Did I leave them out?” Jayne wondered weakly. “I worry I left them out.”
“Whoever did, I should have noticed them,” Carter said. “But isn’t that our luck. Holds a fork by the tines, but still remembers how to strike a match.”
They were huddled across the street in the blankets Carter had grabbed to protect them from being scorched. New York’s finest had taken their time, though at this point he was amazed that there was a fire department. The blaze wasn’t contained. In the glow, Luella danced with pagan glee.
“You didn’t have to rescue her, you know,” Douglas said heavily.
“I, ah—had a single moment of hesitation,” Carter admitted. “It gave me the creeps.”
For the better part of the last year, Avery had taken refuge in toil: scrubbing, dishwashing, mending, chopping, and laundry. She arranged neighborhood hand-me-down swaps of children’s clothes. To combat Bing’s give-away weight gain, she led him in sets of jumping jacks (she got the idea from Nollie), because pantry pilfering was a perfect formula for becoming a pariah. Swallowing her umbrage, she coached Goog on his Spanish. She only panicked when she ran out of tasks. Drudgery was therapeutic. Were she ever to start another practice, she’d have all her patients mop the office floor.
Besides, she had committed to this refurbished persona out of cold calculation. The alternative was to continue to cede the moral high ground to her sister, who would keep laying claim to competence, grit, efficiency, stoicism, selflessness, and her famous practicality, so that everyone would feel grateful to Florence, and Avery’s children would look up to Florence, and come to Florence with their problems, and her husband might wonder why he had chosen a weepy sniveler over this pillar of fortitude. Petulance, too, could not manifest provender or privacy if it couldn’t even manifest toilet paper. Spiked with an acute awareness of how unattractive the propensity looks to others, the experience of petulance was itself a small torture; it was a thin, sharp, needling emotion and ultimately a form of self-abuse. In sum, Avery could not control history. She could only control her disposition while history did its damnedest. Carrying on being a princess was lose-lose. To Avery’s delight, Florence sometimes seemed actively annoyed that her sister had become a saint—at points an even saintlier saint than the patron paragon of East Fifty-Fifth Street.
Thus it was in the midst of single-handedly cleaning up after yet another big communal dinner that Avery dried her hands hastily to answer the door. Through the peephole, her parents, Grand Man, and Luella were framed in curvature, faces sooted as if fresh from a coalmine, wrapped in blankets like squaws.
“What the fuck!” In her shock on opening the door, she forgot to watch her mouth around Grand Man.
Her father announced with a curious triumph, “Luella burned down the house.”
In short order, the news spread, and everyone but Savannah—out doing what her mother dared not contemplate—convened in the living room. Amidst many an aghast “Oh, my God!,” hurried inquiries about whether the four disaster victims were all right, and homilies about what really mattered was having escaped with their lives, Avery could detect a collective anxiety murmuring barely below the surface: this untoward turn of events brought this bursting abode’s population to fourteen—or, if you credited her father’s previous proclamations about how Luella alone was “the equivalent of twenty extra residents in their right minds,” to thirty-three.
They ceded seats to their new guests. Lowering himself onto the distinguished claret sofa with which he’d grown up, Grand Man shot a woeful look at the duct tape.
“Our brave troops, gold mining in Brooklyn,” Florence said cryptically. “Nollie? I was going to make everyone tea, but if you could spare it …”
“Fuck tea,” Nollie said, heading with Florence to the kitchen. “I have a new batch of killer hooch that’ll take your head off.”
“Did you manage to save anything?” Avery asked, rehearsing an array of childhood keepsakes in their attic.
“It’s missing a few pieces that were in the sink, I’m afraid,” Dad said, flapping his blanket back to reveal a scarred but regal wooden box in his lap. “But I did rescue the silver service.”
Grand Man burst into tears. “You didn’t tell me!” Avery had never seen him cry.
“I was saving it. I figured on a night like this,” Dad said, “I wouldn’t have many surprises of a happy sort to spring.” He removed one of the dinner knives, with a large scrolled M at the base, and the blade caught the light.
“It’s magnificent!” Kurt exclaimed. He was the kind of guy who would resist class distinctions on ideological grounds, yet instinctively think more highly of their family for bearing talismans of noble birth. Avery didn’t entirely buy into the notion of American aristocracy herself, whereas her sister aggressively rejected elitism as offensive. But Esteban had been right, back when the Stackhouses first moved in: all the Mandibles felt special, if only, in Florence’s case, special for refusing to feel special. Like the larger tussle over American “exceptionalism,” the family’s tensions over are-we-or-aren’t-we-special could now be put to rest. All the sumptuous fine craftsmanship in Bountiful House in Mount Vernon—the carved oak paneling, the curling banisters, the storied oriental carpets, the grand piano, the bone china for fifty—was officially reduced to an incomplete set of silverware and a sofa bandaged with duct tape. That should have been a little saddening, even to Karl Marx.
“If you want to head back to Carroll Gardens tomorrow morning and see what’s left to salvage,” Kurt volunteered, “I’ll give you a hand. Unless it’s still an inferno, scavengers will be all over that place within the day, and they’ll strip it clean.”
“You’re at least covered by insurance?” Esteban said.
Dad rubbed his neck. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Mom said.
“Our payments are up to date,” Dad said. “But I saw on the news last week that Titan Corp. has gone under. It’s a legal morass. I don’t know where that leaves us, but settling a claim could be messy.”
“You’d have a good case, if you haven’t been formally notified of cancellation,” Lowell said. “But Titan’s gone into Chapter Seven—total liquidation—and the line of creditors will be out the door. Even if you do get a settlement, it could be years before you see the money.”
“And it won’t be pegged to inflation,” Willing said from the stairwell. “In which case, a check for the contents of all three floors will buy you a cheap suit.”
“You’re just a one-note wonder, aren’t you?” Lowell told his nephew sourly.
“Why didn’t you tell me our insurance company was bankrupt?” Mom exclaimed.
“I was going to look into it.” Dad had that look of trying to control himself in front of other people, as if with no one else around he’d be screeching. “After I tried to give Luella a bath without drowning both of us, after I cut Luella’s nails if only to keep her from clawing my eyes out, and after I cleaned up the shards of the platter from Tuscany that we thought was on a shelf she couldn’t reach. Speak of the devil, someone had better go find her.”
Avery slipped off, checking the basement first, because she didn’t want her family’s few remaining possessions ravaged by a five-foot-ten enfant terrible. In her PhysHead practice, she’d treated patients with dementia. They’d been universally sweet and submissive, if perhaps lost or disconcerted, on occasion very insistent, but never, like Luella, reputedly, violent or destructive. So Avery had been skeptical of her parents’ accounts. Now that her own clothes were in danger of being shredded, it seemed prudent to take their version of events at face value.
She located her stepgran in the upstairs bathroom, where Luella was spurting shampoo in great decorative swirls around the tub, walls, and floor. Taking the bottle away from her was like wresting a tennis ball from the jaws of a rottweiler. Avery had found her parents’ practice of keeping their charge on a leash a ghastly violation of an adult’s civil lib
erties. Yet the nylon strap was invaluable for tugging the woman downstairs.
“The adventurer returns,” Avery announced, trying to sound jolly, then handing her youngest the nearly empty bottle. “Bing, honey? Unscrew the top, and see if you can scoop up any of the shampoo Luella accidentally spilled.” Rescuing shampoo was a perfect job for her thirteen-year-old. He couldn’t eat it.
“God, what’s that smell?” Goog said, glowering on the sidelines. Not fleshy, but with rounded corners—nose snub, shoulders sloped—he was blunt in every sense.
“I think she needs changing,” Avery whispered to her mother.
“I have no doubt,” Mom said. “But my house just burned down. Why are you telling me that?”
“Maybe Nollie should do the honors,” Dad said, accepting an ersatz screwdriver from his sister without saying thank you. “It’s her stepmother, too.”
“I don’t know how,” Nollie said flatly.
“I didn’t know how to fasten a square of old bedspread on a flailing grown woman two years ago, either,” Dad said. “You’ve always been a quick study. Everyone says so.”
“Oh, I’ll do it,” Florence said. “We have to remember, Luella’s not to blame. In a few years, one of us might need the same—”
“I’ve done it hundreds of times!” Dad cut her off. “Your aunt could do it once!”
Then the powwowing over where everyone would sleep. Kurt abdicated the sofa to the family patriarch and volunteered to doze in the armchair. Willing offered his room to his grandparents, suggesting Goog take Savannah’s mattress in the basement. When Mom wondered why on earth her granddaughter would be out all night, Avery pretended she hadn’t heard the question.
“And doesn’t our own Mrs. Rochester belong in an attic?” Dad proposed. He was seething so at his sister that you’d think it was Nollie who’d burned his house down.
“I’ll stay with Nollie,” Willing intervened. The suggestion was politic—Nollie wouldn’t permit anyone but Willing in her sanctum—but still left up in the air where on earth they’d bed down “Mrs. Rochester,” since Luella was the card no one cared to get stuck with in this game of Old Maid. Avery, for one, didn’t want their incontinent ward in the basement with a passion bordering on hysteria. After only a couple of hours with that harridan in the house, she now better appreciated the cravenness with which she’d always elected to do laundry in East Flatbush—anything but look after Luella so that her parents could enjoy a night off. Even now, guilt over having ducked geriatric babysitting was overwhelmed by a resolve to keep ducking it.
Yet as matters turned out, all the horse-trading over pallets and pillows was pointless.
The doorbell rang. The house was crowded, but with people who knew and, after a fashion (though it could be hard to tell), loved each other, the ground floor teemed with the energy of a big party. So when Avery went to answer the door, she proclaimed over the hubbub, “Are there any more relatives out in the cold we might have forgotten?” She said this gaily. That was the word, gaily.
She recognized the family through the peephole as neighbors from a couple of streets over—the Wellingtons, or Warburtons, something with a W. The woman (Tara? Tilly?) had participated in Avery’s last hand-me-down exchange, and had seemed grateful for Bing’s jeans (which, alas, he had outgrown on the lateral axis).
“Hello!” Tara/Tilly cried on the stoop, clasping her three-year-old to her breast. “We need help! It’s an emergency, please!”
Never rains but it pours. Having lobbied with unseemly fervor to keep Luella from bedding down in the basement, Avery welcomed an opportunity to act generous, and opened the door.
“My little girl,” the mother went on, bouncing the child. “She’s awfully sick. We have to get her to the hospital. We can’t find a taxi, and the ER at Kings County won’t send ambulances to this neighborhood because they’re getting hijacked. We’re so sorry to interrupt your evening, but I know you have a car …”
Avery frowned. “You sure know how to pick your nights. My parents’ house just burned down.” Naturally competitive, she trumped their heartache with a higher-value catastrophe.
“You know how disasters seem to happen all at once,” the father said gamely.
“Yes,” Avery said with a quick smile. “My husband calls it karmic clumping.”
“We could just borrow the Jaunt, if you’re busy,” the drawn woman said.
Something snagged in Avery’s head when the neighbor cited the very make of their vehicle, the sort of fine detail to which parents of seriously sick children would be oblivious. But it was parked out front, so the noticing probably meant nothing.
“No, I guess I could drive you,” Avery said. “Hold on and let me get my keys.”
“Please …?” the mother beseeched. “Could we have a glass of water for Ellie? She’s burning up.”
“Sure, no problem.” Avery hesitated; she couldn’t shut the door in their faces. “Come in for a sec. It’s freezing, and I don’t want to leave the door open.”
The family piled into the foyer. “Tanya, remember?” Clutching the child with one arm, the woman shook Avery’s hand. Freckles always made people look friendly.
The husband kept his right hand in his coat pocket and merely nodded: “Sam.” He was squarely built with Italianate good looks, but his limbs were spindly. A deferent bearing of earlier encounters replaced by a clenched rigidity, he seemed determined to get his daughter medical attention, regardless of whom he inconvenienced. “And this is Jake.” About eleven, the redhead winced into his father’s trousers. Avery recognized the jeans.
“Quite a crowd,” Tanya said, as her family huddled at the entrance to the living room.
“Nothing like losing the house where you grew up for an impromptu family reunion,” Avery said.
Tanya reached to squeeze her husband’s left hand. Willing was following the proceedings from his usual perch on the stairs. He met the eyes of the boy, who drew more tightly against his father’s leg and glared. Not a polite expression when your parents were shopping for a favor.
Once Avery returned with water, Tanya stood holding the glass as if looking for a place to put it down. Wasn’t Ellie thirsty? Avery dangled the key fob. Sam withdrew his right hand from his coat pocket and pulled out a gun.
She wondered why anyone shouted, “Freeze!” when pointing a firearm. Perfect immobility was instinctive. “That’s not necessary,” Avery said quietly. “I said I’d drive you.”
“We’re not going anywhere.” Sam leveled the handgun at her chest. “You are.”
“I don’t understand what you want,” Avery said. “What about your little girl …?”
“She’ll be fine,” Tanya said.
Avery felt like an idiot. She prided herself on having grown streetwise in the face of hardship. But underneath the broken fingernails from doing her own cleaning flitted a Washington social butterfly. In terms of her expectations of others, she still lived in a world of lunch dates, coffee klatches, and charity runs for breast cancer—a world in which the worst thing that arrived on your doorstep was a dinner party guest with an insultingly cheap bottle of red. The clincher: until not long ago, that was the same world that Sam and Tanya W-something inhabited, too. Having moved in with the wave of moneyed homebuyers that hit the neighborhood in the last decade, the desperadoes in this foyer were “gentry.”
“I’ll take that,” Sam said, reaching for the key fob.
“I thought you weren’t going anywhere,” Avery said. Willing had stood up. The bubble of conversation in the living room had died.
“You never know,” Sam said.
“Is this a robbery?” Avery used her full voice. The others needed to know what was up. “Because aside from the Jaunt, there’s not much to take here. Hinges?” she said defiantly. “We have plenty of hinges.”
“You have one big item to take,” Sam said. “Sometimes the elephant in the room is the room.”
“When you’re waving that thing around isn’t a g
ood time to be obscure,” Avery said.
“I’ll say I’m sorry, once.” Sam panned the weapon across the living room. “In happier days, we’d have you around for a drink. But our house is in foreclosure, and we’ve been evicted. They’ve replaced the locks, set the alarm, changed the code.”
“So when the police came by to kick you out, why didn’t you shoot them?” Avery asked, glowering at the sidearm.
“Police!” Sam said. “What police? The banks all hire private security firms now. Armed to the eyeballs. Thugs.”
“What are you, then?”
“I don’t care what you call me. Because there is nothing I won’t do to put a roof over my family’s head. Your roof. I’m afraid you’re all going to have to leave.”
The room emitted a collective gasp.
“In my day,” Grand Man piped up, “any reputable American man facing ruin would shoot his own family. And then himself. Tradition was efficient. Like the self-cleaning oven.”
“See, we have elderly people here,” Avery said. “Infirm people. You can’t throw them on the street.”
“I can, and will.” The gun barrel betrayed a tremble, but it was insufficiently pronounced to guarantee that valiant funny business would succeed.
“For pity’s sake, we just lost everything!” her mother cried. “I suffer from debilitating clinical anxiety! High stress levels could bring on arrhythmia—fibrillation—hyperventilation—!”
“Mom,” Avery said quietly.
“Yeah, I’ve been diagnosed with OCD, restless leg syndrome, and an allergy to sulphites,” Sam said. “Then I got real problems. Maybe you should take the same cure.”
“This is my house,” Florence said, pulling from Esteban’s protective embrace. “We’re not renting, this is my house. By law.”
“Of which possession is nine-tenths,” Sam said.
The Mandibles Page 29