The Parallel Apartments (6 page)

“If you can't confide in me after fifty-three years,” said Livia, “then I guess you can take a taxicab. I'm sure you have the number memorized.”

Charlotte stood up and pointed at her daughter.

“What exactly do you mean by that?
Livia
?”

Livia took a step back. Her mother stared into Livia's eyes, something she did not often do. Charlotte pointed right at her daughter's nose with a smoldering Belair between her fingers, something else she didn't often do. And she called her Livia, perhaps the rarest of all three rarities. Her mother liked to observe and report on backyard flittings; she liked to host short, low-census parties; she liked to rationalize, to pooh-pooh, to change subjects. But she had never liked to confront, argue, curse, duel. And she did not often exhibit a flush in her neck and cheeks that looked, the more Livia thought about it, flagrantly sexual, and a little bit murderous. In fact, it may have been the first time she'd ever seen her mother like this, since at least the late 1980s, when Lou, the only person Livia had ever heard her mother declare romantic love for, was last in evidence. There's no way her mother was in love with anyone, though. Livia would know.

At the thought of Lou, Livia shuddered, a flag surprised by a sudden, wild gust.

“What?” said Charlotte, evidently noticing the shudder.

“What?” said Livia, pretending not to have shuddered.

“Your flip tone is not appreciated, and as for your taxicab remark, I do not know what you are talking about.”

Charlotte sat back down. It seemed to Livia that her mother did so slowly, charily, arthritically, yet also with menace, like a bloodthirsty but aging queen. A queen well practiced in—but not perfect at—lying.

A small bird, bluish-black and oily, glided to a perch atop Charlotte's tallest bird feeder, a tin replica of the Château Frontenac that her granddaughter Justine had brought her from Quebec, where Justine had gone in junior high school with her French class. Justine hadn't brought anything back for Livia.

The birdhouse was one of the only things of Justine's that had remained on the property since Justine had threatened suicide and then run away to New York at age seventeen, and it was the object that most sharply reminded Livia of her uncontrollable, unknowable daughter.

There were many times Livia'd wanted to cut the birdhouse down or uproot it or bump it with the mower or pay Duck Baby, their now-and-then handyman, to haul it off, but she never had.

The bird immediately got all of Charlotte's attention.

“Oh,” said Charlotte. “A juvenile grackle.”

The oven timer. The grackle heard it, too, and flew off, a plum-black wash, calling its crisp, electrical gurgle.

“Good
night,
” said Charlotte touching her temple. “My gnomes have scared off Justine's boat-tail.”

The mention of Justine swung in the air between them, a hanged man on a windy day.

“There are one hundred octillion grackles in this neighborhood, Mother. One of them will happen upon the damn Château again very soon.”

Charlotte stubbed out her Belair, dumped the ice water into the sink, got a Tuborg from the refrigerator, refilled the glass with it, and disappeared down the hall. She returned with some Alka-Seltzer in a long glass bottle sealed with a screw-top lid. She opened it and plopped two tablets into her beer. They did not fizz, but rather disintegrated and sank to the bottom as pharmaceutical silt.

“Gas?” said Livia. “One of your symptoms is gas? Why couldn't you just have said, ‘Livie, darling, one of my symptoms is gas.' Instead you conduct a charade. Where did you find those, anyway? They're bound to be expired.
They don't even make glass bottles anymore.”

“Alka-Seltzer does not expire,” Charlotte said casually. “They were in an old suitcase of things I found in the shed.”

Livia was not prescient. She prided herself on having no preternatural gifts. She did not see ghosts or dream of plane crashes or have a feeling she was going to get a full house. She knew astrology and numerology were for paranoiacs and Eastern cultures. She had never awoken from a night's sleep feeling she'd been borrowed from the planet Earth by curious alien beings with probes. She knew that luck was a form of the future and therefore unknowable, even with crystal balls and Aleister Crowley tarot cards. She left such things to Archibold.

But Livia began to feel a foreign stirring. She had caught a whiff of the spoor of a future of… what?
Disorder
was the word that came to mind.
Disintegration. Disease.
Pleasant nouns prefixed with
dis.

“I've asked you not to go into the shed. There are nails and glass shards and explosive solvents in there. And brown recluse spiders. No suitcases.”

“I shall go anywhere on my premises that I damn well care to go.”

“What's gotten into you? Why are you being so fierce?”

“The suitcase was hidden behind piles of old linoleum squares much the same character and color as the linoleum upon which you now dawdle.”

“What…,” said Livia, but she didn't know what the right question was.
Who? When? Why?

“Oh, just some old stuff of Lou's.”

The preternatural stirring she'd felt a moment earlier graduated to a tremble.

“Daddy's stuff?” Livia said, keeping her voice as even as possible. “In the shed?”

“I brought it inside.”

“I didn't know there was anything of his here.”

“Me neither,” said Charlotte. “I just stumbled across it while I was looking for my crème brûlée torch.”

“Goddammit,
Mother, what's happening? Torches, Justine, doctors, Daddy? I command you to sit down and explain every single one of your maddening utterances over the last thirty minutes.”

Livia turned her mother by the shoulders so they faced each other, which was how Livia established communication when she felt that Charlotte, or
anyone, was being unreasonable or balky. Whenever she faced her thus, Livia couldn't help thinking how much it was like looking into a mirror in a room lit with black light—Charlotte was duskier and subtler, but they had the same round faces, long noses, brown-black eyes set far apart. Livia was taller, more voluptuous, and generally larger in all dimensions, but they both walked with the same chaise-longue leisure, they both sat Indian-style no matter the seat, and they both could arch a single eyebrow in a way that made people want to apologize. Charlotte's thick, gray hair was cut shoulder length and tied back, whereas Livia's was long and wavy and the color of vine charcoal. But when they were younger, they had both been cloaked in the same heavy, coffee-black tapestries. Charlotte was only thirteen when she had Livia, and they had been routinely mistaken for sisters—occasionally twins—ever since. Sometimes even now.

They had certainly grown up more as sisters than as mother-daughter. Charlotte's mother, Mère Durant, had been the acting mother to both Charlotte and Livia. Charlotte had never shown any especially motherly tendencies toward Livia; their relationship had nearly always been one of competitive sisterliness.

But, in the late summer of 1969, after Burt, Livia's newlywed husband, died in boot camp after being bitten by a big spider hiding in a bunch of bananas, Charlotte, seemingly overnight, became a protective mother, and Livia, then eighteen, became a daughter needing shelter and maternal attention. The sisterliness vanished. Then, two days after Burt's death, Mère died of a heart attack while bowling. That was the story; the truth may have been that she died of grief—Mère had loved Burt, even though she had pretended otherwise.

Time had diminished and blurred the edges of the memories of 1969, but the mention of Lou and Justine, just now, brought that summer back in sharp resolve.

Charlotte pushed off one tennis shoe and began to massage her big toe.

“I didn't know we had anything of Daddy's here,” said Livia. “You got rid of everything when he left in 1988. I mean everything.”

Her mother's expression, a composition of tiny, shallow dimples around her mouth and hairline, Livia recognized as her nonverbal
Well, I thought I had.
That had been the third time he had broken Charlotte's heart, and the last. Charlotte evacuated the house of his presence, leaving nothing, nothing.

Livia had looked, too. She'd always hoped to come across something, a letter, a comb, a deck of cards, the wool army blanket he used while he and his friend Dot were living in the house in 1988. But she'd never found anything. In fact, all she had was one of his teeth. She kept it in a taped-shut matchbox in her purse. Everything else Charlotte had thrown in the front yard for Duck Baby to haul away. It could be argued that all that was really left was the house itself, where Lou had spent exactly one night, on a divan in 1969, and, nearly two decades later, several months on a cot in the garage. That visit ended when Dot died and Lou and Justine disappeared, all on the same day: April 4, 1988. Neither Lou nor Justine had been heard from since.

Evidence of Justine, on the other hand, was, in spite of Livia's efforts, everywhere on the property. After Justine had written her a horrible letter and threatened suicide and run off to New York, Livia had thrown out everything of hers she could find, but there were still unmovable indexes:
POW!
scratched with a glasscutter into the concrete of the garage floor, poster-tack punctures in closet doors, a collage of Brooke Shields faces pasted to the inside of Charlotte's bedside table drawer that Livia'd come across once while searching for triple-A batteries, pen marks on the doorjamb in the utility room that chronicled Justine's height until age eight and that Livia'd tried to remove with a rotary sander but which creepily reappeared the following day, a yellow spray-paint silhouette of a pogo stick on the shed, the faint chrome glint, noticeable only when sitting in the living room in the wicker chair on late sunny afternoons, of a buffalo nickel Justine had hammered down into a gap in the floorboards when she was nine. And, of course, the Château Frontenac.

“I don't know,” said Charlotte. “He must have hidden it back there. It has since been simply overlooked.”

Charlotte put her Tretorn tennis shoe back on, lit a cigarette, and daintily, consummately Charlotte-like, sipped her beer.

“Is he visiting?” asked Livia as evenly as she was able.

“Not that I am aware of.”

“I assume that's it?”

Livia nodded to an old, typewriter-sized wort-green American Tourister covered in greasy dirt and spiderwebs that she'd just noticed sitting in the corner of the living room by Charlotte's pinochle table.

“That is it.”

“I don't remember ever seeing that before.”

“And yet there you have it.”

“What's in it?”

Charlotte finished her beer without a word.

“You opened a time capsule and the only thing you found of any interest was a tube of expired Alka-Seltzer.”

“A comb. A pair of green platform shoes for a large-footed woman; I imagine they were the property of that friend of Lou's, Dot.”

“That's it?”

“That is it,” said Charlotte, stubbing out her one-third-smoked cigarette.

“Oh, and some old leather books. Two, both the same.”

For the first time in years, maybe even her entire life, Livia thought she might faint. She sat down. She had forgotten about those diaries.

“Have you read—”

“Unlike most doctors,” said Charlotte, standing up, “Dr. Gonzales sees his patients precisely on time. If one is tardy, one must reschedule, even if one has just swallowed a bottle of ant poison. It is now 2:36, and we must detour around Forty-Fifth due to construction. So. Are you or are you not going to take me?”

Dartmouth raced into the room and marked the suitcase with a jet of tinkle.

“Okay. Come on.” Livia stood carefully. “No smoking in my Nissan.”

Charlotte locked the front door on their way out. Livia had lived two doors down from her mother for years but never had she owned her own key. Her mother had never offered and Livia had never asked. This sort of non-exchange was a feature of their relationship (and, in general terms, was a family dynamic—if Mère or Justine were here, they could non-exchange just as expertly), and the longer a non-exchange lasted, the more keen and envenomed it became. The non-nonissue of the key had survived for so long because it was not that important: Livia hardly needed one. Since Charlotte had retired from the bank she never left home. Even before retirement, they had worked roughly the same hours, at the same bank (Livia, collections; Charlotte, teller), so if Livia really did need to go to her mother's during the workday, she just took the elevator down from the collections offices to the lobby and asked her mother for the key.

At the moment, though, Livia had never wished so earnestly for her own key. If she had one, the minute Dr. Gonzales called her mother into the
exam room, Livia would bolt home and rifle the suitcase, subtracting from it anything that might really, really complicate their lives. Most specifically, those diaries. Dot Disfarmer's journals, a brace of masty leather-bound octavos filled with illegibly minuscule cursive. Dot, the woman who'd known Lou better than anyone. Dot, in whom Lou had probably confided all his secrets, including the darkest non-exchange the Durant family had known.