The Cake House (30 page)

“It’s my money; I have a right to my money,” Harold said, sounding accusative.

“Never said it wasn’t your money.” Claude paused; his tone shifted. “What is this really about?”

Harold took his time replying.

“I hear things. The Myerses aren’t the only ones having a hard time getting their money. Mark Lieberman mentioned he’s been waiting over three months. I’m a modest man. The money I have, I had to work hard for it.”

“I explained to Mr. Lieberman the reason for the delay, and I explained to the Myerses that they will get their money following the normal course of business,” said Claude. Then he laughed, but it was a strange, hollow laugh. “I don’t know what you all think I’m doing here. This isn’t a bank. You can’t swing by and make a withdrawal. I require a commitment. It takes time and patience. When you need the money, the money will be there.”

“You’re saying I have no right to my own money?” asked Harold.

“We all have to do what we have to do,” Claude said, and in the window’s reflection I saw the ghost’s head whispering
in Claude’s ear. “I think you should leave. I’m not a thief, and I resent the implication.”

Claude stood.

“I’ve offended you,” said Harold, following suit.

“Damn straight I’m offended,” Claude said, putting his hand on Harold’s arm and pushing him toward the door. “I’ll have a check drawn for you. It’ll be available in six to eight weeks, standard policy, with penalties. Remember, it’s your choice.”

“What if I just take half?” asked Harold.

“No, you’re either in or you’re out,” said Claude. “It’s time for you to leave. I don’t go halfway. That’s not how I do business. You either take your money and lose out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or you trust in me, and in this company, and make a lot of money.”

“Okay, fine. Full commitment,” said Harold. “But can I trust you? You’re taking everything I have.”

Another stretch of silence. Was the ghost pouring poison in Claude’s ear again, urging him to say yes?
You have him. You did it. You’re the master. Bravo.

“Harold, I’m the only one you can trust,” said Claude. Harold must have nodded, because Claude clapped him on the back and held out his hand. Harold shook it. “All right. I knew I could count on you. You won’t regret this. Stay here; I have something for you.”

Claude pushed the door open and left Harold alone in his office without seeing that I was there, heading for the cabinets behind the reception desk. I continued to watch Harold. He got up from his seat and walked behind Claude’s desk, picking up a file from the stack of paperwork.

I must have made a noise, some indefinable whisper of shoes against the carpeted floor. Harold turned around.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” he asked, his voice turning steely all of a sudden.

I wished I could take his picture so I could study the lines of his face and how his eyes changed from weak to strong in the space of one breath. Before I could answer, Claude walked in carrying an over-the-shoulder bag. He paused when he saw me, the barest look of discomfort. “Rosie.”

Harold stepped back, smiling. “Found a mouse,” he said.

“My stepdaughter,” said Claude, moving between us. “Say hello to Mr. Daniels.”

Harold offered his hand, and his deep-set eyes glinted in the fluorescent light. “Nice to meet you, Rosie.”

Claude nodded for me to return to the copy room. In the familiar scent of Xerox paper, I sat before the shredding machine, pushing the button that turned it on, but I could hear Claude as he offered Harold a Global Securities mug and a Global Securities visor to take back to his wife as a present.

THE NEXT DAY
,
WHEN I
got home from school, I saw the VW Bug parked in the same spot from before, on the opposite side of the street underneath a tree. The sight of it caused a jolt of anxiety, but I knew now that it could only be Joey in the car, not Tina. It was there again the next day, and on Saturday it was there in the morning in the same spot. I wondered if Joey knew that Alex was gone. Maybe no one had told her? Maybe she was expecting him to emerge from the side gate?

“I’m going out,” I said, touching my mother on her shoulder to make her look at me. She paused in her furious drawing, page after page of charcoal images scattered
across the dining table. It took her a moment to focus. She didn’t answer but squeezed my hand.

It was cool outside with that hint of dewy morning, but the sun shone warm and bright. Joey sat in the driver’s side with both of her hands on the steering wheel. Her top hugged her breasts, plumped them up under her chin, big and round and lush.

When I reached the car, I knocked until Joey lowered the passenger-side window. “Are you waiting for Alex?” I asked. “Because he’s not here.”

She leaned across the passenger seat, peered up at me. “He said he’d go with me to see Tina.”

This surprised me, since the last time I had seen Joey and Alex together they had been fighting. I couldn’t believe he had agreed to visit Tina in the hospital. He never would have made it inside the building.

“He’s gone,” I said. “His mother took him away.”

“She was here?” Joey’s voice rose to a higher octave. I was fascinated by her eye makeup, which was just as elaborate as it had been the night of the Halloween party. “You mean she really came?”

Joey wasn’t directing the question at me but seemed to be asking the car, or perhaps she was asking Alex, even though he wasn’t there. I realized that I didn’t know anything about Alex’s relationship with Joey. If it had been romantic or sexual or if they were just friends the way Alex had claimed. I wasn’t certain if I could trust anything Alex had ever said to me.

“He lied,” Joey said, with a blank expression, blinking at the dashboard. “He told Tina he wouldn’t leave—she made him swear it—but I guess he lied. Fucking asshole. I don’t know why I’m surprised.”

“He told you about his mom?” I should have been used to the sting of Alex’s betrayal by then, but it hurt to realize that all this time, he had shared this with Joey but not with me.

“He told us everything.”

Everything. Her large eyes turned toward me, and their mirror-like reflection echoed back the enormity of everything. Had he told her about Tina’s parents? About working for Claude? Had he told her about us? About the way he came to my bed in the middle of the night? He might have, or maybe she would have taken one look at him and known anyway, whether he’d told her or not. He told her everything. Except that he obviously hadn’t, or she would have known that his promise was a lie.

“Get in,” said Joey. She tilted her head, mascara streaking out to the sides.

“Why?”

She hesitated a moment. “Come with me to see Tina.”

“Don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Please,” she begged, quiet and desperate.

My gut reaction was to say no. She must have sensed that, because she continued to beg, and I got in the car to make her stop. We sat without speaking until she started the engine and we drove away.

“I thought he and I were friends, but I’m not sure any of us mattered to him,” she said, not looking at me. Sunlight caught the halo of her hair as she spoke. “We were all just a game to him. A way for him to pass the time until he left. Me, Tina, you. He never cared.”

I shook my head, even though that was what I had been feeling and thinking and worrying over. She couldn’t know what it was like for Alex to live in the Cake House, with
the secrets harbored in its walls, and the ever-present stranglehold of his father. Did he have a choice? Could he have said no to Claude? I didn’t think so. Aaron said Alex didn’t have friends, but he had been my friend. He had been Joey’s friend too. In the end, it hadn’t been enough.

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t a game.” Unless the game was survival, but I didn’t say that part out loud.

She looked at me with pity, blowing air through her nose in a big huff. “Have it your way,” she said.

The closer we got to the hospital, the more frazzled Joey got. She drove too fast, taking corners with the tires screeching, then slamming on the brakes suddenly. After she’d parked the car in the visitors’ parking lot at the hospital, I wondered if she would even get out of the car or if she would squeal out of the lot in a blind panic to get away, but she did get out and started walking forward.

When we got to the main desk on the first floor of the hospital, Joey couldn’t speak, so I asked the receptionist where Tina Myers was. She looked it up in her computer and directed us to the third floor.

The shades had been opened to let in the sun, putting half of Tina’s hospital room in brilliant sunlight and the other half in shadows, with a steady
beep-beep-beep
of medical monitors the only sound. A woman sat on the right side of Tina’s bed. She turned, the sunlight hit her face, and I felt the impact of her tired green eyes and her familiar round face. The mall. The scene at the mall. She was the woman who had confronted Claude, who’d yelled at him, who had begged and cried and demanded that he show compassion. But he’d pretended not to know her. That same woman was Tina’s mother. I hadn’t put it together, not until I saw her sitting next to her daughter with the same exact eyes.

“Oh. Joey?” Mrs. Myers spoke in a blank voice. She had a lighter shade of brown hair but the same pert, upturned nose.

I had to look away, overwhelmed by the feelings of guilt and remorse that seemed to rise from the ground up to my chin, to the top of my head, so strong I was drowning in them.

Joey cleared her throat, then spoke. “Mrs. Myers, I’m so sorry.”

Mrs. Myers shook her head. “Good of you to come,” she said, turning back to watch her daughter.

Tina lay unmoving. Sunlight touched only her feet, the rest of her obscured in the shadows. I pulled Joey farther into the room. Someone had cut off all of Tina’s hair. She had tubes in her nose and her mouth. Bruises dotted her face. One leg in a cast, suspended. An arm in a brace, every finger of her hand black and blue and swollen. Neck brace. There was more, but I stopped looking. Flowers all over the room, and cards, a pot of daisies perched by Tina’s head, pink flowers, white flowers, opening in the morning sun. Tina’s mother had hung up posters of Tina’s favorite movie stars and musicians. She liked Madonna the same as I did, and also Tori Amos and Sonic Youth. She had posters of
The Little Mermaid
and
The Princess Bride.
She had stuffed animals in bed with her.

Tina’s mother got up, took a tissue, and wiped Tina’s mouth, all the while speaking to her daughter. “Joey is here. Isn’t that nice? Would you like some water?” She took a large cup with a cover and a straw and held it to her daughter’s mouth. I couldn’t see how Tina could drink at all, but I realized it was something for her mother to do. She held the straw to Tina’s chapped lips. Tina didn’t move. “I’ll get more water,” said Tina’s mother, and without a word to us, she left the room.

With Mrs. Myers’s absence, I could breathe easier, but the stench of disinfectant and urine together threatened to make my eyes sting. I breathed in through my mouth, but that was no better.

“Talk to her,” I said to Joey.

Joey swallowed. She stepped closer to Tina’s right side. The sun hit her, and I saw how she had to squint and lean down to avoid the glare. “Hey, girl,” said Joey, and touched Tina’s arm.

Tina moved. She took a breath, gurgled; her eyelids rose, revealing the whites of her eyes. The monitors hiccupped.

“Oh God,” Joey said, taking several steps backward before she hit a chair. It banged against the wall. Joey ran from the room.

Left alone, just Tina and me. She fell still again, and the
beep-beep-beep
of the monitors evened out. I watched the jumping line of her heartbeat: steady, easy, a slow-moving ballad. The sun had moved off Tina’s legs and right into my eyes, so I moved closer, into the shadows.

Mrs. Myers returned with a refilled thermos of water, placing it on the side table by Tina’s bed. I flinched as if caught doing something wrong, even though I was only standing there not doing anything. Mrs. Myers adjusted Tina’s pillows, then moved a small potted plant closer. “Aren’t these pretty?” she asked, and I didn’t know if she was speaking to me or to Tina.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s so kind of you to visit.” Mrs. Myers spoke as she rearranged the flowers along the window ledge. I got the sense that she had previously moved the flowers around and would
do so again. “Tina hasn’t had many visitors. I thought there would be more. But I guess everyone’s a little afraid.”

“I guess,” I said, shifting from foot to foot.

“What’s your name?”

“Rosaura.” Then, after a moment, I added, “Douglas,” because even though Mrs. Myers would have no reason to think otherwise, I was suddenly worried that she would think my last name was Fisk, that she would know who my stepfather was and who my stepbrother was.

She tilted her head to one side, and I held my breath. If she and her husband had gone to Claude, she might have known my father. Maybe she recognized him in me. I looked down at Tina, stepping close in an effort to avoid her mother. “She’s so still,” I said.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Myers. “She does move, though, sometimes. With music. Or when I read to her.”

Mrs. Myers returned to arranging the flowers, the cards, the stuffed animals. I wondered if she did that all day. Instead, I swallowed and hummed just under my breath the French lullaby, about the little sparrow stealing grain, brave little sparrow.

The dust motes froze in mid-glide. The
beep-beep-beep
of the monitors faded into silence. It was like we fell into a vacuum, Tina, her mother, and I.

“That was pretty,” said Mrs. Myers, and I stepped back, having almost forgotten that she was there.

“Thank you,” I said. “My father used to sing it to me.” And just like that, I remembered. I told Alex that it was my mother’s song, that she used to sing it to me, but I lied.
I didn’t even know that I had lied. It had always been my father who sang to me.