Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  A very gentlemanly fire captain explained all this to me after the worst of it was over. That was after Mimi had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance and Xander was handcuffed and shoved in the back of a patrol car. I was on the couch holding Frank wrapped tight in a blanket. The captain had carried him inside and laid him, still asleep, across my lap. He spoke quietly so he wouldn’t wake Frank up, but when Frank was out like that, it was more like a coma than sleep.

  “You got lucky,” the captain said. “We’re still in the rainy season, and that big wall around the property kept the fire contained. Otherwise it might have run down the hillside and spread through the canyon. During fire season, we have to evacuate whole neighborhoods.”

  “Lucky,” I said. “Yes.” The sun had been up for a couple of hours by then. Happy birthday, Frank.

  “Do you have anyplace to go?” the captain asked.

  “Can’t we stay here?”

  “Most people want to leave after a fire, but you’ll be okay if you want to stay. The tree took down your exterior power lines but we extinguished the fire before it got in the walls. Your interior wiring should be okay. Have your electrician check it ASAP though, okay?”

  “Okay.” Although the last time I saw our electrician, he was being shoved into a squad car. “I know this place is a wreck, but it’s his wreck,” I said, nodding at Frank. “He doesn’t like change.”

  “Got it. Anybody you want to call to come and stay with you?” the captain asked.

  “I did that already,” I said. “I told him to bring flashlights.”

  “The DWP should have power up before the day is out. Let me know if they don’t.” He gave me his card. “Call if you need anything. I’ll close the gate behind me when I go to keep you safe.”

  Honestly, it seemed a little late for that.

  I WOKE UP hours later still holding the fire captain’s card in my hand and Frank in my lap. The speaker hooked up to the gate buzzed so insistently I decided that was probably what woke me. At least the power was back on.

  I looked at my watch. Two-thirty. Frank should be getting out of school soon. If he were still going to school.

  I slid out from under Frank without waking him and went to answer the buzzer. “Who is it?”

  “Delivery,” the voice on the other end said. “I have a birthday cake here for Frank. Is this Mimi?”

  I slumped against the wall. Mimi had taken care of everything. “Can you bring it up to the house?” I asked.

  “Sure. What’s the code for the gate?”

  “Two-one-two-two-zero-zero-zero.”

  “So let me guess. Frank is ten years old today?”

  “Yes. How did you know? Did you count the candles?”

  “Nope. No candles, just like you ordered. The gate code. Two. One-two. Two zero zero zero. A kid’s birthday is one of those number combinations a mother can’t forget, right? But you know it’s kind of dangerous to use a birthday for a security code like that. Birth dates are the first things hackers try after ‘one-two-three-four.’”

  So I did know Frank’s birthday by heart. I just didn’t know that I knew it.

  I buzzed the delivery guy in without answering. When I went outside to take the cake from him he was standing in the driveway holding the box, surveying the carnage with a stunned look on his face.

  “Is everybody okay?” he asked.

  I KNOW. I skipped some parts. The ones I don’t like remembering.

  After we saw the Dream House on fire, I grabbed Frank’s hand and ran to the kitchen, dialed 911, babbled the nature of our emergency, then raced to Mimi’s office to pound on the door. “Alice,” Frank said after a minute of this. “You know, this door’s not locked anymore.”

  I yanked it open and burst into her sanctum. There was her typewriter that had once been Julian’s typewriter. A desk, a chair, a bookcase. No Mimi anywhere, but paper everywhere. Stacks and stacks of it, covered with words. On the desk, the bookcase, the carpet. I don’t care what Frank said about Mimi chucking stuff. It didn’t look like she threw away any piece of paper, ever.

  I tried to sound calm. “Where’s your mother?”

  “Not here,” Frank said. “Maybe in her bedroom. I tried there earlier tonight but it was locked.”

  We bolted down the hall and laid siege to Mimi’s door. We heard fumbling with the lock and then the door swung open. Mimi was in one of her lacy white nightgowns, looking half-asleep and completely annoyed. Frank threw himself on her. “Did we wake you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Look at you. You’re wearing your birthday suit.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s your birthday. I was going to give it to you today anyway.”

  “Why weren’t you in your office? I looked for you everywhere. Except here, because you locked the door.”

  “I know, baby. But I really needed sleep. I almost killed myself finishing that book in time for your birthday. I’ve been an awful, neglectful mother these last few months and I feel terrible about it. But now it’s done and I’m all yours again.”

  “I hate that book.” She put her arms around him and he buried his face in her shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Monkey. The bad part is over now.”

  Not quite. “The Dream House is on fire,” I said.

  “The Dream House?” she asked.

  THEN WE WERE in the backyard together, Mimi and I watching a wall of the guesthouse buckle and send sparks twirling up into the sky. The eucalyptus next to it exploded in flames and burned oily-bright and hot against the night sky. In the distance we heard the wails of fire trucks converging on us fast.

  “Sirens,” I said.

  Frank still had his head burrowed into his mother’s shoulder. She looked at me, glassy-eyed, and said, “This isn’t my fault.”

  “Of course it isn’t your fault. Come on. We need to move. Let me take Frank. I’m bigger than you.”

  “Don’t you touch him,” she said. “Don’t you dare.” She picked the kid up and clutched him even more tightly.

  “Fine. Anything. Let’s go. Now. Fast.”

  Even weighed down with Frank, Mimi reached the front yard before I did. We heard a terrific crash then and all the lights in the house went out. “The gate,” I said to Mimi, and ran down the driveway to open it manually so the firefighters could get in. While I waited for the fire trucks I looked up toward the house. The side angled toward the Dream House reflected the conflagration, making it seem twice as big and the yard out front twice as dark. There was just enough moonlight for me to pick out Mimi’s wraithlike nightgown, a paper cutout against the black background of grass at night. The chunk of darkness where her shoulder should be must have been Frank. I was amazed that she still held him. My arms would have given out long since.

  Up where the driveway ended, part of the eucalyptus that stood alongside the Dream House had fallen across the yard and into the shade tree outside Mimi’s office. Now Frank’s favorite perch and repository for random artifacts was burning, too. The Hula-Hoop’s circle and the lollipop shape of the tennis racket were dark against the flames for the moment it took them to catch. Where was the machete?

  Then firefighters were streaming up the driveway, dragging hoses. “Is everybody out?” one of them asked me. He turned out to be the captain.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Everybody everybody?” he asked.

  “Yes. Everybody.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Front yard.”

  “Good. Stay there with them.”

  I REACHED THE two of them just as a flaming branch of the shade tree fell away from the trunk and crashed through Mimi’s office window. The curtains went up in a flash and we could see fiery bits of paper spin upward in hot drafts. Mimi dropped Frank and lit out for the house. I started after her, but then Frank flashed past me on his mother’s heels. I grabbed him around the waist and left it to the
firefighters to catch Mimi.

  When Frank and I caught up to them, Mimi and a fireman were arguing. “Lady, I don’t care if you left your book in there,” the fireman was saying. “Buy yourself another book. I can’t let you go back inside.”

  “You don’t understand!” Mimi tried to twist free of him.

  “Mom. Mother. Mama. Mimi. Ma. Mommie dearest.” Frank was yelling every variation he could think of to get her attention. Recognizing that the fireman would make the perfect lectern, Frank had shaken me off somehow, scrambled up his back, and put an arm around the guy’s neck for balance. “We’re all in this together, Mama!” Frank shouted. “You and me and Alice. If your book burns, my book will burn and Alice’s book will burn. Are you listening to me? What did I just say?”

  The fireman was so distracted by Frank’s chokehold that Mimi was able to duck his grip. “Alice’s book will burn? Frank, what are you talking about?” She plucked her son from his perch and stood him on the grass in front of her. “What book?”

  “The book she keeps under her mattress. She writes down everything that happens. I’m always eager for the newest installment. It’s like I’m living in nineteenth-century New York, waiting on the docks for the latest chapter of Dickens to arrive.”

  Even a person as tiny as Mimi can look terrifying against a backdrop of swirling flame. “You’re writing a book, Alice?”

  “It’s not a book,” I insisted. “Just some notes for Mr. Vargas.”

  “Isaac asked you to spy on me?” She pressed the heels of her palms into her eye sockets, then started pounding her forehead with her fists.

  “Mother, you stop that right now,” Frank said. “How many times do I have to tell you that hitting your head is bad for your brain?”

  Mimi picked him up, stamped his forehead with a kiss, then handed him off to me. “Take him. Whatever you do, don’t let him go,” she said, and bolted for the burning house.

  She put up quite a fight when the fireman caught her the second time. It took him plus a couple of paramedics to subdue her. Two of them held her arms and legs while one gave Mimi a shot to calm her down enough to get her in the ambulance. Once she was strapped in, the fireman dashed back to us. “Are you two Alice and Julian?”

  “Alice and Frank,” I said.

  “Is Julian still inside the house?”

  “Julian is my uncle,” Frank said. “He’s dead.”

  The fireman’s eyes widened. “In there?” But Frank had turned into about four and a half feet of board lumber and lay unresponsive on the grass.

  I touched the fireman’s shoulder to turn him away from Frank. “Suicide,” I said, speaking softly so Frank couldn’t hear me. “Long ago. She was with him when it happened.”

  “Got it. I’ll pass that along to the paramedics.”

  When we turned back to Frank the kid was shivering. Because California is a desert climate, when the sun isn’t shining directly on you it can get pretty chilly. The fireman brought us one of those shiny aluminum astronaut blankets they hand out to disaster victims. I wrapped Frank up tight and sat on the grass with him in my lap until he stopped shaking and loosened up again enough to talk.

  “Alice,” Frank said after the firefighters started rolling up their hoses. “She’s finished her book. Things will be better now, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

  The craziest part of the whole night, in my opinion, was that he did.

  OR MAYBE THE craziest thing was this: There was a melee at the gate. I saw Xander plow into the gawker-control barricades the police had set up across the driveway. He ran right over them as if he were a steeplechaser who’d forgotten the hurdles were meant to be jumped. One of the police officers took off after him, shouting. When Xander wouldn’t stop, the officer caught him by the back of his shirt. I saw Xander punch the guy and break free. Another officer joined in the pursuit and put Xander in handcuffs.

  “But I live here,” Xander shouted.

  I decided not to get involved.

  “Let’s see your driver’s license then, sir.” I had to admire the cop’s restraint. It was interesting sitting there on the grass listening to them. Their voices carried across the flat of the lawn the way voices skim across the surface of a swimming pool sometimes, letting you in on the conversation of two people lying on blankets on the other side of the water, whispering to each other.

  “You’ll have to uncuff me so I can get to it,” Xander said in a calmer voice. The officer did and Xander massaged his wrists. “Can you tell me how the fire started?” he asked.

  “Kid playing with fireworks,” the officer said.

  “Was anybody hurt?” Xander asked as he pulled out his wallet.

  “Somebody left in an ambulance,” the officer said. “That’s all I know.”

  Xander threw his wallet in the officer’s face and took off running. They caught and cuffed him again. “I can’t show you something I don’t have,” he wailed. “I don’t have a driver’s license.”

  They’d stopped listening by then. They hustled him none too gently down the driveway and shoved him into the backseat of a squad car.

  After they left, I picked up Xander’s wallet. There wasn’t much in it. No driver’s license, of course. Three crumpled one-dollar bills. A monthly bus pass. A piece of paper with a phone number written on it, and the words Sara’s new cell.

  OR MAYBE THE craziest was this: a fragment, half paper, half cinder, floated down and landed on my head while I sat there with Frank sleeping in my lap. Bits of paper had swirled everywhere before the firefighters were able to get the blaze in Mimi’s office under control and for some time after that. The dew had fallen so the grass was damp enough now that the arsonous bits sizzled and died without starting any new small fires.

  I wasn’t trusting dew to save my hair. I grabbed that fragment and crushed it out against the grass. When it was completely extinguished I could see the part of sentence it held: and then Alice

  AND THEN ALICE put Frank’s birthday cake in the fridge in the kitchen and went into what was left of Mimi’s office to see if she could find any part of that finished novel.

  Everything was gone. Everything but sodden, scorched carpet and lacy remnants of incinerated drapes and splinters of wood and a sad lump of metal that must have been her typewriter and muddy gray piles of ash. Here and there, scraps of burnt-edged paper with a word or phrase on it. Maddening bits of what must have been her novel the day before, reduced to word puzzles and haiku.

  ( 23 )

  AFTER THE FIRE Mimi was put on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold at the hospital. The admitting doctor informed me of this over the telephone after I made it clear I couldn’t leave my distraught younger brother, aka Frank, to come in for a chat. I had no intention of taking Frank to the hospital while his mother was in lockdown. I knew he’d insist on seeing her and I also knew that Mimi wouldn’t want him to see her and in the end all three of us might end up being put away. I told the kid his mother was so tired they’d tucked her in bed in a very private room so she could sleep there uninterrupted for three days straight. “She’s on hiatus,” I said. “All of us could use a little rest, right?”

  “We’re keeping your mother under observation as a precaution,” the doctor explained when we talked. “I don’t want to cause you unnecessary alarm, but the paramedics told me about the situation with your late uncle. Also I see from her hospital record that your mom is unusually accident-prone, and that she was brought to the hospital this time after becoming hysterical because her house had burned down. Hmm. That might make me a little hysterical, too.”

  I wanted to tell him that Frank, code name Jeopardy, was the disaster magnet and that Mimi was collateral damage. I just couldn’t frame it in a way that wouldn’t make Frank sound like a criminal or a maniac. “Only part of it burned,” I said. “The guesthouse. Her office. It was an accident. Could have happened to anybody.”

  The doctor paused so long that I wondered if he was writ
ing down what I’d said or considering what to make of it. “What I’m trying to say is that events like these are red flags. The kind of self-destructive urge that took your uncle can run in families. Things that get written off as accidents—car wrecks, drownings, ‘accidental’ fires—aren’t always accidents. Have any other relatives died under questionable circumstances?”

  Banning. “My mother’s mother,” I said. “She drove her car into a fence.”

  I’d gone outdoors with the phone so Frank wouldn’t hear me but kept an eye on him through the glass. He was wrapped in a comforter and rolling around on the living room floor. It didn’t make me feel great about my “parenting” that Frank turned to a comforter for comfort instead of me.

  When would this kid’s real mother come home? My own mother said she’d often thought that when she walked the floor with my infant self in the middle of the night. Was it easier to be a parent when you could carry the kid around without breaking a sweat, or did that lightness make it too tempting to throw it out a window when it wouldn’t stop shrieking?

  A horrible thought occurred to me then. Had Mimi picked a guardian for Frank? She must have done that, right? But who? According to Xander, Mimi had nobody but him. Xander, and her few billion fans outside the stucco wall. I hoped she hadn’t chosen Xander. For all his charms and handyman skills, I wouldn’t ask Xander to housesit a cat.

  THE DAY MIMI went into the hospital, the second massive blizzard in a week hit New York City, a climatic double whammy that media wags alternately tagged “Snowmageddon” or “Snowpocalypse.” Mr. Vargas managed to get a flight out somehow anyway, and called from the Los Angeles airport to say he was picking up his bags and rental car. He’d be in Bel Air within the hour. I told Frank we’d wait for Mimi’s old friend and mine outside the gate so he could find the house. The truth of it was that I didn’t want Mr. Vargas to meet Frank for the first time in front of a pile of smoking rubble. That’s the kind of first impression that’s hard to shake.