Invisible Boy (13 page)

“Do you think I should go to Rome?” she asked again as I was about to close the door.

“I think you should sleep on it. If you still don’t know in the morning, we can talk about it some more.”

I shut the door and patted the cab’s roof, then watched it whisk her away down the darkening street.

I raised my bottle of Rolling Rock in salute, wishing her safety in whatever journey she’d embarked upon.

“Toasting the city, Bunny?”

I turned to find Dean walking toward me down the sidewalk.

“Thank God,” I said, hugging him. “I thought you’d never get here.”

Y
ou have some really fucked-up friends,” said Sue when we were all back splayed out across the living room, having called Mykonos
for delivery of baba ghanoush and hummus and souvlaki, agreeing we were all too communally exhausted to consider walking anywhere.

“I can’t believe she was
here
, too,” said Dean. “She drove out to the office in New Jersey twice today.”

“After you called me this morning?” I asked.

He nodded.

“That woman needs a fucking job,” said Sue.

“Or a fucking
life
,” added Pagan. “I mean,
go
to fucking Rome already. Who fucking cares?”

“I’m worried about her,” I said.

“Why don’t you worry about world peace or something, Maddie?” asked Sue. “I mean, use your energy wisely.”

“Oh, right, because the pursuit of world peace is such a historically non-frustrating endeavor,” I said.

Pagan laid her head down on the arm of the sofa and closed her eyes. “What.
Ever
. I’m just so happy she isn’t talking at me anymore.”

We heard the rattle-and-clink of someone wrapping heavy chains around a bicycle.

“Hark,” said Dean, “the dinner bell.”

*   *   *   

It wasn’t until we’d paid the delivery guy and opened up all the various containers across the coffee table that I started
relating my adventures out in Queens that day.

“I wouldn’t have known what Melmac even
was
,” said Pagan, scooping up a bite of lamb and tzatziki with a wedge of pita bread.

“I don’t know why I did,” I said. “It’s not like I really watched that show. I mean, maybe a couple of times when I had the
flu or something. I don’t even remember.”

“It’s your photogenic memory,” she said. “Only this time there was some purpose to the useless trivia your brain is flypaper
for.”

“Photogenic?” asked Dean.

“Old joke,” said Pagan. “Long boring explanation.”

“Who’s got the salt?” I asked.

Pagan picked up the shaker from down the table and set it on the napkin beside my plate.

I started shaking the white gold generously over my food.

“You haven’t even tasted it,” said Sue.

“Why ruin the first bite?” I replied.

Sue said, “I want to know more about the cemetery. Who do you think killed the little boy, his mother?”

Pague and I said “Boyfriend” simultaneously.

“But if he’d been beaten up a lot before?” asked Sue. “I mean, does anyone even know how long his mother’d been with the boyfriend?”

“I have a hard time picturing a woman doing that much damage, just from the upper-body-strength perspective. His rib cage
was totally—”

“We’re
eating
, here,” said Pagan.

I shrugged. “Sue asked.”

Pagan pointed her pita at me. “Funny, I didn’t hear her say, ‘Could you please cause me to be overcome with extreme nausea.’ ”

“Sorry,” I said.

“You should be.”

Ah, sisters.

Sue turned to Dean. “So how’s the new job?”

“Interesting,” he said. “I’m liking it so far.”

“What do these machines do, anyway?” asked Pagan.

“Tell you how much shit there is in a sample of water. Microbes have to breathe, so you measure their respiration and figure
out your level of contaminant.”

“I’m so glad I went to film school,” said Sue. “I have no idea what you just said.”

“They don’t seem to work. Christoph keeps blaming the ignorant American workforce lacking proper respect for holy Swiss inventors
in lab coats. I’ll find out next week.”

“Next week?” I asked.

“They’re sending me to Houston on a service call Sunday night. Looks like it’s time for a fresh set of coveralls.”

“Pinstripe or herringbone?” I asked.

“Herringbone,” he said. “More slimming.”

Sue went out for a game of pool with some pals, and Dean wandered off to bed.

Pague and I decided to have one more beer before we went to sleep ourselves, after turning off the lights in the living room
to stop the evil orange from searing further into our eyeballs.

Our lone streetlamp threw a soft glow in through the room’s two windows, the fire escape’s locked gate casting long skinny
shadows across the ceiling.

“Tell me more about the kid,” said Pagan, taking a sip of beer.

“His name was Teddy Underhill.”

“So he’s a distant cousin or something, right?”

“Might be. I mean, he’s black.”

“Which means maybe our family owned his family,” she said. “Ouch.”

“Doesn’t rule out being related.”

“Of course not. How’d he end up in the cemetery?”

“We don’t know.” I took a sip of my beer, then told her about the hotel by LaGuardia and how close Mrs. Underhill lived to
Prospect.

“His mother told the cops she’d been out on a job interview,” I said, “but Skwarecki doesn’t believe it.”

“Skwarecki?” asked Pague.

“The homicide detective chick.”

“Why doesn’t she believe the mother?”

“Says she looked like a crackhound.”

“How big was the kid?”

I held my hand about six inches above the surface of the coffee table, and Pague shivered.

“I’m kind of struck by something,” I said.

“What?”

“How you and I immediately blamed the boyfriend. Nobody else did—Sue and Dean, Cate this afternoon.”

“How ’bout the cop?”

“Skwarecki’s totally down with the boyfriend angle. I could just tell. But it being my default response freaked her out a
little.”

Pagan shrugged. “That’s just our life.”

“Stepfathers, sure,” I said. “But I got spanked
once
. Mom and Michael were having a dinner party and I kept stomping my feet on the mattress and chanting ‘Fee fi fo fum’ really
loudly for an hour after they’d put me to bed.”

“I would’ve thrown you out the window.”

“Right? I mean, it’s not like we were beaten, ever.”

“No.”

“Or, you know,
molested
.”

Pagan didn’t say anything.

After a few seconds the quiet took on a scary gravity.

My little sister took another swallow of beer.

I was cold all of a sudden. That creeping chill I’d felt back in the cemetery, when Skwarecki described the last time Teddy
had been seen alive. I looked down to see all the little hairs on my forearms standing straight up.

“Pague?”

“That whole thing with Pierce,” she said.

“
What
whole thing with Pierce?”

“I told you about it.”

“I’d totally remember you telling me anything to do with that stupid pompous arrogant sorry-ass piece-of-shit skeevy
butt
head,” I said.

My sister scootched her back down against the sofa, nestling her head into the top of a nubby-tweed pillow. She hooked a big
toe under the coffee table to pull it closer, then stretched her bare feet across its surface.

A lone car swept past in the street below.

I turned sideways to face her, hugging my knees to my chest.

She looked up at the ceiling. “It’s weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“That you don’t know,” she said. “I could’ve sworn I told you years ago.”

I
could’ve sworn I told you years ago
.

Maybe thirty seconds elapsed after my sister said that—half a minute during which pretty much every nuance of Pagan’s and
my entire childhood crashed through my head.

I was eleven when Pierce moved into our house. Pagan was nine and a half. Mom split up with our dad in 1967, and with our
brother Trace’s father in ’72.

Pierce came on the scene following her yearish-long stints dating a very sweet seventeen-year-old guy, then a newly divorced
South African mathematician whose kids we played with on the weekends he had custody.

We were pretty cool with it all, frankly. The only still-married parents we knew were Mr. and Mrs. Neare, who knocked back
highball glasses of vodka-spiked green Hi-C from 7
A.M.
onward, every day.

By the time the schoolbus returned their kids they could barely maneuver the Victrola’s needle onto their next bullshit-Republican
Mantovani record.

All the other moms hung out in each other’s kitchens, half of them with toddlers in their laps. They laughed over coffee or
glasses of wine, comparing notes on the vagaries of vanished men and the fifties myths they’d been raised believing the worth
of: monogamy or the rhythm method or the Stock Exchange.

That was the surface of things. The version Mom told at cocktail parties back east, illustrating how much better everything
was now that we’d abandoned Long Island for California.

Mom didn’t talk about how there was never enough money, or how bright the kitchen lights seemed in the middle of the night
as she emptied ice trays into a dishtowel to soothe some other mother’s black eye or bruised throat.

They’d tiptoe back outside to lift sleeping children tenderly from some broken-down station wagon’s backseat, the blankies
still clutched in tiny fists, fat cheeks flushed with the warmth of footie pajamas.

Like I said, most of the time we were pretty cool with that life, me and Pagan. But we got out as early as we could. I scored
a scholarship to Mom’s boarding school, and Pagan was treated to a year in Switzerland by her godmother.

I was fleeing the miserable daily grind of Pierce in our house, but I never imagined he had anything to do with my sister’s
exodus.

I
was the kid he hated: the bitch, the smart-ass, the “put-down queen.”

The man enjoyed playing favorites, telling me I was fat and ugly compared to my lithe, dark-haired mother and sister.

I’d envied my sister, the beloved child: Pagan-the-graceful, Pagan-the-good. The kid who’d never blurt out a sharp phrase,
unable to resist the sheer snapping delight of the words in her mouth.

She was not a constant, involuntary, green-eyed-blonde reminder of Mom’s first husband and his utter indifference to our financial
upkeep.

Pierce lived in our house for five years. He gave Mom $150 a month, and pointedly begrudged every single lightbulb, chicken
thigh, paper towel, bowl of cereal, or gallon of gas that money purchased.

He’d paid goddamn child support to two goddamn ex-wives, and he was goddamned if he’d pick up the slack for any deadbeat asshole
who didn’t fucking care enough about his own goddamn kids to make sure they went to school with goddamn shoes on their goddamn
feet.

Unless it was something for Pagan.

But I’d gotten it totally, utterly wrong: the premise underlying

everything I remembered.

And I should have known,

I should have known,

I should have fucking well
known
.

I flashed on an afternoon when I was thirteen or so, sitting in the backseat of Mom’s car.

She was up front behind the wheel, Pierce riding shotgun beside her.

We were parked in someone’s driveway, picking Pagan up after a friend’s slumber party.

The three of us watched a dozen ten-year-old girls stumble out of the house one by one, clutching rolled-up pastel sleeping
bags and little pink or purple overnight cases.

And as each downy-armed, bare-legged child walked past us to climb into a parent’s car, Pierce pronounced judgment, in his
plummy community-theater drawl, on whether or not she was a nymphette.

I just kept seeing that afternoon in my head while Pagan spoke on the sofa, next to me in the present.