White Elephant

by Julie Langsdorf

  People were saying the thaw was because of global warming, but Jillian knew it had nothing to do with that. It was because of the fire. Everything had melted since then. The anger that had been churning up in the neighborhood since the Coxes had moved to town had gone up in flames along with the White Elephant. Warring neighbors were friends again. Well, most of them. Some. A few at least.

  Furniture was spread out all over the Coxes’ lawn in the shapes of rooms, like someone was playing a practical joke—only it wasn’t a joke. The Coxes were selling their furniture, nearly all of it. The house they were moving to in South Carolina, the house Kaye had grown up in, only had three little bedrooms. Lindy called it a miniature house. “Like yours,” she told Jillian with a laugh that made her wince, the movement pulling at the burns around her mouth.

  Lindy still looked red and raw, but better than she had a month ago, when Jillian visited her at the hospital. At that time she’d been on a ventilator and wrapped in bandages. Being on the burn unit was like being in a nightmare. You could hear children screaming, like they were being tortured. Which they kind of were. Being burned was pretty much the worst torture ever. Lindy had had some skin grafts where the burns were the worst, and would have more surgery, including plastic surgery, but she would likely always be scarred inside and out. She was on all kinds of medication for pain and itching.

  Kaye was on medication too. She looked terrible these days, skinny and sad. Her hands shook and her eyes darted back and forth, as if she was constantly on the lookout for unknown dangers. “I almost lost you,” she told Lindy all the time, patting her like a baby where she wasn’t burned, and Lindy let her, without complaint. When she asked Lindy if she would ever forgive her, Lindy told her there was nothing to forgive. “It was my fault I was in the house. I snuck out. It was my own fault,” she said, drawing on a maturity she seemed to have acquired during her weeks in the hospital.

  “What’s wrong with your face?” Rebecca Thompson asked. “Rebecca!” her father said, shushing her, and Lindy, being Lindy, said, “What’s wrong with yours?” Then she gave Rebecca her pick of the American Girl dolls for fifteen dollars. The Odinga sisters hauled away her purple beanbag chair and Amanda Giannangeli held her pink chandelier over her head like a sparkly hat. Moms scooped up great armfuls of children’s clothes from the piles spread out on blankets on the grass.

  Jillian lay on Lindy’s bed—too big for Lindy’s room down on the island; Mark lay beside her, like they were an old married couple.

  “Eight dollars,” Lindy said to Nora McConnell, who wanted the flowered pillows Jillian and Mark were using to prop themselves up on the bed, their sketch pads resting on their legs.

  “But I said ten dollars,” Nora said. She was seven, and missing so many teeth it was hard to understand her. “I said I’d pay ten.”

  “Five dollars, and that’s my final offer,” Lindy said. Nora snatched the pillows from behind Mark’s and Jillian’s heads without another word. Their heads thumped down on the mattress. “Hey. You made me mess up,” Mark said.

  He and Jillian were drawing pictures of squirt guns. Well, squirt creatures. Suzanne had told them she’d pay them for any designs she turned into squirt guns for Squirts for Squirts, her company that she was working on while she was on bed rest, waiting for the baby to come. Mark was designing a dragon gun that spat water instead of fire, Jillian a spitting frog.

  “You’re not a very good businesswoman,” Jillian told Lindy.

  “It’s more fun this way.” Then, “You guys are going to visit me, promise?”

  Mark and Jillian groaned. “We already told you.” Jillian wanted to. She liked the sound of the words “sea isle.” She imagined sand and palm trees and misty, salty air. She pictured the three of them making sandcastles and biking to the market for ice cream once Lindy was well enough. She’d saved Lindy’s life, and that gave them a bond that might last their whole lives.

  Uncle Terrance forgave Lindy when she apologized after she got out of the hospital, and probably would have even if she hadn’t given him homemade chocolate chip cookies. They were perfect: big and chewy and packed with chocolate chips. “You totally did not make these,” Jillian said, and Lindy admitted that she hadn’t. “My dad did,” she said, which was probably a lie, too, but who cared? They tasted better than Lucy’s.

  Lindy was going to see a psychiatrist in South Carolina. Her dad had worked this out to keep her out of juvie for lying to the police. “It’s not like I need it, but maybe my mom does. Maybe if I go, my mom’ll go,” she said, again drawing on that newfound wisdom. She and her father were going to paint her new room in the new house together. Not one of his workers, she pointed out, but her actual father. She kept showing Jillian the deep blue paint swatch, like it was a diamond ring.

  Adam leaped onto the bed like a baby bird falling from the sky, landing between Jillian and Mark with a bounce.

  “Hey,” Mark said.

  Jillian tickled Adam, who shook with laughter.

  “What do you want, Adam?” Lindy said. “You can have anything you want for one dollar.”

  “This bed!” he said. “Can I, Grammy?”

  “I think that’s a wonderful idea! But Mommy makes the decisions,” she said. She was so nice. She was living with Adam and his mom now. They were staying on at the Coxes’, their furniture—which had filled their old house—looking a little lost in just a few of the Coxes’ enormous rooms.

  “He can have it,” Lindy said. “But he has to jump on it first, to see if it’s springy enough.”

  Adam started jumping, bouncing Mark and Jillian onto the grass.

  “Special sale!” Lindy yelled. “Anything purple is free for the next ten minutes.” A band of little girls came running over.

  “I wish I were moving too,” Mark said as he and Jillian headed toward another furniture grouping.

  They sat down on an L-shaped leather couch and put their feet up on the glass coffee table.

  “But it’s never going to happen. I will never move out west and I will never have a horse. Nothing will ever change.”

  “You’re going to a dude ranch for vacation this summer,” Jillian reminded him. “That’s new. That’s, like, amazing.”

  He shrugged as if it wasn’t that big a deal, but his expression betrayed him. “In Montana. For a week. Just me and my mom . . . and her cell phone,” he said, glum again.

  “Maybe you could bribe a horse to step on it.”

  “I’ll bring extra carrots.”

  “There’s always college.”

  “What?”

  “You could go away to college,” she said, but it was a lame suggestion. College was years away. An endless stretch of time.

  “What about you?”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Jillian said.

  “What if terrorists attack Washington? What if there are dirty bombs and smallpox spores? You’d go then,” Mark said.

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “The countryside would be safer.”

  “We’re safe,” Jillian said, and in that moment, she felt as though they were.

  “Instead of knocking down trees, I should have made bomb threats,” Mark said.

  “That was you?”

  “Your uncle too. We ran into each other a couple of times. He’s cool.”

  “Uncle Terrance?” The idea of the two of them in the park, pulling up trees, made Jillian laugh. “Why?”

  “Something my mother said.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “How the trees were half the charm, and we’d have to move if people cut them down.”

  “So you thought you’d yank them all up? That’s so stupid.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah. I guess.”

  She swatted him with her sketch pad. “It’s not so bad here.”

  “Some things are okay,” he said, swatting her back, and Jillian had a feeling that one of those th
ings might just be her.

  TED SAT ON THE PORCH, LOOKING UP FROM HIS BOOK NOW AND THEN to see the progression of the Coxes’ yard sale. Ed Zyck loaded an easy chair into his trunk. Margaret Chen admired a TV. He’d imagined this scenario when the Davenport-Gardners’ house was demolished on New Year’s Day, and here it was, really happening.

  He turned the page of the book on his lap, Trees of North America. He was in his element. He ought to have become a botanist or a historian, some kind of a researcher, instead of a hack writer who churned out stories about Foggy Bottom University bores. Then the thought struck him: he was finally going to write a class note for the alumni magazine. He had a new position in town and he was proud of it.

  Ted had been appointed the official steward of White Elephant Park, the new town park that was to rise from the ashes of the house which—for now—still occupied the quarter-acre plot in charred chunks. Cox had sold the land back to the town at a bargain-basement price, with the understanding that the town would be responsible for cleanup. Ted’s job was to choose the trees and plants, to put out bids and coordinate the planting. Kids would get student-service-learning hours for planting and tending to the park after all of the toxic material had been professionally removed.

  There was going to be a theatrical fund-raiser for the park in the spring. The cast of Annie Get Your Gun had reunited and was back in rehearsals. Well, most of it had reunited. The role of Frank was going to be played by Phil who, along with Valeria and Sofia, was coming home for a visit. He was learning the songs on his own and would be taught simple blocking when he got back. Allison had offered the role of Annie to Valeria, but Valeria said something in Spanish that clearly meant “no chance, sucker,” so Allison walked around the house mumbling her lines to herself and practicing song-and-dance routines. Ted had even joined the cast as a cowboy.

  What would Thomas think? he asked himself. The answer was, Awesome. Thomas would think, Fucking awesome. He was channeling Thomas now. Thinking in words not he, but Thomas, would have used. And he’d have said it about Terrance, too. The twins might be able to do away with the big guy before long if things kept going in this direction.

  The mail truck pulled up to the house. Ted retrieved the mail and sifted through it, looking for a promised postcard from Terrance, who was in New York with Free to Be Me. It was the social group’s first excursion farther than mini golf in Rockville. So far he had texted Ted nearly hourly, and sent multiple photos, including one of himself in a Statue of Liberty hat and another of him wearing a Godzilla T-shirt that said I ATE NEW YORK. I hope you don’t have indigestion, Ted texted back. It’s just a joke, Ted, Terrance wrote. New York is too big to eat.

  The postcard was at the bottom of today’s mail, a picture of the Empire State Building. Terrance had drawn a little stick-figure man, waving from the top of the building. On the other side it said, “Looking out for you, bro.” Ted had to smile.

  Ted looked up to see Nick Cox heading up the walkway with his now infamous snowblower. Ted could feel his stomach tighten.

  “A little gift for you, Miller,” he said.

  “Thanks. I guess,” Ted said. “You can have my shovel.”

  “But it doesn’t snow in the sunny south.”

  “Not for snow. For sand. Or to get yourself out of the next hole you dig yourself into.”

  Cox laughed. “No need. I got big plans.”

  “Mansions?”

  “A water-treatment plant,” he said. “Or cotton. I’m considering growing cotton.”

  “Cotton?”

  “It’s worked before.”

  Ted was about to say something about how well that had worked before, but thought better of it. They shook hands and Ted watched him retreat down the walkway toward his yard, rapidly clearing of oversize televisions and overstuffed couches.

  ALLISON WALKED AMID THE COXES’ OUTDOOR ROOMS TRYING OUT chairs like Goldilocks, imagining herself into the kind of woman who would want the furniture that was set out here: a lamp that was more valuable than the contents of her entire first floor, a chair so big and cushioned you had to put up a good fight with it to get up again. But her heart wasn’t in it. She couldn’t stop looking at Kaye, sitting on the porch with her hand in Jakey’s. She looked so small and beaten down, a ghost of the bubbly blonde she had been before the fire. She rarely left the house these days.

  Allison felt to blame, knowing the feeling was irrational. Obviously nearly killing her daughter had sent Kaye over the edge—but she still couldn’t rid herself of a feeling of culpability. Her lust for Nick had turned to wonder at her own folly in the nearly two months since their fling had ended, but her feelings of guilt and shame held fast. Did what she did make her a bad person? Did it erase forty-plus years of trying to be reasonably good? Could she make up for it by being extra mindful for the rest of her life? She didn’t know. She just knew that she had hurt Kaye Cox, even if Kaye didn’t know it. And she hoped she never would know. Kaye had suffered enough.

  She and Nick had met at the Sawyers’ one last time after the fire, not to be intimate in their old way—Allison had made it very clear that was never going to happen again—but for a different kind of intimacy. Nick had cried about Lindy, and Allison had patted his back, let him release feelings that, she told him, he should start sharing with Kaye. He could start anew, she told him, be a better person. And if he could, maybe she could. Maybe redemption was a possibility.

  She bought a tree-shaped cookie at Lucy’s table, along with a cup of hazelnut tea and a lemon bar to take to Suzanne. Lucy had put up the old bulletin board on an easel and had tacked quotes to it: Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing, and Love is flowerlike; friendship is like a sheltering tree, among a bunch of others.

  “So you’re WP Tree Poet?” Allison said.

  Lucy raised and lowered her eyebrows, neither admitting nor denying it, but definitely capitalizing on it. Now people were only allowed to post beautiful things on the big bulletin board in back of the café. “I’m reversing its karma,” she said, offering Allison an index card upon which to write her own sentiment.

  Allison wrote, “And the tree was happy,” and tacked it up with a blue-tipped thumbtack.

  She poked amid the open boxes of plates and glasses, place mats, and flatware, old DVDs, computer games, and bed linens. When she spied a flat white box under one of the couches, she pulled it out, opening it to find poster-sized black plastic sheets like photo negatives on steroids.

  She took one out and held it up to the sun. What she saw was both beautiful and strange. It was a negative of some sort, amorphous, yet familiar. It was painted in fantastic colors, like a haunted sunrise, with yellows, oranges, and green amid the gray and black. She set it aside, and pulled out another. This one was a melee of blues and greens, more like an ocean than the sky. There were dozens of similar negatives. She was about to take out another, when she heard a shrill “Noooooooooo” from across the lawn.

  Allison looked up to see Kaye running toward her, a wild expression on her face. What in the world? Allison moved out of the way just as Kaye skidded onto the box, belly down.

  “This is all trash. It shouldn’t be out here. I missed a few boxes, that’s all.” Kaye sat on the box, then grabbed the two films Allison had and held them to her chest.

  “They don’t look like trash,” Allison said.

  “Well, they are.”

  “What are they?”

  “Nothing. They’re nothing.”

  “They’re beautiful.”

  “Please don’t make fun of me,” Kaye said.

  “Make fun . . . ?”

  “Just forget you ever saw them. Promise me.” She looked ashamed.

  “But they’re incredible. They ought to be in a gallery or something. Where did you get them?”

  Kaye whispered something.

  “What?”

  “I made them,” she said, her voice just audible now.
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  “You made these?”

  “Hush!” she said. “Please?”

  “They’re amazing, Kaye.”

  Kaye looked at Allison with skeptical eyes.

  “I didn’t know you were an artist.”

  Kaye frowned. “I am?” She blinked back tears.

  Allison bought two of Kaye’s pieces for far more money than she would ever admit to Ted. She had insisted on the price, and Kaye had thrown in a light box as a bonus, for being the first person ever to buy a Kaye Cox original “mammographic.” Kaye smiled, showing a welcome glimmer of her old self. Others came over to see what the fuss was about, and she sold several more, rapid fire, everyone afraid they were going to miss out on Something Big. And maybe they were right. Only time would tell.

  Maybe Allison could sell her work, too, she thought. Not just the family portraits, but her town photos—of Willard Park at its most perfect and at its less-than-perfect. One of her shots of the White Elephant fire had been printed in the Post’s Metro section, and another in the county Journal. Maybe Lucy would hang them at the café. Maybe Allison didn’t need to publish a book to feel like she had “made” it. It might not be the Venice Biennale, or her own company, but it was something. Just finding moments of beauty in life was something. Just living and appreciating was something. Maybe it was enough.

  Allison passed the Coxes’ stone lions on her way into the house—well, one lion, the other, apparently, had sold—and called for Suzanne. No one answered, but Allison ventured in anyway, knowing there was nowhere else Suzanne could be. Allison could hear her talking in her professional voice from deep inside the house.

  She found Suzanne propped up in her bed, her belly a growing mound, surrounded by myriad papers and her laptop. She was on the phone, but she waved to Allison.

  “By Monday,” Suzanne said. “I’ll expect to hear from you then.”

  Suzanne was working frantically these days, hoping to have a few un-squirt guns, as she was calling them, ready for the summer season—now only a few months away.