Kids These Days (18 page)

“Wow,” I said, too loudly.

The dad whipped around to face me. “You got some kind of issue?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I really don't.”

“You seem like you do, though.”

“I'm good,” I said.

“Gerald,” his wife said.

“I'm just talking to this dude,” Gerald said. “He's got some kind of issue.”

That fast: trouble. I felt for the weight of my arms, trying to gin up a plan for what I'd do if he came over the couple of rows at us, which right then seemed fairly possible. The last person I'd hit had been a saxophone player in my high school marching band. There'd been some disagreement over a girl, and he'd been able to hit me right back, no problem, which left us both standing in the instrument room, bleeding and yelling at each other. Our friends broke up what was left of the fight. Gerald looked like he'd be ready to hold his own. Like he had hair plugs, but like he'd be able to hold his own. Alice stood up. “Oh,” Gerald said.

“Oh, what?” she said.

“I didn't realize.”

“Realize what?”

“You're pregnant,” he said. “Right?”

“You don't know that. Now turn around and cheer for your son and leave us alone.”

“Sure,” he said. “Whatever.”

“Peace be with you,” I said.

He said, “What did you say?”

“It's something we said in church growing up.”

“We're Jewish,” he said.

“Walter,” Alice said. “Cut it out.”

“Congratulations anyway,” I said.

“On what?”

“Your son,” I said. “The race.”

“Oh,” Gerald said. “Yeah. Thanks.”

We kept staring each other down, like apes. He turned around, finally, and Alice sat back down, whispered, “What was that?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” I said.

“I got caught up in the moment.”

“You were a wolverine.”

“Don't talk like that.”

The line was short enough that Sophie and Jane got to go again right away. Gerald Junior came up into the stands, and his parents treated him like he'd won the world. A new race started. Alice and I watched the twins trace that same path over and over, watched the lights flick down the tower. Then they went again. And again. Finally they ran out of tickets, and we got back in the car, headed for the castle. Sophie and Jane were fast friends for the time being, talking endlessly in the back seat about how awesome the go-carts were, how they were totally going to try to go again next week. Alice and I rode quietly up front. My math: What would have happened if Gerald had come across the bleachers at us? If Alice hadn't stood up? If he and I had had to hit each other until one of us learned something? It was all a tryout, I thought, my head alive with the sound of the little engines. A dry run. Every damn thing all the time.

I was up early—a Saturday, no cabins, no secret agent men, no nothing. I left Alice and the BOJ in bed and took a cup of coffee down to the beach, walked south toward where the river cut in from the Intracoastal. People were out fishing, bait in plastic coolers and poles propped in PVC pipes shoved into the sand. Once the condos gave way to houses, there were old women in white hats looking for shells, old men in white hats toting metal detectors. Deeply wealthy Scandinavian couples, too, out first thing in their teak-and-canvas folding chairs, their meatloaves of babies sheltering under strikingly engineered tents and umbrellas, eating sand. Bicyclists. Joggers. A man in goggles and a Speedo, headed out for a swim. The sun was almost metal off the water.

We'd been there six weeks. I'd been out of a job for three months. We were only a little more pregnant than that. Even while I was well aware that I should be panicked about whatever had happened to my career, if a word like that even applied anymore, there just wasn't time. Or there hadn't been. We had a roof above us. Food on the table. Cash in the bank—most of which we could not use, or should not, though knowing it was there helped all the same. On a roller coaster, you're only ever playing at being afraid. That's the trick, the thrill. It's all a game. Look: Everyone comes back, strapped in just the same.

I didn't fully register what I was seeing until the parachutist was already a couple hundred yards past me. He came in from somewhere over the Intracoastal, over the houses in a long curve, and he was too low—the motor silent, the black sail not entirely inflated. Something was wrong. He got the rig partially straightened out, at least, but he was falling, and he kept falling until he managed to set the thing down on the hard sand left by low tide. He rolled to a stop. It was the quietest emergency landing I'd ever seen. It was the only emergency landing I'd ever seen. The parachute settled onto the beach like a napkin. He sat inside the cage, not moving.

I ran over and found him staring straight ahead, still belted in, hands on the control bars. “Are you hurt?” I asked him. “Are you OK?”

He held his hands out in front of him, opened and closed them. He was wearing gloves the same green as his cart. “I'm back,” he said. “I must have blacked out for a moment.” He pulled off his goggles, which left red rings around his eyes where they'd pressed into the skin. “The doctors tell me not to fly, but how am I supposed to give that up?” He unbuckled and got out, checked a couple of levers on the engine. “Yep,” he said. “Everything looks fine here. I think this one was all on me.”

“Is there someone I could call for you?” I said.

“No, no,” he said. “I don't think that's a good idea. I believe we need to get this chariot back up in the sky before anybody brings a sheriff down here.”

A man in a flannel robe came out of one of the houses. “Hey,” he called, once he got far enough down his walkway. “Do you two need me to call the police?”

“Already it starts,” the parachutist said. He looked up at the guy. “I'd prefer you didn't,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“I am,” the parachutist said, and turned back to me. “You think a lot of folks saw that?”

There were people headed in our direction. “Some,” I said.

“I really need to go,” he said. “They'll be all over me if I don't get back up.” The flannel robe guy was down near us now, and a small crowd was half-gathering. The parachutist held his hand out. “Hank,” he said to me.

“Walter.”

“Pleasure.”

The robe guy shook his hand, too. “Neil,” he said. Then: “What is this thing?”

“It's like an ultralight,” said Hank. “But lighter.”

“Where'd you get it?”

“Built it myself. Once you've got the engine, you're mostly good to go.” Neil apparently knew about engines, and he had questions about governor springs and ccs. I did not know what ccs were. I stayed quiet while Hank answered, while he laid the parachute out flat behind the buggy, folding it in what looked like a precise way. I had questions, too, but I was not asking them: Have you been pointing at me? Who are you, exactly? Is there something you've been trying to tell me? Once Hank had the chute the way he wanted it, he picked it up and handed it to the two of us. “Here's what I'll need,” he said. “Run behind me until I get going fast enough, and when you can't keep up any longer, that's when you know to let go.”

“Hold on,” Neil said. “I'm just wearing this robe.”

“You'll see how it works right away,” Hank said. “It doesn't take a lot to get this thing to jump. Gentlemen, my great thanks.” He got back in, started the engine. It was powerfully loud. The propeller fan seemed enough alone to inflate the chute. Far off down the beach, I saw an ATV cop coming toward us, blue light flashing at the top of a pole mounted off the back. Hank got a little more hurried about his getaway. He kicked something below the steering bar, some clutch, and the whole thing lurched forward, and Neil and I looked at each other—and then we were running behind Hank and his green cart, a string of tiny American flags clipped to the side, holding onto the POW chute until he was going faster than we were. When we let go, the chute jerked into the air with a pop, like a bedsheet, and it bounced him off the beach twice, three times, and then he was in the air for good, swinging back and forth a little before leveling out, gliding up and circling back once to yell something we did not understand. He flew back out over the houses instead of up the beach. The crowd watched him go, and then, not knowing what else to do, went back to their metal detecting, their jogging, their shells. The cop cut his light off, turned around, rode back north. I said, “That was something.”

“I've seen him before, up and down the beach,” Neil said.

“Me, too,” I said.

Neither of us knew how it was supposed to work, the awkward camaraderie of men. Neil tightened his robe. He said, “Do you live down here, or are you vacationing?”

“It's sort of both,” I said. “We've been here since June. We're up at the Sanddollar.”

“I know that place. It's nice.”

“Is that your house?” I asked him, meaning the one he'd come out of, a shingled three-story with huge windows.

“It is.”

“It's fantastic,” I said, because it was.

“The kids like it. We summer down here.”

“That must be great,” I said. I did not ask him where he summered from. We squinted in the sun.

“You have kids?” he said.

“A little girl,” I told him. “On the way.”

“We've got boys,” he said. “Ten and five. Just put the oldest one in braces.” Braces. I hadn't considered braces, though I could see the metal shining, remembered my childhood friends with rubber bands all in their mouths, the little plastic bags the rubber bands came in. “I'm surprised they didn't come out,” he said. “I'd have thought they'd want to see that.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“They're playing video games. Extreme something. Tennis. You swing your arm and your guy on the screen does, too. These games these days—it's wild.”

“I know,” I said, even though I didn't know.

The nice thing about having a parachute, it occurred to me, was that when something did go wrong, you already had your parachute ready. Accounting for calamity was built into the design. Neil was saying we should come down sometime, introduce ourselves. I told him we would and thanked him for the invitation. I knew we'd never do it. He went back to his house, to Extreme Tennis, and I walked back up to the condo. I felt like I'd been dropped onto some other planet, one that looked a lot like the one I'd come from, but where something wasn't exactly right, something I knew but couldn't name. Alice wanted to know everything about the crash landing, everything about the parachutist. What he looked like up close. How his voice sounded. Like himself, I said. Like you'd think. She wanted to know why I hadn't asked him what he was up to. I told her it had all happened so fast I hadn't had a chance, which was nearly true. I told her he'd built the thing himself. She wasn't all that impressed. “Did you find out his name, at least?” she said.

“Hank.”

“Hank? Really?”

“Why?”

“I would have thought it would be something bigger,” she said. “I think I wanted something regal.”

“What, like Leviticus?”

“Wouldn't that have been better?” She went to the sliding doors, opened and shut them.

“It certainly would have been stranger,” I said, hearing the hum pick back up again.

“Would it?” She opened the doors again, let another amount of air in. We stood there like that, not knowing, while the whole of the outside pressed in against us.

Delton ran away. She wanted to get a second tattoo on her other arm, and what Mid and Carolyn said was no, absolutely not, not while you're living under our roof, young lady, and Delton took them at their word, waited until they were both out of the house, packed up her things, and moved in with Nic.
I am not running away,
her note said.
That's not what this is. Please remain calm.
Carolyn and Mid showed it to us that evening at the house. We'd gone over to stand nearby during tragedy. The note was on Nancy Drew stationery. I was surprised Delton even knew who that was. “She ran away,” Carolyn said, folding the note back up again. She was crying. She was drinking wine.

“She didn't run away,” Mid said.

Carolyn put her head down on the kitchen table. “I can't believe she ran away.”

The crisis had brought Mid back home, at least temporarily, which I'd tried to say was a good thing. Alice wasn't having any of it. “There's nothing good going on here,” she said on the way over, and then she turned up the news. For the rest of the ride, we listened to a report on chamber music affecting or not affecting cognitive ability in skinks.

Alice sat with Carolyn. Mid and I stood in front of his giant television. Golf was on. The TV was so large that the close-ups were much bigger than life-size, which made everything feel off. “I guess you've got to give her this,” Mid said. “I didn't see this coming.”

I didn't say anything about how she'd already stolen the car and come down to the condo. I didn't say that even I'd sort of seen it coming, now that I looked at it.

Mid said, “She's too young to be moving in with a boy, probably.”

“Probably,” I said.

“It's at least too soon. It's got to be too soon.” He looked over at Alice and Carolyn like he was making sure they were still there. “Don't have kids,” he said.

“Good advice,” I said. “Timely.”

“It's a goddamned merry-go-round. Maybe if we kept them in a pen in the yard, never taught them to read or write—”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Shit, this kind of thing probably won't happen to you. You guys'll do a better job. And even if you don't, you've got a few years to get ready.”

“That helps,” I said.

On TV, a golfer took several practice swings. “We're going to have to go get her,” Mid said.

I said, “Anything you want. I'm here to help.”

He said, “What I want is for her to wipe that shit off her arm and come back home.”

“That seems sound.”

He said, “Sometimes it gets a little hard to tell.”

The one guy never did hit the ball. The coverage shifted to somebody in pink argyle pants, and then they went to a blimp shot. It was a different time of day where they were. There was a lot of green grass, green trees. Big houses. You wanted to be there instead of where you were, a place with mountains in the background instead of a place with runaway notes on the kitchen table. I did, anyway. I wanted to be in the blimp. That had to be why they put it on TV in the first place.

One of the twins came downstairs, looking grave. “Hey, Sophie,” said Alice.

“Olivia called,” Sophie said, walking into the kitchen.

“She what?” Carolyn said.

“She called. Olivia called me.”

Carolyn said, “Is she still on the phone? Is she talking to Jane?”

“She made me promise not to say where she was.”

“She's with Nic. It's in the note.”

“Oh,” said Sophie.

“Where's Jane?”

“Upstairs,” Sophie said, “in her room,” and Carolyn was up in a hurry, knocking her chair over on her way out. She took the stairs two at a time. We waited, listened. We heard her talking to Jane. Sophie cracked her knuckles and executed a slow-motion tae kwon do move. “This is called back pose,” she said, to nobody in particular. “Our instructor says it's useful for a quick strike.”

“It's very good,” Alice said.

“Thank you.” She did a kick next, held her leg out until she lost her balance, had to grab the refrigerator to keep from falling. The door swung open and two or three sodas rolled out onto the floor.

“Sophie,” Mid said.

“Sorry.” She picked up the cans. “Can I have one?”

He said, “Why not?”

“What about Jane?”

“Just make sure you actually give it to her.”

“Cookies, too?” she said.

“How about a piece of fruit?”

“Gross.” But she took four or five bananas from a bunch on the table, disappeared back into the house.

Mid got up, opened one of the cabinets, lined up a few juice glasses. “Wait until
they're
fifteen,” he said. “What a couple of vipers. If you think having
one's
bad—” He trailed off. He was talking to the dishes. He moved on to another cabinet. “I didn't know we still had these,” he said. He had a stack of oversized pasta bowls with fat purple grapes painted on the sides. “I hate these. They're about the ugliest plates I've ever seen.”

“Bowls,” Alice said. “Those are bowls. Mom gave them to us. One set to you guys, one set to us.”

“Do you still have yours?”

“No. I hated them, too.”

“Who could even eat this much pasta?” He held one out like Exhibit A, and then walked over to the pantry, started dropping the bowls one by one into the trash. The first one landed softly enough, but the second one broke on the first, and he kept going. Alice and I just watched him do it. It was hard to know what to say to a man dropping bowls in the trash. It was hard to say whether what he was doing was right or wrong. Carolyn came back down the stairs. Mid stopped, holding a bowl out in front of him.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I hate these.”

She said, “I don't understand.”

“I'm getting rid of a few things.”

“Now?”

He dropped the bowl in. He was tilting. I couldn't blame him.

“You'll wake Maggie,” Carolyn said. “And are you not going to ask if that was Olivia on the phone?”

“I already know it was.”

“You don't want to know what she said?”

He handed her the bowls he had left. “Let me take a crack at it,” he said. “She said she wasn't coming home. She said she was safe at Nic's. She said she's old enough to make her own decisions. Something along those lines?”

“She said she was scared,” Carolyn said.

“Of what?” he said.

“Of the world. She said she was scared of the world.”

“I get that,” I said, and everybody looked at me. It was not my turn to talk, and I had talked. “I do,” I said. “That makes sense to me.”

“How do you mean?” Alice said.

“How much answer do you want?” I said. “Poisonous snakes. Lupus. Monthly fees.”

“You're not helping,” Alice said.

“Is that all she said?” Mid asked Carolyn.

“No,” Carolyn said, sitting down at the table. “She said all your stuff, too.” She looked flattened out, like a paper doll. “She's not coming home, she's old, she's safe, she decides.”

“Does she want us to go get her?”

“You're not even listening to me,” she said.

“Well, this is fucking great,” said Mid. “When did it happen that we don't make the rules any more?”

“Stop shouting,” Carolyn said.

“I don't get to be a little surprised that she's telling us where she's going to live or when she's going to call?”

Carolyn said, “And where do you think she got it in her head that something like that would be OK? How about we just start right there?”

“Guys,” Alice said.

Carolyn said, “Leecy, has Walter been in jail?”

“Not yet.”

“So there we are.” She turned back to Mid. “How about you just tell us the truth this one time. You knew they were selling pot in the shop.”

“We've been through this,” he said.

“Wrong,” she said. “We get near it, but you never really tell anybody anything. So come on. You're among friends. Don't tell us that when the police showed up, you thought it was some kind of goodwill gesture. I mean, even Olivia knew, for chrissakes.”

He looked genuinely surprised. “What?”

Carolyn knew. Which meant Alice had to know. “She has friends who bought from there,” Carolyn said. “She told me a couple of weeks ago, after you moved out.”

He pushed a few breaths into his fist. “I wish you'd told me that,” he said.

“Why?”

“Does she buy from there? Is she still buying from there?”

“She said she didn't, but why?”

“They set up cameras last week,” he said. “In the back. And microphones. If she buys there, she'll be on the tape.”

Carolyn said, “What are you talking about?”

“They already set it up?” I said. I hadn't thought about Delton, either.

“You didn't say it was definitely happening,” Alice said to me.

Carolyn looked at her. “What are
you
talking about?”

“I knew,” Mid said. “OK? I totally knew. Of course I fucking knew. I just tried to hang on to being able to say I didn't
really
know.”

Carolyn was still looking at Alice. “
You
knew?”

“Walter told me about the police,” she said. “That's all.”

“What the fuck is going on here?” Carolyn said. She grabbed Mid's arm. “What have you done to us?” She pointed at Alice. “What have you done to them?”

“Nothing,” he said. “This is all going to blow over. I've got it under control.”

“Blow over? Are you shitting me? Now there are these cops—”

“Agents,” he said. “Revenue agents.”

Alice said, “I didn't know they were agents.”

“Some fucking
agents
everybody already knows about are going to set up some—some
sting
operation at Island?”

Mid said, “More or less.”

“After you and the rest of the world already got arrested? For doing nothing?”

“Almost nothing,” he said.

“And they think the kids are stupid enough to keep dealing back there after they already got caught once?”

“I think they do.”

“Forget for a second that you didn't tell me any of this, OK? How could you not tell
her
?”

“What would I have said? ‘Do take care this week, dear, when you purchase marijuana from Daddy's store?' ”

“Something like that would have been good, yes.” I kept trying to get Alice's attention, but she was staring at her hands. Carolyn said, “But what would have been easier, you colossal asshole, is if Daddy wasn't involved with any agents at all. If she didn't need to be warned off from purchasing anything from Daddy's store in the first place. Jesus shit, how did we get
here
?” She picked up the wine bottle. “And my God,” she said, walking past Alice. “
You
knew? Both of you knew? And neither of you could tell her, either? Or tell me?” She stopped in front of the sliding doors. “You know what I'll bet? I'll bet this is not your typical Wednesday-night-gather-the-family-round-the-dinner-table topic of conversation. I'll bet the Walkers down the street aren't having this conversation.” She opened the door. “But wait!” she said, spinning around. “Good news! There
are
no Walkers down the street! We're the only goddamned people in here!
Any
conversation we have is the typical conversation for this street!” She poured wine into her glass, both hands shaking. “Mid, you're a lucky man. Turns out the cops busting your own daughter because it didn't occur to you to even
have
anything occur to you is just fine around here. It is the fucking norm.” She stared him down. “You are a complete sack of shit, you know that?”

“Carolyn,” he said, but she was already outside, slamming the door behind her. She stood out on the patio, didn't move. There were lightning bugs. She kept her back to us. Eventually Mid got up, went out there with her. They were so still we couldn't tell if they were talking or not.

Alice got herself a glass of water, leaned on the sink. The little muscles in her forearms stood out like vines. “You knew she was buying?” she said.

“That night on the balcony, she told me her friends were. Or that they did, sometimes.”

“You didn't tell me.”

“She asked me not to.”

“What else haven't you told me?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm so fucking lost I have no idea. Start at the beginning. Ask me anything.”

She said, “That's a copout. Don't hide behind that.”

“He never goes into details,” I said. “The cops turn up somewhere, he talks to them, they drive off again. It's all very secret.”

“But how does that strike you as being alright?”

“I didn't say it did,” I said. “I never said that.”

“I thought you were watching him.”

“I am watching him.”

“We're not supposed to keep things from each other.”

“I'm aware.”

“Carolyn's never going to speak to me again.”

“Yes, she will.”

“Are they like FBI agents? Is that the deal?”

“It's like state FBI,” I said.

“That sounds worse than regular police,” she said. She pulled a drawer open, pushed it back closed again. “Maybe you can't work for him anymore.”

“I don't know what I'm supposed to do here. We need me to work. We need me to have something—”

“But this?” she said. “We can't live our lives like this.”

“We're not,” I said. “I never see anything. We're safe.”

“That's not safe,” she said. “That's not anything close to safe. Safe is what we had before, what you had—”