Casebook: A novel

  My dad helped himself to seconds before he brought up my future. “Your SATs matter now, Miles,” he said. “But once those are done, I’d like you to find something educational. An internship. A volunteer program abroad. I don’t see that taking tickets at a movie theater will expand your perspective.”

  “You guys cost me hundreds of dollars I could have earned selling soup.”

  “Cry me a river,” my dad said.

  “I ate soup every day for a year!”

  When I went in to say good night to the Boops, they were looking at a baby book, a Berenstain Bear. Dad had annotated it, adding a Twin Sister Bear to the drawings. Our dad was a master of scribbles found years later that made a child’s book permanently personal, theirs and his. The Mims seemed to be okay with just the evaporating present. Those nights Dad stayed for supper the Boops whispered in their room in the dark.

  Our parents were laughing together in the kitchen.

  “We are close, Irene,” he was saying. “We’ve been talking for forty minutes.”

  “You’re not the only one I told,” she said.

  “I know I’m not the only one, but I’m in the rotation.”

  That was love, I supposed. Not romantic love. But a kind of love we still had. Leave it to my dad; he’d found a way to earn his A in Divorce.

  When I went to say good night, he had to keep his mouth in check: it wanted to smile; you could sense his muscles pulling the edges down. “If I’d known heterosexuality would make you this happy,” I said, “I’d have told you in time for soup selling.” The long joke was over (no coming out for April Fools’ Day), but they didn’t say anything more about my ticket taking. I kept my job.

  As my dad was walking down to his car, Ben Orion was loping up to take the dog for a walk. He and the Mims set out. When she returned with Hound, I asked her if she and Ben were ever going to date. She got that smile. The smile.

  But then she said no. She said she wanted Ben to have the whole shebang: a wife, children, all of it. And she was too old.

  “He’s your same age, almost,” I pointed out.

  Just then my phone buzzed. Ella.

  73 • A Noise in the Night

  A noise woke me in the middle of the night, and I made myself shove up. I thought it was the Mims, crying again. Marge said that it took half as long as you were with a person to get over them. And the Mims had been with Eli six years. He’d bought that house with his wife in the middle of it. Buying a house was a huge deal, even I knew that. He must have made his decision then and put off the ugly duty of telling us.

  I found the Mims on the back porch, holding Hound. “He was whimpering,” she said, her face dry, a cup of tea next to her. I rummaged on the cluttered kitchen counter, found a tennis ball, and threw it across our small backyard. He ran, leaping in the dark. He could fetch but still not retrieve. We watched him together. Our delight.

  Open cookbooks were strewn on the porch next to a small shoebox. She told me she’d been reading recipes as bedtime stories. Now that I was up, I didn’t feel tired. She talked about work. She and Marge strayed in and out of each other’s offices every day. After lunch, they walked down to the lab on South Campus. They had invitations to fly different places around the world. Mostly, she said, she wanted to just stay home and keep working.

  “What’s this?” I finally said, knocking on the shoebox. “Love letters?”

  I’d been joking, but she nodded yes. She told me the potter had finally sent the box of letters, and she didn’t know what to do with them. She said she would have sent them back, but she had the feeling that Lorelei, or at least Lorelei’s husband, wanted to get rid of them.

  “You could send them to Eli and his wife,” I said.

  I took the lid off. There were about twenty-some letters still in their envelopes. The potter had tied them into a little bundle with plain string.

  I took one out, glanced at it quickly, then folded the stationery into a paper airplane. I flew it. Hound bounded after it but lost interest once it landed; the paper was too flimsy for satisfying mastication. I kept folding and sending them up, though; he liked the airplanes while they were still in the air.

  The Mims asked if I was seeing a girl. She said she thought I was. She could tell. I asked how.

  Showers, she mentioned. Also, a comb seemed to have been involved.

  I told her yes.

  “Oh, good.” She sighed. “I worried that things with Eli turning out the way they did may have … I wasn’t wary enough,” she said. “But I don’t want that to make you too suspicious.”

  I had been too suspicious. Hector and I both. And for all our suspecting, we didn’t really know anything until we saw hard evidence. All our suspicions hadn’t protected us from the bad truth.

  She told me then that she and Ben Orion had decided, more than once, that it didn’t make sense for them to get involved, but that it seemed they’d begun to anyway. She shrugged. Sometimes things didn’t make sense, she said, or at least the sense isn’t immediately apparent.

  That same morning at dawn, I walked over to our old house. I’d been thinking of the Rabid Rabbits’ Pad. Since we’d moved, I hadn’t seen our house once, even from the outside. When I got there, I stood on the curb. It looked the same. Nothing had been painted or changed that I could tell. I considered creeping around to the back and just climbing up the rope ladder. Or waiting an hour, then knocking and asking the people who lived there if I could sit in my childhood tree house. But I had to get back to drive the Boops to school. I didn’t detect any motion through the windows. The people who lived there must have been asleep. Still, I could feel that the life in the house wasn’t ours anymore. It was like visiting a strange future; I knew all the walls but not the people. I stood there awhile and then went home.

  I called Hector and woke him, even though it was three hours later in New York. He said he’d discovered something called rogue taxidermy that was like our mutants but made with real dead animals, patched together. There was a museum of it in Canada. One day, he said, we’d drive up to see it. “Inspiration,” he said. It was almost ten there, but he was just getting up, and I could hear him drawing on a joint and coughing.

  Hector had turned out to be right, though. As the year wore on, the Mims didn’t seem so sad. She had a taut energy for work; she and Marge were busy in a happy, contained way that involved many lists. I didn’t think she pined for Eli anymore.

  The only thing she still seemed sad about was me.

  74 • A Hummingbird in the Yard

  One ordinary afternoon in Neverland, Hershel told me they’d been receiving orders for our book, fifty a week, steadily, from indie comic-book buyers all over the country. “It’s word of mouth,” he said. “It’s been happening for eight, nine weeks, but I didn’t want to tell you, in case it was just a blip. But people respond to these kids redistributing pets.” They had to reprint Two Sleuths. They would pay us fifteen hundred dollars! But it took a day and a half to get Hector to pick up his phone so I could tell him. He was glad, but not like I’d expected. He sounded really stoned. I felt a little superior to his new friends and a little inferior at the same time. Fifteen hundred dollars would have once made him swoon.

  “We should write another,” I said.

  “Maybe. But what about?”

  “I’ll think of something,” I mumbled. He was doing a lot of drugs. He told me he ate junk food with his roommates for dinner. They slept through breakfast and lunch. He didn’t go to classes. He stayed in his room. I started to think I wasn’t meant for college. I felt old. When Ella and I went out, I paid for dinner. We got into the Aero for free.

  I banked an extra hundred and fifty taking my dad’s online traffic school course, twice. “What did you do before when you got tickets?” I asked. He was watching the news as I ripped through the sections.

  (Fact: In the fifties Japan outlawed hula hoops because the swinging hips proved to be too distracting for motorists.)

  “Malc did t
hem, but it’s better to keep it in the family. I’m not proud of getting tickets.”

  One morning, our mow-and-blow gardener knocked on the door just as we were leaving for school. The Mims was already gone. The gardener had a hummingbird in his large palm and explained that he’d found him on the grass. I didn’t even know the gardener’s name. Boop Two ran back in the house. She googled hummingbirds and then tried to feed him water mixed with sugar from an eyedropper.

  “Come on,” her sister shouted, her backpack hanging off one shoulder. “We’re gonna be late.”

  Boop Two had the eyedropper in her hand and the phone against her ear. She was talking to a woman in Orange County who kept forty injured hummingbirds in her kitchen, feeding them every twenty minutes. Boop Two wanted me to drive her with the bird to Orange County, but Boop One had to get to school. The hummingbird rehabilitator on the phone told us to put the bird in a strawberry box on a bush or somewhere off the ground. Its mother would find it, she said, or he’d learn to fly. His pinfeathers were already grown, Boop Two explained. Just as we were getting in the car, we saw him try to flap his wings and then leverage himself up into the air.

  He learned to fly right then, while we were watching.

  “Miles Adler-Hart, yeah, I know Miles Adler-Hart. Sure, I know where to find him. He’s right here.” Hershel had the phone to his ear behind the cash register.

  He handed me the receiver on its sprongy cord. A professor from Princeton said he was teaching Two Sleuths. He wanted to invite me and Hector to come there and talk about it! He’d pay for our plane tickets! He seemed shocked to find out we were actually nineteen. I told him Hector was in college. “What about you?” he asked.

  I found myself sounding like my dad. “I’m taking a gap year. Working here and at a revival movie theater.” I didn’t say about the doughnuts.

  He offered to pay us each five hundred plus transportation. I said yes right away. He asked if I was considering Princeton. I said sure, but I didn’t know if Princeton was considering me. He said he’d make sure it did. I cleared the days with Hershel and the Aero and Krispy Kreme before I mentioned any of this to my folks. They didn’t know about Two Sleuths. Since soup selling, I didn’t like to tell them about my businesses. I wasn’t 100 percent sure I could get Hector to go. I thought it would take a delicate negotiation to get him out of his dorm room.

  I added Princeton to my college list. I applied to Bard, Berkeley, and Princeton, early action. Professor Tin recommended that. This time, I pressed buttons.

  Before Hector and I visited Princeton, the Mims received a diagnosis. The news stabbed me. I thought I’d caused her cancer. Right away, I blurted out that I’d called Eli two years ago and told him that she’d killed herself. My lips moved against the fabric of her shirt. Eli would have nothing on me now; I could purely hate him. But even that didn’t matter anymore. My face was in her shoulder so I couldn’t see. Finally, I lifted my head. She didn’t ream me out, she just looked incredibly sad, as if Eli had deformed me, me, her favorite.

  When I got the letter from Princeton, I waited three days before telling them. I didn’t know how to explain. My test scores were high—purchased 800s, as my dad called them—but there was still the matter of my GPA.

  When Hector and I had received the precious first copies of Two Sleuths, we’d talked about showing our parents. We wanted to, but great as the book looked, we wished it was about something else, something entirely made up, or at least from our lives, not my mom’s. We only had the Villain in a few pages at the beginning and his house as the place of last resort for the incorrigible animals whose lives were endangered and who needed a home. I’d hidden my copy under a mountain of comic books. For the first days, I took it out and held it when I was alone in the house.

  I told my dad about Princeton and the book first. “Does your mother know about this?” he asked, sitting in the car, leafing through Two Sleuths. “It’s mostly a fantasy, but she might object to the notion of boys flying errant pets to a bigamist’s yard. I’m assuming you never did actually put animals on his lawn.” I’d had to tell my father the whole story of Eli. He hadn’t known. I was surprised. “I never trusted him,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t like his hair.”

  In the end, after the Mims read it, her only question was, “You got into Princeton because of a comic book?” She shook her head and laughed. “I stayed up reading it with the windows open, and I laughed and laughed.”

  It took me years to understand that that was a generous reading of our book.

  The Superboys wondered how the Villain’s lies were different from lies everyone told. And why his broken promise to love was worse than their own mothers’ and fathers’, who’d stood at altars and vowed to love each other until death did them part.

  When I left, Ben Orion promised to take the Mims to treatments. He slept in her room sometimes. I guessed that she decided to lift her scruples about the future, probably for the obvious reason that there was none. I didn’t ask.

  75 • The Woman Who’d Been Washed and Dried Many Times

  That summer before I tried Princeton, Ella and I drove to Pasadena together. She waited in the car. I walked up Eli’s lawn alone, my chest fluttering. I didn’t know what I’d say. The wife opened the door. She looked middle-aged, not so different from my mom or Sare. She stood in a housedress and old-fashioned pointed white Keds. Her legs were bare, shaved only a few days ago so that five-o’clock-shadow bristles showed on her muscled calves.

  “Is Eli here?” I asked.

  “No, he’s out of town,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

  “I’m Miles Adler-Hart. Do you know who I am?”

  She first kept her public face, but when I said I was Irene’s son, she motioned me to sit down on the bright blue porch chair. She didn’t invite me inside. I’d glimpsed the living room, though; it had a blue-and-green color scheme, and a mod Escher-looking skewed plaid rug.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked. It didn’t occur to me then that she might have been scared. She kept her hands folded together in her fabric lap.

  Six years, I thought. I hadn’t prepared anything. I told her about the cabin her husband had taken us to. The Mims’s family romance. My Christmas lights. That key he gave us each to hold. The talk about rings and marriage. The delivered sofa.

  “Did you know all this?” I said.

  For a while she didn’t answer. Then she said, “What can I tell you? Marriages are complicated. They have long, deep roots. No one but the two people in a marriage can ever really understand. We have a fine marriage, but I know that there are places I can’t follow. Eli had a problem with lust.”

  A problem with lust! “I’ll say,” I muttered. Just then, Pretzel the chihuahua ran through the bushes chased by the barky spaniel.

  “Eli and your mother don’t have anything to do with each other now. There’s no other way that can be.” She stood up. “I have to pick up my son at football.”

  “Does Hugo live with you?” The question just burped up.

  She looked at me, startled. “No. He lives far away.” I noticed she didn’t tell me where, even the state. But Ben Orion had found Hugo’s address in New Jersey. For all I know, the Mims had sent him a white vase.

  I told her about Eli’s last note, signed Yours, always, always.

  “I’m sorry if Eli made promises to your mother that he couldn’t keep. He shouldn’t have. But I have a little boy who needs his father. You have a father, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I have a great dad.”

  “Well, be glad of that. You’re what, eighteen, nineteen? My son is twelve. I’m not going to say anything to Eli about this visit. He won’t contact your mother. He wouldn’t. He’s past all that now. And it sounds like you have what you need already. Try to be grateful.”

  She opened the front door again to go inside, and I saw our parrot in a cage at the end of a neat hallway. A dog I didn’t recognize nudged against her hem. r />
  “You sure have a lot of pets,” I said.

  She smiled. “My husband calls me Saint Jean of the Animals.” My husband! Who says that? All the moms I knew called their husbands by their first names.

  But the woman was right: I did have what I needed. Could the cure for suffering be the person picked instead of you? Jean seemed okay; she was prettier than she’d looked at a distance, and she loved her kid, I was sure, but she could live with someone who called her Saint Jean and let that make her happy, knowing that he’d harmed other people. She could forget about the uncollected promises he left littering the world.

  The Mims couldn’t have, I didn’t think.

  And Jean wasn’t who the Mims would have wanted to be. Marge was that. Marge, whom Eli had never appreciated. What exactly is there to preserve? He could keep his Saint Jean of the Animals.

  I’d take Marge any day.

  76 • The Right End

  I bagged Princeton after seven months and came home. I didn’t tell anyone ahead of time. One day in winter, I took the shuttle to the Newark airport and bought a one-way ticket in cash. The most romantic moment of my life will always be that March Tuesday when I walked into the gold-lit playground of the nursery school where Ella worked in aftercare. It had been snowing gray sleet when I left that morning. It was a good thing I went to Ella first. I had two parents in two houses and not one of them was glad to see me home. The Boops didn’t care either way. Only Hound was happy. Later on, guys at the Aero threw a party. I felt like telling all the people walking around numb and bundled back in Princeton, You know, you don’t have to live like this!

  For two years then I worked and racked up money. Ella’s parents kept on her to get a degree. I had mine worried about my sanity. When the Boops were graduating, I thought I’d better get my shit together, and so Ella and I and Boop One all drove north to college in my car. We dropped her at the Farm and kept going to Berkeley, where Ella and I started like freshmen, three years late. We found a house to rent just over the Oakland border. The Aero people had already set me up with a job at the Pacific Film Archive, and so we began the life we’re still living today.