by Drew Perry
“I tried.”
“What happened?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“You don’t sound like yourself,” she said. “I’m worried about you.”
“He told me he needed a few empty days,” I said. “I think I need that, too.”
“Read me the number off the phone you’re holding, OK? Read it to me right now.”
I did that. She wrote it down. She made me read it again to make sure it was right. She told me not to go anywhere, and I asked her where she thought I might go, and she told me again: Stay there. Stay right where you are. She made me promise. I promised. She hung up the phone.
Most of the movies on the preview channel seemed to want to be about two people having a very fine time until some manner of adversity or confusion arrives, and then one of them has to run through the rain or the night or both in order to set things right. There was also porn, but after a few times through, those plots seemed to be about the same as the regular movies. I sat on the floor between the two beds so I could see the light flashing from the TV, but not the picture itself. That helped. Alice telling me not to go anywhere—all along I’d wanted to go somewhere. Everything was upside down now. I pulled a comforter off one of the beds and lay down. Sure I’d wanted there to have been a third buggy for me, a third parachute. Sure I’d wanted to be off the ground, too. But then also this: All I wanted right then, in the entire open landscape of my life, was for there to be a knock on the door of my room and for Alice to be there, pregnant, on the other side.
Things that had come out of Delton’s mouth in the week she’d been living with us: Kids were sending naked pictures of each other back and forth on their cell phones, but she wasn’t. Not because she thought it was wrong, but because she thought it’d be too easy for somebody to hit the wrong button. Kids were off birth control and using the rhythm method because birth control made them fat. She was sticking with the pill. Anything else was too risky. Some kids had sworn off having actual sex. Not for religious reasons—it was just easier. They were doing everything else, everything but. She was trying to shock us. She wanted us to have to ask what “everything but” was. Maybe she thought we’d never been to high school, had never parked a car at the St. Jude’s Catholic Church playground, never frantically, desperately tried to decide whether asking Janet Rosenthal for a little help getting her pants down would break the mood.
“Some kids are getting their genitals pierced,” she’d said. “But I don’t think I will.” She pushed her sleeve up past her tattoo like that’d be plenty, thanks. We sat at the dinner table and acted like we pierced our genitals all the time. We told her we liked her tattoo. She said Mid and Carolyn had threatened to make her sand it off.
Alice brought Delton with her to the hotel. They knocked, and I stayed on the floor, trying to remember if I’d thrown the deadbolt. “Walter,” Alice said. “Let us in.”
“I’m coming,” I said, but I stayed still.
She knocked some more. “Come on,” she said.
“Yeah,” Delton said. “Open up.”
There was an escape plan on the inside of my door. In case of fire. Somebody’d hand-drawn a long red arrow telling me where to go, but the outline of the building was backwards from the way I’d pictured it, and I couldn’t figure out whether the map was actually wanting me to run in the direction of the arrow as shown or if in fact I was supposed to go the opposite way. That, and the map had me in 304. I thought I was in 303. When I opened the door, I checked: 303. I had the wrong map.
“You’ve been sleeping,” Alice said.
“I was going in and out.”
“Cool hotel,” said Delton. She was wearing gray cutoffs and a tuxedo shirt. It was a huge relief to see her. I didn’t know why. “Does it have a pool?”
“You can see it from the room,” I said.
“Does it have a diving board?”
“Come look for yourself.” I stood back from the door. “I have oranges, if you want any.”
“I hate oranges,” she said.
“You do?”
“If you’d grown up here, you’d hate them, too. Is there a soda machine anywhere?”
I said, “By the stairs, I think.”
“Can I borrow a dollar?” I gave her a few ones. “Either of you want anything?” she said.
I said, “How about a bucket of ice?”
She said, “How about a bucket?” I got the bucket from the bathroom, brought it back and handed it to her. “Coming right up,” she said, and walked off toward the stairs. I swung the latch around so the door would close but not shut. Alice came in and sat down, and there we were.
“That was graceful,” I said. “Her leaving us alone.”
“That’s how she is.”
“She’s taking it well?”
“She’s not taking it at all,” Alice said. “She’s ignoring it. Plus, she’s convinced he’ll be back in an hour. She thinks it’s not a big deal.”
“You’re mad at me,” I said.
“You know, I was trying not to be, but that’s not working out so well.”
“This is not my fault,” I said.
“This part is. The me-rescuing-you-from-a-hotel-room is.”
“I don’t need rescuing.”
“If all you have is a hundred oranges, you need rescuing.” She folded one leg up under her. She was looking everywhere in the room but at me. “Tell me you’re not covering for him right now.”
“I’m not.”
“Are you stalling for him?”
I thought about that. I was, after all, in the Howard Johnson instead of at the police station, turning the car over so they could dust it for fingerprints. “He said he had things to take care of,” I said.
“What things?”
“He was talking about telling the cops about these guys on the commission who’re selling illegal gas. He thinks he can trade that for some get-out-of-jail-free deal.”
She said, “You have to be kidding me.”
“I want to be,” I said.
“What else is there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bullshit. How could you not know?”
I wanted to crawl into the bed and sleep. I wanted to stand in the shower and use every one of the little prewrapped soaps, one after the other. “He already had the thing waiting on the runway,” I said. “The parachute. I don’t know a hell of a lot more than you do.”
“But why are you here? Why didn’t you come home?”
I wanted to make an apology out of something, knit it together somehow. I wanted to tell her about sickness and health. “I ended up here,” I said. “This is what happened.”
“Is this about the baby?”
“No,” I said.
She got up from her chair, walked over to the glass doors. “You know what we were doing when you called?”
“What?”
“Watching giraffes give birth. Online. It was some website Delton found.” She slid the door open, stepped outside, leaned over the railing. It felt dangerous. “They’re so relaxed,” she said. “They just stand in the grass, and then they start breathing a little more deeply, and then, bang! Baby giraffe. Like it doesn’t hurt at all.” She leaned out farther. “Did you park the car behind the Dumpster?”
“Yes.”
“You hid it?”
“I guess so.”
“I don’t believe this,” she said. She was back inside now. “How could you be doing this?”
“Do you want to see the money?” I said.
“What money?”
“The box of money. The sixty thousand.”
“You were serious? That exists?”
I opened the little drawer in the desk. I’d been keeping the box in there with the Bible, which somehow seemed the right choice when I first walked in the room.
She said, “We have to go see Carolyn. We have to go over there right now.”
“It’s not about the baby,” I said.
“It’s bigger than that.”
“There is no bigger than that,” she said.
I held the box out. “This?” I said. “This isn’t?”
She sat down on a bed, leaned forward until her head was between her knees. Her hair nearly touched the floor. “It’s all part of the same thing,” she said. “I don’t know how you don’t see that.”
“I tried to stop him.”
“Like hell you did.”
“That’s not fair.”
She sat back up. “This doesn’t have anything to do with fair. If this were fair, I wouldn’t be here right now. We wouldn’t be doing this.”
“I don’t not want her,” I said.
Something played through her face I didn’t recognize. “That’s the best you can do?” she said. “That’s what you spent your morning at Howard Johnson coming up with?”
Delton knocked on the door. She had the bucket of ice and two cans of a brand of ginger ale I’d never seen before. She went in the bathroom, came back out with three plastic cups in plastic sleeves. She poured one for each of us. I wondered how long she’d been out there—if she might have been listening behind the door. She said, “Don’t worry, you guys. He pulls stuff like this all the time.”
She was wrong. She’d lived with him for fifteen years, and I’d worked for him for six weeks, and still I knew she was wrong. “Are you OK?” I asked her.
She took a long sip of ginger ale. She flashed me a too-big smile. “Are you?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Don’t tell her that,” said Alice.
“Tell her,” Delton said. “Tell her everything.”
“What have you told her?” I asked Alice.
“Nothing,” Delton said. “She said you guys got pulled over or something, and then Dad took off.”
“That’s about what there is,” I said. “That’s the problem.”
And if you did pull the young man aside to have a talk with him, to speak as men speak, what would you say? Nic, she’s fifteen. You’re nineteen. Brainwise, yes, this still leaves her a good bit out in front of you, but that doesn’t matter so much as you being nineteen. Finally there’s no getting around that. You operate in an entirely different era. So come up with a good way to let her down easy, and then go to Dollar Night somewhere on your fake ID and find a nice girl your own age who will take you back to her dorm room and make you listen to her albums, who will take pity on you, who will invite you into her single bed. Do not be dating a fifteen-year-old child who, as soon as she wises up or ages six months, whichever comes first, will hopefully dump you on your ass for someone sophisticated enough for her. Get out before she realizes what the deal is with that whole Vespa – through – the – streets – of – St. Augustine thing.
And that’s of course if she’s lucky. If she’s unlucky, you either do or don’t speak with the boy, and he either ignores you or it makes no difference, and he lands at Dollar Night anyway, and without telling her, because that’s what he’s been doing all along. Not because he’s vicious. Because he’s nineteen. Or it’s even less his fault: He’s at a party one night, a party no parent in her right mind would let a fifteen-year-old go to, and for whatever reason she hasn’t lied. She’s asked for permission. They’ve said no. So there’s Delton at home, or in her foiled-over room at the condo, and she’s got three wishes, each one of them that she not be fifteen anymore. She doesn’t yet know that it doesn’t ever get any better. And while she’s uploading adorable photographs of when Nic took her for that picnic at Fort Matanzas—there they are in sunglasses; there they are laughing, laughing—he’s standing across the keg from a girl, a kind of quiet girl, and pretty, probably, because the new girl is always pretty. He finds out she’s in Deaf Ed, too, that she has a deaf sister. Nic’s stepbrother is deaf, of course, and what that’s like is so hard to explain to someone who doesn’t already know that he usually doesn’t even bother. But she knows. So he tells her. And while they talk he’s deciding no one has ever really gotten him like this before, which is what he explains to Delton over pancakes a couple of mornings later at the IHOP. At least he breaks up with her in person. At least he tells her at all. He’s not vicious. But there’s our little girl, pouring too much boysenberry syrup over her food, listening to this boy break up with her for someone she surely can’t compete with, someone who can drive and vote and go to fucking college and even under certain circumstances probably even rent a car, and the thing is—the real problem is that her parents will have been right all along, the whole time, which more than anything else is what’s going to play over her inner airwaves while she fails to fall asleep at night for the next ten weeks. They were right. He was too old. She was too young. They were right all along.
So let her change her name. Let her get a tattoo. Let her pierce what she does or doesn’t want to pierce and let her date this boy four years older than she is, so much older that you probably lie about his age at parties so people won’t judge you, won’t score your parenting. It probably never matters what you tell her, how right you are or were, how clearly you could see this one coming the very minute it walked through the door. She was always going to do it. She is always going to do it all, and it doesn’t make any difference: That’s still your kid in there, hobbled by the world, completely by herself, and you cannot save her from any of it, and you never could.
The three of us stood on the doorstep, looking somber. Delton rang the bell and Carolyn opened the door, and we knew we’d screwed it up right away: She thought he was dead. She started saying no, no, and her legs went out from under her, and she caught herself on the wall, slid down to the floor. Alice went right at her, telling her it was OK, that he was OK, which was only true so far as we knew, but that was the only thing anybody could have said. Alice held her until she calmed down, caught her breath, and in that little space Alice was able to explain that he hadn’t died, that he was only a fugitive, that everything would somehow be alright. The twins showed up in the hallway wanting to know what was going on. Delton took them away. Carolyn wiped her face with her sleeve. The little rug they had on the floor was all piled up underneath her. She pushed her hair out of her face. It was the same move I’d seen Alice make a thousand times. I was still standing in the door. I hadn’t moved. I could smell the newness of the house. “A fugitive from what?” Carolyn wanted to know.
8
Alice wanted to call the police, wanted to tell them he was incapacitated, wanted to declare him a missing person. It was Carolyn who wouldn’t do it. “He’s not missing,” she said. “He’s an asshole.”
I assumed we wouldn’t have any need to call the police. I stood in the front of the house, in the big bay window, waiting for six or eight squad cars and a SWAT van to pull into Pelican Pines, roll down the empty road to the house. I had an idea about opening the door, putting my hands up. I had a speech that addressed my innocence. I could deliver it to the SWAT team and to Alice at the same time. The basic problem: I was trying to make sense of something that couldn’t be made sense of. Mid, flying over the trees. Mid, master of the corner hustle. Mid, leaving Delton at Nic’s house, and then leaving her with us, and the growing possibility that both of those moves had been the right ones.
Delton called Nic. The twins went out to the backyard to try kicking things off a stepladder. Maggie decided she wanted to swim. It took twenty minutes to get her suited and floatied and buoyed, by which time she no longer cared about swimming, but Carolyn sent her out there anyway, enlisted us to help watch her. The grass around the pool almost glowed green. The sky was more white than blue. It was hard not to think Mid was about to land in the backyard. Carolyn wanted to know if anybody wanted Bloody Marys. I said sure, what the hell. Alice said it hardly seemed like the time, and Carolyn ignored her. She made a pitcher of V8 and hot sauce and lemon juice, and she set out a bottle of vodka and some tall glasses. Delton came through and wanted one. Carolyn said no problem, but no booze. Delton poured herself a glass, a
nd then she stared Carolyn down, very carefully topped her drink with an ounce or so of vodka.
“Olivia,” Alice said.
“Look,” Delton said. “Delton has two mommies.” It wasn’t mean the way she said it, but it still hung in the air wrong. She looked a little sorry, and then she disappeared off into the house.
Carolyn watched her go. “I quit,” she said.
“You don’t,” Alice said.
Carolyn poured a drink for herself. “You don’t think I’m doing it right,” she said.
Alice said, “I didn’t say anything like that.”
“An hour ago I thought he was dead, OK? Give me a few minutes, and I’ll call the police. Give me half an hour of peace and we can call anybody you want.”
“That was Walter’s argument,” Alice said. “Back at the hotel.”
“Let’s just sit down,” Carolyn said. “Outside. Half an hour. You can set the clock.”
We got ourselves huddled in what shade there was from the table umbrella. Maggie paddled side to side across the shallow end, and the twins worked through an elaborately scored contest having to do with how high up the ladder the thing was that was being kicked, plus how far it went when you kicked it. Beach balls. Plastic flowerpots. There was a lot of subjectivity. Much disagreement. They seemed like kids. I said so.
“They are kids,” Alice said. “They don’t seem like it. They are.”
“Be nice to him,” Carolyn said. “He was the last person to see Mid alive.”
“How is that funny?” Alice said.
“It isn’t,” Carolyn said.
“That’s not funny, either,” said Alice.
Carolyn worked on her drink. She stared off into the yard. She said, “Did he leave you money, too? A ton of cash in a box?”
“Oh, God,” Alice said. “Really?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I found ours this morning,” said Carolyn. “He’s never coming back.”
I said, “He’s coming back.”
Carolyn said, “How do you know that?”
I felt heavy in my chair. I said, “I just have a feeling.”