“We could be a family,” Elliot said.
45.
A week after Ollie went back to Walnut Creek, a surprising thing happened. Dwight called to suggest that our son move back in with me for the rest of the summer.
“We’re going through a rough patch,” he said. “He’s just gotten so defiant. No respect for authority. All of a sudden he’s saying things like ‘piss’ and ‘badass,’ and when I call him on it, he just mouths off more. I guess it’s a stage, but Cheri’s concerned that Jared’s picking up Oliver’s bad habits now. If you want to tackle it, be our guest.”
I didn’t say anything, but I knew where our son had acquired his new vocabulary. Swift was always telling Ollie that the guys who got someplace in the world were the rule breakers, the outlaws. Once, when we’d been over at the Havillands, Ollie had told a story about his second-grade teacher, Mr. Rettstadt, and how he made them march all the way back to their bus, when they were on a field trip, because some of the boys started break-dancing in the line.
“What a pussy,” Swift had said. “He was probably just jealous he didn’t have any cool moves of his own.”
Now in the car, bringing him back to Redwood City with me again, I tried to talk with my son about what was going on with his father and Cheri.
“Cheri’s stupid,” he said. “All she ever does is talk on the phone.”
As much as I might have disliked Cheri, too (might have, and did), I knew I couldn’t let that one go.
“You know I wish you could be with me all the time,” I told him. “But when you’re with your father and your stepmother, it’s important to try and get along, and you need to be kind. Kids don’t know everything. That’s why they have parents to take care of them.”
Ollie was quiet for a while as we drove over the bridge, with his clothes and his hamster on his lap.
“It’s not like Dad wants to get rid of me or anything,” he said, in that way children have of naming their worst fear, in the hope that someone will tell them it’s not real. “He just thought it would be a good idea for me to have a change of pace,” Ollie told me. “Jared’s always getting into my stuff. Little kids are a pain.”
Ollie’s face had that tough, diffident look I recognized well at this point. I knew him well enough to recognize what it concealed, which was hurt. “Plus I think I get on Dad’s nerves,” he said. This part was spoken so softly I could just barely hear him.
“I’ve been thinking about some fun things we can do together now that we’ve got more time,” I said. “Go camping maybe. Visit the Monterey Aquarium.”
He looked at me warily. “What about Monkey Man?” he said. “I get to go over there, right?”
“Some of the time,” I said. “But some of the time I thought it might be fun if we hung out with Elliot, too. Remember him?” I didn’t call him my boyfriend. I called him my friend.
“I want to hang out at Monkey Man’s pool,” Ollie said. “I need to practice for our race. And we’re going to Tahoe and ride in the Donzi.”
“Ava and Swift will probably want their privacy sometimes,” I said. “But you and I will have plenty of time for adventures.”
Ollie looked out the window for a while, studying the cars on the bridge. He’d been keeping count of how many were Mini Coopers. Every minute or two he’d call out that he saw another one.
“People don’t like to have kids around when they do sex,” he said. He didn’t look at me when he said this, just kept staring out the window, tracing imaginary letters on the glass.
“Making love is private,” I told him. “Someday when you’re older, you’ll have someone you feel that way about. You’ll want to be private, too.”
“Like going to the bathroom,” he said.
“Not so much. But the privacy part’s the same.”
“My dad and Cheri do it when they think I’m asleep,” he said. “They don’t know I know.”
I thought a moment before addressing this one.
“Racing stripes,” Ollie called out. Another Mini Cooper for his count.
“People do that when they love each other,” I told him. Or not, I might have added, but didn’t.
“I’m glad you didn’t get married to anybody,” Ollie said. He announced this as if it was a done deal I’d be alone forever.
“Right now, I’m not married to anybody,” I said. “But you never know. Maybe someday.”
“That would be dumb,” Ollie said.
“Well, anyway, I don’t have any plans to get married to anybody anytime soon,” I told him. This might have been a moment to mention Elliot, but I didn’t.
46.
July was almost over when Ollie came back to spend the rest of the summer with me. I didn’t bring him over to Folger Lane that first night he returned. Nor did I invite Elliot over. I thought we should have some time together for just the two of us, the way it used to be.
But the next day there was no keeping my son away from the Havillands’ house. He wasn’t past the door before Swift put him in a wrestling hold. “What took you so long, buddy?” he said.
Then came the sound of Ollie’s laughter. Swift had pulled his shirt up and was tickling him. Around his ankles, all three dogs were barking. Rocco was actually licking his hand.
“I hope you like brownies,” Ava said.
“You think I’m sharing your special brownies with this no-good bum?” Swift said to her. He had Ollie in the air now, upside down.
“Say uncle. Say uncle,” Swift told him. “Then I’ll let go. Maybe.”
More shrieks from Ollie. Happy ones. “Uncle!” he yelled. “Uncle!”
“All right,” Swift said. “I guess I’ll release you. But you must understand, I am your mighty and all-powerful leader. You do as I command.” He set my son back on the floor. His voice was deeper than normal and his eyes narrowed.
Ollie was bent over from laughing so hard. I worried he might wet his pants—a problem in the past—but he didn’t.
“Repeat after me,” Swift said. “‘I promise to obey you, my all-powerful leader!’”
“I promise to obey—”
“—all-powerful leader,” Swift reminded him.
“All-powerful leader.”
Ollie was still catching his breath, though I knew he loved this. He had the same look I sometimes observed on Sammy when Ava took out his leash and the special tool she used to throw his tennis ball farther than normal, meaning he would be going to the park. Excitement, not fear. Though I knew what this amount of excitement would bring about later, back at our apartment. I wouldn’t get Ollie to sleep tonight until way past his bedtime. He’d be too wired.
The table was set for us out on the patio. At Ollie’s place there were two packages: a snorkel mask and fins, and a watch.
“It’s waterproof,” Swift told him. “Good up to a hundred meters. That should do until you and I get into some serious scuba diving. Cooper and I did a lot of that when he was just a few years older than you.”
Ollie had ripped the packaging off already. He was trying to set the time.
“And there’s a timer,” Swift said. “So we can clock your speed from one end of the pool to the other. Or holding your breath.”
“I always wanted a watch like this,” Ollie said, his voice a husky whisper.
This was news to me. But Swift revealed a whole new side to my son I had not experienced before. A kind of swagger and bravado. Around Swift, he even seemed to lower his voice when he spoke, though he was still a few years from the age when it would happen on its own.
The next day was Sunday. Elliot showed up at my apartment at eight thirty in the morning with a gift for me: a staple gun. He’d noticed I didn’t own one. I was in the shower, so Ollie answered the door.
“That guy’s here,” my son called out. “The one that threw up.” I pulled on my bathrobe and went out to the living room.
“I thought I’d take you two out for breakfast,” Elliot said. “I know a place that makes the best Fr
ench toast.”
Ollie was still in his pajamas. He’d been eating cereal and watching cartoons on television. I had promised myself that while Ollie was with me we’d have our meals at the table, not sitting in front of the TV, but for now I was just happy to let him hang out and relax.
“Good morning, Ollie,” Elliot said. He offered his hand. My son looked up at him a little blankly, but shook it.
“We weren’t expecting you,” I said. He was trying to be spontaneous, probably—a little crazy, like Swift—but it didn’t come naturally. Elliot had to plan his spontaneity.
“I already ate,” Ollie said.
“Well, how about this, then? We load the bikes on the back of my car and go for a ride? I brought mine along.”
“I think Ollie might like to hang around at home for a while,” I said. “Actually, so would I.”
He had set the staple gun down. I looked at the coffee pot. Empty.
“I could make another pot,” I said.
He shook his head. “I should have called first,” he said. “All I was thinking was how much I wanted to see you two.”
“Why would you want to see me?” Ollie said. “You don’t even know me.”
“Well, that’s true,” Elliot said. His voice, which had been, very briefly, playful, returned to the usual somber tone. “But I wanted to get to know you.”
47.
From the moment he heard about the Donzi, my son had been after Swift to take him out on that boat. He’d never even heard of Miami Vice or Colin Farrell before meeting Swift, but now Ollie reminded me this was the same boat he drove in the movie. The Donzi could go faster than a speeding bullet, Ollie told me. Warp speed.
When Ollie had asked Swift if he could drive the Donzi, Swift had given him an uncharacteristic response. “When you’re older, you can,” he told Ollie. “But you really have to know what you’re doing to drive the Donzi, or you can get into trouble. That’s why I waited till Cooper was seventeen until I bought it, and even then I wouldn’t let him take the controls unless I was right there next to him.”
If Ollie was disappointed by this, he didn’t show it. Swift’s words on the subject only added to the Donzi’s mystique.
“The Donzi used to belong to bad guys that used it to carry drugs from other countries to America,” Ollie told me. We were driving over to Folger Lane when the topic of the speedboat came up, as it frequently did.
“Also machine guns,” Ollie added. “Then they got arrested, and the police sold the boat, and Monkey Man bought it.”
I didn’t know this, I told him. Leave it to Swift to take ownership of a cigarette boat formerly owned by cocaine smugglers with guns.
“When I grow up I want to be like Monkey Man,” Ollie said. He made his voice go low and narrowed his eyes, checking his reflection in the mirror.
As I saw my son do this, a realization came to me. Though I had been the one who introduced Swift into Ollie’s life—and though I loved spending time with Swift, and called the Havillands the nearest thing I had to family, I didn’t want my boy to be like him when he grew up. Swift entertained and amused me, and I had come to count on his generosity and protection, but I realized with a sudden clarity that I didn’t entirely respect the man. If I were still working at that catering job and he’d attended some party where I was passing around the trays of appetizers, my old friend Alice would probably have written Swift off as an asshole, and I probably would have agreed with her.
Now in the car with me, heading over to the Havillands’, my son was once again launched into a discussion of Monkey Man’s speedboat.
“Monkey Man says the Donzi can go a hundred and fifty miles an hour,” Ollie said. “One time he was going so fast, this girl on the boat lost her bikini top.”
My hands tightened on the wheel. “If we go up to Tahoe with Swift and Ava someday, and you ride on that boat, I can tell you he won’t be driving that fast with you,” I said. “I’ll make sure of that.”
“You’re not the boss of him,” said Ollie. “Nobody’s the boss of Monkey Man.”
48.
My ex-husband had agreed to let Ollie stay with me for the remainder of the summer, with occasional visits back to Walnut Creek. All of this sounded so civilized, I was actually thinking I might not need to enlist the services of Marty Matthias at all, which may have been just as well since Swift seemed not to have gotten around to calling him yet. Maybe, after Labor Day, Dwight and I could sit down and have a reasonable, friendly conversation about custody, and we could talk about the possibility of Oliver coming to live with me again.
“It sounds as if Dwight might be open to that,” I told Swift and Ava. “Maybe he and Cheri are a little burned out from juggling a toddler and an eight-year-old.”
Meanwhile, the defiant behavior Dwight had complained about was not in evidence with me. Every night now, when we got back to the apartment, Ollie would have his bath and then climb into bed to read with me, as if all the old bad times had never happened.
On the first weekend in August, I drove Ollie up to Sacramento for a visit with Dwight’s family. The McCabes, who had once embraced me as their new daughter, stayed inside when I dropped him off at their house.
That same weekend, the Havillands were going up to their Tahoe house. In the past, Ava would have asked Estella to watch the dogs, but Rocco had taken a strong dislike to her—stronger even than his dislike of me, which had actually lessened over time—and anyway, Ava said, the idea that Carmen might accompany her mother to the house had left her uneasy about having Estella over on her own for a whole weekend. So Ava asked if I’d stay there.
I knew Elliot would have welcomed this opportunity to spend a couple of nights with me. This was true with or without Ollie on the scene, but Ollie’s presence that summer—and my reluctance to be around Elliot when Ollie was there—had severely curtailed our time together, and virtually eliminated any possibility of sex.
I could have called Elliot and invited him to join me at the Havillands’. But when I thought about it, I realized that what I really wanted was to be alone in their house.
As always, I offered to take care of whatever errands or odd jobs Ava might need done, but other than walking the dogs and checking in with Evelyn Couture to make sure she was doing all right, she told me not to bother, just to enjoy myself. “Take a nice long soak in the Jacuzzi and slather yourself with La Mer,” she told me. This would be her three-hundred-dollar face cream. “And I left a great piece of wild salmon in the refrigerator.”
“Give me a job to do,” I told her. “I might as well be useful.”
“Just pick up my dry cleaning,” she said.
On my way over to Folger Lane from the cleaners’, I turned the radio up high to a hard rock station. Not my usual choice, but I liked the feeling of singing at the top of my lungs. I stopped at the market where Ava shopped and picked up a couple of imported cheeses and a baguette. No doubt the Havillands’ refrigerator was already well stocked with great delicacies, but it felt good to choose for myself. I added a large slice of dark chocolate cake to my purchases and a croissant for the morning.
I had considered the possibility that Estella might have dropped by, so I was glad to see that mine was the only car in the driveway when I pulled in. With the pile of clothes over my arm, I turned the key in the lock, bracing myself slightly for the dogs I knew were on the other side. As usual, Lillian and Sammy jumped all over me with excitement as soon as I stepped into the house. Rocco hung back, but no longer growled at the sight of me, though he bared his teeth in a way that always set mine on edge.
Something came over me then: the knowledge that for once I could do whatever I wanted in this house.
I set the clothes down. Opened the refrigerator.
I’d sat on the patio with Ava and Swift a hundred times while they drank wine without it bothering me, but for some reason this evening, the sight of their French rosé and the good chardonnay chilling beside it made me hesitate a moment. For just a
few seconds, I let myself imagine how it would feel to sit out by the pool by myself with the runny cheese and a plate of Ava’s special crackers and a large, chilled glass of wine. I closed the refrigerator.
With Ava’s clothes in one arm and a bottle of Pellegrino in the other, I made my way up the stairs to Ava’s dressing room.
I was going to just pull the plastic off the clothes I’d picked up and hang them on a hook for Estella to put away later on, then head downstairs to cook my fish, but something made me linger. I let my hand pass over one of the cashmere sweaters. I kicked off my shoes. Counted out loud, in high school French, the number of silk blouses in Ava’s collection. Quatorze.
I studied a particular gown from among those I’d just picked up, which Ava had recently worn to a dinner in the city—one of the intimate gatherings Swift had hosted for BARK benefactors. This dress was made of hand-painted silk, with diaphanous butterfly sleeves. The dress went down very low in the back, though because she had been in her wheelchair the whole time she wore it, this feature must have been lost on her tablemates. Only Swift and I would have known Ava’s dress was backless and that she’d worn no underwear to accommodate it.
“Sometimes, driving home,” she’d told me, as I helped her get ready, “he takes his right hand off the wheel to touch me.”
“On the freeway?” I said.
“Only his right hand. He’s a good driver.”
There was a stereo in Swift and Ava’s bedroom, naturally, with a stack of compact discs beside it. I picked up the top disc. Andrea Bocelli. That blind Italian singer.
I put the disc into the player and turned the music up loud, so I could hear it in the dressing room. Andrea Bocelli was singing in Italian, of course, so I had no idea what the words meant, but it had to be about love—passionate, possibly desperate. This was the kind of song that probably made Andrea Bocelli’s fans throw themselves at his feet and beg to go back to the hotel with him, even if he was blind. Maybe that made it even better.
Under the Influence Page 17