Tinderbox (26 page)

Standing next to her brother, Caro looks for Eva, but she is nowhere to be seen.

32

After the children have left and Caro and Eva, who reappeared when the cake was over,
have helped Myra clean up, Caro gathers her things to leave.

“I’ll walk you,” Rachida says so matter-of-factly it alarms Caro to think how natural
the habit of deception must be to her sister-in-law. “I could use some air.”

Omar is seated at the farm table, building one of his new Legos with Eva. Caro leans
over to kiss him. “See you Friday,” she says.

They head south along Central Park West, past the doormen hailing taxis and ribbing
one another, the bare trees in the park across the avenue ghostly in the falling dark.
Caro waits in the quiet between her sister-in-law and herself—a silence that after
so many years of knowing each other is usually comfortable but is now weighted with
what must be said.

At Ninetieth Street, Caro tells herself, she will begin. When they reach Eighty-eighth
Street, she renegotiates with herself: Eighty-sixth Street, at Eighty-sixth Street,
she’ll begin.

At Eighty-sixth Street she points to the benches along the park wall. “Are you too
cold to sit so we can talk?”

Rachida raises her eyebrows, surprised, Caro suspects, that she would suggest the
park side of the street after dark.

“It’s only six o’clock. There are dozens of people out. Two doormen standing here
looking out.”

They cross and sit. Sit for what feels like a long time, both of them facing the street,
their legs stretched in front of them, while Caro’s thoughts go in circles: Does she
really need to tell Rachida that she knows about Layla, is it truly necessary? But
what about Adam, how can she keep this from him? Couldn’t she wait and tell Rachida
some other time?

“I know”—Rachida leans over her legs, gripping her knees—“that you know about Layla.
She told me. About the call. It took me several days to convince her that it hadn’t
been me on the line.”

Caro hugs her arms, blinking in the dark.

“I’m sorry you heard that,” Rachida says. “It must have been shocking.”

“Layla seems to specialize in shocking.”

Rachida looks up.

“The stoning by her brothers. She told me about it the time I walked her to the bus.”

“What did she tell you?”

“How her brothers almost killed her when she said she wanted to go to medical school.”

Rachida hoists a foot onto the bench so she is sitting with her knee level with her
chin. It is the way a teenager might sit, though there is nothing youthful in her
expression.

“I’m in love with her.”

Caro nods.

“She is very brilliant, the most brilliant woman I’ve ever known. But very vulnerable.”

“I can imagine. After what she’s been through.”

“That was a crock of shit. She has two older sisters, no brothers. One is a lawyer,
the other’s an architect. Her father is a professor of surgery. He planned for her
to be a doctor since she was in diapers.”

Caro feels a flush spread over her cheeks, as though she has been slapped. “So how
did she get the scar on her arm?”

“She was in a motorbike accident a few years ago.”

A bus pulls in front of them, exuding its belchy fumes. Two elderly women, one wearing
a turban hat, the other wearing a hat with a pom-pom at the top, descend. They hold
each other’s arm as they cross the street.

Caro waits for the bus to leave. “Is she the first?”

“First what?”

“Woman you’ve been with? Infidelity with Adam?”

“Yes. Yes to both. And I’m the first woman for her too. At the beginning we were like
two kids, unsure even of how to make love.”

Caro fights the impulse to snap at Rachida that she’s heard enough details already.
“What are you going to do about Adam?”

“I don’t know. He lives so much of the time in his own world, I don’t really even
feel that guilty about him. I feel guilty at the thought of our separating and putting
Omar through all of that.”

“Does Adam have someone else?”

“I wish. That would make things easier. But there’s so much going on all the time
in his head, I don’t think he has the mental space.”

Somehow the conversation has gone off track. Learning that Layla’s story about the
stoning was made up, a lie, feels, in some ways, more of a violation than hearing
her pathetic panting over the phone.

“I don’t want to judge you. How you lead your life is up to you. But you can’t expect
me to keep this kind of secret from my brother. Believe me, I wish I hadn’t answered
your phone. But if you don’t tell Adam, I’ll have to.”

Rachida lowers her leg. A second bus is pulling up to the stop in front of their bench.
“I know,” she says, raising her voice over the bus’s whooshing halt. “But I need a
little time.”

They cross the street, hugging quickly at the corner as they say goodbye.

Caro is unlocking her door before she realizes that Rachida, in fact, has told her
nothing: does she intend to end it with Layla? To end it with Adam? And how much time
is a little time?

For the first time since their return from Uri’s funeral, Caro feels the urge to put
something in her mouth, but now, her key still in hand, the awareness of how much
worse food would make her feel overpowers the urge. Inside, she stretches out on her
couch, the room still dark, wondering if her father had debated telling her mother
about Cheryl or Shirley or whatever the woman’s name had been. Or had both phone calls—from
Cheryl or Shirley or whatever her name had been and from Layla—been fated from the
start, the impossibility, as her mother would say, of an equilibrium ever lasting,
the inevitability of entropy, tumult, and decay.

33

Myra plays the Bach Invention Number 8 in F Major. It is the most difficult of the
two-part inventions she has learned thus far and her favorite because the challenge
of following the patterns between left and right hands, the alternations between legato
and staccato, the way the melody moves across hands, does not allow her thoughts to
wander. With the Schumann
Kinderszenen
she played at the beginning of her practice, the left hand by now automatic, she
found herself wondering why Eva had disappeared when the lights were lowered and she
carried the cake with the lit candles over to place in front of Omar’s sweet, excited
face.

Before Christmas, Myra had assumed that what has happened with Eva is a kind of regression:
having lost her mother so young, having been left unprotected with a brutal father,
the girl is starved for mothering. Watching Myra with Omar and, to some extent, with
Caro and Adam too set off this ravenous wish to be mothered herself.

Since Christmas, though, Myra has found herself feeling confused, feeling that behind
her formulation, she understands nothing. She knows that she should go back to Dreis
and try to sort it out, but she is in a state where she cannot even articulate what
is bothering her. All she knows is that she has begun to worry that the girl’s troubles
run deeper than she thought. When she told Eva that Adam would be taking over the
Tuesday pickup so he could spend more time with Omar, Eva had looked at her suspiciously,
with the immediate, unguarded perception of another’s intent that Myra has seen in
her most disturbed patients, in vicious animals, and in the unhappiest of children.

Myra turns off the piano light and heads downstairs. Eva is at the farm table eating
a piece of the leftover birthday cake.

“I put stain stick on the tablecloth where the children left marks.”

“Thank you.” Myra points at Eva’s plate. “You missed the cake before.”

Eva digs her fork into the butter cream icing and licks her lips. “It is so good.
I cannot believe you make it!”

Myra pulls out a chair and sits across from Eva. She folds her hands on the table.
“Eva, we need to talk.”

“I do something wrong?” Eva glances at the kitchen drawer where she told Myra she
couldn’t find the matches Myra had sent her to get. When Myra went to look herself,
the matches were, as always, at the front of the drawer.

“I want to take you to a doctor who will give you some medicine to help you feel less
nervous all the time.”

“I am not nervous.”

“Less bothered by thoughts of the past.”

“I do not want to talk with anyone else. I go to synagogue Friday nights, I go to
my class on Tuesday and Thursday. I never bother anyone.”

“I’m not saying you’re bothering anyone. I want you to feel better.”

“I bother you when I talk in your office. You cannot eat your lunch. It is very bad
of me. But now I stop.”

“I’ve made an appointment for you to see a doctor I often work with. The appointment
is this Tuesday. He won’t ask you to tell him a lot of details about your past. Just
how you are feeling now.”

Myra looks at Eva’s empty plate. She wants to offer Eva another slice of cake. Maybe
all the girl needs is another slice of cake, a glass of milk, and to be tucked into
bed.

“I have to insist.”

Eva touches the chain around her neck. She goes to the sink and washes her plate.

After Eva leaves, Myra putters around the kitchen, putting away the silver cake server
and the box of birthday candles. She feels terrible. Eva did not make her say it,
which she’d been prepared to do if needed—that if she does not go to see Meyers, she
will have to leave. Instead, Eva looked at Myra as though she’d been asked to gouge
out an eye.

Rachida unlocks the front door. Without saying a word, she goes upstairs.

On the corkboard is the schedule Myra made last June for Eva. Myra takes it down.
Behind it is the editorial about the misguided Smokey Bear policy she clipped from
the paper the summer Adam and Rachida and Omar took the rafting trip down the burning
Salmon River: the snuffing out of the small, natural fires without which the overgrown
underbrush becomes perfect tinder for out-of-control burns. She had read the article
at the table on her deck, nibbling her sandwich, a map of Idaho beside her. A lifetime
ago, when she lived in this house by herself, without Adam and Rachida and Omar and
Eva, not always tracking their enthusiasms and moods.

34

On Tuesday, Myra takes Eva to see Jim Meyers. She sits in the consultation room with
Eva while Meyers gently asks Eva about troubling thoughts, sleep patterns, preoccupations,
hearing voices that other people don’t hear, seeing things that other people can’t
see. Eva stares past the doctor’s face, saying no to each question. Afterward, he
asks Eva to sit for a moment in the waiting room while he talks with Myra.

“Obviously, she’s very guarded. From what you’ve told me and the way she acted, I
think there’s a lot going on that she’s not saying. I’d like to give her a low-dose
antipsychotic and see how she does. We’ll give her one pill at night so she’s not
too drowsy during the days. If she tolerates one pill, we can try doubling the dose.”

“I think we’re going to have a compliance issue.”

“So give it to her yourself. Just make sure you watch her swallow.”

Myra gives Eva the first pill with a glass of water.

“I don’t need water. I can swallow pills without water.” Eva puts the pill in her
mouth and makes a swallowing motion. She smiles at Myra, keeping her mouth closed.

The following evening, Myra goes to get the pill vial from the kitchen cupboard, but
it is no longer there.

“I put the pills on the table next to my bed,” Eva says when Myra asks what happened
to the vial. “It is easier for me to take the pill after I get into bed.” Eva smiles
sweetly. “Don’t worry, I won’t forget.”

35

Dressed in a blue kaftan and white flip-flops, Ursula is in the garden of the San
Isidro house, inspecting the peonies the ugly, brooding gardener put in this year
when her cell phone, on the table next to the coffee her husband left halfdrunk before
leaving for his Saturday-morning golf game, rings.

She stubs her toe as she rushes to get her phone, cursing under her breath and rubbing
the China red nail while she listens to Myra’s concerns about the girl whose name
had slipped Ursula’s mind until Myra says it now. Eva.

“Sweetheart, how terrible for you. And I am entirely to blame.” The polish is chipped
on a corner of the toenail. She doesn’t have the color herself. Now she will have
to drive all the way to Miraflores to get it repaired.

“Perhaps New York is too much for her,” Myra says. “Certainly our family is. I can’t
think of anywhere she could go except back to you.”

“Of course, if she is not a help to you, send her back.” Ursula mouths
Goddamnit
. Well, Alicia will have to figure it out, will have to manage her maid, Marina, who
will undoubtedly be unhappy to find Eva returned. Over the last few months, Alicia
has given Ursula an earful about this Marina: emboldened by her plan to marry her
boyfriend, Marina has turned from sassy to brazen. Twice, Alicia has caught her washing
the foyer tiles with a bucket of filthy water, too lazy to fetch clean water. When
Alicia chastised her, Marina let her know who was boss by telephoning in sick the
next morning for herself and the two other girls with whom she shares a room in a
boardinghouse. “All three of you?” Alicia asked, certain she could hear the others
laughing in the background. “We are so sorry,” Marina said. “We all ate spoiled
anticuchos
last night.”

“Does she clean or is she one of those girls who just moves around the dirt?”

With her cousin’s question, Myra realizes that Ursula has let herself absorb the outlines
of what she’s been telling her without actually listening. And doesn’t Ursula recall
that she herself recommended Eva as someone Alicia said was one of the most thorough
cleaners she’d ever had? As she sometimes does with a distracted patient, Myra lowers
the register of her voice and slows the pace. “The problem is not with her housekeeping.
The problem is Eva herself. She’s a disturbed young lady.”