The New Elvis (10 page)

Ryan and Bea were in the middle of a lingering kiss when the cell phone in Ryan’s pocket rang.

Bea pulled back. “Is that a phone in your pocket, or are you—?”

They both laughed. Ryan untangled his hand from Bea’s long hair and dug into his front pocket. He looked up, frowning. “My dad.”

“Probably sold a house and wants you to be as excited about it as he is.”

Ryan dialed his father’s cell.

“Guess what?” Gene’s voice was so loud Bea could hear him without any trouble.

“What?”

“Your grandparents are here!”

Ryan was puzzled. “I thought they lived in Thailand.”

“They did. They do. They came back for a visit.”

“After twenty years?”

“Well, they like it over there. It took them a while to get motivated to take a trip. They’re old, you know. People slow down.”

“When do I meet them?”

“Your mom is cooking dinner for us right now. You’re with Bea?”

Ryan leaned over and kissed her ear. “Yep.”

“How is she?”

“We can talk about that when I get there.”

“Well, get a move on, son. Your grandparents aren’t getting any younger.”

Ryan sat up on Bea’s bed and looked around at the clocks. A quarter past five, a quarter past five, a quarter past five. They all kept perfect time.

He slid off the bed. “I gotta go.”

“Your grandparents are here?”

“Yeah. Never met ’em.”

“Well, good luck.” She winced as she rose from the bed. “It’s time for me to knock myself out for a while anyway.”

Ryan thought Bea would walk him to the door, but she stopped at her bureau and opened the top drawer. It was full of fat vials from the pharmacy. She took a bottle, unscrewed the cap, and dropped two oblong white tablets into her palm.

“What’s that?”

“Vicodin.”

Of the litany of drugs Bea’s mom had listed off the top of her head that her daughter was taking, Ryan hadn’t remembered Vicodin being included in the rundown. Then again, she was taking so many different pills it would be hard to remember them all.

Uncle Wendall’s home was magnificent, and Logan had his own room at the top of the sweeping staircase that led downstairs to the living room. His uncle had a lady friend named Nancy, who came over twice a week to visit but never stayed long, and she often spent time alone with Logan, sitting with him as he played, silently, on the carpet in his lavish room.

“Is there anything you need?” Nancy asked him.

She had helped him shop for new clothing at Macy’s, where he’d point at what he wanted, which she’d take with him to the dressing room, where she would wait patiently to see if what he picked fit him or if they’d need a different size. He was also taking baths every night before bed now, and he had twenty pairs of pajamas, mostly all superhero-themed.

Before bedtime, he would kneel next to his new, large bed covered with an X-Men spread, and put his forehead down on his fists, his fingers laced together. He would pray for his mother and father, pray that he wouldn’t have nightmares about the bad men, and pray that he would get his voice back so he could go to school like a normal kid.

Then, after his uncle tucked him in, he would point to the turntable on the dresser. Uncle Wendall would go over, lift the lid, turn the player on, drop the needle, and, to the faint strains of
Elvis’ Christmas Album
, Logan would drift off to sleep.

When the local elementary school found out that Logan was unwilling or unable to talk, they decided he had selective mutism and told Uncle Wendall to take him to a specialist, who sat with him but never made any progress.

The therapist would talk about anything that was on his mind, which never interested Logan. One day, at the door, the therapist told Uncle Wendall he had heard of a case where a young man stopped talking because he had a speech impediment that made him reluctant to talk because of the teasing he’d received. His mother was abusive, making him feel like whatever he had to contribute to a conversation was worthless. He hadn’t spoken for ten years by the time he was brought in for therapy. They uncovered some of his personal writings, where he referred to IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabetic, representing only those qualities of speech in spoken language. It was proof to the doctor that the young man could speak but chose not to.

“He was older than your nephew, but the challenge is similar.”

Uncle Wendall told the doctor that Logan had never had a speech impediment. While his mother had been difficult, he believed the bond between Logan and his mother had been a close one, that Logan saw himself as important in her life, helpful in the face of her emotional and physical difficulties.

“Maybe he feels guilty he couldn’t save her,” the doctor posited.

Wendall shook his head. “I think he knows the fire wasn’t his fault.”

“Maybe he’s experiencing survivor’s guilt.”

Wendall studied Logan carefully. Clean cut, with his hair freshly clipped and combed at the barbershop, he barely resembled the raggedy kid he had rescued. “I just don’t know.”

“Try to get him interested in something,” the doctor urged. “Find out what he likes, what he’s good at. Do anything you can to lessen his anxiety. Find something he can throw himself into and excel at.”

Though Wendall was retired and liked his schedule of golf games and poker just fine, he picked up the necessary textbooks from the school district and began to home school Logan. He also tried to teach him how to play poker, sitting him down at the card table after one of his Wednesday night games to show him various hands.

Placing the Ace of diamonds and the Queen of spades together, followed by the Queen of diamonds and the King of spades, followed by the ten of spades and the nine of diamonds, he asked Logan which hand would be strongest, pre-flop, in a game of Texas Hold’em.

Logan shrugged, and Wendall pointed at the first pair. “Ace high starts off strong.”

Then Wendall laid down the flop: the seven of hearts, the seven of spades, and the three of spades. “OK, how about now?”

Logan didn’t know.

Wendall pointed to the first pair again. “Ace, Queen continues to lead. OK, now here’s the turn card.”

He flipped over the nine of clubs and looked at Logan expectantly, but Logan wasn’t catching on.

“Ten, nine is now in the lead,” Wendall told him, placing the river card on the table. It was the Queen of clubs. “How about now?”

Logan shrugged.

“Ace, Queen. Highest two pair and the Ace kicker takes it.”

Everything about Logan’s body language told Wendall he was bored. Wendall scooped up the cards and smiled. “Maybe some other time.”

Life went on that way for years. Wendall continued to test and see where Logan’s interests might lie and guide Logan through his studies, to the point where Logan would soon be ready to get his high school equivalency certificate. Over the years, the only addition to the household was a Siamese cat named Professor X, who was as loud as Logan was silent. Nancy continued to come around with regularity, and one day, she brought Logan a Microsoft Tablet PC so he could carry it around and write notes to them.

Then, one Sunday, close to one in the afternoon, just as Wendall finished his several newspapers, dropping them onto the carpet section by section as he finished them, something curious happened.

Logan entered the living room with a pair of scissors and sat down on the rug at his uncle’s feet. He took the entertainment sections from the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
San Francisco Chronicle
, and the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
, cut out the main photos and stories, and rearranged them carefully to form an amalgamated spread that was pleasing to the eye.

Uncle Wendall stood up and looked it over. Logan had spaced the stories and photos out into a tableaux that was well balanced and effective. 2004 was winding to a close, so the entertainment news was a combination of events that had happened earlier in the year and more recently. Stories on Britney Spears’s brief marriage to Jason Alexander, J.Lo and Ben Affleck’s breakup, Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl XXXVIII’s halftime show performance snafu with Justin Timberlake, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s appointment as the new governor of California, and the success of the new ABC show
Desperate Housewives
were all featured in Logan’s spread.

Wendall knelt down and rested his arm across Logan’s shoulders. “I see a few things going on here. You’ve got a killer eye for layout, you like entertainment, and it’s time for me to get you a few layout and design programs for your computer.”

Logan grinned and impulsively hugged his uncle, and when they broke from their embrace, it was impossible to tell which one of them was more surprised.

Zella had redecorated the front of the house earlier that year, and the focal point in the living room was now a sprawling, modern, white leather sectional with seating for twelve that could be repositioned as she saw fit. When Ryan came home that day, the couch was arranged around a chrome-legged, walnut matte table placed in the center of a Gandia Blasco, hand-tufted rug that fit the entire room like a glove, ending six inches from the baseboards, its earth-toned stripes intermixed with turquoise, the color Zella chose for room accent pieces, throw pillows, and lamps.

Ryan tucked his white dress shirt into his khakis and took a swig from his bottle of Diet Pepsi before he opened the front door. Seated together in the middle of the sectional were his father’s parents. His grandfather was a withered version of Gene, with sagging jowls, spindly arms, and stick-like legs. His grandmother was top-heavy, and her frilly blouse covered her ample bosom and stomach like a frothy bib. She wore a thick skirt of nubbly fabric in a dusty rose that matched the splotches of rouge she’d dabbed on her cheeks. She had gone white-haired, while her husband had gone gray.

Ryan’s parents stood in the entranceway to the dining room, watching their son’s reaction to his grandparents and Gene’s parents’ reaction to their son. Everyone seemed frozen as they gazed at each other. Finally, Gene broke the ice. He went and put his arm around Ryan’s shoulder and steered him toward the couch. George and Katherine Wyatt rose and gave their grandson a hug. Ryan backed up, hit the coffee table, recovered, and took a seat adjacent to them. Grandma Katherine reached out and tapped the baby photo album on the table in front of them.

Ryan blushed. It was filled with pictures of him. His first meal eaten by himself with a spoon, orange squash on his cheeks and lips. His first ride in his doorway bouncy swing, his legs dangling from the seat, his feet inches above the ground. His first Halloween, dressed as Wolverine, flashing a fistful of plastic claws. His first Christmas, surrounded by squishy rubber blocks, his mother in the background, beaming. The school plays, when he was older. Bea, with a frown on her face, bent over the sandbox while he built a hill for his Matchbox cars to drive up. His first school dance, again with Bea, both of them unwilling to smile for the camera, wanting to appear grown-up and serious.

Grandma Katherine gazed across the room. “You look a bit like her,” she said, referring to Zella.

“Him, not so much,” Grandpa George added.

“Well, of course the boy doesn’t look like Eugene. He’s—”

Gene rushed over to the couch, intent on interrupting. “Mom, that’s OK.”

“What, he doesn’t know?”

Ryan looked around the room at them. The air was still. No one spoke. Then, just as suddenly, Gene began to babble, determined to push past the moment.

“Hey, Ryan, remember Michael Knight-Lewis? We showed him that house where Nana went for a swim? He didn’t want that one, but I showed him another one on Victoria Point. Four bedrooms, four baths, seven and a half million. Loads of pine trees on the property, no public beach access, so he’d be buying his own piece of the Pacific. It has a deck on the second level, with the bedrooms downstairs. If you took a shower in the upstairs bath, I kid you not, you’d be looking at the side of a cliff. Stairs go right down to the beach from the deck. A real surf spot.”

Zella came over to the couch but didn’t sit. “Gene, I’m sure Ryan would rather hear about your parents’ adventures in Thailand.” She looked at Ryan pointedly. “Don’t you wonder what it would be like to live there for twenty years?”

Ryan cleared his throat, ready to ask his grandparents a question.

Gene rolled on. “Well, Michael didn’t like that house, either, so I showed him a third one in Ramirez Canyon. Eleven acres, eight and a half million, five thousand square feet. It has a family area right off the side of the kitchen, which is something he really wanted, and—get this—the entire first floor was done in oak from a reclaimed barn in Oklahoma. Really gave the place character.”

Ryan watched his mother leave the room. Gene didn’t notice. He was locked in on his parents, trying to impress on them what a successful realtor he’d become. Quietly, Ryan got up and followed his mother. She was in the kitchen, trying to read the thermometer stuck in the browning turkey.

“Mom?”

She turned to look at him and then looked away, unable to hold his gaze.

“Dad’s not my father?”

“Of course he’s your father. He raised you, didn’t he?”

Ryan came over and stood next to her. “I mean, my
real
father.”

Zella pursed her lips. “I’m not sure this is the right time to—”

“They know and I don’t? Everybody knows but me? I’m supposed to sit through a dinner with my grandparents and—”

Zella cringed. “Maybe we can talk about this later. With your father.”

“Oh, sure. We’ve waited my entire life. What does a few more hours matter?”

He left his mother hovering over the turkey, her face shaded by a veil of dark hair that had fallen forward. He started to go back into the living room and then stopped. The conversation in the living room had shifted back to him.

“He looks like a little Elvis,” Grandma Katherine was saying.