Be Frank With Me (22 page)

When we turned back to Frank the kid was shivering. Because California is a desert climate, when the sun isn't shining directly on you it can get pretty chilly. The fireman brought us one of those shiny aluminum astronaut blankets they hand out to disaster victims. I wrapped Frank up tight and sat on the grass with him in my lap until he stopped shaking and loosened up again enough to talk.

“Alice,” Frank said after the firefighters started rolling up their hoses. “She's finished her book. Things will be better now, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

The craziest part of the whole night, in my opinion, was that he did.

OR MAYBE THE
craziest thing was this: There was a melee at the gate. I saw Xander plow into the gawker-control barricades the police had set up across the driveway. He ran right over them as if he were a steeplechaser who'd forgotten the hurdles were meant to be jumped. One of the police officers took off after him, shouting. When Xander wouldn't stop, the officer caught him by the back of his shirt. I saw
Xander punch the guy and break free. Another officer joined in the pursuit and put Xander in handcuffs.

“But I live here,” Xander shouted.

I decided not to get involved.

“Let's see your driver's license then, sir.” I had to admire the cop's restraint. It was interesting sitting there on the grass listening to them. Their voices carried across the flat of the lawn the way voices skim across the surface of a swimming pool sometimes, letting you in on the conversation of two people lying on blankets on the other side of the water, whispering to each other.

“You'll have to uncuff me so I can get to it,” Xander said in a calmer voice. The officer did and Xander massaged his wrists. “Can you tell me how the fire started?” he asked.

“Kid playing with fireworks,” the officer said.

“Was anybody hurt?” Xander asked as he pulled out his wallet.

“Somebody left in an ambulance,” the officer said. “That's all I know.”

Xander threw his wallet in the officer's face and took off running. They caught and cuffed him again. “I can't show you something I don't have,” he wailed. “I don't have a driver's license.”

They'd stopped listening by then. They hustled him none too gently down the driveway and shoved him into the backseat of a squad car.

After they left, I picked up Xander's wallet. There wasn't much in it. No driver's license, of course. Three crumpled one-dollar bills. A monthly bus pass. A piece of paper with a phone number written on it, and the words
Sara's new cell.

OR MAYBE THE
craziest was this: a fragment, half paper, half cinder, floated down and landed on my head while I sat there with Frank sleeping in my lap. Bits of paper had swirled everywhere before the firefighters were able to get the blaze in Mimi's office under control and for some time after that. The dew had fallen so the grass
was damp enough now that the arsonous bits sizzled and died without starting any new small fires.

I wasn't trusting dew to save my hair. I grabbed that fragment and crushed it out against the grass. When it was completely extinguished I could see the part of sentence it held:
and then Alice

AND THEN ALICE
put Frank's birthday cake in the fridge in the kitchen and went into what was left of Mimi's office to see if she could find any part of that finished novel.

Everything was gone. Everything but sodden, scorched carpet and lacy remnants of incinerated drapes and splinters of wood and a sad lump of metal that must have been her typewriter and muddy gray piles of ash. Here and there, scraps of burnt-edged paper with a word or phrase on it. Maddening bits of what must have been her novel the day before, reduced to word puzzles and haiku.

A
FTER THE FIRE
Mimi was put on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold at the hospital. The admitting doctor informed me of this over the telephone after I made it clear I couldn't leave my distraught younger brother, aka Frank, to come in for a chat. I had no intention of taking Frank to the hospital while his mother was in lockdown. I knew he'd insist on seeing her and I also knew that Mimi wouldn't want him to see her and in the end all three of us might end up being put away. I told the kid his mother was so tired they'd tucked her in bed in a very private room so she could sleep there uninterrupted for three days straight. “She's on hiatus,” I said. “All of us could use a little rest, right?”

“We're keeping your mother under observation as a precaution,” the doctor explained when we talked. “I don't want to cause you unnecessary alarm, but the paramedics told me about the situation with your late uncle. Also I see from her hospital record that your mom is unusually accident-prone, and that she was brought to the hospital this time after becoming hysterical because her house had burned down. Hmm. That might make me a little hysterical, too.”

I wanted to tell him that Frank, code name Jeopardy, was the disaster magnet and that Mimi was collateral damage. I just couldn't frame it in a way that wouldn't make Frank sound like a criminal or a maniac. “Only part of it burned,” I said. “The guesthouse. Her office. It was an accident. Could have happened to anybody.”

The doctor paused so long that I wondered if he was writing down
what I'd said or considering what to make of it. “What I'm trying to say is that events like these are red flags. The kind of self-destructive urge that took your uncle can run in families. Things that get written off as accidents—car wrecks, drownings, ‘accidental' fires—aren't always accidents. Have any other relatives died under questionable circumstances?”

Banning. “My mother's mother,” I said. “She drove her car into a fence.”

I'd gone outdoors with the phone so Frank wouldn't hear me but kept an eye on him through the glass. He was wrapped in a comforter and rolling around on the living room floor. It didn't make me feel great about my “parenting” that Frank turned to a comforter for comfort instead of me.

When would this kid's real mother come home? My own mother said she'd often thought that when she walked the floor with my infant self in the middle of the night. Was it easier to be a parent when you could carry the kid around without breaking a sweat, or did that lightness make it too tempting to throw it out a window when it wouldn't stop shrieking?

A horrible thought occurred to me then. Had Mimi picked a guardian for Frank? She must have done that, right? But who? According to Xander, Mimi had nobody but him. Xander, and her few billion fans outside the stucco wall. I hoped she hadn't chosen Xander. For all his charms and handyman skills, I wouldn't ask Xander to housesit a cat.

THE DAY MIMI
went into the hospital, the second massive blizzard in a week hit New York City, a climatic double whammy that media wags alternately tagged “Snowmageddon” or “Snowpocalypse.” Mr. Vargas managed to get a flight out somehow anyway, and called from the Los Angeles airport to say he was picking up his bags and rental car. He'd be in Bel Air within the hour. I told Frank we'd wait for Mimi's old friend and mine outside the gate so he could find the house. The truth of it was that I didn't want Mr. Vargas to meet Frank for the
first time in front of a pile of smoking rubble. That's the kind of first impression that's hard to shake.

Besides, it was so lovely outside the wall that it seemed a shame nobody was out there enjoying it. A soft, warm breeze was already shaking loose petals from the ornamental pear trees on Mimi's block that had erupted into blossoms overnight. I was tempted to try to catch a petal on my tongue as it drifted to the sidewalk, but held my right hand out palm up until one settled there instead. So this was February in Southern California. No wonder the silent movie guys threw over New Jersey to come out here, where most days were warm and the desert and ocean and snowcapped mountains and the gardens of Shangri-la were all within easy reach. But how was a normal person, me for example, who'd grown up with the usual up-and-down cycle of seasons supposed to keep track of the passage of time? Who learned to handle adversity when every day was more intoxicatingly gorgeous than the one before it? What mind could grasp that anything could go wrong in a place like this? I could see why so many people who came out here expecting easy fame ended up losing their grip.

“Alice. There.” With the petals wafting down around him, Frank looked like a child inside a snow globe, one wearing a glen-plaid Clarence Darrow suit, leather aviator's cap and goggles, looking for a yellow biplane come to scoop him up. “In the Lamborghini.” He pointed. “That must be your friend.”

“No pointing, Frank. That isn't him. Hold my hand please. I don't want to lose you.”

Frank clutched my fingers so tightly that I winced. After that I didn't correct him when he pointed at every Italian sports car or English luxury sedan that tooled down the street because I was grateful for the chance to flex every time he dropped my hand.

Finally a nondescript sedan with Arizona plates that screamed “rental car” turned onto our block. I knew right away that it was Mr. Vargas. I let go of Frank, waved and shouted. As soon as the car nosed into the driveway, I ran to open the driver's side door.

While Mr. Vargas fumbled with his seat belt, I looked over my shoulder to summon Frank to meet him. No Frank. Wait. Yes Frank. Flat on his back on the sidewalk, eyes squeezed shut and hands balled in fists.

I abandoned Mr. Vargas and knelt alongside the kid. “What's wrong, Frank?” I asked.

“You rushed that car like one of my mother's fanatics, Alice. The man inside must be terrified.”

“Look at me, Frank,” I said. The kid cracked one wary, begoggled eyelid open. “The man in that car knows me, remember? We're friends, so it's okay for me to be excited to see him.” I don't think I'd been more excited to see anybody in my life.

Mr. Vargas came and knelt beside us. “You must be Frank,” he said. “I've been looking forward to meeting you.”

Frank pushed the goggles up on his forehead to get a better look at him. I guess he was on the fence about Mr. Vargas because he shut his eyes again after he checked him out but didn't put the goggles back on.

“Look, I brought you a present, Frank. Is it all right for me to call you Frank?” Mr. Vargas stood, pulled a cylindrical something from his pocket, and gave it a long, rattling shake. “Alice said to bring flashlights. So I brought you this special one that's powered by shaking. No batteries required.”

He had Frank's attention then. The kid sat up and took the flashlight, shook it hard, turned it on, and nodded. “Well done,” he said. “Now that you've delivered it, please leave.”

ON DAY THREE
of Mimi's sequestration, Frank and I set off by city bus to fetch her home. Mr. Vargas offered to take us in his rental car, but Frank refused to set foot in it or even have him along on the bus ride. “Fine,” Mr. Vargas said. “I have important things to do here. I need to buy a few groceries. Rug shampoo. A new mop.”

“I'll have a beer and a mop,” Frank said. “That's what the skeleton said when he walked into the bar.” Whether the joke was meant
for Mr. Vargas or me was impossible to say. Up until then Frank had insisted I stand between the two of them whenever we were together, as if the man were a rubber zombie mask that had sprouted arms and legs.

I'd been so paralyzed by our disaster that I hadn't cleaned up the ashy footprints the firefighters had tracked through the house. “Oh, Mr. Vargas, don't,” I said. “I'll call a cleaning service. Or I'll do it myself when we get home.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “It will keep me busy until you get back.”

So Frank and I set out by bus, stopping at every street corner in Los Angeles along the way. Frank insisted we visit the mall across the street to buy Mimi Valentine's Day candy before the hospital. I gave in without a fight. There wasn't any point in saying she'd been waiting too long for us already.

On the upside, one day post-Valentine's the hearts were half-price. Frank chose the biggest ones still available, three of solid chocolate that cost twenty-five bucks apiece even on special. “Why three?” I asked, being careful not to sound confrontational.

“One for me, one for my mother, one for you,” he said. Just when you wanted to strangle the kid for being impossible, he'd come up with something like that to cut your anger off at the knees.

Mimi had checked herself out of the hospital and was long gone by the time we finally got there. I wasn't surprised, but Frank was stunned. Before he launched into a seismic fit I managed to convince him that Mimi had called home, talked to Mr. Vargas, and was so excited to see him after so many years that she'd taken a cab back to Bel Air before we'd crawled through half of Los Angeles on the bus. “We could take a cab ourselves, you know, and get home much faster,” I added. We were talking on the bench at the hospital bus stop.

“I only ride in taxis with my mother, Alice,” Frank said. “If what you suggest is true, why didn't she call to alert us of her departure?”

Because she hates me. “Because she never learned my number, I bet,” I said. “It was programmed into her cell.”

“I doubt that,” Frank said. “My mother has no problem with numbers in a series. She'd be the first to tell you that she's good with numbers but terrible with money. I know because she's told me that more times than I can count on my fingers and toes. Maybe your cell was turned off. Or you forgot to bring it.”

I rooted through my purse and all my pockets. “You're right, Frank. I forgot my phone. I'm the stupidest person alive.”

“That's not true. In every classroom I've ever been in there have been at least a couple of kids less intelligent than you are. Also one teacher. Who had me transferred to another class.”

We went inside in search of a pay phone. Hard to find these days, as noted earlier by Frank. Once we located one, I realized I'd never learned the number to the glass house because it was programmed into my cell. Mr. Vargas would be so disappointed in me. The man hated speed dial. He believed that memorized phone numbers were the sign of a civilized mind.

Frank didn't know his home number, either, though he had memorized the girlhood phone number of his Alabama grandmother who'd died before he was born. Easily. It was “
7
.”

NIGHT HAD FALLEN
by the time we got back. Mr. Vargas had opened all the curtains and had the lights on in every room except Mimi's office, where we'd covered the broken-in glass wall with a tarp. We could see him in the display case that was the living room, wearing an apron over his suit and watching for us. He couldn't see us hiking up the driveway in the dark because the light inside had turned all the windows into one-way mirrors.

When we unlocked the front door Frank brushed past me, calling “Mama” in that weird monotone of his, repeating it like a squeeze-me talking baby doll left under a rocking chair. I waited in the foyer, not wanting to get in the way of any reunions. The hall carpet looked good as new and the mirrors all around me were free of fingerprints
and delicious smells came from the kitchen. I had made none of this happen. I can't tell you what a relief that was. Until now I'd prided myself on being so responsible, but a life without responsibilities was starting to sound pretty great to me. I was starting to think Xander wasn't a deadbeat. He was a genius.

Mr. Vargas came to meet us, pulling the apron over his head, smoothing his hair and straightening his tie. Came to meet me, really, since I was the only one there. “You surprised me, Alice,” he said. “I called to find out where on earth you were and heard your phone ringing in the kitchen. Howling, actually. Is the coyote ringtone a West Coast thing? Where's Mimi?”

ONCE FRANK HAD
searched every room and under every bed and inside every drawer and closet and felt inside a pair of Mimi's shoes and even peered into the vacuum cleaner hose and bag, he went out in the yard and returned with his yellow plastic bat. He took the cake box out of the refrigerator and removed his gorgeous, forlorn, untouched birthday cake. He put the cake on the counter and proceeded to beat it to chocolate smithereens. Then he pushed its remains through the kitchen colander and pawed through the crumbs before proclaiming, “Well, that's that. Not here, either.”

After Mr. Vargas regained his capacity for speech, he wondered aloud if Mimi had been home at all, since he'd only been at the store for an hour at most. Frank said Mimi had absolutely been there, probably while Mr. Vargas was at the grocery or when he'd been vacuuming in one of the bedrooms. “What makes you think that?” Mr. Vargas asked.

Young Sherlock Holmes pointed out the clues: The vacuum cleaner bag filled with the powdery residue of carpet shampoo, evidence of the recent cleanup of the firefighters' muddy footprints that might have made sufficient racket to allow Mimi to slip in and out undetected by anybody who might ask awkward questions like, “Say, Mimi, where's
that manuscript you promised me?” The shoes I'd sent to Mimi in the hospital, still damp inside from being worn home sockless. A suitcase gone from under her bed, her blue and black and gray cardigans missing, plus seven T-shirts and two pairs of jeans, one an embroidered pair she'd inherited from Julian that she only wore on special occasions. Also the watercolor portrait of Frank over the mantelpiece that I couldn't believe I hadn't missed. A nightgown was MIA, and a pair of slippers. Two pairs of shoes I gathered Mimi preferred to the ones I'd picked for her. Seven pairs of socks, something I'd forgotten to include in her care package. Her toothbrush. “Her hairbrush is here,” Frank mused, “but her hair is still short enough to do without it.” Her purse was gone and her glasses, but not her cell phone. “Either she doesn't want to talk to anybody,” he said, “or she knows her computer could pinpoint its location and, by extension, hers.” My money was on “doesn't want to talk to anybody.”