The Cake House (31 page)

I tripped, crashed the chair against the wall the same way Joey had. “Sorry,” I said, fixing the chair. “I’m so sorry. I have to go. Joey’s waiting. I’m sorry.”

I ran from the room.

Joey sat in her car, crying, her face twisted in grief: unflattering, ugly grief. I sat with her in the car and waited, with that French song ringing in my head and my heart rattling in my chest. Tears streaked down her cheeks, smeared with makeup. Twenty minutes passed before she stopped, sitting up to look at herself in the rearview mirror. She wiped at the mascara dripping from the corners of her eyes with her two thumbs, then took out her makeup from her bag, patting her face with powder, reapplying mascara.

No matter how much makeup Joey put on, I could see the same invisible scars as mine. It made me think of my mother and her diamonds and those sunglasses she used to wear.

In silence she drove me home, but before I got out of the car she asked, “See you at school?”

“Sure,” I said, and then she drove off.

I counted the days without Alex. A week passed and I began to get used to his absence. Most days, when I was home from school or on the weekends, it was just my mother and me alone in the house. Claude was gone more and more. In their room, I sat with my mother on her bed and took her sketchbook and one of her pencils. She held her breath as I first drew a circle in the center of the page. Then petals shooting out, uneven, crooked. It was about all I could draw. She watched, then picked up another pencil and started to draw along with me. A face, a pair of hands, and then a flower of her own. She drew a stem and leaves, providing a ground for it with grass growing. Then a road. With mountains. And a sun in the corner of the sky.

“I called one of my previous jobs, to see if they have anything. I thought you might like to know,” she said as she drew.

I drew a smiley face inside the sun, my way of telling her what I felt and thought.

“Have you told Claude?” I asked.

“Not yet, but I will.”

“Do you think he’ll be okay with it?”

She turned to a fresh page and started another garden but didn’t answer.

“I know Dad worked for Claude.” I kept my eyes on the page.

Her pencil faltered, and the line she was drawing went crooked.

“Can you tell me why he did?” I asked.

She got up to plump the pillows, scattering the pencils and forcing me to move so she could straighten the sheets and the comforter.

“You have to understand,” she said, still moving but turning her attention to the closet where Claude’s and her clothing clung to the hangers and huddled against the shoe tree, attacked the tie rack. “You have to understand what it was like.”

“I remember.”

She turned to me, holding a pair of Claude’s trousers upside down by a pant leg. “Do you?”

“Dad was always angry, yelling, or trying not to yell but still fighting. And he made you cry.”

I had forgotten how he yelled at her: “What are we supposed to do now? How are we going to pay for anything? I was counting on you. You let me down. You always let me down.”

“What was he like? Before, when you were married?” I asked her.

She was holding on to Claude’s trousers, her fingers like claws. We stood at opposite ends of the room. She returned her attention to the trousers.

“In school your father was this strange boy, all freckles and teeth. But well liked. Popular because his parents were wealthy. His father was a lawyer, very successful, and involved with local politics. He ran for state senate but lost.”

She lined the two pant legs together, the fabric held between her fingers while she clipped it to the hanger. She spoke to the clothes instead of to me.

“Why did you marry him?” I asked.

When she raised her head, her eyes were filled with little shards of memories. “It was the way he looked at me. I thought I could marry him because he loved me so much, and that would be enough. That would be all I needed. And I got pregnant.”

I hadn’t known that she had been pregnant with me before she married my father. “That’s why you married him? Because of me?”

She smiled. “Not only because of you, but yes, you were the main reason.”

“You could have had an abortion,” I said. How many of her problems would have disappeared if I had never existed? She could have been free. She could have had another life, a better life.

“I wanted you. My mother had died by then, and I had no one else except Robert. I had already decided to name you after my mother. I knew you’d be a girl.”

She walked to the dresser and picked up a pack of cigarettes, taking one out, but she had no match, no fire, so she just held on to the cigarette, looking at it as if it could finish the story for her. “We had no money. And his parents refused to help. He tried everything: real estate, all different kinds of sales positions and get-rich-quick programs, one scheme after another. He’d put all of himself into some venture.
You had to gamble, he said, to get the rewards. He’d lose any money we had, asked me to work to make up for it, so I worked. I could never keep a job for long, though. It was difficult when you were young and we couldn’t afford day care, and I didn’t want to leave you with him. I didn’t want to leave you at all.”

“You resented him.”

This startled her. “Maybe I did.” She played with the cigarette, turning it around and around. “He’d get so scared sometimes. When you were about two or three, he answered an ad in the newspaper for a job. That’s where he met Claude. They both worked for this company, something about oil fields in an Asian country. He became very involved. It took about four months before the person running the thing disappeared and the venture went under. We lost everything.”

“What did you do?”

“He stopped eating. He either slept all the time or he raged around the apartment. We had no money for food, not even for milk. I couldn’t work because I couldn’t leave you with him and there was no one else. I didn’t know what to do. So I called his parents. They never liked me, but I knew they’d take us in; I knew they’d want you. I put you in the car and we were going to go, but your father … he didn’t want us to leave.”

The memory of the ghost wielding his baseball bat and the way my mother’s car shook each time he swung it down onto the hood slammed back into existence. Her eyes were shadowed and brilliant with the force of memory.

“I wish you had gone. I wish we had left then.”

“It wasn’t all terrible. I got a job, and we had a little bit of money coming in. I thought things might get better,
but—” She stopped. Swallowed. Fingers to her lips, but she didn’t find a cigarette there. “He kept in touch with Claude. Claude asked Robert to help him with a new company he started. Robert would pose as one of Claude’s clients, and they’d work together to recruit new investments. Robert got very good at it.”

“I remember hearing his name. Claude this. Claude that,” I said. My mother nodded, but I wasn’t certain she heard me. She was in her own world, pacing around the room.

“Claude could be very charming, and kind,” she said. “With me, he never spoke as if his company was anything other than legitimate, pretending as if I didn’t know. Even now, he still does it, and sometimes I’m not sure if he’s aware that I know. He’d sit me down and say how he’d take care of me if anything ever happened to Robert. That he wouldn’t let anything happen to us. It was easy to believe him. I wanted to believe. But it would just make Robert angry.”

The room had darkened. I missed the music Alex used to play. I even missed Catherine Craig’s violin.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Robert worked with Claude, but it was never on the books,” she said. “This frustrated Robert. According to him, he ran that company—he was the one who knew all the moving parts; he was the one who made it work. Without him, it would fall apart. He wanted to escalate everything into a bigger enterprise. He had all these ideas of how to expand into further untapped wealth. Claude was too small-minded, but Robert could really make something big, if Claude would step aside, if he would just let Robert do it. He needed Claude’s capital. It terrified me. It sounded so insane. It could all vanish in a second, and I couldn’t go
through that again. I begged him to get out, threatened to leave him. I said I would take you and I would run away, and—”

I knew what had happened next. I knew now why she’d thrown our things into her car, had stolen me from the steps where I was hanging out with José and Sofie, demanding that I get in the car, wearing sunglasses to hide the bruises on her face.

Even though she had no fire and couldn’t light her cigarette, I thought I saw smoke drifting around her. It reminded me of the ghost, reaching out for her. “I’m glad you left him,” I said, and hoped the ghost would leave her alone.

She let go of a pent-up breath, then sat down on her bed, picking up the scattered pencils. She started drawing with long sweeps, rough shapes and energetic motion. “That day, that terrible day, I wanted us to go far away. I didn’t want you there anymore; I needed to get out, and at the time Claude seemed the best way to do that. But then your father showed up, and God—I thought he was going to kill us.” She kept drawing, fast, her hand going around and around. “And maybe he would have. I don’t know. Instead, he turned the gun on himself, and everything changed. Everything fell apart, and everything changed.”

I heard the gunshot. I saw the blood spreading on the carpet of the front room. I sat next to her and put my hand over her moving arm.

“We have to get out of here,” she said, still drawing. “Somehow.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” I said.

She wasn’t crying. Maybe she was beyond tears. I said nothing until the room grew dark.

THE NEXT NIGHT I SAW
a change happen in my mother. I watched her as I did my homework on the dining table after school. She stood on the threshold before the living room, contemplating Claude, who sat in the near darkness, having pulled the phone over to the sofa with his usual briefcase and files scattered around him. But he wasn’t calling anyone. Instead, he worried a paper clip with his fingers, bending it out of shape until it snapped.

She fiddled with the buttons of her blouse and called to Claude, but he ignored her. She said his name again, moving to stand in front of him. “I need to drive into Los Angeles tomorrow. For an interview,” she said.

“What?” he asked, then, “No, I told you, you can work for me. There’s plenty to do at the office if you don’t want to be here. I need you with me.”

“Claude, we discussed this.” She shook her head, lips pinched. “I told you how I felt. You agreed.”

He shuffled his papers. “Well, I changed my mind.”

She stood in the middle of the room, stunned. Or maybe not stunned, as her initial surprise melted away to terrible understanding.

“I’m going anyway,” she said.

“You’ll do as I say, and that’s the end of it,” he said.

Her nostrils flared. Claude shook his head, ran his hand through his hair.

“I won’t.”

He stormed from the room, leaving my mother and me to eat dinner alone, just the two of us. A few hours later he came home and apologized, said she could do whatever she wanted. My mother nodded but then turned away.

In the morning, Claude was there as usual, waiting to drive me to school, but I brought my bike from the garden to the front of the house.

“I don’t need a ride.”

“Rosie, wait,” he said, and force of habit made my feet stop pedaling. “What’s this about?”

“I want to ride my bike to school.” I didn’t say that I couldn’t bring myself to get into the Mercedes, not after the way he had yelled at my mother. He wasn’t the same Claude I’d feared and hated from when I first came to live at the Cake House. I didn’t hate him anymore, but he wasn’t the Claude who helped build my darkroom either.

“All right,” he said, as if he still needed to give his permission. “But be careful.”

I sped down the hill. My bike felt familiar in my hands, riding rough over curbs, skidding down unpaved hills, swishing through the morning fog with only a little bit of road revealed at a time. I climbed up a hill and saw the ghost swathed in fog. I rode down a hill and saw the ghost standing at the bottom, watching. My teeth clattered in my head. On straightaways I pumped my legs very fast.

Aaron stood in front of the bulletin board. I hadn’t seen him since the fight between Tom and Alex, and I wondered if he had even been in school at all or if this was his first day back. Since Alex had left, I hadn’t thought of Aaron or Tom.

I must have made a noise, because he turned and saw me watching.

“There’s no more room,” he said, and I realized he meant the bulletin board was now so crowded with prayers he had no space for the homemade card he held in his hands. I wondered if the card was from him or from Tom but didn’t ask.

“We can make room.”

Together we moved around the cards, the notes written on torn lined notebook paper, and the photographs of Tina and the others from the accident. In these photographs Tina was smiling or laughing, and I wished I had brought the few photos I had taken of her. Except that she was sad in those pictures. Maybe it was better that this wall held the happier moments of her life. We stole a couple of pushpins and stuck his card on the board.