The Cake House (2 page)

“Here,” Alex finally said, nudging the door open and stuffing the bedding through. “At least take the pillow and blanket.”

After he left, I struggled out of my shoes, out of my jeans, and lay on the pillow in just my shirt. Hours passed. The light that bled through the cracks around the closet doors changed from gray to a bright white that cut through the darkness and sliced across my limbs.

Two voices entered. “She’s still in the closet,” one said.

“Well, leave her there until Dahlia can talk to her.”

I took a quick peek. Alex and Claude had brought the garbage bags full of stuff from my other life and left them in a pile in the center of the room.

Claude walked toward my hiding spot. “How are you doing?” he asked, and I shrank back into the corner. “Are you hungry?” He turned to Alex without waiting for an answer. “Maybe you should bring up some food.”

Alex brought a tray of food and left it outside the closet, but I wasn’t hungry. At one point, when it was dark again, I stumbled out to find a bathroom but returned as soon as I could to the safety of the closet, dragging one of the garbage bags in with me.

The heat made me drowsy, and I dreamt of our apartment. I dreamt of José and Sofie, of hanging out with them at the mall after school, where sometimes José would buy us each a scoop of ice cream. I closed my eyes and dreamt of my father coming home from work, banging the door open and kicking it closed because his hands and arms were full with his briefcase and folders and papers.
There’s my girl,
he said, and placed a kiss on my forehead. I told him I was
hungry, and we went out for a burger, just the two of us, before my mother came home from the temp job she had at a lawyer’s office downtown.

I dreamt of my mother finding me and saying,
Okay, it’s time. Let’s go. Let’s go home,
and we would leave and maybe things could go back to the way they used to be. Or, if we left, would the ghost come with us? Would that become our new normal, my mother, the ghost, and me, in our old apartment?

“Rosaura,” called my mother, and I opened my eyes. She stood in the open door of the closet wearing an unfamiliar blue dress. From the smell of cigarette smoke on her breath, I knew she was real and not a dream.

“Is it time?” I asked. “Are we leaving?”

“Don’t you think this has gone on long enough?” she asked. “You’re not even dressed. When was the last time you took a shower?”

Claude appeared behind her and placed an arm around her shoulders. A diamond on her finger caught the light. It glittered as she brought her hand up to her lips, searching for a cigarette that wasn’t there.

She caught me staring and hid her hand in the folds of her dress. “You have to understand,” she said, her eyes shifting to Claude, then to anywhere but me. “I have to think of our future,” she said in a monotone, almost as if reciting lines. “And after”—she compressed her lips—“after what happened, with your father …”

I started laughing. It was funny because I had thought we might be leaving, but now we could never leave. My laughter disturbed her. She didn’t know what to do.

“Rosaura, please,” she said.

Behind her, the ghost appeared, hovering between
Claude and my mother like a minister at church, his arms spread wide. I shut the door in their faces. My mother tried to speak to me through the wood, but Claude insisted that she leave.

The silent weight of the house pressed in from all sides. I ripped off my shirt and stripped down to my skin, burrowing like a rat into my nest of clothing, blankets, and the pillow. I remained in this nest, breathing in the stink of my own sweat, sleeping and waking and sleeping again until I lost all track of time, waking to pitch darkness with my heart racing.

My father’s ghost sat at the other end of the closet, facing me. I could see his glinting eyes, and his hair that flopped over his forehead the same way it did in life. But the bullet wound hadn’t existed in life. The black stain of blood running down his cheek, down into his collar, was new.

I didn’t wait. I pushed my way out of the closet, and when I tripped and fell to my knees, I crawled until I could stumble out of the room, down the stairs, down to the first floor, and pushed the sliding glass doors open.

Outside, a boy’s bike had been left to lean against the side of the house. Black and scuffed with mud, the bike was too big for me—my toes barely touched the ground; the seat dug into my naked crotch. But still I managed to ride away, gritting my teeth with each bump over the sidewalk until I learned to stand up on the pedals.

The night was vast and open. I reached the sidewalk. Then the street. With gathering speed, I rode down the hill. I couldn’t fly, but I could feel the wind and I could breathe. The chill of night lingered, but it swept the horror of the ghost away, swept out the heat and stifled fright of the
house. Giddy for the first time in days, I sped around a corner, hair tangling in my eyes.

NAKED AND CHILLED
,
I RODE
the bike through the empty streets of Canyon Country. These streets were different from the ones in my old crowded neighborhood full of families and music thumping at all times, kids frolicking in apartment pools, and me and José sitting on the steps of our building, his arm around my shoulder, his other hand resting on my leg. I used to giggle at him; I used to laugh.

In Canyon Country, the streets were empty and the sidewalks had trees planted in each neat square patch of dirt. The houses I passed were painted in tasteful colors that I imagined had names like Baby Turtle Bottoms or Sunshine Sally’s Toes. Some had boats or large trucks parked in their driveways.

I rode, not caring how naked I was, how bizarre it must seem, or in what direction I went. Commuters watched with creased foreheads and open mouths, but it just made me laugh more: A car braked to a sharp halt; a pedestrian pointed as I rode past. Up hills, down hills. I discovered a park full of early-morning joggers and people walking their dogs; a tai chi class, another kid on his bike delivering papers. They stopped and stared.

A police car coasted on my left side, then drove around to block my panting climb up a hill. One cop, backlit by the dawning sun. Tall, dressed in a tan shirt that blended with his skin and his eyes: all over light and dark brown, like a chocolate chip cookie. I remembered him: Deputy Mike Nuñez. His badge flashed.

I imagined what I must look like, my skin red from the
chill, my hair a wild, mangled mess. A naked girl on a boy’s bike, panting, lost.

“Has someone hurt you?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, even though sometimes everything hurt.

He stepped closer, and I wondered if I should be afraid. The older kids in my apartment complex had all hated cops. They called them
puerco
and said I could never trust them.

Deputy Mike went to his trunk and got out a puffy, collared jacket to put around my shoulders. It covered me down to the middle of my thighs. I pulled it closed and zipped it up.

“All right, get in.” He opened the car door.

“My bike,” I said, swallowing around my dry throat. I gripped the handlebars.

“It can come with us.”

“I’m not sure I remember where I live,” I said. It was the truth; in my mad dash from the house, I hadn’t paid any attention to the street names; I didn’t remember being told the telephone number; I wasn’t even sure I knew Claude’s last name, although I should. It must have been told to me at one point. He was my stepfather now, I realized, and the memory made me want to sink down to the ground and pull Deputy Mike’s jacket over my head.

“I know where you live. But first, I have to take you in,” he said, putting the bike in the backseat like a prisoner. He waited until I climbed into the passenger side, and then he shut the door behind me.

This excited me. Being arrested was better than returning to live with Claude.

Deputy Mike adjusted his rearview mirror and said, “Buckle up.” He didn’t smile, but he paused to stare at me
with his brown gaze. Then he put the car in gear and we drove away.

DEPUTY MIKE HAD A BLACK
-
AND
-
WHITE
photograph of himself taped to the corner of the glove compartment. In the photo he was much younger, with a small boy sitting on his lap. It was the kind of photograph one got from a booth. The little boy wasn’t smiling.

He picked up his radio and said something in his strange cop language full of numbers and codes, and told the person on the other end to contact Claude Fisk and ask for Dahlia Douglas. He said Claude’s name like he knew him.

Without making a sound, I rolled the name “Fisk” around in my mouth. Fisk. Fisk. Fisk.

“It’s Dahlia Fisk now,” I said, speaking more to the window than to Deputy Mike, but he heard me, glancing from the road, then back again. He finished with the radio and hung the receiver on its peg.

“Your mother married him?”

I chose not to answer, listening instead to the chatter of the police radio, the disembodied voice of a woman directing officers here and there. Twice Deputy Mike picked up the radio to answer. They were looking for a missing persons report. There wouldn’t be one, and I told Deputy Mike that. There was no reason for anyone to have missed me.

The sheriff’s station was a squat building, low to the ground and built with flat bricks the same color as Deputy Mike’s shirt. Even the leaves on the trees outside were beige, dried out, crumpling dusty to the ground.

The reception area had a bulletin board covered in “Wanted” posters of men and women with hollowed eyes,
sneers twisting their mouths. There was one of a woman with wild hair, a scar splitting one half of her face. Her name was Audra Rose. Did she steal? Did she commit murder? I imagined she was one half of me. I could be part Audra Rose, split myself down the middle.

Claude’s picture should be up there. I should take a pen and draw him in, his flat blue eyes fitting next to all the dead expressions of the other criminals, as guilty as any murderer.

Deputy Mike led me through a set of doors into a bigger room with desks and chairs. There were fans blowing air along with the air conditioner. After the cloistered heat of the closet, the frigid room made it feel like the arctic. He pointed to a chair next to a desk. “Wait here,” he said, and left me alone.

The seat was uncomfortable, so I wandered around the room, curious as to what kind of criminals Canyon Country might boast; were they like José’s brothers with their tattoos and colored bandannas wrapped around their upper arms and foreheads? Uniformed men and women came and went. Someone got me a cup of hot coffee. It was bitter but I sipped it for warmth. The clock in the center of the wall clicked each second that passed, like a vicious, even-toned cricket. A calendar pinned to a board had been turned to July. I stared at it for a long time, confused, wondering what day it was, how many days I had been living in the closet.

Deputy Mike came back. He sat in a chair opposite mine and indicated I should do the same. “Do you want anything from the machines?”

“Am I under arrest?” The seat was cold against my naked thighs.

He half smiled, and I wondered if he ever smiled fully. “Not today,” he said. “But there will be some consequences.
An investigation. What you did isn’t normal, do you understand?”

I nodded. I regretted it now, even though the freedom, the wind on my bare skin, had felt so delicious, so wonderful. To exist for even a short time outside the walls of that house that felt like my prison.

“Your father died,” he said. “It’s okay to be a little messed up.”

I knew he said that to explain my aberrant behavior, but it made me feel ashamed. I hadn’t thought of my father while I was on the bike. I thought only of the ghost and of being free.

He shuffled papers on his desk until his phone rang. “All right,” he said into the phone before hanging up. “Your parents are here. They’re waiting outside.”

I was tied to the chair, not wanting to stay and not wanting to go. Perhaps Deputy Mike sensed my hesitation, because he leaned forward and started to raise his hand to touch my face before dropping it. It felt intimate, sitting across from him wearing nothing but his jacket, my bare feet against the cold floor.

“Tell me,” he said.

I wanted to tell him about my mother running away on a hot summer afternoon. That we had driven fast but my father was still able to follow and had arrived at Claude’s house just minutes after us. And now we lived with Claude and his son, Alex. I tried to tell him that I could barely stand to be in the same house as Claude and that was why I hid in the closet. I wanted to tell him about my father’s ghost and the wound that took over one side of his face.

“Are you scared?” he asked.

It wasn’t right to say his eyes were brown. They had
green flecks in them, and the outside of the irises had a ring of yellow. “He’s not my father,” I said. It was the simplest explanation I could think of.

He nodded. “Does he hurt you?”

I wanted to say yes, Claude had hurt me more than any person ever had, but it was like I had lost my voice, like my throat didn’t work, and I couldn’t.

“It’ll be all right,” he said. “Believe me.”

I wanted to. I wanted to take his words and hold them like a prayer against my heart.

He led me from the room into the reception area. My mother was there with Claude next to her, tall and blustery with his too-wide smile like a salesman in a commercial:
Buy my car, just nine ninety-nine down.
But he wasn’t smiling now. My mother rushed forward, carrying a shopping bag.

“What happened to her?” Claude’s voice boomed as he rested a big hand on my head, examining me in a perfect likeness of a concerned parent.

“That’s our question,” said Deputy Mike, all his gentleness gone.

Claude puffed up like a sail in the wind, but Deputy Mike ignored him and placed paperwork on the counter with a pen on top. “Your daughter was found at six fifteen this morning, unclothed, riding her bicycle down Lone Mountain Drive.”

Tense silence followed. My mother closed her eyes.

“She’s not mine,” said Claude. At Deputy Mike’s continued stare, Claude tilted his head. “But you knew that already. We hadn’t realized she was gone.”