All the Houses (45 page)

I was born in 1941 in Trinity, Pennsylvania. My father, William (Bill) Atherton, worked at a dry goods store, which he later bought from the original owner. My mother, Dolores Kelley Atherton, grew up on a dairy farm, became a teacher, and met my father at a dance in Trinity. They married, bought a two-story house outside of town, and had three children, my older brother, Bill Jr., my younger sister, Edith, and me. Despite her country upbringing, Mother had a love of politics that she'd inherited from her father. She and my father were active in the local Republican Party, and I can recall passing out leaflets and attending candidate events from a young age.

This went on for several more paragraphs, in the same mode. He named the schools he'd gone to, the piano lessons he'd taken, his boyhood friends. His was “an all-American childhood,” he wrote. “Bill and I went fishing and ice-skating at Mill Pond, dreamed up pranks to play on our sister, and worked afternoons in Dad's store.” He'd done well at school. He'd been part of a championship debate team. He was accepted at Cornell, where he'd struggled his first year but eventually found his footing. Then Georgetown for law school.

I turned to the next page, glanced at its first lines:

Churchill once said, “The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.” These words came to mind on November 13, 1986, as I watched President Ronald Reagan give his first press conference regarding the Iran-Contra Affair.

That was about as personal as it got. I skimmed the rest: no revelations, minimal detail. Nothing I didn't already know. I stacked the pages and set them back on the table.

*   *   *

The buzzer rang. I'd been making cheese toast when its obnoxious peal sounded. Over the intercom I heard Nina's scratched voice, asking could she come up. Of course, I said. I felt newly ashamed of my place. The moment she walked in, I thought, she would see how unsuited I was to be a big-sister figure, or whatever kind of figure I'd been pretending to be. When I opened the door, though, her face was like a sack full of stones. She made straight for my bed and sat on it and grabbed the edge with her hands.

“I really need to go to Wheaton. Can you take me in your car?”

To me Wheaton was a name on the Metro map, a suburb I'd been to maybe once or twice or maybe never.

“It's my dad's car.”

“Please. It's important. We don't even have to take the car, we could go on the Metro.”

“What's out there?”

“That's where Sam lives,” she said.

“I don't think—”

“It's an emergency.”

“Don't you have a friend with a car?”

“If I'm out late with my friends, my dad gets all frantic. He trusts you.”

“It's not a good idea.”

The stones in her face were shifting now, grinding against each other. “Sam hasn't answered any of my texts for the past week. I think he could be in some kind of trouble. I went to AU to try to find him today, but I couldn't.”

I brought her a glass of water, even though she hadn't asked for one, and set it on the floor. Then I sat down next to her.

“You know, guys, sometimes … sometimes they just—”

“That's not what happened.”

“One day they're all into you, and then the next day—”

“He wouldn't do that.”

“It's not even about you, it's that men basically suck, most of them do.”

“I did get a text from your friend Rob,” she said, biting back, and that instinct to bite upset me as much as anything.

“Texted you. How did he have your number?”

“He got it when we were at dinner. You were in the bathroom.”

I didn't know what to say to that. She crossed her arms over her chest and said, “So you won't take me.”

“I'm sorry.”

She sat there glaring at the wall and then launched herself to standing. “I guess I'll see you later.”

My cheese toast was burning. “Why don't we do something else, like on Sunday?” I asked as I opened the toaster and waved my hand through the smoke.

By the time I turned back around she was halfway out the door. She called back to me from the hall, “Yeah sure,” but it was as though she'd said
yeah right.
The door shut, and I was convinced I'd said the right thing in the wrong way, which was not much different from saying the wrong thing. Or was it that she'd said one thing and I'd heard another, I couldn't be absolutely sure. And wasn't it too late to take a neutral stance with Nina and her dad and Sam, now that she'd already dragged me into it? I should've either gone to her father and told him everything or stuck by her and driven her to Wheaton, but I couldn't bring myself to do either, and even without saying anything to Daniel I'd probably lost her, lost them both, because really there's no remaining neutral unless you're okay with remaining by yourself.

And then there was the fact (alleged at least) that she'd received a text from Rob, which confirmed some fears I'd had but tried to not have when we were all at the restaurant.

It took me a while, at least thirty minutes, to notice that the car key was missing. I'd put it with my own keys, in the middle of the table, and now only my keys were there. Maybe I was misremembering? Maybe, I said to myself, I'd set the car key someplace else, on the counter, in my purse, left it in the bathroom. But it wasn't any of those places.

I called Nina's phone and she didn't pick up. Then I called Daniel. “Is Nina there?”

“Isn't she with you?”

“No. Are you at home?” He was. “I'm coming over, okay?”

 

1987

And then came another nighttime phone call from Courtney, this one later in the night and more desperate. I had a telephone in my room, a low-profile desk phone that I usually left in the middle of the floor. It didn't reach all the way to the bed, and so most of my calls were spent lying on the carpet and staring at the ceiling. I liked how all the sound was right there in my ear and up above me was just light and shadow. But I was in bed, not on the floor, that night. The phone rang at around two or three in the morning. Shoved out of sleep, I kicked the phone by accident before I answered—a little brawl between me and nobody. A recording said it was a collect call. Then my sister's first and last name: Courtney Atherton, calling from jail.

For once my parents were home. I went to wake them up. I think that was the only time I ever saw them both asleep at the same time—they were on their backs, under a comforter. The phone had half-roused them, and as soon as I said “Mom, Dad” they sat up, my mother leaning against the headboard, my father planting his legs on the floor, and once he got on the line he told me to hang up my phone and go back to sleep. Here was another problem they wanted to pretend didn't exist, but I couldn't possibly pretend that. After Dad left to pick up Courtney, I went down to the kitchen, poured a glass of juice, and sat at the table and waited.

Thirty minutes passed, then an hour, and I went back up to my room. I lay down on my bed with all the lights on. Just to rest, I vowed, but the next time I opened my eyes it was morning.

I crept up to the third floor. Courtney's door was shut. I went back down, back up, back down—she slept until noon, and when at last she appeared in the kitchen, still wearing her pajamas, she acted as though it were just a normal Sunday. I couldn't get more than a single word at a time out of her. She brought the milk and a box of cereal to the table and ate two bowls in a row.

Finally she said, “Surely you have better things to do than to stand there and watch me eat,” and I could have countered with the truth, which was that I did not have anything better to do, but instead I took a basketball outside and started shooting.

What I didn't learn that day but found out over the next couple of weeks: Courtney had gone to hear a band play, and then on the way home she was pulled over for driving with no headlights. The policeman smelled alcohol, according to his report, and he brought her in. By the time they tested her she was well under the limit, but she was underage, and they'd found prescription pills in her purse that had not been prescribed to her by a doctor. They charged her with possession of a controlled substance. My parents hired a lawyer (another lawyer!), who got the case transferred to juvenile court, the charge reduced to minor in possession.

She told our parents that she'd just wanted to see what it was like to drive on Rock Creek Parkway without lights. They didn't understand that, and neither did I. There were still streetlights on that road, other cars with lights on. It seemed to me that by switching off your own headlights you would not experience the dark but merely raise your odds of hitting something or being hit. The judge suspended her license and made her attend teen Narcotics Anonymous meetings and do community service. She wound up going two afternoons a week to a big downtown homeless shelter and got involved with some homeless activists for a while, who tried to make a radical out of her, unsuccessfully, though they did convince her not to go to prom.

My parents were at a loss. In any other year, this would've been our crisis, but in '87 it was another blip on the screen. Courtney had been accepted by Brown, and briefly they panicked about whether that offer would be revoked, but once they had been assured that she could still enroll there, and once she had made it through the court system, they just let it go.

 

2005

Daniel met me at the door to his apartment, shoeless and stricken, intoning “come in, come in.” That was it for hospitality. Next came interrogation. Yes, I admitted, yes, Nina had mentioned somebody named Sam, and yes, I believed she might have seen him recently. In fact I believed she might have gone to look for him.

He tore into me. The fact that his daughter had stolen a car, that I'd hardly condoned the mission—these things didn't matter. He brought his hands up by his head and then slashed them through the air, drawing out the word
irresponsible
, the word
negligent
, and while I sensed that every accusation he leveled against me was in some measure a charge against himself, insights like that are not much comfort when you're getting your ass chewed. He yelled until he was winded and his voice was breaking. He said he planned to call the police, as well as some of his daughter's friends, and he said he wanted me to leave and to have no further contact with him or Nina ever again.

*   *   *

Back in my own building, I called my father and told him the entire story, not very coherently. His car was missing and a girl was missing along with it, I said, and we needed to locate an American University student from Turkey who went by Sam or Samed and lived in Wheaton. When I was done talking I expected him to tell me that it would be impossible to dig up that kind of information, at night especially, but instead he spoke in a voice that I hadn't heard in years: his official voice. He said he'd see what he could do. His voice was responding to my voice, the undercurrent in it, the plea for help, more than the strange specifics.

Less than an hour later he called back, already on the way to my apartment. He'd contacted his colleague Dr. Mohammad, who had in turn called the head of an international students association, who had happened to know the roommate of Sam/Samed and had offered up a phone number as well as the address where they lived. Nobody had answered at the number, and so, Dad thought, we should just head out there ourselves. He'd borrowed a car from Judge O'Neill. It was a far-fetched thing to do, going to Wheaton, but we had worked ourselves into a far-fetched state, without knowing whether this was a real emergency or an imaginary one—it didn't matter, we'd found ourselves a crisis and were determined to act more effectively than we had in past crises.

I suppose I ought to have contacted Daniel to tell him where we were going. I did not. I went off with my dad into the night.

*   *   *

Those were the last days of paper maps, and as Dad drove the judge's black sedan I opened the glovebox and used the light from there to read the same Montgomery County map book my sisters and I had used to look for parties twenty years earlier, its pages faded and creased, a large rip jagging the middle of Bethesda. That book was another thing my Dad had kept in the house, in a drawer with old phone directories.

I was unexpectedly happy to be driven by him, once again. Maybe I was more at home in a car driven by my dad than anyplace else.

We were on the Beltway, and then we weren't. The city's false modesty was replaced by a suburb's actual modesty: on either side of a plain avenue stood flat-roofed brick buildings, with shops at street level and awnings that bore the most straightforward of business names. The Lunch Box, Ace Cleaners, Atlantic Appliance. From there we turned onto a street of narrow wooden houses on narrow lots, their clapboard not recently painted, with chain-link fencing around the yards and trash barrels standing sentry.

The sky was dark over the house in question, a house split in half, with two front doors, A and B. The right side of the porch was strewn with random junk, some of which I could identify as, say, children's toys, while much of the rest seemed to be parts of unknown wholes. My thoughts started to overheat. This could be a crack house, a whorehouse. Unlikely but possible.

Dad and I went up to the door on the left side, and simultaneously I was reporting it all to some future listener, Courtney, I suppose. I imagined telling her that we'd knocked, heard a voice say something indistinct, then found the door unlatched. Dad pushed it halfway open, then fully open. I told her that the living room was sorrily lit by an overhead fixture and furnished with a shapeless couch of gray leather substitute and a maroon recliner, both angled toward a large television. A young guy with an earring and a soul patch and a face more consternated than friendly sat on the recliner, changing channels.