother of yours.' From then on, whenever Mim got pissed off, which was often, and she wanted to let my dad or me have it, it was all about that. Always about Olivia. Mim said Olivia had run off, taken her dying baby, and left me behind. That dying baby would have been you, I guess. Mim said Olivia was a gold digger and ran off with a rich guy from back east. But I always had the memory of my dad out there, mowing the lawn and saying her name. And he wasn't saying it out of hatred, I knew that, and I thought Olivia couldn't be that bad, right? Although he never talked about her. Not ever.

“I started looking through their stuff after that. Their drawers and closets, and there wasn't much. Mim raised me, mostly. My dad cooked in the summers for river trips, and in the winters he took farming jobs in the Sonora. He'd be gone for long periods. She's crazy, Mim is. I'm glad I don't have her blood running in my veins. I'm glad I come from better stock.”

“What did he die of?” William asked. “Your dad.”

“Cancer.”

“Of the what?”

“Prostate. He let it go. Knew he had it and let it go. He wasn't a guy to listen to doctors.”

“Anything else the matter with him?” William asked.

“The usual. He had ulcers. High blood pressure.”

William nodded. “He ever say anything about me?”

“Like I said, he thought you were dead. We all did.”

William could hear the river in the distance. The man had never bothered to find out one way or the other.

“I went east some years back,” Keith said. “I drove by that house
of yours. I couldn't believe it. I parked around the corner and walked by. I walked all around those blocks. Yards like golf courses, kids playing. I stood in front of your house and thought,
Score one for Mim.
She was right about one thing. Olivia hit pay dirt. I lost my nerve. I wanted to ring the doorbell, but I lost my nerve. I called her on the telephone instead, said I wanted to meet her.”

“And?”

“And nothing. She said she didn't know what I was talking about. Which figures. She didn't want to upset the apple cart. I can understand that. I really can. Don't get me wrong. I was disappointed. But I understood where she was coming from. You hear about that all the time. It's not uncommon for birth parents to deny a child's existence.”

“That was it?”

“That was it. I came back here. Bear in mind, I didn't know about you. I believed Mim, that you were dead. I thought I had half brothers and sisters, maybe. But never a real brother.” Keith wiped his lower lip with his thumb. “My dad had a cabin. Well, your dad, too. This will take getting used to, won't it? Our father. Our mother. Anyway, cabin's not much, three sides and a roof, more of a lean-to. Mim doesn't know about it. My dad and I used to go there all the time. Maybe that's something you'd like to see. I think if you saw his cabin, you'd understand a lot more about him.”

“Like?”

“You're a climber, right? Hiker or whatever.”

“So?”

“So you do that because it's where you want to be. Simple. The cabin is where our dad wanted to be. Would have lived in it if he could have.”

“He was a hiker?” William asked.

“Fishing. White-water. I take after him,” Keith said. “Done a fair amount of river swamping myself.”

Some Cub Scouts were pitching a tent twenty feet away. They had pretty foul mouths. A whistle blew somewhere nearby.

“It's a hell of a lot quieter up at the cabin,” Keith said. “Only sound is the great Salmon River. Makes this look like a trickle.”

William wasn't sure. Maybe they could go into town, find a bar, and talk. And yet there was a cabin. Secret, in the mountains. His father's cabin, the place his father loved. The pull was irresistible, Keith or no Keith. “How far is it?” he asked.

 

Keith helped him strike camp. He said they'd need to take both vehicles—William's car and Keith's truck. Keith explained that the cabin was on the Salmon River, and there was no more beautiful place in the world. “It's half yours, you know. Mim won't part with anything of his, but I will. And like I said, she doesn't even know about the cabin.” He was eager as they packed William's gear into the trunk of his car, excited about showing this place to William, about the times he and his old man had gone up there together and how in any other family, that would have included William, and wasn't that something?

William followed Keith out of Stanley and along some secondary roads. The drive took longer than he'd expected; the roads were narrow and pitted. It was also quite a distance. William's thoughts couldn't keep up with the speed of what was happening. Here he was, driving behind his brother in the middle of Idaho, but his thoughts were way behind. Did he buy what Keith had said? Maybe it added up and maybe not. On the one hand, if Keith did just happen to arrive in West Hartford around the time Pony died, William could understand his reluctance to come forward in light of her death. He could also understand Keith's curiosity about the family and why he'd attend the funeral. And he obviously hadn't bought any painting from Pony. That part was all a lie. He'd never even met Pony, if William was to believe him now. So why did he speak at Pony's funeral? Why lie about knowing her in front of everybody that day, especially in front of the family he wanted to know? And why take up with Mira? By now Keith had had a couple of months to come forward, but he hadn't. What did he want?

Ahead, Keith swerved onto a dirt road, and William followed until the road ended at the river. He parked his rental car in some brush, hidden against thieves, and got into the cab of the truck. Keith explained that the best way to get to the cabin was on the river, using his inflatable kayak.

“The best way or the only way?” William asked.

Keith grinned. “Okay, the only way. We could ferry over, but we'd get moved too far downstream, and then we'd have to walk back up, which you can't do. It's too dense. This way we can relax, put in a few miles above the cabin, and take out a mile or so below. Trust me.”

They doubled back along the roads they'd come on for a time and then along a better two-lane road. Keith said there wouldn't be any rapids to speak of, nothing over a category two at this time of year. And even if there were, it was no problem. He could read water easier than he could read a book. William was in good hands. Keith was loud, talking over the roar of the motor, gesturing large with his free hand, mostly about Stanley and the town and what it had been like growing up there, and about the lodgepole pine infestation that was browning out the hills, and he'd slow to point out one area or another where all the evergreens were the color of rust. “It's the topic out here,” he said. “One of these days, it's all going to catch fire, and all those million-dollar homes hidden away up there will go up in smoke.”

He swung off the main road onto a dirt two-track, and they bumped fast down it for a couple of miles. William heard the river before he saw it; he knew about its pitch, that it dropped seven thousand feet from the headwaters to its confluence with the Snake. He got out of the truck and went to the river's edge. The Salmon was like frothing blue steel. And looking downriver, you could almost see its downward cant.

As they readied the kayak, a good-size two-person inflatable, William studied Keith again surreptitiously. Keith, he thought, wasted energy; he used too much effort on small tasks.

“Technically, we're not supposed to be doing this,” Keith said over the roar of the water. “These days everybody needs a permit, which is bullshit, if you ask me. But we'll only be on the water for a couple of miles, and I haven't been caught yet. Those river trips come by five or six a day sometimes. Every one of those guides is ready to turn in somebody for outlawin.'” He grinned at William. “Easterners like you, mostly. Liberals. Kids. Think it's their job to police our river. ‘Take only photographs, leave only footprints.' Give me a break.”

“So your dad worked on the river,” William said.

“He did a lot of stuff. No one thing. Your dad, too, by the way. You've got to get used to saying that.”

They worked smoothly together, loading the kayak, strapping down the gear. They set off, William in front and Keith behind. The water pulled them quickly away from shore, and they shot out into the middle part of the river, where the current was swift. William felt a sudden rush. God, it was spectacular. And fast. They rocketed along, digging in their paddles to keep a straight line. Keith shouted out commands:
Left turn, right turn, left back, right back.
During a period of flat water, William raised his paddle and laid it across the bow of the kayak. He realized with a start that no one knew where he was, and now his rental car was miles downstream, with no indication he was so far upstream from it. No one else knew that Keith Brink was Patrick Anholt.