“You got any sunblock in that pile of crap in your bathroom?” Rafi asked.
Julian blinked, as if confused, then seemed to remember. “Ah, yes. The performative art piece. I don’t know, but of course I do have some in the master bath. I’ll put it on in the car. Let’s go.”
* * * *
As Rafi was putting on his seatbelt, Julian tapped his shoulder and held out his hand.
“Give me your phone.”
Rafi raised an eyebrow. “You need to make a call?”
“I don’t want you driving us into any giant construction pits along the way.”
“I did not drive into a pit! I just—parked on it—whatever, you know better, you’re just being annoying.” Rafi handed over the phone. “It’s locked to my thumb-print, by the way. Just so you don’t get any ideas.”
“What, afraid I might leak more naked pictures of you?”
Rafi tossed him a grin as they pulled into traffic. “Sweetheart, if you want to see my body all you have to do is ask.”
Julian, interestingly, looked away and did not reply. Were his cheeks a little pink?
Not, Rafi thought, the face of a rage junkie.
“Actually, let me unlock that,” he said. “I want you to see the last picture I took.” He held out his thumb; warily, Julian let him unlock the phone, and opened his pictures to the shot of the tabloid headline.
“Ah,” he said. “I hadn’t seen that one. Has a distinct veneer of plausibility, doesn’t it, given my reputation? The best lies always have a kernel of truth, and my uncle is a brilliant liar.”
“Your uncle?” Rafi couldn’t help a startled glance, though he quickly tore his gaze back to the road. “You think your uncle was the confidential source?”
“Oh, no question. He’s punishing me, currently, for the crime of rebelling against him.” His mouth twisted thoughtfully as he eyed the article. “Admittedly, this quote has more of a flavor of Christian. His version of a favor to me is to sound as over-the-top as he can, when Uncle makes him do this sort of thing. Make it less credible.”
“Your uncle makes him…? That is bizarre.” Perhaps unbelievably so…
“This is one of Uncle’s more serious attempts to discredit me. Some of the others are merely intended to add a whiff of scandal and trash to my name. Let me show you my personal favorite, thus far.” While they were stopped at a red light, Julian held up his own phone to show Rafi an article from some bottom of the barrel clickbait site.
“‘He Really Is a Freak,’” Rafi read aloud. “Is that some reference to your role in Freaks?”
“Keep reading.”
“‘Loved ones are begging the troubled young actor to give up drug-fueled—bestiality orgies’?” Rafi choked on a shocked laugh.
Julian looked wryly delighted. “Apparently my love of horses goes deeper than previously thought.”
Someone behind Rafi honked; he proceeded through the now-green light. “Seeing Us Weekly disparage my fashion choices doesn’t seem nearly so bad in comparison.”
“Especially since they’re right.”
“Spoken like a man who wants to get out and walk to…wherever we’re going. Where are we going?”
Julian pointed at the navigation screen, on which he had already entered the address, looking at Rafi like he was an idiot.
“Yes, but why there? Whose house is this? Why are we cleaning it up? Hey—was anybody hurt?”
“No.”
“Thank God.”
That…seemed to throw Julian for a moment, as if he hadn’t expected Rafi to care. But he moved on. “The house belongs to an old family friend, actually. Helen Rhodes, my father’s lawyer. It caught fire two days ago—electrical short, perhaps. There’s still a lot going on with the police and the insurance companies and so on. Helen and her family are trying to recover what they can of their personal effects before it rains or the place gets looted.”
“Looted? Who loots somebody’s burned-out house?”
“Plenty of people. Helen Rhodes is a wealthy woman; I’m sure there are valuables in the rubble. She’s less concerned about those, however, than about her family keepsakes and her granddaughter’s toys.”
Rafi had to pay attention to the navigation screen for a few minutes after that; they were headed out of town, toward the suburbs. “So this lady’s a family friend? She’s okay with us coming? I don’t think I’d want a bunch of strangers around at a time like this.” Or photographers…
“I’m hardly a stranger, though I haven’t seen her for a long time,” Julian said, looking out the window rather than at Rafi. “Technically Helen is my godmother. If things had…worked out differently…she might have taken me in, instead of my uncle, when my family died.”
A very close family friend, then. Rafi wondered why it was that Julian hadn’t seen her in so long. Did Helen Rhodes not get along with Uncle Eddie? Or maybe she didn’t get along with Julian. No one else seemed to, rage junkie or not.
They arrived at the sort of place that would call itself “a modest estate,” as if there were anything modest about having an estate. All the same, the house itself had been fairly unassuming, judging by what was left of it—a two-story family home, not a party mansion. Now it was only a blackened skeleton, wall studs showing like ribs, with rubble heaped around it.
A wine-red minivan was parked a safe distance from the house, and climbing out of it were an old woman, a middle-aged man, and a little girl. Helen and her family, he assumed.
Rafi looked around again, more carefully, as he parked the car and got out. But even on second look, he didn’t see any kind of news team. No cameras, no vans, not even anyone with a clipboard and a mic. Huh.
“Gimme back my phone,” Rafi said, catching the back of Julian’s collar as he tried to leave his seat.
Julian tossed the phone over his shoulder at him, muttering about where Rafi could shove it, and slammed the door behind him.
Julian looked tense as he approached the Rhodes family. He usually did, of course, but this was slightly different; self-conscious, Rafi realized, perhaps even nervous, and that wasn’t a tension Rafi had seen in him before.
“Helen, it’s good to see you,” Julian said stiffly—but his words were nearly swallowed by the old woman’s shout of joy as she threw her arms around him.
“Julian! Oh, my boy, you’ve grown so tall!” Helen Rhodes—a Brit, by the accent—cupped Julian’s face in her aged hands, eyes watering. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to have you here.”
Julian actually seemed to be at a loss for words. Rafi was tempted to take a video.
“I’m sorry it couldn’t be under better circumstances,” Julian managed at last.
“Your presence makes the circumstances better,” Helen said firmly. “I don’t know if you remember my son Gene, and this is his daughter—Brittany, wait for us!”
The little girl, perhaps nine years old, had clearly decided to skip the introductions and was making her way toward the shell of the house. “I want my horses,” she said, voice grim, and did not turn back.
The son, Gene, sighed and followed after her. “I’ve got her. Take your time, Mom.”
“Helen, this is,” Julian swallowed, “my boyfriend, Rafael. I hope you don’t mind my bringing him. I thought he might be useful.”
“My goodness, you do look like a useful fellow, Rafael.” Helen pumped Rafi’s hand cheerfully. “Boyfriend, is it? I didn’t know whether to believe the tabloids about that. Congratulations to you both! Any loved one of Julian’s is a loved one of mine.”
Once again, Julian seemed to be caught flat-footed. “You follow the tabloids?”
“A hard habit to break, after a career in Hollywood. But mostly I follow you, Julian. I’ve seen all your movies—amazing, just amazing. Well, all right, not all of the movies were to my taste, but you were always amazing in them. Your parents, your brother, they would all be so proud.”
Julian turned abruptly away, toward the house. “We should get start
ed. It’ll get hot soon.”
“Julian?” Helen stepped after him, touched his arm hesitantly. “I’m sorry I didn’t stay in touch, lad. Each time I tried, your uncle said you didn’t want to see anybody. I thought I should give you space, and then it had been so long…I should have tried harder.”
Julian laughed, a single bark of sound that was all irony without mirth. “My uncle told me you never called…I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“He said what?” Helen’s shock was so visible that Rafi feared for her health. Not just shock, either—rage reddened her cheeks and left her voice trembling. “Julian, I swear to you, I tried to—”
“I believe you,” Julian said, his own voice tight. He touched her hand, briefly, a shy reassurance. “You have no reason to lie, and he has many.”
Rafi shook his head in disbelief. “Surely there was some sort of misunderstanding—”
“Not everyone’s intentions are as honorable as yours, Rafi. It has always suited my uncle to have me believe I must depend on him for everything.” He gave his head a brisk shake, regaining steely control of his expression. “We should get started. There’s no use worrying about it now.”
If not now, when?
But Julian was marching off toward the burned house, where Brittany and her father were already poking through wreckage. Rafi would have liked to catch up with him, but Helen was wobbling on the uneven ground; he offered her his arm instead.
“I hope you’ll take good care of that boy,” Helen murmured, watching Julian with a profoundly disturbed expression. “It’s high time someone did.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rafi said, “I’m starting to agree with you.”
* * * *
The closer they got to the house, the more upsetting Rafi found it. True, no one had died—but this was a family’s home, the walls that had sheltered them, the floors their children had learned to walk on, and all the little things they had gathered around themselves for comfort and beauty and memory of the past. All gone, reduced to black bones and tumbled, waterlogged pieces.
“This is such a shame, ma’am,” Rafi said, eyes scanning the devastation. A few yards away, Helen’s son was wiping his eyes, holding the charred remains of some item he clearly recognized. “What can I do to help?”
“There’s only a few things we’re specifically trying to retrieve today,” Helen said. “A safe from my office, if we can find it, since that part of the house collapsed. Gene’s computer hard drive—it has a lot of photos. My grandmother’s family silver. And Brittany’s toy horses. Anything of Brittany’s that we can salvage.”
Rafi looked around for Julian, and found him putting on a dust mask and helping Brittany do the same. They were both pointing and gesturing toward one area of the house, probably discussing the location of her room.
“Here, put this on,” Helen was saying, handing Rafi a dust mask of his own. “The silver would be in the kitchen, right through here. Watch your head.”
The inside of the house was even more depressing, scorched destruction vying with peculiar pockets of undamaged tile, wallpaper, or furniture. The glass-fronted cabinet holding the silver had fallen forward, and Rafi had to carefully turn it over, with the charred wood threatening to crumble in his hands. Underneath it, amidst a sea of broken glass, they found not only the silver but a variety of other knick-knacks—music boxes, china figurines—protected from the flames by the cabinet and mostly intact. Rafi carefully picked them out of the glass and handed them to Helen to wrap in newspaper and pack into a canvas bag.
“I can’t believe all these little things survived,” Helen said, sounding a little choked up. “This music box was a wedding present from my father to my mother. This here, this is one of those Russian nesting dolls—Julian’s mother brought that back for me from a trip.”
Rafi pounced on the opportunity. “So you’ve known Julian’s family a long time?”
“Oh yes—I introduced Alan and Rebecca.” She turned the peanut-shaped doll in her hand, her voice a little raspy behind her dust mask. “So many years ago…Everything changes, doesn’t it? You know it will, but you never expect it when it happens.”
“What…what was it that happened? To them?”
Helen shot him a knowing glance. “Julian doesn’t talk about it, I take it? They were in a car accident. Alan and Rebecca had both gone to pick up their older son, Leo, from the airport—I wish it had happened on the way there, rather than the way back, Julian could have had his brother at least…Another driver was paying attention to his cell phone rather than the road. Plowed right into them, and pushed the car off an embankment.”
Rafi was struck dumb. For all that he had not been on the phone while he was driving, it was close enough to make him wonder how Julian could stand to look at him.
“I tried to get custody of Julian,” Helen said quietly, “based on his parents’ wishes. Sadly the courts don’t always pay attention to that. There’s such a strong preference for giving a child to his blood family.”
Rafi chewed his lip. “Eddie said he and Julian used to be close. But that lately he’s been…acting strange. Pushing away his loved ones.”
“Pushing away his uncle, at least,” Helen said. “Reaching out to you, instead, and to me, when he heard about…this misfortune. Is that really so strange?”
Rafi thought about tabloid headlines and confidential sources. “Maybe not.”
* * * *
“This was your bedroom?” Julian said. Sunlight, almost mocking, filled the burned-out corner where they picked their way through the remnants of toys and child-sized furniture.
“Yeah,” Brittany said. “I mean, it was upstairs. Now there isn’t an upstairs, so everything landed down here.”
She picked up a porcelain doll, its face shattered and clothes filthy. Set it down again. Gathered a few pieces of a board game before seeming to realize she would never find them all, and let them slip back through her fingers.
“What would you like me to do to help?” Julian asked, feeling useless.
“Help me dig me through these books,” she said, pointing out the splintered remains of a bookshelf. “Maybe some of them are okay.”
One. Between fire, smoke, and water damage, they found exactly one book that was okay, a board book about colors that was clearly far below her current reading level. Stoically, Brittany placed it in the ‘keep bag’ Julian carried.
Julian remembered going through his room, after the accident. Picking out what to take with him to his uncle’s for the night, not knowing he would never be permitted back. Or perhaps he had known, on some level; why else had he gone into Leo’s room, taken his favorite CDs and books and his green newsboy cap? Into his parents’ room, and taken his father’s bracelet and his mother’s favorite earrings?
Brittany had started sniffling behind her dust mask, but she held herself together—until she found a plastic horse, blackened and warped into something from a nightmare. Clutching it to her chest, she sat down on a pile of broken boards and began to cry.
Julian stood frozen. What could he possibly say to comfort her? There was no platitude, especially from a stranger, that could make the destruction of a child’s treasures suddenly okay.
Brittany pulled off her dust mask and wiped at her face, smearing ash and tears everywhere.
When Julian had been thirteen, the greatest gift anyone could give him had been distraction. Something to think about besides his loss.
He crouched down in front of her, pulling his own dust mask down and shaking soot from his hair. She watched suspiciously as he began gesturing and murmuring under his breath—then reached out and pulled a coin from her ear.
“I’ve seen that trick before,” Brittany said, narrow-eyed—but she’d stopped crying.
“For good reason,” Julian said. “It’s a classic. You can’t go wrong with the classics.” Which was why Leo had taught him that one first. “Have you seen this one?” He rolled the coin in his fingers, then skimmed one hand against the
other, fast enough to make a noise, and the coin was gone.
“It’s up your sleeve,” Brittany said scornfully.
“Is it?” Julian shook out his sleeves; no coin.
Now they were getting somewhere. Frowning fiercely, Brittany felt along Julian’s arms, his hands, even between his fingers. “Okay, where’d it go?”
“If I told you, it would spoil the magic.”
She huffed, half frustration, half amusement. “C’mon, tell me how you did it. Please? I want to learn how to do that!”
“You would become apprentice to the great magician? Well, then, if you insist.” A flicker of motion caught Julian’s eye, and he looked up to find Rafi, recording them on his phone. At Julian’s glare, he merely smiled and waved.
“The secrets of my art are not for public consumption,” Julian said sternly, and shuffled so that his back was to Rafi.
Rafi chuckled and stopped recording. As Julian showed Brittany the magic trick, though, he could see that Rafi hadn’t put the phone away, continuing to work with the screen.
“What are you doing, Rafi?” Julian asked suspiciously, looking up from where Brittany was clumsily practicing the trick.
“Instagramming this. I figure someone should document you being genuinely nice,” Rafi said, “since there’s no one else around to do it. Despite what you led me to believe.” He raised an eyebrow pointedly.
Julian looked away awkwardly. “I…I was afraid you might not come. If you didn’t think it was part of the…thing.” And he’d desperately wanted Rafi to come, though he couldn’t explain why.
“I’m sure you don’t realize how insulting that is,” Rafi said.
Insulting? That he didn’t think Rafi would want to spend his morning doing dirty, dangerous work for no reason?
Oh, Julian realized. Insulting that he didn’t think Rafi would want to help people unless it was for publicity.
How about that.
“I found the safe,” Helen called, picking her way toward them on Gene’s arm. “Could you two strong-backed fellows help unearth it?”
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