The 10 P.M. Question (23 page)

Gertrude. Ruby. Garnet. Faith.

“Gertrude? Ruby? Garnet? Faith? Hope? Charity?” Frankie asked.

Ma shook her head.

“What’s up, Frankie?”

Everything,
Frankie thought.

“Nothing really,” he said.

Frankie sat in the riverside bus shelter, massaging the end of his nose, which stung with the cold. He imagined it red at the tip and shiny like freshly cut beef. It had been that way since he’d woken this morning, his bedroom frigid. He’d half fallen out of bed, dragging the duvet around him, and trudged to the window. Rivulets of moisture ran the length of the pane and pooled beneath the window frame. He rubbed the glass with the side of his fist and peered out into the backyard; the grass was white and solid with frost. Winter,
for real,
as Gigs would say. Frankie liked a frost, though. He liked the raw morning air that came with frosts and the blue sky that followed. He liked the excuse to wear his Wolverhampton scarf to school.

But there was no school today. It was the second day of the vacation and he was going over to Sydney’s house to work on the last two chapters of
The Valiant Ranger.
They were working at Sydney’s because Ma was having a visit from Dinah, her psychiatrist. (Gordana called Dinah the Shrink, in an overtly hushed tone, which Frankie thought unfair because, actually, Dinah was kind and reassuringly brisk. In the past she had come every month, and even Gordana conceded that fewer visits meant things had improved with Ma.)

Yes, he liked Dinah fine, but all the same he was uncomfortable being in the house when she and Ma were talking, though they did it in the sunroom, with the door closed. Frankie felt self-conscious somehow when Dinah was present, as if his movements around the house were slightly spastic, as if his breathing, his very
thoughts,
might somehow be visible and damning.

Sydney was looking after her sisters, which was another reason for working at her house. Freya, apparently, had appointments with the blind. Frankie doubted this very much. He was convinced now that Freya’s reading to the blind was, ha,
a blind
. He was sure she really went shopping or to the movies — or worse. But Sydney, who was ruthlessly realistic about her mother, seemed to believe that Freya would in fact be sitting in elderly blind people’s houses, reading to them for hours at a time. Gigs agreed with Frankie, though; they had speculated about it endlessly.

Frankie missed Gigs. He always spent the first week of vacation at Brass camp, and the second week at his mother’s house down at the very south of South Island. Right this minute, he and ten other trombones would be warming up in Section Rehearsal. In the afternoons there would be Individual Lessons, then Full Band Rehearsal. (Frankie had poured over the camp brochure with Gigs when it had arrived. He had simultaneously envied Gigs
and
been thankful that he did not play the tuba or the cornet or anything else that would oblige him to lie his way out of another camp.)

On Saturday night the students would present Brass Gala, which Frankie was attending with Chris and Dr. Pete. Frankie went to all Gigs’s performances. He liked to watch him flourishing the trombone, all red-faced and sweaty and transported. He liked the lines of trumpeters, standing tall, their horns lifted skyward like medieval heralds. Best of all he loved the music. True, there were lullabies and love songs — sometimes slow, sometimes sorrowful — but most often it was busy, triumphal music, the sounds diamond bright,
heartening
.

Back at home Ma was at work in the kitchen, a cake in the oven, several others in progress. Frankie had inspected the bowls while he ate his Just Right. Orange almond cake. Blueberry polenta cake. Ginger loaf with crystallized ginger. Something unfamiliar involving Brazil nuts and dried cranberries, which turned out to be a gluten-free fiftieth-birthday cake. Very unappetizing, Frankie thought. In his backpack he had a container with a wedge of day-old Mistake Cake. Mistake Cake could be any flavor and any shape, and was rarer than you might have wished. Gordana had come up with the name in the early days of Ma’s business when she was experimenting and failed cakes were a little more common. The Mistake Cake in Frankie’s backpack was a dark German chocolate torte that had unexpectedly sunk in the middle. He had delivered some of the cake to Gigs’s house on his way to the bus. The rest of it was for Gordana, who was decamping to Ben’s.

“I may be some time,” she said.

“Why?” Frankie asked.

“The Shrink
and
Aunt Invasion,” said Gordana. “Ask yourself.” She gave the front door an emphatic slam behind her.

But, Frankie reflected as he waited at the bus stop, things had been minutely better with Gordana in the last couple of weeks. Frankie felt sure he could detect the very faintest softening in her exchanges with him. Merely
having
an exchange was a softening in itself, in Frankie’s view. For instance, on the weekend, Gordana had inquired — in a distinctly Gordana-ish way — about his rash.

“How’s your galloping jock itch?” She was lying with her legs hooked over the back of the sofa and her head hanging just above the floor, texting several of her forty-seven friends. Uncle George and Louie were sitting at the dining-room table, trying out designs for Louie’s new business card.

“Jock itch?” said Uncle George. “What’s going on, old man?”

“You done something filthy?” said Louie.

But Frankie was impervious to embarrassment, because the jock itch rash
was
better. It had faded and shrunk. He had applied Uncle George’s foot cream as instructed by Gordana, and the rash had visibly improved. He could hardly believe it — something actually going right. Of course, history had taught him that the minute one thing went right, something else immediately went very wrong, so it was certainly just a matter of time before a new worry was born. Still, just now, sitting at the bus stop, holding his cold nose and enjoying the dog-walkers on the other side of the river, he could, for a few moments, feel pleased about his rash.

There were four dogs being exercised across the river, but Frankie’s eyes were on his favorite: Yeti, the Saint Bernard, who was as big as the proverbial monster and shortsighted to boot. Yeti moved very slowly, which was just as well because his owner, Mr. Scully, was elderly and also shuffled along at a glacial pace. Frankie found it very funny that Mr. Scully and Yeti looked so alike; they both had long shaggy hair and solid bodies. He watched them now, inching along the riverbank path toward a bench, where they would sit while Mr. Scully fed the ducks. They did this several times a week, though Frankie and Gigs usually only saw them on Saturdays while they waited for cricket or soccer pickups. Sometimes Mr. Scully and Yeti crossed the footbridge and walked along the other side toward the hospital, which was when Frankie and Gigs got to make a fuss of the big dog, who stood, stolid and patient, while they patted him.

Mr. Scully liked to have a chat. He talked as slowly as he walked — about the government, about Mrs. Scully, who had passed on, about the river traffic, and about his garden, which was the pride of Riverside Drive. Years ago, in his semi-delinquent phase, Louie, assisted by Hunter Nichols, had stripped Mr. Scully’s garden of opium poppies in the dead of night. Mr. Scully had never known the raider was young Frankie’s brother, but Frankie had been ashamed anyway. Mr. Scully was a nice old guy. He was kind to boys and animals, and his dog never chased the ducks.

Dogs and ducks made Frankie think of
The Valiant Ranger.
The hero of their story was a nice
young
guy who was kind to animals and also owned a dog. The ranger, Hank (Sydney had named him after her dead
opa
), had found his dog, abandoned in the countryside. Microsoft (he was undersized and fluffy, a mutt with teaspoons of beagle and terrier) had been a starving puppy at the time, left at the side of the road by owners who’d had second thoughts. The fearless duo chased bird-smugglers through bush and small town and city. Hank had trained Microsoft to carry birds in his muzzle without damaging them. In the final chapters of the story, Microsoft would round up Anders and Goldberger, the bird-smugglers, and nose out the rare and endangered “aral” bird, which the two thieves had stolen from her protected nesting site and were hiding in their tree house.

(There was really no good reason Frankie and Sydney could think up for two criminals to have a tree house, but they had one anyway. Frankie wanted badly to draw a big gnarled acacia with a perfect cubby house in it. The Aunties had just such a tree in their backyard, and Frankie had dreamed often about a splendid structure of corrugated iron and building offcuts curtained by the yellow blossoms. That was the good thing about writing and drawing, he and Sydney agreed. You could have all the things you yearned for but could never achieve. Including easy solutions.)

Frankie was really very pleased with Microsoft and the aral bird. He had sketched them over and over, trying out different features and expressions, different coats and feathering. Microsoft needed to look both adorable
and
fierce, so Frankie decided there might be pit bull somewhere far back in his mongrel genealogy. He had given him a set of menacing teeth.

The aral bird was a quite brilliant creation, he thought, an eighth wonder of the world — with an exquisitely fine beak (like a hummingbird) and an orange underbelly (like an oriole). The male aral had cute tufts about the eyes (like a burrowing owl), which lent him a comic aspect. The female aral had wing feathers that turned creamy in nesting season, making her highly visible to predators. She laid deep red-brown eggs (like a speckled warbler) in a most delicately wrought nest (like a chaffinch’s). Frankie imagined the arals so vividly when he was drawing that occasionally he forgot the species was an invention, a perfect composite of all his favorite bird bits.

An ambulance drove along the river road, toward the hospital. No flashing light or siren, so no emergency, Frankie supposed. The paramedic in the passenger seat gave him a friendly wave and Frankie raised his hand in return. He tried to imagine being a paramedic or a nurse or a doctor. It would be all disease and crisis and never-ending information about symptoms; he’d be catatonic with terror by the end of the first day. It was bad enough merely visiting hospitals, which Frankie had done when Gran Parsons had been sick. He had gone with Uncle George and Gordana, who had both held Gran’s purple hands and chatted to her though she was practically a corpse, propped up on pillows and thin as a stick, with only one side of her mouth smiling. Frankie had stood at the foot of her bed, trying not to breathe in the ward smells, looking away, and never touching anything, including Gran, which had made him feel like a terrible grandson.

“Oh, good
God,
Frankie,” Gordana had said afterward. “Strokes aren’t
infectious
. And neither is old age.”

Uncle George had said, “Ahem,
correction,”
explaining that old age was 100 percent infectious because eventually everyone caught it. He and Gordana had laughed like idiots at this splendid witticism, but Frankie had imagined Ma, Uncle George, Louie, Gordana, and the Aunties, one by one becoming brittle sticks on big white pillows, and he had felt desolate.

Across the river, the ducks swarmed at the bank as Mr. Scully began throwing his toast crusts and stale Chelsea buns. Frankie came out from the shelter and perched on the fire hydrant to watch the mayhem, his head turned slightly, catching the pale sun on his cheek.

Sydney’s sisters were playing War when Frankie arrived. He stepped into the hallway, and a small figure wearing swimming goggles and a woolen balaclava darted from an adjoining room and brandished a furled umbrella at him.

“Hilt!” said the figure.

“She means halt,” said Sydney.

Frankie stood obligingly still.

“Calcutta,” said Sydney, pointing to the child.

“No, it’s not!” growled Calcutta.

“Who are you, then?”

“That man you said.”

“Nelson Mandela?”

“No.”

“Pablo Picasso?”

“No.”

Sydney screwed up her face, thinking.

“Robinson Crusoe?”

“Him!”

“So Frankie’s Man Friday, then,” said Sydney.

“No!” said Calcutta. “That’s Galway.”

“What
ever,
” said Sydney, turning away. “And that’s Galway — I mean Friday.” She gestured up the stairs and Frankie saw a second small figure watching them guardedly from the corner of the half-landing. Galway was wearing a crumpled Stetson and a Wonder Woman cape and holding a hairbrush. Frankie wished Gigs were there. Sydney’s sisters were just like human versions of the Second-Left Army.

“Yo, Friday,” he said tentatively. He raised a hand but Galway didn’t respond.

“She’s shy,” said Sydney. “Calcutta’s the boss, even though she’s younger. Come on,” she ordered.

Frankie followed Sydney down the passage, making his way through a jumble of furniture. A sofa minus its cushions had been inverted to provide a tunnel; a drawerless dresser had soft toys strung up on the struts. There was a procession of chairs, two deep, back to back. Bedding and pillows filled every space in between.