The Cake House Page 5

  Claude stood up when she entered. “Well,” he said, holding out his seat for her, and then placing another plate with eggs and toast on the table. She hesitated a moment before taking the offered seat.

  “Thank you,” she said. “This looks great. You shouldn’t have.”

  He leaned over and gave her a kiss on her cheek. “The luncheon starts at noon, if you could be ready by eleven-thirty. Wear the new dress, and those earrings.” He spoke with an easy mixture of request and command before leaving the kitchen.

  My mother and I remained silent. She looked at the eggs with a revulsion that I shared, and then she scraped the rest into the trash. I could see the red scratch along her left arm where my fingernail had marked her.

  “Where are you going?” I couldn’t hide my resentment that she was leaving. But maybe she had left often during that time I was in the closet and I hadn’t even known. “Can’t I go too?”

  She shook her head, as if to clear it, then focused her attention on me. “Will you help me get ready?”

  I used to love to watch her dress, watch her put her makeup on. She knew this. Maybe this was her way of apologizing. As we passed the second floor, I strained to hear anything from Alex’s room, but there was nothing.

  Her new dress hung on the open closet door, tasteful in a pastel blue. As she took a shower and dried her hair, I organized her makeup: lipsticks lined up, brushes arranged tallest to smallest.

  She sat at the new vanity Claude had bought and put on makeup like it was war paint: a little too much blush, lips painted a too-dark red. It was her normal way of putting on makeup, but it seemed more out of place in this strange bedroom than before. She smacked her lips together, smoothing out the color. Then came the dress, sliding over her shoulders, swinging down around her hips.

  All she had to do was put her shoes on to complete the outfit, but as she lifted her gaze to the mirror she froze. I looked, too, and saw confusion and disgust cross her face. Without warning, she swept her makeup off the vanity, scattering it across the carpet.

  Then she took a deep breath and grabbed a tissue with a quick jerk of her wrist. She rubbed at her lips.

  “Wet a towel for me?” I went into their bathroom to get a washcloth. When I returned, she’d picked up all of the makeup. I handed her the washcloth and she scrubbed her face clean, starting over again, this time with neutral colors, a soft, clean foundation and light rosy beige on her lips.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  She looked like a character from a television show where families lived in the suburbs and mothers wore sweaters draped over their shoulders. Together, we looked at her image again, her hair brushed to shining gold, diamond drops in her ears; she was perfect, and different from before. Something had changed in the hour it had taken for her to dress, some indefinable metamorphosis that took her even further away from the mother I knew.

  I went with her downstairs and was surprised to see Alex sitting at the dining table, dressed in ironed khaki trousers and a light yellow polo shirt that matched his hair.

  It hit me that Alex was meant to go with Claude and my mother to this luncheon, all of them together, and that I wasn’t going with them. They were going to leave me alone, without even Alex as company. It felt like a betrayal, a deliberate insult meant to say I was not wanted, not cared for, not needed.

  Claude whistled as he entered the living room with a smile. “All ready?” he asked. “Good. I’ll be just a minute.”

  “You’re all going? Without me?” I said, outraged with disbelief I couldn’t control.

  “That’s right,” he said, not reacting to my anger.

  I hadn’t expected him to admit it. “You don’t want me with you. Keep the crazy kid at home, right?”

  Claude pursed his lips. Beside him, my mother and Alex stood mute, apparently unwilling to come to my defense. Maybe they didn’t want me to go either. “After last night, I think you should stay here and rest.”

  “But what about Child Services?” I asked, trying to hold on to my panic, feeling sick to my stomach. “What if I call the police and tell them you left me alone?”

  Anger snapped in Claude’s eyes, and he took a step in my direction. “You’re going to stay home, and you’re going to rest, and you’re not going to cause any trouble,” he said in a measured tone.

  I didn’t understand. If he was so worried, why didn’t he keep Alex home with me, at least? Or better yet, take me with them? Whatever this “luncheon” was, it was important to Claude, important enough that despite the imminent visit from Child Services, he would risk leaving his crazy stepdaughter at home alone rather than bring her with him. And he needed the appearance of a family, together. Looking at my mother, the way she was dressed, she fit in with Claude and Alex more than with me, and I could see in her face that she couldn’t or wouldn’t encourage Claude to bring me with them.

  THEY LEFT AND I REMAINED standing in the living room, uncertain what to do next. I faced the front room, darkened and full of shadows because the curtains were drawn. Alone in the house for the first time, it was like I could feel the different layers settling with the weight of all that was unsaid. Before the ghost could return, to say those unsaid things, I made my escape to the garden, where at least I could pretend to be free.

  Faded petals littered the flower beds, fallen from flowers that lacked the strength to hold their heads up. I dug my fingers and hands into the dirt, the top layer warmed by the sun, and busied myself collecting the corpses of poppies and daisies and dahlia flowers. The Mercedes returned and I heard the car doors slam shut, but I didn’t get up from my work in the garden. The flowers had all died and they needed to be buried.

  The side garden gate creaked open and shut. I didn’t turn around, but I could hear someone crossing through the tall grass. A moment later, a pair of neat leather shoes stepped close, and Alex knelt down beside me. The sun made my eyes water, but I was happy to think that he’d come straight back to the garden to see me. I pushed my hands farther into the dirt.

  “They’ve all died,” I said with a sigh.

  “It’s the heat.” He watched me dig a fresh grave and lay a dandelion to rest next to a sister daisy. “The heat killed them.”

  I took a fistful of dirt in my hand, raised it perpendicular before me, and then let it go. The dirt fanned out as the wind picked up. “I think they died of sadness.”

  “That’s dumb,” Alex said, and, careless of his still-immaculate khakis, he dug a hole next to all the others, an unmarked mass grave, and laid a dead flower to rest. “But it’s obviously important to you.”

  He wiped his dirt-covered hands on his khakis. Did he also think I was crazy? He wouldn’t quite meet my eyes when I leaned closer.

  “Did you have a good time at this stupid luncheon?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, and even though his face hardly changed, I thought he might be amused by my resentment.

  “Why couldn’t I go?”

  “Hey, you have a bike now,” he said. “Let’s try it out.”

  He led me to where our bikes stood. Instead of taking his, he took mine instead.

  “What are you doing? That one’s mine.”

  “I like yours better,” he said. “It’s newer.”

  I followed him through the side gate to the front driveway and street. He helped me sit on the handlebars, but I still fell halfway into the basket, screeching in fright, but he was careful as we sailed together. Downhill, with the wind blowing my hair all over the place. On sidewalks and off, until we hit a curb and I almost fell but he grabbed me around the waist. His hand was warm against the skin of my stomach.

  “Now it’s my turn,” he said. Despite how much taller and heavier he was, he hopped onto the handlebars, but I wasn’t strong enough to hold him up and we toppled over in a heap onto the lawn of a neighboring house.

  He dusted himself off and pushed the bike away. There was a long, streaky grass stain across his chest and shoulder, ruining his polo
shirt. I touched the stain. He looked at it and made a face that was a cross between “oops” and “who cares?” that made me smile. For some reason, his willingness to ruin his clothing felt like a gift. I kept my hand on his shoulder. “Why couldn’t I go with you today?” I asked a second time.

  Alex inspected his knees, which were also stained. After our yelling earlier while we rode my bike, his silence was unnerving. The skin at his neck glistened with sweat, flushed pink from the heat and brightness of the day.

  “Ask me anything else,” he said.

  There were so many secrets, and I didn’t know where to look for answers. My mother didn’t speak at all. The ghost told me not to trust Claude. And Claude said to be careful with Alex, that he hadn’t been the same since … something, long ago.

  “Did your mother ever live here with you?” I asked.

  Alex turned his face away. A car honked, and a lemon-yellow Volkswagen Bug drove up with a couple of girls in the front seats. I couldn’t see the driver, but the girl in the passenger side stuck her head out the window. Pretty face, with dark hair pulled back in a half ponytail framing freckles and a small, upturned nose. She waved and called his name.

  I pushed at the tangled mess of my hair, wild and rough around my face. The girl got out of the car and smiled when Alex walked over to her. They looked like a matched pair, even with the stains on Alex’s pants and polo shirt. She should have been the one to go with Alex to a country club lunch.

  “Just thought you might like to go see a movie,” I heard her say with a touch of uncertainty.

  Alex hesitated, but then the other girl, whom I still couldn’t see, yelled from inside the car, “Come on, Alex, we’re bored. Get your butt in here.”

  Did he prefer the sweet request or the demand? I wondered.

  “Do you know how to get back?” he asked me, and I realized he was planning to go with them. “Straight up the street. You got it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and there was a moment when I thought he might change his mind, say to the girls in the VW Bug that he was already busy and he didn’t want to go to the movies with them. He wavered, but then the girl in the driver’s seat honked, and Alex looked back at the car.

  “Tell my dad I’ll be back later,” Alex said, and with a wave in my direction, he got into the car and drove away.

  CLAUDE CAME HOME IN HIS suit with his jacket draped over his arm, his briefcase in one hand, and questioned me with a glare and an annoyed tug of his tie. “Did he say where he was going? Or when he’d be back?”

  “The movies, I think,” I said, and shrugged, wondering if it was a betrayal of Alex to tell Claude this.

  Claude stared as if he wasn’t sure to believe me, or as if maybe what I had said held another meaning or there was a hidden truth.

  “All right,” he said, then headed for the stairs.

  Later, after we had all eaten, without Alex, and my mother went upstairs, I didn’t want to go to my room or go to bed yet, so I waited for Alex to come home. I went into the kitchen where I could watch the front driveway through the window.

  There was banging and movement from the living room, and I froze, heart hammering in my chest for fear of the ghost until I recognized the sound of Claude’s footsteps. I inched toward the door of the kitchen and spied Claude crouching by the cherrywood rolltop desk. My heart lurched; I was certain he had found the notebook. But he had no reason to search for it; it wasn’t worth anything, except to my mother and me.

  He hadn’t seen me, too engrossed in whatever he was doing to notice that the kitchen light was still on. I tried to make out the shape of him, his arms resting on the desk. He was muttering to himself and pressing his forehead down onto the wood.

  His hands were folded as if in prayer, and he took in a big lungful of air. I wondered if he might start crying—he didn’t seem like himself—and I turned away, uncomfortable to see him vulnerable.

  The front door creaked open, then shut with a dull thud. A moment later, Alex walked in and turned on a lamp, transforming the living room from a wonderland of mysteries to the dull world of carpets, tables, and walls. I stepped back into the kitchen so they wouldn’t see me.

  “It’s past your curfew,” Claude said, with steel and a quiet scolding that didn’t fit the man I’d just seen.

  “You playing the concerned parent?” asked Alex, somewhere between annoyed and disbelieving, but he didn’t deny his tardiness. Silence followed, filled with the busy noises of distant traffic and a dog barking a couple of houses over.

  “Things are a little thin, son. You’ll have to do better this year. The same sort. Understand?”

  There was a pause, and then I heard Alex run up the stairs.

  I peeked around the kitchen door and saw Claude as he stood with his hands at his sides, rubbing his fingers together as if he had touched something sticky and was trying to wipe them clean. He turned to face the desk again. “Damn,” he said under his breath, so low I had to strain to hear him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Claude cooked breakfast again and called everyone down to eat together at the kitchen table. I watched both Alex and Claude for hints that might help me understand their conversation from the night before, but they didn’t speak to each other at all. Alex ate his food in silence, and Claude spoke only to my mother. To escape from the tension, I went out to the garden and got my bike, deciding to ride up and down the street.

  After a sweaty couple of hours of trying to bike up the hill, I saw Claude’s big gray Mercedes drive away. I went back to the house and dumped my bike next to Alex’s before pushing the sliding doors open. The dark gloom of the living room felt heavy with the caged heat of the day.

  I stopped when I heard his voice in the hallway.

  “Did you tell her it was Alex calling? Did you say my name?” Pause. “I’ll hold.” Then a longer pause.

  Alex was on the phone. I had not seen anyone other than Claude ever use it, but that wasn’t what stopped me; it was how his voice sounded: rough, strung out, strangled.

  He played with the phone cord, wrapping it around his hand, then letting it go, then wrapping it around his hand again, whipping the cord against the wall, in circles, like a jump rope. With each whip against the wall, the cord made a thwapping sound.

  “When will she be free?” Alex’s voice regained some of its normal timbre. I wondered if he was calling the VW Bug girl from the other day. “No message,” he said, now sounding haughty. Without saying goodbye he ended the call, staring at the receiver for several seconds after he placed it back in its cradle.

  I must have made a noise, because he turned and our eyes met.

  “Who were you trying to call?”

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked, studying my face, my body.

  I passed my hand through my tangled and damp hair. “I went for a ride.”

  “That it?”

  “Yeah, why? Should I get naked again and head for the hills?”

  Unimpressed, he leaned against the wall and watched until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s all right.” He started up the stairs, then looked over his shoulder. “Come up to my room?” he asked. He glided away. “Or don’t come. Either way.”

  ALEX LIVED LIKE A GUEST in someone else’s house. His bed was made, the pillow in the exact center. No posters, nothing on the walls, no clothing on the floor or shoes left in the middle of the room, no sign of life except for the disordered stack of vinyl albums leaning against his stereo.

  In a competition of weird rooms, I wondered which one of us would win. At least mine looked lived-in.

  He went straight for the stereo and switched it on, plopping the needle down on the record that was already there. I was grateful for the swelling guitar and drums that helped hide my growing awkwardness. Uncertain where to sit that wouldn’t disrupt the obsessive order, I lingered in the center. Alex wasn’t paying attention, going through his records, taking some out, tucking others
back in. I inched toward his desk, daring to sit on the chair.

  His desk was pristine—not a pencil out of place, papers stacked, and a dictionary and thesaurus ready and available. Not a speck of dust on the desk surface, with his desk calendar, stapler, and scissors all at right angles.

  I took the tape dispenser and pulled and ripped off a long strip, then taped my mouth shut, adding a second strip. The adhesive tickled my nose, but I kept adding more until the moisture from my mouth made a bubble. With my mouth sealed shut I went behind him and tapped his shoulder. When he turned around I raised my hands like claws and mumbled as threateningly as I could before I started laughing, ruining the effect.

  “Very funny,” he said, reaching to rip the tape from my face, but I sidestepped.

  On one corner of the desk stood a framed photograph of a woman who shared Alex’s distant, chilled expression. Not beautiful, or at least not the way my mother was beautiful. But perhaps she might have been pretty in the way that novels liked to call “striking” or “handsome.” She aimed her stare at the camera, daring it to take her picture and trap her in a plain metal frame.

  I picked it up.

  “That’s my mother,” said Alex.

  Stunned that he volunteered this information, I peeled away the tape across my mouth. “Where is she?”

  “New York. Paris. London. I don’t know. Somewhere else.”

  “Do you talk to her?”

  “She calls sometimes,” he said, speaking almost before I finished asking my question, and then he took the frame and stuffed it into a drawer in his desk. He crouched by the stereo and changed records, choosing a violin concerto instead of rock music, haunting and vicious and beautiful. He was like a yo-yo, landing in my hand for one second but then gone again in the next. It kept me wanting more. I couldn’t keep up. And now, as before, a subtle change occurred after he mentioned his mother—he couldn’t sit still.

  “Sing that song.” He licked his lips, twirling an album cover in his hands so that I couldn’t see what the picture was, and started humming my mother’s lullaby despite its clashing with the violin. Above our heads, reflected light from the red plastic stereo cover danced on the ceiling, not quite on beat but almost: a second too late, a beat off. It made me dizzy.