I was mesmerized by the rhythmic sound of their voices, my chin resting on my fist, my eyes slipping into sleep. I no longer felt superior to their task or believed it was futile to go through the names of possible suspects, as I had thought earlier.
Whatever Victor said or wanted me to believe, Benjamin Reed was not responsible for Steven’s death. I knew that.
If I were to ask myself now when I knew and how, I might say I began to know while I sat next to Uncle Milo, listening to the songs, and something like a seed took root in me and grew.
But the truth is, I don’t know how these things happen. When Steven was murdered, I went from shock to a kind of surreal rationality to terror in a matter of hours.
Then, as I perceived it at the time, I was saved by Victor Duarte’s mission of justice.
My mother read the names aloud, reported what she remembered, waited for my father to say, “No, I never heard of that child.” And then went on to the next name.
“Beatrice Shoe,” my mother was saying. “I remember Beatrice Shoe. She had those breasts in seventh grade and didn’t wear a bra.”
“Did she have anything to do with Steven?” my father asked, his head resting in his hands. “Otherwise let’s move on.”
“A crush. She used to call him several times a week. But here is Liza Schmidt, and he broke her heart. That’s something.”
“I don’t think we need to include Liza Schmidt on the FBI list,” he said.
“We have to put someone on it.”
My father checked the list. “We have seven people, and that’s plenty,” he said.
“For all the years we’ve lived here? It’s nothing,” my mother said. “We may as well have been recluses.”
“Everyone knew each other in Llangollen, and I don’t really remember seven people there, although it’s a national pastime in Wales to remember.”
“You remember Meryn What’s-Her-Name.”
My father let that pass.
Milo was calling from the living room for us to listen.
“He’s going to play his new CD.” Bernard sat down at the table with us.
“He hasn’t made a CD,” Julia said. “That’s insane.”
“Hush,” Milo called. “Duh-de-duh-DUM. Friends and family and invited guests. Preludes to Night Music, a sonata composed and performed by Miles Augusten Frayn.”
I got up in the middle of the recital of Milo’s music, which I had already heard over and over, and went into Steven’s room to check my messages.
There were two voice mails, one from Eva and the second from Victor Duarte.
“News?” he asked when I called back.
“Nothing,” I said.
I had made up my mind to tell him nothing. Nothing about Benjamin. Nothing at all.
“Nothing? What’s the matter with the guy? Some kind of wimp?”
“Maybe he isn’t going to call, Victor,” I said. “He’s only here for a short time, and I’m not high on his list of priorities.”
“He’s going to call,” Victor said. “I’m dead certain of that, but if he doesn’t do it soon, you’ll go over to his father’s house and find him.” I heard him shuffle papers, clear his throat. “Here. I have the address: 310 A Street SE, just off East Capitol at Third.”
I took a deep breath, the air slipping away as it had in the ladies’ room of Café Rouge.
“Let’s wait until tomorrow,” I said.
I lay on the top of the bedspread thinking about Sophia Lupe. For weeks I had had a plan. I’d meet Benjamin in a café. We’d talk about this and that, childhood stories, my brother’s death from encephalitis, my Latina family. Fifteen minutes of conversation, no longer. Victor would appear, sit down, engage Benjamin, and I would leave.
Now, thinking of Sophia Lupe, I couldn’t imagine sitting at lunch with Benjamin Reed and making her up on the spot. In the last weeks, she had deserted me, and nothing had surfaced to replace the space she’d filled.
I didn’t know what Victor had in mind for Benjamin Reed. Only that somewhere along the timeline of revenge, we were supposed to deliver Benjamin to the FBI.
3
My father stopped by my room on his way to the hangar and stuck his head in the door.
“Would you like to talk?” he asked.
“About what?” I asked. It wasn’t in his character to probe.
“Just talk,” he said. “If you’d like. I’m going to the hangar for the night now.”
I waited, watching the light in the hangar, hoping he might turn it off. I had a sense of foreboding and didn’t want to know what he had in mind.
But it began to look as if he would wait all night for me to come, so I slipped out the back door and crossed the garden to the hangar.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
He pulled over a faded deck chair for me to sit, put his feet up on his desk.
“I’ve been thinking about guilt, so tonight I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary.”
“Why guilt?”
“Because that’s how I feel all the time about Steven.” He tipped his chair back. “As if I’d had a hand in what happened to him. Remember you told me you were frightened after Steven died.”
I twisted in the chair, stretching my legs out in front of me, wondering if I could escape the room without offending him, without having to listen to his confession.
“What the Oxford said about ‘guilt’ is what you’d expect.” He was looking out the window into the streetlight above the Denvers’ house. “Like culpability, wrongdoing, misconduct, misbehavior, turpitude, transgression, sin, vice, on and on.” He turned the shade on the lamp so he was in shadow. “Those don’t describe how I feel.”
It had become clear since Steven died that my mother was too aggressive in her emotions for the quiet conversations my father needed to have. Her moods pushed him out of the room.
“Guilt, at least the way I’m aware of it, is the loss of control.”
He crossed his legs, folded his hands around his knee, and in the light from outside the window, he looked as if his eyes had sunk beneath the surface. “I’ve lost control.”
I started to ask him, What does it matter? The dictionary definition—the semantics of language—this isn’t science. Another definition won’t alter the way you feel.
But he was struggling, and so I waited, saying nothing as he arranged a conversation in his mind.
“Julia brought up Meryn tonight at dinner,” he said. “You remember Meryn, the girl whose picture—”
“I remember.”
“It was winter, and we were seventeen, and the Dee was frozen. It seldom froze, too much current, but as we went under the main bridge over the river in Llangollen, the ice broke, and we slipped into the water, and I got out.”
“I don’t want to know,” I said, speaking sweetly but getting up to leave. “You have to understand. It’s too much after this year. I begin to believe that everything is an accident, and I don’t want to feel that way.”
“I want you to understand what I mean about control,” he said.
“I do understand about control,” I said. “I’m not as innocent as you think I am. Not any longer.”
“I’m talking about myself, Claire,” he said. “That’s why I told you the story.”
“I didn’t like the story,” I said. “It’s as if you think of yourself as destructive.”
“I do,” my father said, getting up, following me to the door, opening it for me to leave.
Back in Steven’s room, I couldn’t sleep. The light from the hangar spread across the bed, and even with my eyes tight shut, it filtered though the lids. And my eyelids turned into a movie screen with familiar images flashing across the surface—Olivia, my white rat, sitting on her haunches in the garden at night, the pallid bat, Julia’s gift from the glass factory on the day that Steven died—again and again a floating picture of my first treasure, the black and white kitten still in the floppy fetal sac, swimming in formaldehy
de.
THE LIFEGUARD CHAIR
We just got back from visiting my grandmother Frayn in Llangollen, who is quite old and difficult to understand, not because she’s old but because she’s Welsh. Mama tells me she may die soon, so I should pay particular attention to what she has to say, because sometime before too long she won’t be saying it any longer.
What she had to say to me at this visit for my ninth birthday was about strawberries, which she grows on her farm at the edge of town just above the canal. She sat on the damp ground in her big woolly skirt, pulled me down with her and showed me the strawberries creeping along the ground around the garden fence. She picked one up, put it in the cup of my hand and told me to look at it very carefully.
“You see that mass of tiny black seeds right at the place the skin of the strawberry has been torn by the wire fence it ran into while it was growing.”
I did see them.
“And here,” she said, “is the tear, which has healed over so you can’t see the raw flesh, but you can see that the lovely strawberry has been smart enough to toughen up her skin with a peppering of seeds in case she runs into another wire fence.”
“Can I eat it?” I asked.
“No, love. Don’t eat this brave strawberry. Put it in your pocket and keep it to remember.”
C.F., age 9
An injured strawberry in my pocket
VIII.
BENJAMIN IN THE FLESH
1
I left a note on the kitchen table:
“Not to worry. He’s arrived, and I’ll be gone probably all day with him. Claire”
I assumed that Milo would fill in the blanks.
There had been a message from Benjamin the night before:
“Meet me at six A.M. at the front gate to Dumbarton Oaks. Is that too early? I have to be home by noon.”
It was dawn when I left the house, the air wild with birdsong, the beginning of a soft summer day. The streets were empty except for an occasional bus, clear all the way down Wisconsin Avenue, mist salting the windshields.
In the rearview mirror, I checked my skin for bloom.
I had to remind myself not to press the accelerator to the floor and fly there.
Benjamin Reed was waiting by his car, leaning against the trunk in khaki shorts and a white T-shirt. He was darker-skinned than I had expected, fine-boned, with a deep dimple on one side of his lips, his hair long and unruly.
I crossed to his side of the street, feeling awkward, off balance, a long-legged goose of a girl.
“Sophia?”
“Hello.”
We stood head-to-head.
At some level of consciousness, I must have been aware of the danger of this charade, keeping mental track of the facts I had told him about Sophia Lupe’s life so I wouldn’t betray my own deceit. I couldn’t drop the story of Sophia now, maybe not ever, couldn’t possibly tell Benjamin the truth.
Whatever had broken the trust I had in Victor Duarte—Vanessa/ Rosie St. John, or Victor’s own strangeness, or the songs with Benjamin—as if he were some kind of savior instead of a stranger, the trust was gone as quickly as it had come that evening at the Café Rouge.
Something was the matter with him, and I had enough remaining animal instinct to recognize that now.
In retrospect I have no memory of what electrical current traveled the crossed wires of my brain. Dawn at Dumbarton Oaks with another stranger. I must have put trouble out of my mind, and for that moment I could believe my life no more complicated than this new arrival on my horizon.
“You’re tall!” he said with pleasure, as if I had grown especially for him. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“It’s a surprise who I am, isn’t it?” I said, slipping my hands into the pockets of my pants. “I could be anyone.”
“A mischief maker is what you are.” He laughed. “All those songs!”
The gates to the garden were closed—it was too early in the morning for Dumbarton Oaks to open—and I followed Benjamin to a path just to the side of the entrance, lush with the growth of late summer.
“This path goes all the way north, coming out behind the Safe-way, parallel to Wisconsin Avenue, and almost no one knows about it except the homeless,” he said. “You’ll see.”
He stopped to look at me.
“You’re the perfect height,” he said. “And lovely.”
I had never been called lovely. My mother said I was beautiful, but “lovely” was a different word, and I liked the sound of it, imagining lovely as deeper than beautiful.
We walked down a steep hill, the roots of trees breaking through along the path obstructing our way so we had to hold on to the branches above us to keep from falling.
The trees were craggy, thick-trunked, pressed together. Pine and beech and oak, a scattering of dogwood, heavy with leaves spreading a green umbrella above us as we made our way deeper into the woods, along a muddy path, the rising sun dappling our hair and arms.
“I thought it would be crazy to meet for coffee the first time,” he was calling over his shoulder to me. “Everybody does that. Or drinks in a bar so crowded you can’t hear yourself talk.”
“I know,” I said, dropping down a small hill, walking level with him. “I love that we came here.”
“So tell me everything,” he said. “Your whole life, from the beginning to now.”
Once in junior high, I’d asked Steven what happens the first time when you get together with a girl.
“Sex?” I’d asked.
“Stories,” he’d said. “She tells you her story and you tell her yours. And then sex. But the stories have to be worth it.”
I wanted to tell Benjamin everything. My own life.
“I’m Claire Frayn,” I wanted to say. “Sophia Lupe is a fraud. I, Claire Frayn, was born in New York City on the Upper West Side, and my history began there with my brother, Steven, my true companion.”
That conversation was spinning in my head.
Going along a narrow path, I struggled to keep up.
“I told you some things about me the first time I wrote to you in Ann Arbor,” I said.
“I remember everything you said, even the sequence. And then you turned out not to be the convent girl you promised.”
I snapped a purple wildflower and put it behind my ear. “And most of what you had to say was song,” I said.
“Nothing else to add,” he said.
The woods opened along an old stone wall, partially destroyed, the deep crevices thick with wildflowers and moss.
“This land was private, maybe in the nineteenth century, and the owners had gardens and stone walls and fountains.” He dropped back to walk along beside me. “We’ll come to the place where the creek surfaces and makes an amazing racket as the shallow water goes over the rocks.”
“How do you know about this place?” I asked.
“I found it once walking from Dumbarton Oaks.”
“With another girl?”
“With a dog,” he said.
I laughed, relieved.
“We used to live near here after my mother died, and once when I was walking my golden retriever at Dumbarton Oaks, he led me down this path, and I’ve never seen anyone else on it, except the homeless who’ve made a place for themselves near here.”
“Why here?” I asked.
“They’ve made themselves a home,” he said. “It’s out of the way, and they must have discovered it like I did.”
I followed him up a steep hill, the trees crowding us off the path, and I grabbed the waistband of his shorts to keep my balance.
I was in a space capsule, out of gravity’s reach, and in this place, the air soft on my skin, the sun warming the top of my head, there was no room for reflection or analysis, only this moment in a new geography far from earth.
“I’m an only child, and my mother was a concert pianist from Argentina who was killed in an automobile accident when I was six,” Benjamin was saying. “You know about my father.”
“Only what it said in the paper.”
“He and I lived together, and we had a dog, which he got so I’d have a sibling, and when one dog died, we got another. I went to school, first to the local elementary school, then to Catholic high school. The usual,” he said, pulling me up a muddy bank. “I had started to make up little songs on the piano before my mother died, and then I took piano lessons and played lacrosse and did okay in school and had an ordinary, satisfactory daily life, doing the usual things a boy at a strict academic parochial school will do.”
“Did you have girlfriends?”
“Not in high school, but I used to pretend I had a girlfriend who was also a composer. We wrote duets.”
We had to climb up rocks, slippery with moss, to a higher plateau, not exactly a field but a break in the trees, an open space with wildflowers, the silence of early morning. I could hear the creek slipping over the rocks.
“Now you!” he said.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’ve had girlfriends,” he said, “but I don’t have one now.”
“I’ve had no one,” I said.
It was the one true thing I told him and he laughed in disbelief.
“I didn’t expect anything of that letter I sent you,” I said. “Maybe sympathy about my brother, but that’s all.” My face was hot and damp.
“No?” Benjamin said. “You should reread your first letter. It was a love letter, as I remember.”
I slid down a rock, catching him by the arm.
“I’m looking for a particular place I’ve always found when I walked here, and I hope I can find it now.” He pulled me up a hill behind him. “It’s near here, behind an old fountain that still has water coming through the mouth of a cherub, but the creek may be too dry this time of year.”
A Student of Living Things Page 18