Casebook (37 page)

“Why not?” I said. Hector had told me on the way down the mountain that they’d had a new washer/dryer installed.

Boop One shrugged. “I just don’t think so. She doesn’t look like a second wife.”

My mom said she hadn’t heard anything about a wedding. But Marge had picked someone from the architecture department to draw an addition to Philip’s house. Hector and Jules would each get their own rooms. She was probably too busy to plan a ceremony, the Mims said. Marge warmed to the
project
of it all, the sad house with its broken machines, the children whose mother lived with a fragile sister. I could see her happiness: a contained excitement, a private, satisfied calm.

“So you think it’s a good thing for Marge?” I asked.

The Mims sipped her coffee. “Yes. I worry about her work. But she wants this.”

So both of Hector’s parents had found someone.

Mine remained single. And still, the Mims was too sad.

68 • The Unnecessary Lies

Maude Stern had the good-student habit of reading the newspaper every day, even in summer. When she dropped by flyers against Prop 8, which was on the ballot for November, she told me three
or four things, and I spaced out. She followed me to my room, still talking. Whenever she came into my lair, she started picking up papers from the floor. Maude loved busywork. “What is this?” she asked.

“Just leave it,” I said, the way I did to my mom.

She was starting SAT boot camp. She said I should do it, too. She always moved frantically the first minutes alone with me. She circled the room, making neater stacks, collecting old homework from the floor, balling the paper and throwing it into the basket.

She told me that her mom was putting together family photo albums. Her life was worse than mine: the bad guy was her dad. She looked at me, her hands hanging ready, and I could see—this time in my room; it wasn’t the same for her. It was more. Maybe this was how you kept someone hanging on. Had Eli seen us the way I saw Maude?

I thought I understood what was supposed to happen. I could pat a spot next to me on the bed, like I did for Hound just before he jumped. I was even attracted to her that afternoon in an easy way, like a door one inch open. She wore shorts and a sleeveless blouse. I didn’t feel even one percent nervous.

I wanted sex. I thought about it all the time. I jerked off every night. Except for Hector, the other Rabid Rabbits were having it. Charlie had Laura; Simon had Cait. For all our trying to prove what good divorces we were, the Rabid Rabbits who had intact families were the ones who got girlfriends and sex. I’d lost weight, but I wasn’t buff like Charlie. Ella had never returned my text. I could smell Maude’s shampoo or something, the chemical spray of it, astringent, maybe orange. But the air held no charge. I turned my face away.

Instead of patting the spot next to me, I stood.

In a little while, she left, her head bumping on the square paper hanging light.

What did other people feel? Was it what I’d passed up the chance of with Maude or what I still longed for from Ella?

When Neverland closed to do inventory, Hector and I counted and shelved for two days. We took cash, made change, and bagged the comics at the Saturday-morning crate sale in the back parking lot. “Wish we could hire you guys,” Hershel, the owner, said, “but we’ll give you the staff discount. You earned it.”

The Mims drove the Boops and me to see an old table in a warehouse. She asked, did we like it? We said, Well, yeah, I guess, but what for? It was too tall to eat around. Or for a desk. She said it had been made that way because people worked at it standing. It was a Chinese counting table. But Sare knew someone who could chop the legs down. She wanted to use it as a dining table.

Later that day, Sare and Reed met us there with an SUV. We spread packing blankets over the roof and tied the table on top.

We went bowling with Ben Orion and he asked us what books we’d read. He offered to take us to a conference on forensic induction.

“Do you think Eli ever separated like he said?” I asked. “He told my mom once that he apologized to his wife’s father.”

There was a look Ben got now whenever I brought up Eli. But I hadn’t said his name the whole first hour at the bowling alley!

“When your mom asked if she could see his divorce papers, the guy said
sure
. His saying something doesn’t get you any closer to the truth. You guys need to remember that the case is closed.”

“But you have to admit,” Hector said, “it wasn’t a very good ending.”

“Not a good one, maybe, but it’s the end. We know he’s a bad guy.” He knocked out the remaining pins. A spare.

“Miles’d like to be done. He can’t help it,” Hector said. “He loved him.” I felt grateful to him for knowing me.

“I didn’t understand that.” Ben sat on the edge of the chute, hands clasped. The clicks and rings of a strike in the lane next to us clattered. “What do you still want to learn?”

The things that really bugged me now were the unnecessary lies. Eli had accepted our gifts for his kid. Why?

“He pretended they were from him,” Ben said. “Saved him some money. And they helped his guilt; he could tell himself his kid was getting something out of this, too.”

“Who did he say my old clothes were from?”

“He probably just threw them away.”

Those tiny garments she’d carefully laundered and folded, that had once been saved for our children—they were gone forever.

“And he wanted to be the only one she talked to. But knowing what he knew, shouldn’t he have been glad she had friends? If he cared about her at all?”

“Here, your turn,” Ben said. My favorite ball had choked up the chute. It was purple and marbleized. “You’re hoping for some kind of honor among thieves. The only place to find that is at the movies. You know, the longer you work in criminal justice, those stories begin to seem like fairy tales.”

“So that’s just all?” Hector said. “Nothing happens to him?”

“Here’s what we can do. We’ll tune in every so often and watch the show. We can’t lock him up, but somebody else might. We won’t lift a finger. We’ll just see. And call it God or karma or whatever, usually these guys get it in the end.”

I looked up at him, surprised. “Do you believe in God?”

“I believe in good over evil,” he said. “Of course. Don’t you?”

“No.” I shrugged. “I’m half Jewish.” Hector and I didn’t pursue that further. Neither of us wanted to find out Ben was some wack religious. The age we were, with the education we’d had, any religion seemed superstition.

“He’ll probably never send back that watch,” I said. I thought he kept all our gifts in one place, like the Mims’s drawer. His presents to her were all promises. For a tattoo, a suit, loyalty on his deathbed.
All except
Irene Adler, I have
known
you
. Someday, maybe, he’d give my watch to his own kid.

“It’s likely in some Pasadena pawnshop by now,” Ben said. That shocked me. But Eli had thought she was dead, and he hadn’t called us.

I could live without his loot.

At the end Ben asked how my mom was doing.

I told him not so great. Not the same as before.

“She hikes with my dad,” Hector volunteered.

“Well, ’cause of the puppy. Hound needs exercise.”

“It peed on my dad.”

“Hey, you told me Eli was a big animal rights guy? Well, I put out an alert on the address. Turns out they rented their house to McDonald’s. That tells you they’re hard up. Those commercial shoots wreck a place. And how does McDonald’s square with animal rights? Tell your mom that. Maybe it’ll help.” When he dropped us off at our house, the Mims waved at him from the porch.

Hector and I were waiting in line at the Aero when a guy with a ponytail came out. “Sorry, people. The kid who does the concessions didn’t show. I had to start the popcorn before I opened the doors. I’m the only one here, so I’ll collect tickets, and then we’ll move to the refreshment bar.” I offered to help. He showed me how to tear the tickets and drop half down a slot in a wooden box. When the movie started, I said I’d like to put in an application. By the end of the night I had a job.

From then on, four evenings a week I took tickets, swept, sold popcorn and Cokes. I let Hector in for free. My dad stopped sometimes on his way home from work. He snapped a picture of me in the outside booth and made it the wallpaper on his phone. For some reason, the movie theater didn’t scare him about pedophiles. Or maybe he’d finally outgrown that fear. Thinking so made me nostalgic.

69 • The Sex Journal

By the time school started, Hector and I had reputations as do-gooders, because of the money Philip made us give to the Animal Rights Collective. Our donations had benefits: quite a few good-looking girls apparently cared about animals; they’d learned our names and voted to fund FLAGBTU’s fight against Prop 8. They elected Boop Two as vice president. And just from the handed-over money, we’d completed our community service hours for the first time in our whole academic lives. The only bad thing was that the pretty girls assumed we were gay.

We vowed to quit the animal-transfer business; we needed better grades, especially I did, but we still had one schnauzer to deliver. Then that would be it.

Boop One hipped into my room, a leg pointed in the air. “Can I have ten dollars for the In-N-Out truck? Mom’s not home and I’m going to Jules’s play.”

“How’re you getting there?”

“Philip.”

“I’ll look in the Mims’s drawer.” I found two fifties and some curled ones. I started flattening the dollars. My sister discovered a stack of old baseball cards with her mug on them that she couldn’t stop cooing over (“Look how little I was! Aww!”). I had nine dollars when she gasped. She’d opened one of those cardboard FedEx envelopes and taken out a picture of our mother naked.

“Give me that.” I grabbed. Queasy. A yellow Post-it was stuck to the cardboard:
I want to get frames
. I shoved the photograph back in the envelope and returned to counting, all business. “Okay, I’ll give you nine and change. That enough?”

“Yes,” she said, her hand ready for the money. “Why would she do that? Get pictures taken with her booty like that?”

“Medical reasons,” I said. Good save. A car honked in front. She ran out.

“What time will you be home?” I called after her, trying to sound parental.

“Later,” she yelled back.

I opened the cardboard envelope. There were more, five in all, taken in our old house. It’s strange to look at nude photographs of your mother. They made me feel exposed. As if I would never be attractive. They were odd pictures. Her face looked pretty, her smile like an open fan. Her body looked too pale and bare—shy, as if it wanted to put on clothes. She wasn’t as thin then. I recognized Eli’s penmanship on the Post-it. He must have taken the pictures. I felt like burning them. I’d leave the one of her back; in it, she looked like she could be anyone or even a smooth rock. Someday my sisters would want this, I thought, their mother beautiful at forty-something. Her back. But I slid the black-and-white photos between the cardboard so nothing looked different. It was her property. She wouldn’t want me touching it.

I had the feeling again that I’d had when I was afraid there was more bad to find.

But what could be left? I rummaged in the drawer. I found his letter, in the envelope with no return address, and a small black Moleskine notebook, closed with a rubber band. I slipped the band off, opened it, and inside the fly read,
Our Sex Journal
. Then snapped it shut. It was what Hector had once guessed. A prank! I thought, Hector planted it! The idea spread with relief, but no, I realized, Hector would never have taken the risk—not to put this in my mom’s room. Hector came over less now anyway. This was a Friday, and he wasn’t here. On the first page, I recognized Eli’s small, spidery writing.

Where are my arms?

What did he mean,
Where are my arms?
Sex again. Liquids swirled in my gut. I put the rubber band back around the Moleskine and closed the drawer.

Boop One asked me later, “What ever happened to Eli?”