Bright Shards of Someplace Else (3 page)

The thread was lost on Grace, but she felt hypnotized by the boy's tone, the widening of his eyes, the small, polished giggles, the cajoling followed by a sudden cold word, which crackled like ice dropped in a hot toddy. Andy was talking on the phone, but she felt his disjointed comments were making an appeal to her personally. For what, she couldn't say, but she was starting to feel different—yes, her head was swimming, but that wasn't different, not really—she felt, watching him, that he was, with his little-boy claw hands, ripping a hole in a heavy scrim that long lay between her and the rest of the world. She was, she felt, surfacing. But she was also getting the bends.

The boy sat Indian-style on the couch cushions, his fluffed-up hair forming a perfect looping curl, like a bent horn, right on the top of his head. In another place and time a boy like him would be trussed up in velvets and dripping gold tassels and paraded through the town on a platform carried high by elders, and as he passed her on the street she would hope simply to catch his eye, or—better yet—to hear him speak. Or maybe she would trek to him, as he sat in the center of a do-nut of fog high on a precipice. Tell me, oh wise one …

She laughed to herself; he was just a kid, whatever that meant. He laid down the phone and said, simply, “Done.”

“You did it.”

“Yup. Easy-peasy. It's all about what you do and don't say, and I know when to shut up and when to speak. It's like a game.”

“You're amazing. Just, wow.” The boy had lifted another burden off her as if unhooking a balloon from its bunch to sail away. A giddiness rose up in her, and she looked around for something to distract her from a manic laugh. On the side table, she spotted the mother's list.
Eczema cream twice nightly. No liquids after nine. Make sure he uses floss and gets the uppers
and
the lowers
…

Grace stood up and floated into the bathroom. The cream bore a
piece of masking tape marked “Andy.” The tube was solid in her hand, fraught; it was one of the boy's things. She returned and presented it to him on her outstretched palms.

“You've got to apply this,” she said, and he plucked it from her and squeezed a pearl into his hand. He anointed his inner elbow with what she now recognized as characteristic grace, and she knew the night was back onto appropriate footing: the responsible au pair and the obedient child.

“Is that all you have?” Andy said.

“You have to floss at some point, too.”

“I mean, all the calls you have?”

Of course she had more calls! A problem for every call and a call for every problem—she could think of another one right now. But it wasn't the kind of call he could make.

“It's not the kind of call you could make.”

“Why not? Does it have to do with your legal stuff?”

“Sort of. And other, personal stuff. It wouldn't be strictly a company call.”

“I can make all kinds of calls.”

“Well, I'd have to give you more background and you'd really have to listen.”

“Okay.”

She could not really let him make this call, but she saw no harm in laying out, as a form of bedtime story, just what kind of shit she was in. In that spirit she went to the kitchen, where she made up a cup of warm milk and honey for the boy and a milky drink for herself—one of those creamy liqueurs that were normally served hot and topped with whipped cream and sprinkles, though she now just zapped it for thirty seconds in the microwave. She brought the drinks into the living room and turned off all the lights but the one next to them. Then, she began.

She started out telling her story in clear, picture-book sentences, the kind that are one to a page. “There were once two sisters,” she said,
and in her mind's eye she saw the idyllic accompanying picture—a washed-out pastel of two sisters swinging on a tire swing over a blue-ribbon stream. “They were the best of friends,” she continued, conjuring another picture—this time of the two of them laughing and giggling as they hid under the clothing racks while their mother yelled in a panic over their heads. Those storybook illustrators weren't good at panic, though. Maybe the girls could be pushing one of those big circle things, like kids from a bygone era. Maybe the story worked better in a different time period.

“Is this a real story?”

“Of course.”

“Then why are you telling it like that? Those circle things are called trundle hoops, anyway.”

She was on the wrong track here, somehow. The call wasn't about her history with her sister; he didn't need to hear about all that. It was about Greg. Nearly every romantic relationship she'd had in the last five years had come from the situation with her sister. She'd dated lawyers, of course, but also mediators (when they tried that), court staff, even former employees of her sister. Now she was seeing Greg, the private investigator. When she first met him he was attractive because he seemed to have the power to get her free. He was that rope cast down to her in the pit. But soon enough he, like the rest of them, became just another part of the problem, just another part of what she simply referred to in her mind as “Susan.” The word no longer conjured up a person, but a constellation of bills to pay, appointments to make, paperwork to fill out, and moves demanding response.
Susan
was a word for the wild rudder of her life that she had to counteract daily at the helm. Greg was now part of Susan.

She began telling the boy all this, sketching out the feud and the lawsuit and Greg's poor performance as an investigator and how she had gotten involved with him for the “wrong reasons,” and that now she wanted to fire him and dump him in the same brisk call. This would be tough, she explained, because fired employees and dumped
boyfriends often wanted explanations. She didn't like explaining herself but always felt herself doing it, ad nauseam. Plus, Greg had a funny way of moving his upper lip that reminded her of the lower fringe of a jellyfish, undulating and curling in. He changed the way he walked based on who was watching. When he spoke he sounded intelligent but had a bovine look in his eye that made her doubt the existence of his soul. She wished there were a special kind of radio that would tune in to other people's thoughts, even for just a minute. She'd pay a mint for that. When she was a kid sometimes she thought she could hear Susan's thoughts when the two of them were falling asleep in their bunk beds. The moment was like a crossed-wire connection, and Susan's thoughts were always about the social situation between the fish in their fish tank.

Grace ranged wildly in her talk to the boy. She felt, sometimes, that he was the perfect confidant—mature enough to understand, young enough not to have his insight clogged up with learned falsehoods. At those moments she talked to him like a man. Other times he seemed more like a dog or cat, some questionably sentient being to whom she could spew her thoughts without concern about judgment or even comprehension. She spoke in that vaguely doubting way pet owners confided in their pets, then stopped to giggle at how silly she sounded. Or she sometimes spoke to him like an object, a key stuck in a lock, and in these cases she mumbled to herself about him while looking at him:
Stop it. Stop. He's just a little boy, you shouldn't be talking to him this way
.

She slumped on the couch. It was dark outside and she stared at the orange bottom of her cup, which caught the lamplight and reflected a small sun on her hand. The cup probably wasn't even microwave safe.

“Okay, is that all? Can I call now?”

“You can't. Don't you see? The guy's my employee and boyfriend. It's a call I have to make.”

“Why? I could say I'm your new boyfriend. Or new investigator. Or
best friend. Or representative. I've been my own father on the phone before and called about the treatment of myself at school. I've said stuff like ‘He's a good kid, just weird,' because I know that's how it's said. I can do anything. Plus you don't even like the guy. So it doesn't matter.”

Something needed correcting in the boy's logic, she knew, but she didn't feel moved to do it. She looked out the large picture window behind him. The driveway was lit up by small recessed lights pressed into the shorn lawn. It was raining, and the drive looked, through the distortion, like a bridge twisting in the wind. She remembered seeing an old black-and-white clip of a concrete bridge snapping like a jump rope before throwing off its burden of cars and souls. Something about the image made her take heart: that a solid bridge could get so loopy had good implications, she thought, and the silent, forgotten deaths made her feel she'd dodged a nasty bullet just by being born in a later age. The wind made the rain sluice down the window at all angles. The thin, wet trails all seemed to converge behind the boy's head, making him seem the center of a web—or an incredible deal that all arrows were pointing toward, a pattern of emphasis familiar to her from the neon signage that so often lit up her repetitive nights.

“You're right. Go for it. I'll pay him for his work, but I want out. Get me out.”

The boy cracked his knuckles like an old pool shark and made the call. Grace could hear Greg announce his company name in a harangued voice, as if he had been fielding nonstop calls, though Grace knew that was a put-on. She fell back against the couch cushions, kicked her shoes off, and lay down. The throw pillows smelled like potpourri—lilac and geranium, a steamy whiff of green.

The smell transported her to the dank crawl space in her mind where all her out-of-rotation bitter memories were stored. (The more contemporary ones were on display right behind her eyes.) There, her eyes fell on a bouquet of nettles, dandelions, milkweed, and some spiky yellow flower that grew by the drainage ditches hemming her
childhood lawn. She had built the bouquet for her Girl Scout pastime badge, and the flowers she had chosen were supposed to be both aesthetically pleasing and calling to mind the arrangement of character traits a young scout should exemplify. The other girls had chosen daisies for sweetness, roses for fidelity, petunias for perseverance, and the dull like. Grace's bouquet, she explained, expressed the critical qualities of defensiveness, invasiveness, passivity, and squalor.

The bouquet did not go over well. The troop leader pulled her aside and accused her of undermining the spirit, if not the letter, of Girl Scout Law. The other girls' blank sincerity was thrown up in her face as if she alone had flung open the door to all the forces of ambiguity that would soon enough sully their innocence for good.

When Grace had told Susan about this—at dinner, when their mother and father were arguing and deaf to their talk—little Susan had said a shocking and perfect thing: “She's a cuntbug.” Cuntbug. The word had moved Grace profoundly. “Cunt” was a word they shouldn't have heard—lewdly adult. But “bug” commandeered the expression into a realm of childhood whimsy, a place that was far more ecstatically dark than anything a grownup could dream up. She loved her evil little sister then.

One of Grace's arms draped over the couch and grabbed the empty air, searching for her drink or perhaps simply arranging weeds in her dream at the edge of the carpet. She moaned and shifted, then sat bolt upright and cried out, in a voice rent by epiphany: “She embezzled from
Girl Scouts
!”

The boy put his nibbled straw to his lips in a shushing motion and then said into the phone, “She's shouting because of how lame that discovery is. It's second-class work.”

But her mind was on fire. Susan had stolen from Girl Scouts. Was this not an act of love? Grace's heart was pounding through her body. She leaped up with her orange cup and went to the liquor cabinet for another drink, slopping gin all over the sideboard. She took a clarifying chug. This discovery felt like a communiqué. It sounded absurd,
but Grace couldn't help but thinking that Susan had somehow arranged to have her find out about the embezzlement. This was, she felt, an olive branch, presented in the only way possible. Susan could not call her outright, what with all the restraining orders and pending court dates. The only way she could reach out to Grace would be to plant a clue—a loving clue, tied to a memory when they were aligned against something together—somewhere out in the mess for Grace to find.

When she returned to the living room and saw the boy hang up the phone, she already knew that Greg was out of the picture. She felt it in her bones—or, rather, she felt the lead shot of worry in her bones discharge, leaving her as light as a child's balsa plane.

“Greg's gone. I made sure. He wanted me to tell you that you're being shortsighted. I said, sure thing, private eye. He didn't get it. So dumb.”

“I've got another—”

“Nah. I think I'm done.” He squirmed into the corner of the couch.

“Wait. Just wait.” The boy hadn't eaten—the normal dinner hour had long passed. She stepped toward the kitchen as if following a strange choreography—one foot shooting out in a wide side-step, the other in a heel-scraping jazzy thrust. It was the dance of staying upright. When she got to the refrigerator she opened it, clung to the handle, and spied the boy's sober dinner—a gluten-free enchilada and greens—among the fresh veggies, soda water, and cheese wheels. She could not serve such a thing to him. It would be dispiriting.

She thought of a gambler she once saw at the slots, a fat nobody slug who, by dint of his hot streak, became a kind of temporary god. Friends and hangers-on brought him meatloaf in Styrofoam, drinks, crab cakes, pudding … it went on and on into the night. If he moved, it was understood, the streak would end. It was also understood that these offerings of cake and meat were really being laid at the feet of Lady Luck, who was at that moment making herself manifest in that bloated husk.

She found a piece of old cherry cheesecake in tinfoil and a can of whipped cream tucked behind a stand of low-fat salad dressings. She snapped off several single-serve Jell-Os from a pack. High in a cabinet, she found a bag of chocolate baking chips. Under the stove, she found a deep roasting pan. She filled it with her finds and topped it off with a few travel bags of potato chips and some Lifesavers she dug out from her purse. She laid the feast at his feet. “Eat,” she murmured. “Then we'll talk.”