The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel (16 page)

“What’re you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood,” he said. It was two o’clock in the morning. Behind him, a lone tangle of lights blinked anemically beside a felled plastic deer. “This place,” he said, turning his headlamp off, “is insane.”

Anders wasn’t sure what to say, and as he stood there, Charlie waltzed past him into the condo.

After he’d been expelled from school, Preston had made a habit of disappearing in the middle of the night to God knows where, then strolling in a day or two later with his clothes rumpled and the fervent belief that he owed no one an explanation. Helene had seen the whole thing as a stage he would grow out of and shrugged it off the same way she shrugged off all the vagaries of that age, all the Saturdays he spent sleeping until two and the laundry glued with semen and the cubic feet of food he consumed. “He’s pushing us,” she said. “Don’t give him the pleasure of your outrage.” But after his third reappearance, as Anders watched his son root around in the fridge without having said hello—an openly hostile act—sniffing the milk and showing theatrical disappointment in the leftovers, he couldn’t help but take the bait.

The scream-a-thon that followed—about the cost of food and housing and tuition for an unrefunded semester at St. Paul’s; about the beautiful things this family had given Preston and the minuscule bit of respect it asked in return; about the basic tenets of responsibility and fairness and decency that, when ignored so flagrantly, gave the boy the ugly stench of entitlement—was all straight from the moral-high-ground handbook, and therefore it was easy for his son to smile, thank him, and sit down at the table with his five containers of leftovers.

Fairness, it seemed, was a ridiculous thing to plead for with children, considering they had no say about coming into the world or about the rules they had to follow—and, in the case of Preston, no choice about virtually any of the institutions his parents continually reminded him he should be grateful for attending. Therefore, in the calculus of parent-offspring responsibility, he owed them nothing, while they, like it or not, owed him everything. This was a logic Anders himself had used on his own father, and so, after watching his son devour the very same tray of wild-rice casserole he had proclaimed to his mother’s face the week before was “inedible,” he decided to get personal. He told his son that he was making an ass of himself with his long greasy hair and all his naked desperation to seem cool and transgressive, because someone who truly had the character to run away, who had even half the courage needed to spurn everything and disappear, would never come home for leftovers.

Preston had planted his fork vertically in the square of casserole and walked out the front door.

“Here,” said Charlie now, holding up the Klee book with its faded cover. “It’s overdue. I figure this shit’s getting expensive.”

“Are you running away?” Anders asked. Charlie sprawled on the sofa. On his wrist, he was still wearing the sad pink bangle of a hospital bracelet.

“I’m taking some time.”

“Do your parents know?”

Charlie looked at him.

“Dude, if you’re going to call them, I can just get out of here.”

“I’d really like to avoid doing that,” said Anders. “Believe me. That’s pretty much the last thing in the world I want to do right now.” He was feeling the scotch; he had finished half of the bottle.

“I need a favor,” said Charlie.

“I can’t let you stay here,” said Anders, plopping down on a chair. “I’d love to, since your parents annoy the shit out of me. But they’d probably have me arrested.”

“It’s not me that needs to stay,” he said and he unzipped his pack.

Charlie’s turtle had been wrapped in a pillowcase and carted over in the top compartment of his backpack. He pulled it out—a high, domed shell, the turtle shut in tight—and held it in his palm like a stone.

“You brought over a turtle?”

“You remember Relic.”

“Why did you bring over a turtle?”

“Because he’s basically my best friend in the world. And I need someone to watch him for me.”

Anders shook his head. “Are you serious?”

“He’s a kind old man,” said Charlie. “Here, hold him.”

Charlie put the creature in his hand, and Anders held it by its smooth undershell. It was still and surprisingly light. “You sure he’s in there?”

“Give him a second.”

Sure enough, soon the bottom of his shell hinged open and a small, bald head peeked out. He had the half-squint and glassy eyes of a stoner, but when he emerged completely and looked up at Anders, he held his gaze.

“Look at that,” said Charlie. “He likes you.”

“Look, your parents will take care of your turtle.”

“My
parents,
” said Charlie, suddenly angry, “won’t even feed him. They think he smells, but that’s only because they don’t clean his tank. Yelena’s supposed to do it but she’s scared of him, calls him
el reptil,
so now they think he’s too much work. They won’t say it to me, but I know they’re going to give him away. My
parents,
” said Charlie again, “are assholes.”

Anders looked at him a moment and the situation was suddenly clear.

“You’re not planning on coming back, are you?”

Charlie glanced over his shoulder, as if someone might be watching.

“Probably not.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have a plan, okay?”

“To Seattle? To your sister?”

Charlie didn’t answer.

“Sorry,” said Anders. “Lucky guess.”

When Preston had stormed out, Anders followed his son out the door and across town to an unmaintained ranch house marked by a wet pile of newspapers and a wall of evergreen bushes that had gotten out of hand. The house, it turned out, belonged to Davis Lestrade, a cast member from an iconic mid-eighties sitcom who now taught middle-school drama in town. Never mind how he ended up teaching a generation of students who took winky pleasure in the badness of his show or that his only friends seemed to be adolescents who were the same age he was at the height of his career, because according to Preston, he and Davis Lestrade were “good friends.” Lestrade wore a high-necked heavy sweater that obscured his belly and a ring on each pinkie. He wasn’t particularly surprised to see Anders, though he never seemed to be particularly surprised about anything ever; his default mode was the droll sophistication of a Tennessee Williams heroine.

“Oh, Preston,” Lestrade called into the house, as if in lament, “the authorities have found you.” Lestrade held a spherical lowball glass that tinkled with a giant ice cube and had a black cigarette tucked behind his ear. He looked up. “I can’t remember,” he said with a wince. “Are you The Dad?” Anders pushed by him and into the house.

Down the hall, three teenagers were lounging on a sofa in a haze of cigarette smoke, watching a black-and-white Italian movie with English subtitles. Inside, the house was pristine, with ornate chaises and love seats upholstered in burgundy and lots of beaded lampshades and large potted plants, all of which combined to create the feeling of a high-end bordello. The kids smoked casually and drank from their own lowballs casually and generally mimicked the air of sophisticated boredom their mentor had modeled for them. Preston was slumped in a beanbag chair, drinkless and smokeless but like everyone else absorbed in the gray flicker on the screen. Anders stood behind him, waiting for his son to turn. Finally, he put a hand on his shoulder.

“Go away,” said Preston.

“Shh,” said someone behind him.

Anders crouched down so he could speak into his son’s ear.

“I’m your father,” he whispered. “You can’t keep leaving like this. It’s not fair to us.”

“Can you guys go in the other
room?
”

“Once you’re eighteen you can do what you want, but until then you live by my rules, do you understand me?” Anders said. When his son didn’t respond, he stood up. “Do you understand me?”

“Okay,” said Lestrade from the back of the room. “Either leave or sit down and enjoy the film like everyone else.”

“Excuse me?” said Anders.

“It’s Antonioni,” said Lestrade, stepping toward him in his argyle socks. “And it’s a masterpiece. I think you’d like it.”

Anders looked at Lestrade’s smile, saw his confidence and his protectiveness of his little disciples of culture. He looked down at his boy and his ridiculous hair and his ill-fitting cords with the wale worn clean off the front, saw his posture—he was so clearly in distress, so clearly confused and isolated and angry for reasons no one understood—and eased himself down to the floor, where he sat, cross-legged, for the rest of the movie.

And the film
was
good. He had seen it in college and it had held up. When it was over, he thanked Lestrade for his hospitality and let himself out. The next day he reported the whole thing to the superintendent of schools; Lestrade was dismissed before Christmas.

He never admitted it to Preston or even thought much about it, at least not until his son turned eighteen and disappeared completely. This one, it turned out, was not a drill. No one at Boston University, where Preston was at school, seemed to know anything. His roommate, who could barely look up from the macho soap opera of professional wrestling, could only shrug and claim that that hippie would never talk to him. So after a night in which his fits of shut-eye amounted to less than an hour of sleep, he got in the Thing and drove to Lestrade’s. It was a Saturday, and he had heard the guy was still around, pulling espresso shots in a grimy green apron and offering children’s acting lessons on Craigslist. The place was a wreck. The grass hadn’t been cut all summer and had withered into mats of brown. A hole had been punched through the cheap front door and plugged with a hand towel. When Lestrade finally answered, in a kimono robe and with a thatch of light-socketed bedhead, he was shockingly frail, half his former size, his round face shrunken and bruised half-moons under his eyes. He leaned on a cane, waiting for Anders to speak. “I need your help,” Anders said eventually.

Lestrade swore that he knew nothing, and something in the way Lestrade had paused to consider the situation displayed concern for the boy, who he had heard was gone and who he knew had a penchant for idiotic decisions. “Well, who
would
know?” Anders said, and Lestrade, who had every reason to hate him, who had every reason to wish this terror and so much more on him, yawned in his feline way and told him he’d look into it.

Why exactly the man had helped him after everything was a matter he couldn’t explain except to think he was genuinely concerned, except to admit that maybe Lestrade actually was one of his son’s good friends. Lestrade called him that afternoon and told him his son was driving around the country following a band. “It’s a thing for some kids,” he said. “A subculture. The music is
dreadful,
but if you find the band, you’ll find your son.” Anders tried to figure out how to thank him but everything he came up with seemed slight or silly, especially in light of the man’s health, and by the time Lestrade showed up in a
Times
obituary, Preston had resurfaced and the whole episode had the distant, ludicrous quality of a dream.

The photo the
Times
had printed was a headshot of Lestrade from his healthier days. Anders had seen it on the train, the picture staring at him from the back of a newspaper the man across from him was reading, and he asked to borrow the paper. The writer called him a “cult-sitcom favorite” and cited his career as an educator and a mentor (though nothing of how it had ended), filling the obituary with glowing quotes from former students about his compassion and his faith in them, about his empowering belief in their abilities. Reading it, Anders finally understood the reason his son had run across town to this peculiar man’s home. Lestrade may have been frozen in the psychological landscape of adolescence, but he had made himself available to the emotional lives of young people—a simple thing—and it suddenly broke Anders’s heart that his son had needed to go and look for that elsewhere.

Anders handed the turtle back to Charlie.

“Where are you going?” said Charlie.

“To call your parents.”

“For real?” he said. “That’s how you’re going to play this?”

“I don’t really have a choice.” He headed toward the phone in the kitchen.

“I should probably warn you that you’re not exactly their favorite person right now.”

Anders laughed. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

“Okay,” said Charlie. “They’re suing you.”

Anders came back in the room. “What did you say?”

“They’re suing you.”

“For what?”

“What do you think?”

“I can think of a handful of things, actually.”

Charlie’s look begged him not be dense.

“They know?”

Charlie sighed and shook his head. “I swear to God, I didn’t tell them.”

“They
know?
” Anders looked down at the stickered spine of the Klee book. Howard was never getting his book back.

“You know what?” he said. “They can do whatever they want. Tell them that. Tell them they can have everything I own if it makes them feel better. I don’t care anymore. I just don’t
care!
”

When he looked up, Charlie was grinning at him.

“My parents are assholes,” he said. “They’re suing everyone, if it makes you feel any better.”

“I was tricked into smoking that crap with you—you know that. You’ll testify or what have you, right? You’ll tell them the truth?”

Charlie raised his right hand. “So help me God.”

Anders nodded. All he could think about all of a sudden was Davis Lestrade, shrunken in his kimono. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“That’s right,” said Charlie. “You didn’t. My
dad
even smoked grass with us that night. We have a one-bowl policy.”

“Aha!” said Anders. “See?”

“And I don’t think you can technically ‘abandon’ your kids if they’re, like, full-grown adults.”

“What?” said Anders.

“Oh, it’s just a thing my mother keeps saying, like her proof for the whole situation.”

“What is?”

“Nothing. It’s dumb. She gets all calm and weird when you come up and then she says this stupid thing.”