Besides, it was so lovely outside the wall that it seemed a shame nobody was out there enjoying it. A soft, warm breeze was already shaking loose petals from the ornamental pear trees on Mimi’s block that had erupted into blossoms overnight. I was tempted to try to catch a petal on my tongue as it drifted to the sidewalk, but held my right hand out palm up until one settled there instead. So this was February in Southern California. No wonder the silent movie guys threw over New Jersey to come out here, where most days were warm and the desert and ocean and snowcapped mountains and the gardens of Shangri-la were all within easy reach. But how was a normal person, me for example, who’d grown up with the usual up-and-down cycle of seasons supposed to keep track of the passage of time? Who learned to handle adversity when every day was more intoxicatingly gorgeous than the one before it? What mind could grasp that anything could go wrong in a place like this? I could see why so many people who came out here expecting easy fame ended up losing their grip.
“Alice. There.” With the petals wafting down around him, Frank looked like a child inside a snow globe, one wearing a glen-plaid Clarence Darrow suit, leather aviator’s cap and goggles, looking for a yellow biplane come to scoop him up. “In the Lamborghini.” He pointed. “That must be your friend.”
“No pointing, Frank. That isn’t him. Hold my hand please. I don’t want to lose you.”
Frank clutched my fingers so tightly that I winced. After that I didn’t correct him when he pointed at every Italian sports car or English luxury sedan that tooled down the street because I was grateful for the chance to flex every time he dropped my hand.
Finally a nondescript sedan with Arizona plates that screamed “rental car” turned onto our block. I knew right away that it was Mr. Vargas. I let go of Frank, waved and shouted. As soon as the car nosed into the driveway, I ran to open the driver’s side door.
While Mr. Vargas fumbled with his seat belt, I looked over my shoulder to summon Frank to meet him. No Frank. Wait. Yes Frank. Flat on his back on the sidewalk, eyes squeezed shut and hands balled in fists.
I abandoned Mr. Vargas and knelt alongside the kid. “What’s wrong, Frank?” I asked.
“You rushed that car like one of my mother’s fanatics, Alice. The man inside must be terrified.”
“Look at me, Frank,” I said. The kid cracked one wary, begoggled eyelid open. “The man in that car knows me, remember? We’re friends, so it’s okay for me to be excited to see him.” I don’t think I’d been more excited to see anybody in my life.
Mr. Vargas came and knelt beside us. “You must be Frank,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
Frank pushed the goggles up on his forehead to get a better look at him. I guess he was on the fence about Mr. Vargas because he shut his eyes again after he checked him out but didn’t put the goggles back on.
“Look, I brought you a present, Frank. Is it all right for me to call you Frank?” Mr. Vargas stood, pulled a cylindrical something from his pocket, and gave it a long, rattling shake. “Alice said to bring flashlights. So I brought you this special one that’s powered by shaking. No batteries required.”
He had Frank’s attention then. The kid sat up and took the flashlight, shook it hard, turned it on, and nodded. “Well done,” he said. “Now that you’ve delivered it, please leave.”
ON DAY THREE of Mimi’s sequestration, Frank and I set off by city bus to fetch her home. Mr. Vargas offered to take us in his rental car, but Frank refused to set foot in it or even have him along on the bus ride. “Fine,” Mr. Vargas said. “I have important things to do here. I need to buy a few groceries. Rug shampoo. A new mop.”
“I’ll have a beer and a mop,” Frank said. “That’s what the skeleton said when he walked into the bar.” Whether the joke was meant for Mr. Vargas or me was impossible to say. Up until then Frank had insisted I stand between the two of them whenever we were together, as if the man were a rubber zombie mask that had sprouted arms and legs.
I’d been so paralyzed by our disaster that I hadn’t cleaned up the ashy footprints the firefighters had tracked through the house. “Oh, Mr. Vargas, don’t,” I said. “I’ll call a cleaning service. Or I’ll do it myself when we get home.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “It will keep me busy until you get back.”
So Frank and I set out by bus, stopping at every street corner in Los Angeles along the way. Frank insisted we visit the mall across the street to buy Mimi Valentine’s Day candy before the hospital. I gave in without a fight. There wasn’t any point in saying she’d been waiting too long for us already.
On the upside, one day post-Valentine’s the hearts were half-price. Frank chose the biggest ones still available, three of solid chocolate that cost twenty-five bucks apiece even on special. “Why three?” I asked, being careful not to sound confrontational.
“One for me, one for my mother, one for you,” he said. Just when you wanted to strangle the kid for being impossible, he’d come up with something like that to cut your anger off at the knees.
Mimi had checked herself out of the hospital and was long gone by the time we finally got there. I wasn’t surprised, but Frank was stunned. Before he launched into a seismic fit I managed to convince him that Mimi had called home, talked to Mr. Vargas, and was so excited to see him after so many years that she’d taken a cab back to Bel Air before we’d crawled through half of Los Angeles on the bus. “We could take a cab ourselves, you know, and get home much faster,” I added. We were talking on the bench at the hospital bus stop.
“I only ride in taxis with my mother, Alice,” Frank said. “If what you suggest is true, why didn’t she call to alert us of her departure?”
Because she hates me. “Because she never learned my number, I bet,” I said. “It was programmed into her cell.”
“I doubt that,” Frank said. “My mother has no problem with numbers in a series. She’d be the first to tell you that she’s good with numbers but terrible with money. I know because she’s told me that more times than I can count on my fingers and toes. Maybe your cell was turned off. Or you forgot to bring it.”
I rooted through my purse and all my pockets. “You’re right, Frank. I forgot my phone. I’m the stupidest person alive.”
“That’s not true. In every classroom I’ve ever been in there have been at least a couple of kids less intelligent than you are. Also one teacher. Who had me transferred to another class.”
We went inside in search of a pay phone. Hard to find these days, as noted earlier by Frank. Once we located one, I realized I’d never learned the number to the glass house because it was programmed into my cell. Mr. Vargas would be so disappointed in me. The man hated speed dial. He believed that memorized phone numbers were the sign of a civilized mind.
Frank didn’t know his home number, either, though he had memorized the girlhood phone number of his Alabama grandmother who’d died before he was born. Easily. It was “7.”
NIGHT HAD FALLEN by the time we got back. Mr. Vargas had opened all the curtains and had the lights on in every room except Mimi’s office, where we’d covered the broken-in glass wall with a tarp. We could see him in the display case that was the living room, wearing an apron over his suit and watching for us. He couldn’t see us hiking up the driveway in the dark because the light inside had turned all the windows into one-way mirrors.
When we unlocked the front door Frank brushed past me, calling “Mama” in that weird monotone of his, repeating it like a squeeze-me talking baby doll left under a rocking chair. I waited in the foyer, not wanting to get in the way of any reunions. The hall carpet looked good as new and the mirrors all around me were free of fingerprints and delicious smells came from the kitchen. I had made none of this happen. I can’t tell you what a relief that was. Until now I’d prided myself on being so responsible, but a life without responsibilities was starting to sound pretty great to me. I was starting to think Xander wasn’t a deadbeat. He was a genius.
Mr. Vargas
came to meet us, pulling the apron over his head, smoothing his hair and straightening his tie. Came to meet me, really, since I was the only one there. “You surprised me, Alice,” he said. “I called to find out where on earth you were and heard your phone ringing in the kitchen. Howling, actually. Is the coyote ringtone a West Coast thing? Where’s Mimi?”
ONCE FRANK HAD searched every room and under every bed and inside every drawer and closet and felt inside a pair of Mimi’s shoes and even peered into the vacuum cleaner hose and bag, he went out in the yard and returned with his yellow plastic bat. He took the cake box out of the refrigerator and removed his gorgeous, forlorn, untouched birthday cake. He put the cake on the counter and proceeded to beat it to chocolate smithereens. Then he pushed its remains through the kitchen colander and pawed through the crumbs before proclaiming, “Well, that’s that. Not here, either.”
After Mr. Vargas regained his capacity for speech, he wondered aloud if Mimi had been home at all, since he’d only been at the store for an hour at most. Frank said Mimi had absolutely been there, probably while Mr. Vargas was at the grocery or when he’d been vacuuming in one of the bedrooms. “What makes you think that?” Mr. Vargas asked.
Young Sherlock Holmes pointed out the clues: The vacuum cleaner bag filled with the powdery residue of carpet shampoo, evidence of the recent cleanup of the firefighters’ muddy footprints that might have made sufficient racket to allow Mimi to slip in and out undetected by anybody who might ask awkward questions like, “Say, Mimi, where’s that manuscript you promised me?” The shoes I’d sent to Mimi in the hospital, still damp inside from being worn home sockless. A suitcase gone from under her bed, her blue and black and gray cardigans missing, plus seven T-shirts and two pairs of jeans, one an embroidered pair she’d inherited from Julian that she only wore on special occasions. Also the watercolor portrait of Frank over the mantelpiece that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t missed. A nightgown was MIA, and a pair of slippers. Two pairs of shoes I gathered Mimi preferred to the ones I’d picked for her. Seven pairs of socks, something I’d forgotten to include in her care package. Her toothbrush. “Her hairbrush is here,” Frank mused, “but her hair is still short enough to do without it.” Her purse was gone and her glasses, but not her cell phone. “Either she doesn’t want to talk to anybody,” he said, “or she knows her computer could pinpoint its location and, by extension, hers.” My money was on “doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”
He ended by showing us an ancient copy of The Little Prince, now resting on his pillow. “I know I wasn’t reading it last night because I don’t understand much French. Although sometimes my mother and I like to pretend we speak it.”
That was the difference between Frank and me. I’d recognized the cover art but hadn’t gotten past it to the letters spelling out Le Petit Prince. “Why do you have it in French, then?” I asked.
“My mother’s very fond of this book because it belonged to my Uncle Julian in high school. She had to translate it for him for his French class the way she has to translate it for me.” He turned to the flyleaf and showed us “Julian Gillespie” there, printed awkwardly enough to embarrass a second-grader. Seeing Julian’s lousy handwriting gave me gooseflesh. Frank’s psychiatrist says it runs in families.
“If she liked it so much, why didn’t she get you a copy in English?” Mr. Vargas asked.
“She’s fond of it because it belonged to Uncle Julian. She says the illustrations are the best thing about it anyway. Her capsule review of the story is ‘Waiting for Godot, le Junior Edition. Snore.’ She says the word snore because sometimes loud noises like actual snores can startle me.”
“I’ll try to remember that when I go to sleep tonight,” Mr. Vargas said.
“After I’ve canvassed the property thoroughly I may note other tipoffs to her recent presence here,” Frank said. “I can start an in-depth investigation now if you like.”
I told him that wouldn’t be necessary and hustled him into his pajamas. I’d put Mr. Vargas in Frank’s monastery cell and made up the red love seat in my bedroom with sheets so the kid could stay with me. I worried he would have a harder time sleeping that night than ever, but when I tucked him in on the couch he said, “All of us could use a little rest, right, Alice?” and his eyelids fluttered shut. Once I was sure he was sleeping I went looking for Mr. Vargas. He was on the white couch, holding a plastic martini glass.
“What are you drinking?” I asked.
“I didn’t get that far,” he said. “I ran out of steam after I found the glass. There’s something funny about it. The weight’s off.”
“It’s plastic,” I said.
“Ah. That explains it.”
“Glass and Frank are a bad combination. I’m worried about Mimi, Mr. Vargas. Should we call the police?”
“Call the police? Why?”
“Because she’s missing. Something terrible may have happened to her.” Sirens.
“Mimi’s not missing, Alice. She packed a bag and left.”
He had a point. Not one that I liked, though. “What if she doesn’t come back?”
“I suppose that’s a possibility, but I doubt it. She’s done this kind of thing before.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Bolted. When Mimi gets overwhelmed, she takes off.”
Like mother, like son. Also like Xander.
“But she didn’t have a kid before. She wouldn’t abandon Frank, would she?”
“Frank isn’t abandoned. You’re here.” Mr. Vargas held the glass to the light and twisted it between his fingers. “Plastic, huh? It does look different when the light shines through it.”
I dropped onto the couch alongside him and covered my face with my hands.
“Try not to worry so much, Alice. I don’t know where Mimi is, but I imagine she’s off someplace trying to piece her novel back together. She knows that you’ll take care of Frank while she’s gone. She wouldn’t have kept you around if she didn’t think you could handle the job.”
“But I haven’t handled the job,” I wailed. “You sent me here to transcribe Mimi’s book and I never saw a page of it. If I’d done it right, we’d be back in New York having cocktails in real cocktail glasses at the Algonquin now. There might not have even been a fire.”
“What I love about you, Alice,” Mr. Vargas said, “is the way you simultaneously give yourself too much credit for everything that happens and not enough. Listening to you makes me feel young again.”
“This isn’t funny, Mr. Vargas.”
“Who said it was? Listen to me, Genius. I sent you out here to help Mimi in whatever way Mimi needed help. You did that.”
But I hardly heard what he was saying because I’d suddenly thought of something. “Hang on a minute,” I said, and ran into my bedroom.
When I came back I thrust my ridiculous-looking unicorn notebook into his hands.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“The notes you asked me to keep. Before I went to sleep at night I wrote down everything that happened every day. I really ought to type them out for you. Some of the entries are pretty cryptic and my handwriting isn’t the best. But then neither was Einstein’s.”
“Notes?” Mr. Vargas asked. “What are you talking about, Alice?”
I WOKE UP in the night pretty sure I’d heard somebody knock on my bedroom door. As much as I wanted to stay asleep, I skidded out of bed and went to check.
It was Mr. Vargas, clutching a flashlight and looking embarrassed. I stepped out into the hall and closed my door behind me so we wouldn’t wake Frank. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” Mr. Vargas said. “But is it conceivable that a raccoon found its way into my bedroom closet? Something’s moving in there, but I don’t think it’s a burglar, as the sound is more shuffling than ransacking.”
“I suppose one could have found a way under the tarp over the hole in Mimi’s office wall,” I said. “But I imagine a raccoon would go for the kitchen instead of Frank’s closet. Although knowing Frank he
might have snacks wrapped inside some of his pocket squares. Did you close your bedroom door before you went to sleep?”
“I did. And it was closed when I woke up.”
“Let’s have a look,” I said, sounding braver than I felt. Where was that plastic machete when we really needed it?
When we got to the bedroom I noticed a line of light under Frank’s closet door. “Was the closet light on before?” I whispered.
“I didn’t notice.”
“Follow me,” I said.
We went back to my room and I turned on the light. Frank wasn’t sleeping on the love seat anymore and the sheets I’d made it up with were strewn across the floor. We found the Nocturnal Rambler asleep on the rug in his closet, the light on, the cashmere overcoat it was never cold enough for him to wear rolled up under his head, an oversized pink cardigan I’d never seen before as his blanket. Frank might be okay with pink but he preferred a more tailored fit so I guessed the cardigan was Mimi’s even though I couldn’t imagine her in such a cheerful color. The kid had a shoe tucked in the crook of each elbow, as if he worried someone might steal them while he slept. His hands were folded across the copy of Le Petit Prince.
We backed out of the closet and reconvened in the hallway. “Frank’s protective of his things,” I said. “We’d better trade bedrooms.”
BEFORE WE TURNED in for the night again, Mr. Vargas and I decided to do a little nocturnal rambling of our own. Outside, a crescent moon tipped our way, spilling silvery Southern California magic all over the sad ruins of the Dream House. The two of us stood in the driveway pondering the heap. Mr. Vargas took a deep breath and said, “Smell that?”
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