The Cake House Read online

  I took a step back, nearly overcome by an instinct to run. But he was my father. And his words grabbed hold and kept me planted to the ground. When he lived, he had talked all the time, to my mother about his work, or they had argued about money, but he had never spoken like the ghost did, with such calm, quiet determination. He turned his head, as if to examine the dead bike from a different angle.

  “I felt guilty,” he continued, as if he weren’t speaking to me. As if I were the one who didn’t exist. “Frightened of my own kid. I mean, you fucking scared the shit out of me. Your mom was sick when you were born, so it was just me taking care of you, and I sometimes left you in your crib, let you lie there. I’d look down at your fists balled up and struggling, all of you wiggling and angry, and your eyes wide-open and black. And so goddamned silent. I didn’t want to hold you.”

  My face felt warm, and it hurt to breathe. Of all the things I had expected the ghost to say, it wasn’t that he feared me. My father loved me. I tried to remember what he had been like alive, but the ghost was all I could see.

  “I thought maybe that was why you never cried, because you were mad at me. You didn’t make a sound, not until your mom got better and was able to hold you. Maybe you were waiting for her. And then, God, you were loud. After all that silence, your crying was so goddamned loud. I thought you would shatter windows.”

  Even as a ghost he had blue eyes. Now they were tinged with blood. The ghost stretched out its hand, but I stepped back, swallowing a cry of fright.

  “We were happy once,” he said, oblivious to my fear. “Before Claude took everything from me. We were happy, your mom and me. She loved me. Didn’t she?”

  So uncertain, my heart broke.

  “Dad,” I said, forcing sound through my throat.

  “Don’t trust Claude. He lies,” he said, in that too-familiar voice.

  Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The first time I heard Claude’s name was in the living room of our apartment. My mother had answered the phone when it rang, listened for a moment, then turned to my father. “It’s a Claude Fisk for you.”

  My father had taken the phone and gone into their bedroom for privacy. He didn’t come out for hours, but when he did, he went to my mother and took her into his arms, excited, laughing. From then on, my father began and ended his day with Claude’s name. In the morning, he would say to my mother, “I’m going to meet Claude later.” And then again, in the evening, “Claude said it was a good idea to start now. I think he’s right.”

  Through most of this my mother’s expression was one of pale worry and concern that occasionally gave way to a burst of fear. “But how do you know?” she asked. “How do you know this isn’t a mistake?”

  They argued over Claude. I went into my room and tried to read with a pillow over my head. Then later, he talked animatedly to my mother, following her around the apartment. “We can trust Claude for this,” he said. “This is our chance.”

  The ghost said not to trust Claude; my father had said we could trust him. Proof, I thought, that they were opposite. But the ghost had my father’s eyes. And he had my father’s voice.

  After the ghost vanished into empty air, I stayed standing in the middle of the garden until the sun burned the top of my head and my legs shook. I walked through the sliding glass doors, up the stairs, and into the room that would be my room.

  The mess shocked me. I had forgotten the garbage bag left in the center, gutted and torn in my mad dash from the room, left like a dead animal with its side torn open, spilling innards of sleeves, shorts, and pant legs. The trail of books and magazines, shoes, old dolls, and stuffed animals exploded out of the closet. I hopped from one clear island of carpet to the next.

  My father hated mess—he used to pretend he would come after me if I didn’t clean my room, counting to ten until I squealed with terror. Maybe the ghost hated mess, too. Or maybe he loved mess, because he was the opposite of my father.

  I started with the clothing, matching socks and balling them up into a pyramid. Without a dresser to put them in, I left stacks of T-shirts, jeans, and shorts along the floor.

  With each folded article of clothing, I unfolded a memory.

  I remembered my father in our apartment pacing while on the phone, back and forth in the living room, tangling the cord around his legs. He talked for hours, phone call after phone call. Sometimes he shouted; sometimes he slammed the receiver down in triumph or in anger. Or he sat in the growing dusk, staring into space. “Hey, Dad,” I said, “watch TV with me. Let’s go for food. Let’s go for a drive.” But he shook his head, no.

  Next came shoes, laid out in matching pairs along one side. Underneath the garbage bag of clothes I found a shoebox filled with old birthday cards and photographs of Sofie and me together in her backyard, building a fort from blankets when we were twelve. It hurt to think I might never see Sofie again, and I wondered if I could call her, if there might be some way to visit. I looked around this big room with its layer of mess and wished for Sofie to help organize it. She loved to line things up by size. She loved to make lists, then alphabetize them: lists of boys, lists of movie stars, lists of places she wanted to visit.

  Stack the books, stack the memories.

  I dug out a worn school copy of Shakespeare’s Tragedies mixed in with several magazines my mother purchased at supermarkets—People for herself, Teen Beat for me. I cut out the pictures from both types of magazines and taped them to the walls.

  I placed everything in short stacks in the center of the room, my clothing ringed by books and magazines, dolls and stuffed animals propped against one another. But then I changed my mind, grouping everything into small islands, needing a map to find my way to my underwear or my T-shirts. This left things messier than before, and I was overcome with a desire to toss everything out the window, to grab fistfuls of socks like baseballs and throw.

  But night had fallen, with the moon rising over the mountains. I hadn’t realized how much time had passed—the whole day gone. It must have been midnight or later. I took a deep breath before lining everything up against each of the walls and leaving the center of my room bare and free. Laid out end to end, there were enough things to make it all the way around. There was an order to it: first my favorite shirts and jeans and shorts, then my next favorite, then the things I never wore, followed by my favorite books, my photos of Sofie and José, schoolbooks, presents from my father.

  In my closet, I hung one piece of clothing—Deputy Mike’s jacket.

  BY THE NEXT MORNING, PLASTIC covered every inch of carpet downstairs. It crackled beneath my feet as I followed the wet-clay smell of fresh paint wafting from the front room. Tinny pop music played at a low volume. A stranger in splattered overalls took a roller and sloshed it in a pan of white paint before he turned toward the far wall, moving from top to bottom. The furniture had been taken away, and someone had pulled up the carpet, stripping the room bare.

  I stood at the edge, not wanting to go in. Behind me, Claude sat on the couch in the living room, elbow deep in papers and folders with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his beeper rattling on the coffee table. He had the phone from the hallway pressed against his ear with his shoulder.

  “I’ll tell you what the secret is: Keep your eye on the future,” he was saying. “There’s poor mentality and rich mentality. Most think you have to get lucky to get rich, or you have to be dishonest. But you see, the rich,” he said, spinning a pen around and around with his fingers, catching it every time, “the rich know it’s their God-given right to be rich. Not because they’re special or any bullshit like that. But because they’re not afraid to take it when it’s offered. This is a bull market; it’s ripe. I’m offering low risk, and a pretty goddamned steady yield. You let me worry about the details.”

  I moved into his line of vision and he turned to watch me as he continued speaking.

  “Yeah, well, do me a favor and leave it for now? I promise, tomorrow I’m all yours, an
d we’ll go over everything point by point. Right,” he said, and hung up.

  His beeper buzzed again, vibrating a little jig, but he ignored it.

  “You erased him,” I said.

  A look of surprise crowded around Claude’s eyes. It was the first time I’d spoken to him, and it was an accusation. I could tell he didn’t know how to react.

  “Wait here,” he said. “There’s something I want to discuss with you.” He snapped his fingers in a jokey way and moved past me to where a desk was squeezed between two bookshelves in the corner of the living room. It was an elaborate thing, made of cherrywood. I could make out the faint stenciling along its side: the image of a woman with turn-of-the-century hair, a small smile on her lips. He unlocked it with a key. The desk unfolded like a flower—the front part rolled up; then two panels hinged out to the sides.

  The desk was a trove of unasked questions. I tried to peer around Claude’s body to see what was inside it, but he was very careful to block my view.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “Just office-type stuff,” he answered, taking out a pen and a sheet of white paper before folding it up again and locking it. Sitting next to me on the couch, he wrote the house’s address down on the piece of paper:

  11509 Shangri-La Road, on the corner with Jupiter Lane.

  Shangri-La, the magical sanctuary hidden away in the mountains. My father and I had watched the old black-and-white movie together. Would it take a hundred years to escape this place? And when I did leave, would I shrivel up into an old woman? But in some ways it fit: the big pink house hidden away in the mountains, collecting an odd assortment of individuals over the years. But this wasn’t an idyllic land, and none of us were at peace.

  As if I were a six-year-old child, Claude made me memorize the telephone number as well as the ones for his cell phone and beeper.

  “This is stupid,” I said, but with an annoyed sigh I recited the address back to him.

  “Good girl,” he said, and took both of my hands between his much bigger ones. “I want you to do something for me,” he continued. “I want you to think of what you’re going to say to the social worker when they visit. We don’t know when they’ll come, but you should prepare now. Do you understand? You don’t want to cause any more trouble for your mother.”

  He wouldn’t let my hands go, his cologne so pungent I could taste it. I saw where he’d missed a spot shaving, under his chin.

  I knew then that it was the Child Services visit that had prompted the speed of the front room’s transformation, when, before, he’d let it linger, and that was the reason why Claude was home on a weekday. My anger rose again, but I nodded, and he let my hands go.

  “One more thing,” he said, rising to push the sliding doors open. I hesitated, but mirrored surfaces no longer scared me. The ghost wasn’t limited to a reflection. He could come and go as he pleased.

  I followed Claude onto the back patio, and there, waiting, was a brand-new bike. He wheeled it over.

  “For you,” he said, and I took it. My own bike, a girls’ bike, as pink as the house, with tassels and a basket and wide pedals for my feet. He pointed his finger in his over-the-top way, which I was beginning to realize was his normal way of talking. “Don’t you dare run away.”

  I steadied the bike by its handlebars, the perfect height for me. A cruiser, with a wide, cushioned seat.

  “What do you say, Rosaura?”

  My mother had come down from the third floor and stood inside. She had a pale silk kimono robe wrapped around her, and while her hair was loose and uncombed, it shone golden in the morning light.

  I didn’t want to say it, and she knew I didn’t want to. But I couldn’t see how to get out of it. I had never owned a bike before. I’d learned to ride on Sofie’s bike. It felt solid and real, like its weight belonged in my hands.

  “Thank you,” I said finally.

  He smiled. “You’re welcome.” He patted my head before going in. When he squeezed past my mother, she held herself still, then offered a cheek. His face softened, and he bent his head to kiss her before leaving the two of us alone.

  She stepped down onto the patio. “Are you going to ride away again?”

  There was a bitter edge to her question, and I was uncertain if she was still angry or not. She must have agreed to the changes for the front room. I knew it was irrational to want to keep it stained and unusable, but I couldn’t help it.

  “Just around the block. If that’s all right with you?” I answered, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my reply.

  Her lips thinned. She seemed ready to yank me to her side again, but instead she lifted her hand and touched my hair, then dropped it to finger my T-shirt. Rings of lazy gray cigarette smoke floated around her head. She was holding a notebook in her other hand. I’d seen it before, in our apartment. On evenings when my father was late coming home, she used to sit in the kitchen with it and a pack of cigarettes. She liked to draw and write, stick pictures in it, but she never let me see, hiding it underneath newspapers or in a kitchen drawer or somewhere in her room, where my father would find it and laugh at her for always wanting to keep some old school notebook that was falling apart. When I was twelve, my mother caught me sneaking a look at the notebook and snatched it from my hands, hiding it someplace I could not find. It came from a time when my father had been alive and we had lived as a family.

  She saw me notice it, and her hand gripped it tighter. “Don’t go far,” she said.

  I STOLE HER NOTEBOOK.

  It was the first time I had gone to the third floor, its bedroom larger than any other room in the house. There was a giant bed against the back wall, disordered with mounds of pillows and a fluffy comforter. I hated to think that she slept here with Claude.

  The notebook was left open on the bed, half-buried under the comforter. As I stood in the center of the room, I could hear the shower going. She must have been looking at the notebook before deciding to take a shower.

  The ghost had said, “We were happy once.” Maybe the notebook would show me a glimpse of that happiness. I picked it up and ran from the room.

  In the kitchen closet, behind the ironing board and the vacuum cleaner, I found a flashlight and then went out into the garden. The heat of the summer had browned it around the edges like an old photograph, and crickets sang beneath the buzz of cars from the nearby freeway.

  I sought the large row of bushes that marked the border between the garden and the wilderness of the hill that rose behind it. They were overgrown and prickly, creating a haven with a roof of twisted branches and patches of sky. On my knees, I crawled to a space where the ground was dry.

  It was the type of notebook you bought for ninety-nine cents at a drugstore: college ruled, one hundred sheets of paper. She had written her name in childish curlicued cursive: Dahlia, with a star over the i. I traced the indentation of the ballpoint pen, then looked inside.

  She had cut out the bulldog logo from her high school yearbook and glued it to the first page, but it had come unstuck and the edges were bent and ragged. A spiky collar bulged around the bulldog’s neck, with the words “Home of the Bulldogs” written in block letters underneath its toothy grin. The pages that followed were filled with more cutouts of strangers, posing or in candid shots, with old-fashioned hairstyles and clothing. These must have been her friends from long ago, although my mother never talked about having friends, never had them over for dinner or spoke to them on the phone. With an indrawn breath, I recognized my father: young, foolish, laughing. There were pages full of him, each revealing a secret: He wore bell-bottom jeans; he had a mustache; he was on the track team. Pictures of him running or standing with his teammates, and captions that read: Robert Douglas hurdles toward another win. He tended to have a permanent look of surprise, as if he was always caught off guard. I stared at one shot of him in mid-leap over a hurdle, graceful, determined, all his limbs working together in harmony. I wanted that picture to continue, to become unstuck
in time and roll forward so I could see him land, run, and leap again.

  She had made her own yearbook with just those pictures she wanted, manipulating the images to tell different stories from the ones in the real yearbook. In and around each picture cut and taped into the notebook, my mother had drawn illustrations, portraits of the photographed subjects. Sometimes there were words: wednesday, february, history class. It’s raining today. Water soaked my bed. I sleep on the floor again. Mama cries in her bed no longer rising she’s going to cry forever she’s dying. I will name my daughter Rosaura after her.

  The energy of her handwriting filled me with unease. She drew many vines around her sentences, constantly entangled.

  The stars stole into my bed again. He makes love like an overgrown puppy.

  She cries in Spanish she says his name over and over in a whisper so I can’t hear.

  Toward the end of the notebook, I found a picture of an older man and woman standing beside my father. They resembled him: the man was balding, with something familiar in his ink-spot eyes, in the way his mouth slashed across his face like an unhealed wound. The woman had a prim smile, and she clutched her purse tight to her side. My grandparents. They had names in the caption: Henry and Judith Douglas. My father had rarely spoken of them.

  On the last page of the notebook was one picture of my mother. A candid shot of her sitting on the bottom step of a small rise of stairs, a window above streaming light over her head and shoulders. The picture was black-and-white, grainy, slightly out of focus. Her hair looked darker than it did now, before she started dyeing it the color of warm honey. It fell over one side of her face. She sat with a notebook—her notebook, the same one I held in my lap—and raised her hand with an uncapped pen between her fingers as if she’d been caught in mid-gesture. Beside her she had a box with other pens. Underneath, the caption read, Artist Dahlia Reyes sits in the upper atrium stairway, creating another masterpiece.