The Best American Short Stories 2013 (15 page)

They’d been close when Becca was a girl, and Bob struggled to recall when, exactly, they had drifted apart. He’d had a few busy years, with the mortgage business booming and commissions pouring in, but he’d always tried to make time for Becca, to take her to Panda Express on Saturdays for the greasy Chinese food she liked, to the store where they sold those plastic robots she collected. But then, probably around the start of junior high school, Becca had turned inward, or at least retreated from Bob. She had lately, troublingly, also turned destructive, making Sharpie squiggles and shapes—she drew pentagrams and the kind of lettering Bob remembered from heavy metal albums—on the Explorer’s leather interior; she jammed wadded, wet paper into the bathtub drain and had burned a bunch of leaves and twigs in the shower stall. Worrying little acts of vandalism that Bob had trouble fitting into any pattern of behavior he could recognize.

Minnie urged patience, describing what Becca was going through as an “ugly duckling phase.”

He pulled his eye away from the gap. This wasn’t really spying, he reasoned; he was up here working, trying to solve a problem, lay some cable.

He took another look and she was gone.

He backed away, now careful to slide his kneepads slowly so that the roof beams wouldn’t creak. This space had never been used for storage, but as he shone the light around the attic, he saw that various cable and phone companies had left their detritus behind: empty router boxes, cable spools, cellophane wrappers, and over in the corner, for some reason, an old delivery pizza box. This fast-food refuse offended him, so he crawled over and grabbed it and Frisbeed it toward the attic door. As he was about to start backing away, his light caught something in the far corner, near where the roof sloped down at a thirty-degree angle to the external wall. He struggled forward again, uncomfortable as the roof drew lower above him, and reached for the object and yanked it from where it was wedged between ceiling boards. He set the light down so that its beam aimed forward, and he held this discovery in both hands. It was a small brown clay bust, still soft, no larger than a golf ball, mounted on a Popsicle stick. It was exquisitely carved: curly hair, horns, androgynous features, villainous grin, a goatee. Some kind of satyr or devil. Written on the stick, in tiny penciled letters: “And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of the teeth.”

Bob was suddenly aware of the rushing of air past his ears. The attic felt momentarily strange, as if it were concealing something from him.

He was tempted to crush the little sculpture, but instead he laid it down so that its cheek rested on one of the beams, and he backed away.

Becca once asked her father if he felt guilty about all the people who had lost their homes. She knew what Bob did for a living, and the daily coverage of the foreclosure crisis coincided with her beginning to take an interest in the news, in the larger world around her. She asked this as if she already knew the answer; she was at the age when she was eager to confirm her suspicion that her father was eminently fallible.

Bob had told her no, he didn’t feel guilty, not at all. He said he had been making people’s dreams come true, but as soon as that platitude came out of his mouth, he regretted it, because he could see by Becca’s smug smile and nodding head that he had just incriminated himself.

“We were loaning people money, to buy houses,” Bob began again, “and these people wanted to buy the houses, of course they did. And because maybe they hadn’t been good with their money in the past, they could only get certain kinds of loans, with certain kinds of payment terms and interest rates—it’s a little complicated.”

“So you made them repay way more than they were borrowing,” Becca said.

“Well, every mortgage requires that you repay more than you borrow. And, well, no, I didn’t make them repay anything. I showed them what kind of loan they could get.” Bob was finding it difficult to defend himself while also having to oversimplify his argument so that Becca would understand. “And, well, they wanted the houses. And the houses were appreciating in value—going up—so it seemed like, why shouldn’t they borrow the money, at whatever terms, because houses only go—”

“But they didn’t go up.” Becca jumped in. “They didn’t. So they all had to leave those houses. And now they’re all, like, broke and homeless and living in meth labs.”

“Well, I don’t think they’re living in—”

“Whatever,” Becca said. “They lost their homes. Like we did.”

“Well, now, who’s they?”

“Only
they
didn’t have Gam’s old house to go live in.”

“Well, we’re lucky, but—”

“And you guys
KNEW
they couldn’t pay this money back. Because after like a month, the money they had to pay back would go up like a
THOUSAND
percent.”

“Well—”

By then Becca was gone, back to her room.

He found himself now standing in Becca’s room, next to the pile of unpacked boxes. She was at school; Minnie was at Costco. Even with most of her stuff still packed, the room was a mess of discarded clothes and scraps of partially filled notebook paper. He picked up a sheet, studied where Becca had scribbled some letters and symbols he couldn’t make out, and then let it flutter to the floor.

Should he feel guilty about glimpsing his daughter from the crawlspace or spending this time in her room without her? He was already worried at what he might see or find. The parental mind reeled at the possibilities. The small glimpses he’d had of her were already confusing enough.

His elbow had swollen up to the size of a grapefruit and Bob couldn’t get over how alien it looked, as if someone else’s joint had ended up on his arm. It was sore and the two red fang marks had emanated disconcerting red ripples. Bob worked his arm open and closed and found his movement restricted so that he couldn’t even clench his upper arm into a muscle. He iced it and then applied some antihistamine cream, but that wasn’t offering much relief.

He didn’t remember walking back to the living room, but he discovered that a pile of mail had finally been pushed through the door slot. There were two plain white envelopes with the State of California seal on them, each containing an identical subpoena to appear in court to answer questions regarding his old firm’s policy of nondisclosure during the lending process.

He sat down on the sofa, a masonry bit in the fully charged power drill in his hand, and looked outside at the pomegranate tree that was now ripe and bearing an abundance of red fruit. He hadn’t told anyone that he could see his daughter’s room from up in the attic, or what he had found up there, or the scripture verse. He had his reasons for keeping quiet: he didn’t want to creep out his daughter, he didn’t want to frighten his family. Minnie seemed busy enough, ferrying Becca to school and trying to fashion a little charm from their limited budget. And Becca, who had returned from her first day of school with a one-word description—
SUCKS
—she was struggling to adjust.

Bob liked to see his memory as a collection of index cards with names and dates on them, but the names and dates were hazy and growing hazier. But now, as he was trying to settle into Gam’s old house, he felt memories seeping in. He had been busy for so many years, selling those loans, that now, now that he had time—the subpoena had also jogged his memory—he was finally able to think back on that period and was uncomfortable with some of the details he recalled. It had been so easy; nobody seemed very concerned about the terms, just worried about the monthlies. As long as the next month’s payment was affordable, they signed.

Then he flashed on those Wagonseller kids, the two of them bowed down in prayer right out there beneath that pomegranate tree, blond heads shining in the sunlight, their lips moving silently.

For the first time, he found himself reluctant to head back up to the crawlspace, but the job needed to be done.

He was up there again, drilling into a corner of the chimney brick, the flashlight beam hitting the spot where the bit was kicking up red dust. He bent down and blew into the hole, pushing a finger into the heat caused by the friction, and then resumed drilling. When he had punched through and into the wood, he replaced the masonry bit with a longer wood bit, but before resuming his drilling, he shone the flashlight around the crawlspace, the yellow beam sliding over the orderly descent of the shingles, the reddish brown of their undersides. In the corner where he had found the horned man, the sweeping glow passed over a white pizza box. Confused, he quickly swung his flashlight back to where he had tossed the box yesterday and found it wasn’t there—of course it wasn’t; he had taken that down to the recycling bin, hadn’t he? Was it possible there had been two pizza boxes and he had tossed only one? He crawled over, his swollen arm making his progress slow, and gathered this box and tossed it behind him. There was the horned man, on the side of its face, where he had left it.

He heard Becca shouting from below. “
OHMYGOD
. What
IS THIS
?”

Becca had finally begun to unpack her boxes and was putting her clothes away in a closet with slatted doors. There, in the back of the closet, where a six-by-two-foot plank painted white held a half-dozen screw-in clothes hooks, was another horned man, in the same soft clay, mounted on another stick with runic lettering: “Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: As he has caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.”

She was pointing at it the way a frightened housewife would point to a mouse. “LOOK AT THAT!”

Bob took the totem by the stick and inspected it. The work of the same hand.

He drove himself to testify at the law firm in Century City. An attorney from the state representatives’ office was there, as was an attorney from the firm that had bought out the remnants of his old firm. While Bob was waiting in a brown leather chair with wooden arms, he saw one of his old coworkers departing. They did not acknowledge each other. When Bob’s turn came, he spoke honestly, recalled as best he could his former pitch, patter, and close. But when it came to specific loans and terms, he struggled. There had been so many mortgages, and even when he was shown the loan applications, the small print with circumlocutory explanations about adjustments, penalties, resets, and readjustments, the hundreds of pages of forms that clients hurriedly signed on closing day. He flipped through the sheafs of contracts, dutifully read aloud those portions he was told to, and then answered as best he could, rubbing his throbbing elbow as he spoke. There were hundreds, thousands of such agreements in legal-file boxes all around the conference room. All of them homes, probably lost now.

Mostly the lawyers talked among themselves, occasionally asking Bob for clarification of a term or if he recalled anything about a specific loan. He shook his head. He couldn’t remember anything, but he was sorry. He repeated that, as if his apology might make it okay.

The doctor agreed to see him for half her usual fee; he had delayed as long as he could since he no longer had health insurance. His muscles and joints in both arms were aching, his range of motion on the bitten arm had decreased to the point where he couldn’t cock his elbow at a right angle, and the skin around the swollen area was numb. She asked when it happened, and where, and he explained, remembering, as he did so, that first day he had discovered he could watch his daughter. He didn’t tell the doctor about that.

She prescribed steroids and a strong antibiotic; he would have to pay out of pocket for the medications at
CVS
.

The old house was going to be fine. It was smaller than the mansion they had left behind, but after those first hard weeks of shaking down—all that time in the crawlspace—it had begun to seem like a decent, functional machine for living, all the house they needed.

He had finally succeeded in dropping that cable through to the living room, set it with carpet tacks, backed out of the crawlspace, and then pulled the access panel shut behind him.

His wife had been panicked by the horned men, speculating the house was cursed: Bob immediately mentioned the Wagonsellers. They had been a strange family; the father had even, sort of, implied revenge. Maybe this was a born-again curse, Christian voodoo.

They condemned the Wagonsellers, wondered whether they should call the police, press charges, or file some sort of complaint. What kind of people would do something like this? Bob listened as Minnie unloaded her concerns before pointing out that, really, they couldn’t prove anything and was it, technically, illegal to leave little clay carvings behind? He didn’t seem as spooked as his wife.

Bob never told Minnie, or Becca, that while he was up there in the attic, he had inadvertently spied on his daughter in her room. He planned to go back up there just once more. He had with him some spackle and a palette knife, and he slithered along the boards, his elbow still sore—it would ache the rest of his days—to the gap above his daughter’s room. He told himself he was going to seal the cracks around the
HVAC
duct and the hole near the fixture, to make it so he could no longer watch his daughter. This would be the final glimpse, he reassured himself.

In hindsight, the tumult of this period, the little change o’ life, all the changes in their lives, would seem almost exciting. Bob would wonder how he ever had the energy for all of this, the foreclosing, the moving, the stringing of cable. He would take a job as a loan officer at the local branch of a national bank; Minnie would soon be back at work herself, doing the books part-time for an interior decorating firm. The family would never again have the means that it had during the great mortgage boom, those years of feeling wealthy, of being flush consumers caught in the profligate mainstream, and Bob would wonder at that, at how he might regain that feeling.

In the late evening, he would walk out into the front garden, to the dry, yellowed grass where the Wagonseller twins had been praying the day he moved in, and from that spot reach up—the muscles around his elbow would never again allow his arm to reach full extension—and pluck a pomegranate, which he would split with his bare hands and then bite into its flesh and seed, sucking the red juice out and shaking at its bitterness.