The Cake House (20 page)

He must have gotten a new one, because I still had his old one in my closet. Sometimes I even wore it to school. Behind me, the screen door banged open and more people left the party, most of them casting a nervous glance at Deputy Mike before crossing the yard. Joey tumbled from the front door. A princess and a kitty cat tried to get her to walk, but her knees buckled and they couldn’t carry her.

Alex watched Joey slip and fall a second time. She laughed, raised her arms like a small child asking to be lifted, but he did nothing. Tina made a move to go to her, but Alex held her back.

The other officer shined a light into Joey’s face. She flinched, waved her hands in front as if she were blind. He spoke to her, helped her to her feet, and led her from the house and around the corner.

“Have you been drinking?” asked Deputy Mike, pulling Alex’s attention away from Joey.

“No, sir,” answered Alex, easing up on his hostility.

“Your father know you’re here?” Deputy Mike eyed Tina and me. We were standing like two Alex satellites, but he was uninterested in our teenage love triangle. I shifted toward him and was rewarded with a hand on my shoulder.

“He gave me the keys to the car,” answered Alex. “You want to call him?”

They held each other’s gaze long enough for the rain to soak my shoes, for my face to prickle with spittle bouncing
off the nearby window. Deputy Mike nodded. “All right.” He waved everyone off the porch. “Get going.” With a nod at Alex, he said, “Get them home.”

Alex took his jacket off, holding it over Tina’s head, and they ran to the car.

I stayed where I was. Deputy Mike beamed his flashlight through the thickening rain, following the slow departure of the party.

“The fight was about me,” I said.

He pointed his flashlight at the various ghouls and fairies crossing the lawn. Then he pointed the flashlight at my face and I had to shut my eyes.

“I doubt that,” he said, returning to observing the party exodus.

“But it was,” I said. “Alex got mad, and I was—”

Deputy Mike looked straight at me, and I fell quiet, intimidated by his nearness. The wind swooped down. Quicker than an intake of breath, the downpour that had been threatening began and the rain fell in thick veils, louder than a thousand drummers drumming.

He took his jacket off and put it over my head, the same way Alex had with Tina. Together, we moved across the yard. Water sprayed into my eyes despite the shelter of his arms. He hauled me against his chest, his gun belt digging into my side. When we got to the car, he pushed me inside with Tina, shutting the door before I could say anything. Alex remained outside, listening and nodding to something Deputy Mike was saying.

Tina had turned in her seat, wiping the rain from her face and watching Alex and Deputy Mike with a searching expression. I wanted to shake her and imagined pushing her out of the car so that she floated away with all the debris
that washed down the street. That might shock Deputy Mike and Alex and get their attention. “Do you think he’s in trouble?” I asked.

She wiped the rain from her face. “He’s always in trouble.”

Before I could ask her what she meant, the car door opened, bringing in noise and rain. Alex slid in. He looked at Tina and then at me. The shadows in the car made the bruises emerging on his face seem grotesque. Cold, hard silence wrapped around us. He started the car.

It wasn’t until after we had dropped Tina at her home that I realized I still had Deputy Mike’s jacket: another one, to add to my collection.

THE CAKE HOUSE WINDOWS WERE
glowing with golden light when we got home, a warped hint of the warmth inside. I wondered if my mother had woken up. She never rested easy during rainstorms; the thunder was too loud, the lightning too bright.

Alex pulled into the garage and turned the car off, the heat from the vents fading away. Lightning flashed, with thunder hard upon its heels. The rain beat a constant tribal rhythm against the roof of the garage.

“Stay away from Tom,” he said. “And Aaron.”

“Why?”

“Just do it. They’re not—” Gingerly, he licked his lip where it had split open again. “They’re not good friends for you.”

“And you are? If I said stay away from Tina, would you do it?” I asked.

“Leave her out of this.”

“Why?” I demanded, wanting to hit him at the same time that I wanted to make him tell me what he was feeling. I was frustrated with his evasions, the way he came close only to push me away again. “You kiss me, then you kiss her; I don’t know what it is you want. I don’t know what’s going on in this house. Why did Claude want my photographs?” I fell silent, but he wasn’t looking at me.

“Tina’s none of your business. It’s not what you think. It’s complicated.”

“Then tell me. Sometimes I think you like me. But maybe you’re just playing? What were you doing with Tina at the party, in the garden? I followed you, you know. That Joey girl said you were fuck—”

Alex pushed me against my seat, his arm across my chest. “Don’t follow me,” he said.

“All right,” I said, trying to dislodge his arm, but it wouldn’t budge.

He pressed harder, and my chest and collarbone hurt. “Don’t fucking follow me.”

“I said all right.” I dug my nails into his flesh until he snatched his arm back.

In the poor lighting, his chest rose and fell, and the bruise stood out like a stamp over his eye and cheekbone. He said, “Joey should keep her mouth shut.”

The rain continued. I suppressed a shiver.

“But were you?” I wanted him to look at me, so I took his hand in mine. “Fucking?”

His fingernails were rough, brutally hacked away, calluses like unsung songs mapped across each fingertip.

“Now who’s playing?” he asked, but he didn’t let go of my hand.

Our mingled breath hung in the air, visible in the cold. I
could see the small boy he used to be in the shape of his face, in the way his hair curled around his ears.

The drumbeat of rain stopped as quickly as it had started, and the absence of noise was like a sudden loss of hearing.

“What about you?” he asked. “You’re normal one minute and then completely fucking crazy the next. What is it that you see?”

I opened my mouth in shock. He couldn’t know. He didn’t know that the mere mention of my father frightened me. But he had noticed; he’d paid attention and had seen something that wasn’t right. It made me shiver, to know how closely he had been watching and that maybe, with time, he could see the ghost. I licked my lips, wanting to tell him about the ghost, but I remembered how the ghost looked wielding the baseball bat outside the car. Before Alex could ask again, I kissed him and tasted his blood. Cold air blew through a crack in the rear window. I ran a hand under his damp shirt, as I had imagined Tina had done earlier, up against his chest where his heart beat fast. He trembled, but maybe that was because of the cold. He took my other hand and pressed it flat against his stomach, against his crotch. Not gentle, but desperate, and strange.

A muffled bang and crash pulled us apart. I heard my mother’s voice, loud and panicked, and I struggled to unlock the car door as Alex said, “Wait up.”

I burst into the house. The front room was empty and I took a deep breath. No blood on the walls, no body on the floor. I had expected the ghost to be crouching in a corner, upset that I had been kissing Alex, or upset that I was afraid of him, but there was nothing.

Claude and my mother were by the stairs, facing each other like someone had pressed pause and they stood frozen
in their current positions. She was dressed in her nightgown but had her coat on with slippers on her feet. A suitcase lay at an angle across the last few steps, with clothing exploding out of it. Neither my mother nor Claude acknowledged my existence, or Alex’s.

Then she took a long, shuddering breath and wrapped her coat across her chest. “I wear what I want to wear,” she said, her voice raspy. “I stay home if I want to stay home. If I don’t want to meet your”—she swallowed—“your friends, I don’t have to.”

“Absolutely,” said Claude, his hands held before him. “Whatever you say. Whatever you want.”

My mother’s eyes fell on her scattered clothing. With an awkward jerk forward, Claude bent to pick up the suitcase, stuffing the clothing inside. My mother’s eyes wandered to where Alex and I stood.

“You went to a party?” she asked, coming over to pass her hands over my hair, down to my shoulders. She smiled. “I’m glad. Did you like it?”

Alex headed for the stairs, but Claude stopped him and peered at his face. Alex tried to duck his head to hide the bruises.

“Care to explain?” Claude asked Alex.

“Not really,” said Alex.

Claude frowned but let him go.

I looked from my mother to the suitcase and then to Claude.

“Are we leaving?” I asked. Every morning, every day since my father died, this was all I had wanted from her. Only now I wanted to go back to that interrupted moment in the darkness of the garage. I wanted to follow Alex up the stairs and into his room.

My mother breathed in and closed her eyes. “Go to bed, Rosaura. Everything’s all right.”

She and Claude remained where they stood, locked in their silent conversation. I left them and went up the stairs to the dark hallway. Alex waited by his door. I started for him, but he held his hand up and I stopped. Perhaps he waited to find out if my mother and I were leaving as well. He didn’t say anything, and a moment later he went into his room and I went into mine.

The rain worsened overnight, and the Cake House had let in water. We woke up to coffee-colored stains on the carpets and a leak dripping down the walls. It had started in the roof, seeping through each floor to my bedroom, buckling the plaster by the closet, then down to the first floor. But the storm damaged the back room behind the staircase the most, where a window had been left open. No more than a closet, barely large enough to hold a table, a couple of chairs, it wasn’t good for much except as a storeroom for Claude’s old filing cabinet and boxes of paperwork.

I opened a box filled with computer printouts of names and addresses faded and barely legible, then stepped back to let Claude lift it, the bottom dissolving into mush, spilling paper like a ladder. The sight of Claude holding a rotted cardboard box with the bottom flapping like a torn wet paper towel made me laugh.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” he said, looking at the mess at his feet.

Damp hands on my hips, I kicked another spongy box to the side. “You’re going to have to get rid of everything in here.”

“Is that your expert opinion?”

“Definitely,” I said.

Claude sighed. “It’s probably for the best. I should have gotten rid of this stuff ages ago.”

I bent down to pick up a handful of disintegrating documents with the letters “K.I.S., LLC” written on the letterhead. The logo—a mountain, a half circle that maybe represented the sun—was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

Instead of going through the rest of the boxes, Claude made a fist and knocked on the wall, inspecting the structure of the room. “If all this has to be cleared out, it’ll be wasted space,” he hinted. He knocked the wall again and then turned toward me with a “so what’s it going to be?” expression. He wasn’t going to say it. It had to be my decision, my desire.

“We could make it a darkroom,” I said.

“Is that another expert opinion?” he asked.

“Yes.”

I yelped as he spun me around in the small room.

“Get your coat. There isn’t a moment to waste,” he said, ushering me out to the living room. He took a set of keys from his pocket and handed them to me. “Do me a favor? There should be an envelope in that desk over there,” he said, pointing to the rolltop desk in the corner. “Get it for me.”

He didn’t wait for my answer but pulled his coat and an umbrella from the downstairs closet. Before he could change his mind, I unlocked the desk, eager to see the treasures it held. But inside was nothing other than unorganized
stacks of bills, receipts, and a few floppy disks and CDs inside jewel cases. The photographs and negatives Claude had confiscated were shoved in against a folded manila envelope, my payment for the darkroom.

The manila envelope weighed as much as a book. I undid the metal clasp and turned it upside down. Two stacks of hundred-dollar bills fell into my hand.

“Can I trust you, Rosie?”

I hadn’t noticed Claude’s approach. The night before, he’d asked Alex the same question. Instead of answering, I handed him the money.

He slipped out a few bills for his wallet, then returned the rest of the money to the envelope. He locked the desk. “All set?”

“What else do you keep in there?” I asked as Claude ushered me toward the front door. I realized that he wanted me to see his money. Or maybe he wanted to say that this money was as much mine as it was his, that I was a part of his world now and that I belonged to him.

“My secrets,” he said as we walked to his car. He stopped before I got into the passenger side of the Mercedes, and for a second I thought he was finally going to tell me the truth, but instead he looked bashful, rubbing at his jaw before speaking. “I wanted to thank you. For letting me build you a darkroom. Means a lot to me. More than I can say.”

“You don’t need my permission to build anything you want.”

He suddenly looked aged. “You’d be surprised.”

At the camera store, Claude asked what brand of enlarger I preferred. He wanted my opinion on paper stock and how much of each chemical we should order. He deferred to my choice on trays and squeegees and aprons, and even to
the color of clothespin. By the end of the two-hour shopping spree, I couldn’t stop smiling; my blood pulsed hot and strong. I realized, as Claude pulled out his wallet and paid the attendant in cash, that until that moment I had not thought once of the ghost.

THE DARKROOM WOULD TAKE A
few days to finish. After the boxes were removed, the room had to dry out, the carpet had to be torn up, and a sink had to be installed to provide water for the developing processes. But Claude had bought me a box of black-and-white film and said I should get started.