Casebook

  “Well, she does now, and she wants a divorce.”

  “That’s good, right? Is Terry happy?”

  “I guess.” He said that a way that made the word disyllabic.

  We finally shuffled into the house as if handcuffed. My sisters skated around the table in socks, slapping down napkins. It looked as if we were going to get dinner.

  The Mims poured pasta into a colander, then mixed it with garlic and parsley. She stared down at the food.

  “They did research and deduction,” Ben Orion said. “They were obsessed. They’d make good cops.”

  My mom’s half smile fell a millimeter. Boop One called out, What side do the knives go on again?

  I couldn’t settle down at the table. My fingers and toes jumped. Hector and I had kept this to ourselves for so long.

  “Miles said you didn’t know he was married,” Ben said. “I didn’t believe him at first.”

  “I’m an idiot,” the Mims said.

  I never stopped watching her face. I couldn’t tell if she’d been crying. I wondered what Ben Orion had told them.

  “We thought there was some madwoman sending that stuff about Eli from her attic,” Philip said. “And all along it was you guys.” For Philip this was effervescence.

  I was amazed that they weren’t furious. Maybe they would be furious later. Still, it was exhilarating for them to understand what we’d done and have it be all right. I’d joked about coming out as gay to my father, but this was a truer confession. I felt an urge to lead them downstairs on a field trip and show them the wires and the phone from Hector’s garage we’d rigged with Silly Putty, but I kept scanning my mom’s face, and I could see she didn’t want to learn more. She seemed fragile and embarrassed, as if she could barely hold the new information she’d gained and stay herself. I just then remembered she didn’t know about me calling Eli. No one did.

  “Did you think the guy was lying?” Ben Orion asked her. I wished he hadn’t, but her face didn’t avalanche. He had a nice voice. He was sitting next to her. His hand touched her elbow.

  “No. But …” She stopped with a laugh through her nose. “But one time he talked to me about his eighth-grade teacher. She was the one who told him to read a book a day. Eli read a book every day. I loved that about him.”

  “If it was even true,” Ben said.

  “I think that was.” She was doing it, too. She believed everything Eli said except what we knew for sure were lies. Eli didn’t really read a book every day, I bet. How many people did? Hardly any. Not even teachers.

  “She had him over to her house after school,” the Mims went on. “She gave him cake. He said that once the teacher’s husband came home, and she rushed him out the side door. He said nothing ever happened, but I thought he was trying to tell me something. That same year, he moved down to the basement, away from his mother and brother.”

  “I thought they lived in an apartment!” I called from the refrigerator, where I was getting milk.

  “I guess it had a basement,” she said. Our basement and the one beneath Dr. Bach’s office had dirt floors. You couldn’t really move there, like with a bed. My dad’s house didn’t even have a basement. Holland had told me a lot of California houses didn’t.

  “So, what, you think he lost his virginity with his eighth-grade teacher?” I said to her in the kitchen. I’d brought in plates.

  “He’d told me it happened at that age with an older girl. He said it was strange.”

  “Doesn’t sound so strange to me,” I said.

  She hit me with a dish towel. A flash of the old, real her.

  Hector shook his head. “What Eli did was worse than just ordinary lying. Remember how he flew around all the time? Where did he get the money for that?”

  “Maybe he was just in Pasadena.”

  “I think Ben Orion should run a criminal check,” he said.

  I remembered that little sketch Hector had made of Eli that we’d shown to the librarian. We’d put it in Our Psychopath, WANTED printed above the picture, like a mug shot in the post office or the Doors album Philip kept. But wanted for what? For breaking a promise to love? That happened seventeen times a day in just our class at school. That wasn’t criminal enough for Hector. He felt unsatisfied. It seemed too small. He’d thought we were missing our high school life to do something big and important, to chase down evil.

  Eli had promised us money, though. And a future. I still thought he was terrible, even if that was all.

  I wanted everyone to leave. It was a school night. But the grown-ups stood talking on the porch. Hector and I lurked around the bushes on the side of the house. I still felt weird with him. He’d told his dad, and all this time I hadn’t known.

  “Well, case is finally closed,” Ben Orion said. “Done.”

  The Mims sighed. “How can you change the way you feel about someone after six years?”

  “You’re loyal,” Philip said.

  “There’s such a thing as loyalty to the wrong cause,” Ben Orion said. “And he’s a wrong cause if I’ve ever seen one.”

  “ ‘I’ll always love you,’ ” the Mims said, her voice with a sarcastic curve I’d never heard before. “Is that just something people say?”

  “Some people,” Ben Orion said. “Charmers.”

  Snake charmer, more like it.

  “It’s like ‘Let’s have lunch,’ ” Philip said.

  “Oh my God. Philip told a joke.” I felt like calling my dad.

  Just then Kat’s VW pulled up to get Jules. “I thought Miles was yours,” Ben said when she was introduced. So he thought the Mims was Kat. No wonder he had a crush!

  Then, as the Audreys were leaving, a buzz came from Ben’s pocket.

  “Another client?” my mother asked. “A better-paying one, I hope.”

  “Not a client anymore. Used to be. For a long time.” It must have been that woman who’d finally fired him. I felt a twinge: Ben Orion wouldn’t be going out on any dates with the Mims. That woman we’d seen was an ex-actress.

  He waved good-bye, walking down to his car with the phone to his ear.

  The Mims stood in the kitchen, whisking warm milk with cardamom, a star anise floating on top. I wanted to talk. When I’d woken in the night and heard her crying, I understood because I’d seen Eli tickling her on the floor, his face in big clowny exaggeration, softening to her fleeting expressions. Can you fake that? I wanted to ask. But I guessed he could. I said, “Do you think he lied about everything?” She just shrugged. She still didn’t want to talk to me about this. She didn’t talk to our dad about it either.

  This is what you got growing up, I thought. You lost your closest person. I’d entered a new, uncertain feeling with Hector. But at the end of that long night, I realized, nobody had said anything about the animals being delivered to Eli, so we could probably keep the business. I called to tell Hector. “I noticed that, too,” he said. We needed the money. We’d have to take the flyers down from Co-opportunity and Whole Foods and put them somewhere else, he said, somewhere Philip and the Mims didn’t shop. Then Philip came into his room and made him get off the phone.

  I ambled to the Mims’s closet, found the camera, and looked at the pictures in her trash. She didn’t know how to empty her trash. “It’s the same dog, isn’t it?” I said, carrying the whole contraption out. “Hound is the ugly puppy Sare thought was brain-damaged.”

  “Well, would you rather have a different dog?”

  I got down on the floor and set Hound on my chest. “Not now.”

  “That’s what you do. You find the best angle. You crop. You edit. That’s not cheating. That’s love.”

  “Dad’s family sure does that,” I said, “up to and including bragging.”

  My mom sighed. “I remember when I met them. They seemed a whole better world.”

  * * *

  *1 That’s ironic. That that would be my fear.

  *2 It wasn’t the same. But it was a lot.

  66 • Flunking

&
nbsp; I had a small bad worry, always with me, but never precise: my grades. I’d been confiscating our assessments the whole year, and I felt guilty about it. Final reports would be sent the first week of June. I had a wild hope that I’d yanked up my scores the last few weeks. The day Hector got his, mine didn’t come. Hector, who truly was the smartest person I’d ever met, had turned in work as late as humanly possible all spring and still got A minuses. The next morning, I told the Mims I needed a mental health day. When I heard the mail drop I ran and ripped open the verdict.

  Bad. One B minus and three C’s. For my junior year. When it counted. That night, after the Boops went to sleep, I handed the paper to the Mims and stood there as she read. She was never one of those parents who paid for A’s, but I understood that she’d had hopes for me.

  “I know you wanted me to do better,” I said.

  “Miles, I expect you to try your hardest. You know that.”

  “Maybe I did. I’m not as smart as you always thought.”

  “Not everything shows in grades. Come on, let’s take the dog.” She unhooked the leash, the clamp ticking on the floor, and we followed Hound out into the dark. The world smelled more at night. A brush of pine wet my face. I thought of Eli. He’d loved his mother, too; through his lies you could hear that he cherished her: an undereducated secretary who read history books. Yet she’d failed: she’d made one son who had no friends and another who lived his life as an impostor. Her momentary happiness, when her boys got into better colleges than the sons of her employers, turned out to be only a short-lived blast of promise.

  “Look.” My mom nudged me. In front of us a family of deer stood straight-legged, tentative, all pointed in one direction, about to spring.

  Hound went stiff too and started barking to call in the Marines.

  The deer turned, their knees synchronous, and leaped off, down the hill of brush.

  “I’ll get my grades up,” I said. “First semester senior GPA counts, too.”

  “We had a hard year,” she said. “My student evaluations weren’t great either. One said, Professor Adler’s mind seems to be stumbling. She keeps dropping chalk. None of this is your fault. But I need to start focusing on what matters, and I want you to, too.”

  “Tutu,” I said, did a twirl, and tripped.

  67 • Life Goes On, Especially for Other People

  Hector and I didn’t do much that summer. We woke up around noon and then began to figure out how to get to the other’s house. His house was better because Marge left food around, but ours was because no one was home. We puttered lackadaisically, but then, in the late afternoon, we started messing around on our comic book and stayed at it until ten or eleven. I couldn’t completely get rid of the embarrassment I felt from him having told his father what I’d thought was our secret, but we both had a new quiet excitement for our project. Hector got the idea to go to the comic-book store and check out titles like ours. So we made a field trip to Neverland. Locking our bikes, we remembered the library across the street.

  So our schedule developed. We met at twelve thirty, worked in the library until two, and then bought sandwiches for lunch. We had cash from the 20 percent we allowed ourselves of the animal profits. Then we moved across the streets to Neverland. Hector read the good books the length of ours with the same split between text and drawings, and I sought out the bad ones. Whenever I found a really lame story, I read it through. The guys and one girl with a nose ring who worked there teased us about turning the store into a library. At the end of each day, Hector showed me the best book he’d read, and I showed him the worst. Then, invigorated, as much from the worst (ours seemed at least as good as that) as from the best, we rode our bikes home and kept on working. After three weeks, the shame I’d felt from that awful night when he’d told his dad began to dissolve. We started joking about it. Maybe this was the way we could get back to ourselves. Even better, because with this project we didn’t have to wait for discoveries.

  It was too bad we weren’t gay, I thought more than once that summer, because there was no chance either one of us would ever find anyone else as compatible again. Hector was still undeclared. But if he were gay with someone else, I’d have been offended. We’d gotten lucky. For the rest of the time we both lived in our parents’ houses, we were best friends, and the comic epic we were trying to make together was the most important work we’d ever done, more important than school. It lingered in us long after tennis and surfing became occasional sports and pastimes.

  Hector had the brilliant idea of showing the double lives on different-colored backgrounds. But once the kids busted the Villain, our story seemed to peter out. Then what? The characters on the light background just went back to regular life, which doesn’t really fly in comics.

  “How about sex?” Hector said. “Maybe we should put that in.”

  I shook my head.

  Hector had changed the signs we’d posted to say we accepted animals under twenty-five pounds and that larger mammals could be handled only by special arrangement. On the phone, we explained that oversize animals had to be brought to the outside patio of Peet’s in Pasadena, where we’d take possession. We’d located the Lees’ dog door. Twice, we shoved pets in and then obstructed the flap with a fallen branch. The night they busted us, Philip had made us agree to give the money we’d already earned to the animal rights club, but he and the Mims never exactly forbade us to continue. We took down our signs from Whole Foods and Co-opportunity. We didn’t go to Pasadena often, only once a month or so. We carried treats to quiet the barking dogs. Twice, the house was completely dark. Once, a car slid to a stop in front, its door slammed, and Eli carried a suitcase up to the porch. He opened the mailbox, took out envelopes, and then let himself in with a key.

  The Mims and Philip ran mornings; she ate now, but she still seemed too thin. For Marge, on the other hand, weight loss helped. I found a book, open on my mom’s desk.

  O Western wind, when wilt thou blow

  That the small rain down can rain?

  Christ, that my love were in my arms,

  And I in my bed again!

  So she still missed him, I guessed. Maybe she hoped he’d return. But how could he? Wouldn’t he have to start all over at the beginning and tell us the real version? He’d have to get a divorce first off. I didn’t think impostors came back. What would they come back to? He hadn’t ever been known.

  And Eli had a real life in Pasadena. I’d seen it.

  But I supposed that real life wasn’t enough for him either.

  Hound liked to roughhouse. He’d push up next to me and bite the end of my pants when he craved exercise. I threw the squeak toy into the yard. He bounded to get it, but he hadn’t yet learned how to bring it back to me. I had to fight it out of his mouth to throw it again. I tossed it too far into the side yard and he wouldn’t go into the bushes, so I climbed through the untended margin between our house and the fence to retrieve it and heard my mom talking in her room. I’d promised myself not to eavesdrop anymore, but this had to qualify as a complete accident.

  “I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to him,” she said.

  I stood in the mess of unidentified growth holding the squeak toy and thinking, But what did it even mean to say good-bye to someone who wasn’t all real? I felt discouraged. It had been such a long time. In high school people got over people faster.

  “He fed me at restaurants,” she said. “I thought he loved me.” That made her think he loved her!

  “He did love you,” someone else said. “Remember how he came to my office hysterical? You can’t put that on.” Her office! It was the old doctor, the psychiatrist who made house calls. “He loved you, but he’s crazy. He’s just too crazy.”

  Then what were feelings worth? Like currency, their value depended on a sound treasury, so love from a liar was pretty worthless. “He’s just too crazy,” the ancient doctor said again, her voice light, as if insanity were a joke. My long-ago impression had been that she was a pa
rty girl, just a very, very old one. But was she good at her job? I wondered, with a shiver, if my mom was improving at all.

  At the edge of the perimeter, Hound growled.

  “Philip says I should call his wife. He thinks the two of us would have a lot to talk about.”

  I thought of that wife we’d seen ironing. The Victim. I’d watched her swoosh her boy up in the park. She’d stepped onto her porch with a curler in her hair, a frill of paper between her toes. The idea of her and my mom talking seemed as impossible as the Mims having a conversation with Olive Oyl, Marge Simpson, or, for that matter, a figure Hector had drawn.

  She sighed. “What am I going to do for the rest of my life?”

  “Have you thought about online dating?” the aged doctor said.

  I crawled back to Hound, who stood stiff-legged at the edge of his known world.

  The old doctor seemed to think love was a laughing matter, a question of who asked you to dance at the big, long party. Sare didn’t believe in love at all. She understood that the Mims was working through her days with no particular hope. Welcome to the human condition was pretty much her point of view. But not Marge’s.

  “I just don’t think I can live without him,” the Mims had said to Marge one night while they sat at the table working.

  “Well, maybe that’ll change. And, if you can’t get over it, we’ll just have to get him away from Jean somehow.”

  I’d liked hearing that, even though I knew better.

  “Kat’s getting married,” Philip said during one of the dawn hikes he and my mom still dragged us on, as we stood looking at the vast detailed carpet of LA.

  “She really is now?” the Mims said.

  “They set a date.”

  I turned to Hector. He looked down. You don’t tell me anything, I thought.

  At the bottom by the cars, Philip mentioned, “They offered me a job at Cottonwoods. Teaching drama. But they put on a musical comedy every winter. I’ve never even seen one.”