The Family Fang: A Novel (25 page)

O
ne afternoon, a package appeared in the mailbox, and Buster felt as if every bone in his body had, for a split second, rubberized. He steadied himself, touched the address label, and saw that Annie’s name was on it. Annie. Not Buster, who had spent so much time searching for his parents, but his sister, who seemed content, like an experienced assassin, to wait patiently for the perfect moment to kill her target. He brought the package into the house, into her room, and he tossed it on her bed. “This came for you,” he said. She smiled. “I think we’ve watched every movie in the house,” she said. “I ordered some more.” Buster frowned. “I thought maybe Mom and Dad had sent it to us,” he admitted. Now it was Annie’s turn to frown. “They’re not looking for us,” she told him, “we’re looking for them.”

She opened the box and produced a stack of DVDs. Buster saw
Five Easy Pieces
and
Orpheus,
movies he remembered Annie loving, movies he did not particularly enjoy or, to be honest, understand. In the pile, Buster picked up
The Third Man,
a black-and-white image of Orson Welles on the cover. “I never saw this,” Buster said, “though I know I should have.” Annie brightened, swiped the DVD from his hands, and tapped it on the bed as if she was a conductor about to begin a symphony. “This one,” she said, “holy shit. It’s got a writer as the main character. And there’s an actress in it. And somebody gets killed but maybe he’s not really killed. Maybe he disappeared on purpose.” Buster shook his head. “Did you just ruin the movie for me?”

“If a movie is really amazing,” she said, “you can’t ruin it by giving the plot away. The plot is incidental to everything else.”

“So this movie is the story of our lives?” Buster asked.

“It’s the story of our lives, if our lives were better and more interesting,” Annie replied. “Let’s watch it tonight.”

That evening, the two of them settled on the sofa, Buster’s computer resting on the coffee table, the movie opened and they listened to the score, nothing but a zither, so chaotic and atonal that Buster had the sudden urge to turn off the movie. They watched Joseph Cotten run all around Vienna, looking for a man, Harry Lime, who might or might not be dead. In the movie, there were shadowy, suspicious people at every turn, people who pushed Cotten into stranger and stranger places. Buster wished for shadowy, suspicious people in his own life. When Lime turned up indeed alive, Buster felt an instantaneous and shocking relief, even though he understood that it would have been better for everyone if Harry Lime had really been dead.

Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy’s thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland’s five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock. It was the exact kind of thing that Buster could imagine his own father saying. Annie told Buster that Orson Welles had written that line himself, had added it after the script had been finished, and Buster felt that Orson Welles and his father would have been best buddies if they had ever met.

Once the movie was over, Cotten and the authorities tracking Orson Welles through the sewers beneath the city, Cotten finally shooting Welles dead, Buster turned to his sister. “I know why you picked that movie,” he told her. Annie smiled and said, “It fits our life in a few ways, I guess.” Buster pointed at the screen, which was now blank. “It shows you that you have to stay vigilant to find a missing person, even when people tell you not to, that it’s possible to bring them back from the dead.” Annie shook her head. “I picked it because it shows that after you bring someone back from the dead, you get to kill them yourself.” Annie whistled the song from the movie, doing a terrible job of it, and ejected the disc from the computer. She placed the DVD back in its case and snapped the box shut.

B
uster was the only person in the house, to his knowledge, when the phone rang. Annie was at the grocery store, something that had once been a chore now being an excuse to get out of the house; she also had begun to warm up to the fact that now that she had been back in town long enough, people were beginning to recognize her, to ask for her autograph. Annie admitted that it was not a bad feeling. People were polite, always kind, and none of them seemed to have seen the disaster of a movie that she had recently made. They knew her as a superhero, and that was fine with her. Sometimes the checkout girl gave Annie packs of gum for free. But now the phone was ringing and Buster was alone. He walked over to the phone, let it ring for the fifth time, and answered it, hoping the voice on the other end of the line would be a familiar one.

“Is this A or B?” the voice asked, a voice so old that Buster was unsure of whether it was a man or a woman. Buster knew immediately that it was another gallery. This was the language that they used, A and B Fang, and Buster answered, as Annie had taught him years ago when someone other than their parents tried to call them by their stage names, “This is Buster.”

“I saw the paintings,” the person said. “I thought I’d better give you a call.”

“Who is this?” Buster said. He thought it might be Annie, trying to lighten Buster’s mood. All morning, Buster had been digging even deeper into the novel, having finally given it a name,
The Child Pit
. The twins, now captured, were kept underground, hidden within rooms connected by tunnels built underneath the structure, steel-reinforced doors, the sound of murder-ballads played over the loudspeakers. Micah and Rachel, the twins, had quickly established themselves as fierce fighters, earning the respect of the other kids. Escape was constantly plotted, without any real hope of coming to fruition. Even as he increased the inherent danger among the children, wild and dirty and struggling to keep their anger focused on the adults, not each other, Buster could not help but feel an affection for the pit, the idea that, even if their lives would not escape ruination, they would at least suffer together. And now, light-headed like a swimmer quickly surfacing after minutes underwater, Buster was finding himself overmatched by the insistent, scratchy voice on the phone. “Dad?” he asked, confused. “Mom?”

“What? No, this is Betsy Pringle. My husband and I ran the Anchor Gallery here in San Francisco for many years. We’re a rather experimental gallery space. Now I run the gallery with my son.”

Buster did not remember this gallery, had not sent them any e-mail. This fact, and the randomness of the call, began to steady Buster’s mind, forced him to focus.

“What are you calling about?” Buster asked, drawing this person out, hoping to gain some clarity.

“The paintings. I’m calling about your mother’s paintings, of course. Are you okay? Is Child A there, perhaps? Could I talk to her?”

“She’s not in. I can handle this, however,” Buster replied.

“Good. That’s good to hear. Now, we were, I’m sure you know, the first gallery to ever show a Fang piece. Your father had done a bit of work on his own, but we showcased the first work created jointly by your mother and father. This was before you and A were born. We’d like to take some credit for having discovered them. My husband was always a big supporter of your parents’ work. And now, we’d like to be able to show the final Fang work, to bring things full circle, if you will.”

“The Anchor Gallery?” Buster asked, still trying to make sense of things. “I don’t remember contacting you.”

“Hobart talked to me,” the woman replied. “He’s an old friend, a genius. I guess your sister sent him an e-mail, asking for help, and he got in touch with me, smart man that he is. I’m looking at the paintings right now. Wonderful, wonderful work. I remember your mother had started as a painter, had won all kinds of scholarships based on her more traditional artistic pursuits. So it wasn’t as shocking as you might think to see these paintings. And, I don’t know what your situation is, but you seem eager to showcase your mother’s work, and we happen to have a slot coming up very soon. I think this would be a good thing for everyone involved.”

Buster wished Annie was here. He had no pen or paper. He could not even remember the woman’s name. He kept repeating, in his head, the word
Anchor,
so he would not forget. If this was true, he reminded himself, this would set into motion the thing he had been hoping for, the initial finger-flick that sent the marble rolling down the ramp of the inelegantly crafted Rube Goldberg device.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Buster said. “We just want to find a way to showcase the fact that my mother was a talented artist in her own right, in her own medium.”

“That’s what we want as well,” Mrs. Pringle replied. “To honor her memory.” This made Buster flinch and he thought about clarifying the fact that his parents were simply missing, not dead, not officially dead, but he kept his mouth shut.

“My son wants to talk to you about the details,” she said. “I just wanted to make the offer. I still own the place. I still make the final decisions. And I still think, though I am old and I’m not as connected to the art world as I used to be, that something strange is always better than something beautiful.”

“Something can be both,” Buster reminded her.

“Sometimes,” she admitted, and then she handed the phone over to her son.

W
hen Annie came home from the grocery store, Buster became a tidal wave, the story washing over her with such force that, when Buster finished speaking, he was panting for breath. “This is it, Annie,” he told her. “It’s happening.” Annie smiled, her teeth so perfect and white that it seemed to Buster as though she was in a commercial for a medically impossible formula of toothpaste. “I wish,” she said. “Goddamn, I just wish I could see Caleb’s face when he finds out about these paintings. I would pay any amount of money to see that.” Buster wanted to tell her that their father more than likely knew about the paintings already, but he understood that they were coming at this thing from different angles, and he did not want to spoil her happiness. What did it matter, their motivations, as long as it ended with the Fangs, all four of them, in the same room?

“L
et me come with you,” Suzanne asked Buster once he had told her about the gallery opening in San Francisco, only a few weeks away. The two of them were in her tiny apartment in a government-housing complex, which seemed one busted water main away from being condemned. At all hours, Buster could hear children running up and down the hallways, the walls little more than a sheet of fabric hanging on a line.

“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Buster admitted. He imagined the four Fangs, Annie and Buster and Caleb and Camille, rejoined, angry and relieved and unsure of how to proceed. And then he imagined Suzanne, roller-skating around and around the four of them. Was it that he didn’t want to expose her to the Fangs or was it that he didn’t want to expose the Fangs to her? Was it that he simply needed to be alone when the important thing happened? He had no idea. He tried to think of all the people in his life as chemicals, the uncertainty of mixing them together, the potential for explosions and scarring. However, it seemed the most likely explanation was that he simply liked having Suzanne to himself, away from the possibility of chaos. Whatever the reason, however much he might want her close to him when his parents returned, he could not allow her to come.

“I wouldn’t just tag along,” she said. “I could be useful. You think your parents are going to reappear at the opening, right, make a big spectacle? But Annie thinks they’ll come incognito and then try to disappear again? Either way, they’re calling the shots. But they don’t know me. I could set up a stakeout or something, be watching from a building across the street. We could have walkie-talkies, and I could use binoculars, and when I saw them, I could let you know so you’d be ready. I could be your tactical advantage,” she said, her pupils dilating with the excitement of her imagined spy games. She was, Buster realized, someone his parents would probably love, the way she so quickly adjusted to the weirdness around her.

“I just don’t think it’s a great idea. It’s not how I want you to meet my parents,” he told her, as if there was some version of reality where Buster would bring Suzanne to his parents’ house and they would all have iced tea on the porch and play cards and talk about horse racing. He could not figure out why, having found someone who seemed unfazed by his family history, he believed that she deserved something traditional and boring.

They were in her bed, the TV still playing some kung-fu movie marathon that had been on the entire time they were having sex. The room echoed with the whiplash sounds of kicks being unleashed, the constant, staccato laughter that was dubbed in English and yet sounded so foreign to his ears. Suzanne wasn’t wearing her glasses and it made her eyes seem dim and unfocused. She looked disappointed, and he wondered if she was upset with him. “You met me at a strange time. I’m glad you did, but I think everything will be better after I do this thing for my parents, for Annie and me. There won’t be this, I don’t know, uncertainty hovering over me.”

Suzanne leaned closer to him and tapped him on the forehead with her finger, a sharp thwack of the tip of her finger glancing off his skin. It made him flinch, but not before registering the odd expression on her face, as though she was trying to decide what kind of person he really was. He held as still as possible, not breathing, hoping that she liked what she saw.