Night Owls

by Jenn Bennett

  22

  IT WAS A MIRACLE MOM DIDN’T CATCH ME SNEAKING in that night, because she was still up at 4:45 a.m.—which was when Jack left me in front of my house. I stayed up long enough for him to text me Good morning instead of “Good night.” And then I slept like the dead until almost noon, when Mom woke me up for our lunch date.

  Thankfully, her gift of condoms was not a topic of conversation. The graffiti on the BART escalator, however, was.

  The escalator repair workers had apparently found Jack’s graffiti after we ran off, and told the police that we were the Golden Apple vandals—we being two guys dressed in black, one tall, one short. I’d have been insulted if I wasn’t busy freaking out.

  The local radio station debated the incident while Mom drove us to the Mission. One DJ thought it was a “crying shame” that a brand-new escalator had been defaced. Her partner said it was “urban art” and “inspirational.” And squirming in the passenger seat of the paddy wagon, I embodied both viewpoints, in turns horrified and giddy. In the middle of all this, Jack texted to tease me about my new status as “the short male suspect.”

  On top of that, Mom asked me a lot of questions that made me sweat. Like about the student art contest. She wanted to know what I was submitting; the deadline was quickly approaching. But a paranoid part of me was convinced she knew about Minnie, too, and was giving me a chance to confess that I’d blatantly disobeyed her in pursuing the cadaver drawing. It made me realize that I really needed to be more careful. She worked only a few buildings away from the Willed Body lab. All it would take was one ill-timed break on her part to see me with my portfolio, strolling into my next drawing session, and my entire summer’s work would be ruined.

  While she ran her errand—picking up some custom-size discounted blinds to replace the ones in our house that had fallen apart from old age—I made a rash decision that had nothing to do with Minnie or my new criminal standing. Maybe it was all the leftover adrenaline from the night before rotting my brain—I don’t know. But I pulled out my phone to email the lady at the wood-carving shop in Berkeley. Yes, I actually would like to meet with the guy who carved my artist’s mannequin, I wrote her. Why not? In a week, I’d be too busy getting ready for the art contest. Besides, if my dad thought he could start up a conversation with me on his terms, he could think again.

  And while I polished off half an overstuffed carne asada Super Burrito with Mom, I got a speedy response from the shop in Berkeley: Could I come by at one the following afternoon? I texted Jack, and he said he’d gladly drive me.

  “Sometimes I think you’re full of secrets,” Mom said wistfully, eyeing the leftover plastic cup of salsa verde on the table like she might ask for a to-go lid.

  I balled up my napkin and stuffed it inside the cup so I wouldn’t have to eat it on eggs the next morning. “None of them are all that interesting,” I assured her.

  THE NEXT DAY, JACK PICKED ME UP AT ELEVEN THIRTY in the morning. My whole body went haywire when I saw him in the doorway as I peered over my mom’s shoulder. Chills. Warmth in my chest. Jackhammering heartbeat. I practically swooned. Swooned! This couldn’t be good. Everything felt . . . intensified. Like, overnight. Magically. I quietly prayed he couldn’t tell.

  Or Mom.

  If I were going to his house, and his mom had just presented him with a hundred condoms, I think I’d rather jab a screwdriver in my ear than face her. But Jack greeted Mom like they were best friends.

  “Prince Vincent,” she said before I could step around her. “Where are you two going on this fine foggy morning?”

  His lie was smoother than smooth. “We’re heading over to the East Bay for lunch. I wanted to check out a record store.”

  I’d pretty much told her same thing an hour before; how come it sounded so much more natural coming out of his mouth than mine? And Mom smiled at him like he was charm incarnate. “Just make sure she’s back in time for work,” she told him.

  “I will. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m taking my uniform with me,” I added with forced casualness, patting the red bag I normally carried back and forth to the anatomy lab. “My shift starts at four.”

  This definitely mollified her. Because if I was going to work, I surely didn’t have time to get into trouble or pull any “shenanigans,” as she said when it was Heath doing something behind her back. Little did she know, I could cram a lot of shenanigans into a short span of time.

  She watched us jog down the stairs. “Take care of my baby,” she called out. If she knew I was headed into enemy territory, she probably wouldn’t be so cheery.

  But when she went back inside the house and we were safely out of her range, Jack reached for my hand, and I said, “I’ve missed you”—as if it had been a week, not a day, since I’d last seen him. And just like that, we fell on each other like rabid dogs, kissing against the passenger door of his car until someone passing by on the sidewalk made a rude comment.

  “Yeah, maybe we will,” Jack called to the pedestrian’s back after she was too far away to hear him.

  I smothered a laugh into his shoulder. He pretended to bite my ear and growled against my hair, which only made me laugh harder. I hugged him tighter and sighed into his neck.

  “God, I’m crazy about you,” he whispered. “If you don’t stop me, I’ll be begging to see you every day, because I can’t stand being apart from you.”

  “Oh, good. I thought it was only me.”

  “Not just you,” he said, kissing the side of my head.

  I clung to him for a moment and then pried myself away, clearing my throat.

  “Right,” he said, blowing out a long breath. “Let’s get on the road before we get arrested for public indecency.”

  “I believe that’s the least of our potential charges.”

  “How does it feel to have aided a wanted felon?” he murmured as he unlocked the car door.

  “Exhilarating,” I whispered back.

  Maybe I was better at being bad than I thought.

  The drive to Berkeley took only a half hour, and we rolled down our windows when the sun chased away gray skies over the Bay Bridge. Jack had gone back to the scene of our crime and shot a one-minute video of the escalator in action. I’d already seen a couple of videos posted online, but it was so much more exciting watching it on his phone.

  “A spokesperson from BART said they’ll be closing it down for cleanup in a week,” he told me as Ghost’s motor rumbled through my seat. “I think that’s the longest one of them has ever stayed up. And it’s easy to clean metal. I’m betting foot traffic will wear the paint off the tops of the steps in a couple of days.”

  “Has Jillian seen it?”

  “Yeah,” he said, lips curving. “I showed her the video last night. She couldn’t stop smiling. We used to go to the main city library across the street from that BART station, and Jillie always headed for that looping stair sculpture on the fifth floor. You know what I’m talking about?”

  I hadn’t been there in years, but I knew which one he meant. “The stairs that lead nowhere.”

  “Exactly. That’s what she said when she saw the video, and that the stairs to nowhere matched up nicely with ‘rise.’ I hadn’t even remembered how much she liked those stairs. I was only matching up the word to the escalator.”

  “A happy coincidence.”

  He shook his head. “Everything’s connected, Bex. Whether we understand it or not.” He drummed his thumbs against the steering wheel, tapping out a happy rhythm. “She asked about you.”

  “She did?”

  “I told her you helped me. I was worried it might upset her—that she might get jealous, or whatever. Change stresses her out, and Dr. Kapoor has been monitoring her since your visit. No—don’t be worried,” he said when I groaned. “It wouldn’t matter if it was you or someone else. Little things set her off, and she’s been juggling meds since the seizure. But it’s cool. She likes you.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, and he grinned at m
e, squinting over the top of his sunglasses.

  The address for the wood-carving shop was near the edge of UC Berkeley’s campus. Jack parked Ghost on a side street just off Telegraph Avenue, a few blocks away, and since we still had forty-five minutes to waste, we strolled past bookstores and cafés and herb shops until we found a curry place that had a bunch of vegetarian dishes, where we ate a quick lunch (validating our lie). At exactly one o’clock, I strode by a blonde in a green Jaguar who stared at me so hard I gave her a dirty look, and marched through a glass door into Telegraph Wood Studio.

  True to its name, it smelled strongly of wood shavings. The front of the shop was cluttered with totem poles and carved fireplace mantels. Sculptures of dancing women. A solid-wood globe. Even a mermaid figurehead dove out of a wall, looking as if a ship might crash through behind it at any second. A long counter separated the front from the workshop, where multiple tables stretched around carving equipment and large pieces of furniture.

  “Whoa,” Jack said in a low, reverent voice. “Check out the old cable-car replicas. They’re gorgeous.”

  I looked at the handwritten price tag. “Fifteen hundred? That’s one hell of a toy train set.” And it wasn’t half as detailed as my artist’s mannequin, which lay at the bottom of my red bag. I didn’t think the guy who’d made it would need a reminder, but just in case . . .

  A woman’s voice floated out from behind the counter. “Hello. Would you be Beatrix?”

  Her gray hair was loosely clipped behind her head. Long strings of wooden beads dangled over a flowing caftan.

  “Yes,” I said. “Are you Mary?”

  She nodded. “And I have someone here who wanted to see you. I really hope you don’t mind the subterfuge too much.”

  Before I could unravel what that meant, she gestured to someone behind a carved Japanese screen, and out stepped the man who’d ruined my family.

  My father had changed his hair. Grown it out from his old, boring VP crew cut so that silver-streaked locks of brown now curled around the collar of his expensive sport coat. His face was a lot tanner than I remembered, and crow’s-feet now furrowed the outer corners of his eyes. But his wire-framed glasses were the same, and so was the way he stood: head high, chin up, back made of steel—and a look on his face like someone had just shoved a big, fat stick up his butt.

  Yep. He’d looked at me exactly the same way the last time I’d seen him. When he’d told me that the separation had nothing to do with me, and that nothing would change between us.

  The biggest lie of all.

  “Beatrix,” he said in a low voice.

  I couldn’t even answer him. I just turned and stormed out the door. “Please, take me home,” I managed to say to Jack, who stuck to me like a shadow while I started down the sidewalk. That stupid blonde in the Jaguar was still staring at us from the curb.

  “Beatrix!”

  My father had followed us outside, and he was angry now. Big surprise. I swung around so fast he had to jerk himself backward not to run into me. “How dare you,” I said to him.

  “If she’d said I wanted to meet you, you wouldn’t have come.”

  “No, probably not. But that’s my decision, not yours.”

  “What could I do? Your mother wouldn’t let me see you.”

  “So you sent me the artist’s mannequin to lure me here, like some creepy old man in a white van?”

  His face looked pinched. “No, I sent it because I wanted to give you something that would make you happy. I knew you would like it.”

  “Because you know me so well.”

  The depressing thing was, he’d gotten it right. He, not Mom, was the one who’d actually sparked my interest in anatomy. When I was a kid, he had these big pull-down diagram charts of the human body hanging on the wall in the home office of our old house. The brightly colored muscles and organs were endlessly fascinating to my ten-year-old brain, and after school he’d spend hours answering all my questions about bones and arteries and blood. Of course, he didn’t know half of what Mom knew about anatomy, so when he didn’t know the answer, he’d make something silly up.

  He’d always had a knack for lying.

  I started to walk away again, but he held his hands out as if to show me he wasn’t armed.

  “Please, just hear me out for one minute.” His arms slowly dropped to his sides. “Let me look at you. My God, you’re practically a woman. I haven’t seen you—”

  “In three years,” I finished. “Been too busy banging your strip-club-owning wife to bother communicating with your own children until now?”

  Jack made a small noise at my side, but he said nothing. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I’d be sorry later that he’d witnessed this messiness, but right now I was too angry to care.

  My father’s nose wrinkled. “Strip club? What in the world are you talking about? Suzi owned a cabaret in Santa Monica.”

  “Cabaret?” What in the world was that?

  “A piano bar,” he elaborated. “Singers, not strippers.”

  That’s not what Mom had told us. But who was I going to believe? The woman who worked her ass off to keep a roof over our heads, or the man who abandoned us for a newer model?

  “Strip club.” He said this like he was spitting out rancid food, shaking his head. It took me a second to realize he had darted a look toward the Jaguar. That was “Suzi”? No wonder Mom had gone ballistic. Suzi couldn’t have been that much older than I was! And by then she was standing outside the Jag, arms crossed over her breasts. Wearing designer clothes, which my father had probably paid for.

  I wanted to vomit.

  My father just shook his head and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “And I haven’t been too busy to see you. Your mother won’t let me near you or Heath.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re too broke to pay child support.” I used finger quotes on “broke” and crossed my arms over my chest, mimicking his new wife’s stance. “Guess those car payments are more important than our utility bill.”

  My father growled. “Oh, that’s rich. Is that what she’s telling you? She refused child support. It’s in the divorce papers, Beatrix. Go look at them. She had her lawyer strike right over the payments. She said she wasn’t taking a dime from me—that she’d rather the three of you live at the YMCA than accept a ‘handout’ from me.” He, too, used finger quotes. And his Dutch accent began creeping out of his Stanford-educated crisp words.

  “A likely story,” I said. But if I was being honest with myself, it did sound a little like Mom. A lot, really. But, still, she wouldn’t have lied to us about something that big. Maybe there was a misunderstanding about the so-called cabaret—maybe—but not this. Not when we lost the house in Cole Valley. Not when she struggled to work twelve-hour graveyard shifts that barely kept us in generic shampoo and those weird-tasting tubes of discount ground beef.

  “Not a story,” my father said firmly, hands on his waist, elbows pushing the tails of his sport coat back like angry wings. “Truth, Beatrix. It’s the goddamn truth.”

  “Truth is action, not words. Mom helps me with my homework. Mom cooks me dinner. Mom takes care of me when I’m sick.”

  “I know she does.”

  “Do you know? Really? Did you know Mom received a Distinguished Nurse award from the chancellor in May?”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “She’s wonderful. And she’s there every day for us. But what have you done? Have you even tried to write me or Heath a single postcard?

  “As a matter of fact—”

  “Did you know I lost all my friends when we were forced to move and I had to change schools? Did you know I’m one of the poorest kids in my class, and I’ve had to work since I was sixteen to pay my own cell phone bill and Muni pass? Did you know I can’t afford to go to the college I want, and that I’m spending my summer busting my ass for an art project because the only way I can go to any school at all is to win a stupid scholarship in a competition? Did y
ou know Heath has dropped out of two colleges and gotten in all kinds of trouble? You wanna know why? Because you fucking left us.”

  His face jerked back as if I’d slapped him, but the hurt left as quickly as it had appeared, and the calm and reasonable Vice President Van Asch got control over himself. “I can’t apologize forever.”

  “Forever? Try once!”

  “I’m sorry, Beatrix. I should’ve done better. Tried harder. But I want to now. It’s one of the reasons I moved back—I took a provost position at Berkeley so I could be closer to you and Heath. Just let me try. Come have coffee with me. Meet Suzi—”

  “Never.”

  He was livid. And for a second, I saw a familiar look on his face—the same one he’d given me when I spilled a bottle of drawing ink on his precious Moroccan rug. He wanted to take me by the shoulders and shake me. His hand twitched, and he reached out as if he might just do it.

  My shadow stepped between us.

  Jack towered over Dad by a good head. And at that moment, with his face tight and his dark brows lowered, he looked like more of a man than my father.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Jack said in a deep, scarily calm voice.

  Oh, my father did not like this. Not at all. And for a moment they were two bulls, one young, one middle-aged. One wrong word and they’d be going at it, mano a mano.

  “Lars,” a feminine voice called from behind him. His new wife, Suzi. It was a plea and a gentle warning. And it was enough to break up the pinballing tension.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Jack.

  Without hesitation, he curled his arm around my shoulders and pulled me away from my father.

  “Beatrix,” Dad said as we started to turn away from him. “Please contact me when you’re ready. My university email address is on the campus website. We can talk on your terms.”

  I stopped long enough to dig the artist’s mannequin from my bag. My father’s face twisted with hurt, eyes quietly pleading, and that made my throat catch. Just for a second. I steeled my resolve and hurled the mannequin down on the sidewalk between us. The carved body cracked at his feet, splintering in half.