Tumbledown (45 page)

He would find her house. The neighborhood had giant trees, like sentries or lookout towers or lighthouses. Things so tall and obvious, you’d have to be blind not to find your way.

Candler pretended to be shopping, ducking the attention of the other salesgirl until Lise could free herself. The shop had once been someone’s home, and the store owners had taken pains to make it elegant. Faux elegance was big business in the country, he thought. If only he’d gotten in on the ground floor of that industry.

“Is anyone helping you?” Lise asked him.

“I’m just looking,” he said. “Could use some guidance, though.”

She moved him by increments to a back room, where he tried to kiss her but she placed a hand on his chest. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood,” he said, which was true, but he understood that she would think he was lying. He decided to let her give him credit for having come all this way to see her.

“I thought so,” she said. “I saw you walk by earlier.”

“I had a meeting,” he said, disappointed that she saw through his honesty. Or had she failed to see through his honesty? “My life is an insane mess at the moment.”

“You want me to try something on for you? Otherwise, I can’t stay back here too long.”

“I can’t buy anything.”

“I know that.”

“I just couldn’t imagine coming all the way down here and not seeing you. Can you take a break?”

She shook her head. “What’s your problem?”

“Work. Colleagues. Home. I don’t know, what’s my problem?”

“You don’t know who you are,” she said. “You’ve forgotten. Maybe you never knew.”

“And you do?”

“I have an idea, but it’s looking like maybe I was misled. Hoodwinked, you might say.”

“This is not what I need right now.”

“Is that my job? To wait around till you show up and then provide whatever it is you need?”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Why are you so upset?”

“I promised to disappear, and I didn’t,” she said. “Now it’s up to you. Be here or vanish. If you want to be here, I’m for it. Otherwise, I need to sell some clothing.”

“It’s just, this meeting, you know, I’m being told that the promotion—”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Don’t you want to hear what’s happened?”

“Tell your fiancée. I’m not doing it anymore. It’s too aggravating.” She took a paisley dress from a rack and displayed it over her body for him. “This is made from Italian wool. It’s handmade. Someone cared to make it perfect. It took a lot of effort.”

“Can’t we skip the drama and just . . .”

“I’d like to tell you that Lolly is a creep or something, but I can’t judge her. She’s probably fine or could be fine. If you want to be with her, be with her. If you have doubts, then . . . then, well, make up your fucking mind.”

She shoved the dress at him and stalked off, leaving him among the aisles of elegant clothing. He returned the dress to the rack. Its price tag indicated that it was marked down to $890. He felt a powerful urge to wipe his nose on it.

“I haven’t been there,” Mick was saying when Violet returned from the yard. Patricia Barnstone was in the bathroom, but nothing else had changed. “To any beach. It was the old me that went there.”

“I know that beach,” Andujar said. “Sand, water, people in sand, people in water.”

Violet poured herself another glass of wine—a mediocre merlot. She filled it to the brim. She had borrowed a cell phone from Cecil’s cousin and sent Billy a text saying they were ready to go and to please come get them immediately.

“Do you know how to get there?” Lolly asked.

“The freeway,” Andujar explained.

“Is it as beautiful as Mick says?”

Andujar nodded. “Sand, water, some of those birds they got.”

“That’s the place,” Mick said.

Maura and Lolly laughed, but Mick didn’t. He hadn’t meant to be funny, Violet understood, but his face softened. He didn’t mind their laughter. A pretty kid and so eager to be friendly. It was easy to see the little boy’s face residing in the young man’s, a face that would have been very easy to love. Jimmy had told her that schizophrenia just happens. No one knows why. Teenage boys were especially vulnerable. She tried to imagine what the boy’s mother had gone through, her perfect boy suddenly incoherent and lost. Impossible.

“I can draw a map,” Andujar said. He walked quickly to the hallway and was gone.

“Does he live here?” Lolly asked.

Maura nodded. “Barnstone takes in strays.”

“I have a car,” Mick said. “When I drove, back when I was him, the road from Yuma took him—me—over the mountains and right through Onyx Springs. I could do it again, couldn’t I?”

“You’ll take us to the beach?” Lolly said. “That’s so nice of you.”

“Yes,” Mick said. “I can.”

“Oh,” Violet said, “that’s all right. James will take us, sooner or later.”

“I want to go,” Maura said. “I could maybe go if you guys went.”

“Go where?” Barnstone asked from the hall.

Lolly explained in excited terms that they were all going to the beach.

Barnstone made a face. “I suspect that you’d have to have an official from the Center—”

“Like you,
duh,
” Maura said.

“—and an email from your parents giving it the thumbs-up.”

“Then it’s settled,” Maura said. “We’ll go. You want to go, don’t you, Andujar?” She yelled this in the direction of his room, but he was standing in the hall, just beyond their ability to see him, listening.

“Yes, yes, sure,” he said, without showing himself. “But I’m not sure.”

“We wouldn’t all fit in the car,” Barnstone noted. “I’m not certain all of us want to go.” She looked down the hall at Andujar.

“Not so much,” he said. He returned, carrying a pencil and a sheet of white paper.

“Are there any quiet beaches?” Lolly asked. “James makes them sound like outdoor meat markets.”

“Mick knows a secluded beach,” Maura said.

Mick nodded, afraid now to speak, his mind tumbling, running, time sputtering about, now and later all the same. The beach in Mexico where the grunion ran. He could find it, he was positive. He would never find it, and he was positive of that, too. But it had to be there, didn’t it? He had changed, but the coastline would be the same. The world hadn’t turned upside down, no matter that it felt that way.

Maura suddenly blurted out, “I think it’s crazy that you’re marrying Karly.”

“Are you engaged?” Lolly asked. “I’m engaged, you know.”

Violet started coughing and set down her wine too hard, sloshing it over the rim.

Mick retrieved a sponge from the kitchen, moving so quickly that he was in the kitchen while he was still on the couch, the same sponge he had used to wash the dishes—there was a pile of plates and utensils he had missed! No, new dishes, what they’d eaten from, soap like thoughts bubbling in his fist, and purple bubbles where the wine had been, and somehow he was back in the living room.

“I’m so sorry,” Violet said softly as he cleaned up the spill.

“You can’t stain that table,” Barnstone said. “It’s already the color of mud.”

In the kitchen again, alone, the sponge in the sink and a wine bottle already to his mouth before his hand could grasp the neck. Four times he lifted the bottle. He counted. Slowing himself. Four long gulps, which finished off the bottle. He set it down with such care that the noise was no more than a tick, like a fingernail against the wooden rail of a flight of stairs, which led up to another level. Hadn’t he always known there was another level?

Maura had sneaked in behind him, taking his elbow, and again her mouth to his ear. “I shouldn’t have said anything about Karly,” she said and apologized. His mind slowing again. Losing steam. That mad steam. He was okay, after all. Wasn’t he? Okay? Back into the living room they went. The energy of the conversation dissipated, and the braying of Cecil Fresnay made a brief appearance, almost visible, like a ghost. The Candler girls began the shuffling-about business that anticipates departure, but Lolly had another question for Mick.

“If I were a counselor?” Mick said.

“This should be interesting,” Maura put in.

“Who or what am I dealing with?”

“How about with you yourself,” Maura said. “You’re the client you have to deal with, and your mom has called you to say,
My Mickey didn’t take his meds this weekend.
”

Mick nodded, suddenly serious, heavy, the chair squeaking with his weight. “I’d want to ask him why—and really find out—why he didn’t want to take his medicine. Like what was going on in his life. What did the drugs do to him besides what they were supposed to do?”

“You’d want him to really talk to you,” Lolly said.

“How is this different,” Violet asked, “from what Jimmy would do? Jimmy is your—James, I mean. James is your counselor, isn’t he?”

“Mr. James Candler is my counselor,” Mick said, his mind now as clear as glass. “He sent someone, a nice person, to give me a note, reminding me that I need meds. He tries to understand, and I try to be understandable.”

“And once you hear him,” Barnstone said, “then what do you do?” Maura leapt in. “You don’t dope them up,” she said, and proceeded to rail against the overuse of medication.

Mick thought of a dozen different answers to Barnstone’s question, and then a hundred answers, and he knew he was letting the illness get in his head again. But really, if he could answer this question, would he even need Mr. James Candler?

Maura had a thesis about letting people be whoever they really were, that they shouldn’t be forced to adhere to society’s norms if they didn’t share those norms. She had a convert’s fervor and a good argument, so long as no one scratched beneath its shiny surface. Not only Barnstone but Violet, too, could see that this was about Mick and her desire to love him, to treasure him as he was. The medications did not, in Maura’s mind, serve to restore him to his former self. She had never known that Mick and did not want to believe in his previous existence. This was the only Mick she knew, and it was plenty. She quoted a line from a book Barnstone had recently given her, altered to fit her own obsessions. “Medicated schizophrenics are all alike,” she said. “Each unmedicated schizophrenic is his own person.” She paused for a dramatic second before adding, “So in conclusion,” hamming it up precisely because it meant so much to her, “people have to be free to be exactly who they are.”

“What if they don’t want to be who they are?” Lolly said. “What if they’re not anyone?”

“Everybody’s somebody,” Mick said. “Even if he can’t remember being the somebody he is, he’s still him even when he isn’t.”

“But what if,” Lolly began but she shook her head. “Maura’s right, of course.” She joined in the harangue, one of those general and insubstantial and never more than half-articulated tirades that serve to unite people in a general fury against
them.

Violet took a stab at changing the subject by asking Andujar whether he worked at the Center.

“Hmm,” Andujar replied.

“Andujar is a graduate of the Center, staying with me until he can manage a place of his own,” Barnstone said. “He works, has a couple of jobs actually. He can tell you about them, maybe, or maybe he’s feeling shy. He keeps the house in running order. Plays the piano. Your basic Jeffersonian man.”

“Jimmy had that nickname,” Violet said and blanched. The nickname was one Dlu had given him, and it wasn’t quite
Jeffersonian Man
but
Renaissance Boy.
There was no way not to tell it now. “He was good at a lot of things, but they were all
boy
things, dancing and basketball and making up stories . . . I mean, he’s not like that now.” Before the subject could switch to her brother—something she knew he would hate—she said to Andujar, “I wondered who played the piano.” He had seated himself on the bench, his hands inches above the keys.

Andujar did not respond. It was Mick who spoke. “I’d give him another chance.” He had all this time been thinking of what he would do if he were counselor to himself.

“Won’t Jimmy do that, too?” Violet asked.

Mick nodded. He didn’t want to try to explain that the chances he got from Mr. James Candler were always chances to become the person Mr. James Candler wanted him to become. Not that it was all that different from the person Mick wanted to become, but what was a person but this small difference and that one? Like if you were kind or too kind, quick or too quick. Thoughts flooded him again, and he knew he had to let them go, let them wash away. It was just his mind.

“Jimmy became a counselor because of our brother,” Violet said. “At least, that’s what I believe.”

“Pook,” Lolly put in. “James will hardly talk about him.”

“Our parents are both artists,” Violet said, “and they didn’t believe in . . . well, they never had Pook examined or studied. There was something wrong with him, but he wasn’t so very different from other people. Awkward and—I don’t know how to put it. Gruff, I suppose. Jimmy has told me that he might have been autistic.”

“High-functioning autism,” Barnstone said. “Most people call it Asperger’s now. Usually means that the boy—it’s almost exclusively males who are given this diagnosis—the boy is bright, especially in math, for some reason, but socially inadequate. Blunt and self-centered. Often, they don’t care to be touched. Sound like him?”

“Not exactly. Partly, maybe. He loved animals,” Violet said. “And he painted. He was quite a gifted painter. My parents thought art would be his redemption.” She told them the story of Pook’s paintings and the opening in New York, but she did not describe the way he died.

“I’ve seen one of them,” Mick said. “It’s in Mr. James Candler’s office. It’s got a man you can see through.”

Violet shook her head. “That doesn’t sound like one of Pook’s.”

“And behind him is a wall with pieces of paper.”

Violet touched her fingers to her lips.
Pook’s room.
Could there be a painting of Pook’s she had not seen?

“James never told me the whole story of his brother,” Lolly said. She could not hide the distress in her voice. “What happened to Pook’s paintings? Do you have any of them? Are they valuable?”