The Garden of Lost and Found (17 page)

“How does it feel to be a hero?”

And I thought: how did it feel? I looked down at the magazine, tried to summon up the feeling of the river, of that man—Thomas Muirland was his name—his body against mine, but all that came was a tingle in my lips, a faint reminder of his stubbled cheek. I tried to remember what it had felt like watching the deer from behind a tree because that seemed part of it too, and I tried to remember what it had felt like eating lunch with Knute, but all I remembered was red fur and blue eyes, which is another way of saying I didn’t remember anything real at all. I looked down at Knute’s article, searching for the end of the sentence I’d just read, but all I saw was “I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man.” The sentence was in quotation marks, as if I’d said it, and I decided to try it on for size. I said:

“I was raised to believe in the brotherhood of man.”

Claudia shrugged. “Whatever.” She tried to open her purse’s tiny clasp with the hand that held her shoes, couldn’t. “Hold these?”

She took a step toward me, I took a step toward her; there was still a step between us. Claudia looked at me.

“Don’t worry, I just want a cigarette, brotherman.”

I took the second step and took her shoes from her. They seemed impossibly light and flimsy, and I couldn’t imagine how they’d held up a whole woman. But the tiny platforms, pillared and sloped like miniature slides, were still warm from Claudia’s soles, still smelled of feet.

I jumped back when I felt Claudia’s hand on my head. Claudia was looking at my hair but her eyes were only half focused.

“Nappy.” Then: “I guess white folks call it shaggy. You could use a haircut, Mr. Ramsay.”

She let her hand rest on my scraggly skull a moment longer, then took it off to light her cigarette. The lighter flicked and she inhaled deeply, held the smoke in with closed eyes.

“That’s the ticket,” she said after she finally exhaled. But as soon as the words and the smoke were out of her mouth confusion clouded her face. She looked down at the cigarette pinched between the tips of her thumb and middle finger—Lily Windglass, who preferred the plierslike clamp of extended middle and index fingers, used to say only fags and foreigners smoked that way—then she looked around the garden until her eyes ended up on me. “Do you want this?”

“Um, I don’t smoke?” I said, although I was thinking that if she asked me too I just might.

Claudia looked around again. “Oh well.” She dropped the cigarette on the ground. A bare foot emerged from beneath her dress to stamp it out and I lunged forward.

“Careful!” I said, catching her waist with my arm. Claudia
oof
ed in my face, a jet of residual smoke and alcohol and something else, something sweet, minty, and I remembered that she was high as we tumbled to the ground.

The cigarette smoked silently in the grass.

Claudia propped herself on her elbows, gave me a sloppy grin.

“What is it with you, a compulsion?”

“What’s what?”

“The hero thing. ‘Saving people.’” Like Knute, Claudia made quotation marks with her fingers, but because her elbows were on the ground her fingers seatbelted her waist. “Anyway, thanks. I dated a guy who was into the whole cigarette thing, and believe me, it was no fun.” She was brushing herself off when she noticed the look on my face. “Um, I was joking? Hello?
Irony?
”

I stood up, put the cigarette out with the sole of Johnson Montgomery Croft’s sandal and picked up the butt. Lacking anything else I ripped a page from the magazine and folded the crushed cylinder inside it, and as I smoothed creases into Knute’s words I found myself thinking of his hand—of his finger, dipping into the pocket over his heart. “Trying to quit?”

Claudia’d sat up but showed no inclination to stand, instead stared down at the taut plain of dress pulled tight across her thighs.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What are you, pregnant?”

The look Claudia flashed me was filled with such fury and fear that I crunched up the folded page in my hand.

“Didn’t your momma teach you to mind your own business?”

“My ‘momma’ abandoned me when I was a year old,” I shot back. “For all of ‘this.’” In lieu of quotation marks I threw the crumpled page in the direction of the shop.

With a little laugh Claudia attempted to compose herself.

“Well then,” she said, and held up a hand to me, palm down, wrist relaxed, as if to be kissed. “I’m Claudia.”

I ignored her hand. “I know that.”

“I’m Claudia
MacTeer
.”

I hesitated, then decided to play along. “That I didn’t know.” I took her hand, but instead of kissing it I hauled her to her feet.

Claudia
whoop
ed as she came up, caught on to me to keep from toppling in the other direction. Her giggle was more of a snigger, at her own intoxication I think, and, indecorously, she pulled her dress out of the crack of her ass, then stepped back and curtseyed as if we were meeting at a cotillion.

“And you are?”

I retrieved the magazine from the ground and held its surreal headline beside my face. “I’m the man who saves people.”

And suddenly we were friends. Or almost friends. As good as friends. I don’t know how else to put it. The choreography of introduction had been managed, or mangled, and Claudia began walking deeper into the garden with the steady stride—well, not so steady actually—of someone who expects to be followed. Her dress had inchwormed up her body, and as she smoothed it down her hips she called back,

“Stop staring at my ass.”

“How do you know I’m staring at your ass?”

“Because,” Claudia said, and turned back to me. “Boys always stare at my ass.”

I put my hand to my chest, fingers splayed. “Even boys like me?”

Claudia squinted, then put a like hand to her chest and said, “Especially boys like you.” A complicated series of expressions distorted her face. “Who would’ve figured? Ginny’s son a fag. I guess this is one case where no one can blame the mother. Oh, I don’t mind,” she said as if I’d protested. She turned and continued into the garden. “Just don’t go gettin’ all black girl on me,
okay
?”

A dozen pitchy trunks made a miniature pine forest, then all at once ended in a tiny clearing. Eight mulberries marked the clearing’s perimeter: you could see someone had spent years espaliering the mulberries into a bower, ragged-edged now, but filled with green-gold light and the sound of birds and the faint mechanical hum of air conditioning in the adjacent buildings.

“Look,” Claudia said. She pried open the tentacles of wisteria that formed the bower’s misshapen arched entrance. Within the vine-tree’s depths I could see fragments of trellis, flecks of white paint still clinging to broken lath like barnacles. “We used to play here when we were kids. Me and Ellis and Parker.”

“Your…brothers?”

Claudia looked me full in the face, and in a voice that was more warning than invitation she said, “They were.” Then she turned back to the bower. “Oh look!” she said again, the warning gone, her voice all childish glee.

It took me a moment to make it out. A table, three chairs. They were made of rusted metal and were nearly invisible beneath—inside—a mound of vines in the center of the tiny clearing.

“I guess it’s been a while since you were kids.”

“It’s been a while since they were alive.” Claudia’s eyes darted to the magazine in my hand. “Families, huh?”

I wasn’t sure if she was referring to hers or mine. “I wouldn’t know.”

But Claudia was already heading to the far side of the mound of vines. She attempted to pull out a chair, and I knew from the way she’d circumnavigated the table that this had been her chair. It only moved a few inches, and Claudia pushed as much vine off it as she could and plopped down. She sat there as if exhausted, or defeated. Her back slumped, her head hung, the soft flesh under her jaw pushed up into a double chin. “My God,” she said without looking at me. “I am too old for this game.”

I don’t know why but I took that as license, and went to the chair across from hers. The magazine, nearly weightless, floated on a hammock of leaves and vine, but my sharp elbows poked right down to the table’s rough metal weave. It was uncomfortable, yet also comforting. It felt good to be more substantial than the stories Knute had made up about me.

Claudia started a little when I sat down, and I saw that her fingers were pressed into the soft little mound of her stomach. I noticed the lines around her bright wet eyes, the gray strands scattered through the scalloped skullcap of her hair.

“Who was it?” She raised the almost-firm flesh of her arms above her head in a modern dance pose. “Mythology. Turned into a tree.”

“Daphne,” I said. “Among others.”

“Right. Why was she—”

“To protect her chastity.”

Claudia’s not-quite-plump arms fell to her lap. “I guess it’s too late for me,” she giggled, reaching across the table and turning the magazine toward her. “So. What questions do you think your Kay would have if he were here?”

“Kay?”

Claudia tapped the magazine, and for the first time I noticed the cover story’s byline: “THE MAN WHO SAVES PEOPLE, by K. Lingon.”

“Not exactly a judicious use of the leading initial.” Claudia looked back at me. “So? I’m sure you must be full of questions.”

I thought, given the circumstances, that it should be Claudia who was full of questions—it was my picture on the cover of
New York
magazine, after all, not hers—but she only stared at me with a wide-open smile, slightly less opened eyes.

“What’re you on anyway?”

Claudia giggled and made the sign for a toke.

“Weren’t you worried about the baby?”

“Don’t preach at me, boy,” Claudia frowned. “I get enough of that from my father and her in there.” Then, again, she tried to draw me out. Draw me in rather, to her world, her past, rather than mine. “I believe the expression,” she said, waving her shoeless feet in the air, “is barefoot ‘n’ pregnant.”

“Who was that man in there?”

“Who was—oh. You mean Sonny.”

“Sonny Dinadio.”

“I haven’t seen Sonny for years. Not since—oh!” She looked me in the eye with what I thought was a knowing expression. “Not since Ginny was around.”

I waited for her to continue, but she looked down at the polished tops of her toenails—midnight blue, not yet chipped—and then she folded over at the waist until her stomach rested on her thighs and her breasts ballooned over her knees. A finger snaked down and picked at something on one toe, and when she finished the polish was chipped.

All the sudden she turned to me. “Can I tell you something?” She was still bent over, bent way over, her skin stretched tight as canvas and her lips pulled apart by a line of tautness that pulleyed around her hip joint all the way to her feet.

“Only if it’s about Sonny Dinadio.”

At my words Claudia sat up and turned the full light of her face toward me, as if I’d said exactly what she wanted to hear. She sucked in a breath, then wheezed out, “Sonny Dinadio wants to buy No. 1 but Endean won’t sell to him. Do you know why?”

“Because it’s not hers to sell?”

Claudia’s smile faded, her eyes fell to the table. But then she said, “Oh look!” once again, and there, suspended by pale green corkscrews of vine, shrouded by leaves, were three teacups. “After all these years!” She reached for one of the cups but the vines resisted, and slowly, tenderly, she began to extract it from their grasp.

“Sonny Dinadio,” I prompted.

“Right.” Claudia’s interest in this relic of my past had been superseded by the teacups, a relic from hers. “The shop’s been losing money for
decades
, and Sonny’s offered Endean, like, a
lot
of money. But she’s not even interested.”

I recalled the conversation I’d overheard between Sonny and Nellydean.

“Sonny Dinadio wants to
buy
No. 1?”

“He’s offering, like, millions. But Endean doesn’t care.” She’d freed the first cup, was on to the second. “Your mother wouldn’t sell either. The IRS has been sucking this place dry for as long as I can remember but your mother wouldn’t sell to Sonny Dinadio or anyone else.”

“Claudia,” I said then, using her name for the first time. “Is Sonny Dinadio my father?”

Claudia’s fingers stopped what they were doing but her eyes remained fastened on them, and then she unwrapped the last tentacle of vine from the second teacup. It was full of rainwater and she handled it gingerly, clearing a little space on the table and setting it upright.

“I didn’t know your mother well. But she said to me once—she told me she’d made a provision for the building. Set something aside.” The last cup wouldn’t twist free and, clucking her tongue, Claudia gave it a little tug. I think she expected the clinging strand of vine to snap but the handle did instead, and she winced a little, set the cup down. She worked the sliver of handle from the coil of vine and dropped it inside the cup. “Parker,” she said, more to the cup than to me, and only then did she look up. “She said it was in the building or the garden. She didn’t say which, but she said it was worth a fortune.”

She was coming down, I saw then. Fatigue weighted her eyelids until they sagged like half-lowered curtains; the light beneath had dimmed to a smolder. She moved the teacups around the table like an open game of three-card Monte until I couldn’t hold myself back any more. I grabbed both her hands to still them. The sleeves of my new shirt came all the way to my knuckles, covering up my watch and my bones but not quite my desperation, and I tried not to squeeze too hard.

“Claudia,” I said when she finally looked into my eyes. “Are you talking about buried treasure?”

The words surprised me. I’d meant to ask her about Sonny, not some fairy tale I was pretty sure Nellydean had cooked up—probably, it occurred to me now, to keep me from selling the building to Sonny—but Claudia didn’t look up from the teacups.
 

“Endean used to call it that. She said there ain’t no such thing as buried treasure but if I wanted to waste my time looking it was my own life I was throwing away. Sonny’s not your father, Jamie. Your mother always said she didn’t know who that man is.” It was only when her fingers went slack in mine that I realized she’d been gripping my hands as tightly as I’d gripped hers. “Knew,” she amended herself. “Was.” Then: “
James
.”