Kids These Days (19 page)

“And that's gone,” I said. “Remember? So, not so safe, after all.”

“Is this what it's going to be like, though?”

I said, “I have no idea. Maybe it is. Maybe for now.”

“I just wish somebody could tell me,” she said.

“You,” I said. “Line up the people to explain it to me, OK? Schedule somebody every half an hour. Tell them to bring visual aids.”

“Don't start in on me. I can only deal with one gaping pit of quicksand at a time.” She walked into the living room, vanished around a corner. “Oh, shit,” she said.

“What?”

“In here.” She sounded exhausted. “Sophie and Jane.”

I followed her in. The twins were at the top of the stairs. “Hey,” they said.

“Hey,” said Alice.

“We heard everything,” Sophie said. “In case you were wondering.”

Jane said, “We always do.”

“That's fine,” Alice said, looking at me. I blinked back at her, deaf and dumb. We needed semaphore flags. Lamps. One if by sea, that kind of thing. She looked up at the girls. “So,” she said. She smoothed her hands on her legs. The twins held their position. “Is there anything you want to talk about?”

“Are Mom and Dad still fighting?” Jane asked.

Out on the pool deck, Mid had an arm around Carolyn. Her head was on his shoulder. “It doesn't look like it,” Alice said. “Though I don't know why not.”

“OK,” they said, and got up, took off down the hall to somebody's room. A door shut.

“Is that all you needed?” Alice called, but there was no answer. Music came on, something with a lot of noise in it. I wondered if we should be hanging soundproofing in the baby's room instead of tinfoil. Or if maybe it wouldn't matter—maybe we wouldn't even have music twelve years from now. Maybe the ocean would have long since come up and grabbed the buildings, taken us all, swept the sand back clean. Alice sat down on the bottom step. “We're going to have to do something,” she said. “We have to think of something. I hate this.”

I said, “You wouldn't go get her?”

“Olivia? I'd absolutely go get her. I'd go get her right now. That's not what I meant at all.” She stared up into the stairwell, at a chandelier the size of a small car. “What I meant was, I don't know what the hell we do next.”

What the hell we did next was stand in the kitchen while Mid made calls until he tracked down the kid who owned the little beach house, Robbie, who knew Nic, knew where he lived. “How could it be easier to get there by water?” Mid said into the phone.

“Get where?” Carolyn said.

Mid said, “I do know somebody who has one.”

“Has one what?” said Carolyn.

Mid put his hand over the mouthpiece. “A boat,” he said. “Wait a minute.” They'd come to some kind of agreement outside, who knew why or how. Mid listened a minute. “I can do that,” he said. “That'll be fine.” He checked his watch. “Half an hour, maybe a little longer. That good by you?” He waited. Then he said, “Thanks, man, OK? I appreciate it.” He hung up, put the phone on the table. He said, “Well, I guess we're going to get her.”

I said, “In a boat?”

“He's got a house on a spur creek off the Matanzas,” he said. “Nic does. Robbie says the road can be bad. Says it's half again as easy if we go by water.”

“You're going to go get our daughter in a boat,” Carolyn said. “On the advice of a highschooler.”

“Robbie's in college,” Mid said. “They all are. I need to call Hurley.”

“I hate boats,” she said.

Mid said, “I know you do.”

“I'll go,” I said.

Alice said, “You will?”

“I should be there,” Carolyn said.

“You can go if you want to,” Mid said.

“We could all go,” Alice said.

“Except somebody has to stay here,” said Carolyn. “With the kids. Jesus. I should be here, I should be there—” Carolyn had the telephone now, was pressing numbers, calling nobody. This I did not want. Not this part. Alice rubbed her shoulders. “I'm sorry,” Carolyn said.

Alice told her she didn't have to apologize for anything. Upstairs there was a massive thump. The dishes rattled in their cupboards.

“We're OK,” one of the twins yelled down.

Mid went to the stairs. “No injuries,” he said, whisper-yelling. “Don't wake Maggie up.”

“OK,” they said, though even from that distance, you could tell they didn't mean it.

Mid came back in, took the phone from Carolyn. He said, “Whoever's going, we should get ready.”

I looked to Alice. Again the secret messages I could not quite decode. “Go ahead,” she said.

I said, “You're sure?”

She nodded. “We hate boats.”

I said, “You don't—”

“Go,” she said. “Call when you get there so you can tell us everything's OK.”

I kissed her. Mid reached for Carolyn, who put her head on the table, and he dropped his hand down on her neck like he was praying for her, almost.

“Are they going to take the house?” she said, into her arm.

“I don't know,” he said. “They might.”

“Just bring her back. I can't even talk about the rest of it right now.”

“I will,” he said.

“Maybe you should call the Coast Guard.”

He said, “I don't think this is in their jurisdiction.”

She picked her head up. “Don't die,” she said. “Don't get lost at sea.”

“I won't,” he said.

“Don't come back with a goddamn tattoo, either.”

“This can't be happening,” Alice said.

“See?” Carolyn said. “That's how I feel all the time. That's how I've felt for years.” Then she told us to go, and Alice told us to be careful. Mid called Hurley, detailed the situation, asked about his boat. It was clear from our end that Hurley, without a lot of pushing, was agreeing to take us wherever we needed to go. Mid hung up. I kissed Alice one more time, wanting it to mean, Don't worry, this kind of thing happens all the time
,
but I knew that was a lie, and she did, too.

For the first time, the Camaro felt right—like a yellow Camaro was what was required for a trip like this. Or a purple one. The car wanted for a name, like Rhiannon or Jolene. We rode along with the windows down and the wet salt air blowing in all around us and we needed a shotgun, needed cans of beer, a temperamental CB, a half-blind dog. Instead, we stopped at a gas station for Gatorade. I sat in the car, head singing, watching Mid wait in line inside. The summer before you were born, I thought, Daddy went on a riverboat adventure to save your cousin from herself. She was not yet allowed to make mistakes, so we went to get her so we could keep on making them for her. Mid came back with six or eight bottles in a plastic sack. “Hope you like green,” he said.

He drove us a few miles, neither of us talking. He drank one of the Gatorades all the way down and tossed the empty in the back. He turned the radio off. He said, “Look. I'd like to tell you something.”

He was going to say he was the Lindbergh Baby. That he was mounting a Senate run. That he had another family in another state.

He said, “This isn't what I had in mind when we brought you guys down.”

“It's no problem,” I said.

“Not just tonight. The whole thing. I had something else pictured. Something calmer. Fewer police, fewer wayward children, you know?”

“Isn't this how it goes with children?” I said.

He said, “How do you mean?”

The lights went by on the hotels and condos, their oranges not quite enough to do the job, like whoever'd hung them hadn't wanted things all the way lit up. I said, “Won't it pretty much be like this for the next twenty years?”

“I don't know about twenty,” he said. “I know about fifteen.”

“Has it been like this for fifteen?”

“More or less,” he said. “Minus the cops.”

“But the cops don't count, right? That's not her.”

“Fuck me, Walter, if she's on that tape—if you think they've got me by the balls now, just wait.”

“I try not to think about what they've got you by,” I said.

“This is not what you expect,” he said. “Let me just set that out there right now. When they pull the kid out, after they get her all polished up and get the little hat on her, you do not expect that fifteen years down the road you'll find yourself caught up in some motherfucking crime spree just to get ready enough to send her off to college.” He was driving a little faster. “And I know I brought it on myself. You should hear Carolyn. I get it, alright? Mea culpa and all that.”

I could feel a new desperation edging in, or another one. A certainty about disaster. “What are we talking about here?” I said.

“All I'm trying to do is make it so we can have a fucking life. That's all. It's not like I'm selling pistols to rapists. I'm not poaching endangered lemurs. So maybe I forgot to dot some i's. Or maybe I did it on purpose. Maybe I owe Uncle Sam some scratch. I'll pay it, OK? I'll pay the whole goddamned thing. I'll pay everybody's bill.”

He pushed us under a yellow light. I found myself looking for police cars. “Should we stop?” I said. “Take a minute or something? Deep breaths?”

“All I'm trying to say is you don't see something like this headed your way.”

“I believe you,” I said.

He reached out his window to work the mirror around. “Probably you don't need me yelling at you about my shit.”

“You're OK,” I told him, trying to calm him back down. Because that's what I would have wanted if it was my kid we were questing after. Calm.

He said, “You'll make a champion father, by the way.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I'm serious. I can smell it all over you.”

All I could really see right then was our kid, the one we'd have to bring home, thirty hours old and arranged in one of those glass brownie pans at the hospital, sporting a pink watchcap and planning already to move in with her boyfriend. I pulled on the rumble bar up in the ceiling. Changing table. Car seat. Evenings full of word problems, of Train A leaving the station in time to roar by Train B at a point as yet undetermined. Veronica wears woolen scarves and speaks Portuguese, but can't sit next to Michelle, who eats only fish. The whole of it a flip book, a shoebox diorama. I watched our headlights pick up reflectors embedded in the road.

“I didn't mean to go off the reservation like that,” Mid said.

“Are you alright?” I said.

“Mainly.” He took both hands off the steering wheel, then took hold of it again. “Thank you for coming with me,” he said.

“It was the least I could do,” I said.

“How about you? You hanging in there OK?”

“Sure I am,” I said, and we kept pushing south, two liars in a ridiculous car.

Robbie was high. Very. We stood in his bombed-out kitchen, watching him roll a couple of extra joints for the road. “You guys want any of this?” he said, and I couldn't help but wonder where he'd bought it.