All the Lasting Things (9 page)

“I love my sister,” answered Cat, pausing as one does before equivocating the unequivocal, “but she can be a bitter, bitter pill.”

“She said you don’t know how lucky you are.”

“Because I’m not a waitress, right? I’m so lucky. What she calls luck, I call the death of my parents.” Cat gave Benji a dispirited smile and started on her elbows. “She acts like she doesn’t know where that money comes from. How did I pay for the BFA or the summerhouse or any of the other things she thinks I’m so lucky to have? The same way she paid for a Range Rover and two divorces. A big fucking insurance policy.”

Benji breathed deeply. The perfume of Cat’s soap and body lotion worked its way into his system, rocketing every available drop of blood between his legs. He felt light-headed, ashamed to be fully erect in such close proximity to Cat’s dead parents, but undeniably ready to fuck all the same. He folded his hands over his lap and did his best to look attentive and grave.

“She has dreams for me,” Cat went on. “Mama Rose dreams. Which makes me either June or Gypsy. It’s unclear which. I haven’t tried stripping yet.”

“If ever you want to practice.”

She gave him a quick, teasing kiss and hopped off the bed. Shimmying across the room, she danced an impromptu burlesque behind her towel before dropping it to the floor and stepping into a pair of striped cotton panties.

“Molly wanted to be an actor?”

“No, but she was always the one bound for the spotlight. Or so everyone thought. Or my dad, at least.”

“And what was Molly’s talent?”

“Resentment? She won the science fair one year, and that was it: she was going to be a doctor. Find the cure for cancer. That kind of thing.” Cat pulled on torn jeans and a fitted sweater with flared sleeves while she talked, then sized herself up in the standing mirror.

“She’s a rich biotech researcher. What does she have to complain about?”

“Her money’s pretty much gone. And she tells people she’s a biotech researcher. She’s an assistant, actually. She isn’t curing cancer. She’s watching bacteria bloom.” Cat ran a wand of colorless gloss over her lips and pressed them together, more or less satisfied with the result. “She told me she could have won the Nobel Prize if only my parents hadn’t died.”

“No pressure there.”

“Right? My parents’ dying is all she ever needed to explain why her life has been so—I don’t know what she’d call it. Ordinary.”

Benji understood completely where Molly was coming from but, because this was a fledgling nemesis they were talking about, felt compelled to set his camp on the other side of the fence. “Like winning the Nobel Prize is the only way of making a name for yourself.”

Cat turned to Benji with an arched brow. “Like you never feel that compulsion?”

“What?” he answered innocently. “I don’t want to win a Nobel Prize.”

“No, just all the other ones.” She batted her eyelashes and, with a southern accent, drawled, “If only I were famous.”

Benji supposed she meant to imitate him, but, seeing that he wasn’t gay or Blanche DuBois, he thought she fell short of the mark. “But you—you actually belong in a spotlight.”

“At least my sister thinks so. Which is why I need to be pushed. And punished.”

Benji got out of bed at Cat’s clapping command. He pulled on his clothes, brushed his teeth, readied himself to plunge into the day. A knot of dread tightened in his stomach at the thought of parting ways. He didn’t want to let go. Not even for the few hours Cat needed to run errands and rally to save the graves of the long-forgotten dead. Benji had, for a moment, broken free of time, lost track of the world and his place in it. He delighted in not being certain whether it was Sunday or Monday, and he paused now before opening the door to the wider world. He didn’t want to end this rare honeymoon, to leave his horse-filled hermitage. He didn’t want to step back into time. He didn’t want to step back into himself.

Carefully, Cat eased the car out of a gravel drive with a treacherous blind spot. The first hints of fall dusted the leaves, streaming, moth-eaten banners flecked with red, yellow, and ochre in the bright-blue air. Benji fed his Wilco CD into the stereo slot, flipped to his favorite song. He leaned his head against the window and drummed a finger absently on the door handle. He wanted to say he’d seen some new possibility, that Cat had shown him a new possibility. He wanted to say something about light. About Cat being the light. What he said was, “We should do a sex tape.”

She glanced at him through narrowed eyes before turning back to the road. “Sweet talker.”

“Look what it did for the Kardashians. We’re at least as talented as they are.”

“You think comparing me to a Kardashian is the best way to seduce me?”

They passed a prim white farmhouse with two huge barns and a line of dairy cows chewing drowsily in the muck.

“It could be my comeback,” Benji said. “No pun intended.”

Cat rolled her eyes. “Gross.”

“The guy from
Saved by the Bell
did one.”

“Mario Lopez?” She perked up.

“The other one. The one you’d least want to see in a sex tape. Whatshisname? At the end, he does a dirty Sanchez.”

“I seriously hope that’s not referring to a person. Actually, I don’t want to know what that is.”

Benji laughed. “If nothing else, it would be another feather in my father’s cap. One more thing to prove him right about me.” He knew how dreary this line of conversation was, how decidedly unappealing self-deprecation could be, but he couldn’t stop himself. It was as painful as scratching a rash but also as satisfying. And besides, leaving the house, bursting that bright little bubble of Edenic seclusion, left him feeling embattled, in want of a target, even if he was the one locked in his sights.

“Crackpot theory?” Cat asked.

It made him smile, the lingo developing between them, their own little dictionary and standing invitation to amateur psychoanalysis. “Please.”

“I think you like proving your father right. You get off on it.” She turned down the music and tightened her grip on the wheel, her shoulders, her entire upper body gone rigid with conviction. “It’s more than just pissing him off. It’s your way of staying connected. The antagonism. The impasse. It’s how you stay close.” He considered her profile, her creased forehead, the straight line of her small nose, the pale down above her upper lip turned to gold by the sun. “Maybe it’s why you take these jobs that. That.”

Benji watched her teeter on a ledge, not knowing how to finish her sentence without falling off. “Suck,” he offered.

“That’s your word. I was going to say that are less than what you’re capable of.”

“How do you know what I’m capable of?”

Cat shrugged. “You act interested when I read to you from
Middlemarch
. You can be very convincing when you want to be.” She pulled the car to a stop at a deserted intersection and turned onto the pocked rural road that would deposit them in downtown Alluvia. “What would it mean if you were Hamlet?” she asked. “Not the Ghost. Not the understudy for Horatio. Not the butt of your own joke. But Hamlet. You’d have to change your entire worldview.”

“I’d have to memorize a lot more lines.”

“You’d have to live with proving your father wrong. And who would you be then? If you weren’t failing Henry Fisher?”

Benji plucked a bottle of warm, flat soda from the cup holder and took a swig. “It wouldn’t matter. I could be Hamlet. I could be Ralph fucking Fiennes. My father’s totally unimpressed by fame.”

“That’s easy for him to say. You could sink a boat with the awards he’s won. But I’m not talking about
fame
,” Cat said. She sounded like a schoolteacher saddled with some incorrigibly dull kid. “I’m not talking about being famous. I’m talking about being—I don’t know. What am I talking about?”

“Happy?” Benji tried.

“Happy is overrated. Happy comes and goes.” She put a hand on his knee and looked at him longer than a person behind the wheel of a moving vehicle should. “Is that really what you want? In the end? To be famous?”

It was. Of course it was. He’d had a taste of it, the largest possible dose a boy could squeeze from a second-tier sitcom in the days before the Internet. The giggling requests for autographs, usually made by moonfaced, acne-prone girls, as he walked through the mall. The jean-jacketed spread in
Teen Beat
. Strangers doing double takes and tugging each other’s sleeves as they passed him by. That’s what
you
think! That’s what
you
think! Hell yes, he wanted to be famous.

“No. That’s not what I want. Not the only thing.”

The grassy fields gave way to more or less tended lawns, clusters of cheap, vinyl-sided split-level ranches, and cul-de-sac developments named with the puzzlingly idyllic optimism of mental health facilities.
Echo Valley. Windview Fields.
They passed the tennis courts, the Elks Lodge, the municipal swimming pool (closed for the season) before crossing the town line and crawling down Main Street, past the post office, hardware store, hair salon, gas mart, past the pizza parlor and the library and the steepled Presbyterian church that comprised Alluvia’s business district. Cat turned right onto School Street, then left onto Palmer, then left again into the Fishers’ drive.

And there it was. As soon as Benji saw it, his foot began pumping the imaginary brake that provides comfort to so many frazzled mothers when driving with their lead-footed teenage sons. “Whoa,” he said. “Whoa.”

The silver Mercedes he’d noticed three days earlier sat under the elm at the curb in a dappled pool of light. He’d assumed the car belonged to Roger, but Roger Fitch would no sooner spend three days in Alluvia than in Al Anbar, and someone, someone of size, someone with hair, someone decidedly not Roger, was sitting in the front seat.

“Back up,” Benji said. “Back up to that car.”

“Who is it?” Cat asked with a tinge of alarm, letting the car roll slowly down the sloped blacktop.

Benji saw a silhouette, nothing more, but he could tell from the rigid, upright shape that the person was considering whether to flee. He rolled down his window and waved. “Hey,” he called. “You. Hey.”

In the largest, most fundamentally solipsistic region of his mind, Benji assumed the car was somehow there for him. He entertained the idea that the car belonged to a fan. An enthusiast of eighties television, come to ask for his autograph or to wish him well or, more darkly, to stalk and possibly shoot him. Or did he owe somebody money? Had he fucked (or fucked over) somebody’s sister? Was he about to get his other leg broken? There were, of course, more realistic possibilities—perhaps the man (it seemed to be a man) numbered among the doctoral candidates who appeared every so often, like pilgrims at a holy site, journeying to meet the esteemed author, the subject of a dissertation on rural ennui or imploding masculinity.

The door of the Mercedes swung open and, after a minute, a boy climbed out of the car. He was less handsome than pretty, possessed of a pale, waxen beauty that, were it not for the shadow of stubble on his cheeks and a small silver barbell piercing the upper curve of his ear, belonged to a porcelain doll. He was tall and thin with big, staring blue eyes, a slender nose, and a perfect Cupid’s bow for a mouth. His dark hair, oiled to a high, almost plastic sheen, was pushed back. He wore black camouflage pants, cut off at the knee, and a lilac shirt with a deep V-neck that exposed the taut and, despite his otherwise androgynous mien, surprisingly hairy plates of his chest. He was eighteen, Benji guessed. Or twenty-five. It was hard to tell. The only thing Benji could say with certainty was that the kid had never seen
Prodigy
.

“I’m sorry,” the boy said.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m just sitting here.”

“You’ve been sitting there for three days.”

“Not the whole time.”

“And not because you like the block.”

The boy considered his car, flicked a rock at the tire with a shy sweep of his boot. “No,” he answered.

Benji leaned out the window and waited for what followed, waited for more, but nothing came. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

The boy stared up at the house, the pleasant picture made by the dormers and chimneys and pillared porticos, the pearl-gray paint that was almost the same color as his car. “Do the Fishers live here?”

“Pull around back,” he said to Cat, feeling mildly heroic in his promise to handle this. He swung his door open and gruntingly heaved himself out of the car, tapped the sun-warmed roof to make Cat go, then took a few wobbly steps closer to the boy. “Who’s asking?”

“Me? I’m Max. Max Davis.” He swiped the hair out of his eyes and for the first time met Benji’s gaze head-on. Had they met before? “What happened to you?”

“Long story.”

The boy blinked. “I’m looking for Claudia?”

“Claudia’s my sister.”

“You’re?”

“Her brother.” Benji felt entitled to give the kid a hard time until he stated his business.

“Is she here?”

“You’re about twenty years too late. She hasn’t lived her since, ah, you do the math.”

“1990.” Max nodded, plunging his hands into his commodious pockets to play an anxious, rattling song of keys and change. “I figured she wouldn’t be here, but this was the address they had on file. And there are about sixteen million Claudia Fishers on Google. I wasn’t even sure Fisher was still her last name.”

Twenty-two years. No sooner had Max uttered the year than Benji, with the startling suddenness of having a blindfold pulled from his eyes, could plainly see. 1990. It was the only number Benji needed to solve the equation. He didn’t need Max to tell him who “they” were or what their files contained. He didn’t need to summon the memory of the year Claudia disappeared between college and grad school, the entire year she refused to come home. The variables fell ineradicably into place in front of him. Max’s eyes, Max’s mouth. He hadn’t met the boy before, but nevertheless Benji had seen him. He knew that mouth. He
had
that mouth. The same as Claudia’s. The same as their father’s.

“Oh my God,” Benji whispered.