Casebook: A novel

  “I own every musical comedy recording there is,” Marge said. “I can tutor you.” She started a shuffle ball change, hands flat and parallel to the ground, so she looked like a bear dancing. Even thinner, you could still see her big.

  When we were alone again in our house, Boop Two asked the Mims if she was ever going to remarry.

  “She can’t,” Boop One interrupted. “You have us. And that’s enough for you. I don’t think Marge and Philip will really get married either.”

  “Why not?” I said. Hector had told me on the way down the mountain that they’d had a new washer/dryer installed.

  Boop One shrugged. “I just don’t think so. She doesn’t look like a second wife.”

  My mom said she hadn’t heard anything about a wedding. But Marge had picked someone from the architecture department to draw an addition to Philip’s house. Hector and Jules would each get their own rooms. She was probably too busy to plan a ceremony, the Mims said. Marge warmed to the project of it all, the sad house with its broken machines, the children whose mother lived with a fragile sister. I could see her happiness: a contained excitement, a private, satisfied calm.

  “So you think it’s a good thing for Marge?” I asked.

  The Mims sipped her coffee. “Yes. I worry about her work. But she wants this.”

  So both of Hector’s parents had found someone.

  Mine remained single. And still, the Mims was too sad.

  68 • The Unnecessary Lies

  Maude Stern had the good-student habit of reading the newspaper every day, even in summer. When she dropped by flyers against Prop 8, which was on the ballot for November, she told me three or four things, and I spaced out. She followed me to my room, still talking. Whenever she came into my lair, she started picking up papers from the floor. Maude loved busywork. “What is this?” she asked.

  “Just leave it,” I said, the way I did to my mom.

  She was starting SAT boot camp. She said I should do it, too. She always moved frantically the first minutes alone with me. She circled the room, making neater stacks, collecting old homework from the floor, balling the paper and throwing it into the basket.

  She told me that her mom was putting together family photo albums. Her life was worse than mine: the bad guy was her dad. She looked at me, her hands hanging ready, and I could see—this time in my room; it wasn’t the same for her. It was more. Maybe this was how you kept someone hanging on. Had Eli seen us the way I saw Maude?

  I thought I understood what was supposed to happen. I could pat a spot next to me on the bed, like I did for Hound just before he jumped. I was even attracted to her that afternoon in an easy way, like a door one inch open. She wore shorts and a sleeveless blouse. I didn’t feel even one percent nervous.

  I wanted sex. I thought about it all the time. I jerked off every night. Except for Hector, the other Rabid Rabbits were having it. Charlie had Laura; Simon had Cait. For all our trying to prove what good divorces we were, the Rabid Rabbits who had intact families were the ones who got girlfriends and sex. I’d lost weight, but I wasn’t buff like Charlie. Ella had never returned my text. I could smell Maude’s shampoo or something, the chemical spray of it, astringent, maybe orange. But the air held no charge. I turned my face away.

  Instead of patting the spot next to me, I stood.

  In a little while, she left, her head bumping on the square paper hanging light.

  What did other people feel? Was it what I’d passed up the chance of with Maude or what I still longed for from Ella?

  When Neverland closed to do inventory, Hector and I counted and shelved for two days. We took cash, made change, and bagged the comics at the Saturday-morning crate sale in the back parking lot. “Wish we could hire you guys,” Hershel, the owner, said, “but we’ll give you the staff discount. You earned it.”

  The Mims drove the Boops and me to see an old table in a warehouse. She asked, did we like it? We said, Well, yeah, I guess, but what for? It was too tall to eat around. Or for a desk. She said it had been made that way because people worked at it standing. It was a Chinese counting table. But Sare knew someone who could chop the legs down. She wanted to use it as a dining table.

  Later that day, Sare and Reed met us there with an SUV. We spread packing blankets over the roof and tied the table on top.

  We went bowling with Ben Orion and he asked us what books we’d read. He offered to take us to a conference on forensic induction.

  “Do you think Eli ever separated like he said?” I asked. “He told my mom once that he apologized to his wife’s father.”

  There was a look Ben got now whenever I brought up Eli. But I hadn’t said his name the whole first hour at the bowling alley!

  “When your mom asked if she could see his divorce papers, the guy said sure. His saying something doesn’t get you any closer to the truth. You guys need to remember that the case is closed.”

  “But you have to admit,” Hector said, “it wasn’t a very good ending.”

  “Not a good one, maybe, but it’s the end. We know he’s a bad guy.” He knocked out the remaining pins. A spare.

  “Miles’d like to be done. He can’t help it,” Hector said. “He loved him.” I felt grateful to him for knowing me.

  “I didn’t understand that.” Ben sat on the edge of the chute, hands clasped. The clicks and rings of a strike in the lane next to us clattered. “What do you still want to learn?”

  The things that really bugged me now were the unnecessary lies. Eli had accepted our gifts for his kid. Why?

  “He pretended they were from him,” Ben said. “Saved him some money. And they helped his guilt; he could tell himself his kid was getting something out of this, too.”

  “Who did he say my old clothes were from?”

  “He probably just threw them away.”

  Those tiny garments she’d carefully laundered and folded, that had once been saved for our children—they were gone forever.

  “And he wanted to be the only one she talked to. But knowing what he knew, shouldn’t he have been glad she had friends? If he cared about her at all?”

  “Here, your turn,” Ben said. My favorite ball had choked up the chute. It was purple and marbleized. “You’re hoping for some kind of honor among thieves. The only place to find that is at the movies. You know, the longer you work in criminal justice, those stories begin to seem like fairy tales.”

  “So that’s just all?” Hector said. “Nothing happens to him?”

  “Here’s what we can do. We’ll tune in every so often and watch the show. We can’t lock him up, but somebody else might. We won’t lift a finger. We’ll just see. And call it God or karma or whatever, usually these guys get it in the end.”

  I looked up at him, surprised. “Do you believe in God?”

  “I believe in good over evil,” he said. “Of course. Don’t you?”

  “No.” I shrugged. “I’m half Jewish.” Hector and I didn’t pursue that further. Neither of us wanted to find out Ben was some wack religious. The age we were, with the education we’d had, any religion seemed superstition.

  “He’ll probably never send back that watch,” I said. I thought he kept all our gifts in one place, like the Mims’s drawer. His presents to her were all promises. For a tattoo, a suit, loyalty on his deathbed. All except Irene Adler, I have known you. Someday, maybe, he’d give my watch to his own kid.

  “It’s likely in some Pasadena pawnshop by now,” Ben said. That shocked me. But Eli had thought she was dead, and he hadn’t called us.

  I could live without his loot.

  At the end Ben asked how my mom was doing.

  I told him not so great. Not the same as before.

  “She hikes with my dad,” Hector volunteered.

  “Well, ’cause of the puppy. Hound needs exercise.”

  “It peed on my dad.”

  “Hey, you told me Eli was a big animal rights guy? Well, I put out an alert on the address. Turns out they rented their house
to McDonald’s. That tells you they’re hard up. Those commercial shoots wreck a place. And how does McDonald’s square with animal rights? Tell your mom that. Maybe it’ll help.” When he dropped us off at our house, the Mims waved at him from the porch.

  Hector and I were waiting in line at the Aero when a guy with a ponytail came out. “Sorry, people. The kid who does the concessions didn’t show. I had to start the popcorn before I opened the doors. I’m the only one here, so I’ll collect tickets, and then we’ll move to the refreshment bar.” I offered to help. He showed me how to tear the tickets and drop half down a slot in a wooden box. When the movie started, I said I’d like to put in an application. By the end of the night I had a job.

  From then on, four evenings a week I took tickets, swept, sold popcorn and Cokes. I let Hector in for free. My dad stopped sometimes on his way home from work. He snapped a picture of me in the outside booth and made it the wallpaper on his phone. For some reason, the movie theater didn’t scare him about pedophiles. Or maybe he’d finally outgrown that fear. Thinking so made me nostalgic.

  69 • The Sex Journal

  By the time school started, Hector and I had reputations as do-gooders, because of the money Philip made us give to the Animal Rights Collective. Our donations had benefits: quite a few good-looking girls apparently cared about animals; they’d learned our names and voted to fund FLAGBTU’s fight against Prop 8. They elected Boop Two as vice president. And just from the handed-over money, we’d completed our community service hours for the first time in our whole academic lives. The only bad thing was that the pretty girls assumed we were gay.

  We vowed to quit the animal-transfer business; we needed better grades, especially I did, but we still had one schnauzer to deliver. Then that would be it.

  Boop One hipped into my room, a leg pointed in the air. “Can I have ten dollars for the In-N-Out truck? Mom’s not home and I’m going to Jules’s play.”

  “How’re you getting there?”

  “Philip.”

  “I’ll look in the Mims’s drawer.” I found two fifties and some curled ones. I started flattening the dollars. My sister discovered a stack of old baseball cards with her mug on them that she couldn’t stop cooing over (“Look how little I was! Aww!”). I had nine dollars when she gasped. She’d opened one of those cardboard FedEx envelopes and taken out a picture of our mother naked.

  “Give me that.” I grabbed. Queasy. A yellow Post-it was stuck to the cardboard: I want to get frames. I shoved the photograph back in the envelope and returned to counting, all business. “Okay, I’ll give you nine and change. That enough?”

  “Yes,” she said, her hand ready for the money. “Why would she do that? Get pictures taken with her booty like that?”

  “Medical reasons,” I said. Good save. A car honked in front. She ran out.

  “What time will you be home?” I called after her, trying to sound parental.

  “Later,” she yelled back.

  I opened the cardboard envelope. There were more, five in all, taken in our old house. It’s strange to look at nude photographs of your mother. They made me feel exposed. As if I would never be attractive. They were odd pictures. Her face looked pretty, her smile like an open fan. Her body looked too pale and bare—shy, as if it wanted to put on clothes. She wasn’t as thin then. I recognized Eli’s penmanship on the Post-it. He must have taken the pictures. I felt like burning them. I’d leave the one of her back; in it, she looked like she could be anyone or even a smooth rock. Someday my sisters would want this, I thought, their mother beautiful at forty-something. Her back. But I slid the black-and-white photos between the cardboard so nothing looked different. It was her property. She wouldn’t want me touching it.

  I had the feeling again that I’d had when I was afraid there was more bad to find.

  But what could be left? I rummaged in the drawer. I found his letter, in the envelope with no return address, and a small black Moleskine notebook, closed with a rubber band. I slipped the band off, opened it, and inside the fly read, Our Sex Journal. Then snapped it shut. It was what Hector had once guessed. A prank! I thought, Hector planted it! The idea spread with relief, but no, I realized, Hector would never have taken the risk—not to put this in my mom’s room. Hector came over less now anyway. This was a Friday, and he wasn’t here. On the first page, I recognized Eli’s small, spidery writing.

  Where are my arms?

  What did he mean, Where are my arms? Sex again. Liquids swirled in my gut. I put the rubber band back around the Moleskine and closed the drawer.

  Boop One asked me later, “What ever happened to Eli?”

  “That’s over,” I said.

  She nodded, absorbing the information. “Is he still in Washington?”

  “I don’t know where he is.” I shrugged. “Not in our life.”

  My bad. The Mims would have said something like We’re friends now. I thought of all the trouble our parents took with the divorce, the We still love each others and the as a familys. Parents don’t want kids to think people just fall off into anonymity. And they don’t normally. My dad was coming over for dinner the next night.

  Boop Two sluffed in with a friend. I’d noticed before that Boop One’s friends looked like her—they wore sweats and leotards and always seemed to know where their legs went. They kept their hair in neat buns or brushed it out long and shiny. Boop Two had her peeps, too. This girl wore hiking boots and fleece. One long thick braid swung on her back.

  I heard our mom in the kitchen and thought of the Moleskine. Eli had remembered Zeke’s and Simon’s names, my daily class schedule, for Pete’s sake. With his memory, I shuddered to think what was in that notebook. I hated that the thing existed in our house. Hector had hounded me about sex for our comic. I’d put him off. Even now, I didn’t tell him about the Moleskine, though I wanted to talk about it to someone. But I thought he’d zero in on it for other reasons than just me and my roiled brain. And there was no one else to tell.

  After a week, I finally stole the thing and handed it over to him.

  His jaw actually dropped, and this time his eyes fell more open, too.

  “Did you read it?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. I had an aversion.

  The way Hector held the small notebook, a finger on the cover, I could tell he felt a tingle. He wanted something for our comic.

  “Read it fast,” I said, “so I can replant it before she notices it’s gone.”

  In school a day later, Hector showed me a picture. A made bed, the cover nicked in under the pillows. One window. A Canary Island pine outside. That all seemed okay. He gave the Moleskine back. “Finished?” I said, and he nodded.

  “Anything I need to know?”

  He thought a minute. “Most of it wasn’t even about sex.” They’d had conversations running and on the phone. They’d talked for years, before anything. The monster had written that their relationship rested on a long, deep friendship.

  “Right,” I whispered. Not like any friendship I ever want.

  I slipped the Moleskine back into the drawer, never to be opened by me again. I rummaged around and in the back found a small leather pillbox, inside of which was the Ring.* I wondered what the Mims was going to do with it. She never wore it anymore. She had two daughters; she could hardly give it to one of them. But I was glad it was still here, in with the scraps of paper, promises from Eli, and our baby teeth.

  Boop Two rallied the Animal Rights Collective to carry signs against Prop 8 with us in front of the polling booths. So it was animal activists in fleece, bunches of girly girls who were also members, and our weird gang from FLAGBTU. A guy in a Cadillac rolled down his windows and called my twin sisters lesbos, ten feet away from real lesbos. Maude thumped the front of his car.

  But we lost.

  After the polls came in, Hector and I waded through a crowd of girls to my room and closed the door, with a chair hooked up under the knob so they couldn’t enter. This house always seemed fuller than
our old one. Hound whimpered against the door, knocking his tail. I finally asked Hector about the Moleskine.

  In the beginning, Hector said, the Mims told Eli she had problems. With sex. Hector asked me how much I wanted to hear. Less than I’d heard already, I said.

  Eli had made her talk about it. Talk some more, he’d said. Just blab.

  It’s pretty bad, she’d told him. I think of my mother.

  What was so bad about that? I’d known my grandmother. She’d run, pushing my tricycle, wearing a long scarf, the times we’d visited Detroit.

  Hector opened his notebook and showed me a sketch of a woman yanking up her T-shirt.

  I have to show you. From breastfeeding.

  One smaller than the other.

  “He cried the first time,” Hector told me.

  Eli cried! What was I supposed to do with that?

  And after, he sent her a list of ideas. That seemed to involve pillows.

  “Maybe I don’t need to hear this.” You’ve heard of dry humping? It turned out there was also such a thing as dry retching.

  We were quiet for a while.

  He showed me a panel.

  Pitched up on his arms, in a bed, Eli asked, Where are you?

  And so I told him. Where I was, was not with him.

  Tell me where you are, Eli said a lot. He wanted to climb inside her thought bubble, join her there.

  I had a headache starting. Rounded brains throbbed against my skull. I shouldn’t know this. She wouldn’t have told me. This is why you shouldn’t break into people’s privacy.

  She needed to imagine ugly things.

  I gagged, feeling sick, maybe permanently unhappy. If this was where all our investigations led, I understood: Ben Orion had been right. We’d gone too far.

  Hector said Eli found porn on his computer, postage-stamp-sized pictures of young girls. Eli thought a certain type of girl excited her. He said he could tell she was aroused.

  A word a person should never hear about one’s mother.