The Invisible Circus (17 page)

part three

thirteen

Trees were in feverish white flower outside the lavish, dilapidated building where Kyle’s cousin, Steven Lake, and his wife, Ingrid, lived. Phoebe lingered on the street, hesitant to ring the bell so early. She’d taken the overnight train to Munich from Paris, giving the Lakes, who had never heard of her, no warning of her arrival. She’d been afraid they might say there wasn’t room for her.

Phoebe sat on the front steps to wait. Days had passed since the acid trip. The pounding of her head had been unbearable at first, gray-blue bruises on her forehead and temples and scalp. For two days she’d lain quite still on the sagging bed, listening to scattershot sounds from the street. She’d been afraid to move; the membrane between herself and the acid trip seemed very thin, like the soft patch on an infant’s skull. Sudden, drastic movement might puncture it, causing her to fall back through. Carefully Phoebe would creep down the many flights of stairs to pay for her room and buy food. On the third day she’d begun reading her book of Charles Dickens stories: blacksmiths, scullery maids, Christmas roasts, somehow they were what she needed.

She’d thought at first that she might go home. But with time this seemed less and less possible, like turning around on that narrow street lined with hissing women, finding the way back just as long.

When the ache in her head subsided, Phoebe had turned to the task of repairing her room. She moved carefully, as if each bone in her body had been broken and reset. She wrapped the pieces of shattered mirror in a T-shirt and smuggled them out to the street, where she emptied them into a wastebin. Her bloody hand had stained the bedspread, but after several bouts of scrubbing and hanging it in the sun to dry, the stain (the whole spread, in fact) had faded.

Faith’s postcards were gone. She’d thrown them into the Seine. Phoebe remembered doing it, the driving, frantic sense that this move held the key to her survival, but she no longer knew why. Now there was nothing to guide her—if you chose a place at random, how could it matter whether you went there? The address of Kyle’s cousin, Steven Lake, was still wrapped around the pink joint at the bottom of her wallet. All this time she’d carried it.

Phoebe leaned against her backpack and drifted into shallow sleep. At exactly nine o’clock she woke, climbed the steps and pressed buzzer three. An intercom clicked on, a man’s voice spoke in German.

“I’m looking for Steven Lake,” Phoebe said, pronouncing the name slowly.

“Steve’s in Brussels this summer,” said the same voice, but American now.

“Brussels,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m renting while they’re gone. You want their address? Hello?”

Phoebe felt as if she were sliding down a hill.

“Hello?”

“I was supposed to—give him—” She was stammering.

The intercom clicked off. Phoebe turned back to the empty street. The flowering trees had a sweet, powdery smell. She was in Munich, Germany. When a buzzer sounded, Phoebe whirled back around, throwing her weight against the door.

“Third floor,” he called. The hall was shadowy. Phoebe began toiling up the stairs under her backpack. She heard descending footsteps, and through the hair that had fallen across her face, glimpsed a tall man wearing wire-rimmed glasses. She questioned the point of hauling the backpack upstairs when Steven Lake didn’t even live here.

“Here, let me take that,” the man said, lifting it from her shoulders. Phoebe noticed a slight double-take at her appearance. The bruises were still visible, ashy smudges above her eyes and on her temples. She lowered her head. The man sprang ahead toward the first landing. Phoebe sensed the hurry in his step, an eagerness to get on with his day.

“You a friend of Steve’s?” he said over his shoulder.

“No. But I know his cousin, Kyle Marion.”

He paused mid-step. “Not San Francisco Kyle Marion.”

“Yes!” Phoebe said. “You know him?”

There was a pause. “I went to high school with him,” the man said. He waited at the next landing. Phoebe’s curiosity had the better of her now, and in spite of her bruises she looked full at him. The recognition broke across her in a single white flash, raising goosebumps on her legs and scalp.

“Wolf,” she said.

The color had left his face.

They both stared, speechless. It was Wolf. He looked as if he might faint. “I’m Phoebe,” she said.

“I know who you are,” Wolf said, and he pulled Phoebe to him, rocking her in arms whose feel was instantly familiar to her. “I know who you are, Phoebe, Jesus.” He drew away to look at her, smiling that sheepish smile of older relatives who haven’t seen you in years. He gripped the tops of Phoebe’s arms, her heavy backpack still dangling from his shoulder. “Phoebe O’Connor,” he said. “I’ll be damned.”

He looked smaller than she remembered. In Phoebe’s mind Wolf had grown vast with the years, ballooning in size and strength at twice the rate she herself had, since childhood. Now his chipped features looked almost frail. But his face was the same: white teeth, narrow green-gray eyes like the animal he’d been nicknamed for, the brown hair that once had fallen halfway down his back cut short now, so it stood up a little from his head. He’d lost his indelible tan. But for all that he was Wolf, familiar in every detail down to the hands on Phoebe’s arms, hands she’d watched rolling joints, steering his pickup truck with invisible ticks of movement, sifting through her sister’s hair.

“What are you doing here?” Wolf said.

“Traveling.” It was all the explanation she could muster. “How do you know Steven Lake?”

Wolf shook his head. “Americans in Munich,” he said. “I’ve known him for years.”

“But you never knew he and Kyle were cousins?”

“No idea. I mean … isn’t Steve from New York?”

They were climbing the last flight of stairs. Through an open door Phoebe stepped into a large, spare living room overlooking a backyard. In contrast to the sumptuous decay of the building, the apartment itself was sleekly renovated, crisp walls, knotty blond floor.

“Have a seat, walk around, make yourself at home,” Wolf said, setting Phoebe’s backpack inside the door. “Some coffee?”

Phoebe followed Wolf into a kitchen. His shape was the same, she decided, broad torso, long legs, but the smallness, the slight ness of him disconcerted her. He was no bigger than any other tall man.

Wolf set the kettle to boil and turned to Phoebe, smiling. “You grew up,” he said.

Phoebe crossed her arms.

“You were, like, a child the last time I saw you.”

“Ten,” she said. “I was ten.”

“Now you’re what, sixteen, seventeen?”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen,” Wolf said. “God, I forget how long it’s been.”

The kettle sang. He lifted it from the stove with a potholder, pouring an arc of scalding water into the filter.

“Your hair’s so short,” Phoebe said shyly. “And you have glasses now.”

“I always had glasses, I just never wore them,” Wolf said, laughing. “My blurred youth.”

“You look different,” Phoebe said. She couldn’t get over it. “You look, I don’t know, respectable.”

Wolf gave a wry half-smile. “It’s a different world.”

They brought their mugs to the living room and sat on a striped blue couch. Sunlight poured through the windows. In the bright light Wolf suddenly leaned toward Phoebe, peering at her forehead. “What’s happened to you?” he said softly.

“I fell.”

Gently Wolf pressed a palm to Phoebe’s head. The cool of his hand felt good. “Looks like someone beat you up,” he said. “How did you do this?”

“Oh, it’s not worth telling,” Phoebe said. “Stairs.”

Wolf let it go, but she sensed his reluctance, his concern, and they felt like balm. The bright light hurt her eyes; she closed them awhile and leaned back. It seemed an unfathomable luxury, being in somebody’s home.

“How’s your mom?” Wolf said.

“She’s good, I guess. She has a boyfriend. Actually, her boss, Jack Lamont? It’s him.”

“Get out of here!”

“Swear to God,” Phoebe said, pleased that Wolf could appreciate the bizarreness of her mother’s choice.

“Well, hey, that’s fantastic,” Wolf said. “If she’s happy, that’s fantastic. And the Bear? What’s old Barry been up to?”

“He’s a millionaire,” Phoebe said, and gave Wolf the short version of her brother’s success.

“Well, there’s some justice for you,” he said, grinning. “I always liked your brother.”

Phoebe was keenly aware that neither one of them had spoken Faith’s name. She wondered whether in Wolf’s eyes she looked as much like her sister as everyone said. She hoped so.

Wolf relaxed, spreading his long arms across the back of the couch. “Phoebe O’Connor,” he said. “I have in my head the most vivid picture of you—outside your house, waving to us as we drove to the airport.”

She laughed, embarrassed. “You remember that?”

“You were barefoot,” Wolf said, a catch in his voice.

Phoebe recalled the absolute stillness that had fallen on the street the moment his truck disappeared, as if everything loud and bright in the world were gone, too, packed away among their sea-shells and bandanas. She’d knelt on the pavement, touching the warm spot where the truck had been, keeping her hand there until the pavement cooled and even after, for many minutes more, until the fog made her teeth chatter.

“Anyway,” Wolf said, “I want to know everything that’s happened to you since.”

Phoebe laughed. “That’s a lot,” she said, though of course it was really so little.

The telephone rang in another room. Wolf went to answer it, and through the open door Phoebe admired his virtuosic German. The language made her picture someone clipping bushes with a pair of oversized shears.

“You sound totally German,” she commended him when he returned to the living room.

Wolf laughed. “I practically am, at this point,” he said. “I’m a legal resident, so I’m allowed to work here and everything. And my fiancee’s German, Carla—that was just her on the phone. So I’ll become a citizen after we’re married.”

“You’re getting married?”

“I am,” Wolf said, hesitant. “We were engaged in March.”

“Wow.” Phoebe felt as if she’d been struck. Her bruised head began to throb.

“It must be tough, hearing that,” Wolf said. “I’m sorry.”

Phoebe nodded and looked at the windows. A hummingbird hovered outside the glass like a giant mosquito.

So Wolf’s life had moved on. The strange thing was not so much that this had happened, Phoebe thought, but that suddenly she knew it. In her mind he’d remained shirtless, sun-soaked, restlessly prowling her thoughts. Now she felt the shame of facing an acquaintance she’d dreamed about, hoping he wouldn’t read it in her face.

“How did you end up in Germany?” she asked.

Wolf resumed his seat beside her on the couch. He’d never really gone back to the U.S., he explained, had stayed here illegally for years, working in restaurants, factories. He’d studied German at Berkeley for his biochemistry major, so he spoke the language.

“You dropped out of Berkeley, right?” Phoebe asked. “To go to Europe with Faith?”

There. Her sister’s name filled the room. Phoebe wanted to say it again, yell it out.

“Yeah,” Wolf said. “I loathed America then. I was dying to escape.”

But the name had done its work. A respectful silence descended over them.

“Anyway, I’m a translator now,” Wolf concluded. “Mostly technical stuff, brochures, annual reports for companies doing business in the States. Lot of drug companies, so the biochem wasn’t a total waste. Actually comes in pretty handy.”

“So everything’s worked out great,” Phoebe said ruefully.

Wolf knocked twice on the coffee table, as if hearing this made him nervous. Or maybe he just felt guilty, parading his happiness.

“Oh, I forgot,” Phoebe said, fumbling in her purse for her wallet. “I was supposed to give this to Steven Lake. From Kyle.”

She pried the pink joint from the crease in her wallet. It was bent and smudged from the long trip. Wolf took it, smiling at its condition. “We’ll save it for Steve,” he said.

The bathroom was full of spotless white tile. In the medicine cabinet Phoebe found a bottle of Estée Lauder perfume and several light-brown hairpins laid neatly in a pile. A pair of jade earrings shaped like tears, a bottle of coconut-smelling lotion; Phoebe stared at these items, trying to conjure up the woman who had bought them and worn them, placed them so carefully here. Their neat economy could not have been less like the bright jumble of Faith’s possessions, yet when she tried to picture Carla, all Phoebe saw was her sister’s face.

In the hot shower her hand began to throb. The cut from the mirror had become infected at first, but was healing now. Phoebe moved cautiously, as if the shower tiles were made of eggshell. I’m in Wolf’s apartment, she told herself, awaiting a jolt of elation at this spectacular good luck, but her feelings were dulled. Too much had happened; finding Wolf seemed the fulfillment of a hope she’d abandoned when her journey veered inexplicably from adventure into survival. Why had she come to Europe? Phoebe no longer felt sure; all she knew was that she’d barely survived a nightmare. The prospect of portraying a happy girl on vacation for Wolf exhausted her in advance, made her want to stay in the bathroom forever.

“What’s your fiancée like?” Phoebe asked as she and Wolf traversed the wide, regal streets of Munich. The churches looked like big armoires, the sky was flawless blue. Outdoor clocks were striking noon.

“She’s a doctor,” Wolf said.

“A doctor. Wow.” It made the fiancée seem old. “So you must be incredibly healthy,” she joked.

Wolf laughed, tipping back his head as if the laughter were a substance, like smoke, which might offend Phoebe. “Slowly but surely,” he said with affection. “I’m not an easy patient.”

He pointed out sights: the old and new painting museums, the technical university where he would teach a course in translation this fall. Phoebe gave them only passing attention. Mostly she looked at Wolf, filled with wonderment at the thought that he was the same boy whose shoulders she’d ridden down Haight Street, kicking his ribs to make him go faster. Perhaps Wolf, too, was remembering that time, for he asked suddenly how much San Francisco had changed.