What We've Lost Is Nothing (10 page)

Wednesday, April 7, 2004

8:55 a.m.

C
az had promised to sit with Mary at lunch. It was enough to make Mary feel overheated, short of breath. He'd sidled past her desk at the end of their composition class, in which they'd spent forty-five minutes comparing the narrator in Zora Neale Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God
to that in Maxine Hong Kingston's
Woman Warrior
.

“Pissed-off chicks,” Dave DiMartini had whispered to Caz, who whispered it to Mary, who giggled.

“Hey,” Caz'd said after class. “See you at lunch.”

It was less asking and more telling, but Mary didn't mind. The teachers had all been nice to her, telling her she could hand in homework late, inquiring about her family, about how she was doing. When they heard her father remark to reporters about her illness, Mary's unexcused absence from school the day before suddenly disappeared. She could get used to this kind of attention. Her homeroom teacher reminded her of the counseling service available to all students and offered to write her a pass. The counselor, a man in his midforties, seemed like the kind of person who would keep a brood of cats in the house.

Sofia had always been popular, the whole Asian thing. Some of the girls accused the boys of having “yellow fever.” But Mary Elizabeth had always felt herself more of a fringe character, marginally acknowledged by the freaks, the geeks, the preppies, the poshies, the burnouts and hipsters, the jocks, the nerds, the chills, the gays, but not particularly welcomed by any of them. To her, the fault obviously lay with her hair. Her parents wouldn't let her dye it, even though her mother, Susan, had dyed her own hair blond for as long as Mary could remember. In any case, it wasn't so much the color as the shape; it moved as a singular force, like a barrister's wig from an English crime drama. Her mother called it “unbreakable.” As in Samson. Providing Mary with some kind of mysterious strength, which she thought was supremely stupid. But now, both she
and
her inglorious coif had been invited to lunch by Caz.

She spent the next hour trying to figure out how to merge her own initials with Caz's. Mary Elizabeth McPherson and Christopher Alexander Zaininger. MEM and CAZ. Mary realized they both had middle names that began with vowels, and she suddenly felt there was something to that, something she'd somehow failed to see in the past. She toyed with finding Sofia in her biology class and telling her about lunch, but then worried Sofia would somehow wrangle her way to their lunch table and Mary's one chance with Caz would be ruined.

She drew a heart with a purple gel pen on the inside cover of her notebook and filled it with:

She wondered if he brought his own lunch or ordered from the counter. She wondered if she should order from the counter as she usually did or just nibble on the granola bars she'd brought from home. But granola bars were boring, the nerd's candy bar. If she ordered at the counter, should she get pizza—the suggestion being that she was cool, just one of the guys, a down-to-earth girl—or salad, suggesting that she was elegant and mature. Salad offered sophistication, while pizza said tomboy. She decided on salad and a cookie, elegance with a little impulsive deviance thrown in.

Today, she felt, could really be the start of something, some whole new life, the opportunity to reinvent herself to a public who had barely noticed her before. And what had she lost in the burglaries? Nearly everything taken from her family's home had been her father's. Karma indeed! she thought. Hell, she even wriggled out of cutting class. Maybe she should run for student government? Maybe she should take up an instrument such as the drums? Maybe she should use her newfound celebrity for a good cause? Better cheerleading uniforms? Shorter class periods? Homelessness? Where trouble and intolerance had loomed just a day earlier, opportunity now seemed to present itself. This moment, she recognized, must be seized.

She remembered one student when she was in eighth grade who'd suddenly been whisked out of class by two men in dark suits and sunglasses, never to return. Turned out, his father worked for the embassy of Uruguay, or some other -guay, and someone had tried to assassinate him that morning. The boy's entire family had been collected and put on a plane back home for their protection. It was all so ­incredibly romantic, Mary remembered. The student's status rose ­immediately to the top tiers of social legend. Stories began ­circulating that he had quietly and secretly—heroically, even—intervened in fights, saved girls from roofie-spiked drinks, stood up to vindictive teachers. He'd become a moral compass for classroom injustice.

There was a downside, too, though. At home Mary's father and mother had a series of squabbles the night before that lasted well past midnight and promised to continue for some time, and her father was particularly frenetic.

“That Francophile freak!” he'd shouted, slamming the door behind him after he'd spoken to the reporters loitering around the McPhersons' front lawn. “I never trusted him. Never.”

“Helen's got a real mess at her house,” Susan said, straightening the cushions in the living room, plumping them back up to their original airiness. “We tidied up a bit, but I should go back tomorrow. It's just a
scene.
We really got off lucky when you look at her place.”

“Why the fuck would he lie? I mean what for? To
us
?”

“Language, Michael!” Susan's face had a sheen of sweat across it.

“Yeah,” Mary whispered. “Don't want your fucking language to fuck me up.”

Susan stopped plumping and looked at her daughter for a moment. Mary felt a spike in her stomach. Her mother, dorky though she may have been, was also Mary's loyal advocate most of the time; disappointing her father elicited no particular feeling in Mary since it happened with such frequency, but her mom was another matter. After a second, Susan redoubled her efforts on the pillows, then moved on to stack coasters. Mary exhaled and sat on the stairs leading to their bedrooms.

Michael paced. “He's just snaky, that guy. Too stupid to really pull something like this off, but still. He's just . . . fucking weak.”

“Michael! The language!”

He stopped pacing and seemed to notice Mary for the first time.

“Who are you talking about, anyway?” Susan asked.

Mary had a sinking feeling that a fight was about to erupt. She wished she had retreated to her room the moment she walked in the door with her mother. Over at Helen's, her mom mostly tried to get Helen to stop crying, while Mary swept up broken plates and picked up shirts and dresses and hangers and threw them in a pile in the corner of Helen's bedroom. It wasn't exactly cleaning so much as redistributing the mess.

“Étienne, the idiot,” Michael said. He rubbed his eyes with the balls of his hands. “The guy with the restaurant.”

“Étienne our friend and neighbor?” Susan said.

“He may be your friend, but he's no friend of mine. And he's no friend of this family.”

Susan put down the coasters.

“He's not in France. He's home, across the street, talking to Wasserman on his front porch.”

“Maybe he flew home when he heard the news.”

“You can't fly home that quickly from Paris.” Michael McPherson glanced at his daughter. He stood on the tile in the foyer. “The look on his face,” Michael said, quieter now. “You should have seen it, Susan. It was guilty, guilty, guilty.”

“Oh, he's just an insecure guy. We should eat at his restaurant more. Support our neighbors.”

“He cooks with rats!”

“He doesn't cook with rats!” Susan picked up a cushion that she'd already plumped once and began to beat it wildly.

“And you.” Her father suddenly pointed at Mary. “Don't think I don't know!”

Mary, taken aback to have suddenly been yanked into the drama, didn't say anything.

“I know exactly what you're up to.” Two steps and he was smack in front of her. “Your secret friend. Don't you think for a minute that I don't know. You think I never tried to pull the wool over my parents' eyes? You think I wasn't a teenager myself, young lady?”

Mary, despite herself, reddened, trained her eyes on the floral wallpaper border that ran the circumference of their living and dining rooms.

“Who do you think it is?” Susan asked, glad for a change of topic. Mary, she reasoned, had actually done something wrong; Étienne, on the other hand, was being unfairly accused by her husband simply because he had a few quirks—not that Michael would ever admit that, she knew.

“Oh, I know who it is.” His finger wagged in Mary's direction. He'd left the foyer and was standing in the living room now. “I know exactly who it is. It's that little Chinese girl down the street.”

“Cambodian, Dad. God!”

“They
are
Cambodian, Michael.”

“It doesn't fucking—”

“Michael!”

He took a deep breath, balled his fists, then flexed his hands. “It doesn't
matter
what they are. You think you can protect her identity, but you're as transparent as a window, my dear.”

“Nice,” Mary snapped. “So now you're a poet. Whatever, Dad. Sofia's cool.”

There was a moment, when you were in trouble, where it didn't much matter anymore how much shit you added to your rap sheet. She turned and ran up the stairs to her bedroom. How could she keep her parents from telling on Sofia? Now she'd look like she'd ratted out her friend. Why couldn't her father just keep anything to himself? She didn't mind being punished; she knew she'd done something wrong. But Sofia really was innocent. The whole thing had been Mary's idea.

Michael had shouted after her, “Don't think you can hide out in your room, Mary Elizabeth McPherson. This isn't over!”

Mary flopped diagonally across her bed, straining to hear her parents' conversation.

“Now her family,” Susan was saying . . . Mary could just make out the words through the heating vent in the floor.

“France . . . America . . . bullshit . . . ,” her father said.

“Michael, please! Étienne may embody some oddities—”

“Oddities? Susan, he's a nutcase.”

“—but Étienne certainly is not capable of grand-scale robbery.” Several bright lights suddenly went dark outside their living-room window. News crews packing it up.

Michael ran his hand absently over his forehead. “I tell you one thing, that little Sofia isn't as innocent as she makes out either. And her cousin! He couldn't even look me in the eye when we were there.”

“Jesus, Michael, you all but accused him!”

Upstairs in her bedroom, Mary turned over in her bed. Her parents were wrong. Sofia
was
as innocent as she made out. Half the boys in school followed her around with wagging tongues and she didn't even notice. Mary hoped her father would keep it to himself. Her only consolation lay in that he'd have to go through Sofia herself to tell her parents. Mary was almost sure he wouldn't go to the trouble. As for Sofia's cousin, Mary had no idea what her dad might do.

10:15 a.m.

T
he Kowalskis returned home the previous night to a house wholly in order, not a speck of dust anywhere, not a piece of furniture an inch out of place. Alicia's parents had cleaned up everything and were waiting up for them when they returned. Except for the blank spaces of what had been taken, you'd never have known anything was amiss. Her father handed her two shiny silver keys, for the new back-door lock. “The burglars used a screwdriver to get in,” her father told her. “I don't know how the police determined this, but they did. A screwdriver!” He seemed both baffled and momentarily impressed by this feat. Alicia's mother jumped in and hugged her daughter, rubbing her back, letting her know that the police had everything they needed—they'd dusted for prints, looked for evidence, and Arlene had cleaned up every last trace of the mess.

Alicia wondered what it had looked like. The chaos and disorder of invasion. Dan thanked her parents profusely, but Alicia stayed silent. She was awed not by what they'd lost, and not by what was happening on Ilios Lane, but by how completely her parents could mask it all in a sheen of normalcy. The only hint of something amiss, indeed, was just how very clean it all was. Alicia never kept her house this spotless. She found herself wanting the chaos, wanting the mess. It was
her
mess, after all, wasn't it? Or was it? The house, the things in the house . . . it had all come from her parents. Perhaps it was only proper that they be the ones to clean it all up. Alicia looked first at her mother, then her father, before she allowed Dan to lead her up the stairs and into bed for the night.

Then, she dozed briefly, awoke, tried unsuccessfully to read herself to sleep, downed a shot of lemon vodka, and drifted off for half an hour before Dan's snoring suddenly spurred her awake again. Finally, at four in the morning, she got up and swallowed a mouthful of NyQuil, which knocked her out cold—at least until her father came in to say good-bye. She felt his hand on the side of her face, but she could not force her mind awake, could not process any of what he said to her. She felt Chester jump up on the bed and curl up in the bend of her legs. When her father bent to kiss her, she was pretty sure she murmured a thank-you, but then fell immediately back to sleep, even before her father had made it to the bottom of the stairs.

She was awakened by her doorbell. She opened one eye and looked at the clock—10:15 a.m. The doorbell rang again, and she noted that Chester was not wildly barking, which meant Dan must have taken him out for a walk. Alicia would have to call their dog walker, let her know they were back. They shared her with Aldrin Rutherford next door, who had a little shit-kicker dog, white and fluffy and stupid. Or at least, he'd
had
a dog until his wife took the kids and the dog and moved out of the house. Alicia knew she and Dan didn't really need a dog walker, but she told herself it was a way to contribute to the local economy.

Alicia stood in a fleece robe, her hair flattened on one side, still in the sarong she'd slept in under the robe. She tried to blink away the harsh daylight.

The man in front of her wore a golf shirt and khakis. His teeth were a severe white and he carried a laptop bag over one shoulder. Holding out a business card, he introduced himself as Mark O'Brien, from some alarm-system company. “All of us at ADT want you to know how very sorry we are about what happened to your family yesterday, These kinds of things, targeting innocent people, we wished they never happened.”

Alicia nodded, heard a thump that she suspected was a bird flying into a window, but she couldn't locate the origin of the sound. “Who are you again?”

“Mark O'Brien. ADT.” When she didn't respond, he added, “Residential security systems.”

She was having trouble thinking straight through her NyQuil haze and wished Dan would come home. Why had he abandoned her on this morning of all mornings?

“If I could have just a moment of your time. We make special allowances for people in your situation.”

“My situation?”

He shifted the laptop bag to the other shoulder. “Recent victims. It's our way of . . . shall we say, easing the blow of the burglaries, trying to get you back a little peace of mind.”

Alicia felt the instant urge to hug him. She heard “peace of mind” as a kind of beacon, and she moved aside and gestured for him to come in. Before she shut the door, she caught a glimpse of the McPherson yard. A lone reporter, lounging on the grass beside a Volvo station wagon, a notebook closed beside him. He appeared to be reading an oversize book, holding a bright yellow highlighter in his hand. Was he a student? Alicia wondered. Some journalism major hoping for a scoop?

Thirty minutes later and still dazed, she'd signed a contract for a brand-new home-security system with door and window sensors, motion detectors, one SafePlace Pro 2000 Touchpad, a smart-voice wireless feature, a carbon monoxide detector, a silent alarm, and six window decals and a yard sign. Installation was 20 percent off; monthly monitoring would cost them just under $600 a year, with 10 percent off the first year because of her “recent victim” status. Alicia glossed over the particulars, but it didn't matter. All she heard, over and over, was “peace of mind.” When he left, she climbed back up the stairs and fell into bed and thought how Dan had still not returned, but even that didn't matter anymore. She had
peace of mind.

In fact, Dan wasn't far. He'd stopped at the McPhersons' to talk to the reporter, a journalism student named Paul Patterson, while Chester panted beside him. He missed entirely the stranger emerging from his house.