The Cake House Read online

  Claude shut his mouth. He stood up and helped her stand. She started on her own for the stairs, not waiting for Claude.

  “Help Rosie clean this up,” Claude said to Alex, watching my mother go. “And you—” He took a deep breath and turned to me. I braced myself for another hot bellow. Instead, he deflated to normal size. He put a finger under my chin and tilted my face up so he could see the cut on my cheek and the imprint of my mother’s hand on my face. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then turned and left.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Alex moved my limbs and guided me through the living room and up to the second-floor bathroom like I was a puppet. Pastel blue tiles, pastel blue walls. My breath wheezed. The chill that started downstairs disappeared, and I was left feeling sluggish and tired. My head drooped.

  There was blood on my shirt. I was tired of blood and peeled the shirt off.

  Alex wet a washcloth, turning to face me, but stopped when he saw me naked from the waist up. His pale cheeks flooded with color. He stood still. The air filled with the rasp of my breathing, with his. Then his eyes dropped.

  Small lumps for breasts with dark nipples, and hips beginning to flare. My skin was peanut colored like my mother’s, but I had little of her beauty and even less of my father’s freckles or his long limbs.

  I don’t know why I did it. I wanted to make him uncomfortable. To shake him up and have him really look at me. I took his hand with the washcloth, passed it over my face, then down my neck, over my chest. His body tensed and he stepped back, grabbing a towel from the rack.

  “Clothes,” he said, throwing the towel around my shoulders, pulling me out of the bathroom and into my room. He searched through the piles of my clothing for underwear, for a shirt and a pair of jeans, remembering to fish out my shoes from the bathroom. He mixed up my carefully ordered stacks of clothing, putting the yellow skirt next to the green shorts and leaving my jeans in a heap. I would fix things later.

  I pulled a T-shirt over my head. I thought he would turn away, but he didn’t. Together, we went downstairs. In the back of the kitchen, he opened the utility closet and handed me a broom. We got to work cleaning, and the only sound between us came with the low tinkle of the porcelain as we swept up the pieces of the vase into a pile.

  Alex bent over with the dustpan. “That vase was expensive.”

  “How expensive?” I asked, picking up one piece of porcelain that was larger than the rest. One side was white and the other had yellow and blue glaze, the suggestion of a pattern.

  He shrugged. “Thousands,” he said. “You probably like that.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “The more expensive the better.”

  He shook his head, but I could see him try to hide a smile.

  THAT NIGHT, MY MOTHER CAME to visit me while I was in the bathroom. The tile felt cool against my knees. My mouth tasted sour; my hair stuck to my cheeks and neck, damp with sweat. I closed my eyes and lay flat on the floor, afraid to look anywhere for fear of seeing my father’s ghost again. It felt like a betrayal of him, to dread. The cut on my cheek throbbed.

  My mother appeared in the doorway to the bathroom, her robe billowing. “Can’t sleep?” she asked, lifting me to a seated position. Her hands were cool, checking for temperature, a featherlight touch.

  I wondered if I had lost my place with her. Could she forgive me for taking the notebook? She tilted my head to one side so that she could look at my left cheek. The wedding ring on her finger caught the light. As she traced the cut, her eyes searched mine, asking a question of her own: Can you forgive me?

  “I’m sorry I took your notebook,” I said. “I wanted to look at the pictures.”

  It was more than the pictures, though. To me, the notebook held the secret of who my father was, hidden somewhere in one of the photographs. I thought I knew who my father was, but I understood him less every day, when I should have understood him more.

  She looked at her hands: slender with long fingers that tapered to points. I put mine next to hers, but our hands were not alike. Mine were darker, with hangnails and raw cuticles, scars from cuts and scratches acquired in the garden or from my bike, or even from before, when I played with José, always a little too rough.

  “He took most of those photographs,” she said. “That’s why I kept them.”

  “For the yearbook?” I hadn’t realized.

  “Yes. Except for those that he was in. He used to love taking pictures.”

  “Why’d he stop?”

  Her eyes grew unfocused. “He got bored with it. There were other things that he wanted to do more.” She opened a drawer and found a brush, passing it through my hair. “You’re so much like him,” she said.

  I was nothing like my father. Not in the way he looked, all freckled and blue-eyed. I’d asked him once where his family came from, but he said he didn’t know. Something Scottish, he thought, maybe French, and for a while I dreamt there had been a mistake in heaven before I was born, that I was supposed to end up blond and blue-eyed but came out brown haired and forgettable.

  My mother smiled at my disbelieving glare. “You’re both stubborn.”

  Nighttime noises drifted in through the bathroom’s open window: owls, crickets, a rustle of leaves and branches that betrayed a creeping cat or some other animal crawling in the garden.

  “But you hated him,” I said, no longer able to hold on to the ghost’s insistence that my parents had been happy. I knew they had never been happy. I didn’t want my mother to hate me too. I didn’t want to be like my father, filled with bitterness even in death.

  She pulled back, took my head between her hands, careful with the still-tender cut on my cheek.

  “What makes you say that?” she asked.

  “You ran away.”

  All this time, and I hadn’t stopped to wonder why we had run away on that day. I knew my parents fought all the time, I knew there were problems between them, but all that had been there before. I didn’t know what had changed. My mother had never said; I didn’t know her side of the story.

  Her eyes were dark. “Maybe sometimes I did hate him. But it was the moments I loved him that hurt. If I had hated him, it would be easier.”

  She stood up. The doorway behind her was a dark, open maw. If my father’s ghost lurked, he wasn’t showing himself this time.

  “I miss you, Mom.”

  She opened her arms, and I sighed as I fell against her.

  “If we leave right now, Claude would never know,” I said after several moments had passed. I didn’t say that if we left right then, the ghost might not know either. That maybe we could escape both of them at the same time.

  Her grip tightened, and I could hear her heart speed up. “And where would we go? With what?” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice had changed, becoming thin and frail. “You may love your father, Rosaura. You should love him, but there’s so much you don’t know.”

  Tell me! I wanted to say. Tell me everything! But instead I asked, “Do you love Claude?”

  She sighed. I thought she meant to ignore my question and leave, but then she said, “Wait here.”

  The house creaked and shook. Wind spanked its sides. When she returned she carried a cardboard box. I sat on the toilet and she sat on the edge of the tub.

  “This belonged to your father. I thought you might want it,” she said, handing me the box.

  It held an old camera, the kind with a lens that needed focusing. The back of it opened to reveal an empty slot ready for a fresh roll of film. I put the strap around my neck and lifted it up to see my mother through the viewer. I tried to focus on her face, but she sat too close and her nose and mouth and eyes all blurred together.

  Part of the black plastic was chipped, and another part had a crack that someone had tried to glue closed. Suddenly, the memory of my father’s hands holding the camera unlocked in my mind. I remembered him taking my picture and taking my mother’s picture, asking us to stand or sit close together while we smiled and
looked at the camera and said “cheese.”

  The box also had a bag of film. She showed me how to thread it. I loved all the different manual parts, working together. I took my first picture of her sitting next to me, not caring that I couldn’t get it all the way in focus and hadn’t used a flash.

  I took my mother’s hand in mine. We sat together until she rose.

  “You should go to bed,” she said, and waited in the hallway until I stepped inside my bedroom. As she walked to the stairs, I took her picture.

  IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, I took more pictures, thinking that perhaps I might make my own handmade bag covered in photographs. I took pictures of Claude and more of my mother despite having no way to develop them. Alex allowed for one picture, maybe two, before he would start refusing, and would not sit still or look at the camera or smile. He would not pose for me, so I had to catch him when he was least expecting it. I took pictures of him when he played his guitar, with his fingers pressing the strings against the frets.

  When I ran out of film, Alex took the used film, developed it, and bought me more. I had been taking pictures anyway, clicking through shot after shot—without film I could take as many pictures as I wanted, over and over again, wondering how they would have turned out.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked. I had planned on asking my mother if we could go buy more, but he beat me to it.

  “Just take it. If you need more, tell me,” he said, holding the camera-store bag.

  I examined each photograph in the stack Alex returned to me, eager and curious to see what my camera and I had captured on film, but in every picture of my mother, she was wrapped in a shroud of smoke like ghostly arms, and I was afraid to look further.

  A NEW CHILD SERVICES CASEWORKER came to the house to question us. This caseworker didn’t have a special handbag. She didn’t take my hand or promise to visit on my birthday.

  During the interview, Claude and my mother and I sat together on the couch, presenting a unified front. Claude held my mother’s hand, and I sat on her other side, with Alex standing behind. My mother let Claude do all the talking. If the caseworker asked her a direct question, she paused before answering, as if working hard to remember how the words might string together to make a sentence.

  When the caseworker questioned me, I had nothing more to say. And although I saw no sign of the ghost, I was too afraid to speak for fear that the caseworker might get run over by a car, or some other horrible thing would happen to her.

  “What about Mrs. Wilson?” I asked. I had my camera in my hand, wanting to take the caseworker’s picture, but I was too shy to ask. Mrs. Wilson would have understood the need for a photograph. “When will she come and visit? Is she all right?”

  But the caseworker didn’t answer. Instead, she recommended therapy, maybe a family vacation. Her suggestions were met with smiles and nods from Claude before he showed her to the door with assurances that they would address the agency’s concerns right away and that they looked forward to her next visit.

  As soon as the caseworker left, my mother sagged with relief.

  “You were great,” said Claude, returning. “Everything is going to be okay. We’re nearly out of it now.”

  “Are we?” she asked, giving him a piercing look. I thought she had sounded stiff and unwelcoming in front of the caseworker, but the woman hadn’t seemed to care or take notice. Or maybe she had noticed and had written quiet observations on her clipboard to be filed in some office far away and forgotten. Her notes might say: Stepfather smiles too much—keep an eye on that one. Mother a little slow, resentful. Unhappy? The son doesn’t appear to speak. And the child in question is … fully dressed, at least.

  The next day, Claude bought my mother an etching. The artist was some long-dead person with the initials CEF. It wasn’t very big. He hung it in the last remaining empty wall space, right over the cherrywood rolltop desk. It depicted a simple scene: a dilapidated wooden stairs, a dirty child sitting in mud, and the child’s mother standing nearby, churning butter.

  My mother’s dark eyes were fixed on the lines of the etching, moving from top to bottom and then back up again, taking it in with arms crossed over her stomach and chest, hugging herself.

  “It’s an original,” Claude said. “I thought, after everything that’s happened recently, you deserved something special. Do you like it?”

  It was like he had bought her a reward for running away from my father, for marrying him.

  Studying the etching, she plucked a cigarette from an already-opened pack and lit it, taking a long inhale.

  She opened her mouth to speak, to thank Claude, to say how much she loved it, to admire the artistry, the use of light, to say the things she was supposed to say. Instead, she began coughing and couldn’t stop.

  The etching was forgotten. When I glanced back at it, the glass reflected my father. I whipped my head around, but he was gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  My birthday fell a couple of weeks before school started. “I’m older now,” I said to Alex as he fixed bowls of cereal, one for himself, one for me. “Fourteen. An established teenager.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked around a mouthful of cornflakes.

  What I wanted to say was that now he had to take me seriously. Now he could tell me things. Now we were alike, and I could be his friend instead of a weird stepsister. But I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like a weird stepsister.

  “You’re still a kid,” he said.

  “So are you.”

  Claude entered the kitchen and saw the two of us sitting at the table. “The birthday girl,” he said with a clap of his hands and a grin. “Ready for your big day? The birthday girl gets anything she wishes.”

  “We could go to the mall, I guess,” I said.

  Unperturbed by my apparent disinterest, Claude hollered for my mother to hurry up. In less than twenty minutes we were on our way.

  The Mercedes purred like a sleek tomcat, ambling around street corners, creaking when it stopped at red lights. Claude drove at a sedate pace with the radio playing Top 40 hits. From the backseat, I could smell his cologne, which reached to all corners of the car and seemed to press me farther against the leather of my seat. It surprised me, how Claude managed to fit himself inside the car.

  On the other side of the backseat, Alex retreated behind noise-canceling headphones, tapping the rhythm of the music out on his legs. I inched closer so I could put my hand next to his thigh, pretended to kick him by accident, but he ignored me as much as he ignored the rest of the world.

  “Are you excited, Rosie?” asked Claude. He grinned through the rearview mirror. “New school, new friends. It all changes in high school, you know. That’s where you get made. You’ll be lining them up, sweetheart, and knocking them out.”

  Claude seemed oblivious to the cartoonish quality of his words. But maybe if we all playacted enough, the lies would disappear by some unnamed magic.

  “Sure, can’t wait. The more boys, the better.”

  “All right, make fun of me,” said Claude. “But mark my words, you’re going to have a great time in high school. I did.”

  His tone changed. My mother turned to look at him, her eyes hidden behind a new pair of diamond-studded sunglasses. Claude put his hand on her leg, squeezing. She turned back to the passing scenery. Alex kept nodding to his music.

  The Mercedes lurched to a stop in the mall parking lot. Waves of heat rose from the black asphalt, radiating upward, making me squint. I was the first one out of the car, followed by Alex, whom Claude quickly pulled aside. He whispered something, and in the next moment Alex mumbled, “Yes, sir,” with a nod. The headphones came off and were left on the backseat.

  My mother was the last one out.

  Before anyone could react, I grabbed Alex and started marching toward the mall entrance.

  He tugged at my hand. “What’s got into you?”

  “It’s my birthday,” I answered. I couldn’t t
ell if he was annoyed, but he hadn’t let go, so I swung our hands back and forth. “They want me to be happy. I’m trying to be happy.”

  “Is it working?”

  Behind us, Claude and my mother followed, her sunglasses glinting. Claude had taken her arm in his, like those couples from movies set in previous decades, strolling down a promenade. But they seemed stiff and awkward, and I wondered what my mother was thinking.

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  We entered the air-conditioned bubble of the mall. Claude took us first to a furniture store and pointed out a new set of bedroom furniture: a canopied bed, a matching dresser and desk. There was also a small sofa and beanbag chairs, bookshelves, and a trunk to hold “memories.” The entire set cost more than four thousand dollars. Each time Claude suggested another piece of furniture—an armoire, a princess chair, a trundle bed for sleepovers I’d probably never have—I sought my mother’s disapproval; these were things I could not accept. But she stood mute.

  “What do you say? Do you like what you see?” asked Claude.

  “I don’t need any of this,” I said, yet I pressed my hands down onto the duvet. I wanted every pillow, every satiny sheet.

  When I turned to Alex, he shrugged as if to say, Why not? Don’t fight it.

  “Tell you what,” said Claude. “I’ll have the store hold it for now. You think about it. If by the end of the day you haven’t changed your mind, then that’s that, okay?” Claude spoke with easy confidence, and although it appeared to be a question, it wasn’t. He turned to speak to the salesman hovering nearby and whispered in his ear, handing the man an envelope. He finished by clapping the man on the back.

  My mother pulled me over to one side. “Don’t be stupid. Take it.”

  “I can’t.”

  Memories of our apartment were plain on her face—the tiny rooms with small windows, the secondhand furniture, my bedroom with the mattress on the floor, and the plans she and my father shared while huddled together on the threadbare sofa. They would often share dreams of their own house, where my mother had a studio for drawing and my father could afford an entertainment center, a luxury car, a pool in the backyard. I would have a room with a bed that wasn’t a mattress on the floor in the corner.