The Cake House (17 page)

Alex was leaning against a graffitied cinder-block wall where the Dumpsters were kept, talking to a boy I recognized from that time in Alex’s room. I was too far away to hear what they were saying, but whatever it was, Alex didn’t seem interested. The boy was agitated, gesturing with his hands, and then he stopped. He looked Alex up and down and said something real quiet-like, a curse, a swearword. Alex shook his head, said something that appeared to satisfy the boy. They spoke for another moment before Alex
shook his head again, and the other boy stood there a second before slouching away.

I took the boy’s picture as he shuffled across to the far chain-link fence that marked the border of the campus. He hopped over the fence and then shuffled down the street to where a big, boat-like station wagon was parked.

“Take good pictures?” asked a warm, low voice. Alex sounded annoyed.

In answer, I raised my camera and took his picture. He blinked from the flash.

“I have to pee,” I said.

Alex took the camera from my hands, lifting the strap from around my neck. He fingered the back of the camera. “You should ask permission first.”

“I never have before.”

For a moment I thought he would open the casing and expose the film, but he returned the strap to my neck, placing the weight of the camera against my chest. “When you get these developed, I’d like to see them.”

He had never asked to see my pictures before. It was against the new unspoken rules. Even though I wanted to be mad at him, I smiled.

He waited while I found the bathroom.

When we returned to the game, Claude and my mother were still talking to the gray-haired man and his wife. I wondered if this was how it had happened with my father, with Claude shaking his hand and laughing at a shared joke.

The prescription drugs came in the same kind of plastic bag as my photographs: store logo on the front with cutouts at the top as handles. My mother left them on the dining table next to her purse—I thought she had brought home my latest developed roll of film, but instead I found a white paper package with her name on it. The bag tore when I opened it, and an amber vial fell into my hand.

“What are these for?” I asked.

She took the bottle before I could read the drug’s name. The pills rattled when she thrust them into her purse, fumbling enough that she dropped her keys. Then her sunglasses fell from the top of her head and she had to pick those up too. “Something to help with my headaches. It probably won’t work. I don’t know why I bothered.”

She went upstairs, and I didn’t see her for the rest of the day. I didn’t see her the next day either. A week after the football game, she finally came down to make a dinner of
pasta and homemade sauce, but she overcooked the tomatoes and left the spaghetti too long on the stove.

“It’s all right,” said Claude when she turned away, one hand covering her face, the diamond ring on her finger trembling. “We’ll get takeout.”

Claude talked to my mother in quiet murmurs, inching closer until she let him put a hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you go upstairs? Let me take care of it. I’ll bring up some food for you. Go and get some rest.”

Her face was white when she passed me in the hallway.

In the kitchen, Claude was rummaging in a drawer. He pulled out a stack of menus and fanned them out like playing cards. “What’ll it be, Rosie?”

I picked one from the middle of the pack: Chinese food.

“My favorite,” said Claude. “Why don’t you call? Order whatever you like, enough for all of us.”

I took the menu but stayed to watch Claude pick up the saucepan. He looked at its contents before turning it upside down over the sink. The condensed tomatoes plopped with a wet splat against the porcelain.

Alex showed up for takeout, but as soon as he swallowed the last of his food, he vanished into his bedroom, leaving Claude and me alone in the flickering light of the television with the volume on low.

I retrieved a stack of my photographs and sat cross-legged on the carpet, laying the photos side by side so I could see them together: pictures of my mother, of Alex surrounded by his friends at school, pictures from the football game. I noticed that the carpet needed vacuuming, crumbs and hard bits of dirt sticking to the palms of my hands.

“Can I see those?” Claude asked. As usual, he had his own puzzle in front of him: paper printouts, file folders,
glossy brochures overlapping like conversations where no one was listening. He came to the edge of the sofa so he could get a better look.

“No,” I said, attempting to hide the photos with my body and arms. “This is none of your business.”

Claude laughed, moving from the couch to sit next to me. He picked up a couple of photos. “These are great,” he said, admiring a photo of my mother standing by the window in my bedroom, a cigarette dangling from her lower lip and a wreath of smoke flowing behind her like a wedding veil.

He put the photo down and started flipping through the others. He stopped when he found the photo I’d taken of him and Alex and my mother talking to Alex’s friends and their parents at the football game. He froze, then held it up so he could get a better look.

“Why’d you take this one?” he asked, with no inflection to his voice.

I shrugged, not wanting to say how I studied Alex, searching for why he was different with his friends than he was with me. “Because I wanted to.”

“What kind of reason is that?”

“I don’t know.” I tried to snag the picture, but he held it out of my reach. “Give it back.”

“Not until you tell me why you took it. A real photographer plans each shot, frames the picture, and considers her subjects and how she wants the photograph to come out. Otherwise you’re wasting film.”

“It’s my film to waste.”

Claude’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Can I have it?” he asked.

“Have what?”

“This picture. Can I have it?”

“Why?” I tried grabbing the picture again, confused. If he wanted a photograph, it should have been one of my mother.

“I want a few of these.” He pointed to the rest of the photos and picked up another one, of Alex talking to his friend by the cinder-block wall. “They’re very good,” he said.

I gathered the rest in a messy pile before he could get his hands on any more. “Well, you can’t have them. What do you know about photography anyway?”

“More than you. I used to be quite the shutterbug. Worked on the school newspaper, lo these many years ago.”

Incomprehensible to think I shared anything with Claude. “You couldn’t have been very good.”

He barked a laugh, and he was back to the same Claude. “I like you, Rosie. Here, judge for yourself.”

From the bottom of the bookshelf he pulled out a crusty binder. The spine crackled as I opened it to find newspaper clippings, all yellowed to the color of old bruises, pasted onto thick black paper. The first article showed a picture of a man, wrinkles crisscrossing his face, sitting on a park bench wrapped in a threadbare, dirty blanket. Caption:
A
vagrant admiring the sun on a Monday morning.
On the next page a little girl cried, her gap-toothed mouth hung open, her hand offering a busted balloon while behind her a Ferris wheel turned. She held the torn bits of plastic as if they were a precious but dead pet, perhaps her first loss. The next photo, a long shot of a street littered with trash, and a lone figure trying to sweep with only a broom. Another, of a group of men at a podium pointing into an unseen crowd, and behind them stood a second row of men in military uniforms holding automatic machine guns. A closer inspection
revealed that the last picture was of a stage production, costumes and props and artificial scenery.

They were horrible—and beautiful. He liked to photograph terrible things, things in which I couldn’t find evidence of the happy-go-lucky, blustering Claude who loved to joke and laugh. But I remembered how he had been when he had caught Alex in my room, and I remembered the hard way he asked why I had taken his picture at the football game.

The final clipping was of a woman with a long face and straight hair that fell well past her waist, exaggerating her height and her bony, exposed shoulders. She stood onstage to the left of the conductor, in front of an orchestra, one big-knuckled hand wrapped around the neck of a violin. Tall and imperious, she dared the camera to take her picture. I realized that I knew that arctic dare.

My finger traced her face, the thinness of her arms, the curved lines of the violin. With a jolt, I understood; it was the sound of her violin that seeped from underneath Alex’s bedroom door every day. Her glare drew my attention. The angles of her face were so severe that I could have cut myself if I’d touched her, sliced my hands open to bleed on the carpet. The caption below the picture read,
Violinist Catherine Craig takes the stage with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“That’s Alex’s mother,” Claude said, no longer smiling.

My tongue stung with questions, surprised that he had volunteered the truth and intrigued by the flare of remorse in his eyes.

“I met her that day for the first time”—he nodded at the binder in my hands—“when I took her picture.”

“Did you love her?”

“Oh yes,” said Claude.

“What happened?”

“She didn’t love me back. Not enough, anyway. I wasn’t enough for her. It was a long time ago.” Claude held his hand out for the binder, snapped it shut. Back in its place, the dust crowded around it protectively. He stood over me, so tall I felt the bones of my neck grind together as I looked up. “You know, I’d build you a darkroom, if you let me. It’d be better that way. Keep everything in house, close to home. You wouldn’t have to wait to have your photos developed.”

I went back to stacking my photographs by subject matter, returning them to the envelopes they came in. “Why do you always have to buy something?”

He reddened, and it made me think of the overcooked tomatoes flushed down the drain. “Who do you think gives Alex the money to buy your film? And who asked him to buy it for you in the first place? Tell me to stop and I’ll stop.”

I’d finally succeeded in making him mad. But it was a quiet anger, cold and reserved, and once again I marveled to see the similarity between father and son.

“I don’t know how to use a darkroom,” I said softly.

He considered this. “If you’ll give me this picture, I could teach you,” he said, and bopped me on the head with it, trying to be playful again.

Before I could respond, Alex came down the stairs, pausing when he saw the two of us. “Can I borrow the car?” he asked Claude.

He had never asked for this before, at least not while I had been living with them. Father and son stared at each other. Push me, pull me.

“What do you want it for?” asked Claude.

“There’s a party.”

A silent conversation took place, questions asked and answered in the open space between them. Claude walked over to the kitchen, rummaged around in a drawer for the second time that evening.

“Take Dahlia’s car,” he said, tossing the keys. I recognized the green key chain; it was a dahlia flower, a gift from my father.

I caught the keys before they reached Alex, snagging the key chain in my right hand. Alex tried to grab them, but I dodged him.

“Can I go to the party too?” I asked. Going to a party was something normal teenagers did. I wanted to see what Alex would do if Claude said that I could go.

Alex reached around one side of my body, then to the other, but I elbowed him in his belly.

“You’re not invited,” he said, exasperated, annoyed.

It didn’t surprise me that he didn’t want me with him, but now I was determined. “But I want to go.

“If you let me go to the party, I’ll let you have those photographs,” I told Claude, who was leaning against the kitchen doorframe.

Alex stopped trying to grab the keys, noticing for the first time the photographs in Claude’s hand. “What photographs?” he asked.

Claude hadn’t moved. “I think that’s a great idea,” he said, and then shifted his attention to Alex. “Why don’t you take Rosie with you?”

My heart stopped, breath trapped in my chest like a great big ball of wonder. I hadn’t thought he would say yes.

“But I can’t—” started Alex.

Claude looked at me. “Wouldn’t you like to go?”

He had turned it around and made it his idea, as if I
hadn’t been the one to ask to go. As if he knew I hadn’t been serious before and now he was calling my bluff.

“Well?” Claude asked.

“She doesn’t want to go,” cut in Alex.

“Let her say that. What will it be, Rosie?”

On the mantel in the living room a clock ticked, doling out time by the fistful. It was past eight on a Friday night. All over Southern California, hundreds of teenagers were getting ready to go to parties. My mother would have wanted me to go; at least the version of her that had existed before my father’s death would have wanted me to go. My father would have wanted me to stay. Alex wanted me to stay.

“I’ll go,” I said.

Alex sighed and took the keys from my hand.

I thought Claude might grin in his usual triumph, but that hard look returned as he pinned me down in close scrutiny. “Then you’d better get ready,” he said, by way of dismissal.

The command in his voice had me already running for the stairs, but I stopped when Claude said my name.

“Why don’t you leave those photographs here, so I can go through them?”

I knew I didn’t have a choice, not if I wanted to go to the party. Not if I wanted that darkroom. And I did want to go, despite Alex’s clear annoyance. After another hesitation, I handed over the envelopes that held both the photographs and negatives before running up the stairs. But I stopped on the top step when I heard Alex speak.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Just taking a look,” answered Claude, but when there wasn’t a response, he continued. “Can you explain this?”

Silence, then Alex said, “It was nothing. I was using the phones and Tom was there. That’s all.”

“We have enough problems, Alex.”

“I know.”