Death by Eggplant (5 page)

“I'll run back and get you a different bag,” I wheedled. “Just as good for dumplings, I promise.”

He shook his head. “I want
this
bag.”

“No!” I said, scared enough now to grab Cleo from the clerk. Again a gigantic hairy hand closed over my wrist. Then a smaller hand with long red nails appeared from nowhere, closed over his, and squeezed hard.

“Drop it, buster!”

The three of us—Berserker, Pinhead, and me—looked up. It took me a moment to recognize my mother.

“Don't you
dare
touch my son.” Her squinted eyes threw off icy cosmic rays.

Berserker Biker Bob and my mom stared at each other. I wasn't sure what happened between them in the silence,
but the clerk kept looking back and forth as if following a tennis match. In the end, Bob dropped my hand and muttered an apology.

Mom reached out and took Cleo, cradled her in her left arm, and motioned for me to follow her.

On the way to the car, I found myself looking over both shoulders and scanning both the parking lot and the trees surrounding it to make sure that Dekker wasn't there.

Maybe I needed to take intimidation lessons from my mom.

“You should have seen her!” I crowed, flipping a pancake onto Dad's plate with enthusiasm. “This guy was like ten feet tall and all leather. I expected chains and whips and spikes—he was
that
scary. Mom made him crumple with just a look. She was as scary as he was. Scarier, because he backed down.”

My father hadn't heard what had happened till now, since he had worked late last night, past midnight. Now he had to be on the golf course at seven. He hated golf, but sometimes the company president wanted him there to explain probability to a client. My father preferred to explain things at work. If he had two hands on a golf club, he had no hands left for a keyboard or cell phone.

That's why I usually got up early on golf mornings to make him breakfast before he left. I didn't have many other chances to talk to him. And besides, I make incredible pancakes, if I do say so myself. Too much handling, too much
checking and flipping, made them tough, but I had an instinctive feel for when to make my move—when the tops dried to a weave of open bubbles and the bottoms were exactly a perfect dark gold, ringed with crispy brown. Plus I had a secret ingredient: I folded a cup of quinoa grains into the batter at the end. When you eat them, the quinoa pops in your mouth.

“‘
Don't you
dare
touch my
son,'” I mimicked, trying to make my voice threatening and Momlike all at once. “And the whole time, they're holding Cleo upside down and trying to scan her bottom.”

“Cleo?” Dad said, between bites. Apparently, he had blocked the memory of discovering he was a father again.

He was saved by the ringing of the cell phone.

“Yes, yes, Jake, I've got the figures on me. Projections from Plan 1, versions 3.5, 3.6, and 3.72,” he said. “No, no, I won't mention a single number till at least one-fourth of the group has played the seventh hole.”

“What time will you be back?” I nudged his shoulder. “Mom wanted me to ask.”

“What time? No, not you, Jake, wait a minute.” Dad pressed the receiver against his chest. “What?”

“Mom wants to know if you'll be back by noon. Dr. Zimmerman wants to meet us.” It must have been pretty important. He was the first of Mom's therapists to ask to see the whole family.

“Dr. Zimmerman?” Dad said.

His expression was so blank I couldn't help myself.

“You know, the baby doctor for Cleo. Because she's so pale.”

“Something's wrong with the baby?” He clicked the off button and tossed the phone to the side. The cell began to chirp at once. He waved at it. “I'll cancel the golf game.”

“No,” I said in alarm. “It's all right. It's just a joke. There
is
no baby, remember?”

“Are you sure?” he said.

“I'm sure, Dad. Ask anybody.”

After he left, I put the rest of the pancake batter in the refrigerator, loaded the dishwasher, then took my math homework outside to the backyard. I had tried doing it last night as I waited for Dad, but it was late and my eyes had stung just looking at the problems. This morning it didn't look any easier.
X equaled 4
ab
to the power of grapefruit when X equals 666?
That didn't make sense. “Algebra” was probably just a code word for how to torture seventh and eighth graders.

My father had tried to help me with math many times, but we spoke different languages. In my head, I could multiply and divide teaspoons, ounces, cups, and quarts, and adjust any recipe to any size crowd. I just couldn't put that crowd onto two trains, both traveling north from different starting points at different speeds, and tell you which one would get to Boston first.

Math book and notebook under one arm, I dragged a
lawn chair to the middle of the yard. The day was sunny and warm, yet early enough that the grass was still damp with dew. Bees buzzed from flower to flower, humming while they worked. I opened my book, but the morning sun slanted into my eyes and forced them closed. It was a crime that school was still in session in June.

I didn't remember feeling sleepy. But the next thing I knew, something bumped my toe. The buzzing, which had gotten much too loud, suddenly stopped. I bolted up and shut my mouth, which for some reason was open.

“You were snoring.”

“What?” I blinked hard, looking up into the sun.

If I was snoring, I must have been sleeping. And if I was sleeping, I must have been dreaming. Only that could explain the sight of Indra Sahir standing over me. She wore pink shorts and a pink top. Her brown arms and long brown legs looked like they had an end-of-summer tan, except it was the beginning of summer and that was their color all year long. I remembered every joke I had ever heard about my being Moby Dick, the great white whale.

“I said you were snoring,” she repeated. “
Soooo
loudly. That's why I poked you. Before you attracted the bees, you know? You sounded like a big one yourself.”

“A big what?”

“A big bee,” she said patiently.

I finally realized that I was awake and that Indra was no dream. Well, yes, she was a dream, but I wasn't dreaming
about her at the moment. I sat up straight and wiped my chin. No drool. Good.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

She shrugged. “Walking home from my piano lesson,” she said.

“Oh.”

She had walked home from piano through my backyard? Sure. Then it hit me: She had come here deliberately to see me. Indra Sahir had come to see me, Bertie Hooks. It was time to say something witty and memorable.

“I didn't know you took piano.”

“For six years.”

Six years? In all that time, she had never once taken this way home, not even the sidewalk out front, at least not that I had noticed, and I would have noticed. Maybe she had just moved. Or maybe she had changed teachers. Or maybe not, and she just wanted to see me. The thought made me scramble out of the chair. I dropped my math book and notebook, then bent to pick it up just as Indra did. We knocked heads, sending her black braid flying.

“Ow!” we both said at once, which somehow made it funny.

“How's the baby?” she asked with a grin.

“Not a peep out of her. I guess she's sleeping in.”

“Well, it
is
Saturday.”

“Yeah, Saturday,” I agreed.

“Nicky's been pretty quiet the last couple of days, too.”

Nicky? She called Dekker
Nicky
?

“If he's quiet, it just means he's planning something,” I said.

“He's not as bad as all that,” she insisted. “That's what I came to tell you—that you don't have to worry. Besides, you can handle him, I know it.”

I felt myself blush. “Thanks.”

Indra smiled, waved good-bye, and walked away, around the house to the street out front.

Nicky wasn't that bad? I wasn't to worry? I could handle him?

Yeah, right. And I was going to get an A in math, too.

 

Dad didn't come home in time from his golf game, so it was just Mom and me at Dr. Zimmerman's.

Mom went in first, while I sat by myself, the only one in the waiting room, which was really strange. Whenever I went to
my
doctor, the place was wall to wall with kids, each one green and hawking up germs of something far worse than I was there for. Dr. Zimmerman's waiting room was empty. The pale blue chairs looked as if they had never once been sat on. And there was a pile of magazines on a table, so neatly stacked I knew they had never once been opened.

I didn't touch the magazines, so they stayed in that super-neat pile. I didn't open my knapsack, either. My math book was in there, but I felt too weird to figure out
problems. Besides, by this point in the year, things were hopeless. That was why I was stuck with Cleo. She was in the knapsack, too, because we didn't have a sitter.

The door to Dr. Zimmerman's office finally opened and Mom came out. Her eyes were red and she was sniffling. Before I could ask what was wrong, she waved me over to the doctor.

“Please, Bertram,” he said. “I'd like to see you alone for a few minutes.” The doctor was short and thin. He had rosy cheeks, curly black hair, a small beard, and a mustache with pointy ends you could twirl. It made me think he was really an elf in a suit. But he had an accent, just like a movie shrink, and I'd never heard of an elf with an accent.

He closed the door after us, pointed to the couch, then put a box of tissues in front of me.

“So,” he said, when we both sat down. He smiled. I smiled. I waited for him to say something. I waited a long time. All the while, he kept smiling.

“So what?” I finally asked.

“Mmmm?”

“You said ‘so' and now I'm saying, ‘so what?'”

“‘So what?'” he repeated. “Tell me, Bertram, why do you say that?”

I spoke more slowly. Maybe, being a foreigner and all, he hadn't understood me. “You said ‘so' and now I'm saying, ‘so what?'”

“Ahh,” he nodded. “‘So what? So what?'”

I guess he liked the phrase, because he kept repeating it.

“Don't you want to know about my mom?” I asked at last.

“Your mother? What do you think I should know about her?”

“For one thing, is there anything
I
should know?”

“Mmmm?”

“Well, I mean, she was crying just now.”

“Mmmm?” Dr. Zimmerman raised a single eyebrow. “I see I must be direct, though it pains me most severely to do so. Bertram, why don't you tell me all about your baby sister.”

“Sister? I don't have a baby sister.”

“Mmmm? Cleo?”

“Cleo is not my sister.”

“Ahhh . . . ” He steepled his fingers and peeked out from between them. “Your mother said you were having a problem. Something about your losing the baby. Something about your grades being affected. Do you see how serious the problem is, that your grades should be affected?”

“Doctor, I don't think you understood what my mother meant. Cleo
is
my grade. She's just a school project.”

He nodded even harder, like one of those dogs with the bouncing heads in the back window of a car. “Sometimes, it is easier to deal with difficult people by transforming them into an object,” he said. “This way, we do not see their humanity. Is this not true?”

“Well, maybe.”

“And so,” the doctor continued, “you turn this difficult, fussy baby into your school project.”

“Doctor, either there's a language barrier or my mother is getting way too wrapped up in my homework. She has only one kid—me. Cleo is a five-pound sack of flour.”

“A sack of flour?” He wrote that down in his notebook.

“Yeah, she's just a future batch of cupcakes.”

“Which
you
would devour, no?” Writing more furiously, he nodded so hard I thought his head would fall off.

“No! Well maybe . . . if they were chocolate. But I'd leave some for her.”

“Cleo?” he said, wrinkling his forehead.

“No, my mother. She loves chocolate.”

He sat back, stunned.

“You would feed your sister to your mother?” He began to write even faster. “This is classic! Straight from the Greek tragedies!”

“Actually, I came straight from home.” I slid off the couch. “Which is where I think I should be going.”

“And leave the issue of your sister unresolved?”

“I don't have a sister,” I said slowly. “I have a sack of flour.”

“You are in deep denial.” He clucked his tongue and shook his head.

“Look,” I said, “Cleo is outside, right now, in my knapsack.”

The thought was suddenly unnerving—my mother alone with my knapsack. Visualizing Cleo, she might decide to visualize a diaper bag and dig around in it for a diaper. I didn't want my chef's hat to wind up on Cleo's bottom, with or without questions from my mother.