The Emperor of Any Place (30 page)

“Then, what, Evan? What are we supposed to make of it all?”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean monsters and ghosts . . .”

There is a pause. “I’m not sure what to make of the monster, but I can tell you something about the ghosts. My mother had a favorite story about the first time she met my dad. She was a graduate student. She knocked on the door to his office, and he said come in, and when she did, he dropped what he was carrying.”

“What do you mean?”

There’s laughter in Leo’s voice now — the genuine kind. “He was carrying this big honking piece of hardware, I guess, which he just dropped when he saw her.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’d never seen her before in person, but he recognized her.”

“You mean . . . but wait . . . The ghosts? On the island? But that isn’t —”

“I should tell you this, first off,” says Leo. “My mother was Iranian — she’d say Persian. In any case, she had this extraordinary face. Beautiful. Big features — huge eyes. It wasn’t her that Dad recognized that first time . . .” He left it at that.

Evan finished the sentence, remembering the picture of Leo he’d seen on his website. “It was you.”

“Right. Exactly. He had seen
me
on the island — the ghost me — and when he met her, he knew right away, she had to be my mother.” Evan doesn’t say wow, but he feels it in his solar plexus, feels the
wow
punch him hard and then seep into his bloodstream. “Evan, I’ve got an appointment. Thanks for keeping me abreast of what’s going on up there.”

“That’s okay,” says Evan. And actually it is okay, because suddenly, out of nowhere, another idea has occurred to him. “Have a good day.”

“You too, Evan.”

Evan hangs up. Composes himself, then opens Google on his phone.

“Evan?”

He looks up. A middle-aged woman with long hair is smiling at him over a cart full of groceries. It takes him a minute to recognize her. He’s never seen her in anything but gardening clothes with her hair all pulled tight in a ponytail.

“Mrs. Cope,” he says.

“How are you?” she asks affectionately, leaving her cart and coming to perch beside him on the mauve bench. “I’ve just come from your house,” she says before he can answer, “and I met your charming grandfather.” If anything her smile is wider now, and Evan has no idea what to say. Mercifully, Mrs. Cope does. “Such a gentleman,” she says. “A real southern gentleman.”

“Oh. Uh, yeah.”

“Just like your father,” she adds. She’s got her hands pressed together in front of her mouth, and she looks almost smitten. “I thought I’d better drop over to cut back the petunias,” she says. To Evan it sounds oddly like some kind of spy-type code. “They always get a bit straggly around mid-July. And while I was at it, I decided I might as well dig up the tulip bulbs and put them into storage. The car was gone and I didn’t know anyone was there. But Griff . . . well, he was ever so helpful.” Evan nods like a zombie. What’s the point of arguing? Besides, there is a tear in her eye, and he’s afraid of what might happen if he disturbs her story by telling her the truth. Telling her that this southern gentleman is a one-man wrecking ball. She notices him noticing the tear, and she self-consciously rubs it away with her finger, then busily looks through her purse for a little packet of tissues.

Was there something between her and Dad? She’s way younger than him. Hmm. The things you don’t know about a person.

Without looking at Evan, she continues to chatter, rubbing her nose, sniffing. “I’d like to come back and prune the roses,” she says. “Clifford always did around this time.” She chuckles, sniffs, rubs. “His rule of thumb was a quarter inch above the first leaf with five leaflets.” She looks up, her eyes shiny with hopefulness, and Evan wonders if she’s passing on this information to him.

“A quarter inch,” he says. He can’t remember the rest.

“Yes, above the first leaf with five leaflets.”

“Okay. Good. Thanks. Got it.”

She looks pleased. “I’ll show you sometime.” She closes her handbag and rests her hands on the latch. “I’m so glad I ran into you,” she says, reaching out to tap his knee. Her smile ignites again.

“It’s nice to see you, too, Mrs. Cope,” he says. And he means it.

“Rachel,” she says.

He nods. “I need to get your casserole dish back to you. It was . . . really good. Thanks.”

She cocks her head to the side and smiles, her hand on her heart. “No hurry,” she says. Then she stands up and straightens her dress. “Don’t be a stranger,” she says.

“Thanks. I won’t.”

And she’s off, leaving Evan sitting there, stunned, wondering about all these nice people: goth girls and gardeners. But there was something he was supposed to be doing. He looks down at his iPhone, wakes it up. It’s opened up to Google. Right.

“Why didn’t I think of this before,” he mutters to himself. He goes to his Internet server, goes to Webmail, punches in his dad’s coordinates. He needs a password for this, but he knows what it is, because he was the one who set it up:

ax1sb0ldasl0ve

And up comes his father’s in-box. He scrolls down and down and —
Bam!
Leo Kraft. “Damn, I’m good!” he says. He opens the e-mail. Scans it quickly. Obviously not the first communication, but a continuation of something they’d been talking about.

Yamada’s work is amazing as I’m sure you’ll see.

“Yamada?” says Evan under his breath. He scrolls down. There it is again. “Benny Yamada.”

“Yo!”

He looks up. It’s Rollo. “Just a minute,” he says.

“I don’t have a minute,” says Rollo. “I’ve got half an hour, and in that time I want to ingest an enormous quantity of meat, preferably full of growth hormones.”

Evan doesn’t put up an argument. He glances at the iPhone, closes it. He can follow this up later. “Who’s Benny Yamada?” he says.

Rollo scratches his cheek. “Second baseman for the Mariners?”

They talk vegetables. “Celeriac,” says Rollo.

“What is that?”

“A vegetable. But it would make a good name for a superhero. It sounds kind of fast.
Celeriac.
” His hand zooms through the air. “You could do a T-shirt with this vegetable guy who’s got a head like celeriac rescuing, you know, a carrot in distress.”

Evan shakes his head wearily. “This job is getting to you, Rollo. You should probably see someone.”

“Monica wouldn’t like that.”

“I mean someone in the head-shrinking business.”

“Speaking of seeing someone,” says Rollo, and pulls out his cell phone. He starts scrolling through a list, and Evan immediately takes out his own, glad for the excuse, intending to follow up on Benny Yamada. The name almost rings a bell. But as he waits for the WiFi to kick in, Rollo suddenly hands him his Samsung.

What?

Evan only says it with his eyes as he takes the phone. Rollo makes the same gesture he does when Evan is supposed to keep on going with a guitar solo. Someone on Rollo’s phone is saying hello.

“Hello?” says Evan.

It’s the girl.

The friend of a friend of a friend. He glares at Rollo, who holds out his hands like he can’t help himself, he’s just way too wonderful for words. Then he goes back to his fries, a contented look on his face and gravy on his chin.

The conversation that follows is generic. The kind you might have in a language lab when you’re learning Portuguese. Evan feels like he’s opened this box full of worn-out and dusty phrases, which he inserts into the conversation in more or less the right order. Like building something, except that there won’t be anything there when he’s finished. Whenever he can catch Rollo’s eye, he glares at him, makes threatening gestures with his plastic fork.

“No way,” he says pleasantly to the girl.

But apparently there
is
a way and the girl —
what the hell is her name!
— goes on to tell him about it. He’s only half listening, but it’s not her fault; she’s not dumb. And it’s not his fault, either; he’s just numb. Still, he hangs in, recognizing the pauses, the openings where you’re supposed to plug in a reply. The weird thing is she sounds nice. She’s not a chatterbox; she’s saying interesting stuff — what he catches of it. It’s just that the part of his brain that knows how to do this kind of thing is buried under that avalanche of anger and that deep and buried sense of loss. That’s all. It’s like he’s been away a long time on an island in the middle of nowhere and he’s forgotten how you play this game.

“Really?” he says, sounding as interested as he can.

And, yes, she does mean
really.

But now Rollo is noisily gathering up their garbage. He points at his wrist as if there had ever been a watch there.

“Hey, this is cool,” Evan says into the phone, “but Rollo’s got to get back to his vegetables and this is his phone. Yeah, I know. Yeah, he is totally insane. In fact, he’s doing his little insane dance right now. Or maybe he just needs to pee.”

She laughs. It’s not a bad laugh. Maybe a seven.

“For sure,” he says. “Yeah, absolutely. Uh-huh. You too.”

Then
click.

Now he can put all of his energy into a vegetable-destroying glare. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he says.

Rollo throws up his hands. “You were great, Ev! Haven’t lost any of that famous Griffin panache.”

Evan hands him back the Samsung.

“So?”

“So, what?” says Evan.

“You’re seeing her when?”

Evan rolls his eyes. “She leaves for camp at the end of the week. She’s a counselor. Hey, stop the matchmaking, okay?”

“Okay, okay. I’ve done my work.”

Evan walks him back to the Pulse. They don’t talk, but it’s fine. Evan recognizes it to be the kind of not talking they do together as opposed to the not talking he’s been doing a lot lately.

So . . . progress?

Then Rollo is gone, and, sitting on the same mauve park bench as before, Evan checks up on Benny Yamada and begins to finally understand what is going on.

He heads home but takes a detour to Laramie Close. He’s been there once, though he can’t remember why: trick or treating when he was a kid, dropping off homework? Whatever. He thinks he can remember the way, which house. There are maybe ten house designs in the whole suburb, but it’s surprising how you learn to find your way around by the smallest of details. It’s like those king penguins coming back to the herd from a fishing trip and somehow finding their own penguin kids among the thousand other penguins all in their dinner jackets.

He rings the bell and — Yes. Got it.

“Oh, hey.”

“Hey.”

Olivia Schlaepfer is dressed almost normally in jean shorts, a white top, and . . . well, a six-gun strapped to her thigh. “Orphan boy,” she says. If she’s surprised to see him, she gets over it pretty quickly. “If you’re here for supper, you’re way early.”

Evan shakes his head. “Thanks, though. That was nice.”

“Anytime. Oh, if it’s about adoption, we could talk to my parents.”

For one crazy moment he thinks she’s serious, but a sly smile gives her away.

“No,” he says, “but again, thanks. Actually, it’s about Benny Yamada.”

“Oh!” Now she’s interested. “What about him?”

“You know his stuff, right? You’re into the whole graphic novel thing?”

“Yeah. How did you know?” Evan shrugs. But she launches in anyway. She’s talking even as she leads him to her room.

Benny Yamada, graphic novelist and soon to be moviemaker.

She opens up the home page of his website on her computer. Evan had already found the site on his phone at the mall — enough to get the idea. But now he looks more closely on her big screen and listens as she fills in the background.

There’s a picture of Yamada: Asian, bleached blond, cool as hell in a Lakers ball cap and a T-shirt that says
WILL FIX IN POST.

“I’ve got the Tilt to Fade trilogy,” she says. “You could borrow it if you like.
Backspatter
is the first — that’s the one they’re filming.” She turns to him, her eyes huge. “There are rumors that Henry Austin Shikongo might play Rat Catcher.”

“No, really?” says Evan. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but he recognizes how important it is.