by John Fulton
Noelle stood behind her chair at the table, wringing her hands, looking stunned, ashamed. “I’m sorry. I …”
Leah felt a flash of sympathy for her, which, thankfully, was replaced by resentment as soon as her strange father looked at Leah. “What happened? What did you do?”
“Me?” Leah said. “I didn’t hit anyone.”
“Yes, you.”
There was exhaustion and frustration in his voice, and Leah couldn’t stand there and hear it. She bolted out the front door, slamming it behind her, and stood in the yard beneath the huge maple, its branches fluttering in the light summer breeze. She waited now for her father to run after her, to ask for an explanation of her rude behavior or, better yet, to apologize for what his girlfriend had just done. But the door remained closed. It was quiet, far too quiet. She kicked at the air. She felt that she should have been crying, bawling, but she couldn’t summon the energy for an all-out fit. She considered her options. She could walk back into the house and face her father, or she could flee, she could run away, head west, for California, for the beaches and docks, for the deserts and mountains. Or she could head east, for the big cities, for the cramped streets, the bars and clubs with lights and loud music. But she was too old to run away. She didn’t even want to run away. She couldn’t care less about the West or East or anywhere else. Next year, she’d have to leave for college, which she was hardly looking forward to. What Leah wanted most was to stay home, to sit down in her room, unbothered, lock the door, and smolder there.
Because Leah had no friends and needed to go somewhere that evening, she headed to Max’s. Max lived on the other side of Stadium Street, about a twenty-minute walk through parks and quiet neighborhoods. She hadn’t been there for years, since before her mother’s death, but the house was the same: a simple yellow two-story midwestern Victorian, two windows facing the street downstairs and one sullen window upstairs. A dingy white-picket fence separated the front yard from the sidewalk. Max was out cutting the grass with a push mower. It was mid-evening. The sun edged low on the horizon, just above a storm cloud, from which Leah saw a flash of lightning. But the sun still had heat in it, and the first raindrops were lukewarm and tiny. “Hey,” Leah said.
Max wore a floppy straw hat that made him look more folksy than scientific and the same blue scrubs and T-shirt—it said Take the Pepsi Challenge and must have been twenty years old—he’d worn at the lab all day. On his feet, as always, were his scruffy tennis shoes, now grass-stained. He greeted her with far more friendliness than she’d expected, waving, then inviting her in. How strange it was to see Max pop his shoes off, the laces still tied, in the linoleum entryway. The sight of him in his white socks felt at once homey and intimate to Leah. Max was a neat freak with absolutely no taste in furniture and interior design. In the living room, Leah walked over an orange shag carpet, then sat in an old, if perfectly preserved, La-Z-Boy, a wooden paddle at its side. Leah gave it a tug, laying herself out flat beneath what she saw now was a thickly textured ceiling. His house was stuck in the seventies. He no doubt owned a waterbed.
Max came out of the kitchen holding a bottle of beer, obviously for himself, and offered Leah a soda pop. “How about a beer for me, too?” Leah said, though she didn’t care for the taste of beer.
“That’s not going to get me in trouble with Franklin, is it?”
“No,” Leah said. “Franklin is pretty cool with that.” In fact, he was cool with it; he allowed Leah to have an occasional glass of wine with dinner, in the belief that parents should teach children to drink responsibly.
Max returned with a beer for her, and when he sat down on the couch, Leah noticed something outright grim: two spots of black on Max’s scrubs. “Is that blood?” Leah asked.
Max looked at his pant leg. “I’d guess so.”
“From the dog?”
Max nodded.
“Oh,” Leah said. Outside, the rain was coming down harder now, thumping against the roof, even as the deep orange of twilight poured in through the windows. “I came to apologize for my antics today. For naming the dog and everything.”
Max finished taking a swig of beer. “Apology accepted.”
“It was an insult to the animal’s dignity,” Leah continued.
“I’m glad that you see it was problematic.”
Leah took a large gulp of her bitter, unpleasant-tasting beverage. “It didn’t really hurt him, though, did it? As far as he was concerned, I just let him out of the cage and gave him companionship.”
“I see,” Max said. “So you did it for him. You did it to make him more comfortable.”
“All right,” she said. “It was a mistake. I’m sorry. Now I’m going to shut up.”
But she couldn’t shut up. She was no good at shutting up these days. She gave him a critical look-over. “You’re a terrible dresser,” she said. “My dad used to be a terrible dresser, before he met his new girlfriend. Before he fell in love. It was because he was depressive. I bet you’re depressive. I bet you take Prozac or something.”
Max chuckled. “Really? You think so?”
She hadn’t expected her words to bounce off him, and the fact that he remained untouched by her sudden honesty made her want to find his soft spots, his vulnerabilities. “I do. I think you’re brokenhearted.” Leah took another long drink of beer and tried to look mean as she did so. “I think you never got over your wife leaving you. You never even tried to date other women, did you? My dad did. It only took him a few years, and then he was crazy in love. I wish he’d been more like you.”
Max put his drink down, and Leah could see that she’d gotten to him this time. He was glaring at her. “You’re trying to make trouble, aren’t you?”
“Maybe,” Leah said. “I guess I sort of do that sometimes.”
He studied her for a moment. “Part of me wonders if I shouldn’t fire you from the lab right now. Before you do something. I almost did it this afternoon.”
“I won’t do anything. Not in the lab. I promise. I’m interested in science,” she added.
He shook his head. “I’m not so sure you are.”
“I am. And I like the animals.”
Max sat back, sank into the couch and seemed, for now, satisfied. He was a softie. “I’m a terrible dresser, too,” she admitted now. “I know I am. I don’t know if I’m depressive. But I know that I don’t look so good.”
“Nonsense,” Max said. “You look fine.”
“I don’t mind. It doesn’t bother me to look this way.” She gazed down at her black high-top sneakers. No other girl at her high school dared to wear such unattractive shoes, and Leah couldn’t help but be a little proud of their ugliness. When she looked up again, Max was smiling at her. It was a smile of affection and goodwill, and it made her say something she hadn’t intended to say. “I sort of have a crush on you. I think about you a lot. I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
“Hum,” Max said. He looked out the window, where the rain had really started to come down now. He smiled. He thought it was cute. He laughed. “You’ll get over it, I’m sure.” Then he stood up. “I’ve got to make myself a little dinner. You hungry?”
Because she’d already had dinner, she sat and watched Max eat an odd assortment of food—microwaved hot dogs with mustard, reheated rice and green beans. He ate hungrily, cutting up the hot dogs, slathering them with mustard, and washing each bite down with beer. It felt good to be with him. It felt good just to sit there and watch him eat while it rained outside. Later, Max lent her an umbrella, and during her walk home in the drizzling dark, she thought about them sitting together. She thought about Max, who had no one, no wife and no children. And she thought about how she’d discovered his broken heart, his soft spot that night.
3
The next morning, Leah’s father met her in the kitchen dressed in his work suit and surprised her with an offer. “How about breakfast?” he said. The sun was so bright that Leah had to squint as they walked up Washington Street where the noise
of traffic mixed oddly with a racket of birdsong.
“I thought you were going to punish me now,” she said once they’d been seated at the Broken Egg and Leah’s orange juice and Franklin’s coffee had been delivered.
Her father nodded. “Yes, I suppose I’m going to.” But at the moment he seemed to be stalling. “Noelle told me you two had a talk last night. She told me that you both apologized.” Leah nodded. In fact, they had, but the interaction had been brief and uncomfortable. “I know Noelle is sorry. She wishes she hadn’t slapped you. I also wish she hadn’t. She shouldn’t have.”
“It’s my fault, too,” Leah said. “I’m sorry for calling her that.”
Franklin put a hand to his bare face. “My prank with the beard didn’t help things any, did it? I blew my top. I have to admit I did it to provoke you. Unfortunately it worked.” He laughed now and profiled his face for her. “How do you like it?”
“It’s strange,” Leah said. “You don’t look like you.”
“You’re changing, too, you know.” He smiled at her. “You look more and more like your mother, to tell you the truth.”
This comment, together with her father’s gaze—he was studying her, admiring her—made Leah blush. She grabbed the saltshaker and squeezed it. “You still think about her?” Leah asked.
“Of course, I think about her. You’re just as pretty. Maybe even more.” He folded his arms then, still looking at her, still smiling. “I wonder,” he said, “if you haven’t caught the eyes of a few boys. I bet you have.”
Leah shrugged. She didn’t much want to revisit the boy issue. “I’m not exactly a babe, am I?” She looked down at herself—her T-shirt and loose jeans. “At least, I don’t try to be. I don’t want to be.”
“I think you are. But it might not hurt to try a little harder.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
Franklin put his hands up in concession. “All right.”
“I bet you forgot what next weekend is,” Leah said accusingly. He stared into the air, trying to remember. “It’s Mom’s birthday. You forgot it.”
“Leah.” There was a warning in his voice, and the last thing she wanted was to fight now.
“We should do something together, the way we used to,” she said. The past two years, Franklin and Leah had spent her mother’s birthdays distracting themselves. Last year, just a few weeks before Franklin had met Noelle, they spent the afternoon and evening in the cinema multiplex, walking out of one movie and into another, filling up on popcorn and Cokes, and not leaving until midnight, after which Leah fell asleep on the couch listening to Franklin weep behind his closed bedroom door. The house had been a mess then, dishes stacked in the sink, the floors dirty, their beds unmade, and unfolded clothes from the dryer piled over the living-room chairs. Without Margaret, Franklin and Leah, both bad cooks and natural slobs, had been helpless. Margaret used to institute weekly cleanups, or “dustups,” as she’d called them, rallying everyone from bed on Saturdays and cheerfully commanding them, putting brooms and mops in their hands, turning her favorite music up high on the stereo, Johnny Cash or the Doors, so that Leah could remember crouching around the toilet with a sponge of ammonia to “Break on Through” while her mother, scrubbing the countertops, swayed in the kitchen and sang off-key, “You know the day destroys the night.” Jim Morrison’s drug songs were so not Leah’s mother, who was sweet and soft-spoken; she would always counter Leah’s assertion that Morrison was all about tripping and getting high by reminding her that the Door’s inspiration came from William Blake, from high art. “We’re cleaning the house to drug music,” Leah would nonetheless say. How this memory could seem pleasant now baffled Leah. At the time she’d resented the chore, resented the interruption of her Saturday-morning sleep, and even found the post-cleanup family breakfast of pancakes or eggs and bacon boring. Now she’d give anything to be scouring that toilet again while her mother danced in the other room.
“Sure,” Franklin said cautiously, “we’ll do something together.”
After they ate, Franklin moved his plate aside. Leah knew her punishment was coming by the way he sat up stiffly. When he spoke now, she could hear that he’d rehearsed his little speech. “It’s fairly obvious that you’d rather not make a family with me and Noelle. Not right now, anyway. We both hoped we could persuade you, and we still hope things change soon. In the meantime, we’ve decided to stop trying to force you into our lives. We won’t ask you to eat with us. We won’t ask you to go to movies with us. We’re happy to let you have your space. If you’d like to do something with us, we’d love the company. We’d love your company. But we only want you along if you want to be there. In other words, we want you to make the decision to spend time with us. We can’t do that for you.”
Franklin placed both hands firmly on the table and let out a long breath as he waited for her response. She felt something very much like the Oh-well, the What-can-be done? feelings she’d experienced after seeing the first sheep begin to die in the lab: a slight undercurrent of sadness that she could easily hold down and contain. “Okay,” she finally said.
Leah did not expect to feel their absence as keenly as she did over the next days. Nor did she expect them to keep their word, to ignore her, to stop extending invitations that she could turn down again and again. They were busy people. When not working, they played. They cooked long, involved dinners, during which Leah made a point of not leaving her room. They spent weekends at bed-and-breakfasts on the coast of Lake Michigan. They attended concerts and theater. Of course, she had not spent much more time with them in the past. What was new and what she noticed now was their lack of interest in her. They too easily got on without her while Leah had very little to do. She had only the lab and Max now, and in some ways she hardly had these. Max had been right; Leah was not interested in science. And Max was not too terribly interested in Leah, save as his student and as an upset young person for whom he might do some good. She had her clarinet and her interest in jazz. But she could stand to play her clarinet no more than an hour each day before the endless scales and dexterity exercises along with her own boundless mediocrity drove her crazy. As for jazz, she could live without it. In fact, the interest was not really her own. She’d picked it up from the first and only guy she’d slept with—an eighteen-year-old drummer named Larry who’d lived across the street from her a few years ago, and with whom she’d slept far too soon after her mother’s death. She’d just turned fifteen, and Larry, who was, Leah could tell, a little bored with her, had taught her to like jazz. They had exhaustive sex, in every possible position, for two weeks, after which he’d put his possessions in a duffel bag the size of a human body and left for college.
In short, Leah had, when she thought about it, nothing.
Nonetheless, she liked her work at the lab, where she had become more accustomed to the fate of the dogs. By mid-July, she’d seen scores of them die. While most wagged their tails all the way to the table, a few fought so viciously it took both Leah and Max to hold them down as Diana administered the anesthesia. Weirdly, inappropriately, the fighters were the easiest to help kill; their struggle somehow made the experience more bearable. Leah always chose to stay in the operating room. She stayed because she would rather have left, and her compulsion to avoid this spectacle made her feel equally compelled to do the opposite. At the same time, she had begun to feel that she was more than a spectator, that she was, perhaps, a witness. She saw something that neither Max nor Diana, to whom each dog was a necessary sacrifice, could see. She was watching the animals die without the least bit of certainty that it was worth it. She saw waste and death where they saw anatomy and potential improvements in common gallbladder procedures. And her ability to accept and endure this vision was, as far as Leah could make out, her one accomplishment that summer.
4
It was at the tedious, hot beginning of August that Leah began to visit the properties that Noelle was trying to sell. These were large, beautiful hous
es in the nicer areas of Ann Arbor—Burns Park and the Old West Side, where Leah lived—green areas with nicely mowed lawns and shady maples spreading their branches over both sides of the street. Noelle kept the keys to the houses she planned to show the next day in separate envelopes, each labeled with an address, on her bedside table. On a sunny evening when Franklin and Noelle had, as usual, gone out, Leah decided to do the same. Why should she remain home when no one else did? And so she borrowed the keys to a few houses that were a short walk away.
At the first, on Green Street, Leah read the name of the realtor on the For Sale sign out front—Noelle Jones. From a plastic folder tacked to the post, Leah took a fact sheet with Noelle’s photograph, which captured well, Leah thought, her pleasantness and her highly competent and neat prettiness. This was Noelle’s territory, and as Leah turned the key, opened the heavy front door, and set foot on the rich yellow shimmer of wood floors, she was acutely and thrillingly aware of being the intruder, the outsider, the one who could wreck and ruin the careful balance and order of a world to which she had no right of entrance. This home was Leah’s. All of it. And when she latched the door behind her and heard the cool and resolute slip and lock of door to jamb, she felt wonderfully transgressive.
This first property she entered happened to be, as most of the houses she would visit over the next days and weeks were not, furnished. Without fear, she switched the lights on and walked from room to room. French doors with beveled glass separated the dining room from the living room, where she turned on the stereo, pressed play, and was happy to hear Freddie Hubbard blasting out “Night in Tunisia,” to which she did a brief dance down the hallway. She didn’t care if she got caught. Let it happen. Let someone find her and stop her. She took a highball glass from the wet bar, poured herself a bit of brown liquid from a bottle that reeked of adulthood and poison, and felt deflated when she found it undrinkably bad. She lunged onto the king-sized bed in the master bedroom and bounced. She opened the closet, ran her hands over blouses, skirts, dresses, many of them freshly dry-cleaned and wrapped in plastic. Oddly, there were no shoes, but Leah did find a small collection of adult films in a shoe-box—Deep Throat Three, Cock Till You Drop, and Analbolic Annabelle. She pissed in the toilet and left without flushing. She peeked into the children’s rooms, one done in blue and the other in pink, as if checking up on the kiddies. She turned on the giant-screen TV and watched twenty minutes of Friends. No one came. No one knocked on the door or burst in to stop her. Perhaps the owners had already moved and left behind furniture and clothing, for which they would later return. Or perhaps the owners were still living here and were out for the evening. In any case, Leah was underwhelmed by her first uneventful act of breaking and entering, and so she conducted what Max might have called an experiment. She took a vase from the entryway table and dropped it, watching it shatter and feeling almost nothing. A slight twinge of guilt, a shiver of pettiness and irrelevancy. She hardly knew what she’d expected, but she’d wanted more. She cleaned it up, turned all but a few lights off, left out the shot glass to make a simple statement—“I was here,” she wanted it to say, “and had a taste of the porridge.”