Five years later, he’d taken Karen out to dinner for her twenty-fourth birthday. After dessert, he’d slid a blank check and an application to the University of Chicago across the table toward her.
“What is this?” she’d asked, her face knotted with surprise.
“It’s a check. And an application. To the University of Chicago. But that’s just for show. You can go anywhere you want to go to school.”
“Huh?”
“It’s true. You can finally become a nuclear research physicist.”
“I have a job,” she’d replied coldly.
Mortified by his clumsy misstep, Joe had attempted to backpedal. “I know you do. And you are an exceptional mother.” She’d preened a little. “I meant your dream job.”
“What about Prescott?”
“Prescott is nearly five. Ready for school himself.”
“School?” Karen’s voice had risen, drawing glances from nearby diners. “Where do you intend to find a preschool appropriate for a child with an IQ in excess of 150?”
Joe had heard it before, how important Prescott’s environment was in order for their son to reach his full potential. “I’m sure there are Montessori schools—”
“Montessori? Montessori is for the terminally B-plus child.” She’d shaken her head. “No. Thank you for thinking of me, but I have a career, Joe. Not just a job, a full-time career. As Prescott’s teacher. He is blooming under my guidance. Blooming.”
“But what about you?”
“I’m blooming, too. Can’t you tell?” She’d smiled, and he’d had to admit, she seemed happy. “I cannot imagine doing anything more rewarding. Or fascinating. The models for developing cognitive skill sets in gifted children are changing daily. I have so much to learn and so many things I want to try with Prescott.”
“I didn’t realize…”
“You’re gone a lot,” she’d said, and then, upon seeing his expression, she added, “I’m not complaining. It’s an observation.”
“You’ve raised Prescott almost single-handedly,” Joe had said. “At least get some help.”
“I don’t need any help,” she’d said tightly.
“Then tell me what I can do to make your life a little easier. That promotion I was telling you about? I’ll turn it down so at least I won’t be around even less than I already am.”
“No!” She’d frowned heavily. “No, don’t do that. Prescott’s education is going to be expensive, and I’m not just talking about undergraduate school. I want all the resources he might need made available to him as soon as he needs them, no matter what the cost.”
“Then I’ll only take it if they promise to let me cut back on the travel.”
She’d met his gaze. She’d looked frightened, and abruptly Joe had realized why. She’d been afraid he was going to take away some part of the career she found so fulfilling. She’d given up everything, and this, being Prescott’s mother, was all she had by which to define herself.
“Please, Joe,” she said, substantiating his suspicion. “Don’t. Don’t interfere. Don’t take this away from me.”
That sealed the deal. He’d agreed.
I kept my word, Joe thought, swinging his damp pant legs into the car and starting the engine. What an idiot.
Joe parked the car in front of the four-car garage and got out. Prescott’s place looked like something out of Disney World, and with about as much North Woods ambience as a pine-scented car deodorizer.
He wanted to like it. He really did. Because he could tell Prescott was proud of it. But…it was so damn big. And bogus. And…big.
Small wonder Mimi loathed it and Prescott. He couldn’t say he blamed her. Poor Mimi. She’d looked so mortified when he’d said Prescott was his son. She’d gulped something and been about to launch into unnecessary apologizes when the kid had arrived with the news about the pontoon-cum-pyre. Later she’d tried to apologize again but he’d cut her off, telling her not to worry about it. He’d wanted to say more—he wasn’t sure what—but her attention had moved on to—what was her name? Debbie?—stomping over the sand shouting.
Joe reached into the backseat, got his tote and picked his way carefully to the front door on tender bare feet. A little red electronic eye, discreetly nestled in a pinecone above the front door, stared down at him. There was no doorbell, just a small, brass-plated intercom speaker.
He looked up at the red eye and smiled weakly. He hated surveillance cameras and webcams. “Hi, Pres. It’s me. Joe.” He would have said, “Dad,” except Prescott referred to him only as Joe. “I made it. But you already know that.”
There was no response.
“This is really some place you have here.” Silence.
“Pres? You there?” If Prescott had left there was no saying when he’d be back. Maybe days. “How am I supposed to get into this fortress, anyway?” he muttered, trying the front door knob. It was locked.
“Go around the back,” Prescott’s disembodied voice answered. “The French doors leading to the deck are unlocked.”
I should have known, Joe thought. He’s been watching me, waiting for me to say something incriminating. Let the games begin!
He headed around to the back of the lodge—what was it Prescott called it? Bum Deal House?—and climbed onto an enormous, prow-shaped cedar deck furnished with expensive cushioned loungers and chairs. Unfortunately, they would never know the imprint of a human butt because the only one who would have used them would be Prescott, and his many unhappily sequential seasonal allergies prohibited his spending any leisure time outdoors.
Prescott refused to take shots. Karen had been suspicious of introducing any chemical into Prescott’s body, as it might somehow migrate to his brain. She’d often said, “You don’t mess with perfection.”
Joe, who’d seen what allergies did to Prescott, would have traded a few IQ points to stop his nose from running. But that was him.
He pushed open the French doors, breaching the purity of Prescott’s hermetically sealed house, and looked around. He was standing in a room the size of a gymnasium that stretched in one vast open expanse from one end of the house to the other. Though no walls divided this room, function separated it into three main areas: a great room (though Joe was tempted to call it a Great Big Room) sparsely but attractively furnished with a sofa and some chairs; a dining area; and a kitchen so large it could have serviced a small hotel.
In a far corner of the living area, Joe could see into a hall and from there through an open door and into a bedroom. Apparently the north side of the house was the bedroom wing. Who knew what the rooms on the second and third floors were for.
Prescott was nowhere in sight.
“Pres?” Nothing. He walked into the kitchen and removed the caramel cashew bar he’d carefully wrapped in a napkin from his pocket. He set it out on the corner of a granite-topped island the size of an Egyptian sarcophagus.
The only sound was the softest susurration of a high-tech air-filtration system. Few noises made it in from outside, no bird calls, not the wind moving through the upper branches of the trees, not even the sound of the Olsons partying next door. Joe looked up above the huge dining room table, where the antlers from an entire herd of deer formed a chandelier the size of a tractor tire.
Now, Joe liked nice things. He enjoyed excellence in every way—well-tailored clothing, good music, beautiful artwork, and fine food. But he disliked waste just as much. And this place was an enormous waste of space and materials.
“Prescott! I’m in the kitchen! I brought you a cookie!”
“You don’t have to yell, Joe.” Prescott’s voice, marked by the faintly tinny sound of one speaking from inside a drum, came calmly through a series of speakers neatly concealed in the kitchen’s coffered ceiling. He sounded eerily like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I can hear you quite clearly.”
Joe looked at the ceiling, trying to spy another red-eyed camera lens. He didn’t see any. Thank God. He didn’t think he could sleep knowing
his REM cycles were being recorded. “Why do you need an intercom system, anyway? You’re alone here.”
“When the cleaning people come, I like to be able to tell them what needs doing without following after them. Or shouting,” Prescott replied without intonation.
“How often do you have cleaning people?” Joe asked curiously. How much clutter could one man create? Not that he disapproved. He appreciated cleanliness as much as the next man. Okay. More.
Prescott didn’t bother to reply, but the message was clear. It was the same message Joe had been receiving since Prescott had started emitting sound: Joe wouldn’t understand.
Still, Joe gave it another shot. “I brought you a caramel cashew bar from next door. These things are amazing—”
“Perhaps sometime in the past you noticed my weight. I’m fat,” the disembodied voice broke in. “Perhaps then you will not be surprised when you hear that henceforth I would appreciate it if you could refrain from bringing food such as caramel cashew cookie bars into the house.”
“You’re not fat. Hefty.” Joe considered the word. “No. Large.” That wasn’t it either. “Sol—”
“Please stop.”
Joe stopped and stood there, staring at the ceiling like an idiot and imagining Prescott, in whatever room he was in, similarly staring. Why, Joe wondered, was he still making a pilgrimage to Prescott’s door every year, when Prescott clearly saw him as an inconvenience and a nuisance?
He didn’t have a good answer. The fact was he’d never felt much like a father.
He recalled the first time he’d seen Prescott in the hospital. Joe had been in the hospital corridor avoiding the accusing glares of Karen’s already elderly parents when the nurse had come out of the delivery room, pushing what looked like a motorized cake cart. Inside had been this tiny, scrawny creature wearing minuscule black swimmer’s goggles. It had looked like an alien space monkey after crash landing, worried, wiggling, and making squalling sounds.
“He’s a little jaundiced, so we had him under the bilirubin lights and had to put goggles on him,” the nurse had explained as she maneuvered the cart in such a way that she’d hemmed Joe in next to the water fountain. “But otherwise, he’s healthy. Do you want to hold him?”
“Not really.” He’d drop him.
The nurse didn’t look surprised. “Okay, then. I’ll take him in to see his grandparents.”
She started to pull the cart back, but something made Joe put out his hand and stop it. He leaned over the Plexiglas cubicle. The little space oddity had disks taped to his tiny dark hide, connected by wires to a machine embedded in the cart. A monitor read out numbers. Joe had looked at those numbers and that helpless creature and felt an avalanche of responsibility sliding down over his shoulders.
He still felt it. As much as he would have sometimes liked to, he could not give himself permission to quit trying to work out this paternal riddle that refused to give up its secrets.
He picked up the caramel cashew bar and took a bite. On the other hand, he’d been standing here like an idiot for almost five minutes with not a word from above.
“You know what? I saw a liquor store in this little town I came through,” he said to the ceiling. “Maybe I’ll drive up there and pick us up a bottle of wine.”
When Prescott spoke, he didn’t bother to hide his relief. “Yes,” he said. “You do that.”
Chapter Ten
“Scootch your shirt up so I can work on your back,” Vida said.
Mimi willingly complied, settling on her stomach atop a stack of beach towels on the picnic table, her chin resting on her forearms. Tension drained out of her like sand out of an overstuffed levy bag. Not that there was that much tension to begin with, a fact Vida never hesitated to point out.
“You’re unnatural,” Vida said, disgusted. “I don’t have to do much more than look at you and you release like one of those finger puppets that collapse when you push up on the bottom.”
“Consider me a testimony to your skill,” Mimi murmured.
The memorial had been two days earlier, and most people had returned from whence they’d come, leaving behind a handful of diehards.
“Go on with your story,” Vida said, drumming the heels of her hands on either side of Mimi’s spine.
“Where was I? Oh, yeah. So I said, ‘Oops.’”
“No!”
“Well, what would you say to a guy you’ve just told has a son who’s a geek, a hermit, agoraphobic, friendless, and probably deservedly so since he has just ruined a perfectly decent view with his hideous attempt to compensate for his undoubtedly inadequate masculinity?”
“Oops?”
“Oops,” Mimi confirmed.
“Then what did you say?”
“Nothing. Naomi chose that minute to send Ardis to Valhalla.” She corrected herself, “Though technically I guess it was Ardis’s picture that was being sent to Valhalla.”
“It’s too bad you made such an ass of yourself. He was a fine-looking man.”
“Yup,” Mimi replied sadly. She hadn’t seen him since the party, though she had wandered along the footpath a couple times, hoping he might be out. Out doing what? Chopping wood? Hardly.
“I don’t suppose there’s any way you could smooth things over? I know!” Vida paused in her massaging to snap her fingers. “You go over there and say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realize Prescott was your son.’ Just don’t mention you’re a psychic.”
“How many times do I have to tell you guys? I’m not a psychic; I’m a medium. I only talk to the dead, which, now that I think of it, Prescott looks like he might be, so I suppose technically I might have been in communication with him,” Mimi said; then her face twisted in self-contempt. “Forget I said that. Way too harsh. I just get so pissed off every time I look at that monstrosity. Besides, you have to admit, he does look like a zombie. A chunky zombie. A goth Peter Pan. It’s that black hair and white face. He’s gotta dye it.”
“His dad has black hair,” Vida said, hands working on autopilot. “Maybe Prescott is better-looking in person. It’s hard to tell from a few glimpses. He’d almost have to be, wouldn’t he? I mean, look at the dad. Yum.”
Mimi half turned over to look Vida in the eye. “You’re not even trying to be subtle, are you?”
“We love you. We’re interested. Where’s the harm?”
“You guys need to get a life.”
“Gee, and that’s just what we say about you. Listen—”
Mimi was saved from having to listen by the arrival of fourteen-year-old Frank, Vida’s son. He came loping around the corner of the cottage and skidded to a halt.
“Geez!” He slapped a hand over his eyes and stretched out his other scrawny arm, pantomiming groping for the cottage. “I think I’m blind!”
“Smart-ass,” Mimi mumbled, reaching behind to flip down the hem of her oversized T-shirt.
“I’m at an impressionable age,” Frank said, splitting his index and middle fingers and peering at her out of one eye. “You could scar me for life. I think I saw something. I’m not sure exactly what it was.”
“Ha. You should be so lucky,” Mimi said. “What do you want, anyway?”
Frank dropped his hand. “There’s something going on over at the Big House. Some sort of conference. Birgie said I better come and get you cause you’re involved.”
“Involved how?” Mimi asked, more bothered than interested. Mimi understood that Birgie didn’t want to be at the family powwow any more than Mimi, but she’d expected more from her great-aunt than an arbitrary “misery loves company” summons.
Frank shrugged. “Dunno. Birgie said it was important, and I should make sure that you come and to tell you that if you duck this meeting, you’ll regret it.”
“Crud.” Mimi scooted off the picnic table. “Are they still fussing about Naomi and the pontoon? Good riddance to the damn thing. It’s not like it was even seaworthy. And I said I was sorry to Debbie.”
“Did you really tell Debbie t
o shut up?” Vida asked, her mouth falling open. “I thought they were kidding. I can’t imagine you doing something like that.”
“Me, neither,” Mimi said uncomfortably. “I don’t know what got into me. I must have been channeling Ardis.”
“Even Ardis never told Debbie to shut up. Honestly, Mimi, you have untapped depths.”
“Birgie said something about a vote,” Frank persisted, obviously taking his job as messenger seriously.
If someone was calling for a vote, that could only mean that people were disagreeing about whatever it was they were voting on. Mimi didn’t want to spend any of her valuable free time (just because a thing was plentiful didn’t make it less valuable) listening to her relatives debate the merits of a yearly snowplow service contract versus a flat per diem rate.
“Can’t your mom go in my place?” she asked, looking at Vida. “I don’t care enough about whatever they’re voting on to make a decent decision, and Vida here—”
“How could you possibly know that?” Vida asked.
“I sense it,” Mimi said, fixing Vida with a level stare. “Hello? Medium! I sense things.”
“I thought you only spoke to the dead.”
“Sometimes I sense things, too.”
“Hm.”
“Can you really sense things?” Frank asked. “Because Dad says he thinks you really believe you can talk to dead people but you’re embarrassed about it and Mom says it doesn’t matter what we think, it’s what you know that counts,” Frank said. “Birgie says she isn’t saying what she thinks and Chuck says it’s a pile of crap and that you are nothing but a swindler who makes a living out of conning people.”
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