The Family Fang: A Novel (18 page)

“Let’s get out of here,” Camille said.

“Where?” Caleb asked, still worried about the police officer.

“Let’s go to the mall.”

“Why?”

“It’s free,” Camille said.

A
t the mall, Christmas season in full swing, shoppers on all sides of them, the Fangs were endlessly fascinated by their surroundings. Sunlight from the skylit ceilings mixed with the buzzing fluorescents and made everything seem clean and expensive. Tinsel and pine needles and cottony snow hung in places that you could see but could not touch. Piped-in Muzak, Christmas standards, found you even in the restrooms. The mall was labyrinthine, exquisitely constructed and impossible to leave.

The Fangs rode the escalator up and then down, over and over, the baby overjoyed at rising and apprehensive about descending. A receipt, two feet long when unfurled, sat on top of a trash can and Caleb and Camille read through the items as though they were directions to a wonderful, previously unheard-of location. They watched a woman, loaded down with packages as if she was a store unto herself, purchase an Orange Julius and then immediately set it down on a bench in order to readjust her belongings. Properly aligned, she then walked away without retrieving her drink. Caleb picked it up, took a few tentative sips, and then passed it over to Camille. “Mmm,” she said, smiling, “orangey.” An item in their hands, they now felt a part of the community, no longer sightseers but active participants in the goings-on. They strolled through the mall without their initial naïveté and, long after the drink was finished, they continued to hold on to the cup, passing it back and forth like a torch.

They found a line that stretched out from a snowy village in the middle of the mall, its own brand of Christmas music, more digital, higher-pitched, emanating from the area. “What’s this?” Camille asked the last person in line, a burly, scowling man in custody of two small children. “Santa Claus,” he said and then turned his back on them. Caleb looked at the line, kinked and unmoving, and then whistled. “All this to see Santa Claus?” he asked. One of the man’s children turned to them and said, “You tell him what you want and then he’ll give it to you.” Camille and Caleb nodded. They understood how it worked. “And then you get a picture with him,” the other child said.

“Is it free?” Camille asked.

“What do you think?” the man snorted.

“I guess it’s not free,” Caleb said.

“No harm in meeting Santa Claus,” Camille replied. In her family’s house, there was a reproduction of a Thomas Nast illustration of Santa Claus, corpulent and red-faced and awkwardly gripping a doll that Camille had mistaken for a real child. Despite her parents’ explanations, she could never see Santa Claus as anything other than a drunk man who kidnapped children. Later, she began to think of Santa Claus as a true artist, crafting elegant toys in his remote studio, fucking elves when he got bored, uninterested in making a profit. “We’ll let Annie meet her first folkloric character. She can ask him for some nice things.”

“She can’t talk,” Caleb said, wary of tradition.

“I know what she wants,” Camille said. “I’ll translate for Santa.”

Now a part of the line, they waited patiently for their turn. Annie happily played with the straw from the Orange Julius drink as they edged closer to Santa Land; stuffed reindeer, heads bowed, apparently eating snow; overflowing bags of toys; and the bellowing, disembodied “Ho, ho, ho” of the store Santa, still unseen from their vantage point, which never failed to startle the Fangs. Caleb found himself uttering sounds in groups of three, “Har, har, har,” and “Hee, hee, hee,” and “Hey, hey, hey,” and “How, how, how,” until Camille shushed him.

Finally rewarded for their patience, the Fangs stepped beyond the velvet rope that separated the chosen from the not-yet-chosen and followed a bored teenage elf up the stairs to Santa’s chair. “Ho, ho, ho,” Santa shouted, seemingly genuinely pleased with his station in life. Caleb hung back with the elf while Camille knelt beside Santa and carefully placed Annie in his lap. “Now what does this pretty little—” and before he could finish his sentence, Annie unleashed a shrill, glass-shattering wail that seemed conjured by the dark arts, the image of the tiny baby and the sound emanating from her so incongruous that Caleb at first seemed unaware that his own child was the source of the chaos that enveloped Santa Land.

“Good Lord,” Santa shouted, his leg spasming as if trying to shake the baby off his person. Camille was shocked by the seismic shift in emotion that crossed Annie’s face, her mouth open so wide it seemed possible that a horde of demons might fly out. She knew she should take the child into her arms and comfort her but she did not move from her position on the floor, a small part of her unwilling to come into contact with the baby until she was sure that Annie was not going to burst into flames.

The elf behind the camera, five minutes from a cigarette break, calmly stared through the viewfinder and prepared to take a photograph of the historic meeting. Caleb looked over at the scene, Santa’s face a rictus of terror, the baby nearly purple with rage, another elf covering his ears with his hands, and Camille, puzzled, confused, as if listening to a foreign language in which she could discern elements of her own native tongue. Down the entire length of the waiting line, as if Annie’s fit was a kind of wildfire, other children began to scream and shake. A few parents had to drag their possessed children away, giving up their places, which caused the children to scream even more. The people who remained in line looked at Caleb and Camille and Annie as if they had personally ruined Christmas for all time. It was, Caleb realized, amazing. “Hurry up and take the photo,” Caleb said to the bored elf and there was a flash of bulbs, the click of the captured image, and Caleb quickly ran toward Santa, plucked the child out of the terrified old man’s lap, and hugged his daughter, feeling the radiating warmth of her unhappiness now happily in his possession. Annie, her eyes red-rimmed, her lips quivering, aftershocks of the disaster, began to calm almost immediately. Camille finally joined the two of them, Santa Land temporarily shut down, grinding to a halt, not a single person in the twisting line wanting to step forward. “It’s okay,” Caleb whispered to Annie, “you did great.”

“I want that photo,” Caleb said, turning to the elf.

“Five bucks,” the elf replied.

“We don’t have any money,” Caleb said, shocked by the realization.

“Well, we don’t barter.”

“Let’s just leave, Caleb,” Camille said.

“I need that picture,” Caleb answered. “I’ll come back tomorrow and pay you.”

“I won’t be here tomorrow,” the elf said. “Thank god.”

“Please,” Camille said, everyone staring at them, Santa Claus shaking uncontrollably, his head in his hands.

Caleb felt the spark of inspiration and quickly handed the baby to Camille. “Five minutes,” he said. “I’ll have your money.”

He left his wife and child and sprinted to the Glass Hut, the discarded receipt from earlier in the afternoon flapping in his hands as he ran. When he reached the entrance, he slowed, adjusted his demeanor, and slipped unnoticed into the store. He walked down the first aisle, his eyes searching the shelves filled with glass knickknacks. Finally, he came to a row of statues, two fish, green and orange, leaping out of the cold-blue sea. On the itemized receipt, he’d read:
Green and Orange Fish Statue: $14.99
.

Statue in hand, he walked to the register and placed the item on the counter. “Oh, wonderful choice,” the woman said. “Actually,” Caleb interjected, “I’m returning this. My wife bought it earlier, along with several other items, and we realized that this particular piece didn’t fit with the décor of the intended recipient. We’d like a refund.” He produced the receipt and pointed to the price of the statue. “It is a lovely piece, though,” he added, his open palm waiting for the money.

The elf paid, Caleb carefully opened the commemorative photo frame and stared at his daughter’s bottomless well of a mouth, her eyes pinched shut, the sound of her screams seeming to blur the space around her body. It was beautiful. It was chaotic and shocking and reverberated long after the Fangs had left Santa Land. It was, Caleb realized, talking so quickly that Camille almost couldn’t understand him, art.

“I
t’s perfect,” Caleb explained, Camille growing more and more interested as she allowed herself to consider the proposal. They sat in the food court and scribbled on napkins, Annie bouncing happily on Camille’s knee, the incident seemingly forgotten.

“The wedding project failed because we were dealing with people accustomed to marriage and then we went right ahead and got married.”

“We should have decided not to get married at the last second,” Camille offered.

“Right, something that would surprise them, create a disorienting effect that we could harness. There was so much wasted potential.”

“And there weren’t enough people to create the kind of event that we’re talking about in a little wedding chapel.”

“Malls are perfect. Aside from college campuses and sporting events, where do you find this many people? And a mall has the most diverse makeup. You have a bunch of people, hypnotized by all this material consumption, stuck inside a big maze of a building that throws off their equilibrium.”

“This could be good,” Camille said.

“We need the Super 8 camera though,” Caleb said. He then pointed to the photo on the table. “We have to capture not just the initial moment but the resulting fallout and the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree effect of the event.”

“But who’s to say that she’ll do it again?” Camille posited. She paused for a few moments, considering the ramifications of what they were discussing, and then said, “And who’s to say that we should make her do it again?”

“What?”

“Caleb, we placed our child in a situation that turned her into an earthquake.”

Caleb stared at Camille as if waiting for her to finish her argument. Stunned that she had to continue, she said, as patiently as she possibly could, “She was terrified of Santa Claus. And we were the ones who put her in the fat man’s lap. That seems like the makings of a long-term psychological problem.”

“Do you know how resilient kids are? When my cousin Jeffrey was three, he was chased by a pack of wild dogs and ended up falling into a well and was stuck there for three days. Now he sells vinyl siding. He’s got a wife and kids. I doubt he even remembers it happened.”

“She’s just a baby,” Camille said.

“She’s an artist, just like us; she just doesn’t know it yet.”

“She’s a baby, Caleb.”

“She’s a Fang,” he replied. “That supersedes everything else.”

They both looked at Annie, who was watching them, smiling, a beautiful, glowing, movie star of a baby. Though the Fangs could not be sure, Annie seemed to be saying, “Count me in.”

“There’s another mall fifteen miles away,” Caleb said. He produced the nine dollars and change and put it on the table. “And another mall about an hour from there.”

Camille paused. She loved art, even if she wasn’t always sure what it was. She loved her husband. She loved her baby. Was it so strange to put all of these things together and see what would happen? Hobart had said that kids kill art, but what did he know? They would prove him wrong. Kids could make art. Their kid was capable of making the most amazing art.

“Okay,” she said.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” Caleb said, squeezing one of her hands so hard it tingled when he released his grip on her.

T
hey stood, a family, and walked out of the mall, into the sunlight, seeking to rearrange the shape of their surroundings, to blow something up and watch all the tiny pieces resettle around them like falling snow.

Chapter Eight

B
uster sat in the barber’s chair, staring at a list of haircut styles that he had never heard of, while the barber waited impatiently, scissors at the ready. “I have no idea what these are,” Buster said, looking at the sign that held words like
brush cut, burr, high and tight, D.A., dipped mushroom, teddy boy,
and
flattop boogie
. “Tell me what you want,” the barber said, “and I’ll make that happen to your head.”

“Short, I guess,” he replied. “Not too short though.”

“Son,” the barber, nearly seventy years old, replied, “everything is short, that’s all I do. What kind of short?”

“Not too short,” Buster said, the smell of bay rum making him dizzy.

“Okay, tell me who you want to look like,” the barber then said.

“He wants to look like an intelligent man of considerable wealth,” his sister, sitting in the waiting area, offered.

The barber spun the chair thirty degrees and began to work. “You’re getting the
Ivy League,
” he said.

“I like the sound of that,” Buster said.

“You like football?” the barber asked.

“I don’t dislike it,” Buster responded, “but I don’t keep up with it.”

“Well then, if you don’t mind,” the man with the scissors said, “I’ll just cut the hair and we’ll dispense with the conversation.”

Less than fifteen minutes later, Buster looked like an Ivy League graduate. He smoothed his hand from the top of his head to the base of his neck, the way the hair tapered to almost nothing.

“You look good,” Annie offered.

“Handsome man,” the barber said.

After the fifteen-dollar transaction, Buster and Annie made to leave, but the barber gestured toward Annie and asked, “You want your hair cut, too?”

Annie touched her shoulder-length hair, looked at Buster, who actually did feel confident and composed with his new look, and shrugged. “What do you suggest?” she asked.

“You got a nice face, soft features,” he said. “I’ll crop it, make you look like Jean Seberg in
Breathless
.”

“I like the sound of that,” Annie said, and sat down in the chair.

Buster watched the way the barber’s hands moved quickly over his sister’s head, pulling his fingers through her hair, the scissors snipping in a precise rhythm, never stopping, no desire to take stock of the situation. Buster admired the skill, loved any action that seemed to be purely muscle memory, disconnected from the brain, which was something he could hardly fathom. His brain always interrupted the actions of his body, interjecting questions and concerns. For instance, right now, his neck itching, watching his sister’s hair pile up on the floor, he could not help but ask himself, “How the hell are we going to find Mom and Dad, and why the hell are we wasting time getting our hair cut?”

The haircuts had been Annie’s idea, yet another way in which they were capable people. If they looked the part, Annie reasoned, they would act accordingly. “It’s acting, Buster,” she said. “You dress the part and pretty soon, you are that person.”

“What person?” Buster had asked.

“The person who solves mysteries and doesn’t fuck things up,” she replied.

T
he last few days had left him wondering if perhaps it would be better if his parents really were dead, the certainty of grief, as opposed to the inescapable suspicion, fueled by his sister, that his parents were engaged in something that Buster could no longer bring himself to call
art
.

The police had been no help. The day after their parents had disappeared, Buster and Annie drove to see the sheriff in Jefferson County. The sheriff, a man in his mid-fifties, handsome and weathered, like a cop on TV, led them into his office and spoke in a calm, practiced tone that Buster believed had been perfected over years of relaying bad news to people predisposed to wild acts of grief. “Now, I know this seems like a small outfit, but we do good work. We’re good cops and we’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he told the Fang children. Buster nodded, felt happy to be around someone who seemed in charge of things, but Annie was not satisfied. “Our parents have done this to themselves, Sheriff,” she insisted, leaning so far out of her chair that she seemed in danger of falling over. “I tried to explain this to one of your officers, but this is all a big hoax.” Buster watched the sheriff’s neck muscles tense then go slack, gathering patience, and he addressed Buster and Annie, choosing to focus his gaze on Annie. “I know about your parents,” he said. “We investigate, you know, so we’ve read about your parents’ little art things.”

“So you can see how something like this disappearance fits in with what they’ve been doing their whole lives,” Annie said.

“Ma’am, I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. Not everything is about art. You did not see the crime scene. You did not see the amount of blood next to the van.”

“Fake blood,” Annie interrupted. “Oldest trick in the book.”

“Real blood,” the sheriff responded, clearly delighted to have real forensic evidence to prove Annie wrong. “Human blood. B positive. Same as your father.” He rested his elbows on his desk and collected his thoughts. “I understand that this is a unique event, but I fear that you’re not allowing yourself to accept the possibility that this was not orchestrated by your parents. I think you’re afraid to admit that this might be something more dangerous than a little art thing.”

Buster felt the sheriff’s patience wearing thin and Buster tried to show that he understood, that he was not a difficult person to deal with. “I read somewhere that denial is the first stage of grieving,” he said.

“Goddamn, Buster,” Annie hissed, turning on him, but the sheriff interjected, “Well, I don’t think you need to be grieving just yet. I’m just saying that you need to let us pursue this case as if a crime was committed, that your parents are in some form of danger.”

“They are hiding somewhere, laughing themselves silly, reading newspaper articles about their possible murder investigation. They’re going to wait until you say they are dead and then they’re going to show up and act like they were resurrected.”

“Okay, fine, ma’am. Let’s just pursue your theory. In the state of Tennessee, if there is no body, a person isn’t pronounced legally dead until seven years after the event. That’s a long time to wait, don’t you think?”

“You don’t know Caleb and Camille Fang,” Annie said, but Buster could see the first instance of doubt on Annie’s face.

“Second, where would your parents be hiding? We’re tracking their credit cards. If they rent a hotel room or buy food or purchase gasoline, we’ll know about it. How are they going to live without money for seven years?”

“I don’t know,” Annie said. She seemed struck dumb by confusion, her mind racing to solve the puzzle of their parents’ disappearance, and immediately Buster felt that he had betrayed his sister by aligning himself with the sheriff. “They’ll pay cash,” Buster offered.

The sheriff waved him off. “And, ma’am? If your parents did decide to just disappear without a trace, as long as no crime was committed, then I really have no reason to track them down. Are you suggesting you’d prefer I stop expending any police resources to find them?”

“This is so damn stupid,” Annie said.

The sheriff paused, looked at Buster and Annie with what seemed like genuine empathy, and then he said, “Let me just ask you this. I understand that you two have been living with your parents?”

“Yes,” Buster cut in, “we’ve been temporarily living with Mom and Dad.”

“How long ago did you move back in with your parents?” the sheriff asked.

“Three or four weeks,” Annie said.

“So,” the sheriff continued, “you two move back into your parents’ house and then, a few weeks later, they disappear without telling you?”

“Okay,” Buster said.

“Maybe,” the sheriff said, “and this is just one of many theories, but maybe they didn’t want you two back at home, felt like they’d lost their privacy, and so they ran away without telling you. Maybe they aren’t waiting seven years to be declared legally dead. Maybe they’re just waiting until you two move back to wherever you came from, and then they’ll come home. Maybe that’s what’s happened.”

Buster looked at Annie, thought she might start crying, but she showed no emotion. “Don’t cry, Annie,” Buster thought. They needed to be strong. The sheriff was wrong. Their parents were not dead. They were not trying to avoid Buster and Annie. They had devised a cunning and beautiful artistic statement about disappearing. They had done what they always did, made art out of confusion and strangeness. And then Buster realized he was crying. He touched his face and felt the tears that he was seemingly producing without effort. Goddamn, he was bawling, and both Annie and the sheriff were now staring at him.

“Buster?” Annie said, touching his shoulder, pulling him closer to her.

“Oh, Lord, son, I didn’t mean any of what I said. I’m sorry. I don’t think any of that is true. Your parents did not run away because of you. They were probably assaulted and then . . . well, son, I didn’t mean any of that. I was just thinking out loud.”

“C’mon, Buster,” Annie said, helping Buster to his feet. “Thank you, Sheriff,” Annie continued, pushing Buster out the door of the office. As Buster, still crying, not able to stop, walked past the officers and secretaries, he felt that his outburst of emotion was not strange at all, that this was probably what they had been expecting when Buster and Annie first walked into the sheriff’s office to discuss their parents’ violent disappearance. This was what grief looked like, Buster realized. So he kept crying, soft hiccups interspersed with low moans, all the way to the parking lot, in the car, all the way back home.

“O
kay,” Annie said, having returned from the barber, another step in reclaiming what was theirs, “let’s brainstorm.” She held a pen in one hand, a legal pad on the kitchen table. She kept absentmindedly raising her hand to her newly cropped hair before stopping short and wincing.

Buster wanted so badly to take a nap. He felt the strain of being a capable person, even if that only meant getting a haircut and reading articles about his missing parents that had begun to pop up on the Internet, was more than he could handle. Annie, however, seemed energized, her anger at her parents bringing her a superhuman level of clarity.

“We need to make a list of suspects,” Annie said. Buster did not understand. “Someone is helping our parents disappear,” Annie said. “If they planned on disappearing for seven years without any money, then they needed help from someone. And if we can figure out who that person is, we can find Caleb and Camille.” Buster nodded and began to think of people who might be helping their parents, people who had taken over the roles Annie and Buster had once played. But even when their careers were at their highest point, their kind of art and their decision to operate here in Tennessee had always kept them on the edge of the art world. Caleb had been orphaned when he was eighteen, his parents killed by a head-on collision with a garbage truck, leaving him the only remaining Fang, and Camille’s family had disowned her when she married Caleb. During his entire childhood, he could not remember a single person coming over to the house for dinner or to play cards or to help the Fangs with their art. No one was allowed inside the house, his parents having an almost agoraphobic need to barricade themselves from the outside world. Caleb and Camille had Buster and Annie and made it clear that they needed no one else. So Buster and Annie struggled with the brainstorming, Buster wishing he had his own pen to hold just so he felt more involved in the process, and then the doorbell rang.

When Buster opened the front door of his parents’ house, he found Suzanne Crosby standing on the porch with a garden salad and a tray of lasagna. “Is this a bad time?” she asked. “No,” Buster said, accepting the food, before he frowned and made some effort to clarify his previous statement. “It is a bad time,” Buster said, “but you should still come in.” Suzanne answered, “I can’t stay long anyway,” and then walked inside.

Buster wondered how long it had been since a non-Fang had entered the house. Months? Years? He had the initial desire to tell Suzanne about the momentousness of the event, and then realized how creepy it would sound and so he resisted the urge. He led Suzanne into the kitchen, where Annie was still staring at the paper, the pen held in such a way that she seemed ready to stab someone with it.

Buster stood in front of Suzanne, blocking her from Annie’s view, and presented the food to his sister. “Did you order food, Buster? What the hell? We’re supposed to be brainstorming,” Annie said. “No,” Buster said, “Suzanne brought them for us.” He stepped aside and Suzanne waved at Annie, embarrassed. “I just wanted to say that I was sorry to hear about your parents,” Suzanne said, referring, Buster assumed, to the news stories, especially online, that had begun popping up, “and so I thought I’d bring you guys some food. I didn’t mean to impose.” Buster looked at his sister, pleading, and Annie looked at Suzanne for the first time and her posture relaxed. “I’m sorry, Suzanne,” Annie said. “We’re still trying to deal with all this. Thank you for the food.”