The Smart One (14 page)

The next day, after I took Kenny to the airport and was still floating around in a postcoital fog, I got a phone call from Clare, who said she and Marc were going out to dinner with another couple on Wednesday night, and wanted to know if Leo and I would join them.

Leo. I’d almost forgotten about him.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not even sure how I feel about him.”

“That’s why you
date
, Bev. To find out if you like someone. Besides, I really need you there. This couple drives me out of my mind.”

“Why? What are they like?”

“I don’t want to scare you off.”

I laughed. “I didn’t realize this was a favor.”

“I might slit my wrists if I have to spend an evening with these people without a buffer. Don’t make me beg.”

I had to smile at that. “Why don’t you just blow them off?”

“I already did like four times. And Jade, the wife, was on a PTA committee with me and her son is friends with Dylan. I can’t avoid her.”

It was hard to think of Leo when my head was so filled with Kenny that I was imagining his reactions to every mundane activity of my day. This was no good. I was too old to be thinking like a lovesick pubescent. Maybe a date with Leo would be a good diversion—something to help me snap out of it.

“Can I wear jeans?” I asked.

Clare tsked. “I’ll take you shopping.”

“This would work,” Teddy Goodwin said, folding his short arms.

He and Joey had surprised me by popping in and walking straight into the living room. They had bad timing. Clare was on her way over to pick me up so we could go to Nordstrom’s together. Apparently, I couldn’t be trusted to select an appropriate outfit on my own.

“What would work?” I said to Teddy.

“We’re looking for a place to rehearse,” Joey explained. “Teddy is putting a band together so we can record his song, but we need someplace to practice. He remembered that the living room here is square—a good shape for acoustics—and wanted to scope it out. So what do you think, Bev?”

“Looks square to me,” I said.

“I meant about letting us rehearse in here.”

“When?”

“I have to see when everyone’s available,” Teddy said.

The phone rang and I picked it up assuming it was Clare. But it was my mother, sounding just a bit hysterical.

“The police are here,” she said. “They want to talk to Sam.”

“Calm down,” I said. “I
told
you they were coming.”

“But he’s not
here
. He’s disappeared.”

“Oh no.”

Joey interrupted, “What is it?”

“Sam Waxman,” I said, my hand over the receiver. “He’s missing and the detectives are there.”

Her face lit up. “Sheldon? Can I talk to him?”

I rolled my eyes at Joey and listened to my mother explain that Sam had gone missing once before, only to be discovered walking along the edge of the highway behind their development. This time, though, he wasn’t there. Kenny had arrived from New York just a short while ago, and was already driving around looking for him.

Mom’s voice changed to a whisper. “The police seem angry. Your father is talking to them by the front door now, promising he’ll call them the second Sam shows up.”

“Maybe you should let the police help search for him.”

“I think they
are
going to search for him, Bev, whether we want them to or not.”

“How’s Renee?”

“She’s in the kitchen, crying. The detectives questioned her for over an hour. They talked to your dad and me too.” She paused. “And Bev?”

“Yes?”

“I hate to ask this, I really do. But…” she stopped.

“But what, Mom?”

She lowered her voice even more. “Do you think he really did it?”

I looked out the window at the Waxmans’ front lawn and pictured Sam standing out there with his hose. He had one of those trigger nozzles and would park himself in the middle of the yard for hours. We called him the human sprinkler. Back then, it didn’t occur to me to wonder what he was thinking as he stood there spraying and spraying, week after week, all summer long. But now, it seemed almost sociopathic. All those hours he could have been playing ball with his son, or helping his nervous wife
around the house, or even involved in a more normal hobby, he just stood there. What was going through his mind?

“It’s just so hard to believe such a thing,” my mother added.

I thought about Stephanie, who Sam probably killed because she peed on his lawn a few times. Would such a man hesitate to kill a woman whose pregnancy could destroy more than a few square inches of sod?

“I don’t know, Mom.”

I waited for her to respond, but she was silent.

“You still there?” I said.

“I’m here, darling, but I’d better go now. I think they need me.”

I told her to take care, and when I got off the phone I noticed that Clare was in the driveway, honking. I’d been too distracted to hear.

“I have to leave,” I said, trying to usher Joey and Teddy outside.

“Do you mind if we stick around for a few minutes to check out the acoustics?” Joey asked. “I promise to lock up on the way out.”

“Knock yourself out,” I said, and gave her a spare key, as she had lost hers eons ago. “Just give me some warning before you decide to pop in and rehearse, okay?”

“Of course,” Teddy said. “Of course we’ll give you warning.”

Apparently, only a few hours after he had gone missing, Sam Waxman turned up in a hospital, confused but not hurt or injured. According to what my mother told me, someone had found him wading in a canal, tossing pieces of bread to nonexistent ducks. He wasn’t able to tell anyone his name, so he was admitted to the hospital as a John Doe. It was local police who had called Renee Waxman to tell her they had located her husband in the Boca Raton Community Hospital.

On hearing this news, a part of me wondered if he was being cagey, planting seeds for an insanity defense like that mobster, Vinnie “the Chin” Gigante. But was Sam lucid enough to pretend to be crazy? It was too paradoxical for me to figure out on my own, especially as I hadn’t seen him in years and didn’t have a real sense of how far gone he was.

I wanted to call Kenny to talk to him about it, but hesitated. The thought of hearing his voice again made my capillaries dilate and spill over with whatever hormone it is that makes teenagers so obnoxiously obsessive about their love lives. The rational side of me was at war with this force, trying to combat it with arguments of how self-destructive it was to be feeling this way. But it was a losing battle. The force was using its secret weapon of cloaking itself behind semi-rational ideas, like the fact that I needed to talk to Kenny to find out what was really going on. And that maybe, just maybe, he actually needed me.

“I was just going to call you,” he said, instead of hello.

“I heard they found your father. Is he okay?”

“He seems fine—physically, at least. But they want to keep him a few days to run tests.”

I kicked my shoes off and sat down on the couch. It still smelled like Kenny and me. “And mentally?”

He sighed. “Hard to tell. One minute he’s fine, the next he’s Uncle June.”

I recognized the Sopranos reference but didn’t laugh. Kenny just sounded too serious. “You think he’s playing up the dementia?”

“I’ll tell you this much. When the police asked for a sample of his DNA, he had the sense to refuse.”

I grabbed a throw pillow and held it against myself. “Can he do that? Refuse?”

“He can if they don’t have a warrant for it. But it’s a futile gesture. They’ll be back with one in a few days.”

It didn’t surprise me to hear that the police wanted a sample of Sam’s DNA so they could determine if the baby was his. I imagined them hauling him off in handcuffs as soon as the results were in.

“I’m sorry you have to deal with all this,” I said.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m more worried about my mom. She vacillates between hysteria and catatonia. And I’m worried about your mom, too.”

I sat up straighter. “Why?”

“She got dizzy today. Your dad took her pulse and said it was probably just low blood pressure, but he wants her to take it easy.”

Great. Something else to be anxious about. “She left me a message about your dad, but she didn’t say anything about that.”

“She probably didn’t want to worry you. I’m sure she’s fine. And your father is keeping a close eye on her.”

“I feel so useless here. Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I can think of a couple of things, but they involve your various and luscious body parts.”

“Stop,” I said, laughing.

“You don’t mean that.”

“Stop means stop,” I said anemically.

“In your case, it usually means ‘that feels so good I can barely take it.’” There was a moment’s pause. “Are you alone?”

“Why?”

“Tell me what you’re wearing.”

I hugged the pillow tighter. “Is this the conversation we’re going to have?”

“Sure,” he said. “If you’re game.”

“I should probably go.”

“Wait,” he said. “Just wait. And you don’t even have to talk. Just listen to my voice.”

The next day I went to Clare’s to watch her children, and I came prepared with an art project that I hoped would get Dylan to give me some clues as to what was going on with him. Before the children got home, though, I went upstairs to say hello to Leo, who was on a ladder installing a skylight in the bathroom ceiling.

“Hey,” I said, looking up. He looked sweaty, dirty, and, I have to admit, adorable.

Leo looked down and smiled. “Hi,” he said, and went back to adjusting the window. I watched the clouds move past his head. Then I looked at his butt, which was just above eye level. Cute as it was, I just wasn’t interested. After the fireworks display with Kenny, nothing else could light my candle. I wondered if it was altogether fair to go on the date with him that Clare was pushing me into. I knew she needed me there to run interference with this Jade person, but I didn’t want to lead Leo on. He was really such a sweetheart. Maybe I could find a way to back out of the whole thing. Clare would understand, wouldn’t she?

“Clare tells me we’re going out Saturday,” Leo said.

So much for backing out. “I didn’t know she’d already told you.”

He climbed down from the ladder and wiped his hands on his pants. “Her friend Jade sounds like a piece of work.”

“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want,” I said.

“Naw, it’s okay. I don’t want to leave Clare in the lurch. Besides, maybe it’ll be a trip. We can make fun of Jade after we leave.”

I smiled and we stood there awkwardly for a moment. He seemed to be getting ready to kiss when, blessedly, the camp bus honked. I said good-bye and ran downstairs to meet the kids.

It was a blazingly hot day, and even Sophie seemed wilted when she got off the bus. I ushered both kids into the cool house, found a bottle of organic lemonade in the refrigerator, and poured them each a tall glass.

“Listen,” I said as they drank, “I need your help with something. I got this idea for an art project that I want to do with my class when I’m a teacher, but I’m not sure if it’s going to work okay. Would you guys be my guinea pigs and try it out? I’d really appreciate it.”

“Sure, Aunt Bev!” Sophie said.

Dylan squinted at me. “What is it?”

When they finished their lemonade, I cleaned and dried the table, and then I handed each of them a sheet of special rainbow-striped paper I found in a teaching supplies store. Though I had been shopping specifically for something to help tap into Dylan’s troubles, I couldn’t resist buying a large enough supply to actually use in a classroom. A few packages of paper, I reasoned, wouldn’t be that hard to take with me to Las Vegas. Of course, I didn’t stop there. I wound up buying a supply of the funny-face pencils that were the current grade school craze, some reward stickers I hadn’t seen before, a pack of die-cut bookmarks that said, “I am a book worm!” and a Nevada poster that listed every salient fact, such as major industries (tourism, mining, hydroelectric power), population
(2,495,529) and motto (“All for our country”), as well as some nonsalient information, like the state flower (sagebrush!) and the state fossil (ichthyosaur). This, of course, was as much for my own edification as my students’.

I took a sheet of rainbow paper for myself, and demonstrated that I wanted Dylan and Sophie to draw a big square with a black crayon and then color it in, so that almost the entire page was a big, waxy mass of black. After they did that, I gave each of them a tool, which was just a small wooden stick with a point. I instructed them to scrape a drawing into the black mass, so that the rainbow colors showed through.

“I think it would be cool to draw a secret scary thing,” I said, “something that frightens you but that nobody else knows is scary. How does that sound?”

“You mean like a tree?” Sophie said, holding up her fingers like claws.

“Sure. Trees can be pretty scary.”

“But not leaves.”

“Right, leaves are our friends.”

Sophie got right to work drawing her spooky tree. Dylan started with something I couldn’t identify. First he outlined a big square, and inside that a slightly smaller square. Beneath it he drew a rectangle he filled with tiny squares. He drew a small oval next to it, and I finally figured out that it was a computer with a keyboard and mouse.

I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach as I wondered why he thought the computer was a frightening thing.

“Good computer, Dyl,” I said. “Are you going to put something scary on the screen?”

He nodded and scratched out a long shape that quickly resembled a hammer.

“Is that the kind of hammer you use to fix something?” I asked. “Or is it a weapon?”

“It’s a killer hammer,” he said. “A mad scientist created it on the computer and it came alive. And now, if you try to type something on the keyboard, it comes out and smashes your fingers.”

“I wouldn’t want to use
that
computer!” I said.

After the children finished their drawings, I thanked them for helping me and asked if they wanted to make another one. Sophie was eager, but Dylan said he wanted to go downstairs and use his PlayStation. I gave Sophie another page to work on, and walked Dylan down into the basement. When we were out of Sophie’s earshot, I made him look at me.

“Is there something on the computer that scared you?” I said.

He shrugged.

“Did you go into a chat room? Did you have an instant message conversation with a stranger? Did somebody say some inappropriate things to you?”

He shook his head.

“What, then?”

“I don’t know.” He looked down, his dark lashes dramatic against his fair skin.

“You can trust me, okay? I only want to help you.”

He was silent.

“Did you accidentally click on a bad Web site? Did you see something you weren’t supposed to see?”

“It wasn’t a Web site.” There was a tiny constellation of pale freckles on his nose, which just broke my heart. As rugged as he was athletically, he was still at such a tender age.

“But you saw something bad? What was it?”

He took in a jagged breath and let it out. I knew I was getting very warm here. “Somebody was IM-ing with my mom,” he said.

“Who?”

He shrugged. “A man.”

“What did he say?”

Dylan led me to the little office off the playroom where they kept their computer and sat down in front of it.

“Sometimes she forgets to close the window after she IMs with someone,” he said as he put his hand on the mouse and clicked. He opened and closed a few windows. “It’s not here today, but look.” He opened Clare’s instant message manager, which showed her entire list, including the people who were not currently online.

“That’s him,” he said, pointing the cursor at a screen name. “Hammerman223.”

“You saw a conversation between this guy and your mother?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What were they talking about?”

“Sex and stuff.”

This was the last thing in the world I expected from my sister, and I thought there just had to be some logical explanation. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I sat down in the side chair and swiveled Dylan around to face me. “Listen, I can’t explain what you saw, but I know your mom, and she loves your dad very much. I just…I want to promise you that everything’s okay.”

I hoped I wasn’t lying and paused, waiting for him to respond. He nodded, noncommittal. I realized, of course, there was only so much I could do. Clare was the one who would have to talk to him and assure him everything was all right. I leaned in to hug him.

“It was brave of you to tell me. I’m proud of you.”

When Clare came home a short while later, Sophie ran to greet her. I called Dylan up from the basement, where he was
slaughtering bad guys on his PlayStation. I was glad that he actually shut it off and came upstairs.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

She kissed him on the top of the head. He didn’t pull away, and Clare glanced at me, beaming. I thought she was getting ahead of herself. Dylan’s crisis hadn’t passed—it was just on hiatus.

“How was your day?” she asked, releasing him.

“Fine.”

“Did you get some time for free swim?”

“Yeah.” He went to the refrigerator.

“We need to talk,” I said softly to Clare, and gave her a look to let her know it was serious.

I went into the backyard and sat on one of the children’s swings while Clare spent some time with Dylan and Sophie. After a while, she came outside and sat on the swing next to mine.

“What’s up?” she said.

I took Dylan’s folded up drawing from my pocket and handed it to her.

“What’s this?” she said, looking at it.

“That’s what Dylan drew when I asked him to make something secret and scary.”

She cocked her head to get another angle on the picture. “I don’t get it.”

It was hard for me to say the words, so I waited a few minutes to see if she could figure it out on her own. But she just stared at the picture, her pretty brow knitted. I finally took a deep breath and got it out.

“Clare, who’s Hammerman223?”

Her face turned white. She dropped the picture to the ground, where a breeze picked it up from beneath and danced it across the yard to the fence.

“Are you having an affair?” I asked.

She got up off the swing and tucked her hair behind her ears. “No,” she said, and folded her arms defiantly. Then she put her head down and mumbled, “Not yet.”

“What are you saying?”

“Don’t judge me for this, Bev.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Do I need to spell it out?” I held up three fingers and ticked them off, “Marc, Dylan, Sophie.”

“No one has to know.”

I pointed to the drawing stuck to the fence. “Hello! You haven’t even
done
anything yet and you’ve traumatized your kid.”

Her jaw tightened. “I’ll deal with that.”

“How?”

“It’s not your concern, okay?”

I had to believe that a part of Clare wanted me to talk her out of it. Why else would she have told me? Surely she didn’t think she would get my blessing.

“If you think that phone call to Marc’s hotel room gives you license to cheat, you’re making a huge mistake.”

“It’s not about that. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand that you have a whole life here, and you’d be risking
everything
.”

Clare rolled her eyes. “You’re only saying that because—” She paused.

“Because what?”

“Nothing.”

“Say it.”

She bit her lip and then exploded. “I’m not Jonathan, okay? This has
nothing
to do with you!”

“Don’t be an idiot. I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about your family. How can you do this to them?”

She pointed a manicured finger in my face. “You have betrayal issues, Bev. Don’t project them onto everyone else.”

She was so maddening I wanted to strangle her. “Spare me the pop psychology. I have
reality
issues. I don’t want to see you lose your family.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Apparently not. You’re being a bonehead about this!”

“A second ago I was an idiot and now I’m a bonehead? Make up your mind.”

“Stop. You’re being childish.”

“And you’re being superior! You think you know better than me about
everything
. But you don’t know what it’s like to feel like nothing—less than nothing—when suddenly someone is in your life who thinks you’re beautiful and smart and desirable.” She tried to hold back tears, but they spilled over her lashes and down her cheeks.

“Clare this is just stu—” I stopped myself. “You can’t take a midlife crisis and whatever paranoia it’s fueled and turn it into an affair. You’ll ruin your life. You’re better off getting a boob job or a facelift or whatever it is women in this town do when they’re feeling unattractive.”

“Is that what you think I need?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“No, you meant that I should just stick to being a stupid, rich, mindless housewife.”

“I meant that if you’re going to be selfish and self-absorbed, at least find an outlet that doesn’t hurt anyone.”

Clare’s eyes filled with fury. “Selfish and self-absorbed! How dare you! You think you know what my life is like? You don’t even know what selfless
is
until you’ve been a mother. Have you ever gone three straight nights without sleep, trying
to comfort a colicky newborn, and then gotten out of bed at five o’clock to drive your husband to the airport? Have you ever nursed a hungry baby until your nipples were bloody and scabbed? Have you ever gotten a urinary infection from holding in your pee an entire day because your husband and kids needed you to be three places at once? I give
everything
to my family. My own needs take a backseat to Marc and the kids every time. In fact, I pay so much attention to everyone else that I don’t even know who Clare
is
anymore!”

“That doesn’t entitle you to an affair,” I said.

“Says who?”

“Sometimes I think being born beautiful was the worst thing that could have happened to you.”

“Meaning what?”

“You think everything is supposed to
come
to you. You think you’re
entitled
to feel desirable, no matter what it costs.”

“I’m done,” she said, and turned her back to me.

I grabbed her shoulders and turned her around. “Is it worth it?” I said. “Even the best sex in the world-“

“It’s not just about sex.”

“Of course it isn’t.”

She pulled away. “Don’t patronize me.”

I grabbed her by the arms this time, intent on getting through to her. “What is it, Clare? Are you falling in love with someone?”

She turned her face from me.

“Are you?” I repeated.

“Go away.” She wrested herself from my hands and turned her back to me again.

“Who is it, Clare?”

She didn’t answer, wouldn’t turn around. But she didn’t move, either. She just stood there. I walked to the corner of the yard and retrieved Dylan’s drawing. I held it in front of her face.

“I can’t let you do this,” I said. “Look! Look how much you’ve hurt Dylan already.”