by Laura McNeal
“Okay.”
For cutting school and not answering my phone and wandering loose among mountain lions and would-be rapists (“did you know there are squatters camps out there?” my mother asked, so I didn’t mention the hammock), she grounded me and took away my phone. The next morning, she refused to make Icelandic pancakes, which were the sacred centerpiece of our Saturday mornings.
“Tell Robby I said joyeux anniversaire,” I told my mother when the catering trucks began to arrive at ten, filling Hoyt’s driveway and the patio with white-shirted men and women. My aunt Agnès was throwing a party for Robby’s seventeenth birthday, and I could hear her voice as she told people where to set up chairs and where to chill the Perrier.
My mother appeared to be thinking it over. “You can go to the party,” she said, “because I’ll be there.”
I hoped hopelessly that my uncle might have hired Amiel to do some of the work. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
My mother and I walked through the grove in our new summer dresses, my mother’s hair pulled into a bun, her mouth similarly tightened, at six. We braced ourselves because a party thrown by Agnès was so elegant that you could only enjoy it if you were, say, invisible and yet able to eat. I was always charmed, at first, by the food and the flowers and the little sparkling lights, her handsomeness, and the waiters with trays. Agnès stood at the far edge of the patio, holding a champagne flute, her dark hair curling up just a little at the back of her ageless neck. I saw immediately that the summer dresses my mother and I had chosen were frowsy and countrified and that we would always and forever be that kind of people. Agnès had that effect on me. The evening sky was periwinkle, and white roses glowed at the edges of a world that smelled of grilled meat and caramelized sugar, where heaps of impossibly perfect strawberries cascaded over one another on silver platters and arrangements of incandescent lilies floated in the center of each round table. The pool water flowed over its vanishing edge, one I had approached from within too many times to be taken in by the illusion.
I doubted Robby was very pleased with the offering. For my fifteenth birthday, my mother, father, Robby, and I had driven to Oceanside and walked the length of the old wooden pier to Ruby’s Diner, where the red and white booths seem to float over the water in a shimmering light that’s the best part of winter in San Diego. The ocean below our windows was mint blue while we were twisting our straw papers and sucking chocolate milk shakes out of tall fluted glasses, and my father was in a cheerful mood because he’d just sold a condo, I think. Then one of the men leaning over the rail with a fishing rod just outside our window caught a bat ray. I remember that part because when we walked out of the restaurant and stood looking out at the hammered pools of silver light where the late sun touched down, Robby asked what the point was of killing a bat ray.
The woman who sat with the dead ray at her feet said, “Have you ever eaten scallops, kid?”
“Yeah,” Robby said.
“Then you’ve probably eaten a ray. Restaurants cut them with a cookie cutter, see, and call them scallops.”
I didn’t believe her at first, but Robby did.
“That doesn’t happen,” I said when we walked away.
“I’ll bet it does,” Robby said.
“I don’t see what difference it makes,” my father said when we were all strolling down the pier past the fishing rods and tubs of bait and men standing with their hands in their coat pockets, waiting for a catch in the cold, late-evening wind. “You’re eating something that used to be alive, one way or the other.”
“But you cut it up and leave all those extra bits,” I said, “and those parts go to waste.” The cookie cutter thing reminded me of making sugar cookie trees at Christmas and trying really hard to use up all the dough, though you never could.
“Plus, they’re lying,” my mom said. “They’re saying it’s something it isn’t. That’s the main thing.”
“I wonder what they make shrimp out of,” Robby said. “Sharks?” He was joking, trying to turn the conversation away from morals. “Hey, check that guy out.”
Beyond the fishing lines, a V of black-suited surfers bobbed up and down on their boards, eyes on the next swell, hoping to eke out one more ride before total darkness. The boy Robby pointed to had just risen, and he stood in perfect balance as the wave held him and carried him for a long beautiful time, and when the boy saw that the ride was over, he stepped off the board.
Looking at Robby beside the tea lights and the swimming pool, his pants tailored and his shirt pressed, I thought he looked like someone who could ride a long way without falling off.
“Shoot me now,” he told us, giving my mother a hug.
“Not when you’re looking so princely,” she said, full of her usual love for him. She handed over the box that I knew contained a small statue of a red-kilted Tintin and his terrier, Snowy, standing in a rowboat as they prepared, according to the catalog description, to set off for L’Ile Noir.
“Thanks,” Robby said, and before I could say anything more, my uncle was there, smooshing me pleasantly to his granite chest, his face cut a little from shaving or crashing through bushes on his motorbike.
“Come eat,” Hoyt said. “Agnès brought you some of those chocolates, Sharon Magoo. From Par-ee. Plus we have scallops wrapped in bacon.”
I raised an eyebrow at Robby.
“Real ones,” Robby said. “Or so they promised.”
When my uncle walked away with my mother, Robby pulled me back and hissed into my ear, “There’s an Avalon in the driveway. I think it’s the one, but I couldn’t check it out when everybody was still arriving.”
“He invited his girlfriend to your party?”
Robby shrugged.
“Why would he do that?”
Robby widened his eyes to show that logic had no place here. “Just come check it out with me,” he said, giving me the sweet old Robby look, the one that said I was his best cousin of all. He led me past various neighbors and friends, all of whom he nodded to with what I have to say was his mother’s charm, and then dragged me through the darkened wisteria arbor to the gravel drive, which was crowded with cars and trucks that gleamed in the fading light. “There,” he said, checking to see that no one was watching or listening to us. He let go of my arm and approached the car as if it were an alien spaceship, which I suppose in a way it was. Stars glittered like moving water overhead.
“Keep watch,” he said. He leaned forward to peer through the windows. “It’s the same one,” he said, “and it’s unlocked.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “Then get in.”
“Get in?”
“Nobody’s coming. Just get in and find the registration.”
Robby climbed into the car and opened the glove compartment. The car’s interior lights lit up the whole scene like a fish tank, and at that moment I heard my uncle calling, “Robby?”
I couldn’t see where Uncle Hoyt was, exactly. There was a catering truck to one side of us and somebody’s Dodge dually on the other side, and though I could see most of the front lawn, I couldn’t see my uncle, so I ducked.
The voice came closer.
“Robby?”
The light in the car went out. I had no way of knowing whether Robby had also heard the voice and ducked.
“I don’t know where he went,” my uncle told somebody. “I’ll send him to find you when he shows up, okay?” he said.
I earnestly hoped that might be the end of his search, but then I saw my uncle’s silhouette at the far end of the corridor that the parked cars formed on the grass and gravel. He would see me. He would see me crouched beside a car and he’d know whose car it was and what would I say? What if he came up and saw Robby in the front seat?
I popped up and started walking—sprinting, nearly—toward him, not daring to sneak a glance into the Avalon. “Hi, Uncle Hoyt,” I said. My voice sounded fake and wobbly, as a nervous, lying voice will. “I was just looking for something.”
“You find it?” He studied me with his usual acuteness. That was the thing that gave Uncle Hoyt real substance, the fact that he always looked like he was weighing your moral fitness and expecting the very best you could be, no lies or cowardice, and giving you the same. How could I have been wrong about him?
“Yeah, I found it,” I told him, sick at heart. I patted my purse as if the phantom lost thing were safely stowed. I sweated onto the tight batiste armholes of my new unfashionable dress.
“Let’s go back to the party, then, okay?” Hoyt said. “Have you seen Robby?”
I said I hadn’t lately, and I went with him to the plates of scallops and figs and strawberries and lamb, but I slipped away again from the quivering pool water and the sparkly lights as soon as I could. There in the Avalon was Robby, prone in the dark seat of the car. When he saw me, he cautiously sat up. I opened the car door and discovered that Robby Wallace is not spy material and maybe not, as I thought at the start of the party, the master of his surfboard and the sea.
“Well?” I whispered.
“I don’t know. I haven’t moved since you left.”
“Get cracking, Tintin! I’ll be the lookout.”
He shook his head, so finally I just did it for him. I got in the car, opened the glove compartment, and rifled away. I told myself it was my father’s fault and my uncle’s, too, and that I used to be good and trustworthy.
The car was registered to someone named Arnold Farlow on Tumblecreek Lane. I memorized this information and stuffed the papers back into the plasticine folder filled with receipts. I was more than ready to declare this sufficient information when I noticed that there was a laminated tag on the floor of the car—one of those ID cards you have to wear now that people assassinate their co-workers all the time. MARY BETH FARLOW, this one said beneath her photograph, but the interior lights had winked out automatically, so I was trying to make out her face when Robby opened the car door and made all the light I needed. “Someone’s coming,” he hissed, crouching down on the grass beside the car. “Let’s go.”
When we returned to the party, my mother said, “I’ve been looking for you. Stay closer.”
Cake was presented, candles were lighted, candles were extinguished, cake was removed from the table by a white-jacketed waiter, and my aunt Agnès said a number of unspecific things about her affection for Robby and Fallbrook and failed, afterward, to include my mother and me in the vast number of guests she invited to step forward and talk into the microphone about Robby. A horse trainer that Robby had always loathed (my aunt Agnès is a big one for horses, Robby not so much) was remembering Robby’s first (forced) participation in a dressage show when I looked up to thank the person who was handing me a plate of cake and ice cream and saw that it was Mary Beth Farlow.
She was pretty, of course. Smooth skin, round eyes, swept-up brown hair, a general neatness and smallness and confidence as she handed me a plate and then walked away in her black ballet shoes. I found my uncle in the crowd, but he was not looking at Mary Beth Farlow. I stared hard at Robby, and I waited for him to look back at me. Her, her, her, her, I was trying to tell him as the black skirt and white blouse and brown twist of hair weaved in and out of tables, retrieving another plate of cake and melting ice cream, the secret of her tie to the man who was paying for the party hers alone, she supposed, and that was why she glided so neatly everywhere.
“I thank you all for joining us tonight to celebrate mon petit Robby, not petit so longer,” Agnès was saying regretfully, and Robby stood up politely and smiled his gray-eyed smile, which finally landed on me. He read my lips well enough to know I either had something to say or was dying of anaphylactic shock, and after kissing the cheeks of what seemed like fifty guests, he made his way to where I stood like the Grim Reaper. The caterers were swiftly dismantling the bar and hustling the trays of food into the house, and because they didn’t always come back out, I had lost track of Mary Beth Fowler.
“What the le hell, girl detective,” Robby said.
“She is here,” I hissed.
“Didn’t we already know that?”
“She served me a piece of your le cake,” I said, my eyes on the white shirts passing to and fro, none of them hers.
This made him turn and survey the men and women who were in such a hurry to go home.
“Which one?” he asked.
“She went in the house with a pile of napkins and she didn’t come back out.”
He strode quickly ahead of me into the house, then remembered he had to let me lead. The kitchen was one of those giant modern spaces composed of granite and steel, and none of the men and women in it stacking trays or washing glasses was Mary Beth. I didn’t see my uncle Hoyt, either, although some of his friends sat on oversized leather sofas watching basketball on an oversized television set. Sometimes walking into Robby’s house made me feel like I’d climbed a bean stalk into the giant’s castle. Fe, fi, fo, fum. “And Kobe scores!”
I shook my head to let Robby know I didn’t see her, and, worried that my mother would come looking for me, I started for the front door, weaving in and out of neighbors and strangers who turned to say goodbye to Robby. He got nabbed by a group of affectionate elderly women, and by the time I reached the farthest row of cars, there was a meaningful gap where Mary Beth’s Avalon had been and a scab of mud where her tires had dug into wet grass.
Robby came up beside me and looked at the car hole. Stars shone above us, and the cold-water smell of the grove, a wet, rocky, pipe-clean odor, rose from the ground.
“What’re you going to do now?” Robby asked me, his voice glum. His shirt had come untucked, his tie was loose, and in the darkness I saw that if we were surfers, we were the ones who waited and waited for the right moment, afraid that in our ignorance we would not even know when the right wave was coming or when we should stand.
“I have to go home,” I said. “I’m grounded.”
“Why? Did your mom find out about Marcel Marceau?”
“There’s nothing to find out. I went off campus for lunch with Greenie and skipped the rest of the day.”
“Darn,” he said. “I was thinking about a swim.”
My mother might have let me swim in Robby’s pool, but I saw her coming toward us, looking fed up, and I said, “See you, Robby. Happy le birthday.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Joyeux good night.”
Sixteen
The next morning, the air was as cool as rain, the sky spreading its whiteness through the room like a bad headache. Robby woke me by shaking the box of Corn Pops over my head. “Bonjour le you. We’re going for a drive in my birthday present,” he said. “Corn Pops to go?”
“Someone le gave you a car?” I asked. I didn’t make it sound like a good thing. “Please tell me it isn’t red.”
“It isn’t red.”
I stood up and went to the window from which, in clear weather, you could glimpse parts of the driveway. I looked suspiciously through the trees.
“It’s red,” he admitted, looking over my shoulder. “I can’t drive it to school, though, until I’m a senior. What kind of sense does that make?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know.
“So where’s your mom, anyway?” he asked.
I squinted at a note my mother had left on the coffeemaker:
Went to farmers’ market with Louise because I trust you to observe the rules. Check out the surprise in the silkworm box!
“Why is there a hairy white egg over here?” Robby asked. He was studying the worm trays with his usual revulsion.
“It’s a cocoon!” I said in the same voice you might have used to say, “It’s a boy!” My mother and I had been waiting for this moment with an embarrassingly high level of anticipation. A few of the worms had reached their fifth instar, which was the last phase of caterpillar fatness, but instead of spinning one strand of silk one mile long into a perfect oval, as we’d been led to expect, they had turned a pale feverish yellow, then saffron, then mahogany
brown, and then died feet up in a sad pool of oozing juices. I was surprised my mother hadn’t dragged me out of bed to behold the reversal of our fortunes.
I stared at the exquisite white cocoon with maternal pride until Robby said impatiently, “Ready?”
“You know,” I told him, “for an honor student you have a remarkable lack of scientific curiosity.”
“It’s not a lack of scientific curiosity,” he said, shaking his head and pouring my Corn Pops for me. “It’s an aversion to worms.”
I picked through a basket of clean, depressing clothes that no one had managed to fold. We lived basket to basket now that we no longer had to spruce up for my dad. “Where are we going in your fancy red car, anyway?” Clearly, he had forgotten that I was grounded.
“Your favorite place.”
Paris? I thought of saying, but the memory of my father’s invitation soured the joke.
“Le river,” Robby said, putting the cereal box away without folding down the liner or closing up the box, a carelessness that was too careless even for us. I resisted the urge to fix the box in front of him. “And one other place,” he added.
When I hid in the bathroom to change out of my pajamas and think about what would happen if I went to the river while I was grounded, I shouted out questions about where the other place might be, but he wouldn’t say.
“To see your pal Monsieur Ostrich?” I asked in a French accent.
“No.”
“To buy me donuts?”
“No.”
“So what kind of car is it? Have you named it yet?”
“I’m thinking of ‘the Fabricationist,’ ” he said. By now we were standing on the porch. In front of us was a paper sign my mother had taped to the screen door. It said,
REMEMBER YOU ARE GROUNDED.
“I forgot,” Robby said. “You can’t go.”
“We’ll just have to hurry,” I said, shoving open the door and walking through fog and avocado leaves until I stood beside a bright red two-door Honda.