Casebook

  In March, a stranger who’d seen our flyer on the community board called. After two obedience classes and a shock collar, her pit bull still attacked. For a biter, I told her, we’d have to charge three fifty. Hector stuck his foot near my face to show the holes in the bottom of his sneaker. We promised to fetch the pit on Friday. It lived near Hector’s dad. But when we arrived, it was obvious that we weren’t what the owner had expected. She sat at her desk writing the check very, very slowly. “Your parents will help with this?” she asked, some shred of compunction battling her desire to get rid of the dog. Hector nodded. Then she led us to a pen where the dog stood, ears up, and handed over the leather-and-chain leash.

  That fib came true. We tied Moto to a tree in Philip’s backyard, putting out food and water in their lost dog’s bowls. We told Philip we knew of a family in Pasadena that would take him. Philip assumed this was part of the animal rights club at Cottonwoods, and we didn’t say anything to dispel that notion. After two nights of howling, Philip stuck him in the car. Jules butted against me; Moto took up most of the seat.

  We got out a few doors down from Eli’s house. Everything was pitch-dark.

  “What if they’re out of town?” I whispered to Hector, yanking the dog. The dog just sat on the sidewalk, so I pulled, scraping his bottom along the cement. We’d brought Rebel’s bowls for food, which we carried in a Baggie, and water that we would pour from my thermos. I had a pocket of treats, too. If they were out of town, though, then what? Maybe Moto would die. I thought of Tomcat all of a sudden. I hoped I’d see him.

  The house stood still and closed. We hooked the leash around the doorknob, knotted it. When we started walking away, the pit barked, and then we scrammed.

  All the next day, I kept thinking about that dog hooked to the doorknob. I pestered Hector to skip seventh period. After two hours and three buses, we still had to walk a long time, Hector in his shoes with the holes. Their street was hard to find, even with Google Maps. We had my thermos full of water and another bag of dog food in my backpack. We’d googled the Pasadena pound, too. If worse came to worst, we could drag Moto there. Once we arrived, though, the porch was swept. No scattered kibble. No bowls. It was as if we hadn’t tied a dog there the night before.

  “I told you it’d be fine,” Hector said.

  “But we couldn’t know.” Walking back toward the bus, we passed a mini-mall with a sports shop. I elbowed Hector in to buy shoes. We had three hundred fifty dollars. We threw his old shoes into a Dumpster. We bought a six-pack of socks, too. “You know what I just thought of?” he said. “I bet they have a dog door. We could’ve shoved him in. Shut it from outside with a stone.”

  That night the moon hung low and enormous. “It’s a super-moon,” Hector said. “We’re at the perigee. It’s thirteen percent bigger and way brighter than usual.” These were the kinds of facts Philip and Hector just knew.

  Our house stayed quiet. We kept to our rooms.

  We finally finished the last Wire.

  Sare maintained a discussion with the Mims about whether she should ask Eli to return the watch. The Mims didn’t think so; it was a gift, she said.

  “Still. A good watch.” Sare probably felt guilty: she’d talked the Mims into giving it to him in the first place, instead of to me.

  They listed items, as they remembered:

  Cuff links

  The watch

  A pen

  The string bracelet*

  She forgot those father-son synthetic mitts from Canada. The camera. My baby clothes. For the next few months, I checked my mom’s drawer for the note Sare had drafted, and I always found it. Please send back the gifts which were chosen with love for a person who turned out not to exist. She never sent it.

  Underneath was the corner scrap of yellow lined paper: Yours is the last face I’ll see. I always covered that right back up.

  We scrawled the list inside a bubble in Our Psychopath, like a message in a bottle. Maybe someday, I thought, I’d receive a package with no return address, and there would be my watch.

  The running, the hikes, the obedience classes, the applications she and Marge wrote at the kitchen table, her renewed preparation for classes—they were all efforts, and maybe they helped. But happiness—I didn’t see that returning. A light had gone out.

  “Okay, I found something,” Marge said, walking in briskly one night in April. “He was fired over a year ago. People think it was something personal; he was difficult. Moody. But I got the name of the woman he had the affair with. Lorelei Bruckner.”

  Marge had already looked her up. It had been easy: the woman had given the NSF a forwarding address. She lived in Northern California now. She’d left science altogether. I remembered what Eli had said about her. He’d said it was just an affair. He hadn’t told her he loved her. He said he couldn’t be with her because she didn’t read. I remembered hearing that and thinking, What, she’s illiterate? Oh, and she’d said unpleasant things about his wife.

  “Well, she’s no slouch,” Marge said. After the NSF, she worked at the Smithsonian and then at the National Gallery, in their design departments. Now she was a potter, with her own business. Marge showed the Mims her webpage.

  My mother and Marge flew up to Marin County to meet the potter sometime in the next few weeks. They must have left and come back the same day. I didn’t know they’d gone until I heard them talking about it with Sare one evening around the kitchen table.

  Apparently, Lorelei—the potter—told my mom that when she and Eli worked at NSF they’d both been married. He’d pursued her very aggressively in the office. Everyone knew. They’d moved in together, and one night they’d come home from dinner and found Jean sitting on the steps of their place, chewing the ends of her hair. Eventually, they each got their own apartments. The affair went on another two years, but he always came to her house; he never let her come to his.

  When my mom told her what had happened to us, Lorelei shook her head. She said she was sorry to hear that he was still up to that; she’d hoped once he and Jean reconciled and had the child, he would have made that his life. They’d asked if Eli had ever said I love you. She laughed a little. She said she had a box full of letters that would answer that question.

  So he’d lied at the very beginning, the Mims said. That seemed important to her.

  The potter offered to send them the box of letters; her husband always said she should throw it out. She liked the idea of it finally coming to some use.

  “I’m glad at least she has a husband,” Sare said. “No children?”

  My mom murmured no, no kids. After Eli, Marge said, she’d been alone years before she met the man she married. Eli had cost her the chance to have a family. Something about the way Marge said that made me remember that she didn’t have kids either. That seemed a serious thing. Like a lack of money.

  Marge and the Mims had each bought a pot from her studio. Sare picked up the vase and complimented it. That was what had made them start talking about Lorelei in the first place. A while before, the white vase had appeared on our table, where it always stayed. I hadn’t thought to wonder where it had come from.

  The Mims had already placed orders for Christmas. Every year, from then on, we gave small white vases instead of cakes.

  * * *

  * Seeing that list we put into the book again was weird. “Cuff links. The watch. A pen. The string bracelet.” We should have added: + 6 years.

  65 • Busted

  Then the doorbell rang on a Tuesday night and the Audreys stood there, Jules swaybacked against her dad, elbows hooked in his arms. He unlatched her and sent her to the Boops’ room. “Sit down, guys,” he said. By now, the Mims had shuffled in. Philip took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to me and Hector. “Could you please explain this?”

  A laugh slipped out of me. It was one of Hector’s signs. His picture of monstro dog and electric cat. He must have left a copy in the printer at home. But no, there were staple holes. Could Phili
p have unhinged it from the Co-opportunity community board?

  “Did you get paid for the pit bull I drove to Pasadena?”

  My mom’s neck jolted at the city name. I mumbled that we had expenses. Animal treats. And what with soup selling prohibited … We didn’t say that the yard where we’d left the pit belonged to Eli. I was listening carefully to detect any hint that they knew. I didn’t think they did.

  “Could you please explain who Ben Orion is,” the Mims said.

  My eyes and Hector’s found each other. “What is this, the Inquisition? How do you know his name? No, Mom. I really want to hear where you got that.”

  “Is he someone from FLAG?” Philip asked, never having attached the BTU.

  “Did you meet on the Internet?” the Mims asked. The pedophile fear! Now she’d infected Philip. I looked around as if my father might jump out from behind a chair.

  “He’s not a pedophile, Mom. He’s just a friend of ours.”

  “He’s a man in his thirties, Miles. That’s not a normal age for a friend of yours to be.”

  “How do you know this person?” Philip asked.

  We looked down. Neither of us broke. Then Philip asked Hector to walk around the block with him. Watching them go, I noticed how Hector put his left hand in a back pocket, just like his dad. They had exactly the same gait. Hector was close to his father. I knew that. I didn’t envy it exactly. It was more complicated than that. I loved Philip, but I knew, without even forming the thought, that for me, I would always pick my dad.

  “Ben Orion is a perfectly decent guy, Mom. You want to meet him? I’ll call him right now and ask him to come over.”

  “Please do that, Miles.”

  Ugh. I hadn’t expected her to say yes. She stood there while I began to dial. I hoped he wouldn’t answer. The last few times we’d called we’d gotten his machine. He was still mad at us from the day with Tomcat, when the VW ran out of gas. He’d never thanked us for our Bundt cake. Then again, we hadn’t put a tag on it. He might not have known it was from us. Please, please don’t answer, I thought. Be gone.

  “You know this thirty-nine-year-old man’s number by heart!” my mom said.

  How did she know his exact age? We didn’t even know that.

  “Ben Orion here,” he answered.

  “Oh, hey, Ben? Yeah. It’s Miles,” I said. I explained that my mom wanted to meet him. It was okay if he couldn’t make it. I mean, I knew it was last-minute, I said.

  But he offered to drive right over.

  Philip returned with Hector shambling behind. “Let’s let the boys do their homework,” he said.

  “In other words, you want to talk about us.” That was all right. I needed Hector alone anyway. “She made me call Ben!” I hissed when he closed my door. “And he’s coming!”

  But Hector wouldn’t look at me. All of a sudden, I understood: he’d caved.

  Why? My face dropped into my hands. We had been working on this mystery together a long time; Hector was so close; he didn’t feel like a completely other person. It was nearly as if I’d been doing it all alone. We’d moved in complete secrecy, almost as if we were playing a make-believe game in our own heads. Now our mutual figments were being lifted out of the water into air for everyone to see.

  “The pill thing,” Hector said. “That night I snuck out and we went to Rite Aid, I got in big trouble coming back. And I was scared. I thought the Mims might get addicted or start drinking or something.*1 That seemed more important than a secret.”

  “Did you tell about soup selling, too, then?” I felt ashamed all of a sudden. I’d thought we were in this together. Maybe everyone felt sorry for our family.

  He swore that he’d only told his dad about my mom being depressed that one night in December, and now he told him that we’d researched Eli and transferred pets. Two separate things. He hadn’t told him we brought the creatures to Eli’s house. Philip was going to make us give the money to my sister’s animal club.

  “Ohww. Not even to FLAGBTU?”

  “He’s a homophobe,” Hector mumbled. “They all are.” The doorbell rang. Hound barked as if the enemy had landed.

  It was Ben Orion. Standing in the kitchen, he seemed cut from a glossy magazine next to our pale parents, who belonged on thin comic-book paper. Wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a blazer, he looked literally sharp, his colors more saturated, his hair a true black, his teeth whiter. I wondered if he actually did resemble a pedophile. “I thought I’d seen you before,” he was saying to my mom. “I guess it was somebody else.” So he hadn’t seen her. I thought he had a crush on the Mims as a damsel in distress. But she turned out not to be the damsel he’d seen. Perhaps distress, by itself, wouldn’t cut it. It shocked me again: maybe my mother was plain. From Eli I’d learned where to look to find her symmetries. Maybe no one else could. Maybe we really were pitiable, I was just beginning to understand.

  “I’m a private investigator,” Ben said, “and once upon a time these two found me in the yellow pages.” He took out his reserve police badge, which wasn’t actually a badge at all but a card in his wallet, with a drawing of a badge. “And I’m familiar with Cottonwoods kids, because I lived with Zoe Fisher, the art teacher there, and her son, Ez. When these two first came to me, I couldn’t decide what to think.”

  I realized he was going to tell the story of us.

  “I thought they were probably imagining things that weren’t there or that the adults already knew about. I tried to talk them out of it. But then I slowly got the sense that they were beyond their depth—”

  Philip interrupted. “Guys.” He looked to my mom, who was nodding in agreement with him. She unhooked the dog’s leash from the peg. “Walk him to the beach and back,” Philip said.

  As we passed through the living room where Boop One and Jules were choreographing a dance, I shouted back, “Why do they get to stay?”

  “Because we’re very good,” Boop One said, a leg diagonal in the air. “And you’re in trouble!” Then she folded herself around the dog. Boop One annoyed me, though I could see her same shapes in Ella, and she didn’t annoy me at all. These girls—I suppose you’d call them the girly girls—had bodies that could fold and unfold again. Smoothly. Boop One slid down from standing to the splits. “She’s more of a leaps girl than a turns girl,” I heard as we left. “I’m a turns girl.”

  I actually didn’t mind being banished. A wind from the ocean cuffed our faces. Maybe for the first time in our lives Hector and I didn’t have much to say to each other. I was mortified that he’d been talking about us to his father. I’d taken it for granted that we were partners. Hector was probably the most important person in my life. I loved Ella; that was a sharp, narrow, painful feeling. But Hector was way more central. In my life then, someone could be insufficiently imaginary, like Maude, and someone else, Ella, insufficiently real. Hector was the only person who was right.

  But maybe it wasn’t the same for him.*2

  We let the dog lead us. Philip had said to go to the beach, but when we came to the street where we’d turn for Ben Orion’s house, Hound pulled in that direction. Like a Ouija, maybe he felt our prompting. We followed. Ben had left lights on inside, so the windows glowed. The Mims always yelled after us to turn off our lights.

  “I wonder if we’ll ever come here anymore,” I said.

  “I kind of doubt it.” Then we were quiet. “Kat got a job,” Hector finally said.

  “You mean, besides working for Sare?”

  “Yeah. Some people hired her to make their kitchen.”

  “Oh, she can do that really well.” Kat had had a breakfast restaurant once, called Jams. After all the times Hector had referred to her as Charlie’s mom’s gopher and Sare’s slave, good news sounded odd coming from him, but of course I knew that all kids really love their mothers. “They tore out a picture from a magazine and said they wanted it to look like that. She told them, ‘Fine, it’ll look like that if you let me take the pictures.’ ”

  We f
ell quiet again. “How’s your aunt?” I asked, trying to make conversation. We’d never had to do that before. “Is the married guy still being all nice? Or was that just right after the holidays?”

  “You know how she doesn’t have kids to spend money on? Well, my dad told her she didn’t have to pay our tuitions anymore, and she had a meltdown. It turned out she liked being necessary. She says her life is going to have to change.”

  “So wait a minute, why isn’t she necessary? Because of your mom’s new job?”

  “I guess that and my dad teaching and with Marge.”

  “What do you mean, with Marge? Are your dad and Marge getting together?” I hadn’t meant to say that the way it came out, kind of shrill, but I’d never thought of Philip with Marge. The Mims and Philip had talked on the porch so much this terrible year, I’d hoped—I didn’t know what I’d hoped. I’d started to wish they would decide they liked each other, but then I worried that Hector would have to move into my tiny room and we already had too many girls. Now I wanted that option back.

  “I think so. She bought a frying pan.”

  “For your house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. Then it sounds like they are.” My organs sank. We still stared at Ben’s windows. What now? I thought.

  “But my aunt, though?” Hector said. “She gave her boss an ultimatum to tell his wife. He said his wife knew, she knew and she didn’t know, she knew as much as she wanted to know. But Terry said she had to be able to call him at home. ’Cause the way it was, if he was in the hospital, she couldn’t even go see him.”

  “And did his wife really know?”