Casebook (34 page)

More like a stalled train at last finally moving.

Or: Steep stairs leading down to an unfinished basement.

PSYCHOPATH
(
kneeling
): I’ll always call you on your birthday.

HER
: (bubble) Well, duh …

“He had a thing with birthdays,” Hector said. “It would have been perfect for him if she died. He would have brought flowers to her grave.”

That made me shiver. Hector said his own lies came true.

Eli had told her that her work lacked vibrant romantic hope.

“How can geometry have hope?” Hector said.

“I can kind of see it.”

HER:
Were you ever going to tell me?

PSYCHOPATH:
I was going to tell when you turned fifty. Because by then you really would be too old.

Hector drew them in a bed, covers up to their clavicles, with a fantasy bubble: her at fifty, hair up, in a regal dress, him kneeling, giving her a jewelry box with the typed fortune:
I’ll always love you
.

“I gained four pounds over the damn holiday,” Marge said.

“We’ll resume training,” Philip answered.

“Well, we got through Christmas,” the Mims replied.

64 • A Message in a Bubble

“Down, boy, down. You’re not a pound dog at all, are you?” Marge said. She looked at the Mims. “You know this dog is proof that you’re over Eli.”

She wasn’t, though. This was late January, day 125. Marge came over nights to work on grant proposals. Their first collaboration was going well; they had two more ideas they were applying to fund. The Mims couldn’t stand to work alone now, she said. She told me that back in the days of Euler and Gauss nobody distinguished between pure math and its uses. Euler worked on the arrangement of ship masts and also on elliptical integrals. We
know Gauss for number theory, she said—Speak for yourself, I mumbled—but he also computed the orbit of the first known asteroid, conducted geographical surveys, and invented the telegraph.

The Mims looked thinner than she’d ever been.

I was, too. I knew because I needed belts for the first time.

“I’m the one who shouldn’t be eating,” Marge said, opening the refrigerator and taking out a wrapped wedge of cheese. On the table was a bowl of Asian persimmons. She sliced one paper-thin.

The Mims said people asked her what diet she’d been on. She and Marge laughed.

“Might as well take advantage of it. Drive into Beverly Hills. Buy a new dress.” Marge said she’d read that the more subjective the discipline, the better dressed the faculty and the more illicit sex they had. Mathematicians, by that theory, had few affairs.

I doubted that the Mims would drive into Beverly Hills to go shopping. Whenever I went to her room at night, she was working numbers with a pencil. I noticed her hands; they looked like mine.

One evening Marge came over after dinner and said, “I’ve got something.” I listened from the hall, against the heater. “He’s not at the NSF anymore. Look. I e-mailed to tell him we wouldn’t need him at UCLA spring quarter, and this bounced back.”

They bent over a piece of paper.

“When somebody leaves under good terms, that isn’t what they say. He must’ve been fired,” Marge said. “But I wonder when. He couldn’t have been living out here and working for them. I’m going to ask around.” I wanted to see the paper but Marge put it back into her bag.

Then I hurried to my room and e-mailed Eli. Just a blank e-mail. A form came back.

The person you have e-mailed can be reached by personal e-mail at the following e-mail address: [email protected]. If you would like to contact someone internally at the National Science Foundation, please reach out to: [email protected].

Philip started running with my mom every morning in the dark. They picked up Marge for the last mile. Now, when the Mims woke us, her face was glossed with sweat. Weekends, they nabbed us out of bed for dawn hikes, with headlamps. After, the Mims dragged us to dog obedience school in the parking lot of a church. We stood like drunks wavering from exhaustion, holding Hound on the leash. She carried around a puppy-training book written by a monk. It seemed as if he’d never learn to go to the bathroom outside, but then, on day 148, he did. He still chewed things. We put our shoes up on our desks. Not one of us, except the Mims, used a desk for anything else.

In March, a stranger who’d seen our flyer on the community board called. After two obedience classes and a shock collar, her pit bull still attacked. For a biter, I told her, we’d have to charge three fifty. Hector stuck his foot near my face to show the holes in the bottom of his sneaker. We promised to fetch the pit on Friday. It lived near Hector’s dad. But when we arrived, it was obvious that we weren’t what the owner had expected. She sat at her desk writing the check very, very slowly. “Your parents will help with this?” she asked, some shred of compunction battling her desire to get rid of the dog. Hector nodded. Then she led us to a pen where the dog stood, ears up, and handed over the leather-and-chain leash.

That fib came true. We tied Moto to a tree in Philip’s backyard, putting out food and water in their lost dog’s bowls. We told Philip we knew of a family in Pasadena that would take him. Philip
assumed this was part of the animal rights club at Cottonwoods, and we didn’t say anything to dispel that notion. After two nights of howling, Philip stuck him in the car. Jules butted against me; Moto took up most of the seat.

We got out a few doors down from Eli’s house. Everything was pitch-dark.

“What if they’re out of town?” I whispered to Hector, yanking the dog. The dog just sat on the sidewalk, so I pulled, scraping his bottom along the cement. We’d brought Rebel’s bowls for food, which we carried in a Baggie, and water that we would pour from my thermos. I had a pocket of treats, too. If they were out of town, though, then what? Maybe Moto would die. I thought of Tomcat all of a sudden. I hoped I’d see him.

The house stood still and closed. We hooked the leash around the doorknob, knotted it. When we started walking away, the pit barked, and then we scrammed.

All the next day, I kept thinking about that dog hooked to the doorknob. I pestered Hector to skip seventh period. After two hours and three buses, we still had to walk a long time, Hector in his shoes with the holes. Their street was hard to find, even with Google Maps. We had my thermos full of water and another bag of dog food in my backpack. We’d googled the Pasadena pound, too. If worse came to worst, we could drag Moto there. Once we arrived, though, the porch was swept. No scattered kibble. No bowls. It was as if we hadn’t tied a dog there the night before.

“I told you it’d be fine,” Hector said.

“But we couldn’t know.” Walking back toward the bus, we passed a mini-mall with a sports shop. I elbowed Hector in to buy shoes. We had three hundred fifty dollars. We threw his old shoes into a Dumpster. We bought a six-pack of socks, too. “You know what I just thought of?” he said. “I bet they have a dog door. We could’ve shoved him in. Shut it from outside with a stone.”

That night the moon hung low and enormous. “It’s a super-moon,” Hector said. “We’re at the perigee. It’s thirteen percent
bigger and way brighter than usual.” These were the kinds of facts Philip and Hector just knew.

Our house stayed quiet. We kept to our rooms.

We finally finished the last
Wire
.

Sare maintained a discussion with the Mims about whether she should ask Eli to return the watch. The Mims didn’t think so; it was a gift, she said.

“Still. A good watch.” Sare probably felt guilty: she’d talked the Mims into giving it to him in the first place, instead of to me.

They listed items, as they remembered:

Cuff links

The watch

A pen

The string bracelet
^*

She forgot those father-son synthetic mitts from Canada. The camera. My baby clothes. For the next few months, I checked my mom’s drawer for the note Sare had drafted, and I always found it.
Please send back the gifts which were chosen with love for a person who turned out not to exist
. She never sent it.

Underneath was the corner scrap of yellow lined paper:
Yours is the last face I’ll see
. I always covered that right back up.

We scrawled the list inside a bubble in
Our Psychopath
, like a message in a bottle. Maybe someday, I thought, I’d receive a package with no return address, and there would be my watch.

The running, the hikes, the obedience classes, the applications
she and Marge wrote at the kitchen table, her renewed preparation for classes—they were all efforts, and maybe they helped. But happiness—I didn’t see that returning. A light had gone out.

“Okay, I found something,” Marge said, walking in briskly one night in April. “He was fired over a year ago. People think it was something personal; he was difficult. Moody. But I got the name of the woman he had the affair with. Lorelei Bruckner.”

Marge had already looked her up. It had been easy: the woman had given the NSF a forwarding address. She lived in Northern California now. She’d left science altogether. I remembered what Eli had said about her. He’d said it was just an affair. He hadn’t told her he loved her. He said he couldn’t be with her because she didn’t read. I remembered hearing that and thinking, What, she’s illiterate? Oh, and she’d said unpleasant things about his wife.

“Well, she’s no slouch,” Marge said. After the NSF, she worked at the Smithsonian and then at the National Gallery, in their design departments. Now she was a potter, with her own business. Marge showed the Mims her webpage.

My mother and Marge flew up to Marin County to meet the potter sometime in the next few weeks. They must have left and come back the same day. I didn’t know they’d gone until I heard them talking about it with Sare one evening around the kitchen table.

Apparently, Lorelei—the potter—told my mom that when she and Eli worked at NSF they’d
both
been married. He’d pursued her
very aggressively
in the office. Everyone knew. They’d moved in together, and one night they’d come home from dinner and found Jean sitting on the steps of their place, chewing the ends of her hair. Eventually, they each got their own apartments. The affair went on another two years, but he always came to her house; he never let her come to his.

When my mom told her what had happened to us, Lorelei shook her head. She said she was sorry to hear that he was still up to that; she’d hoped once he and Jean reconciled and had the child, he would have made that his life. They’d asked if Eli had ever said
I love you
. She laughed a little. She said she had a box full of letters that would answer that question.

So he’d lied at the very beginning, the Mims said. That seemed important to her.

The potter offered to send them the box of letters; her husband always said she should throw it out. She liked the idea of it finally coming to some use.

“I’m glad at least she
has
a husband,” Sare said. “No children?”

My mom murmured no, no kids. After Eli, Marge said, she’d been alone years before she met the man she married. Eli had cost her the chance to have a family. Something about the way Marge said that made me remember that she didn’t have kids either. That seemed a serious thing. Like a lack of money.

Marge and the Mims had each bought a pot from her studio. Sare picked up the vase and complimented it. That was what had made them start talking about Lorelei in the first place. A while before, the white vase had appeared on our table, where it always stayed. I hadn’t thought to wonder where it had come from.

The Mims had already placed orders for Christmas. Every year, from then on, we gave small white vases instead of cakes.

^*
Seeing that list we put into the book again was weird. “Cuff links. The watch. A pen. The string bracelet.” We should have added: + 6 years
.

65 • Busted

Then the doorbell rang on a Tuesday night and the Audreys stood there, Jules swaybacked against her dad, elbows hooked in his arms. He unlatched her and sent her to the Boops’ room. “Sit down, guys,” he said. By now, the Mims had shuffled in. Philip took a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to me and Hector. “Could you please explain this?”

A laugh slipped out of me. It was one of Hector’s signs. His picture of monstro dog and electric cat. He must have left a copy in the printer at home. But no, there were staple holes. Could Philip have unhinged it from the Co-opportunity community board?

“Did you get
paid
for the pit bull I drove to Pasadena?”

My mom’s neck jolted at the city name. I mumbled that we had expenses. Animal treats. And what with soup selling prohibited … We didn’t say that the yard where we’d left the pit belonged to Eli. I was listening carefully to detect any hint that they knew. I didn’t think they did.