Among the Dead (37 page)

Julia volunteered to help the Sifkas make their bed and to show them around the kitchen. ‘And there'll be plenty of leftovers from all this,' she said, sweeping her hands over the trays of cheese and meat and salad and bread and cake that all of Anna's friends had brought to share with each other.

‘This doesn't feel right,' said Frank.

That's not really your decision,' said Lowell.

‘It's really more of an opinion,' said Frank. He heard Julia say something under her breath. ‘What?' he asked, although he knew that if she answered, he would only feel worse.

‘I said, “I can't believe it.” ‘

‘We should go,' said Leon, and he put his hand on Frank's shoulder. The touch, so frighteningly unfamiliar, so old, so full of authority, brought Frank to tears.

He followed his parents to the door. No one looked at him. Already his cousins and friends were collecting dishes, glasses, napkins, and cups from around the room. Anna's father was in the kitchen, putting plastic wrap on the fruit salad.

Stewart stood up and offered his hand to Leon. The contact between them, the look that passed, was martial, full of an unspoken knowledge that only men can share. Frank recognized pieces of the code, but could not break it. Behind them, Mary's head was turned away, she was talking to Julia, who nodded her head a few times, and glanced over at Frank in a way that told Frank that Mary was telling her side of the story of the affair.

Frank's mother opened the door and let him go through first. He turned to look inside, just as Stewart asked Lowell a question.

‘Lowell, have you settled on a lawyer?'

‘Yes, we have, and I'm sure we made the right decision,' said Lowell.

‘So who will it be, Dessick or Berberian?'

Before Frank could hear what his brother said, their mother closed the door, and the sound of the lock clicking into place destroyed the answer. And then he heard Stewart say, ‘An excellent choice, Lowell. That's what I would have done. He's a good man.'

Frank hovered at the door, hoping to hear more, but his father called to him. He fell in step behind him, and they walked to their car, parked on the street.

‘How did your car get here?' asked Frank.

‘What difference does it make?' said his father.

Frank couldn't say. He tried something else. ‘Julia looks good, doesn't she? Well, maybe she looks a little tired, but don't we all?'

Neither of them answered. They drove to Wilshire Boulevard, and to the condominium.

Frank coughed a few times in the elevator, just to be heard.

‘You should have some herbal tea,' said his mother.

‘I think I'd like a drink,' he said, happy, finally, for a conversation.

‘No,' said Ethel, ‘herbal tea.'

As the elevator rose, Frank wanted to yell at them, he wanted to curse his mother and his father for being born, he wanted to soak the curtains of their bedroom in lighter fluid and then burn the fucking place, he wanted to push his mother and his father into the rooftop swimming pool and hold their heads under water with a steel garden rake, he wanted to pull the doors of the refrigerator off its hinges and smear the food over the living room walls, and wait a few days for the mayonnaise to rot, so that the manager of the building, when he responded to the neighbours' complaints about odd smells, would vomit from the stench when he used his pass key to open the door, he wanted to skilfully crack each of the apartment's windows with a brass candlestick and force big sheets of glass to the street, to decapitate mailmen and Guatemalan nannies pushing strollers filled with the infant sons and daughters of Brentwood orthodontists, he wanted to clog the toilets with dirty underwear and run the bathtubs until the overflow soaked through to the apartment downstairs, he wanted to stab his feet with cuticle scissors and then turn the burners on the stove to high and stand on a stepladder and push his feet into the flames, he wanted to do all of this, but he asked himself, Yes, so, where will the profit be?

And so he said goodnight to his mother and father. I have some shopping for you to do in the morning,' his mother said. ‘The list is by the phone in the kitchen.'

Frank said nothing. He went down the hall to the guest room. There was a single bed against one wall, a desk and bookcase. Everything came from his old bedroom at the mansion in Bel Air. There were the books he'd read in high school, photographs of Frank and Lowell at summer camp. There was his old baseball glove, and the first reading lamp he'd had as a child, part of a set of cowboy furniture. The lamp was a covered wagon with a bulb inside. There was a little carved man holding the reins of a team of carved horses. Frank undressed and got into bed, thinking that he should go to the bathroom because he needed to pee, but he decided he could ignore the pain in his bladder, and hold it in until morning.

He turned off the cowboy light, and looked at the darkness,
saw nothing, and fell asleep listening to the muffled sound of the television in his parents' room, as they watched the news.

That night he had this dream:

He is standing in the middle of a dirt road, in the mountains. There are two lines of people on either side of the road. Dessick is at the head of one line, Berberian is at the head of the other.

‘What is this?' asks Frank.

‘We gave you a chance,' says Berberian. ‘I'm sorry you didn't take it.'

‘Why are you all here?'

‘It's too late to ask questions.'

As Frank walks between the two rows, he is struck on the face, the back, the chest, and he is kicked. When he is hit, the hands are always open, and the slapping, from a distance, might even look like a celebration, but by the end of the line, he is in pain.

And these are the names of those who beat him: Dessick, Berberian, Dennis Donoghue, Bettina Welch, Ed Dockery, Lowell Gale, Leon Gale, Ethel Gale, Peter Klauber, Margot Klauber, Barbara Klauber, Teresa Walter, Dale Beltran, Chris, Kelly. And others, too, are also there, to beat him.

At the end of the line, after passing the last of the people in the two rows, he sees clearly to the top of the road, and a little cabin in the woods. He turns to say something to the crowd, but they are already leaving. His father and mother and brother go with him up the hill.

‘I'm sorry,' says Frank. ‘The letter was never supposed to be published. She was supposed to have read it in Mexico. It was private. I think it's against the law to open someone's mail. I think we can sue.'

No one says anything, and he is ashamed of himself for suggesting a lawsuit now, when he has been so diffident about joining the other suit. But he can explain that, he wants to say, he isn't so much against a lawsuit, he only wants to know whose suit to join.

‘Someone will bring you food,' says Lowell.

‘You have been a disgrace to us,' says his father.

His back and shoulders hurt, but he thinks, with some pride in himself, that he really wasn't so badly damaged by the gauntlet. The hell with them, he thinks, and would have turned to say this, but then the word
prudence
comes to him. So he goes into the cabin without saying goodbye to anyone.

It would be a good place to bring a child, when the child is ready for camping. There is a simple metal frame bed with a grey blanket. Next to the door is a small stove, and a refrigerator. The room smells vaguely of horses.

He lies down on the bed and looks up at the ceiling. Someone has nailed a piece of wood to the beam over his head, perhaps the same person who has carved, ‘This is more than you deserve.'