Leo followed her out on to the sidewalk where a taxi was already pulling up to her. She turned to her brother. ‘I totally get it,’ she said. ‘I finally understood why people bother to look at rubbish like that. It’s all about sex. It’s the dance. There’s no other explanation.’
She climbed in and told the driver to take them to St Luke’s Hospital. She looked at Leo with an innocent smile. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘He needs us.’
24
Being a short man, Stefano Parker filled the doorway to his house instead with his barrel chest, which stretched the buttoned breast pockets of his gun check shirt out into the day. He was a strong man, with a taut, swollen belly but no fat on him. His wife, Ann, stood backstage of him and the two of them peered from behind the porch screen at the two English boys, wondering where their daughter was. Ann tipped her body to one side to see if she was hidden behind the boys. In turn, Finn looked into Mr and Mrs Parker’s house for a glimpse of Dilly, and all three of them looked confused.
Jack, on the other hand, looked tired and ill and dangerous, and was oblivious to the effect. Stefano peered fractionally to examine the single track of smooth skin through Jack’s beard and his expression did not convey admiration.
‘I’m Finn,’ Finn said, in the absence of a greeting from his hosts. ‘This is my brother, Jack.’
Jack stood to attention on hearing his name. ‘Yes,’ he said, and offered his hand. This gesture forced Stefano to open the screen door to them and as he did so Mrs Parker emerged from behind her husband’s shoulder. ‘I’m Ann. No “e”.’
Stefano Parker did not offer his name, which Finn knew anyway, and ushered the boys into the house that he no longer owed a cent on. (There was no one in Stefano’s circle unaware of this fact.) Inside, the four of them squared up in a ragged way.
‘Is Dilly here?’ Finn asked.
‘She’s with you,’ Stefano insisted, despite evidence to the contrary.
‘White house,’ Jack remarked.
‘Thank you,’ Ann said. ‘We’re very happy here.’
‘No, I said white, not nice,’ Jack said. Finn looked at his brother curiously as Jack pointed at an olde worlde needlepoint above the door which read Home Is Where The Heart Is. ‘Will you look at that monstrosity?’ he said.
‘What?’ Stefano said.
Finn raised his eyes to the white ceiling in disbelief.
Jack then gestured to what he imagined might be the bathroom door. ‘Need to brush my teeth, mouth feels furry. May I?’
Ann Parker pointed to a different door. Jack fished out his toilet bag, and took it to the bathroom.
Life in New York was a learning curve, of that Finn had been aware since landing. Right now, the lessons in front of him were that Jack was not being himself and that height was a big issue for some men and Stefano Parker was one of them. Finn took his own height for granted, although not his strength and speed, as that had been cultivated for protection. Now, a man stood before him who clearly wanted to pin him to the floor and beat the crap out of him until he got some answers. But the chance reality that Finn was ten inches taller meant that this solidly built Italian-American man with crooner looks and an affable menace had to take another route, a less direct one, for no man could take a pin-you-to-the-wall approach to matters if that man needed a box to stand on.
‘What the hell?’ Stefano hissed.
‘You promised us he works in finance,’ Ann said.
‘We’ve never spoken!’ Finn said.
‘Dilys told us he works at AIG,’ Stefano barked, ‘a respectable company, big salary – a bit boring, Dilys said, not a rock star.’
‘He is a bit boring and I miss that right now,’ Finn said, trying to defuse the situation. ‘I don’t even know who he works for.’
‘Is it right to know your own brother so little?’ Ann said, pointedly.
‘I could justify it pretty easy. And by the way, your daughter hates being called Dilys.’
‘Who the fuck are you to tell us that, two minutes in my house, you little shit?’
‘Who are you to call my brother a little shit?’ This came from Jack, propped against the bathroom door, a foamy electric toothbrush whirring in his mouth. ‘He can be a little shit sometimes,’ Jack foamed, ‘but no one calls him that in front of me.’
‘What the hell!’ Stefano Parker was ready to bust an artery. ‘You’re in my house!’
Finn made to calm things down. ‘No one meant to be rude, Stefano.’ (You don’t want to tell me your name, I’m going to use the hell out of it.) ‘But I thought Dilly would be here.’
‘We thought she was with you,’ Ann said. She and Stefano looked at each other uncertainly. The sound of Jack’s toothbrush receded to the bathroom.
‘Well, I’m sure she’ll turn up,’ Ann said, vaguely, for the benefit of her husband, who she didn’t want further upset. ‘Why don’t I make some coffee?’
‘Thank you,’ Finn said. He wanted tea, but the atmosphere did not lend itself to special requests.
Stefano retreated across the open-plan to his TV chair. He sat forward at first, looking out across the garden, as he gathered his thoughts and ground his molars. Then, he reclined, electronically, to forty-five degrees and lay his hands across the pinnacle of his belly and switched on the sports. Finn took a seat on the nearby sofa, uninvited. In the window, he saw the reflection of his big brother marching from the bathroom to the kitchen area and tensed up at the thought of him unaccompanied with Mrs Parker.
At the kitchen sink, Jack measured out his cough mixture and knocked it back. The care with which he rinsed the measuring cap under the tap and placed it upside down on the drainboard to dry suggested to Ann that this man did know civilised behaviour, despite the smooth track of skin that cut a path through the carnage of his hollow, unshaven appearance. She led Jack back into the living area and set the coffee tray down. Stefano upped the volume on the sports so as to make conversation less probable. Finn declined the coffee on Jack’s behalf. Jack shot Finn a what-the-hell face, which Finn ignored. They argued in whispers beneath the volume of the TV.
‘I could do with some coffee!’
‘No, you couldn’t. You’re wired.’
‘And I’m hungry, is there gonna be food?’
‘It’s the middle of the morning, Jack, they don’t know you haven’t eaten for a year. What’s wrong with you? Just be yourself. Couldn’t you have shaved while you were in there brushing your frickin’ teeth? You look like a werewolf, man.’
‘Hands are shaky. I think I might be a bit unwell.’
‘You think?’
‘Jesus! You sound like Mum.’
‘Why, am I slurring?’
‘Funny.’
‘I’M CALLING DILLY,’ Stefano boomed, then waited patiently for the recliner to return to ninety degrees and, for Finn and Jack’s entertainment, tip the man of the house slowly out of his seat and on to the rug in a knees-bent standing posture, from which he straightened up and sauntered out of the room.
Jack was open-mouthed. ‘Shoot me, the day I buy one of those chairs.’
Ann offered Jack the remote, at arm’s length, and retreated to the kitchen. Stefano returned, complained that Dilly wasn’t answering her phone, snatched the remote out of Jack’s hand (which caused Jack to giggle and Stefano to double take at him) and returned to his chair.
‘Watch this…’ Jack whispered, with a cupped hand at Finn’s ear like a three-year-old. The two of them watched as Stefano slowly re-reclined.
Two hours passed. Jack fell asleep from hunger, his head flung back, neck arched, mouth open. Finn sent Dilly a text, asking when she was going to show.
She replied instantly. Oh, look who’s got himself a cell! Haven’t heard from you for a while.
Not since you walked out, he texted.
That’s your version.
He ignored that and asked her again when she’d show up. She didn’t reply.
Stefano turned in his seat and attempted to c
rowbar some information out of his one conscious guest. ‘What do you do for work?’
Finn weighed Stefano up. ‘My profession?’ he asked.
‘What do you do?’ Stefano replied, impatiently.
‘Well, my parents were alcoholics,’ he said, brightly, deciding to have some fun, ‘and I have a conviction for arson. Nowadays I’m in the art world.’
This was something Stefano retired to the garden to dwell on, taking Ann with him. Finn watched them feign an inspection of the bird feeders as they discussed the threat level orange in their living room.
It was mid-afternoon, when Finn and Jack had seen all traditional definitions of lunchtime come and go without food being served or mentioned, that Dilly’s sister called from college in San Diego. Stefano and Ann held a handset each and the three Parkers cooed and chatted and laughed together. Expressions of adoration washed across Stefano and Ann’s faces, and Finn confided to Jack that he hadn’t known Dilly had a sister.
The Parkers relaxed after the call, enough to sit in the same room as their guests and re-enact the phone call, confirming for each other’s benefit what a sunny success of a human being their other daughter was. Not once, Finn noted, had they asked San Diego if she had heard from Dilly.
‘Finn didn’t even know Dilly had a sister,’ Jack announced. ‘Weird…’
‘I did know.’
Jack looked confused. ‘You said you had no idea.’
Finn smiled, with menace. ‘You talk too much.’
‘You do. And you smell,’ Jack replied.
Stefano Parker smiled as though he was all at sea, and talked his way out of confusion. ‘You would certainly remember her if you’d met her, no doubt about that, she’s a high achiever. Phoebe – we named her after Phoebe Cates – is quite a girl.’
‘A woman now,’ Ann corrected him.
‘A woman indeed,’ Stefano mused, causing Finn to wince. The words didn’t sound good the way he said them.
‘You named your daughter after the virtually irrelevant actress Phoebe Cates?’ Jack asked, incredulous.
‘I love her,’ Ann complained.
‘We tried and tried and tried for another child after Dilys Annalese,’ Stefano said, sitting forward and addressing Finn, making a big, brooding thing out of ignoring Jack’s directness. ‘We were determined not to settle for one. It took five years of trying.’
Ann raised an eyebrow at the memory, activating Jack’s internal hysterics. He vibrated against Finn with the effort not to laugh.
‘When she finally came she was a miracle and, good God, she’s so bright and talented. And beautiful.’
The pink glow on Stefano’s face faded as a long silence took a grip of the room. The lull reminded him that neither his first- nor his precious second-born were here to dilute the presence of these two strangers. Jack looked as though it was his turn to give birth, his face purple, his head buried in his crossed arms, still consumed by the image of Ann Parker’s exasperated face as Stefano humped her halfway to death for five years in an attempt to improve on his first child.
‘Is he okay?’ Stefano said, aggressively.
‘He’s just hungry,’ Finn said.
‘Dilys will be here any minute,’ Stefano kidded himself.
Finn suspected she might not be, and felt he understood a little better why Stefano’s second-favourite daughter might not want to be here, and he felt that maybe he had failed her. It made him feel sick.
He put an arm behind Jack and opened the window a few inches. He could smell a trace of salt in the air, lifting from seaweed drying in the sun on the beach he had not yet seen. He looked at Dilly’s parents, tried to imagine what it was like when they and Dilly were together in the same room, and felt both curious and fearful at the possibility of finding out. As he watched these people defy every gravitational pull of convention by remaining silent for vast lengths of time in front of guests, the breeze nudged a branch on to his hand and brushed a leaf against his little finger and he thought of Amy.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ he said.
The silence stiffened. The Parkers looked appalled, as if he had suggested a spot of tag-teaming.
‘Just an idea, no sweat,’ Finn said.
‘Oh, yes,’ Ann said, ‘a walk along the boardwalk can be quite a tonic. It can be a super thing to do, on the right sort of day.’
As she continued to talk about the benefits of walking, it became clear to Finn that this was a hypothetical speech. No such walk was going to take place. Presumably, this warm, cloudless day was not the right sort of day.
‘I’m going to do that thing in the kitchen,’ Stefano said, staring meaningfully at his wife as he left the room.
‘He wants you to follow him out so you can talk about us,’ Jack told Ann. Ann rose to her feet unsurely. Jack nodded reassuringly to her, to signal she should go. She obeyed.
‘I reckon they think we’ve killed her,’ Jack said.
Finn laughed dismissively. ‘I wouldn’t reckon our chances.’
A few minutes later, the Parkers re-emerged and took their seats, with rehearsed smiles. ‘Look,’ Stefano said to Finn, on a long out-breath, ‘if you two have had an awful fight over something or there’s something you know, just tell us. We’re her parents, for Christ’s sake.’
‘We were joking about killing her,’ Jack said.
Finn buried his head in his hands.
‘Oh, my sweet Lord Jesus!’ Ann whimpered, folding her hands in white-knuckled prayer. Stefano’s chest filled and his face reddened. His hands became twitchy.
Finn slouched back on the sofa. ‘We have not murdered your daughter,’ he said, wearily.
‘You have wanted to, though, at times, admit it,’ Jack said.
We’ve all wanted to, Ann thought to herself.
Finn looked at Jack in disbelief. ‘SHUT. UP.’
‘But the sex kept you in it, I’d imagine,’ Jack reasoned, rising to his feet and ambling into the kitchen for his cough medicine. Stefano watched him, wide-eyed, the way he’d watch a talking squirrel.
Jack yelled out, ‘YOU SAID THE SEX WAS UNBELIEVABLE, LIKE BEING BACK IN FULL-TIME EDUCATION.’ He emerged and sat on an upholstered chair against the wall of the no man’s land between the dining area and the living area. It was the only chair in the house there was no good reason to sit on. ‘I don’t want to be rude,’ he continued, pouring his medicine into the measuring cap and slugging it back, ‘but if I don’t eat a meal soon I’m going to collapse.’
‘There’s places in town,’ Stefano grumbled.
‘We’ll eat when Dilys gets here,’ Ann said, gentle and unyielding.
‘Right,’ Jack said, ‘fair dos. Am I detecting an atmosphere?’
‘Jacko?’
‘Finny?’
‘Any chance you might stop talking and return to your normal self?’
‘It’s probably because you’ve kind of gone and talked about the elephant in the room there, Finny-boy. This atmosphere. Murder, harm. That’s the elephant in the room in this particular context, in her own parents’ house. In a work context I teach people not to do that. We don’t use the word “risk”, we don’t verbalise that in dialogue terms because everyone thinks that’s what we’re trying to minimise.’
‘What do you say instead of risk?’ Stefano asked. This was an opportunity to test the guy’s credentials.
‘Exposure.’
Stefano laughed dismissively. ‘Bullshit, f-ing bullshit.’
‘That’s a powerful retort, Mr Parker; allow me to mull on all the points you’ve raised.’ Jack threw his head back and began to breathe deeply, loudly, into his chest. He looked insane. Finn and the Parkers watched, horrified. Finn turned his attention to the garden, and latched on to the first vaguely intelligent distraction he saw.
‘That’s a sugar maple.’
‘That’s right, I think,’ Ann smiled, trying to ignore Jack’s heavy breathing.
‘JACK!’ Finn snapped.
Jack froze. ‘W
hat?’
‘You’re breathing really loudly, man!’
‘Sorry. Man!’
Jack sat obediently, quiet, on his chair. Finn stared yet again in disbelief at the behaviour of his brother. He stood up. ‘Would you show me your garden?’
Stefano stood up too, looked Finn in the chest and immediately regretted leaving his chair. ‘Sure,’ he said, cautiously, glancing at Jack and wondering if he was walking into a trap. ‘If he steals anything, I’ll know it. I know what I’ve got. We earned it all ourselves. We were born with nothing.’
Finn shrugged. ‘I don’t think he would. He’s doing pretty well for himself, believe it or not. I’d really like to see your garden.’
‘You show him the garden,’ Stefano told Ann, ‘I’ll stay here with this one.’
‘Fun…’ Jack murmured.
All was calm in the garden. Life was on the cusp of breaking through.
‘I don’t know so much about gardening,’ Ann said. ‘We have someone in. It’s not my area of expertise.’
‘What is your area of expertise?’
‘Radiologist.’
‘Very cool,’ he said.
‘And yours?’ Ann asked.
‘Trees. But I’m going to run a boxing gym for kids.’ He hadn’t known it until he said it, but he knew it was perfect as soon as he heard himself.
She smiled. ‘What sort of kids?’
‘My sort.’
‘That sounds like a vocation,’ she said.
He shrugged.
He identified the maple trees she complained were growing too fast as sugar maple, the single oak tree as red oak, and they admired a walnut tree and the silver birch and occasionally she would sigh, ‘Yes, that’s right, I remember our sellers saying that name.’ She stopped in front of an American beech in the corner of the garden. ‘This one I know,’ she said, definitely. ‘This is beech and I know the sellers planted it when they got married and moved in and I know that for a fact because when they decided to move upstate they waited six months to sell so that they saw out their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary here and had their photo taken by the tree.’ She turned to him and smiled proudly, laughed under her breath, and he saw a different version of her. ‘So –’ she jabbed a finger emphatically at the tree ‘– this one I do actually know! And I know that it means it’s twenty-seven and a half years old because we’ve been here two and a half years.’
Men Like Air Page 27