The Cake House (12 page)

When I ran out of film, Alex took the used film, developed it, and bought me more. I had been taking pictures anyway, clicking through shot after shot—without film I could take as many pictures as I wanted, over and over again, wondering how they would have turned out.

“Where did you get this?” I asked. I had planned on asking my mother if we could go buy more, but he beat me to it.

“Just take it. If you need more, tell me,” he said, holding the camera-store bag.

I examined each photograph in the stack Alex returned to me, eager and curious to see what my camera and I had captured on film, but in every picture of my mother, she was wrapped in a shroud of smoke like ghostly arms, and I was afraid to look further.

A NEW CHILD SERVICES CASEWORKER
came to the house to question us. This caseworker didn’t have a special handbag. She didn’t take my hand or promise to visit on my birthday.

During the interview, Claude and my mother and I sat together on the couch, presenting a unified front. Claude held my mother’s hand, and I sat on her other side, with Alex standing behind. My mother let Claude do all the talking. If the caseworker asked her a direct question, she paused before answering, as if working hard to remember how the words might string together to make a sentence.

When the caseworker questioned me, I had nothing more to say. And although I saw no sign of the ghost, I was too afraid to speak for fear that the caseworker might get run over by a car, or some other horrible thing would happen to her.

“What about Mrs. Wilson?” I asked. I had my camera in my hand, wanting to take the caseworker’s picture, but I was too shy to ask. Mrs. Wilson would have understood the need for a photograph. “When will she come and visit? Is she all right?”

But the caseworker didn’t answer. Instead, she recommended
therapy, maybe a family vacation. Her suggestions were met with smiles and nods from Claude before he showed her to the door with assurances that they would address the agency’s concerns right away and that they looked forward to her next visit.

As soon as the caseworker left, my mother sagged with relief.

“You were great,” said Claude, returning. “Everything is going to be okay. We’re nearly out of it now.”

“Are we?” she asked, giving him a piercing look. I thought she had sounded stiff and unwelcoming in front of the caseworker, but the woman hadn’t seemed to care or take notice. Or maybe she had noticed and had written quiet observations on her clipboard to be filed in some office far away and forgotten. Her notes might say:
Stepfather smiles too much—keep an eye on that one. Mother a little slow, resentful. Unhappy? The son doesn’t appear to speak. And the child in question is … fully dressed, at least.

The next day, Claude bought my mother an etching. The artist was some long-dead person with the initials
CEF.
It wasn’t very big. He hung it in the last remaining empty wall space, right over the cherrywood rolltop desk. It depicted a simple scene: a dilapidated wooden stairs, a dirty child sitting in mud, and the child’s mother standing nearby, churning butter.

My mother’s dark eyes were fixed on the lines of the etching, moving from top to bottom and then back up again, taking it in with arms crossed over her stomach and chest, hugging herself.

“It’s an original,” Claude said. “I thought, after everything that’s happened recently, you deserved something special. Do you like it?”

It was like he had bought her a reward for running away from my father, for marrying him.

Studying the etching, she plucked a cigarette from an already-opened pack and lit it, taking a long inhale.

She opened her mouth to speak, to thank Claude, to say how much she loved it, to admire the artistry, the use of light, to say the things she was supposed to say. Instead, she began coughing and couldn’t stop.

The etching was forgotten. When I glanced back at it, the glass reflected my father. I whipped my head around, but he was gone.

My birthday fell a couple of weeks before school started. “I’m older now,” I said to Alex as he fixed bowls of cereal, one for himself, one for me. “Fourteen. An established teenager.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked around a mouthful of cornflakes.

What I wanted to say was that now he had to take me seriously. Now he could tell me things. Now we were alike, and I could be his friend instead of a weird stepsister. But I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like a weird stepsister.

“You’re still a kid,” he said.

“So are you.”

Claude entered the kitchen and saw the two of us sitting at the table. “The birthday girl,” he said with a clap of his hands and a grin. “Ready for your big day? The birthday girl gets anything she wishes.”

“We could go to the mall, I guess,” I said.

Unperturbed by my apparent disinterest, Claude hollered for my mother to hurry up. In less than twenty minutes we were on our way.

The Mercedes purred like a sleek tomcat, ambling around street corners, creaking when it stopped at red lights. Claude drove at a sedate pace with the radio playing Top 40 hits. From the backseat, I could smell his cologne, which reached to all corners of the car and seemed to press me farther against the leather of my seat. It surprised me, how Claude managed to fit himself inside the car.

On the other side of the backseat, Alex retreated behind noise-canceling headphones, tapping the rhythm of the music out on his legs. I inched closer so I could put my hand next to his thigh, pretended to kick him by accident, but he ignored me as much as he ignored the rest of the world.

“Are you excited, Rosie?” asked Claude. He grinned through the rearview mirror. “New school, new friends. It all changes in high school, you know. That’s where you get made. You’ll be lining them up, sweetheart, and knocking them out.”

Claude seemed oblivious to the cartoonish quality of his words. But maybe if we all playacted enough, the lies would disappear by some unnamed magic.

“Sure, can’t wait. The more boys, the better.”

“All right, make fun of me,” said Claude. “But mark my words, you’re going to have a great time in high school. I did.”

His tone changed. My mother turned to look at him, her eyes hidden behind a new pair of diamond-studded sunglasses. Claude put his hand on her leg, squeezing. She turned back to the passing scenery. Alex kept nodding to his music.

The Mercedes lurched to a stop in the mall parking lot. Waves of heat rose from the black asphalt, radiating upward, making me squint. I was the first one out of the car, followed by Alex, whom Claude quickly pulled aside. He whispered something, and in the next moment Alex mumbled, “Yes, sir,” with a nod. The headphones came off and were left on the backseat.

My mother was the last one out.

Before anyone could react, I grabbed Alex and started marching toward the mall entrance.

He tugged at my hand. “What’s got into you?”

“It’s my birthday,” I answered. I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed, but he hadn’t let go, so I swung our hands back and forth. “They want me to be happy. I’m trying to be happy.”

“Is it working?”

Behind us, Claude and my mother followed, her sunglasses glinting. Claude had taken her arm in his, like those couples from movies set in previous decades, strolling down a promenade. But they seemed stiff and awkward, and I wondered what my mother was thinking.

“Sometimes,” I said.

We entered the air-conditioned bubble of the mall. Claude took us first to a furniture store and pointed out a new set of bedroom furniture: a canopied bed, a matching dresser and desk. There was also a small sofa and beanbag chairs, bookshelves, and a trunk to hold “memories.” The entire set cost more than four thousand dollars. Each time Claude suggested another piece of furniture—an armoire, a princess chair, a trundle bed for sleepovers I’d probably never have—I sought my mother’s disapproval; these were things I could not accept. But she stood mute.

“What do you say? Do you like what you see?” asked Claude.

“I don’t need any of this,” I said, yet I pressed my hands down onto the duvet. I wanted every pillow, every satiny sheet.

When I turned to Alex, he shrugged as if to say,
Why not? Don’t fight it.

“Tell you what,” said Claude. “I’ll have the store hold it for now. You think about it. If by the end of the day you haven’t changed your mind, then that’s that, okay?” Claude spoke with easy confidence, and although it appeared to be a question, it wasn’t. He turned to speak to the salesman hovering nearby and whispered in his ear, handing the man an envelope. He finished by clapping the man on the back.

My mother pulled me over to one side. “Don’t be stupid. Take it.”

“I can’t.”

Memories of our apartment were plain on her face—the tiny rooms with small windows, the secondhand furniture, my bedroom with the mattress on the floor, and the plans she and my father shared while huddled together on the threadbare sofa. They would often share dreams of their own house, where my mother had a studio for drawing and my father could afford an entertainment center, a luxury car, a pool in the backyard. I would have a room with a bed that wasn’t a mattress on the floor in the corner.

Next came the clothing. In the department store, Claude sought out the expensive labels, the overpriced dresses or designer jeans, all of it splendid, awesome, perfect. All of it the kind of clothes I envied on others.

“You want to look good for that first day,” he said, dangling an outfit in front of my face; I had seen similar clothing
in teen fashion magazines—the jacket and jeans, the pretty blue button-up blouse. It had cap sleeves and little eyelets in the fabric. He nodded toward the dressing room, waiting until I took the clothing and followed the store attendant. My mother came with me into the stall and we stared at each other until I stripped down to my underwear. She helped me into the shirt, held out the jeans. She buttoned buttons.

The clothing fit, but the labels taunted me.
Guess what?
I always wanted to ask when Sofie had worn her one Guess shirt that her grandmother bought at a consignment store. My father could never have afforded it. Two hundred dollars for the jeans alone.

I hadn’t expected it to look so wonderful, for it to feel so right.

My mother fixed my collar, straightening the sleeves. She brushed hair from my face, smoothing the wild loose strands. “He doesn’t have to buy you anything, you know.”

“He thinks he owns you. You and me. Is this why you married him? Because he makes more money than Dad?”

She kept fixing the collar and smoothing down the folds of the blouse over my stomach. My hips flared outward like hers, no longer the straight-as-a-board silhouette of a little girl. Her lips thinned, and she shook her head. “No, it’s not the money.”

“It costs too much,” I said, not meaning the clothing or the furniture. “Being with him; it costs too much.”

“Whatever the cost, it’s already been paid,” she said. “You might as well accept it. This looks good. It’s perfect, actually. I’ve never seen you look better. I’ll go and tell him.”

After a small pause at the door to the stall, she left. I stared at my reflection, trying to pose like one of those girls
in the clothing catalogs—my hand on my hip as a photographer caught me in mid-laugh, always so happy and dressed to have fun. No matter how hard I tried to fake my laugh, I knew none of those girls ever looked like I did, with the jut of stubbornness set around my jaw, the dark glower in my eyes.

The buzz of the fluorescent lights grew stronger, then stopped. Dead silence. Bit by bit, my father’s ghost formed—first the open wound, then the blood. I was careful not to move, afraid that if I leaned back even an inch I would feel his cold flesh. The mirror fogged and blurred, but then he came into sharp focus. The sad blue of his eyes matched the blue of my blouse.

This was the first time he had followed me outside the house. Had he come with us in the Mercedes? Could he follow me anywhere? He trapped me inside the dressing room. Each time I began to feel like I knew what to expect with the ghost, he changed the rules on me.

“Do you remember,” he started, “how your mother hated going to work? She took forever to get out of bed in the mornings. I had to drag her, literally drag her, and she’d complain the whole way, ‘I don’t want to, I don’t want to,’ like a child. Worse than you, but you were always a good little girl. Even when you didn’t want to be. Ready for school exactly when you should be. Anxious to be on time. ‘Come on, Daddy. Come on, Mommy.’ Do you remember?”

My breath came fast and shallow as I tried to swallow, but he didn’t wait for my answer.

“I had to get the shower going for her. I had to make breakfast for all of us, and your lunch. Dahlia couldn’t do any of it because it took her so goddamned long to get the hell out of bed. But I didn’t mind; I didn’t mind.”

I put my hand against the mirror for support.

“She’d get so angry, already late, and then she had to take you to school. Do you remember? We used to fight about it, late at night when you were asleep so you couldn’t hear. Sometimes, though, I knew you heard every word.

“But one day she quit her job because her boss made her cry. Or maybe they fired her—I can’t remember. She came home, yelling at me even though she was the one who lost her job. How did she expect me to pay for everything? Did she care? The rent, the bills, they were all overdue. She started cooking, pulling out a newspaper, looking at want ads. Cooking and circling ads, right on the counter, next to the stove. She left the paper there, got distracted by something else, by you or me. I said to her, I said—”

“You’re gonna kill us all one day.” I spoke at the same time as the ghost, our voices matching harmony. Transported back in time into that kitchen, I tasted the thick, black smoke, and my eyes watered.

“God, you started choking, crying and choking, just a kid, no more than two or three. It felt like hot needles slowly inserting into my eyeballs—”

“Dad,” I said, but whatever he was, he couldn’t hear me.