The Cake House Page 12

  The Highlights had fallen facedown. A moment later, the Mercedes purred its way up the street. It must have passed the VW Bug on its way up the hill. It did a slow three-point-turn before coming to a halt right in front of me.

  I stayed seated on the curb.

  Claude leaned over and opened the door. He didn’t raise his voice or yell, but it still came out a command. “Let’s go.”

  Funny how he sounded similar to the other girl who’d said the exact same words. My legs obeyed before I could stop them. I sank into the front seat and stuck my tongue out, but it only made him smile.

  “Is Alex coming?”

  I shrugged, reluctant to relay Alex’s message. Claude sighed and put the car in gear.

  I DOZED WHILE LOOKING AT magazines, those that I’d gotten from Mrs. Lombard plus the ones I already owned and a few more that my mother had. They lay scattered over the bed. The light outside dipped into that dusky blue of evening, with the music of crickets outside my window and the flapping of the canopy tickling my bare legs.

  Formed from dust and light, my father’s ghost appeared at the end of my bed, crossed-legged like a genie.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “No more. Not again.” I kicked the mattress with both my legs, making the magazines bounce, making the bedsheets bounce. After his last visit, what more could he possibly have left to say? “Get out, get out,” I said in a whispered cry that no one could hear.

  But he didn’t say a word. He held a magazine in his hands and started looking through it, one page at a time, as if he were a patient in a waiting room. He turned pages faster and faster, too fast to be reading them.

  He tossed the magazine aside, angry that it hadn’t contained what he wanted, and picked up another one, looking through that one just as quickly. Then he stopped and raised it so I could see. “This one,” he said.

  It was an advertisement for jewelry—diamonds. A woman stood, mostly unclothed, the lines of her body blurred and indistinct as she faced a window. Her back was to the camera, but her face was turned in profile to reveal her expression of restful longing. Behind her, a man, fully clothed but with his face hidden, stood, fastening a diamond necklace around her neck.

  “I don’t care.” My tone became sullen, but my heart beat hard and my blood was ice in my veins. “Whatever it is you’re trying to say, I don’t care.”

  The house creaked and shifted, settling into evening. The ghost stopped, cocked his head, then continued at the same agitated pace.

  I tried to leave, but he picked up another magazine and did the same thing, turning pages fast before finding, at last, what he was looking for. He held the magazine up so I could see. This time it was a cartoon—a line drawing, meant to be humorous and relevant to some political statement, but all I could see was that it showed a man lying on the ground with a shocked yet comical expression on his face and a knife sticking out of his chest, illustrated blood dripping over the side of the wound. “This one,” said the ghost, and he pointed at the drawing, directly over the wound.

  Again he continued riffling through the magazine.

  He held up a third picture, but I didn’t want to see it. I wanted to bury my head under the duvet till the ghost left to go someplace where he could molest as many magazines as he wanted on his own without me as witness.

  “This one,” he said, holding the picture up in front of my face until I had to look. It was a full-page close-up of a man screaming, his eyes scrunched shut, his mouth open and stuffed with hundred-dollar bills that were choking him. It was the sort of picture that accompanied a lengthy and in-depth journalistic article, with quotations highlighted in large bold letters, telling the woeful tale of someone else’s misfortune. “This one,” repeated the ghost, holding the magazine too close to my face.

  The light faded to a thick, layered haze. My mother said my name and I jumped, surprised to see her standing in the doorway. Her eyes were brilliant and shadowed, wide with panic, but then she focused on me. “Claude should be home soon,” she said, one hand on the doorknob. “Help me with dinner.”

  The ghost was gone, a tumbled pile of magazines left on the bed.

  All through dinner, I thought of the collage. I thought of those photographs the ghost had chosen, and what I would do, so preoccupied I forgot to wonder where Alex was until he came home just as my mother got up from the table to start clearing dishes.

  Silence descended. I thought Alex would bolt up to his room, but he stood there while his father eyed him up and down.

  My mother picked up Claude’s dish and her own. She said my name with a nod at the table, and I knew I had to help her instead of sitting in the middle between Claude and Alex and whatever confrontation they were going to have. I got up and took my plate into the kitchen, but as soon as I put the plate down on the counter I pushed the door open enough so that I could see and hear.

  Claude sat back with his right arm laid across the seat next to him. “You missed dinner.”

  Alex moved a step closer to the stairs and his escape. “Just doing what you asked.” He met his father’s gaze. “That is what you wanted,” he said.

  Not quite a question, more of a challenge. For the first time I saw a resemblance between the two of them.

  Claude opened his mouth to answer but shut it again. With a sigh and a nod, he waved his hand in dismissal, allowing Alex to disappear up the stairs.

  I didn’t know what it meant, this strange tide and undertow of their father-and-son relationship. I thought, if Alex had his way, he would never leave his bedroom. Or maybe one day he wouldn’t come home at all.

  My mother pulled me away from the door and over to the sink, where the dirty dishes were piled. “It’s not polite to eavesdrop.”

  It took a few minutes before Alex’s music drifted down from the second floor. He chose a violin concerto, its harrowing voice spiraling down through the sticky night air. I didn’t know who the composer was. The music induced an ache deep in my belly of unfulfilled want, of desperation.

  Claude entered the kitchen, causing both my mother and me to pause. He carried the rest of the dinner things, and without further words, the three of us finished washing the dishes while the violin continued.

  I brought the magazines down to the living room and camped out on the carpet. With tape and a cut-up cardboard box, I created scenes in a play: my father handing Claude his money and a gun. My mother, diamonds, escape. Alex and me and a garden. I cut out the three pictures the ghost had given me and used them like centerpieces. I used my own photographs as well as those cut from magazines.

  Sometimes Alex was Goofus; sometimes he was Gallant.

  “What’ve you got there?” asked Claude. He was sitting on the couch, working on his own projects, his own array of papers, folders, and books.

  “Something for school,” I said, angling my body away from him so he couldn’t see what I was working on.

  But he got up off the couch and came around to watch while I worked. There were three panels to the collage, like a medieval painting: heaven, limbo, hell. Claude’s blue eyes lingered over the scene of my father’s death. Maybe he held his breath, maybe he became very still, very quiet, but maybe it was my imagination. He murmured that it was very creative but went back to his paperwork.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Claude didn’t ask to see the final product. As he drove me to school, he didn’t look at me at all.

  In class, my heart buzzed with the anticipation of revealing so much to the world. But when the different collages were set up side by side, mine blended in with the rest and no one said anything.

  After praising the entire class, Mrs. Lombard made us carry the collages across the courtyard so they could be pinned up on bulletin boards in the main building. Students leaving the other classrooms when the bell rang walked past, talking and laughing without looking at the collages. Perhaps they had the same assignment as freshmen and didn’t care.

  But I liked my collage, and after classes ended for th
e day I went back to look at it, not caring that Claude would have to wait. A couple of teachers, a man and a woman, took their time examining each collage like they were pieces hanging in a museum.

  I held my breath as the female teacher reached my collage.

  “Looks like a story,” she said, and spent several minutes staring at it. She lifted her glasses. “It starts here,” she said, pointing to the gun. “Or maybe it starts here.” She pointed to pictures of big houses pieced together.

  The man joined her. He shook his head. “That’s too violent,” he said. “Guns and death. It doesn’t belong in a school. This is the sort of thing we all have to watch out for. Flora should have said something.”

  “Well, I suppose,” said the woman. “No, you’re right.” She didn’t protest when he took down my collage. I stepped forward, but a hand clamped around my arm. Alex was standing next to me.

  I wondered how long he had been there and if he had seen the collage. Could he tell who the characters were? Could he see what I had done?

  “If you demand it back, they might send another social worker,” he said. “Make a different collage. Talk to Mrs. Lombard in the morning.”

  I twisted my lips. But I knew he was right.

  That night, I made another collage using pictures cut from Highlights for Children, a photo story of Goofus causing mischief with a smirk.

  When Alex was in the bathroom, I went into his room and placed the new collage on his bed. I wanted him to see it. I wanted him to know that the boy in the collage was him. He never said anything, but the next morning I found the collage back in my room, left right in the middle of the floor, in front of the canopy bed.

  I gave the new collage to Mrs. Lombard and said it was my stepbrother’s idea to put the pictures of the gun in the first one. I asked for it back. She said she’d talk to Mr. Bucholtz, but I knew I wouldn’t see it again.

  ALEX DIDN’T PARTICIPATE IN THE Key Club or the marching band. He was everyone’s friend and no one’s. He slipped through each day like water through my fingers, held for a moment. I wanted to find his secret, to crack his code, dissect his insides for inspection. But all I could do was take his picture.

  At school, I sat on a slick picnic table, shivering in the sudden October dampness, cross-legged. I took pictures of students when they weren’t looking. Through my camera lens, I tracked Alex as he picked a spot to sit and eat his lunch. A tall kid with headphones joined him. They listened to music together. Another boy with jeans and a baseball cap slapped Alex’s hand in a complicated series of snaps and fist bumps. The members of the football team sat nearby. They teased Alex, called him “Cobain,” which made him scowl. They shook his hand, clapped him on the back. Soon he had a crowd around him.

  Tina sat with Alex and then looked up to see me. She ventured over the ground littered with sodden leaves like a brave wanderer through foreign lands.

  “Can I ask you something?” She stood in front of me, her nose a delicate shade of pink from the cold. Seaweed eyes, foam-white skin. She had a ribbon in her hair that fluttered into her eyes.

  “Sure. Can I take your picture?” I asked in return.

  “Okay,” she said, surprised, but stayed still, a slow smile spreading across her lips.

  “Look over there.” I pointed to where Alex sat in the melee of lunch. The wind struggled to catch her hair, strands threading across her face. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Lunchtime. Chaos. Rain.”

  She was a hidden poet. I snapped a picture. “What else?”

  I caught her in the target of the lens, focusing on the freckles that tripped across her nose. “Why are you always taking pictures?”

  “Because I want to.” Snap.

  “I’ve asked Alex about you.”

  When she said his name there was a catch in her breath, a dip in her sparkle. It was strange to think of Alex talking about me when I wasn’t there. “What has he said?”

  “Nothing.” Tina tilted her head in an unconscious mimic of Alex.

  I lowered my camera. She brushed her hair away from her face. I wanted to hate her, but I liked that she’d painted her nails with pale, frosted glitter, and I liked the way she kept trying to get the hair out of her eyes.

  “Are you guys going out?” I asked, trying to keep my jealousy from my voice, trusting my camera to hide my resentment. Focus on the longing, on the splash of pain in the raindrops falling on her face. Click. I wondered if she was talking to me because she thought it might get her closer to Alex.

  She wrinkled her nose and lowered her eyes. Alex watched us, standing tall in the whirlwind of students. I took her picture again. End of roll.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “You can tell me. Alex and I tell each other everything.” My ears grew hot from the boldfaced lie, but I wanted to reclaim my hold on Alex from her, even though I never had any sort of hold on him to begin with.

  “I know about his mother,” she said, her voice weak against the strength of the cold.

  My hands stopped halfway through rewinding the film, forgetting that she hadn’t answered my question. “What about his mother?”

  “You don’t know?” She lifted her chin, upturned nose pointing to the sky. “She wasn’t married to Alex’s father. I don’t think he even knew he had a son until she showed up one day and left Alex with him.”

  I held my breath, wondering how I had missed this key fact, but there was so much that was never spoken of, so much kept hidden. “I’ve seen her picture, his mother’s. He looks like her. Does he visit her?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think they’ve seen each other since she left. He doesn’t talk about her.” Her gaze shifted with curious sea-green intensity.

  “Yeah. I noticed. How long have you known him?”

  “We were all in preschool together.” She licked her lips and took a quick, short breath. “When he first showed up, he cried every day. Quiet-like, in his chair. He wouldn’t do any of the work; he wouldn’t play. A few of the boys made fun of him, but he just kept crying. He let them tease him. They got rough, pushed Alex around, and still he did nothing. He let them hit him. It was so weird. I tried to stop them. One of them pushed me down and I fell to the floor. I wasn’t hurt, but Alex took hold of Tom’s shirt and threw him onto the floor so hard he broke Tom’s arm.”

  “What happened after that?” I asked, mesmerized by the story and her distant, searching expression.

  “All our parents had to meet, and Alex had to see a doctor. They almost sent him away after that. Everyone was half scared of him, and at the same time they wanted to be his friend. They still do. That was the first time my parents met Alex’s dad.” She added the last almost as an afterthought, wrinkling her forehead.

  Behind Tina, Alex was moving toward us. When she saw Alex approach, all her feelings, her emotions, blossomed, more open than the sky above, ready for plucking.

  He held his hand out. Tina smiled, radiant. They walked away and left me shivering.

  THAT WEEKEND, WHILE I WAS out for a bike ride, it began to rain. I pedaled home as fast as I could, wiping the raindrops from my face, dumping my bike outside and running up the stairs when I heard the front door open and close without the bustle and bang that accompanied Claude’s typical entrance. I knew it had to be Alex. He stopped in the downstairs hallway, and I heard the tone of an open phone line. A moment passed, and then several more, before he put the receiver back.

  “Who do you keep trying to call?” I asked.

  He spun around, blond hair darkened by rain, skin flushed red from the coolness of the weather. He stepped forward, and I saw the way his eyelashes clumped together. “A phone-sex line,” he said, deadpan.

  I laughed but blocked his path when he tried to scoot past. “Can I come up to your room? Borrow some records?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not? There’s no one here but us.”

  Claude had taken my mother with him that morning. He did that e
very once in a while, disappeared with her for the day, only to return in the evening with a shopping bag or two. It had been weeks since that night when Claude had caught Alex in my room, and slowly the new rules were being forgotten.

  “Maybe your girlfriend’s coming over. What’s her name again? Was she who you were trying to call?” I asked, even though I knew her name and knew that he hadn’t been trying to call Tina and that he wouldn’t say whom he had tried to call no matter how I asked.

  He leaned against the wall of the staircase. “What if it was?”

  Frustrated, I let out an exaggerated sigh and stomped up the stairs. “Just say you don’t want to hang out with me.”

  He called after me. “I didn’t say that.”

  I stopped near the top of the stairs but then continued on to my room, shutting the door. It wasn’t until later, when I left my room to come down to dinner, that I found a stack of albums in front of my door.

  THE MEAL WAS ONE MY mother cooked often because it was easy: chicken baked in rice. It used to be one of my favorites, but even though it tasted the same, it now got stuck in my throat and made me gag. The familiar taste brought memories of eating with my father at the kitchen table in our apartment. I pushed my plate away and drank all of my water.

  Alex sat across from me. He took a big breath, as if gathering strength for an arduous task, and said, “There’s a football game tomorrow. Against Newhall.” He spoke to no one in particular.

  Claude leaned back in his chair. He finished chewing before speaking, his tone casual. “Sounds like a great idea,” he said. “We should all go. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Rosie?”

  I looked from Claude to Alex to my mother. My mother wasn’t eating either. She fiddled with a piece of chicken before setting her fork down. She got up and started clearing the table.

  “I’d like to go,” I said, because I did want to. I had never gone to a football game before. Claude smiled, but Alex didn’t. It was strange. Although Alex was the one who brought up the football game, I got the impression that he had no desire to go, that he suggested it because he had to, an obligation or a duty.