Fairway Street was almost completely dark. Only two streetlights at the end of the road as far as I could see, and the houses were charcoal shadows against a line of bushy trees. Except the first house, which belonged to the Banks with slivers of light coming through the shutters and the porch light on, so I could see the artificial blue wreath the Banks put up sometime around Christmas and forgot to take down for months. Their garbage had been put out on the road for Wednesday’s collection, and I heard something rummaging around in the trash—a raccoon, possibly a rat or a possum. We had all three in the neighborhood, though not nearly as many rats as the city, but lately I’d developed a fear of animals, even domestic ones, so I crossed the street, which without the light from the Banks’ porch was absolutely black.
I seldom walked in the neighborhood and never at night, so until this moment I wasn’t aware that I could be afraid of the dark. An effort had been made in these suburbs to create the illusion of rural safety, the properties on half acre lots with long front yards running to the street—no sidewalks—very few streetlights, an occasional view at night into the lives of people willing to keep their blinds open. A menacing loneliness, as if some of the houses had been closed down.
We knew the names of the neighbors, most of them visiting scientists at NIH. Julia had parties for the neighbors, usually in the summer, but the houses were always changing occupants, scientists coming and going, living at a remove, suspicious of strangers, isolated in the airtight shoe boxes of our suburban neighborhood.
At night in the part of the city I knew, around the university, it was noisy and full of light, and I was always in the company of someone, so I’d never felt this particular chill along my spine before.
I was walking with some haste, thinking about Victor Duarte, filled with a sense that someone could be following—even Dr. Hsu’s German shepherd, broken free of its leash.
I used to think I had the mind of a dancer with a dancer’s eye for spacial parameters, or maybe the mind of an athlete or an animal, not particularly complex, with minimal defenses, relying on an instinct for the moment.
And in that moment, walking through my childhood neighborhood in the dark, sufficiently alert to what was around me, I knew I had already made a decision that Victor Duarte was central to my life.
A light rain had started to fall, and my hair was wet, my head chilly. At the end of Fairway, I turned left again, planning to head around the block. One more left turn and I’d be back at Newland, two houses from home. But I didn’t know the neighborhood except for my block, although I’d lived there almost all my life. I used to walk to elementary school, but that walk took me through my backyard onto Ames Drive, and in high school I drove with Steven first and then with Eva, paying little attention to these interior roads. Now when I left the house to go to school or to Eva’s or another friend’s or downtown, I drove straight out of the subdivision to River Road and back the same way.
I decided I would call Victor as soon as I got home. Just call. Wait for him to answer, hear his voice, a kind of reality check, and then I’d hang up without speaking. I had nothing yet to say to him.
What I had was an enemy.
I said his name over and over into the wet air, where it dissolved without an echo, lost in the damp sponge of night. Benjamin, Benjamin Reed. Just repeating his name, I saw his bony face in the newspaper photograph, the spill of black hair across his forehead, the deceptive formality of his posture.
A man capable of killing my brother.
I felt my mind and body organize to the possibility of an enemy. It was like learning to walk again, or for the first time, an initial uncertainty and then one foot in front of the other and again and again, until it became almost easy and familiar, as the body moves forward in a certain direction.
Which is how it was that night, walking along in the darkness, an occasional slip on the black road, falling only once, and then just on my knee. I lost track of time and where I was and whether I’d passed the next left I was supposed to take home or whether I’d walked beyond it. But there would be another turn, I thought, and in any case I had a purpose, a place to put my grief to use.
Already a letter to Benjamin Reed, the murderer, was forming itself in my mind.
Dear Mr. Reed.
No. That was wrong. Too formal.
Dear Benjamin Reed,
You don’t know me, but I have seen you on occasion and most recently in person when I was at the Justice Department picking up a letter for my mother from a friend. I think it was you I saw on the elevator. But I did see the newspaper photograph of you and your father and thought when I saw it—“THERE he is!”
Because—and this is what I write to tell you—my brother died a year ago last February 15 of encephalitis, and when I saw you and then later in the newspaper photograph, I lost my breath, because you look exactly like him. Exactly. You could be the same person. Even the way your hair falls across your forehead.
So I’m hoping to have a correspondence with you, and perhaps when you are home for your summer holiday, we can meet.
I am twenty-three and finished university and am presently working in musical composition, as my dream is be a composer. I play the piano well enough. Quite well, I suppose. We have an upright. It’s what we can afford.
I’m the second-eldest of six children, counting my dead brother, Alberto, who was the first child in a conservative Catholic family. My aunt Louella works for the Justice Department. So, you see, we have things in common, even a background in South America.
In the hope of becoming your friend, Sophia Lupe Sophia Lupe.
Out of the blue, the name came, like the lyrics to an old song I had forgotten but used to sing.
Until that evening spent walking alone along a dark suburban road, a scientist by training, concerned with the observation of minute detail, I had no idea of the hairpin turns my imagination was capable of making.
At some point I began to realize that I was lost. I had taken three—or was it four or maybe even five?—left turns, and it must have gotten to be quite late.
I stopped to lean against a tree and listen. In the darkness, just along the road from the tree where I was standing, a house began to materialize, a long, one-story ranch house like ours was, with a light around the side, perhaps only a small night-light, so little brightness came of it. Somewhere I heard a voice. A sound that repeated and repeated until I began to hear my name—Claire! Claire!—traveling the space between somewhere and the tree where I was leaning.
But it wasn’t my name I heard. Just something I turned into the sound of Claire because I was lost.
I slid down the tree, sitting on the heavy roots, a little damp, wetting my trousers but not particularly cold, not too cold for me to wait for someone to come, for lights to go on in the ranch house across the street, even for daylight.
Maybe I fell asleep, I’m not certain, but suddenly I did hear CLAIRE, and the familiar voice was my mother’s.
“What did you think you were doing going out alone in the dark for a walk in the middle of the night? Something you’ve never done?”
I climbed into the passenger seat, drew my knees up and rested my chin on them.
“Walking,” I said.
“You don’t like to walk. You told me that yourself. You said walking bored you when I suggested you take walks to ease the sadness, and so in the middle of the night—”
“I left no later than nine o’clock.”
“—you go out for a walk in a neighborhood where a stranger can put a stolen flag on our front porch the day before he kills your brother.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Someone killed your brother. It’s not a safe place to walk here.”
My mother was in the pajamas she sometimes wore—a kind of fetching combination of sexuality and nonsense—red silk pajamas with a huge white hibiscus print, and spread all over her face like a milk-white mask was the thick cream Europeans used for their babies’ bottoms.
>
“I was lost,” I said. “I would have been back sooner.”
“Of course you were lost,” she said. “This neighborhood is a maze. I want to move.”
“Thank you for coming to find me.”
“Of course I’d come find you,” she said, winding through the dark streets, turning in to Newport.
I had been so close to home, little more than a block away, but I hadn’t a sense of it at all, as if when I was young I had missed learning the territory of my childhood altogether, thinking my own street went on and on into infinity.
“You believed I’d go to bed—ho hum—and fall into one of those lovely, dreamless sleeps thinking nothing of my dead son or missing daughter, as if they’d been a blip on my march to old age.”
“Shut up, Mother,” I said.
I don’t think I had called her “Mother” in years, and I had never said “shut up.” “Shut up” was her comeback.
But she had stopped talking. She pulled in to the driveway, turned off the engine and got out of the driver’s-side door without a word. The lights were off in the hangar and in my father’s study, where Bernard and Milo slept, bright in Faith’s room, where she was reading novels in Spanish.
I followed my mother through the front hall into the kitchen, where she turned off the light, down the corridor telling her good night as she went into her room and I went into Steven’s. But she didn’t respond.
In Stephen’s room I waited until the sound of Julia’s footsteps had disappeared and I could imagine her in bed, lying on her back so the cream didn’t mess up the pillowcase, far on her side of the bed so her round body wouldn’t intersect with my sleeping father. Her eyes would be wide open, staring at the ceiling.
I picked up the telephone and dialed Victor Duarte. It rang and rang, but there was no answer. No answering machine. I checked the clock. Almost midnight. I had been gone a long time. I called again, and still no answer. I lay down on the bed in my clothes, turned off the light and watched the second hand on the illuminated alarm clock move around the circle of passing time. At twelve-fifteen I called Victor again. No answer.
On the next try, I made myself wait, watching the minute hand move to 1:00 A.M., and then I called.
The phone rang and rang, maybe six or seven times, and then someone picked up, a silence, and Victor Duarte said, “Hello.” I recognized his voice.
“This is Claire Frayn,” I said. “I’m sorry to call so late.”
“Oh, hello.” His voice was flat.
“I called earlier, and you were out.”
“I wasn’t out. I was sleeping.”
“I’m sorry to wake you.”
“Never mind,” he said wearily. “You’ve had a hard time.”
“I wanted you to know I’ve made a decision about the photograph, remember? The man you showed me today—Benjamin Reed.”
“Of course I remember.”
“You said I should think about contacting him, yes?”
“If you wish. Only if you wish, is what I said.”
“So I’m calling myself Sophia Lupe.”
There was a long silence. Victor Duarte didn’t seem to understand what I was saying at first, and then he did, and he laughed and laughed.
“Sophia Lupe, of course,” he said.
THE LIFEGUARD CHAIR
Observations on Natural Selection from the Life Science Notebooks of Claire Frayn.
Industrial Melanism: There are two types of English peppered moths (Biston betularia)—a light gray variety and a very dark one. In regions where the landscape was blackened when industrial pollution killed the lichens, the darker moths increased in relative number, and the lighter ones, without lichens to camouflage the color of their wings, were eaten by birds and nearly disappeared.
“The case of Biston reinforces the point that natural selection operates in the here and now, tending to adapt organisms to their local environment.”1
My father—who fell in love with Darwin when he was a young student—told Steven and me about “survival of the fittest” as a bedtime story, as terrifying as any ghost story that Uncle Milo had to offer.
It was clear to me that of the two of us, Steven was the “fittest,” that in an emergency I would crumple and die and he would sprout another arm, grow more teeth, his breath would turn vile and poison the air around the enemy.
“You’ll adapt,” my father had said when I expressed concern about my own survival.
But I was not convinced.
C.F., age 14
White moth turning black
V.
THE EVOLUTION OF SOPHIA LUPE
1
Lisha had left a suitcase in Steven’s closet, and the following morning I took it out. There were tops and a pair of tight jeans and a skimpy black skirt, a lacy magenta blouse, a blue-jean jacket and high-heeled black boots.
I had never dressed beyond necessity—working clothes, jeans, trousers, long-sleeved tees, occasionally a skirt. I didn’t think about the way I looked or desire to change it. But standing in front of the full-length mirror on Steven’s closet door, wearing Lisha’s short black skirt and high-heeled boots and flimsy blouse, I felt a rush of interest in myself. I brushed my hair so it fell loose and a little wild around my face, put on makeup that Julia had gotten me, always hoping I’d make improvements. Black mascara and red-currant lipstick just beyond the lip line so my mouth looked fuller, blush high on my cheekbones.
To imagine myself a year ago, to re-create the physical memory of what it was like to live in this unstretched skin, is not possible for me now beyond the details of what happened. But I do remember that moment in Steven’s mirror when I became a stranger to myself.
In the evenings when I was very young, my mother used to sit on her bed with me between her legs and read children’s books in Spanish, and I was mesmerized by the mystery of a language I didn’t know.
Imagining myself a year ago is like that.
Now I know the language, but I can’t possibly resurrect a time before I could speak it.
Julia was in the kitchen making coffee, standing at the sink eating a piece of banana bread, Bernard limping down the hall from his bedroom.
“Interesting transformation,” she said, assessing my new costume.
I poured a glass of orange juice and sat down.
“I hate the sound of Bernard’s prosthesis clunking on the hardwood floor disturbing my peace,” Julia said as he came in.
Bernard had become a repository for our family’s anger. We had turned on him, all of us, even Faith.
“There’s coffee on, and I put some banana bread in the oven to warm, Bern,” Julia said.
He got breakfast and sat down next to me, cutting his banana bread in neat quarters.
“I want to mention something to you, Aunt Julia.” And then a funny expression crossed his face, as if he were about to tell her but thought better of it.
“Too early for conversation, Bern. I’m heartsick this morning. You know what that word means? ‘Heartsick’?”
“Yes, yes. I know ‘heartsick.’ ”
He was quiet except for the gurgling in his throat, and I was about to get up because I couldn’t stand the sound of it when he touched my arm. “Claire?”
“Yes, Bern.”
“I notice you have bright lipstick on.”
“I put it on this morning,” I said. “Also mascara.”
“It looks pretty, Claire,” he said sweetly. “Very cheery.”
“Thank you, Bernard.” I was gentle with him, tried to be gentle, although there were times when I wanted to stuff his mouth with paper towels.
“There’s something I need to say to you, Aunt Julia.” Bernard was a short man, as his father had been, Eastern European in looks, with a wide brow and dark, curly hair, a large torso, short legs, short arms. He was nervous.
“I don’t think you like me as much as you used to, and I want to do something about it.”
Words he must have practiced that morning
in the bathroom.
“You know, Bernard, I don’t like anyone as much as I used to.” Julia turned from the sink. “But of course I like you. I love you. And you drive me insane.”
“How insane?” he asked in his earnest way.
“Very insane.”
“Making that funny noise in your throat, Bernard,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. “You didn’t used to do that.”
“I’ll stop, then,” he said, getting up from the table, clearing his dishes. “I’ll stop the noise today. I promise you that, Claire and Aunt Julia. Count on me.”
He gathered his things for work and started out of the kitchen.
“Are you driving to school?” he asked me.
“I don’t drive anymore,” I said. “I thought you’d noticed that.”
“I noticed that you don’t drive, and then last night I asked Uncle Milo, and he said that’s why he ordered a Rangely upright piano to be delivered on Friday afternoon this week.” He checked the hall to see if Milo was opening the bedroom door to listen in on our conversation, as he liked to do. “To make everyone happy is why Milo got a piano, and when it comes, we’ll be normal again and you’ll be able to drive the car.”
“Milo’s raving mad,” Julia said over the sound of water, cleaning out the sink. “A piano will ruin us.”
Julia poured a cup of coffee from the fresh pot and sat down across from me, adding cream, swirling it into the coffee with her finger.
“Is he gone?”
“I don’t hear him,” I said.
A Student of Living Things Page 11