The Cake House Page 17

  The mountains made a jagged silhouette in the sky. We drove on Soledad Canyon Road past horse ranches and riding stables then onto the highway, the windows cracked open, the wind whistling a strange tune. Bushes dotted the way like spots on a calico cat as the road hugged rock walls and sheer cliffs. Aaron turned onto a smaller path, and we drove high up to a mountaintop covered in billowing wheat-colored grass. Below, over the side of the mountain, I saw houses and ranches, open fields. Aaron parked the car beside a large rock formation.

  The wind lashed my hair across my face.

  “Stand with him,” said Aaron, trying for my camera as he pushed me next to Tom.

  “No—first the two of you, over there,” I said, wanting the first picture taken to be of them. Tom leaned against the hood of the station wagon and pulled Aaron to sit next to him. Aaron squawked, thrown off balance, but he settled next to Tom and flung an arm around his shoulders. Aaron turned awkward under the camera, grinning like a child at a birthday party, all teeth and cheeks and bright smiles, while Tom could have been a professional model, posing with stormy eyes focused on some distant skyline.

  We took turns, each taking charge of the camera until another claimed it. Tom got creative, forcing Aaron and me to bend and contort into ridiculous poses. Aaron, on the other hand, wanted action scenes: Tom jumping off the hood of the station wagon, Tom carrying me on his back. Aaron swung my arms up and down, hyperactive and unstoppable. “Who’s a winner?” he asked, laughing, then flung my arms up and took my picture. “You are!”

  Aaron led me to the rock formation, tugging off his shoes until he stood barefoot. My shoes and socks followed. He started climbing, and I placed hand and foot into the same holds Aaron used, until I teetered at the top with him.

  I turned back to help Tom, but he remained sitting on the hood of the wagon. “You’re not getting me to climb that rock. I’ll fall over the side. Crazy mofo,” he scolded.

  “Party pooper,” Aaron yelled. But the merry light in his eyes vanished when Tom rolled off the hood and crawled into the backseat of the car.

  I squeezed Aaron’s hand.

  “Raise your arms. Up, up. That’s it,” he said, whooping out loud and hopping up and down in a comical war dance, his voice carried away, echoing into vastness, bouncing from one side of the valley to the other. “Your turn,” he said.

  “No way.” I shook my head, dizzy from the altitude.

  “Come on, let it out. Let the wind take it. Give it up to the gods of sun and crabgrass.” He grinned, then wrapped one of his long arms around my middle and made me stand in front of him. “Trust me.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders. I closed my eyes, tipping forward as if I might dive off the rock, legs swaying, but he held me against his chest. I barely breathed, my toes gripped into the rock as if I had claws like a bird. I lifted my arms, felt his arms line up along mine. And then there it was, a long, single note spilling from my throat and out into the open valley, not very loud but building louder until it was all I could hear.

  When my voice failed, Aaron kissed me, lips and teeth and saliva, wet and slippery, smooth like the wind-polished rock face, clinging like the tough grass. We sat on the rock, facing the valley.

  “What about Tom?”

  Aaron didn’t answer, spreading his legs so that I could sit between them as he wrapped both of us in his jacket. The station wagon was the only immediate reminder of civilization. I couldn’t see Tom through the windshield.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I leaned back and pressed my cheek against Aaron’s chest, my butt already numb from sitting on the hard rock.

  Aaron’s breath was warm on my scalp. “You want a list? Jeez, where should I start? He likes Pop Rocks for one thing. And by ‘like’ I mean ‘is obsessed with.’ He’s a Pop Rocks fanatic; it’s the weirdest thing. Demands I drive him all over creation to buy the damn things. I find them stuck in the seat of my car, in my hair. Everywhere. And he thinks Van Halen was better with Sammy Hagar. I don’t even know what to say to that one.”

  I laughed and Aaron put his cheek next to mine. From his front pocket he took out a joint and a lighter. The smoke floated away, carried by the wind.

  “Are you scared of Alex?” I asked.

  “Nah. Your friend Alex is a … chump,” he said, nodding as if that gesture added weight to his word choice.

  “I’ve seen Tom with him,” I said. “Are they friends?”

  Maybe that was what irritated Aaron, that Alex might be friends with Tom, usurping his position. But Aaron snorted.

  “Alex isn’t capable of having friends,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Only that he doesn’t view people the same as you or I do. He doesn’t have friends. Unless they’re rich.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said.

  Aaron’s expression cooled. He slid off the rock, then made a motion that I should do the same. He caught me when I jumped down, my feet raw and frozen. We walked back to the station wagon.

  Tom almost fell out of the backseat when Aaron opened the door. He had been sleeping with his head tucked against the window, the sleeve of one arm rolled up. He was bleeding from the inside of his elbow.

  “Hey,” Tom said, struggling to open his eyes.

  Aaron crouched next to him, out of hearing range. I inched along the grass, straining to listen without intruding.

  “You said you didn’t have any more.” Aaron held Tom’s face between his hands.

  “I’m sorry.” Tom nodded, his head falling forward.

  THE STATION WAGON FLEW DOWN the mountain, careening around the curves of the winding road. Once again the chatter of the wind through the open window was the only conversation in the car. Tom sat in the middle this time, regaining consciousness every so often like a kite yanked by a strong wind. Aaron propped him up and I stared at the golden mountains until the school came into view.

  “How long have we been gone?” I asked. For the first time I took note of the sun sunk low in the sky and the lengthening shadows.

  “All day,” said Aaron. Tom blinked like a baby as we drove up to the main entrance, where a few students still loitered by their cars. It looked like the last class had ended some time ago, and that particular desolate, post-school, end-of-the-day quiet had settled over the campus. Neither Aaron nor I had a watch. It was possible that Claude had even come and gone.

  The VW Bug was parked on the opposite side of the street, close to the residential houses behind the school. The passenger-side door was open and, as if he had been kneeling, Alex’s blond head rose into view.

  We coasted to a creaky stop several feet away. I pushed my door open and heard a muffled crying, the kind of crying that came from south of your heart. Through the windshield I saw Joey sitting in the driver’s side. Then I saw a third person, partially blocked by Alex. A flutter of a ribbon, dark hair pulled back in a low braid. Tina sat in the passenger side. When she saw me approach, she covered her face with both hands before pushing past Alex and running across the street toward the school.

  The driver’s-side door opened. “Tina, wait,” called Joey. She ran around the car, pausing to say something to Alex in a fierce whisper before running after her friend.

  I wanted to ask what had happened, but Tom, who had sobered somewhat, beat me to it. “What did you do to her?”

  Alex tensed, and I expected another fight, but instead Alex sighed. “It’s better this way.”

  Tires squealed, and I heard the familiar rumble of a Mercedes. Claude pulled up on the other side of Aaron’s station wagon. Without a flinch or a flicker of emotion, Alex turned and got into the backseat.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Every evening after school Claude and I worked together to finish the darkroom. He boarded up the window; I painted the walls. He hired a plumber to pipe water into the room from the downstairs bathroom. I directed several more trips to the camera store. He bought a drafting table with a stool, another set of shelves, a pushpin bo
ard, a light box, more basins, more of everything.

  One night Alex helped clean and sand the floorboards. I hadn’t seen much of him since the breakup with Tina. I burned with questions and with an uncomfortable awareness of the scent of his sweat as he worked the sander over the wood.

  Claude stabbed into the drywall to get at the electrical wiring, teetering on a stool as I handed him a second overhead light. He showed me how to wire a third light outside the room and mount it on a sawed-off piece of two-by-four. I hammered the extra lightbulb to the door beam.

  “This is safelight,” he said when I finished hammering. He held a set of lightbulbs colored red, screwing one into the new light fixture. “That’s what you use when printing to paper. You have to do it in safelight or you’ll ruin the photograph. The next thing to buy is a developing tank, so you can develop your own negatives. It’s a bit complicated, but then you’ll be able to do everything yourself.”

  We were done. He toggled the switches. Normal light flipped over to the deep red of safelight, like new blood, enhancing the wrinkles that crowded around the corners of Claude’s eyes. “Shall we develop the first photo together?” he asked, gathering the stack of negatives I had collected so far. “Pick one.”

  I chose one of my mother standing before a full-length mirror. His hands guided my hands through each step, while he murmured instructions, patient and attentive. How to thread the film, how to focus, how to choose the right grade of paper, dip in one chemical bath, wait for the image to emerge, dip in another to stop the process. A slow, careful dance.

  Her head appeared first beneath the watery veil, then the line of her shoulder, the sway of her back, and the rest of the room with the sunlight streaming over the carpet and the bed unmade behind her. She was putting on a dress, her head turned to one side, her arms contorted, attempting to reach the zipper. A lit cigarette balanced in an ashtray on the dresser nearby, smoke floating from the tip in whorls that wrapped around her feet and around her neck like hands or chains.

  Claude held the dripping photo. “It looks like a man,” he said, pointing at the cigarette smoke that encircled my mother. “See? The head is here, and the body.”

  Within the folds of smoke I saw a pair of eyes, a mouth, and a wound to the side of the ghost’s head. The more I studied the photograph, the more his shape solidified behind her, taller than she was by a couple of inches.

  “Maybe it’s a ghost,” Claude murmured, distracted as he pinned the photo to the clothesline.

  My stomach clenched. “You see it too?”

  The darkroom felt too warm, having no window to let in a breath of fresh air and a towel stuffed underneath the door to block the light. Claude’s cologne was thick in the air.

  He creased his forehead, then cursed under his breath as he held my shoulders between his hands. He flipped the switch and flooded the room with bright, electric light. With a push of his hand, he ushered me to stand before the dripping photograph hanging on the clothesline. In the full spectrum of light, the picture was simpler: a woman dressing, careless with her cigarette in a messy bedroom. Nothing remarkable. Nothing unnatural. Smoke twirled as smoke should.

  “This house is no more haunted than anything else,” he said. “She smokes too much.”

  “When I was a kid I stopped eating, trying to force her to quit,” I said.

  He laughed and squeezed my shoulder. “That sounds like you. You shouldn’t be scared of a make-believe ghost, anyway.”

  After he left me alone to learn on my own, I flipped the switch back to safelight and selected another photo at random, this one of Claude and my mother standing together in front of the sliding glass doors, the full expanse of the garden behind them.

  “No, you don’t scare me,” I said, but it wasn’t for Claude. I said it for the absent ghost, who had been missing since the night of the party. Perhaps the darkroom angered him. Or perhaps he waited in the invisible ether, ready to pop out like a jack-in-the-box. The next image emerged beneath the chemical bath: Claude, my mother, and the swirl of smoke that blurred their smiles, a smothering embrace.

  LATER IN THE EVENING, MY mother knocked on the door of the darkroom. She examined the equipment Claude and I had set up, passing a hand over the bottles of chemicals.

  “You’ve been busy,” she said, and I couldn’t interpret her threadbare smile.

  “Isn’t it great?” I asked. I loved the shelves the best. They held more than photography things—also brushes and glue and glitter and metal trays.

  “It is.” She fiddled with the two photographs I had developed. They swayed on the clothesline. “I’ve hardly seen you all week.”

  There was a note of sadness in her voice. “I’ve been here.”

  “So many things,” she said, walking to the shelves. “I remember when you didn’t want Claude to buy you anything.”

  I didn’t know what to say. She had been the one to tell me to say yes when Claude wanted to buy my bed and my new clothes. The darkroom answered all my wishes, my unlooked-for dreams—it was a better birthday gift than the bedroom furniture.

  “Should I have said no?”

  “Of course not.” She smiled with a shake of her head. “Come on,” she said. “Help me with dinner.”

  In the kitchen, she handed me a cutting board and a zucchini. “Tell me everything,” she said. “I want to know what you do for so many hours with no light and no fresh air.”

  I supposed, after all those summer days spent outside in the garden, it must seem strange to her. “Just photography stuff,” I said. “Claude’s teaching me how to develop pictures. It’s cool.”

  Her lips pursed, and I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned Claude. But after a few silent moments of her stirring a pot on the stove, her expression softened, and she said, “Your father loved that camera. That must be where you get it from.”

  “Maybe,” I said. My father had taken an endless number of pictures, at least a drawerful, but he never bothered to put them into albums or frames. “What happened to his pictures?”

  “I think they’re in the garage,” she said, watching the flame as she set the soup to simmer.

  After dinner, I took a flashlight and went outside to the garage. The box of my father’s photographs was somewhere shelved and mislabeled among the forgotten detritus of Claude’s life, and Alex’s, not to mention the fragments of my mother’s and mine. I found the switch for the overhead light and walked around the Honda, my fingers caressing the blue metal like an old friend. My reflection flashed in the glass of the passenger-side window: new haircut, new dimensions to my face.

  On the corner beam overhead, a pretty bird with rose-colored feathers watched, one black pearl eye tracking my movement, its head cocked. No twittering, no chirping, only silence.

  The first box I looked in held my mother’s clothing. I picked up one of her blouses—beige, the underarms darkened by use, and the sides pilled and thinned where it had become worn. It used to be one of her work blouses, worn with a blue suit and a paisley scarf pinned down to her collar with a bit of fake jewelry, but now it looked like a rag, with its cheap fabric and loose buttons. It still held hints of her smell, jasmine and cigarette smoke.

  In the next box, I found old broken toys, a Barbie with tangled hair, a snow-cone machine, and children’s books with the corners chewed up or the binding hanging by a thread. A smaller box contained my watercolor set, the red all gone but for a faint ring of color left embedded in the plastic oval cup. Unbound colored pencils rolled around, mixing with a few broken crayons. At the bottom, I found a book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes bought secondhand at a garage sale. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice.

  Some of this hadn’t come with us in the car when we had run away. I wondered who had returned to that distant apartment, who had gone through our things and packed it all in boxes.

  I pulled down box after box stuffed with Claude’s papers full of long-worded financial forecasts and graphs with jagged lines
in a steady incline. Most were for Global Securities, but there were several decrepit, moldy financial statements with the heading “K.I.S., LLC” over the top. Every now and then I came across tattered album covers of Catherine Craig’s violin concertos: Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Sibelius.

  The side door to the garage opened and Alex entered. Startled, I dropped the album for Catherine Craig as soloist in Scheherazade.

  “Sorry,” he said, letting the door creak shut behind him. “You weren’t in your room. Or in the darkroom.”

  I bent over, as much to hide as to pick up the album and return the scratched record back inside its sleeve. It had been almost a full week since his breakup with Tina. Except for that one time when he’d come to help in the darkroom—where I couldn’t speak with him while Claude was there watching and listening—he had made himself absent.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’m looking for my father’s photographs. They have to be in here somewhere,” I said, setting the album aside.

  Dust billowed around Alex’s head, caught in a stray beam of light. It made him glow. He shrugged. “Can I help?” he asked.

  I started to say I didn’t need his help, but he pulled down a box, poked inside, then put it aside to pull down another one. He was much quicker than me; he didn’t need to linger over each piece of clothing or broken toy.

  In less than a minute, he found a box on the top shelf and set it on the long metal worktable. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  I jumped up to sit on the tabletop next to him and opened the box. My father had taken pictures of me as a baby: in my crib, on the couch, in my mother’s arms, in my high chair. And more of my mother in various stages of undress. He was like me in that he tried to catch her unveiled, but he defeated me in quantity—so many pictures, several ruined by a thumb over the lens or the top of a head chopped off. There were no pictures of him. He had never stood still enough to have his picture taken.