God is an Astronaut (19 page)

Whatever the reason—as soon as I said it, I could have kicked myself. I’ve never given a shit what people called me. I didn’t hang on to my name because I was hewing to any lofty second-wave feminist principle. I just never got around to going to the DMV; I was never in the mood for waiting in line. It’s only really been since the accident that I’ve started correcting people. The elementary school secretary. The reporters who called after the story broke. I actually stayed on the line to correct one or two of them.
Frobisher. Frobisher. Frobisher. Are you familiar with Google? Do you need me to spell it for you?
I’ve become the worst kind of pedant—which was always Liam’s specialty, not mine.

But he didn’t seem offended. “Ah,” he said. “A woman after my own heart. I wouldn’t allow any of my wives to take my name. ‘Get your own,’ I said.” He bent down, picked up my ergonomic shovel, and inspected it. “Besides, you never know when you might have to change it back. And then there will be all that bureaucratic nonsense and—” He waved his hand dismissively. “It is all very tiresome. When it comes to marriage, most people are very . . . What is the correct word? Unrealistic. It is better to be prepared.”

It was impossible to tell, Arthur, whether he was bullshitting me or not. “That’s a great philosophy,” I said. “I bet all your wives really loved it.”

“They understood. Some of them sooner than others.” Lacroix flicked a piece of dirt from the sleeve of his sweater. “They were smart women,” he said. “And beautiful.” He sighed with a touch of what I assumed was nostalgia. “And tough. They would be doing what you are doing, I believe.”

I looked down at the mud slicks on my blue jeans. “And what is that, exactly?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. He stared down at me with those faded and faintly menacing blue eyes and smiled at me again. “How would you like to tell me?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. One quick scramble, and I was up and out of my rut. “Will you excuse me for a minute?”

I had to hunt for Liam. I found him in the bedroom, his phone against his ear. He jumped a little when he saw me. I made my
hang up
gesture at him—a thumb-and-pinkie receiver followed by a throat slash.

“Can I call you back?” he said. He hung up and took in the continent-size sweat stains on my T-shirt. “That’s a good look for you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Lacroix’s here.”

“What?” Liam said. He actually put the phone down—all the way down—on the nightstand and detached his hand. “As in
here
here? That’s not possible.”

“OK,” I said. “But he’s standing in the backyard right now.”

Liam got up off the bed and walked toward the balcony window, but I reached out and slapped the curtain flat to the glass. “Don’t. He’ll see us looking.”

He did what I said. He stepped back and picked up the phone, running his thumb back and forth across the screen. The harried look he’d been wearing was gone, replaced by an expression of alert concentration. You could practically hear the gears turning. “I’m going to call Tristan,” he said. “You know what this is, don’t you? Him showing up early like this? It’s a power play. I’d bet you anything. He’s trying to throw us off. He thinks it’s going to give him the upper hand.”

“Well, mission accomplished.” Against my own advice, I peeled back the edge of the curtain and peered down into the backyard. “You guys picked a real doozy, Li. Have you talked to him? I think he might actually be crazy.”

Out on the lawn, Lacroix had taken out his phone and was pacing carefully around the greenhouse trench, holding it out in front of him, filming things: the eaves of the house, the purple-prose lilac trees, Liam’s shed, Corinne’s abandoned Barbie doll moldering in its ball gown in the grass, like a corpse. Then he turned his laser-like attention to the roses. I remember wishing that you were there to see it, Arthur. He had bent down and was fingering the petals, turning all the buds this way and that to inspect them. No one looks at flowers like that unless they’re doing some kind of scientific study on them, or searching for signs of blight. I should know. All of these details in and of themselves were nothing, but it occurred to me that, captured together on his tiny screen, they might add up to something else, like tiny troubling clues. I said, “Did you hear me?”

But Liam already had his phone back up to his ear. He shook his head at me.

“I know, I know,” he was saying. “That’s what Legal will say, but he’s not there, is he? He’s standing in the middle of my backyard right now. What am I supposed to do? Chase the guy off with a baseball bat?” He opened the closet and jerked a dress shirt off its hanger. “I don’t want to be caught on camera telling him to piss off, whatever the reason. It’ll look hostile, or like we’ve got something to hide.” He rolled his eyes at me. “You know what I think— Listen. I think we should show him that two can play this— Fine, fine, fine. I can’t have a heart-to-heart about this right now, Tris. Call Jeff and put him in the loop. I have to go deal with this guy.”

He hung up the phone, walked over to the mirror, and began buttoning up his shirt. He was staring at his reflection, but clearly not seeing a thing. It was the exact same expression of rapt concentration he wears when he’s working, when he’s staring at a computer screen, watching a simulation unfold, working his way through a chain of cause and effect. There are moments when I’m afraid, Arthur, that there’s some part of him that thrives on this. The crisis, I mean.

When he finished, he turned to me. “Are you coming?”

An image of Lacroix’s smile flashed in front of me. “I think I’m going to shower.”

“All right.” Liam turned to the door. “I have no idea what his plans are, but I told Tristan we’d welcome him with open arms. Kill him with kindness. Resort to any and all clichés that will be required. We may need dinner tonight. Can you take care of that?”

“Sure thing,” I said. To his already-disappearing back.

That’s all I have time for now, but more later.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2014 4:58 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: life on the movie set

It’s been . . . interesting. Theo’s wife, Elle, came up yesterday. She appeared promptly at 2:00 p.m. at the Livonia office, thus proving that at least one Lacroix knows how to stick to an itinerary. The woman is clearly Theo’s better half. Or at least his younger one. That picture I sent you was taken more recently than I thought—she can’t possibly be much older than thirty. She arrived in a camper, tailed by two friends in a van—Nigerian guys, I think. Amidst all the chaos, no one bothered to introduce us, but I did manage to catch their names: Abah and Ikenna (sp?). They both had musical accents and a Protestant work ethic like you’ve never seen before. They spent the better part of this morning doing nonstop laps up and down the driveway, transferring the contents of the van into our house. Floodlights filled with intricate filaments. Clamps and stands and sound equipment. Stacks of duct tape. Miles of extension cords. At least three MacBooks. A thirty-six-inch monitor. Those were just the things I could identify. They worked well past lunchtime, and then they declined the deli sandwiches Liam offered them, choosing instead to sit on the hood of the van and smoke and confer with one another and study the house with carefully neutral expressions.

As far as Elle goes, well . . . She dresses in tastefully faded T-shirts and cargo pants and some kind of designer track shoes, but it doesn’t matter. She still looks like Rapunzel, right down to the spun-gold braid and the periwinkle eyes. Corinne’s head over heels for her, and so are most of the Spaceco swains. We had gotten the house back to ourselves, but Elle’s been here for just a few hours and they’re back en masse. (What is the proper plural for nerds anyway? A gaggle? A flock? A herd?) Even the barely divorced Tristan showed up on our doorstep, claiming that he wanted to “just check things out.”

“Right,” I said. “Things.” But I stepped out of the doorway and let him inside. “Last I saw her, she was out in the back,” I said. “Why are you even ringing the doorbell? Nobody else bothers to.”

“Atta girl, Jess,” he said. He picked up Corinne, gave her his best suave look, and hoisted her expertly up into the air while she practically swooned. Six years old, and even she’s susceptible to his charms.

I have to go now. More exciting updates to come.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Friday, June 27, 2014 7:18 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: snooping, sleuthing

Arthur,

Today officially ends day four of the Tour de Lacroix. So far, not much to report. Elle and Lacroix seem to be following a pretty grueling schedule, which goes more or less like this: Leave a little after seven with Liam. Arrive at the Spaceco office before eight. Spend the day filming, asking a slew of questions, taking notes, and hashing out the details of the upcoming launch. Come back to the camper parked in our driveway sometime after nine. Hole up there for a few hours. Lights out around twelve. All that sweeping and dusting and bee-spraying and screen-repairing, and so far they haven’t done much more than duck in through the front door, sling a coil of extension cord over their shoulder, and then duck back out.

Lacroix acts as though we’ve never had a conversation. He just hurries past me on the porch, loaded down with a camera on one of his shoulders—or sometimes one on each—and gives me a perfunctory, professional nod.

I did catch him at something once, just once. I’m not exactly sure what it was. I had terrible insomnia on Wednesday night, and sometime around one in the morning, I decided to get up and write you. I was coming downstairs when a noise made me freeze on the landing. I looked over the railing, and there was Lacroix, standing in the living room. He was standing in front of our defunct fireplace and studying our collection of family photographs. It’s a pretty meager display compared to what most people have nowadays, mostly school portraits of Jack and Corinne. There’s just one photograph of Liam and me, the one snapshot we got from our wedding. It’s not terribly flattering. In it, I’m wearing a pair of blue jeans, and my ridiculously long hair is blowing in the wind. I have on this crown of flowers, the only bride-like detail I insisted on. We both look a little drunk, although we’re not. We’re stone-cold sober.

That was the picture that seemed to have caught his eye. As I stood there watching him, he picked it up off the mantel and held it up to a stray beam of light, turning it from side to side as though he was trying to commit the details to memory.

When I cleared my throat, he jumped.

“Looking for something?” I said.

“No, no.” He picked up a laptop from the chair next to him and waved it at me. “Just picking up the computer. I was going to get some editing done.” It was too dark to make out his face, to see if he looked embarrassed at being caught in the middle of his flagrant snooping. All I could see was the shrug of his shoulders. “To burn a little of the midnight oil. You know how it is.”

“I’m not sure I do,” I said. Or started to, but something stopped me. Suddenly I remembered that I had left my shorts upstairs—all I had on was on a T-shirt that barely covered me. It was so dark that I doubted he could see me, but I took a step back from the railing anyway. “Lock the door behind you, please,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. I could see him waving his hand as he pushed open the screen. “Good night, Jessica.”

I’m not wrong in finding that whole scene a bit creepy, am I, Arthur? Gone was the elaborate e-mail to you that I had been composing in my head for the past hour. (My sleepless epiphanies about possible greenhouse flooring. You should count yourself lucky.) Instead I turned around and snuck back upstairs. I was hoping to crawl back into bed next to Liam, like I’d never left, but I could tell as soon as I opened the door, by the sound of his breathing, that he was awake.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“It’s Lacroix,” I said. “He was down there in the dark, staring at our pictures. When I caught him, he claimed he was coming in for his computer. Didn’t you lock the door?”