All the Lasting Things (24 page)

He meant to stay quiet, to mull over his options as he ate his toast and eggs and, like a true Fisher, pretend that nothing was wrong. But the quiet of the kitchen struck him like a fist, and instinctively he struck back. No sooner had Evelyn ushered him to the table and poured his coffee than he said wincingly, “How’s your eye?”

Earlier that week, Henry, lost in some waking nightmare where everyone before him was a stranger, had slammed Evelyn in the face. She wore the result, a swollen mask of purple and green, with soldierly stoicism, brushing past Max’s question with a pat on his back.

“Where is everybody?” he tried.

“Asleep. I’m surprised you’re up.”

He watched her fuss over the coffeemaker, holding the brown-laden filter like a dirty diaper before dropping it into the trash. “Will you sit?”

She looked as if he’d asked her to dance. “What is it, honey?” She took the seat beside him, her smile brightening but looking even more puzzled as he touched her arm.

“Did you read Henry’s book? The new one?”

“Nobody’s read that. Except for Roger.”

“Did Roger say anything?”

“About the book? Not to me. He and Henry did have a fight. Or I don’t know if I’d call it a fight. They’re old friends. Friends disagree.”

“Why did they fight?”

Evelyn laughed. “I feel like I’m on
Law & Order
.”

Max smiled nervously, took a sip from his mug.

“I don’t know what about,” Evelyn went on. “Roger liked it from what I gathered. It wasn’t that. But for whatever reason he didn’t think Henry should publish it.”

“And neither of them told you?”

“Oh, I let those two do their thing. I learned a long time ago not to ask questions.”

He might have stopped there. He told himself to stop there. But he’d pushed a rock down the hill, and forward it went.

“Because I read it.”

Evelyn cocked her head to one side, as if she’d misheard. “You read it?”

“Last night. He must have left the safe open, so I read it.”

“Oh. Oh now. We better keep that to ourselves.” She patted his hands and got up to go to the cupboard. The container of flour. The clatter of muffin tins. “I think muffins this morning.”

“Did you hear what I said, Gam?”

“I heard.”

“Henry never told you what it was about?”

Evelyn shook her head.

“All those years he spent working on it?”

“Your grandfather is a very private man. He kept his work to himself.” She paused. “You want to tell me what it’s about.”

“It’s about you.” The rock, gathering mud and sticks and size all the way, rolled on. He couldn’t stop it now if he tried. “About you and Claudia and Henry.” An impossible silence. “And Jane.”

Evelyn set the measuring cup on the counter and stared out the window.

“Gam? Did you hear?”

“I heard you.”

“Is it true?” he asked. Then, when she didn’t answer: “I
know
.” He shaped the word as if he could cram all his meaning into a syllable that would spare her from hearing more, but the word wouldn’t expand to fit it.

“Jane,” she said. “He wrote about her?”

Max waited a moment to see what she would do. Would she cry? Scream? Fall to the floor and tell him to get out? All she did was stare. He stood up and slowly went to her. Flour dusted her hands, which were clenched into what seemed the frailest fists.

“He said he never would.” Evelyn sighed. “He hated memoirs. He said they were tacky.” She exhaled, a pale, disbelieving laugh. “He breaks the dish. I get to clean it up.”

“Maybe that’s why Roger said what he did.”

“Roger loves Claudia.” She looked into Max’s eyes then, pleading, “This would crush her.”

“You don’t think she deserves to know?”

Returning to Max, snatching up his hands, Evelyn said, “We’ve gone all this time. We’ve lived all this time fearing this—this curtain was going to be pulled back and show her, but it hasn’t. It never was. And now. She doesn’t need to know.”

“Where would I be,” he asked, “if I never knew? If I didn’t know you all existed, where would I be?”

At this, Evelyn bit her lip. Max pulled her to him and held her tight. “You have to tell her,” he whispered in her ear.

“What good would it do?” she cried. “Jane’s gone. Henry’s gone.”

“You have to. You can’t not tell her, Gam. You have to. You have to. Or I will.”

Max commandeered the picnic table, looking over a great pile of papers (held down by a can of Diet Pepsi and a bottle of charcoal fluid) that fluttered in the barely there breeze. He wore the bottoms of his preferred uniform, black camouflage cutoffs, with the tank top he’d worn the day before, and, although the day’s heat felt like an attack, the gray knit cap Evelyn made him for Christmas. He looked, Benji thought as he stared out the kitchen window, like a member of a punk band. Or homeless.

“Do you think he’s all right?” he asked.

Claudia stopped chopping celery and stepped up beside him for a worried glimpse. “No.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

“I called Arnav last night. After we went to bed.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.” Then: “What did he say?”

“What I thought he’d say.”

“So this isn’t all—” Benji’s hand spiraled into the air, a gesture of some ineffable creative power that Max possessed (or that possessed Max).

“Inspiration? No.”

Benji hadn’t told her, hadn’t told any of them, about the previous day at the airport. Why, he reasoned, make a big deal? Or a bigger one. Max was working. Benji didn’t want to interfere. To raise the alarm and bring the whole family running held the appeal of derailing a train, and he didn’t want that on his conscience. But his confidence in the wisdom of his omission began to waver. He could no sooner erase from his mind the sight of his sweet, humble nephew hurling pocket change at a stranger’s head than he could scrub a blot of ink from a white shirt. “He’s looking a little ragged,” Benji said.

“I looked up the symptoms last night.”

So had Benji, but if anyone had to assume responsibility for knocking the train from its tracks, shouldn’t it be Claudia?

“What did it say?”

“Pretty much what we’re looking at. Driven behavior, insomnia, self-medication, an inflated sense of self.”

Evelyn, loudly hipping her way down the hall, entered the kitchen with, “Whatever’s happening, it’s not good.” She wore a pink polo shirt and flowered culottes and kept her face angled so the children couldn’t see her black eye, which, of course, Claudia did.

“Oh, Mom,” she said. “That eye.”

“Oh, Claudia. If either of you say one more thing about ‘that eye.’ Enough already.”

Claudia shook her head and frowned. “I told you something like this was going to happen. We should have found a place for Daddy months ago. If not last year.”

“Would you like me to travel back in time? He’s going tomorrow.” She stepped up to the window and took a look, three visitors at the aquarium considering a strange, possibly dangerous fish.

“What’s wrong with you?” Benji asked, appraising the expression on his mother’s face. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Evelyn went to the counter, took up the knife to continue what Claudia had started. “What do you think is wrong?” she snapped. “I’m worried about him.”

“So what would you propose we do?” Claudia asked her brother.

“Leave him alone. For now.” How Benji had fumed at their mother’s talent for denial, which had, much to his and Claudia’s told-you-so dismay, earned Evelyn a sucker punch. But here he was doing the same thing.

“Leaving him alone isn’t an option,” Claudia said pointedly.

“I’m not saying leave him alone,” Benji said testily, even though he just had. “I’m not saying
ignore
him. We need to keep a close eye. But if you try to rein him in, you’re going to get nothing but a fight. You might even lose him. And where would he go if not here?”

“When did you become an expert?” Claudia asked, but before Benji could answer, Evelyn broke in with, “What do you mean lose him?”

A shell of silence hardened around Benji. He may not be able to say it, but they all knew what he meant.

Claudia, a note of triumph in her voice, announced, “Navi will be here tonight.”

“What is this going into?” Evelyn asked tightly. “Tuna fish?”

“Chicken salad. Chicken’s in the fridge.”

“He left to get away from Arnav,” Benji reminded them.

“Did you ever stop to think he may not be making decisions from the best place right now? Arnav’s been through this before. He’ll know what to do.”

“Or he’ll chase Max away, and then we’ll be outside instead of inside, and then there will be nothing we can do.”

Cat, who had been sitting quietly at the table until this point pulling the ends from a pot of string beans she planned to make for dinner, said, “You did the right thing, Claudia.”

“Catman,” Benji said, the sweet in his voice mixed with caution. “Put on some music?”

Cat abandoned the beans and held out a hand. “Give me your phone.”

“Use yours. You have better music.”

“I don’t have better music,” she answered angrily. Things had been rough between them lately. His mind was constantly switched to Bravo TV and his phone a top secret conduit to Sam Palin’s Realm of Promises.

“Use mine,” Claudia offered, producing her phone as if waving a white flag. She set it on the table, then relieved Evelyn from chopping the chicken.

Cat rose. “Forget it. We’ll use mine.” She huffed as she plugged her phone into the little dock that sat on the counter and pushed “Play.” An album Benji and she had listened to a hundred times before. “I’m so sick of
A Ghost Is Born
,” she said.

Benji wanted to ask, “Then why did you play it?” but let the moment pass.

Evelyn, who had left the room to get Henry, returned holding his hand as he mumbled like a child, “I don’t want to eat.”

“You have to eat,” Evelyn answered. “You’ll die if you don’t eat.”

“I want to eat outside.”

“It’s so hot out,” Benji complained.

“It’s summer. It’s not that hot out.” Evelyn deposited Henry in the chair next to Cat and, taking a vote (only Benji voted for air-conditioning), asked Claudia to help Max clear the picnic table.

Benji watched his mother bustle around the room, suddenly stabbed in the heart by the increasingly pronounced drag of that arthritic hip. She hadn’t had it easy. He turned to his father, too much of a wreck, too much of a ruin, to blame much anymore, but still Benji blamed him. And then there was Max. And Cat. A familiar rabbit hole opened up in front of him—how to do right by either of them?—but before he fell into it, his phone rang. A twinkling starshine of a ring that, lately, did nothing so much as set Cat’s teeth on edge. He fished it out of his shorts’ confusing array of cargo pockets and said, “Damn. I’ve gotta take this.”

He disappeared out the back door, the screen slamming shut behind him, and slipped around the side of the house, shyly, guiltily, like a boy who needed to pee.

“He’s been getting a lot of those lately,” Cat explained to Claudia.

“What’s that?”

“Phone calls. Of the damn-I’ve-gotta-take-this variety.”

Claudia dumped the chicken into the bowl with the celery and walnuts and quartered green grapes and went for the jar of mayonnaise.

“He doesn’t say what they’re about?”

Cat plunked her beans into the pot, two at a time.

“I want my mother?” Henry asked.

“Business. He says they’re just business. This theater camp thing in Lake George with some guy he met at the ground breaking a few weeks ago. Or didn’t meet. Reconnected. From high school. Do you know Sam Palin?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. And you don’t believe him?”

“I don’t not believe him, exactly. Did you ever read
Highlights
magazine when you were a kid?”

“Sure,” Claudia said, fond of the memory of those cartoony pages. “I’m surprised you did. You’re so young.”

“Remember that game: the two pictures side by side, similar except for the smallest details, and you had to pick out the differences? Look! The stone disappeared! Or: there’s a monkey in that tree! That’s what it feels like with him. I know something’s changed, but I can’t put my finger on what it is.”