The Cake House Page 16

  “And you are? If I said stay away from Tina, would you do it?” I asked.

  “Leave her out of this.”

  “Why?” I demanded, wanting to hit him at the same time that I wanted to make him tell me what he was feeling. I was frustrated with his evasions, the way he came close only to push me away again. “You kiss me, then you kiss her; I don’t know what it is you want. I don’t know what’s going on in this house. Why did Claude want my photographs?” I fell silent, but he wasn’t looking at me.

  “Tina’s none of your business. It’s not what you think. It’s complicated.”

  “Then tell me. Sometimes I think you like me. But maybe you’re just playing? What were you doing with Tina at the party, in the garden? I followed you, you know. That Joey girl said you were fuck—”

  Alex pushed me against my seat, his arm across my chest. “Don’t follow me,” he said.

  “All right,” I said, trying to dislodge his arm, but it wouldn’t budge.

  He pressed harder, and my chest and collarbone hurt. “Don’t fucking follow me.”

  “I said all right.” I dug my nails into his flesh until he snatched his arm back.

  In the poor lighting, his chest rose and fell, and the bruise stood out like a stamp over his eye and cheekbone. He said, “Joey should keep her mouth shut.”

  The rain continued. I suppressed a shiver.

  “But were you?” I wanted him to look at me, so I took his hand in mine. “Fucking?”

  His fingernails were rough, brutally hacked away, calluses like unsung songs mapped across each fingertip.

  “Now who’s playing?” he asked, but he didn’t let go of my hand.

  Our mingled breath hung in the air, visible in the cold. I could see the small boy he used to be in the shape of his face, in the way his hair curled around his ears.

  The drumbeat of rain stopped as quickly as it had started, and the absence of noise was like a sudden loss of hearing.

  “What about you?” he asked. “You’re normal one minute and then completely fucking crazy the next. What is it that you see?”

  I opened my mouth in shock. He couldn’t know. He didn’t know that the mere mention of my father frightened me. But he had noticed; he’d paid attention and had seen something that wasn’t right. It made me shiver, to know how closely he had been watching and that maybe, with time, he could see the ghost. I licked my lips, wanting to tell him about the ghost, but I remembered how the ghost looked wielding the baseball bat outside the car. Before Alex could ask again, I kissed him and tasted his blood. Cold air blew through a crack in the rear window. I ran a hand under his damp shirt, as I had imagined Tina had done earlier, up against his chest where his heart beat fast. He trembled, but maybe that was because of the cold. He took my other hand and pressed it flat against his stomach, against his crotch. Not gentle, but desperate, and strange.

  A muffled bang and crash pulled us apart. I heard my mother’s voice, loud and panicked, and I struggled to unlock the car door as Alex said, “Wait up.”

  I burst into the house. The front room was empty and I took a deep breath. No blood on the walls, no body on the floor. I had expected the ghost to be crouching in a corner, upset that I had been kissing Alex, or upset that I was afraid of him, but there was nothing.

  Claude and my mother were by the stairs, facing each other like someone had pressed pause and they stood frozen in their current positions. She was dressed in her nightgown but had her coat on with slippers on her feet. A suitcase lay at an angle across the last few steps, with clothing exploding out of it. Neither my mother nor Claude acknowledged my existence, or Alex’s.

  Then she took a long, shuddering breath and wrapped her coat across her chest. “I wear what I want to wear,” she said, her voice raspy. “I stay home if I want to stay home. If I don’t want to meet your”—she swallowed—“your friends, I don’t have to.”

  “Absolutely,” said Claude, his hands held before him. “Whatever you say. Whatever you want.”

  My mother’s eyes fell on her scattered clothing. With an awkward jerk forward, Claude bent to pick up the suitcase, stuffing the clothing inside. My mother’s eyes wandered to where Alex and I stood.

  “You went to a party?” she asked, coming over to pass her hands over my hair, down to my shoulders. She smiled. “I’m glad. Did you like it?”

  Alex headed for the stairs, but Claude stopped him and peered at his face. Alex tried to duck his head to hide the bruises.

  “Care to explain?” Claude asked Alex.

  “Not really,” said Alex.

  Claude frowned but let him go.

  I looked from my mother to the suitcase and then to Claude.

  “Are we leaving?” I asked. Every morning, every day since my father died, this was all I had wanted from her. Only now I wanted to go back to that interrupted moment in the darkness of the garage. I wanted to follow Alex up the stairs and into his room.

  My mother breathed in and closed her eyes. “Go to bed, Rosaura. Everything’s all right.”

  She and Claude remained where they stood, locked in their silent conversation. I left them and went up the stairs to the dark hallway. Alex waited by his door. I started for him, but he held his hand up and I stopped. Perhaps he waited to find out if my mother and I were leaving as well. He didn’t say anything, and a moment later he went into his room and I went into mine.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The rain worsened overnight, and the Cake House had let in water. We woke up to coffee-colored stains on the carpets and a leak dripping down the walls. It had started in the roof, seeping through each floor to my bedroom, buckling the plaster by the closet, then down to the first floor. But the storm damaged the back room behind the staircase the most, where a window had been left open. No more than a closet, barely large enough to hold a table, a couple of chairs, it wasn’t good for much except as a storeroom for Claude’s old filing cabinet and boxes of paperwork.

  I opened a box filled with computer printouts of names and addresses faded and barely legible, then stepped back to let Claude lift it, the bottom dissolving into mush, spilling paper like a ladder. The sight of Claude holding a rotted cardboard box with the bottom flapping like a torn wet paper towel made me laugh.

  “I don’t see what’s so funny,” he said, looking at the mess at his feet.

  Damp hands on my hips, I kicked another spongy box to the side. “You’re going to have to get rid of everything in here.”

  “Is that your expert opinion?”

  “Definitely,” I said.

  Claude sighed. “It’s probably for the best. I should have gotten rid of this stuff ages ago.”

  I bent down to pick up a handful of disintegrating documents with the letters “K.I.S., LLC” written on the letterhead. The logo—a mountain, a half circle that maybe represented the sun—was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  Instead of going through the rest of the boxes, Claude made a fist and knocked on the wall, inspecting the structure of the room. “If all this has to be cleared out, it’ll be wasted space,” he hinted. He knocked the wall again and then turned toward me with a “so what’s it going to be?” expression. He wasn’t going to say it. It had to be my decision, my desire.

  “We could make it a darkroom,” I said.

  “Is that another expert opinion?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  I yelped as he spun me around in the small room.

  “Get your coat. There isn’t a moment to waste,” he said, ushering me out to the living room. He took a set of keys from his pocket and handed them to me. “Do me a favor? There should be an envelope in that desk over there,” he said, pointing to the rolltop desk in the corner. “Get it for me.”

  He didn’t wait for my answer but pulled his coat and an umbrella from the downstairs closet. Before he could change his mind, I unlocked the desk, eager to see the treasures it held. But inside was nothing other than unorganized stacks of bills, receipts, and a few flopp
y disks and CDs inside jewel cases. The photographs and negatives Claude had confiscated were shoved in against a folded manila envelope, my payment for the darkroom.

  The manila envelope weighed as much as a book. I undid the metal clasp and turned it upside down. Two stacks of hundred-dollar bills fell into my hand.

  “Can I trust you, Rosie?”

  I hadn’t noticed Claude’s approach. The night before, he’d asked Alex the same question. Instead of answering, I handed him the money.

  He slipped out a few bills for his wallet, then returned the rest of the money to the envelope. He locked the desk. “All set?”

  “What else do you keep in there?” I asked as Claude ushered me toward the front door. I realized that he wanted me to see his money. Or maybe he wanted to say that this money was as much mine as it was his, that I was a part of his world now and that I belonged to him.

  “My secrets,” he said as we walked to his car. He stopped before I got into the passenger side of the Mercedes, and for a second I thought he was finally going to tell me the truth, but instead he looked bashful, rubbing at his jaw before speaking. “I wanted to thank you. For letting me build you a darkroom. Means a lot to me. More than I can say.”

  “You don’t need my permission to build anything you want.”

  He suddenly looked aged. “You’d be surprised.”

  At the camera store, Claude asked what brand of enlarger I preferred. He wanted my opinion on paper stock and how much of each chemical we should order. He deferred to my choice on trays and squeegees and aprons, and even to the color of clothespin. By the end of the two-hour shopping spree, I couldn’t stop smiling; my blood pulsed hot and strong. I realized, as Claude pulled out his wallet and paid the attendant in cash, that until that moment I had not thought once of the ghost.

  THE DARKROOM WOULD TAKE A few days to finish. After the boxes were removed, the room had to dry out, the carpet had to be torn up, and a sink had to be installed to provide water for the developing processes. But Claude had bought me a box of black-and-white film and said I should get started.

  That Sunday, I sat on the front steps with my camera. The laundered blue of the sky unfolded and expanded to every corner, pinned to the heavens by the sun. I shivered in my sweater and thin pair of jeans, taking pictures of the front yard full of puddles.

  The Mercedes lurched into the driveway. Claude and my mother had gone for a drive. She was smiling when she exited, dressed in a new camel-hair coat with a fur-lined collar that nestled around her neck. They held hands crossing the lawn, but my mother lingered in the front yard as Claude went inside. It was as though the storm had swept the tired and sad Dahlia away. Her eyes bright, her expression clear, she sat next to me and brushed the hair out of my face.

  “It’s gotten so long,” she said.

  “I like it long.”

  “Come up to the room,” she said. “We can still trim it.”

  I followed her up the stairs into the bathroom on the third floor. She held my head beneath the faucet. Water dripped cold down my neck and into my eyes and nose before she sat me on a chair facing the mirror. From such a low angle, all I could see was her reflection. She rubbed my head with a towel before placing it around my shoulders. Taking a comb, she pulled it through my hair. My head dragged back. Before, when I was younger, I had resented that she cut my hair herself instead of taking me with her when she got her hair done, but now I was relieved that we weren’t going to a fancy salon, that it was just the two of us. “What were you and Claude fighting about the other night?” I asked, wincing.

  “We weren’t fighting.” She put the comb down and reached for a cigarette, struggling with the lighter. Then she drew in a long drag and set it on the edge of the porcelain sink before picking up the comb again.

  “You had your coat on. And you’d packed a suitcase.”

  She parted my hair down the middle. “I was confused when I woke up.”

  I knew she hated storms. “Were you scared?”

  “A little,” she said, now wielding a pair of scissors. As wet clumps of hair fell to my lap, she added, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: The life you have is the life you choose.”

  I made a face at her. I didn’t choose to be haunted by my father’s ghost, or choose to live here in the Cake House with so many secrets. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if I had. After all, I had chosen to go to the party. I had chosen the darkroom. Maybe I had even wanted my mother to leave my father.

  After this thought, I looked for the ghost in the mirror’s reflection, but there was nothing. More wet clumps of hair slid down to my waiting hands.

  “I didn’t choose any of this,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” she conceded. She came around to kneel in front. “Should we give you bangs? What do you think?” Without waiting for my answer, she took the comb and scissors, cutting away at the hair over my eyes. “That’s better.” She took the towel from around my shoulders and dusted the hair off my lap, wiping at my neck. “It’s still long,” she said. “I didn’t cut too much.”

  I looked at myself in the mirror, wanting to understand. “What about this life did you choose?”

  Her fingers fiddled with my new bangs, brushing them over to one side, then back to the other. “We have to live with our choices, Rosaura. And I’m trying to live with mine. Or at least, taking some control over it. I’ve made a decision.”

  I watched her through our reflection in the mirror. She reminded me of crystal, both fragile and strong. I wanted to run far away from her, and I wanted to be just like her. She placed her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. She had made a decision. I didn’t ask what it entailed, but I thought of the manila envelope full of money.

  The moment passed. She pressed her lips to the top of my head before letting go, picking up the cigarette. Most of it had burned away, leaving a long, crooked finger of ash that crumbled into the sink.

  “I’m going to lie down,” she said, with a brief return of the Dahlia from the week before.

  She left the bathroom, trailing smoke behind her. As she went under the shadow of the doorway, it seemed as if the smoke took the shape of a man that reached for her, grasping for her shoulder, missing by mere inches.

  MONDAY MORNING, I HEARD ALEX’S footsteps and hurried putting on the rest of my clothing to meet him before he headed downstairs and left for school. He hadn’t come home till late the night before, and I hadn’t had the chance to talk to him, to see if he noticed my new haircut. He was standing by the open door of his bedroom.

  “Where were you last night?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer but paused as he was putting on his jacket. I suspected strongly that he’d been with Tina.

  “Whatever you’re doing, you should end it.” I was thinking of what my mother had said, about this being the life we choose.

  “What?”

  “With Tina. Break up with her.”

  His features were devoid of expression. “What makes you think we’re even going out?”

  I folded my arms. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. “She believes you are.”

  “Then why should I break up with her? Give me one good reason.”

  The demand left me speechless. There were so many reasons why he should break up with Tina, I wasn’t certain I could name them all. Because she deserved better. Because he didn’t love her. If he did, he wouldn’t kiss me. He wouldn’t look at me the way he did.

  “Because I want you to,” I said, then turned and left his room.

  Claude didn’t comment but quirked his eyebrows when I came downstairs and demanded, “Can we go now? I don’t want to be late and I want to take some pictures before class.”

  “Whatever you say.” Claude followed me out to the Mercedes.

  Eager to have a stockpile ready to develop in the soon-to-be-completed darkroom, I took pictures of the empty campus, the dew-glistening football field with its sleeping clusters of daisy-chain flowers
. With the temperature cold enough for my hands to ache, I sat near the football field and took pictures. I could have gone inside one of the warm buildings, but I preferred to be outside with my camera and catch the start of the new day on film.

  The broken focus of my camera made objects in the distance blurry. I trained the lens on two fuzzy figures in the distance moving closer. By the long red hair and skinny skeleton silhouette, I knew one of them must be Aaron. The other, Tom.

  Aaron came into focus first, the bruise below his right eye having faded to a mottled yellow with green around the edges. Without the skeleton makeup, freckles crowded across his nose. They both plopped down to the ground next to me.

  “If it isn’t our very own intrepid photographer,” said Aaron. Tom lay on the grass.

  I had been wondering if I would see them again, if perhaps they would emerge from the sea of faces in the hallways at school or remain onetime apparitions from the party.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked, sorry for the bruises and cuts on both of their faces.

  Aaron smiled a little. “If I say yes, will you kiss it?” His smile slipped away as the first bell rang for class.

  “Let’s get out of here, go for a drive,” said Aaron. He stared down at the grass. “I have my car. We can go wherever. Take the day.”

  My first thought was that Alex would know. Not only that I ditched classes, but that I went with these boys in particular. I looked at Tom where he lay with an arm shading his eyes. The skin on his knuckles had split but was already scabbed over. Most of Alex’s animosity during the fight had been focused on him. And yet they were friends enough for Tom to be invited into Alex’s room. Some dark impulse of mine wanted Alex to yell at me, come after me, to answer my questions when I asked him what he was doing with Tina. Anything but ignore me.

  “Forget it,” said Aaron. “Forget I asked.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Aaron grinned. He slapped Tom on the shoulder. Tom peeked from under his arm and let Aaron pull him up on his feet. The three of us slipped between buildings to an opening in the fence, then scurried over to Aaron’s station wagon, an old Buick with bench-style seats that smelled of aftershave, engine grease, and, weirdly, bananas. I sat between them.