Zen and Xander Undone

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  “Regards. Got it,” Xander says as he stands to walk us out. I’m careful to walk behind him, hugging myself like I’m cold. If his eyes weren’t glued to Xander, he’d totally see the edges of the folder poking through my shirt.

  He unlocks the door for us, and Xander slides out, but not before resting her hand lightly on his shoulder and smiling up at him.

  He turns the color of an overripe eggplant.

  Xander and I jog to the hatchback and get in. “Did you get it?” she asks me as she backs out of the parking lot. I pull the folder out from under my shirt and plop it on the dashboard. Xander doesn’t wait. While she’s driving, she opens the folder and starts rifling through it, looking for letters.

  “Damn it,” she says under her breath. “There’s nothing here.”

  “Okay. So we broke the law for nothing.”

  “You broke the law.” She smirks. “All I did was flirt.”

  “You know, it’s not nice to lead people on like that, Xander,” I say, remembering the attentive way Mr. Blackstone was watching her. “It isn’t fair.”

  “Are you kidding?” she squeals. “I made his day!”

  “Maybe, until he sees that Mom’s file is missing.”

  “He won’t even go looking for Mom’s file.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The will was read. Everything was doled out. Case closed,” she says absently. She changes lanes as she pulls a handwritten letter from the mess of papers on the dash. It’s not in Mom’s handwriting, so I don’t even see why she cares about it. We roll to a stop at a red light, and she bends over the letter, holding it in both hands, reading and rereading it.

  “Well, if he does call the cops, I’m not protecting you, Xander. Don’t think I will.”

  “Don’t worry about the cops,” she says, a strange edge to her voice. “Worry about John Phillips.”

  “Who’s John Phillips?”

  “Read it yourself.” She gives me a weird sideways look just before turning onto Williston Road. She doesn’t have the usual playful glint in her eye. If I had to guess, I’d say she was shocked.

  I don’t want to humor her, but I’m curious, so I read the letter. By the time I get to the bottom of the page, my heartbeat feels weak and unsteady.

  Dear Mr. Blackstone,

  As you requested, I’m writing to acknowledge receipt of the package you sent at Marie’s request. I loved her very much, and her death has dealt me a terrible blow. This was a gift I gave her years ago, so it will be a beautiful reminder of her.

  I thank you for your sensitivity and discretion in dealing with this matter.

  Most sincerely,

  John Phillips

  The Statue

  “MAYBE DAD KNOWS who he is,” I suggest.

  Xander is lying on my bed, kicking her bare legs at the ceiling. It’s late and we’ve just gone through Mom’s entire folder for the tenth time, but we’ve found nothing that tells us who John Phillips is. Xander is sucking on her third fudge bar, and I’m peeling the skins off grapes and eating them. Peeling things, anything, is something I do when I’m nervous.

  “If we don’t know who he is, why would Dad?” she demands. The side of her face is scrunched into my pillow, and she’s looking at me very seriously.

  I know what she’s thinking and I don’t even want to go there. “Not Mom.”

  “Why not? I got my sluttiness from somewhere.”

  “It’s not a possibility, Xander. Just drop it.”

  “Well then, answer me this: why would Mom keep John Phillips a secret from us?”

  “Maybe he just never came up,” I say, though my stomach tumbles. It is strange that we’ve never even heard the name before, considering Mom left him something in her will. I loved her very much, he’d said. And there was something more that I didn’t like. The word discretion. Thank you for your sensitivity and discretion, it had said. Why should Mr. Blackstone be discreet? Doesn’t that mean he’s keeping a secret? But I still think Xander is jumping to conclusions. “There’s no way Mom would ever cheat on Dad.”

  “Okay, then you ask Dad who he is.”

  “No.” I finger the only other paper that mentions John Phillips. It’s an addendum to Mom’s will that we never saw, and I’m pretty sure Dad doesn’t know about it either. It’s a worksheet with lots of lines on it, like the one she used to give things away to her friends. On this worksheet, though, is only one name, and next to it are the words Boehm fig 10203.

  “What is a Boehm fig?” I ask Xander. “Like a fig tree?”

  Instead of answering my question like a polite person would do, she ignores me and fires up my laptop.

  It takes forever for my computer to warm up, but she finally gets to the search engine and types in the phrase from the worksheet. A whole bunch of websites about antiques pop up. I’m even more confused than before. “What the hell?”

  But Xander yells, “Oh my god!” and runs out of my room.

  “Wait!” I follow her down the stairs and into the living room. Xander flips on the light and stares into Mom’s curio cabinet.

  Mom collected bird figurines since she was ten years old. She and her grandpa used to go bird watching together, and he’s the one who started the collection for her. Every year for her birthday he bought her a different kind of bird. After he died, other people started adding to her collection, so Mom ended up with a lot of bird statues. She loved them all, and she would sometimes take one out and look at it, smiling. I don’t think she liked the birds so much because they were valuable or anything. I think she liked them because they reminded her of people she loved.

  I get it, all in a flash. Boehm fig is a porcelain figurine. Boehm must be the company.

  Xander is peering through the glass in the cabinet door, tapping her finger on her chin, thinking hard. “Which one is missing?”

  For once, I’m the one to understand something before Xander does. “The lovebirds,” I say simply. I know that’s the missing statue because it was my favorite one. I used to look at it when I was little and imagine that the two birds were alive and flying in our living room.

  “You’re right. Those damn lovebirds! They’re missing!” She whirls around and grabs my shoulders. “Lovebirds, Zen!”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” I say, but I sound a lot less certain than I’d like to.

  “Oh, come on. Do I have to list the evidence for you?”

  “You’re crazy if you think for one second Mom would do that!” I hiss.

  “Do what?” Dad has crept up from his basement bedroom, his hair matted on one side, his potbelly struggling to break through his dirty white T-shirt. I should hide all the peanut butter from him. It’s practically all he eats anymore. “What are you two talking about?”

  I look at Xander, waiting for her to come up with the perfect cover. She always does. “I was thinking we should look into how valuable Mom’s statues are. Maybe Mom meant to sell them someday.”

  Dad’s scraggly blond eyebrows mash downward. “We will never sell your mother’s birds, Alexandra.”

  Xander’s voice gets thready. “I don’t want to either. I was just speculating . . .”

  “Maybe a few of them are worth a hundred bucks. Most of them are worthless. Hardly worth having them appraised.” Dad seems offended. “Now I don’t want to hear talk of this again,” he says quietly before turning away.

  We watch Dad shuffle into the kitchen. Xander just stands there, totally ashamed. It serves her right for suggesting that Mom would have an affair.

  “Thanks for coming to my rescue there, Zen,” she hisses. “Now Dad thinks I’m a grave robber.”

  “So?” I shrug before heading back upstairs.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To bed.”

  “You don’t want to know about this?”

  The question makes me extremely nervous, and I shake my head. “I don’t think I do.” I feel like Xander and I are wandering into an area where we don’t belong. I can
almost feel Mom begging us not to go any further. I imagine her standing in the dark corner behind the curio cabinet, her hands clenched under her chin, mouthing the words please don’t.

  Xander tromps behind me into my room and closes the door so Dad can’t hear. “Zen, we can’t let it lie.”

  “You can’t. I can do whatever I want.”

  “Are you telling me that you’re fine with not knowing who John Phillips is and why Mom sent him . . .” She pauses, casting a sideways glance at my laptop. She sits down again, briefly examines the addendum to Mom’s will, and types some more.

  “Can’t you do that in your own room?” I say as I crawl under my covers. I’m suddenly achy and tired, like I’ve been racked with the flu.

  “Aren’t you curious how much that statue is worth, Zen?”

  Xander’s knowing tone makes me look at her.

  My marrow feels cold, and I pull my knees up to my chest. “How do you know it’s the same statue?”

  “Because the numbers here, ten-two-oh-three, that’s a number the company uses to identify its pieces. And look—” She tips the computer monitor at me. On the screen is a perfect image of the two white birds on the apple blossom branch. There’s no mistaking it. It’s Mom’s figurine. “It’s a limited edition collectible. Only two hundred were made.” She blinks at the screen, as though she can’t believe what she’s seeing. “It’s worth six thousand dollars.”

  Mom and Dad

  ALL FAMILIES HAVE STORIES. After Xander leaves I lie alone in the dark and file through the Vogel Collection in my mind, searching for some hint, some little slip from Mom about John Phillips. But all I can think about is the story of how my parents met, as told by James and Marie Vogel:

  “Your mother was the hottest little librarian on campus.”

  “There was Betty Masterson.”

  “Yuck! Who needs breasts that big?”

  “You noticed her breasts?” Mock indignation.

  Uncomfortable pause for comedic effect. “Anyway. As I was saying, your mother was the hottest little librarian on campus except for Betty Masterson.”

  Mom hits him with whatever is available—napkin, couch cushion, spatula, depending on which room we’re in. “And your father was the subject of much speculation among the women of Dartmouth College.”

  I was very mysterious.

  “Despite your devotion to corduroy.”

  “The first thing I noticed about your mother was her tiny waist. She was looking for a reserved book for some oaf in line ahead of me when I spotted her. I thought she embodied the Platonic ideal of the librarian, in her plaid skirt and clogs.”

  “I never wore a clog in my life.”

  “Her clogs made her stumble so cutely.”

  “Cutely isn’t a word. And they were penny loafers.”

  “She checked out my enormous array of books on Eliot—”

  “It was Yeats—”

  “Eliot’s Wasteland—yes, that’s right—”

  “Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium—”

  “Who is telling this story?”

  “If by ‘story’ you mean ‘pure fiction,’ then you are.”

  “I was researching for an article on Yeats.”

  “Ha! See, I was right!”

  “I mean Eliot, and she checked out my books. She stamped them all with her little rubber stamp—”

  “These were the days before libraries gave people those awful computer receipts.”

  “And she piled them all very neatly for me before she lifted her eyes to my face. She smiled that dazzling smile of hers—”

  “I never smiled in those days—”

  “—and she said, ‘Have a nice day.’ I do not think she noticed me at all.”

  “But I did, because I remembered you and your corduroy pants when you sat down next to me in our Romantic poetry class a month later.”

  “Ah, and you spoke so intelligently about that poem by Wordsworth—”

  “I hate Wordsworth. It was Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge.”

  “She spoke so intelligently about Wordsworth’s ‘By the Sea’ that I realized not only was she a hot librarian, but she was a hot, smart librarian.”

  “And he begged me to go out with him.”

  “I casually inquired whether she would be interested in joining me and my colleagues for a friendly drink.”

  “Ten drinks, more like.”

  “We might have overindulged—”

  “You might have vomited—”

  “At any rate, somewhere between giddiness and total ruination, I worked up the courage to ask her on a real date—”

  “He made me pay for my half—”

  “She insisted on contributing to the bill, and that is the only time I’ve ever allowed her to pay for her own meal.”

  “Well. That much is true.”

  “We dated for over a year before I had to transfer to the Ph.D. program at Harvard. She wouldn’t follow me.”

  “I had to finish my master’s!”

  “She could have applied to Harvard.”

  “I don’t have your mind, James.”

  “But I waited for her.”

  “And I came.”

  At this they would smile into each other’s eyes, and sometimes even kiss.

  At which point Xander and I would double over, pretending to throw up.

  The Dress and My Back

  EVEN FROM THE GRAVE, Mom has terrible timing. It’s the next day, and I’m racing through the house, looking for my gi, or my “karate pajamas” as Xander calls them, when the doorbell rings. I hear Xander open the door, probably still wearing the jeans and T-shirt she’d worn last night. She thanks someone before slamming the door and screaming, “Zen! Package! It’s from Mom!”

  I hear the sound of ripping paper.

  “I know it’s my stupid prom dress. Is there a note from Mom in it?” I call down.

  “No!” she answers.

  “Then I’ll look at it later!” I have only forty minutes to get to practice, and it’s a twenty-minute drive. I like to get there early enough to stretch out and meditate.

  “Oh, it’s nice, Zen! Get down here!”

  She sounds really excited, probably because I haven’t worn a dress since I was twelve. People think it’s because I’m some kind of tomboy, but that’s not it. I happen to know that I have a nice butt and long legs, so I look better in pants. Better than I ever would wearing a stupid skirt and stockings, which always crawl down my crotch and get twisted at the ankles. I hate stockings. The only thing they’re good for is to wear over your face during an armed robbery.

  “Zen, I want you to try this dress on!”

  “I don’t have time! I can’t find my gi!”

  I hear her rummaging around downstairs like she’s looking for it. I come down because it’s very unlike Xander to help me do anything. “Have you seen my gi?” I ask her suspiciously.

  She’s standing in the middle of a pile of tissue paper, shuffling through the mess, mumbling, “I can’t find it.”

  “Can’t find what?”

  “There’s no return address here. It didn’t come from a store, so probably whoever sent it is the one sending the letters.” She sits on the coffee table, and it cracks a little further toward the floor. One of these days she’s going to get a huge splinter in her ass from that thing. She smiles at me, raises one eyebrow, and lifts the dress up from the middle of the pile in front of her. “Oooh, look at the purdy dress! Ain’t it just the most?”

  It’s shimmery and silky and light and airy. The color is sort of bone, sort of ivory, sort of tan. At least it isn’t pink, but it doesn’t matter. “I hate it.”

  “You do not!”

  “Have you seen my gi?”

  “Yes. I hid it. Try this dress on right now.”

  “Give me my gi this instant!” I stomp on the floor with each word.

  “Hey up there!” Dad calls from the basement. Ever since I hid the peanut butter, he hardly comes upstairs a
nymore. “Stop stomping!”

  “We’re only romping!” Xander calls, a lopsided grin on her face.

  “Cut it out or I’ll give you a whomping!”

  Xander shakes the dress at me. The little beads in the bodice sparkle madly. “Try it on and I’ll give you your gi!”

  I look at the clock. I have only thirty minutes to get there. I’ve already lost my meditation time, but I can still stretch if I hurry. “Fine. I’ll try it on.”

  She tosses it at me, and I take it into the downstairs bathroom, rip off my T-shirt, and pull the dress on over my jeans. I launch myself out the door and into the living room without even bothering to look in the mirror.

  Xander’s eyebrows shoot up. “Wow. You have tits!”

  “Shut up!” I yell.

  “No, really, they’re right there.” She points with both hands. “I wouldn’t have believed it if you’d told me.” Xander makes a slow circle around me, looking me up and down. “It’s really nice on you, Zen. Hold still while I zip.” I feel her fiddling with the back of the dress, and suddenly the bodice is pulled snug. “It fits too.”

  I take a deep breath, hoping to prove that it’s too tight, but she’s right. The fit is perfect. “It’s fine. Now can I have my gi?”

  “Did you look at yourself in the mirror?”

  “That wasn’t part of the deal!”

  “Come on! Just take a look. Ow!”

  I’ve grabbed her left wrist and twisted her arm so that she’s totally immobilized, and I steer her around the room. “Am I getting warmer? Warmer?”

  “That hurts! Let me go!”

  “Colder?” I twist her arm a little more, and I suddenly have her complete cooperation.

  “Warmer!” she says when I point her toward the kitchen. I push her through the door and twirl her around, pointing first at the sink. “Colder!” she cries. I spin and point toward the cabinets. “Colder!”

  “You know, you could just say where it is,” I remind her.

  “Oh yeah. It’s in the refrigerator.”

  I’ve known her too long to release her before I’ve confirmed this. I walk her over to the fridge. “Open it.”