A Good Divorce (21 page)

Mr. Washington stood about six foot three, spoke in a deep plantation-owner voice, and had the physique of the linebacker he used to be when he played for the Huskies. I wondered why the School District would waste such brawn in an elementary school where the kids still queued for lunch and fire drills. He'd already loosened his tie and collar.

“Shouldn't we be calling the police, Mrs. Stapleton?”

Jude wisely let the mistaken title pass. There was no sense confusing the school district with the intricacies of our domestic situation. “I think he'll show up. There'll be some simple explanation.”

“You're the lawyer, Mr. Stapleton, what's the standard operating procedure here?”

I imagined Jude bristling the way she used to when my dad directed political questions to me. She was chewing the insides of her cheeks. Derek had seemed fine last time we talked on the phone. We'd joked about Jim Zorn, the pass-crazy quarterback of the Seahawks. Derek said he was afraid they were going to lose to the Raiders on Sunday. Pessimistic but not suicidal. “I think we should report him missing.”

Mr. Washington sat on the edge of his desk. “That all right with you, Ma'am?”

“Sure.”

“Use my phone,” he said, tugging on his tie. “I've already left word with his teacher in case she hears anything. She said he's been a little quiet lately. I understand he's usually quite the comedian.”

Jude gave me a knowing look, and I wondered if we should have mentioned what happened with Justine. We'd been faithful, at Justine's request, in keeping it a secret. Mr. Washington stepped out of the office while Jude called nine-one-one. She gave her home phone number and mine. The emergency operator probably figured another broken home, no wonder the kid was missing.

“Why don't we do some looking around on our own, Jude? Maybe he's back home by now.”

Mr. Washington re-entered the office with a short stack of file folders. “I'll be here a while. Give me a call when you hear something.”

“We really appreciate your help,” I said.

“You attorneys must get cases like this all the time,” he said.

We shook hands. His felt as big as a baseball glove.

I stopped by to pick up Justine and Magpie at the house and we drove the Seward neighborhood, determined to do every alley and street between I-5 and Lake Union. Jude took the Roanoke Park area. I tried to visualize all the possible harmless explanations for his disappearance, but Justine's anxiety was contagious. As we crept down bumpy alleys between garbage cans and heaps of grass clippings and hedge trimmings, I kept expecting to find him slumped against someone's garage door, crippled from a hit-and-run.

“I knew he was upset,” Justine said.

“How do you mean?”

“The way he's just shut down. He used to defend Mom. Now he's given up.”

Justine had my full attention. She knew about giving up. I watched her as she rubbed her thumbs hard against her index fingers and rotated her head trying to see both sides of the street. Derek was always so positive. Maybe I hadn't given him enough credit, ignoring the possibility that he'd inherited my own ability to dissemble and rationalize. We passed sailboats drydocked on blocks along the waterfront with extension cords and tarps draped over the gunnels and guys with face masks sanding keels that rested inches off the ground. We drove every street between Seward School and the Alhambra, and then I called the desk officer to see if the police had found him. No luck.

Justine and Magpie came back with me to the Alhambra. Neither Justine or I were hungry, so we fed Magpie and then just lay on the floor petting her, waiting for the phone to ring. At a few minutes after nine, there were footsteps coming down the stairs.
Ka, bum. Ka, bum
. It was the syncopation of dejection. We herded to the door and swung it open.

“Where have you been? The police have been looking all over for you.” Now that he was apparently safe, Justine reverted to her role of Derek's guardian.

Derek just stood there in the doorway, shivering in his short-sleeve shirt, his pants wet half-way up the calves, and his tennis shoes caked with clay. There were blotches of grime around his eyes where he'd been rubbing them. He ignored Justine.

“We've been worried about you, partner.” His school book with the Rolling Stones cover dropped open-faced onto the floor, spilling note papers. Magpie sniffed the mud on his pants.

“Are you going to ground him, Dad?”

“I need to find out what happened first.”

“It looks like he's been goofing off in some swamp.”

I wished Justine could back off and show her little brother a portion of the compassion I knew was inside her. I patted him on the shoulder and stroked his hair the same way I used to when he woke up with a bad dream and crawled into the waterbed with Jude and me. It always mystified me what a three-year-old had to worry about.

“I wasn't goofing around.” Derek's words were muffled by my stomach.

“Then what were you doing?”

I frowned at Justine. “Get some dry clothes on,” I said. “Then we can talk.” The kids kept spare clothes at the Alhambra so they wouldn't have so much to carry back and forth.

Magpie, the most non-judgmental member of the household, followed Derek into the bedroom.

“You better call the police,” Justine said, unable to resist organizing me.

I called Jude to tell her that Derek was safe and that the kids were going to stay with me overnight. The Alhambra had become the kids' half-way house, the place they came to when things flared up at their mom's.

While we ate toast and sipped hot chocolate at the kitchen table, Derek, in his print guitar and harmonica pajamas, told us how he'd left school and hiked through Interlaken, a steep, forested ravine that cut pie-shaped wedges into the north end of Capitol Hill, and then into the Arboretum. He pulled up his sleeves and showed us the rash from the nettles he'd encountered while hiding under the 520 bridge. Once it got dark, he heard two men shouting at each other.

“One of them kept saying he'd cut the other guy's balls off.” His story sounded like one of his childhood nightmares.

“Why didn't you just come home?” Justine asked.

His cheeks bulged with a bite of toast. “Didn't feel like it.”

“Are you still pissed at Mom?”

“Justine, watch your language.”

Derek gulped a lump down his throat and answered. “Yeah, kind of.”

That seemed to satisfy Justine because she got up, took a spoon out of the drawer, and reached into the bottom of the Nestle's carton. Her spoon tapped the metal bottom, scraped against the sides, and emerged with a heaping scoop of cocoa crystals that she dumped onto a saucer. She rejoined us at the table and begin dipping her licked finger into the chocolate.

After they'd brushed their teeth, I tucked Justine into the hide-abed in the living room. Even though it was for only one night, she'd made the room look like an estate sale, with clothes draped on the furniture and hangers suspended from the candelabra in the floor lamp. She also stationed two folding chairs next to the bed for her lotions, Kleenex, brushes, and magazines.

“I'm glad he's home, Dad, but you have to talk to him about Mom's thing.” Alone with me, she was soft and worried again.

Derek was under the covers flat on his back and his eyes wide open when I came into his room. He'd made a bed on the floor out of pillows and blankets for Magpie, who lay there gazing adoringly at Derek. I took a seat on the edge of the bed and wedged my cold toes under Magpie's belly.

“Okay, why'd you skip out on your mom?”

He twisted his head sideways and pulled his knees up as if to protect his balls and mumbled something.

“What?”

“I didn't want anyone to see her.”

“Why not?”

“They'd know I lied.”

“About what?”

He forced his eyes shut so tight they made creases like cat whiskers from the corners. “I told everyone she was dead.”

I waited for him to elaborate, but he was more comfortable taking questions. Magpie, whose back legs scissor-kicked in little jerks, had already fallen asleep and was in her first dream. Derek leaned off the bed and put his hand on her side until she stopped kicking.

“Did you consider telling them the truth?”

“They'd think she's a freak.”

“What do you think?”

“I know she's not normal.”

It would have been easier for me to argue Derek's side of the allegation, but I knew he wanted to be proven wrong. I remembered when I was young my grandpa on Mom's side making me read G. K. Chesterton's
The Defendant
, which had essays on the defense of nonsense, the defense of rash vows, and the defense of ugly things. Reading that book was as much as anything else I could point to the reason I became a lawyer. “Mediocre people are normal,” I said. “You know Albert Einstein?”

“Yeah.”

“He wasn't normal. He invented the theory of relativity and helped develop the atomic bomb even though he was a pacifist. Einstein was a genius.”

Derek stared at the ceiling. “Name someone else.”

I had to think for a minute. “Stevie Wonder.”

“He's blind.”

“Has to read with his ears. What's normal about that?”

“Who else?”

I was on a roll. “Did your mom ever tell you about the time she and Justine camped out on the federal courthouse lawn?”

“No.”

“Justine was seven. She and your mom chanted and waved banners protesting the war in Viet Nam and slept overnight in Army tents with a bunch of strangers.”

“Really?”

“You were there too, inside your mom. She was eight months pregnant. Does that sound normal?”

He raised up on his elbows. “I know Viet Nam was bad.”

“Everyone says that now, but not the night your mom slept downtown.”

“Why didn't you go with us?”

That was the same thing Jude had asked me, but there was no way I was going to join a bunch of street protestors when I was in my first job in a downtown law firm and hoping to someday make partner. “I was embarrassed someone I knew would see me,” I said.

His eyebrows registered surprise. “You mean Mom had more guts than you did?”

“Pretty bad, huh? Let me tell you something else about your mom. I think she's in love.” His blink popped his stare like a soap bubble. “That's normal as water. Parents love kids even when they screw up. You love Magpie when she chews up your hardball. Your mom loves Lill.” Derek fell back and wrapped his hands underneath the pillow, sifting it all to make sure there weren't any clinkers. I put my hand on his head. The pulse of a million nine-year-old molecules warmed my palm.

“Why do people call them queers?”

“The same people said Columbus would sail off the edge of the earth.”

“That's how I felt under the freeway. Like I'd fallen off the edge of the earth.”

14.

Rush hour traffic on Interstate 90 was bumper-to-bumper across the floating bridge, but I let people cut in front of me with a wave of my hand. Warren and I were on the way to Quincy, and I was hoping homecooking and twenty laps around the track at the high school would help me get my bearings. At Factoria, the logjam loosened and pavement started to reappear between cars like a murky river as the aggressive ones blinkered their way into the passing lane. We gassed at the Shell station in North Bend and bought snacks at the mini-mart. With each odd mile on the odometer we earned a stale pretzel ring. On the even ones we got to swig from the Gatorade wedged between my gym bag and the back of the passenger seat.

Lill's first diplomatic foray had met resistance. Jude told her they'd work through it with the kids and made an appointment with a family counselor for the four of them. She was convinced that it was still fallout from the divorce and the kids were bound to act up regardless of the sex of her new partner. I found myself pulling for a
coup d'etat
. The next time the kids ran to me, I wasn't going to let them go back. I'd hold them hostage until Jude and Lill cleaned up their act. A State Patrol car appeared in the rearview mirror with the blue light flashing. I was sure something had happened to one of the kids and they'd come to find me, but it whizzed past.

“You know,” Warren said out of the blur of tire tread and wind, “that Lill is a charmer. You think lesbians ever cheat on each other?”

“Never thought much about it.”

“What do you think Jude would do if some stud seduced Lill?”

“Is this a knock-knock joke?”

“She'd flip out.”

“At least that.”

Crossing Snoqualmie Pass, the car sputtered even though the fuel gauge showed half full. We made it as far as the turnoff to the Hyak ski area when we lost all power and had to work our way onto the shoulder. The driver behind us honked, then gunned his engine and passed us with his middle finger pressed against the passenger window. So much for the good karma I'd earned in the traffic jam. I pounded the top of the steering wheel with my palms. Dammit. If it hadn't been for the separation, we would have traded the Plymouth in by now for something with a warranty. I put on my right turn blinker and both of us slid out the passenger side. I took a business card out of my wallet, found a dull golf pencil in the glove compartment, and wrote a note to leave on the dashboard. “Best offer accepted.”

With our bags slung over our shoulders, we started hoofing it back to the general store at the summit. The gravel crunched underfoot. Each car let out a windy guffaw as its headlights blew by me. Forget it. I wouldn't stop for you either. This was the kind of situation where I would have called Warren, except that he was with me. The AAA membership was in Jude's name.

“Let's call Dad,” Warren said.

I grimaced. “He's still a hundred miles away.” The prospect of explaining to Dad how I had let the car run down like this was simply too daunting. “I'd rather hitchhike home and call a towing company in the morning.”