Casebook (41 page)

The circle of wrought iron clanked. I moved to stand in the place where she’d been. I wiped my hand on my face and it came back red. My nose was bleeding.

I wasn’t gay, I supposed.

“Do you like Ella?” Boop Two asked in the car.

“I love Ella,” I said, telling the truth a way that seemed just talk. “We’re friends.”

I fully expected to wake up from this shimmery aftercalm and find all the sparkles fallen through my fingers.

“I meant as more than friends.”

“She doesn’t think of me that way.” I knew it wasn’t the same for Ella. But what was it for her? I kept picturing her breasts, the reddish-brown part around the nipple slightly bigger on the right. Still, I didn’t know if I’d talk to her again. We didn’t have school together anymore. And I remembered that time I’d texted her and she’d never texted me back.

“You should tell your father you’re heterosexual,” the Mims said that night. Boop Two must have ratted something. “Because if you don’t, I will.” Our father was coming over for dinner. “You’re using this to yank his chain,” she said.

“I’m using it to get his attention.”

Hector and I had stopped talking about our parents’ marriages a long time ago. We never really figured them out, and Hector had stopped caring. I thought I understood our divorce. My dad had wanted to give the Mims a safe, easy life. But that life had felt too soft to her. After the Boops were born he’d wanted her to quit. “You care about math, not teaching,” he’d said. “You hate faculty meetings.” A lawyer by training, my father litigated, never discussed. At that point, she’d taught four days a week, as an assistant professor. She earned seventy-one thousand dollars a year. By my father’s accounting, that sum was not worth her exhaustion or complaints, most of all not worth her nagging
him
to help more.

She’d grown up poor but
necessary
. She couldn’t find a way to be that with him. He really didn’t need any of us. She’d worked in a Detroit hospital when she was young, as a Candy Striper; she’d described the feeling of smooth time, the paddlewheel of days, where despite the construction-paper cutout decorations, Christmas was never Christmas, Sunday was not Sunday, and the rounds remained the same.

But she was the guilty party. She’d loved Eli and hoped to marry him.

My dad had still never settled on anyone else.

But he finally had his hit show. More people have seen
Happy Never After
than any single one of Shakespeare’s plays. He still handed my mom garbage from his car window, but often she asked him in for dinner, and when he walked up the lawn Hound went wild. Dad hadn’t wanted Hound, but the dog loved him.
And Dad had more pictures of himself with Hound than any of us did, and Hound lived in our rented house. Rented or not, our house felt permanent now. We knew our landlord, Einar Nelson, a ninety-year-old Swedish widower who lived up the street. When Marge and the Mims baked, they made one extra and had the Boops walk it to him. At Christmas, he got a Lorelei vase, too.

My dad helped himself to seconds before he brought up my future. “Your SATs matter now, Miles,” he said. “But once those are done, I’d like you to find something educational. An internship. A volunteer program abroad. I don’t see that taking tickets at a movie theater will expand your perspective.”

“You guys cost me hundreds of dollars I could have earned selling soup.”

“Cry me a river,” my dad said.

“I ate soup every day for a year!”

When I went in to say good night to the Boops, they were looking at a baby book, a Berenstain Bear. Dad had annotated it, adding a
Twin Sister Bear
to the drawings. Our dad was a master of scribbles found years later that made a child’s book permanently
personal
, theirs and his. The Mims seemed to be okay with just the evaporating present. Those nights Dad stayed for supper the Boops whispered in their room in the dark.

Our parents were laughing together in the kitchen.

“We
are
close, Irene,” he was saying. “We’ve been talking for forty minutes.”

“You’re not the only one I told,” she said.

“I know I’m not the only one, but I’m in the rotation.”

That was love, I supposed. Not romantic love. But a kind of love we still had. Leave it to my dad; he’d found a way to earn his A in Divorce.

When I went to say good night, he had to keep his mouth in check: it wanted to smile; you could sense his muscles pulling the edges down. “If I’d known heterosexuality would make you this
happy,” I said, “I’d have told you in time for soup selling.” The long joke was over (no coming out for April Fools’ Day), but they didn’t say anything more about my ticket taking. I kept my job.

As my dad was walking down to his car, Ben Orion was loping up to take the dog for a walk. He and the Mims set out. When she returned with Hound, I asked her if she and Ben were ever going to date. She got that smile.
The
smile.

But then she said no. She said she wanted Ben to have the whole shebang: a wife, children, all of it. And she was too old.

“He’s your same age, almost,” I pointed out.

Just then my phone buzzed. Ella.

73 • A Noise in the Night

A noise woke me in the middle of the night, and I made myself shove up. I thought it was the Mims, crying again. Marge said that it took half as long as you were with a person to get over them. And the Mims had been with Eli six years. He’d bought that house with his wife in the middle of it. Buying a house was a huge deal, even I knew that. He must have made his decision then and put off the ugly duty of telling us.

I found the Mims on the back porch, holding Hound. “He was whimpering,” she said, her face dry, a cup of tea next to her. I rummaged on the cluttered kitchen counter, found a tennis ball, and threw it across our small backyard. He ran, leaping in the dark. He could
fetch
but still not
retrieve
. We watched him together. Our delight.

Open cookbooks were strewn on the porch next to a small shoebox. She told me she’d been reading recipes as bedtime stories. Now that I was up, I didn’t feel tired. She talked about work. She and Marge strayed in and out of each other’s offices every day. After lunch, they walked down to the lab on South Campus. They
had invitations to fly different places around the world. Mostly, she said, she wanted to just stay home and keep working.

“What’s this?” I finally said, knocking on the shoebox. “Love letters?”

I’d been joking, but she nodded yes. She told me the potter had finally sent the box of letters, and she didn’t know what to do with them. She said she would have sent them back, but she had the feeling that Lorelei, or at least Lorelei’s husband, wanted to get rid of them.

“You could send them to Eli and his wife,” I said.

I took the lid off. There were about twenty-some letters still in their envelopes. The potter had tied them into a little bundle with plain string.

I took one out, glanced at it quickly, then folded the stationery into a paper airplane. I flew it. Hound bounded after it but lost interest once it landed; the paper was too flimsy for satisfying mastication. I kept folding and sending them up, though; he liked the airplanes while they were still in the air.

The Mims asked if I was seeing a girl. She said she thought I was. She could tell. I asked how.

Showers, she mentioned. Also, a comb seemed to have been involved.

I told her yes.

“Oh, good.” She sighed. “I worried that things with Eli turning out the way they did may have … I wasn’t wary enough,” she said. “But I don’t want that to make you too suspicious.”

I had been too suspicious. Hector and I both. And for all our suspecting, we didn’t really know anything until we saw hard evidence. All our suspicions hadn’t protected us from the bad truth.

She told me then that she and Ben Orion had decided, more than once, that it didn’t make sense for them to get involved, but that it seemed they’d begun to anyway. She shrugged. Sometimes things didn’t make sense, she said, or at least the sense isn’t immediately apparent.

That same morning at dawn, I walked over to our old house. I’d been thinking of the Rabid Rabbits’ Pad. Since we’d moved, I hadn’t seen our house once, even from the outside. When I got there, I stood on the curb. It looked the same. Nothing had been painted or changed that I could tell. I considered creeping around to the back and just climbing up the rope ladder. Or waiting an hour, then knocking and asking the people who lived there if I could sit in my childhood tree house. But I had to get back to drive the Boops to school. I didn’t detect any motion through the windows. The people who lived there must have been asleep. Still, I could feel that the life in the house wasn’t ours anymore. It was like visiting a strange future; I knew all the walls but not the people. I stood there awhile and then went home.

I called Hector and woke him, even though it was three hours later in New York. He said he’d discovered something called rogue taxidermy that was like our mutants but made with real dead animals, patched together. There was a museum of it in Canada. One day, he said, we’d drive up to see it. “Inspiration,” he said. It was almost ten there, but he was just getting up, and I could hear him drawing on a joint and coughing.

Hector had turned out to be right, though. As the year wore on, the Mims didn’t seem so sad. She had a taut energy for work; she and Marge were busy in a happy, contained way that involved many lists. I didn’t think she pined for Eli anymore.

The only thing she still seemed sad about was me.

74 • A Hummingbird in the Yard

One ordinary afternoon in Neverland, Hershel told me they’d been receiving orders for our book, fifty a week, steadily, from indie comic-book buyers all over the country. “It’s word of mouth,” he said. “It’s been happening for eight, nine weeks, but I didn’t want to tell you, in case it was just a blip. But people respond to these
kids redistributing pets.” They had to reprint
Two Sleuths
. They would pay us fifteen hundred dollars! But it took a day and a half to get Hector to pick up his phone so I could tell him. He was glad, but not like I’d expected. He sounded really stoned. I felt a little superior to his new friends and a little inferior at the same time. Fifteen hundred dollars would have once made him swoon.

“We should write another,” I said.

“Maybe. But what about?”

“I’ll think of something,” I mumbled. He was doing a lot of drugs. He told me he ate junk food with his roommates for dinner. They slept through breakfast and lunch. He didn’t go to classes. He stayed in his room. I started to think I wasn’t meant for college. I felt old. When Ella and I went out, I paid for dinner. We got into the Aero for free.

I banked an extra hundred and fifty taking my dad’s online traffic school course, twice. “What did you do
before
when you got tickets?” I asked. He was watching the news as I ripped through the sections.

(Fact: In the fifties Japan outlawed hula hoops because the swinging hips proved to be too distracting for motorists.)

“Malc did them, but it’s better to keep it in the family. I’m not
proud
of getting tickets.”

One morning, our mow-and-blow gardener knocked on the door just as we were leaving for school. The Mims was already gone. The gardener had a hummingbird in his large palm and explained that he’d found him on the grass. I didn’t even know the gardener’s name. Boop Two ran back in the house. She googled hummingbirds and then tried to feed him water mixed with sugar from an eyedropper.

“Come on,” her sister shouted, her backpack hanging off one shoulder. “We’re gonna be late.”

Boop Two had the eyedropper in her hand and the phone against her ear. She was talking to a woman in Orange County
who kept forty injured hummingbirds in her kitchen, feeding them every twenty minutes. Boop Two wanted me to drive her with the bird to Orange County, but Boop One had to get to school. The hummingbird rehabilitator on the phone told us to put the bird in a strawberry box on a bush or somewhere off the ground. Its mother would find it, she said, or he’d learn to fly. His pinfeathers were already grown, Boop Two explained. Just as we were getting in the car, we saw him try to flap his wings and then leverage himself up into the air.

He learned to fly right then, while we were watching.

“Miles Adler-Hart, yeah, I know Miles Adler-Hart. Sure, I know where to find him. He’s right here.” Hershel had the phone to his ear behind the cash register.

He handed me the receiver on its sprongy cord. A professor from Princeton said he was teaching
Two Sleuths
. He wanted to invite me and Hector to come there and talk about it! He’d pay for our plane tickets! He seemed shocked to find out we were actually nineteen. I told him Hector was in college. “What about you?” he asked.

I found myself sounding like my dad. “I’m taking a gap year. Working here and at a revival movie theater.” I didn’t say about the doughnuts.

He offered to pay us each five hundred plus transportation. I said yes right away. He asked if I was considering Princeton. I said sure, but I didn’t know if Princeton was considering me. He said he’d make sure it did. I cleared the days with Hershel and the Aero and Krispy Kreme before I mentioned any of this to my folks. They didn’t know about
Two Sleuths
. Since soup selling, I didn’t like to tell them about my businesses. I wasn’t 100 percent sure I could get Hector to go. I thought it would take a delicate negotiation to get him out of his dorm room.