Rundown (15 page)

Byron accepted the peanut and then had to negotiate his cage, all the way down to his perch, without dropping it from his hooked beak. He clambered, inch by inch, offering a muttering, pleased discourse with me and with the other birds. And maybe with the peanut, too, telling the goober how tasty it looked. At last he gripped the peanut in one foot and unhusked it with his beak, his pupils dilating wildly, vibrant with pleasure.

I fed them all, made sure dishes were overflowing with seed, cleaned out the cages.

I waved good-bye to Mr. Da Gama, who was on the phone and could only give me a military-style salute in farewell.

I went home.

I watched the Discovery Channel in my bedroom. The bones of a mammoth were discovered by dam builders. A jazz pianist looked back on his forty-year career. Hummingbirds migrated from Oregon to Mexico, using the same landmarks used by human pilots, Mt. Shasta, San Francisco Bay. I propped myself on pillows but made no attempt to sleep, riding out the night with the TV remote in my hand, until nearly three in the morning.

The street outside was still.

Sometimes the quietest sounds carry best. I could hear the subtle open-and-shut of cupboards, the faraway shuffling, all but inaudible.

He was in the kitchen, at the breakfast counter with a bowl in front of him and a large spoon.

He tucked his head when he saw me, with a hand-in-the-cookie jar grin, and said, “Bernice made her special ice cream. I'm sorry you weren't feeling well.”

My reflection flowed across the chrome toaster, restaurant quality, enough slots for ten slices of toast at once.

“Your mom and I couldn't put a dent in it,” Dad was saying. “I just couldn't resist, lying there, knowing it was in the fridge.”

Mom had spend a half hour on the phone before supper with Detective Margate, Mom wandering from room to room with the portable telephone. She kept agreeing, saying, “Yes, I see,” sounding gradually more and more fatigued.

In the end all my mother had said to me was, “Jennifer, at least I'll be there with you,” in one of those dramatically weary tones she uses to silence argument. Mother would have killed before she let Cass go through an ordeal with the police.

I helped myself to the big tub in the freezer, a cardboard container big enough to hold a human head, packed with ivory billows of vanilla ice cream. I topped it with chocolate syrup and sprinkled salted peanuts on it, as Dad looked on approvingly. The syrup was cold and poured out thick, oozing out of the Hershey's can, slowly descending to the ice cream.

“That's why a very wise scientist invented the microwave,” said Dad, hunched on his stool. “It wasn't just so you could reheat a whole cup of coffee in ten seconds.”

I could hear Cass in my mind, telling me to go ahead and ask. She would know: I didn't have the nerve.

Chapter 31

Pots hung from hooks, casting vague shadows over the sink, the yellow Dualit toaster, the jars of dried herbs. The oversize fridge fell silent—a sound I was aware of as soon as it stopped.

The opening question is very important. It sets the tone every other question builds on. “You've been busy in L.A.,” I said.

Dad lifted his shoulder, let it fall, a gesture I use all the time. “I do the same thing over and over. Standing under these hot TV lights. I say, ‘Polenta is corn meal cooked on the stove, stirred lovingly with a wooden spoon.' And then I do it again. I say, ‘with a
wooden
spoon', and next time I say, ‘stirred
lovingly
.' The same words, a different emphasis.”

The ice cream made my teeth ache. I usually love it. I sat at the kitchen table, looking over at my father. We were two diners in a spacious late-night coffee shop.

“And pretty soon the words are nonsense syllables,” he continued. “I'm getting my picture taken today,” he said. “I'm going to look awful. I should be upstairs asleep, or lying quiet with ice cubes on my eyes.”

“Why do you need another picture of your face?”

“For full-page ads, me holding the new Ultra-Lo Ranch Dressing.”

“Reschedule the photo session,” I suggested.

“Thanks, Jenny. A lot. You're telling me I look like doggy-doo.”

He looked like a tired man eating ice cream in his bathrobe. Although he said he had leased a convertible in L.A., he didn't have much of a tan.

“Cass told me something,” I said. I was wearing a bathrobe I rarely put on, a rose satin wraparound with Belgian lace frills, big pockets. It was the sort of thing you'd wear if you had a silver cigarette case and called your makeup space a boudoir.

I had begun, and I couldn't unsay it.

But when I didn't continue immediately, Dad said, dryly, “Well, that's unusual—Cass having something to talk about.” Unlike Mom, Dad sometimes caught the expression in Cass's eyes when she was charming someone on the phone, accepting yet another compliment.

“It was about how things were going for you down in L.A.”

He shoveled ice cream into his mouth.

“She mentioned you and Maggie,” I said.

Dad made a little, noncommittal “Mmm?”

“Cass said you and Maggie are having an affair.”

The spoon stopped midway to his mouth. His hand felt for a napkin, found it, and he wiped his lips.

“Cass said this?”

“Yes,” I said.

He said, “She was joking.”

“She threatened to tell Mom.”

He ran a thumb over his eyebrows. He was quiet for a long time.

“I keep hoping we'll see improvement,” he said at last. “As Cass matures. But I'm still continually surprised.”

Ice cream is terrible for the human voice, cools the vocal cords and coats them with milk phlegm. I cleared my throat, took my time, and asked, “Are you saying that it's not true?”

Dad had been staring at his empty spoon, like someone trying to make out his reflection. He peered at me. “You don't believe it!”

My voice was barely above a whisper, so I stopped trying to talk.

“This is very disturbing,” he said. “Very troubling.” He acted the way people do when they get bad news, expressing their surprise, not absorbing it.

I shifted my fingers slightly on the counter.

“Cass saying it is one thing,” he said. “But, Jennifer, the thought of you believing it—”

The corner of the kitchen embraced a large brick fireplace with pothooks and a stack of pristine firewood. The fireplace had been obsolete when the house was built, but it radiated imaginary warmth. Dad got off his stool and came around the counter toward me, like a compact bruin in his dark blue bathrobe. Something about me stopped him, and he turned toward the fireplace, moving at half speed, his new leather slippers sticking very slightly to the floor with each step.

He spoke as though to the uncharred oakwood. “Cassandra said—what were her words, exactly?”

“That's what she said.”

“What, exactly?” he asked impatiently

I couldn't bring myself to say it again.

“It's a threat, isn't it? She's going to tell Elizabeth this story.”

I said, “Cass won't tell her.”

“Why not?” He came back to the breakfast counter and put his hands flat on the surface. “What's going to keep Cassandra from saying anything that crawls into her head?”

“I gave in.”

“You ‘gave in'—and agreed to what?”

“I agreed that I wouldn't change my mind about being maid of honor.”

“This is how you and your sister talk? How you plan the wedding?” He picked up his bowl and padded across the kitchen to the stainless steel vault of the kitchen sink. He ran water into the bowl longer than he had to.

Mom says you don't have to answer every question, pick and choose.

“Do you know what I found the other night,” he said, “when I was putting my Dickens up on the bookshelves? I found one of your mother's tape cassettes, from music school. And you know what I did?” This was a little unusual for my father, advancing question by question. “I put on a pair of earphones and listened to her tear Carmen to pieces. Glorious singing. A beautiful voice.”

He wasn't saying it never happened.

“I used earphones, because you know how your mother would react if she heard the sound of her singing.”

He was not calling it a lie.

“She'd tell me to please turn it off,” he said. “She'd be embarrassed. This beautiful sound she could make—and she was embarrassed even years ago. Always. Even when I first heard her in that apartment I rented downstairs from her on Parker Street. And went up to her door with a plate of pound cake I had just baked.”

He dried his hands and folded the towel, and he was preparing himself as he created a neat square of terry cloth, getting ready.

“It's not true, Jennifer,” he said. “Cass was telling a lie.”

The delay in making a denial. The show of exasperated weariness, the patient overemphasis, the way he spaced out the words. I weighed the sound of his voice, his choice of words. He steadied his gaze, forced it, calm, sincere.

I wasn't sure I could believe him.

Chapter 32

I tiptoed along the hall, letting the bathroom door breathe open. But the robe made a flouncy rustle, and I went slowly, my arms wrapped around my sides, approaching the medicine cabinet like someone who wasn't really there.

Dad had to make a decision, whether to go back to bed or stay up and catch an earlier flight. He had made coffee, poured the shiny French roast beans into the electric grinder, and as I left the kitchen he said, “I'll call you.”

He made me respond to him, saying, “Jennifer, I'll give you a call,” until I nodded: Message received.

The pill vials were all childproof. I had to press down on each lid and turn, dumping the contents into my pockets. The label on these pills was new, refills remaining, two, Dr. Rigby's old pill containers lined up like chess pieces in an old sterile gauze box.

I emptied all the pills I could find, each plastic cylinder, into my elegant-courtesan dressing gown. When my pockets bulged, the pills made a chalky, calcium grind with each step, like crushed bone, and the satin slithered and whispered all the way to my bedroom.

I placed the voice-activated tape recorder on the edge of my desk.

A red light comes on when you make a sound. Picking up the recorder and moving it to the nightstand, where it is less likely to tumble, made the light come on just as surely as my voice.

I told them where I would be, where I knew brush and trees provided a secluded location. I wanted to be close to where people came and went, on the margin, but not so far away no one would ever find what was left.

I puzzled over what to wear. I rolled on some scentless Ban. I don't approve of shaving my legs, but I do it anyway, with a Phillips electric. I took time, up and down my legs with the twin rotary head, the batteries starting to weaken. A backpack would be cumbersome, and even the sportiest purse was out of the question. Cass had given me a fanny pack one Christmas, Italian leather, but I never felt right running down the street with a bulge full of Kleenex and coins herniating out of my back. I think that was why Cass gave it to me, a practical, casual item Cass herself was too smart to wear.

So I slipped into running pants with deep zipper pockets, and a soft cotton sash between loops. The pockets bulged when I emptied all the pills into them and zipped them up, so I put on an oversize silk jacket over my Cal sweatshirt with the cutoff sleeves. It was a remnant of my roomy wardrobe, when everything I bought was big enough for a heavyweight wrestler. I tucked my hair up under a watch cap, but it looked too mean-streets for this dawn. I shook out my hair, brushed it, and held it with a blue plastic clasp.

I didn't forget a little paper money, held together with a large pink plastic paper clip. I laced on my shoes, and then found myself holding the little Sony recorder.

The recorder kept turning off and on every time I tapped my fingernails on the desk or made the noise Dad makes, a throat-clearing cough, the noise an animal might make, letting the other elk know where he is. I set the tape recorder to manual and switched it on.

I was going to tell everything, but I saw my parents in my mind, unable to comprehend what they were hearing. I saw Quinn when he heard the truth, stunned, bitter, knowing I had deceived everyone I knew.

And Cass—playing the tape over and over again in secret, trying to keep Danny from finding out what her sister was really like.

I couldn't begin to say the words.

I made the bed, something one of Bernice's helpers would not have to do, and tucked the minicassette under the pillowcase, where I left it barely visible, a plastic gleam surrounded by mercerized cotton.

I posed myself from place to place in the room, the way Mom does.

By now I was nervous.

Birds were in the trees, claiming their territory, letting every other bird know a twig on Planet Earth was fully occupied. It's a happy sound even when you know how hungry they are, after a night without feeding.

You hear about yogis, adept at meditation, how they sit for hours letting nothingness console their soul, fill them up. It's impossible, you think. No one can just empty themselves and sit in silence. But that is what I did. I sat on the edge of the bed until sun filled the pleated curtains.

Dad's Lincoln was already purring down the driveway on his way out when I peeked. He ran the windshield wipers, approaching the gate. Sometimes a car looks like a living beast, hesitating, forging ahead.

I tucked the cassette with its message of where they could find me into the toe of one of the satin sling-backs, my maid-of-honor shoes.

Chapter 33

My mother's shower door makes a muted growl in its metal track, another domestic sound I would never get used to.

She takes two kinds of showers, a quick rinse and dry and long, muscle kneading interludes. I hurried. I had to pause on the front steps to tighten my laces. My hands had been numb, and I had not pulled the laces tight the first time. Bernice's car waited as the front gate creaked open on her way to work, her headlights on even though it was full daylight now.