All the Houses (44 page)

“No rush or anything,” I said.

“Where are your parents?”

“My mom's out of town and my dad's still with his lawyers, I guess.”

“It's, like, midnight.”

“They have a lot of work to do.”

“Yeah, I'm sure.”

“What does that mean?”

“I bet all those guys are going to get away with it. They'll get off scot-free,” he said. He stared at the road the whole time.

“I don't know about the ones who did it, but my dad didn't do anything.”

“Okay.”

“He didn't. He wasn't in charge.”

In his silence he was a bastard, and I couldn't believe him, despised him, what did he know? I might have said something, but we'd come to the part of Wisconsin Avenue where the Giant Food was, where Courtney had said she would be.

I didn't see her. I saw the supermarket's tall windows with that week's specials taped to them, and I saw a homeless person cocooned against the store's red brick wall. Oh god, I kept saying.

Anthony tried to reassure me. She probably got a taxi, he said.

We can't leave, I said, and we circled, driving past the store and halfway around the block, taking the back way into the store parking lot and then going around again. After three or four circuits I made Anthony stop the car. He tried to tell me that there was nothing I'd see on foot that we hadn't already seen, he said that maybe she'd been talking about a different store, but I got out anyway. It was windier than it had been when we left the house, and I didn't have any plan about what to do. I paced and waited for her to, I don't know, burst out of the ground like a crocus or a missile. And at the same time I had this view of myself, I saw myself from a distance, the middle sister in a fairy tale—a fucked-up fairy tale in which our girl in her jeans and rugby shirt wanders piteously back and forth in front of Giant Food, now the castle in which her beautiful sister has been imprisoned.

And then there she was, treading slowly from the shadowy end of the block, where the police substation was. She looked awful, and she had on this weird shimmery dress that had bunched up on one side, so that the skirt hung aslant. Her face was a smear of laments I'd never seen on her face before. Her hands were clenched into fists, and as soon as she saw that I'd seen her, she put her head down. I wanted to run toward her but didn't. I walked, and when I was close enough to touch her, I put my hand on the back of her thin arm and guided her to the car. And that meant something, to me at least: in spite of the fear and the unreal feeling I had the whole night, like we were in some strange play about the lives of other kids who had our same bodies, I would hold on to that sensation of my hand on her arm and walking right by her side, just like I made a keepsake of that little slap she gave me during basketball tryouts. Both times the contact was so brief, but in those moments I knew what we were, I knew we had a piece of each other.

Just as we reached Anthony's car, a black Isuzu Trooper pulled up behind, familiar to me because I'd seen Rob drive it. But it wasn't Rob who jumped out, it was Mr. Mitchell, looking dazed. He scrambled toward us and took Courtney's other arm, and as soon as he did she left my side and collapsed toward him as if he were her own father. And he was stiff but also kind, he told her she was safe, she was on her way home. He asked, “Are you hurt?” She shook her head, and shook her head again.

He insisted on taking her to the house himself. I asked if she wanted her sweater or some juice, she said no, and they climbed into the Trooper. I got back into Anthony's car. He turned off the tape player and drove so slowly, the car was like a boat on a still lake, skimming toward a rotten dock. Better to stay out on the water. I wished we would.

When we made it to Albemarle Street, the Trooper was idling at the curb. The doors opened, and as Courtney and Mr. Mitchell started toward the porch I stayed where I was. Anthony's eyes were tired and steady.

“See you Monday,” he said. I could tell that he didn't want me anymore, and that his wanting me had been the furnace of our friendship. It was something I'd let burn too high. I'd wasted it. Still, the wanting, a remnant of it at least, had to be in there somewhere: I was looking for it in his eyes and didn't see anything at all. I leaned forward and kissed him. I felt it, but he wouldn't let it out. He pushed me back and said good night.

From the bottom of the stairs I saw the door swing open, and there was our dad. He saw Courtney and then he saw Mr. Mitchell. I don't even know how to describe the look on his face: it was all out of whack, anger and relief and confusion mottling him, hitting him in waves. What was his friend doing there? He must've wondered that. With all that beating on him from the inside he had to grab on to the doorjamb to support himself.

I hesitated to go up the stairs. I saw Courtney glide past him, and he and Mr. Mitchell stood there talking, though not for long. By the time I'd started upward, Mr. Mitchell was coming down. He gave me a tight nod as he went past.

Courtney had fled to her room, and so I was all Dad had left. “Where the hell were you?” he asked. He smelled like alcohol. I had no idea what to say, and so I just told him I'd gone to pick up Courtney but Mr. Mitchell had beat me to it. My father, uncomprehending, told me I should go to bed.

The next morning Courtney came into my room, very composed, with a sad, noble burnish about her.

“What did you say to Dad?” she asked, and then, after I told her I hadn't said anything, she fed me a story. “Here's what happened. Tanya's car wouldn't start, and so I was stuck at the party and you had to come pick me up.”

“Where were you really?” I asked her.

“That's what happened.”

“No, for real.”

I didn't think she would tell me a thing, but then she said, “I just got together with the wrong guy. He was being a jerk, so I left the party by myself.”

This hardly filled it all in for me, but I knew better than to press her. “So how come Mr. Mitchell showed up?”

“I wasn't sure if you would make it, so I called Rob. His stepdad was the one to answer the phone.”

We were both grounded for two weeks, Courtney for staying out too late and me for leaving Maggie alone at the house. Not that it made Courtney any friendlier toward me—she mostly stayed in her room and listened to music. At school there was something in the air, I caught the scent of it now and again and tried to track it down. I would walk up to people and they would go quiet, and I'd know they'd been saying something about my sister. I just knew. What? I'd ask. And they'd make up something. There was a story about Courtney making the rounds, I could feel it.

*   *   *

Whatever happened that night, it didn't visibly traumatize Courtney, it didn't stop her from going out or from going out with boys in particular (there was Jesse, who had a band, and then Paul, who was Canadian), and eventually I came to remember that night as one of the last times I'd talked to Anthony, all but forgetting the reason I'd been with him. But my sister did continue down the path she'd already started down, one that led away from the rest of us. She let slide much of what she'd once cared about, everything from grades to shaving her legs. Her eighteenth birthday came and went; she barely acknowledged our presents and went out to celebrate with her friends. Her room started to look like mine: what had once been a showcase for trophies arranged just so, for books set with their spines all the same distance from the edge of the shelf, a desk with an absolutely clean surface, and the bulletin board on which photos of her friends and of Matt Dillon and a couple of mix-tape track lists had been perfectly aligned, this same room now had sweaters heaped over the unmade bed, candy wrappers on the radiator cover. A couple of times, when she wasn't home, I went up to her room and started straightening up, even though my own room was still a mess.

One day I saw that she'd thrown all her trophies and ribbons and certificates in the trash can. I couldn't help myself: I exhumed them and placed them back on top of the bookshelf where they'd stood before.

Of course, as soon as she came home and saw them, she guessed that I had put them there, and she barged into my room and told me I was not to go “trespassing” again. She said it like I'd gone deer hunting. Her speech lasted another couple of minutes. The carping was as familiar as could be, but the skinny almost-woman who stood before me was not my familiar sister. It was like somebody else had stolen my sister's voice. In my disorientation I hardly listened to what she said. I wanted the other Courtney back, the one who may not have liked me that much but who was my sister all the same. I wanted my old sister back, I wanted my old family back, and in that moment the wanting was so immediate and so total that I had a glimpse of mortality, i.e., that I would never get them back.

Then Courtney went out and banged the door shut behind her. Even from the floor beneath hers I could hear the clatter of the trophies as they went again into the trash.

 

2005

In the days following my father's cardiology appointment I found myself still contemplating his too-old body, where by
contemplating
I really mean
flinching from
: I would picture him failing on the treadmill, attached to an octopus of wires, or I would see him lying on a kind of man-size tray and being slid inside a big white machine that in my ignorance I pictured as a giant copier. I would see these things and then try to block them out.

I kept returning to what he'd said about Jim Singletary. When I'd read the memoir, wondering what Singletary had done to offend my dad, it hadn't occurred to me that the insult might have been personal, that it was Dad's loyalty to his old colleagues and friend Dick, rather than to larger principles or truth itself, that had made him so hostile. Singletary had helped bring Dick Mitchell down, that was why Dad hated him, even though (or maybe because?) there'd been a part of Dad that had wanted to see Dick Mitchell brought down.

This was moving to me but also dizzying: there were so many personalities and episodes involved even in my father's small portion of history, so many battles that had been fought over how to define the story even as it was unfolding, that I felt a new, or maybe renewed, hopelessness. I am no relativist—I do believe there is such a thing as the truth of the matter, not just a jumble of different versions—but that truth was seeming less and less available to me or to anyone.

I told the temp agency that I was leaving, moving back to L.A. I did think that I would probably go back sooner rather than later, although I had yet to buy a plane ticket. And then I arranged with Dad to borrow the car for a couple of days, because I had this idea I would take a long drive that weekend, out to Shenandoah, and do some thinking, some strategizing.

I drove the car to work on my last Friday of employment, then came home early, just after lunchtime, and parked down the street from my building. When I turned to shut the door, I caught sight of Nina headed my way, her backpack over her shoulder. As she came closer I saw that she was wearing eye makeup, which I hadn't seen on her during the daytime. It made her eyes look bigger but also aloof, masked. And with no real prompting, it hit me that I'd been wrong about her, I'd thought I had maybe half an understanding of what it was to be without a mother, but no, I only knew what it was like to be half-mothered, and that was different. She was fiercer than I'd given her credit for. Inside her an iridescent girl and a cackling, clawing bird shared too-close quarters.

I wanted to gush, I wanted to say
hi, hi, how have you been?
But something straitened me, and I asked, “Don't you have school?”

“Not today. It's parent-teacher conferences.”

“Where are you headed?”

“A friend's house.” I had the feeling she might keep walking, but she stopped and then asked, “You're not working?”

“No, I— No.”

As I was fishing quarters from my wallet to feed the meter, I lost hold of the car key and it fell in the gutter. Nina went over and picked it up. She examined it, as if it were transforming before our eyes into something more than a Toyota fob, and even as I told myself it wasn't true I had the sense—by the way she glanced at the car, the way I could practically hear her gears turning—that she was tempted to take it, hop into the car and drive away. Instead she handed the key back and said, “See ya!” and headed on down the street.

*   *   *

The encounter troubled me, although I couldn't put my finger on the reason. I tried to distract myself. The pages that Dad had given me, his attempts at a memoir, had sat on the table ever since I'd brought them back to the apartment. That afternoon I finally read them. They were fragmentary, the first page a single paragraph:

From 1966 to 1987 I worked in the United States government, first in the State Department and later in the White House. My tenure as a public servant coincided with a tumultuous period in American history, spanning the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the Iran-Contra Affair, and the end of the Cold War. Because I was privileged to observe from close up and at times participate in those significant events, I have endeavored to set down some of my recollections and reflections. It is my hope that these may provide a useful, and at times corrective, footnote to the existing record. Although there is no shortage of primary and secondary material regarding this period, it is my belief that the proliferation of accounts has sometimes had the unfortunate consequence of reinforcing, through sheer repetition, certain misinterpretations of what took place.

That I could recall, Dad had never showed much interest in writing. The books that he read were not memoirs, not even Washington memoirs, but histories or biographies of historical figures, books he didn't necessarily finish but absorbed a lot of facts from, adding to his mental stockpile. I couldn't reasonably expect him to turn out something top-notch, but I was hoping for something a smidgen livelier. What followed was a slightly longer effort, a page and a half in which Dad summarized his early life: