The Violet Hour: A Novel (8 page)

Elizabeth’s voice pulled him out of his reverie. “Grandpa, I’d like you to meet—”

“Kyle Christensen, sir.” A blond boy was standing before him: boulder shoulders, torso descending like a vee. Here was risk, if ever he saw it. Who was this boy to be touching his granddaughter?

Howard shook his hand warily. Kyle squeezed back, polite.

“It’s a pleasure, sir.” A flash of even teeth. “I really admire what you do here.”

Howard shoved his free hand further into the pocket of his jeans. “Well, I hardly do it anymore. Alvin’s the one who runs things. I just build pleasure houses for my wife out back.”

“It’s a
sauna,
” Eunice blared. “And I don’t know why you keep telling people it’s for me.” It shamed her each time she spoke the word. Didn’t everyone know you were naked in a sauna?

“Well, come on,” Cassandra broke in. “Let’s get you upstairs.”

“Where’s Mary?” Elizabeth asked as they unfolded the sofa bed in the third-floor study. “And Howie?”

“They went to the store. Apparently Estella and Max need a particular brand of yogurt.” Estella and Max were Mary’s middle-school twins, pale and blond. Pretty kids, with gimlet eyes. They were fond of mystery games and wrestling, and they always laughed the loudest at cruel jokes. To most, they were charming and precocious; to Cassandra, unsettling achievers. They were born when Mary was in her late thirties, and even though the Cold War had ended, Cassandra couldn’t help but think the KGB had missed a golden opportunity in her young nephew and niece. It was an unfair prejudice, she knew. Their father, Vladimir, had left the Soviet Union in the seventies, a professor of systems engineering and a legitimate defector. He had a broad, humble smile, and was both earnest and fervent in his belief in democracy. But his children were another breed. With their hooded eyes and jagged glacier cheeks, they seemed the children of a Russian mafioso—in spite of his warmth, in spite of butter-yellow Mary. Cassandra had colors for everyone, and Estella and Max were both ardently black.

“Okay.” Cassandra sheathed and fluffed the last pillow and tossed it onto the bed. “Kyle’s in here with Max, and Lizzie, you’re with me in my old room—you didn’t think they’d let you two sleep together, did you?”

“No,” Elizabeth said, uncertainly. “But what about everyone else?”

“Mary and Estella in Mary’s old room—until Vlad gets here anyway. Howie in his old room. Grandma and Grandpa in their bed as usual.”

“Well, this is really great, Cassandra,” Kyle said. “Thank you.” He flopped onto the bed and stretched out his legs. Resting his head in the palms of his interlocked hands, he smiled, as though the arrangements didn’t bother him a bit. “I was expecting a couch in the living room.”

“You may prefer that after a night alone with the devil Max,” Elizabeth laughed.

“Oh, don’t worry about him,” Cassandra said. “I have a feeling he’ll like you. He’s always been enamored of big strong men.” She nudged the bed frame with her knee.

“Mother.” Elizabeth’s face clouded over.

If Mary was yellow and Estella and Max were black, then Cassandra’s own Elizabeth was true to her name: a firm and pitiless green. Somehow, in the years since she’d left home, Elizabeth had become an intimidating creature, prone to flashes of disdain that were capable of momentarily, but regularly, breaking her mother’s heart. Between Harvard and med school, she’d developed a sense of certainty that was as narrow as it was unforgiving, and it seemed that the more she achieved, the more Cassandra fell short. Without a doubt, Cassandra had fallen short—in many ways, on many occasions—but she had always been her own sternest critic. It was a painful new experience to find herself censured, even casually, by her daughter, whom she very much still wanted to advise.

“Is there anything else we can do?” Elizabeth finally asked, allowing the moment to pass.

“Oh, why don’t you two just relax for a bit,” Cassandra said, collecting herself. “Have some alone time. It may be a while before you get another chance.”

An instant after Cassandra had shut the door, Elizabeth dove into Kyle’s lap. Wrapping her legs around his waist, she pulled him up into a sitting position so that she could rest her chin on his shoulder.

“Whatcha doin’, little monkey?” He was smiling; she could hear it in his voice. His baby talk knew no limits. It had surprised her in the beginning, such precious, twee words coming from the mouth of a jock, but she had grown to expect and even relish it, and found she enjoyed answering him in kind. It was liberating, the closest she could come to admitting she was afraid of being an adult.

“Hangin’ on a big stupid tree.”

“Pretty monkey. Will you take me to the crypt?”

She shook her head, pouting, and hid her head in his neck. She knew she was lucky to have this boy of hers—this large, affable boy who genuinely seemed to find her beautiful even when she looked like crap. He was the beautiful one, and he spoiled her.

“So they really live here,” he said in his regular voice, his breath warming and dampening her neck.

“My mom’s whole life. Totally traumatized her, I think.” She’d told him all about it, but he was curious enough that she allowed herself to go on. “Alvin Dao, my grandfather’s partner, runs it now.”

“Right,” Kyle said, kissing her neck, undoing the top button of her shirt.

Elizabeth ran her fingers through his hair, squeezing the back of his head with her palm. “My grandfather’s basically retired, but I think he still does some mortuary work now and then.”

“Just for kicks?” Kyle’s voice softened. He had completely removed her shirt, eased Elizabeth onto her back, and was working his fingers down.

“Budgets and business strategy were never his forte. He’s a man who likes to work with his hands.” She raised her hips for Kyle’s hands. Her underwear came off; his fingers pressed inward, hooking her and grabbing hold. “With Alvin here, he could withdraw . . . from management, focus on the work that needed . . . a human touch.” She almost giggled, but did not.

“In another life,” Kyle concluded, his tongue in her ear, “he might have been an artist.”

This was the story she told about her grandfather, a lean, mysterious man named Howard Fabricant, who came from a different time, when people were more pragmatic, and true callings always consigned to “another life.”

“He could probably use a hand out there,” Elizabeth said, her spine arching up, aching toward Kyle. “We should offer to help.”

“Would he want our help?”

“I don’t know.” Kyle’s mouth was endless on her breast. She turned inside out; they might be caught at any moment.

“Probably not,” he breathed.

She bit his shoulder. His mouth. His cheek.

Yes,
she said.

H
OWARD REPOSITIONED HIS
ladder and climbed carefully, eager to finish the frame before dinner. He had studied sauna mechanics for months before selecting a design and mapping out his construction schedule. The plan was to start the serious building in September, after the swampy summer was behind him, but once he’d purchased and arranged all his materials, he found himself too excited to wait. So far, the heat had been a nuisance but not insufferable; if anything, it helped warm his fingers and toes.

The windows of his sauna would face west, perpendicular to the house. Several experts had counseled him on this point—saunas were best enjoyed at sunset—and in this regard, Howard considered the orientation of his yard to be a blessing. Though his property was now grotesquely dwarfed by towers of steel, glimpses of nature remained. One such glimpse, through a break in his trees and a gap in the buildings beyond, produced a perfect cut of the western horizon from the spot where he chose to build.

Howard pulled himself up to his walkway. He’d always been a sunset guy. The sky leaking into dark in the east. The ongoing riot in the west. The excruciating binge of bright just before the sun finally gave up. He loved how, paradoxically, the world became clearer in those moments after the drop, how much better he could see the things around him. The dailiness was reassuring, too. Here was something you could count on that wasn’t tragedy; that wasn’t accident, atrocity, or disease.

Positioning a nail, he began to join the last set of rafters.

After a moment, he looked up. A flash of movement had caught his eye. Standing in the northeast corner of his yard was a doughy young man dressed in an oversize white T-shirt and gray athletic shorts. It was Joseph, who lived with his mother in one of the affordable-housing complexes and attended Eunice’s church.

Howard couldn’t remember the name of the mental disorder the boy supposedly had, only that his was a sad case, requiring all kinds of drugs and therapies that put his mother in the red. He stood below Howard uncertainly, his round face bumpy as a squash, his arms dangling leafily at his sides. A real vegetable garden kind of kid. He gave off an oniony odor, even from that distance, though his clothes looked clean enough. Howard returned to his project; the boy would grow restless and move along. Best not to stare and upset him.

But the boy didn’t move. “What are you building?” he asked, his voice reedy but steady in pitch. It was the first time Howard could remember actually hearing him speak.

“It’s a sauna. Gets real hot.”

Joseph nodded. “There’s a sauna at the Y. I saw it once on a tour.” He sounded lucid, like any other boy—perhaps more serious than most kids his age, but that was all.

“So you know all about this.” Howard set his hammer down and smiled in what he hoped was a friendly manner.

“Well, they didn’t let me take one. But I will one day. It’s on my list.”

“How ’bout that?” Howard’s gut flooded with recognition. “I have a list, too.”

“Everyone should. So you know you’re doing—” He stopped abruptly. Perhaps he was shy.

Howard rapped his knuckle on a beam. “This is on my list.”

Joseph quailed a little and stepped back, as though the beam had been his hand.

“It’s okay,” Howard said, immediately regretting the gesture. “Don’t worry. So. What brings you to my yard?”

The boy itched his head in a slightly broken motion, moving it back and forth against his fingers. “I was taking a walk. I do that sometimes.”

“Just around the neighborhood?”

Joseph began shifting his weight from one ponderous foot to the other.

“It’s a nice neighborhood,” Howard tried again.

“I like walking. There are always new things to see.” Head scratch, foot shift. “New buildings. New stores.”

“Are you nervous about something?” Howard asked.

“Yes.”

“Don’t be. You’re okay here.”

Joseph shifted backward now, then forward, then over to one side, then the other. He was nearly doing a box step.

“Don’t be nervous,” Howard repeated, trying again to sound calm.

“I’m always nervous,” Joseph said, and made another box step.

“Why?”
Why talk to him?
a panicked voice inside him asked. But Howard shoved that voice out of mind. He felt he could help the boy. No one ever seemed to talk to him. Surely talking could help free him just a little from whatever was happening inside.

Joseph stopped swaying and came to a sudden stop. “They say don’t get too close, but then you go the other way, and they say don’t go too far.”

Howard’s chest fluttered at the ominous mention of
they
.

“Who’s saying that?”

“They say stay away from the monster on the rock, and stay away from the water that swirls. Nowhere to go but down the middle. Straight down the middle the only where to go.” Joseph’s pimpled face looked as tangled as his grammar.

“Shh,” Howard said, looking around, not wanting to attract any attention. “No they don’t. No one’s saying anything. You’re safe.”

“She will devour you, she will eat you whole, she will swallow you and spit you back up.”

“Shh, shh, no she won’t. She won’t hurt you at all.”

“She bashes like rocks, she burns like pox, she screams and sings like cocks. Iraq.”

Howard had never heard anything crazier in his life. He ducked down under a rafter and came into a squat on the side nearest the boy.

“Where’s your mother?” he asked, gripping the edge.

It appeared this was a good question to ask. Joseph had been standing rigidly with his fingers spread wide by his sides. But now he blinked several times and resumed his bizarre habit of scratching his head against his hand, which after the outburst looked almost like an act of tenderness from a pet. “She’s at work,” Joseph said.

“Will she be home soon?”

“Yeah, soon.” A look of relief rolled over his face. “She doesn’t like me taking walks. But I can’t stay inside all day. The television watches me.”

“Not to worry,” Howard said, exhaling partially. “I won’t tell.”

“I gotta do my summer reading.”

So he was still in school—that was something. “Sounds good,” Howard said.

Joseph’s face drained. “I’m sorry for what I said.”

“Not to worry,” Howard repeated, wanting to reassure him as much as he could.

“That was Scylla and Charybdis. They’re just in the book.”

“That’s right,” Howard said, only vaguely recognizing the names.

Joseph flapped his hand good-bye and Howard began to straighten himself back up. But as the boy made his way along the perimeter of the yard, his toe caught an invisible mound of earth, and he tottered a bit, reaching out to the nearest bush for support. With a great clatter of wings, several small gray birds flew out from its branches, gurgling, heading straight for the poor kid’s face. He closed his eyes and didn’t make a sound, but held up his arms in an X to protect himself. Diverted, the birds flew on.

Suddenly, they were in front of Howard, nearly blocking Joseph from his sight: pigeons beating their wings uselessly, trying to reach
the safety of a wooden beam. Seeing Howard hunched there in his hothouse steeple frightened most of them back, and within a few moments all had returned to the bush save one. It was sick, or old, or otherwise unfit for pigeon life, its tongue bulging outward like a cyst. Howard swatted at it, but the bird surged forward again, grasping for a perch with its scaly, purple claws.