his mulish brow furrowing deeper as I talked.
“You need to call her,” he said. “Your father’s wife.”
“But she’s not his wife! She’s just his girlfriend! She doesn’t care anything about me.”
Firmly, he shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. You have to ring her up and tell her that you’re all right. Yes, yes you do,” he said, speaking over me as I tried to object. “No buts. Right now. This instant. Pips—” there was an old-fashioned wall phone in the kitchen—“come along and let’s clear out of here for a minute.”
Though Xandra was just about the last person in the world I wanted to talk to—especially after I’d ransacked her bedroom and stolen her tip money—I was so relieved to be there that I would have done anything he asked. Dialing the number, I tried to tell myself she probably wouldn’t pick up (so many solicitors and bill collectors phoned us, all the time, that she seldom took calls from numbers she didn’t recognize). Hence I was surprised when she answered on the first ring.
“You left the door open,” she said almost immediately, in an accusing voice.
“What?”
“You let the dog out. He’s run off—I can’t find him anywhere. He probably got hit by a car or something.”
“No.” I was gazing fixedly at the blackness of the brick courtyard. It was raining, drops pounding hard on the windowpanes, the first real rain I’d seen in almost two years. “He’s with me.”
“Oh.” She sounded relieved. Then, more sharply: “Where are you? With Boris somewhere?”
“No.”
“I spoke to him—wired out of his mind, it sounded like. He wouldn’t tell me where you were. I know he knows.” Though it was still early out there, her voice was gravelly like she’d been drinking, or crying. “I ought to call the cops on you, Theo. I know it was you two who stole that money and stuff.”
“Yeah, just like you stole my mom’s earrings.”
“What—”
“Those emerald ones. They belonged to my grandmother.”
“I didn’t steal them.” She was angry now. “How dare you. Larry gave those to me, he gave them to me after—”
“Yeah. After he stole them from my mother.”
“Um, excuse me, but your mom’s dead.”
“Yes, but she wasn’t when he stole them. That was like a year before she died. She contacted the insurance company,” I said, raising my voice over hers. “And filed a police report.” I didn’t know if the police part was true, but it might as well have been.
“Um, I guess you’ve never heard of a little something called marital property.”
“Right. And I guess you never heard of something called a family heirloom. You and my dad weren’t even married. He had no right to give those to you.”
Silence. I could hear the click of her cigarette lighter on the other end, a weary inhale. “Look, kid. Can I say something? Not about the money, honest. Or the blow. Although, I can tell you for damn sure, I wasn’t doing anything like that when I was your age. You think you’re pretty smart and all, and I guess you are, but you’re headed down a bad road, you and whats-his-name too. Yeah, yeah,” she said, raising her voice over mine, “I like him too, but he’s bad news, that kid.”
“You should know.”
She laughed, bleakly. “Well, kid, guess what? I’ve been around the track a few times—I do know. He’s going to end up in jail by the time he’s eighteen, that one, and dollars to doughnuts you’ll be right there with him. I mean, I can’t blame you,” she said, raising her voice again, “I loved your dad, but he sure wasn’t worth much, and from what he told me, your mother wasn’t worth much either.”
“Okay. That’s it. Fuck you.” I was so mad I was trembling. “I’m hanging up now.”
“No—wait. Wait. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about your mother. That’s not why I wanted to talk to you. Please. Will you wait a second?”
“I’m waiting.”
“First off—assuming you care—I’m having your dad cremated. That all right with you?”
“Do what you want.”
“You never did have much use for him, did you?”
“Is that it?”
“One more thing. I don’t care where you are, quite frankly. But I need an address where I can get in touch with you.”
“And why is that?”
“Don’t be a wise ass. At some point somebody’s going to call from your school or something—”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
“—and I’m going to need, I don’t know, some kind of explanation of where you are. Unless you want the cops to put you on the side of a milk carton or something.”
“I think that’s fairly unlikely.”
“Fairly unlikely,” she repeated, in a cruel, drawling imitation of my voice. “Well, may be. But give it to me, all the same, and we’ll call it even. I mean,” she said, when I didn’t answer, “let me make it plain, it makes no difference to me where you are. I just don’t want to be left holding the bag out here in case there’s some problem and I need to get in touch with you.”
“There’s a lawyer in New York. His name’s Bracegirdle. George Bracegirdle.”
“Do you have a number?”
“Look it up,” I said. Pippa had come into the room to get the dog a bowl of water, and, awkwardly, so I wouldn’t have to look at her, I turned to face the wall.
“Brace Girdle?” Xandra was saying. “Is that the way it sounds? What the hell kind of name is that?”
“Look, I’m sure you’ll be able to find him.”
There was a silence. Then Xandra said: “You know what?”
“What?”
“That was your father that died. Your own father. And you act like it was, I don’t know, I’d say the dog, but not even the dog. Because I know you’d care if it was the dog got hit by a car, at least I think you would.”
“Let’s say I cared about him exactly as much as he did about me.”
“Well, let me tell you something. You and your dad are a whole lot more alike than you might think. You’re his kid, all right, through and through.”
“Well, you’re full of shit,” I said, after a brief, contemptuous pause—a retort that seemed, to me, to sum up the situation pretty nicely. But—long after I’d hung up the phone, when I sat sneezing and shivering in a hot bath, and in the bright fog after (swallowing the aspirins Hobie gave me, following him down the hall to the musty spare room, you look packed in, extra blankets in the trunk, no, no more talking, I’ll leave you to it now) her parting shot rang again and again in my mind, as I turned my face into the heavy, foreign-smelling pillow. It wasn’t true—no more than what she’d said about my mother was true. Even her raspy dry voice coming through the line, the memory of it, made me feel dirty. Fuck her, I thought sleepily. Forget about it. She was a million miles away. But though I was dead tired—more than dead tired—and the rickety brass bed was the softest bed I’d ever slept in, her words were an ugly thread running all night long through my dreams.
III.
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.
—F
RANÇOIS DE
L
A
R
OCHEFOUCAULD
Chapter 7.
The Shop-Behind-the-Shop
i.
WHEN I WOKE TO the clatter of garbage trucks, it was as if I’d parachuted into a different universe. My throat hurt. Lying very still under the eiderdown, I breathed the dark air of dried-out potpourri and burnt fireplace wood and—very faint—the evergreen tang of turpentine, resin, and varnish.
For some time I lay there. Popper—who’d been curled by my feet—was nowhere in evidence. I’d slept in my clothes, which were filthy. At last—propelled by a sneezing fit—I sat up, pulled my sweater over my shirt and grappled under the bed to make sure the pillowcase was still there, then trudged on cold floors to the bathroom. My hair had dried in knots too tangled to yank the comb through, and even after I doused it in water and started over, one chunk was so matted I finally gave up and sawed it out, laboriously, with a pair of rusted nail scissors from the drawer.
Christ, I thought, turning from the mirror to sneeze. I hadn’t been around a mirror in a while and I barely recognized myself: bruised jaw, spattering of chin acne, face blotched and swollen from my cold—eyes swollen too, lidded and sleepy, giving me a sort of dumb, shifty, homeschooled look. I looked like some cult-raised kid just rescued by local law enforcement, brought blinking from some basement stocked with firearms and powdered milk.
It was late: nine. Stepping out of my room, I could hear the morning classical program on WNYC, a dream familiarity in the announcer’s voice, Köchel numbers, a drugged calm, the same warm public-radio purr I’d woken up to so many mornings back at Sutton Place. In the kitchen, I found Hobie at the table with a book.
But he wasn’t reading; he was staring across the room. When he saw me he started.
“Well, there you are,” he said as he rose to messily sweep aside a pile of mail and bills so I could sit. He was dressed for the workshop, knee-sprung corduroys and an old peat-brown sweater, ragged and eaten with moth holes, and his receding hairline and new short-cropped hair gave him the ponderous, bald-templed look of the marble senator on the cover of Hadley’s Latin book. “How’s the form?”
“Fine, thanks.” Voice gravelled and croaking.
Down came the brows again and he looked at me hard. “Good heavens!” he said. “You sound like a raven this morning.”
What did that mean? Ablaze with shame, I slid into the chair he scraped out for me and—too embarrassed to meet his eye—stared at his book: cracked leather, Life and Letters of Lord Somebody, an old volume that had probably come from one of his estate sales, old Mrs. So-and-So up in Poughkeepsie, broken hip, no children, all very sad.
He was pouring me tea, pushing a plate my way. In an attempt to hide my discomfort I put my head down and plowed into the toast—and nearly choked, since my throat was too raw for me to swallow. Too quickly I reached for the tea, so I sloshed it on the tablecloth and had to scramble to blot it up.
“No—no, it doesn’t matter—here—”
My napkin was sopping wet; I didn’t know what to do with it; in my confusion I dropped it on top of my toast and reached under my glasses to rub my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I blurted.
“Sorry?” He was looking at me as if I’d asked him for directions to a place he wasn’t sure how to get to. “Oh, come now—”
“Please don’t make me go.”
“What’s that? Make you go? Go where?” He pulled his half-moon glasses low and looked at me over the tops of them. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, in a playful, half-irritated voice. “Tell you where I ought to make you go is straight back to bed. You sound like you’re down with the Black Death.”
But his manner failed to reassure me. Paralyzed with embarrassment, determined not to start crying, I found myself staring hard at the forlorn spot by the stove where once upon a time Cosmo’s basket had stood.
“Ah,” said Hobie, when he saw me looking at the empty corner. “Yes. There you go. Deaf as a haddock, having three and four seizures a week but still we wanted him to live forever. I blubbed like a baby. If you’d told me Welty was going to go before Cosmo—he spent half his life carrying that dog back and forth to the vet—Look here,” he said in an altered voice, leaning forward and trying to catch my eye when still I sat speechless and miserable. “Come on. I know you’ve been through a lot but there’s no need in the world to fuss about it now. You look very shook—now, now, yes you do,” he said crisply. “Very shook indeed and—bless you!”—flinching a bit—“bad dose of something, for sure. Don’t fret—everything’s all right. Go back to bed, why don’t you, and we’ll hash it out later.”
“I know but—” I turned my head away to stifle a wet, burbling sneeze. “I don’t have any place to go.”
He leaned back in his chair: courteous, careful, something a little dusty about him. “Theo—” tapping at his lower lip—“how old are you?”
“Fifteen. Fifteen and a half.”
“And—” he seemed to be working out how to ask it—“what about your grandfather?”
“Oh,” I said, helplessly, after a pause.
“You’ve spoken to him? He knows that you’ve nowhere to go?”
“Well, shit—” it had just slipped out; Hobie put up a hand to reassure me—“you don’t understand. I mean—I don’t know if he has Alzheimer’s or what, but when they called him he didn’t even ask to speak to me.”
“So—” Hobie leaned his chin heavily in his hand and eyed me like a skeptical schoolteacher—“you didn’t speak to him.”
“No—I mean not personally—this lady was there, helping out—” Xandra’s friend Lisa (solicitous, following me around, voicing gentle but increasingly urgent concerns that “the family” be notified) had retreated to a corner at some point to dial the number I gave her—and got off the phone with such a look that it had elicited, from Xandra, the only laugh of the evening.
“This lady?” said Hobie, in the silence that had fallen, in a voice you might employ with a mental patient.
“Right. I mean—” I scrubbed a hand over my face; the colors in the kitchen were too intense; I felt lightheaded, out of control—“I guess Dorothy answered the phone and Lisa said she was like ‘okay, wait,’—not even ‘Oh no!’ or ‘what happened?’ or ‘how terrible!’—just ‘hang on, let me get him,’ and then my granddad came on and Lisa told him about the wreck and he listened, and then he said well, he was sorry to hear it, but in this sort of tone, Lisa said. Not ‘what can I do’ or ‘when is the funeral’ or anything. Just, like, thank you for calling, we appreciate it, bye. I mean—I could have told her,” I added nervously when Hobie didn’t answer. “Because, I mean, they really didn’t like my dad—really didn’t like him—Dorothy is his stepmother and they hated each other from Day One but he never got along with Grandpa Decker either—”
“All right, all right. Steady on—”
“—and, I mean, my dad was in some trouble when he was a kid, that might have had something to do with it—he was arrested but I don’t know what for—honestly I don’t know why, but they never wanted anything to do with him for as long as I remember and they never wanted anything to do with me either—”
“Calm down! I’m not trying to—”
“—because, I swear, I hardly ever met them, I really don’t know them at all but there’s no reason for them to hate me—not that my grandpa is such a great guy, he was pretty abusive to my dad actually—”
“Ssh—no carrying on! I’m not trying to put the screws on you, I just want to know—no now, listen,” he said as I tried to talk over him, batting away my words as if he were shooing a fly from the table.
“My mother’s lawyer is here. In the city. Will you come with me to see him? No,” I said in confusion as his eyebrows came together, “not a lawyer lawyer, but that handles money? I talked to him on the phone? Before I left?”
“Okay,” said Pippa—laughing, pink-cheeked from the cold—“what’s wrong with this dog? Has he never seen a car?”
Bright red hair; green wool hat; the shock of seeing her in broad daylight was a dash of cold water. She had a hitch in her walk, probably from the accident but there was a grasshopper lightness to it like the odd, graceful preliminary to a dance step; and she was wrapped in so many layers against the cold that she looked like a colorful little cocoon, with feet.
“He was yowling like a cat,” she said, unwinding one of her many patterned scarves as Popchyk danced at her feet with the end of his leash in his mouth. “Does he always make that weird noise? I mean, a cab would go by and—whoo! in the air! I was flying him like a kite! People were laughing their heads off. Yes—” stooping to speak to the dog, rubbing the top of his head with her knuckles—“you, you need a bath, don’t you? Is he a Maltese?” she said, glancing up.
Furiously I nodded, back of my hand to my mouth, trying to choke back a sneeze.
“I love dogs.” I could hardly hear what she was saying, so dazzled was I by her eyes on mine. “I have a dog book and I memorized every breed there is. If I had a big dog I’d have a Newfoundland like Nana in Peter Pan, and if I had a small dog—well, I change my mind all the time. I like all the little terriers—Jack Russells especially, they’re always so funny and friendly on the street. But I know a wonderful Basenji too. And I met a really great Pekingese the other day. Really really tiny and really intelligent. Only royalty could have them in China. They’re a very ancient breed.”
“Maltese are ancient, too,” I croaked, glad to have an interesting fact to contribute. “They date back to ancient Greece.”
“That’s why you picked a Maltese? Because it was ancient?”
“Um—” Stifling a cough.
She was saying something else—to the dog, not me—but I’d fallen into another fit of sneezing. Quickly, Hobie scrabbled for the closest thing at hand—a table napkin—and passed it over to me.
“All right, enough,” he said. “Back to bed. No, no,” he said as I tried to hand the napkin back to him, “you keep it. Now tell me—” eyeing my wrecked plate, spilled tea and soggy toast—“what can I bring you for breakfast?”
Caught between sneezes, I gave a bright, Russian-accented shrug I’d picked up from Boris: anything.
“All right then, if you don’t mind it, I’ll make you some oatmeal. Easy on the throat. Don’t you have any socks?”
“Um—” She was busy with the dog, mustard-yellow sweater and hair like an autumn leaf, and her colors were mixed up and confused with the bright colors of the kitchen: striped apples glowing in a yellow bowl, the sharp ding of silver glinting from the coffee can where Hobie kept his paintbrushes.
“Pyjamas?” Hobie was saying. “No? I’ll see what I can find of Welty’s. And when you get out of those things I’ll throw them in the wash. Now, off with you,” he said, clapping his hand on my shoulder so suddenly I jumped.
“I—”
“You can stay. As long as however you like. And don’t worry, I’ll go with you to see your solicitor, it’ll all be fine.”
ii.
GROGGY, SHIVERING, I MADE my way down the dark hall and eased between the covers, which were heavy and ice-cold. The room smelled damp, and though there were many interesting things to look at—a pair of terra-cotta griffins, Victorian beadwork pictures, even a crystal ball—the dark brown walls, their deep dry texture like cocoa powder, soaked me through and through with a sense of Hobie’s voice and also of Welty’s, a friendly brown that saturated me to the core and spoke in warm old-fashioned tones, so that drifting in a lurid stream of fever I felt wrapped and reassured by their presence whereas Pippa had cast a shifting, colored nimbus of her own, I was thinking in a mixed-up way about scarlet leaves and bonfire sparks flying up in darkness and also my painting, how it would look against such a rich, dark, light-absorbing ground. Yellow feathers. Flash of crimson. Bright black eyes.
I woke with a jolt—terrified, flailing, back on the bus again with someone lifting the painting from my knapsack—to find Pippa lifting up the sleepy dog, her hair brighter than everything else in the room.
“Sorry, but he needs to go out,” she said. “Don’t sneeze on me.”
I scrambled up on my elbows. “Sorry, hi,” I said idiotically, smearing an arm across my face; and then: “I’m feeling better.”
Her unsettling golden-brown eyes went around the room. “Are you bored? Do you want me to bring you some colored pencils?”
“Colored pencils?” I was baffled. “Why?”
“Uh, to draw with—?”
“Well—”
“Not a big deal,” she said. “All you had to say was no.”