The Interloper (14 page)

“I came here today,” I continued, “without Patty—without even telling Patty I was coming—because I wanted to talk about CJ, just the two of us. I know I never knew him, really, but as the newest member of this family, I feel as though I have gotten to know the CJ you all knew. His light is far from extinguished—it is reflected in all of you. I feel honored, I guess is how I’d put it, to participate, even peripherally, in the stewardship of his memory. When Patty and I have children of our own—”

Her eyes lit up at this, as they always did.

“Not yet. Soon. I want to be able to tell those kids about Uncle CJ, whose life was taken way too early.”

“I hope you’ll be able to do that, Owen.”

“I will.”

“Fate allowing.” She bowed her head prayerfully. “I don’t mean to imply it isn’t going to happen. On the contrary, I could wish for nothing more. But life doesn’t always turn out like you expect, or hope. Fate’s agenda is not always known to us.”

“You can say that again,” I said. I employ this phrase whenever I disagree with someone but want to imply enthusiastic agreement. All I have done is given the speaker permission to repeat their assertion. Despite the fact that I was about to unleash a string of careful untruths, I could not bear at that moment to hear myself talking about fate as if it were a real thing. Fate doesn’t exist in real life. Sure, sometimes we see people setting themselves up for a fall unawares, but is that fate? Coincidence isn’t fate. Character isn’t fate. Fate, real fate, old-school Fate, is for characters in books and movies, not real people.

“I’m not quite sure how to say this,” I continued, “but lately I’ve been feeling the presence—and let me know if this sounds
ridiculous—the presence of someone, as if someone is watching over me, too.”

“That’s not ridiculous, Owen.” She looked at me more clearly than she had ever looked at me before, with a yearning in her eyes. I became somewhat aroused by this yearning look of hers. I don’t mean physically aroused, per se, but aroused in such a way that, if you pictured the mind as a 1950s supercomputer, the panel of lights reading “nonspecific sexual thoughts” lit up and began blinking, which it had never done in Minerva’s presence before. The intensity of her gaze, the establishment of a newer, deeper connection between the two of us, our being alone in an empty house—all of these things conspired to set off my arousal mechanism for an instant, as when you see a woman struggling to push a shopping cart into the back of another shopping cart with her hips and you think to yourself “that is what she looks like when she is making love.” No Oedipal web of connections, just a man and an older woman, and the “sex lights” blinking on and off for a millisecond. I wondered if Minerva’s sex lights had lit up, too. I wondered if she’d ever thought of me in a sexual way, and this general wondering remained in my brain for some time. Minerva waited for me to continue—waited for me to validate her experience by repeating it back to her as my experience.

“Lately,” I said, “I’ve been feeling a presence in my life, signals here and there, sort of like your falling leaf, and I have wondered more than once whether it might be CJ. Is that crazy?”

“It’s not crazy at all.” She got up and fetched herself some tissues. She did not return to the seat across from me but remained standing instead. She too, then, had felt the intensity of the moment, and felt safer a bit farther away. She wiped her eyes
as she spoke, in that way women do, with the tip of her finger moving horizontally below the eye. (To keep mascara from running? Was she even wearing mascara?) “I’ve actually … you won’t believe this, Owen, but I’ve actually been waiting for this since the wedding. We’ve all—even Cal Senior—we’ve all accepted you into this family. You’ve become a member of our family, and I knew it was only a matter of time before CJ would throw his blessing into the ring.”

“It’s generous of him,” I said. “Especially considering I barely know him. I feel like there’s so much more to know, like there’s a whole room upstairs full of a life I’ve only begun to hear about.”

“I’d be happy to help you get to know CJ better,” she said. “I think it could be good for you and Patty, too, for you to know Patty better, by understanding who she lost.”

I knew then that Minerva would lead me directly to the reliquary.

“What kind of signs have you been experiencing?” she asked. I had not the slightest idea how to answer this question convincingly, but I took my first cue from Minerva’s own leaf-vision—a totally insignificant event, seemingly random and singular, imbued with significance for being random and singular.

“Please don’t tell Patty,” I said, stalling.

She nodded.

“I was sitting in the house a few weeks ago. And I heard a strange crashing sound, like dishes clanking in the dishwasher, followed by two thumps. Now, I couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from, in part because I wear earplugs while I work, but I first assumed that Asulcena had broken something again—she’s unreliable, I think—and so I didn’t leap up right away. Then
I realized she wasn’t even there that day, so I thought: oh, no, one of the cats. But the cats were in my office, sunning themselves on my reading chair. I got up to investigate.”

“What was it? Don’t tell me—a car accident?”

“No, nothing like that. I walked into the front room and saw that one of our windows had been broken. Part of it was shattered completely, but the other part had the clean round outline of a baseball. I ran out front …”

“No one out there?”

“Deserted.”

“Figures.”

“I have literally never seen our street so quiet during the day. I look, I listen. No one. I get back in the house, annoyed at having to clean up the mess and call the glass guy and so on. While I was waiting for the glass guy—he came and fixed the window before Patty got home—I realized that maybe I should look for the ball. I had swept up all the glass, but for some reason I hadn’t noticed the ball.”

I should point out that Patty’s stories of CJ’s boyhood often referred to his love for baseball, and that he had more than once put a baseball through a neighbor’s window. There was no reason for Minerva to know I’d heard those stories before.

“Because there was no ball?” she asked.

“Well, let’s just say I didn’t find it. I didn’t look all that carefully, figuring it had rolled under something and would turn up later. I wasn’t happy about the broken window interrupting my work, so I wasn’t in the most receptive mood. But after the guy had come to fix the window and everything, I went back to my desk, and something that had been bothering me for weeks,
a particularly thorny piece of documentation—no need to get technical here—all but solved itself, thanks to the broken window, I thought, and thanks to the ball. I decided I’d keep the ball as a memento of sorts. I went back out to find it, convinced I’d missed it before, and I tell you I turned the front half of the house upside down.”

“There was no ball?”

“There was no ball.” It took all my resolve to look Minerva in the eye and continue. “Just a sneaking suspicion, and I can’t explain this either, that CJ had been involved, had paid me a visit somehow, to help me solve my problem.”

“That sounds just like him,” she said. “Breaking your window to help you out. He works in mischievous ways. Did so even when he was alive. Let me show you something.” She indicated I should follow her upstairs.

I put down my empty cup, realizing only then that I’d been gripping it hard this whole time, and followed. Up the stairs, I first avoided, and then enjoyed, looking at her round and firm behind. My sex light panel did not light up. I noted the comeliness of her parts as a pleasant fact. The moment was not charged, as it had been earlier.

I knew where she was taking me. I knew what she was going to show me. Patty had mentioned it to me in passing once: CJ had a baseball collection, and it was still there, somewhere in his old room. He’d always been proud of his baseballs, signed and unsigned, old and new, and he’d held from an early age that such a collection was superior to a collection of statistical picture-cards that came with chewing gum, cards with no inherent value vis-à-vis the game of baseball. Patty cherished the collection
quietly, as one of the things that made CJ CJ, and made his death that much more of a senseless tragedy. The world hadn’t lost just another person, it had lost a CJ, and not only those who knew him, but the whole world (upon which he would have had some impact, had he lived) was the poorer for it.

Minerva led me directly to a window bench in CJ’s room. She pulled the cushion off and deposited it gently on the floor. The top of the bench opened up like a chest, and she flipped it up with the flair of a magician’s assistant. I could feel her eyes on the side of my head, scanning me for a reaction to what she’d revealed. To her, this scene was not about CJ’s collection but about my reaction. It was about my being touched mystically by CJ.

I should have been bowled over by the clear sign of contact from the other side, all of these baseballs representing positive identification—CJ had visited me. And, had I been any kind of actor whatsoever, I might have performed that particular subspecies of wonder. I did not, because I could not contain my equally wonder-filled but far more mundane amazement at the baseball collection itself.

“That,” I said, “is a lot of baseballs. Wow.”

“He loved his baseballs, yes. But don’t you see—”

Here my acting kicked in. To myself I felt very, very phony, but to Minerva—queen of apophenia, desperate for signs—I must have appeared convincing enough. I flashed my eyes wide in astonishment. “He loved his baseballs so much that they became his calling card. This is amazing. Confirmation that CJ was responsible.”

“That’s why I had to bring you up here, Owen. You realized only half of it. He was inviting you into the family.”

I kneeled down to get a closer look at the balls and to shield my face from view, worried that I might betray the feeling of triumph I was experiencing in the face of what should have been a more solemn moment. The chest was full of baseballs, old, new, torn apart, boxed, even some signed ones in plexi cases.

“May I?” I asked.

Minerva nodded. I reached in and pulled out a ball:
Property of Mira Costa Little League
. Another:
Property of YMCA
. Another:
LEWIS
(in marker). Another: No markings, very old ball. A great number of the miscellaneous balls appeared to have belonged to someone else before coming into CJ’s possession. I wondered if he’d stolen them.

“There’s more,” Minerva said. “Dig toward the bottom right. Be careful.”

“A lot of balls in here,” I said.

“Hold the door open,” she said.

I held it open and she kneeled next to me.

“Remember how I was saying he was mischievous?” She rummaged in the corner of the bench. “Well, there was a period there where he was
really
mischievous.” She retrieved a cardboard shoebox, an old Converse Chuck Taylor box, from the depths of the bench. Balls rolled down to fill the empty space. The box was labeled with a crudely drawn skull and crossbones and “CJs Stuff Keep Out.” Minerva gestured at me to close the bench and I did.

She set the box on top and pulled it open.

Inside was a lighter, a can of non-dairy creamer, a roll of caps, a deck of playing cards with nude women on them, a dozen shaved-down pennies (all flat across Lincoln’s head), and a lint-speckled
piece of fake vomit. Also: a lone baseball with a small X written on it, under which he had written “CJ Stocking 1196 Maple Ave.” Minerva retrieved a small spiral notepad from the bottom of the box.

“We weren’t too happy when we discovered this. Somehow he’d managed to keep this a secret, even as he grew older. I think he probably forgot. Otherwise he would have mentioned it.” She handed me the notepad. I opened it. The first page read:

She shook her head. “Keep going—it’s near the back.”

I flipped through more Mad Libs, drawings of cars and explosions, clouds and lightning bolts, band logos (a VH with wings, etc.).

“There, take a look at that.” It was a list of addresses:

I stared at the page for a moment.

“It took us some time to understand it. Took us a while even to find it. I was in here reminiscing and came across it and didn’t know what to think. Cal Senior figured it out finally. When he was a kid, CJ seemed to have the bad luck of putting baseballs through people’s windows. And he was always afraid to tell us he had done it, so we would find out only when the home’s owner, having read the address off the ball, came to our door during dinner, ball in hand, asking for money to fix the broken window. CJ would apologize and then—in front of the homeowner—work out some scheme to pay his father back as Cal Senior handed the man a few twenties, and then everyone would forget about it. Boys will be boys, right? Little did we know, CJ was keeping track. Still a bit of a mystery, really. We had a good laugh when we figured out what the list was. He was always up to something, that kid.”

“Yes,” I said. “Sounds like he was.”

“So,” she said. “There it is.”

I looked at her, puzzled.

“There’s the ball that came through your window. Should we enter your address into the book?”

I wrote our address into the book.

We put the ball away with the notebook in its box, cleared a space for it in the bottom of the bench, and laid it to rest in the corner, under a heap of baseballs eager to return to their original positions.

Minerva replaced the pillow on the seat and motioned for me to sit next to her. “I wouldn’t have believed it either,” she said. “But things like this have happened so many times.”

I took in the room now, bookshelves first. There I saw senior year high school books—unread copies of
Lord Jim, Jude the Obscure
, tattered copies of
The Art of War
and
The Prince
. Yearbooks, high school and junior high. A small blank-spined black book—his journal?!—I longed to open and examine. A few photographs on the desk, family stuff, and a picture of him with a soccer ball, from some team he’d played on in his mid-teens. Posters on the walls: surf and music. Bed with matching dresser, desk, and mirror—a cream-colored lacquer bedroom set, circa mid-1980s. Baseball bat next to the bed (the only obvious sign of baseball in the room).