The Cake House (3 page)

Deputy Mike didn’t comment. He tapped the paperwork he’d laid out. “The minor’s legal guardian will have to sign.
Then she’s free to go. I should warn you, I’ve notified Child Services.”

My mother wiped her face and walked over, taking the pen. With stained cheeks, she scribbled her name. “Thank you,” she said, but wouldn’t look at Deputy Mike, wouldn’t look at me either.

“Put some clothes on,” said Claude, back in command mode, handing me the shopping bag my mother carried. “And then wait in the car.”

I crushed the bag in my hands, moving to the marked bathroom off to the side. My mother had brought my “I’m a Pepper” T-shirt and an old pair of shorts. They’d forgotten to bring shoes.

Outside, someone had taken the bike from Deputy Mike’s car and left it leaning against the building. Barefoot, I rode circles around Claude’s car.

WE DROVE HOME IN CLAUDE
’
S
big steel-gray Mercedes, the hushed radio filling in the gaps between my mother’s tear-filled sighs. Claude had jammed the bike into the backseat with me. A wheel spun in my face and a pedal pressed into my lap.

That first night, Claude’s house had seemed mysterious and dark and strange, but in the full force of daylight I could see that it was just a big, lumbering house on steroids, painted a color fashionable people would call “salmon” or “coral” but I called pink. It looked older than its neighbors, a little superior, like a queen bee, sitting in perfect confectionery stillness. The other houses seemed to inch away, like it was a giant, unwanted cake.

Claude’s house was the biggest house on the block. It
might have been nice a few short years ago, but it had been built without thought or planning and with cheap materials. This was to be my prison, this monstrous pink dessert.

Alex waited on the steps with his head resting on one palm, looking a little bored. He stood when the rest of us exited the car. I had forgotten how tall he was.

Claude took the bike from the backseat and handed it to me. It felt heavy and unwieldy in my hands. I still wore Deputy Mike’s jacket over my “I’m a Pepper” T-shirt.

“You must be tired,” I heard Claude say to my mother.

She didn’t answer but grabbed my arm, her fingers digging into my flesh. “You don’t leave that closet for weeks and then you run away?”

Claude made her let go, placing his two hands on both her upper arms. She swerved away from his touch.

“Maybe I am tired,” she said, pinching the bridge of her nose as I tried to interpret the blush on her face. I didn’t think it was entirely anger at me.

Alex wrested the bike from my clinging grasp, the coldness in his pale eyes making me flinch. He kicked the kickstand back on the bike. I couldn’t tell whom he was mad at, whether he was mad at all.

Claude turned as he walked my mother toward the front door, a look passing between father and son that I didn’t understand except to see that Alex’s mouth tightened.

“Come on,” said Alex to me, wheeling the bike behind my mother and Claude. His voice was nothing like how he looked. Not cold or hard but warm, melted honey dripping off a spoon.

I took a couple of steps but then stopped and stared at the front door, the courage I had gained during my escape draining away. I did not want to walk into that front room
where my father had died. The ghost would be in there. Alex waited, his previous annoyance gone and replaced with a quiet attention. He walked the bike back to my side, and I saw in his face that he understood my fear. With a tilt of his head, he indicated the side gate leading to the garden. “This way,” he said.

I decided the garden should be safe and free of ghosts and followed Alex. The sun beat down on the top of my head. My bare feet slapped against the brick-lined path, past the peonies and the daylilies.

The back of the house was as pink as the front. Alex parked his bike against the side where I had found it. He picked up a rag and began cleaning the wheels and the frame.

“Thanks for the food,” I said, but then wondered if I’d dreamt that he had brought a tray of food. Maybe it hadn’t been real.

He squinted and shrugged, returning his attention to the bike. I played with the zipper on Deputy Mike’s jacket, sweating because the day was warm, but I didn’t want to take it off yet. The jacket reminded me of my bike ride, of that freedom, and of Deputy Mike himself, who had been so kind. Instead, I bunched up the sleeves as high as I could, the excess fabric making it difficult to put my arms down.

I wandered off to the fountain and placed my hands on the brick barrier, turning them so that my fingers pointed back and I could feel the strain on my wrists. I leaned over, my weight on my arms like a seesaw, getting as close as I could to the water without touching.

Alex came up beside me and took a handful of water and flicked it at my face. I screeched with a sharp inhale
of breath, and there was a furious fight as I splashed him back, squinting my eyes shut and laughing, until he caught my arms and made me stop.

Under the sun, I was breathless—from the cool water, from his nearness. He let go and we subsided back into awkward silence. Besides that first night when he had held me against his chest, this was the longest we had been in each other’s presence.

I sat down on the damp, mossy stone, and Alex brought his bike closer to the fountain, picked up the discarded rag, and started cleaning again. I thought it was weird that he was cleaning his bike. It had clearly never been cleaned before. Nervous in the awkward silence, I began to hum.

Alex looked up. “Do you like music?” he asked, wiping at the handlebars. “Can you sing?”

“Not really,” I said, but regretted it when he fell silent. It was the first time he’d ever asked me a direct question. I tried again. “There’s a song I know, that my mother used to sing for me.”

He flashed a smile full of white teeth. “Let’s hear it.”

The fountain appeared bottomless, full of tangled water plants. “Are there fishes in there?” I searched for the gleam of fish scales. I dipped my fingers in the water, causing ripples. It felt silky.

“Yes, but after all our noise and splashing they’ll never show themselves. They like to hide,” he said, sitting next to me.

Smart fishes. I looked at him. “Do you like my mother?”

“Not particularly.”

“And I don’t like your father,” I said, wanting to hear his voice again. “What do you think about them getting married?”

He shook his head. With his long fingers, he picked up a stick from the ground and stripped it clean of bark. He was older than me, maybe sixteen, I wasn’t sure. Thin, narrow face, narrow shoulders, he was unlike his father. I could pick apart his features: those that came from Claude, and those that came from elsewhere, like his eyes with their cool distance. But when he smiled he resembled Claude: a kind of charm with easy confidence. When he smiled, I thought I would do anything he asked.

Then I sang for him. I sang my mother’s favorite lullaby. A French song, about a little bird caught stealing. She said her mother used to sing it to her. She said it used to make her laugh.

My song changed the way he looked at me, more like the way José sometimes had, but with Alex it made me feel dizzy, like I could fall backward, arms spread wide, to splash into the fountain and willfully drown. “Sing it again,” he asked.

I did, holding on to the edge of the fountain.

He made me nervous, so I stared at the puffy clouds in the dark-blue sky until I finished. He could be patient and kind, but then his gaze would shutter and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“Were you worried about me this morning?” I wanted to tease him, wanted to flirt. To do something with my useless hands, I mounted his bike again, riding around the fountain.

He studied me as I wobbled, and I wished I hadn’t asked anything or spoken, feeling foolish and young and ugly. He shrugged, dismissive. “You want me to say yes. I think you like to cause trouble.”

“Don’t you?” I countered, balancing on my tiptoes until I nearly fell, holding on to his bike as if it was the same thing as holding on to him. “Where’s your mom?”

As soon as I asked the question, Alex changed. It wasn’t a big change. He didn’t shout or get angry and say it wasn’t any of my business. He did nothing except continue to watch my haphazard progress on his bike.

“I don’t have one,” he said. “And no, I don’t like to cause trouble.” He tossed the stick he’d stripped bare out over the garden. It twirled in the wind and disappeared into the tall grass. “It doesn’t get you anywhere.”

He walked away, aloof once again. I started after him, but my foot caught on one of the pedals, scraping my skin. The bike crashed to the ground, falling at my feet with the handlebars twisted. By the time I disentangled myself, Alex was already pushing the sliding glass doors open, pausing only long enough to toss the dirty rag onto a pile of other dirty rags by the doors.

The scratches on my shin stung. When I looked down to study them, a second pair of feet appeared next to mine.

The ghost stood in the bright sunshine. I had been wrong to think that he couldn’t appear in daylight, wouldn’t appear in the garden. He was pale, solid, yet removed. He wasn’t like those ghosts shown in movies or TV shows, see-through and made of mist. I had nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. This close, I could see the left side of his face, its pale, freckled skin marred by the black circle of charred flesh. He was wearing the same clothes he died in, his favorite sweatshirt with the front pocket and paint stains, his jeans, and his loafers with the holes in them. It was as if he’d climbed out of the water of the fountain to surprise me.

“There’s my girl,” he said.

He stared down at the twisted bicycle, which lay before us like a corpse.

“I remember when you were born. You were such a strange baby. You didn’t cry when you first came out of your mother. The nurses were freaked out by your silence. So quiet, not a peep, but you opened your eyes immediately and looked at me and at the faces of the doctors and nurses with your bright eyes that always made everyone nervous. You had eyes like two black holes, easy to get sucked into. They said there was no way you could see yet, but they were wrong. You could see everything. So quiet and only a few hours old, you knew everything in the world. It scared me.”

I took a step back, nearly overcome by an instinct to run. But he was my father. And his words grabbed hold and kept me planted to the ground. When he lived, he had talked all the time, to my mother about his work, or they had argued about money, but he had never spoken like the ghost did, with such calm, quiet determination. He turned his head, as if to examine the dead bike from a different angle.

“I felt guilty,” he continued, as if he weren’t speaking to me. As if I were the one who didn’t exist. “Frightened of my own kid. I mean, you fucking scared the shit out of me. Your mom was sick when you were born, so it was just me taking care of you, and I sometimes left you in your crib, let you lie there. I’d look down at your fists balled up and struggling, all of you wiggling and angry, and your eyes wide-open and black. And so goddamned
silent.
I didn’t want to hold you.”

My face felt warm, and it hurt to breathe. Of all the things I had expected the ghost to say, it wasn’t that he
feared me. My father loved me. I tried to remember what he had been like alive, but the ghost was all I could see.

“I thought maybe that was why you never cried, because you were mad at me. You didn’t make a sound, not until your mom got better and was able to hold you. Maybe you were waiting for her. And then, God, you were loud. After all that silence, your crying was so goddamned loud. I thought you would shatter windows.”

Even as a ghost he had blue eyes. Now they were tinged with blood. The ghost stretched out its hand, but I stepped back, swallowing a cry of fright.

“We were happy once,” he said, oblivious to my fear. “Before Claude took everything from me. We were happy, your mom and me. She loved me. Didn’t she?”

So uncertain, my heart broke.

“Dad,” I said, forcing sound through my throat.

“Don’t trust Claude. He lies,” he said, in that too-familiar voice.

Then he was gone.

The first time I heard Claude’s name was in the living room of our apartment. My mother had answered the phone when it rang, listened for a moment, then turned to my father. “It’s a Claude Fisk for you.”

My father had taken the phone and gone into their bedroom for privacy. He didn’t come out for hours, but when he did, he went to my mother and took her into his arms, excited, laughing. From then on, my father began and ended his day with Claude’s name. In the morning, he would say to my mother, “I’m going to meet Claude later.” And then again, in the evening, “Claude said it was a good idea to start now. I think he’s right.”

Through most of this my mother’s expression was one of pale worry and concern that occasionally gave way to a burst of fear. “But how do you know?” she asked. “How do you know this isn’t a mistake?”

They argued over Claude. I went into my room and tried to read with a pillow over my head. Then later, he talked
animatedly to my mother, following her around the apartment. “We can trust Claude for this,” he said. “This is our chance.”

The ghost said not to trust Claude; my father had said we could trust him. Proof, I thought, that they were opposite. But the ghost had my father’s eyes. And he had my father’s voice.

After the ghost vanished into empty air, I stayed standing in the middle of the garden until the sun burned the top of my head and my legs shook. I walked through the sliding glass doors, up the stairs, and into the room that would be my room.

The mess shocked me. I had forgotten the garbage bag left in the center, gutted and torn in my mad dash from the room, left like a dead animal with its side torn open, spilling innards of sleeves, shorts, and pant legs. The trail of books and magazines, shoes, old dolls, and stuffed animals exploded out of the closet. I hopped from one clear island of carpet to the next.