The Night Villa (8 page)

I open the door onto an empty room. My books are as I left them, the pile of typescript beside my laptop undisturbed. The laptop is glowing the tranquil blue of the screensaver. The only addition to the scene is a faint rust-colored smear across the glass window above my desk.

I take a step closer to examine the pale red tint. It looks like blood. I look down and see, on the ground just beneath my window, a melee of black feathers over the crumpled corpse of an enormous black crow. Clearly the sound I heard was its death crash into my study window. Even after I’ve donned a pair of leather gardening gloves and bagged the bird’s broken body, I keep remembering what crows stand for in Greek mythology. They’re psychopomps—messengers sent to lead the soul into the underworld. I find it hard to dismiss the totally irrational thought that the crow, along with the book, is another calling card from Ely.

That night I dream of Ely again, but it’s hardly like a dream at all; it’s more like an appointment Ely’s been waiting to keep with me. The place he’s chosen is his childhood bedroom in the split-level Cape Cod where his parents live in HoHoKus, New Jersey—a room I slept in for three nights five and a half years ago, but which apparently I’ve remembered down to its last detail. It’s been waiting here inside my head, a time bubble, exact down to the burnt umber shade of the carpet and the Styrofoam model of the solar system hanging from the light fixture in the ceiling.

We’d gone for Rosh Hashanah, which fell a week before the fall semester began. It was my last-ditch effort to talk Ely out of going to the Tetraktys community in New Mexico. I’d thought that if we went back to his parents’ house in New Jersey they’d be able to talk some sense into him. Instead, by the end of those three nights—three nights I spent lying awake on a narrow bed staring up at the pitted Styrofoam surface of Neptune—I knew why he was going.

Ely had lost his brother when he was ten. It was one of the links that Ely believed held us together, that we had both lost someone important to us when we were the same age. I had often resented how my grandparents had tried to erase my mother’s memory, but looking at this room I realized it might have been even harder growing up beside the lost person’s remains. It didn’t look as though Ely’s parents had changed a single thing from the day Paul had died, not one soccer trophy or math decathlon blue ribbon.

It didn’t predispose me to think kindly of them, nor did the fact that they weren’t home when we got to the house. Ely explained that they often worked late at the high school where his dad, Howard, taught math, and his mother, Ruth, was a guidance counselor. It seemed strange to me that they couldn’t get out a little early to welcome their only son home. I’d already painted a picture of them as neglectful monsters, the kind of self-absorbed parents who would raise a kid who’d feel so inadequate he’d have to join a cult to gain any sense of belonging, but when they came home there were tears in Ruth’s eyes as she hugged Ely. Howard endeared himself to me by kissing Ely on the cheek (a bit of male intimacy you didn’t see often in Texas).

“Call me Howie,” he told me as he crushed me in a bear hug.

Ruth had chatted nonstop while pulling a casserole from the freezer and handing dishes to me to put on the table as if I’d been in the family forever. “I thought we’d have something simple tonight since we’re having a big dinner tomorrow,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind noodle kugel.”

“Bet that’s not something you get much of out in Texas,” Howie had said. “Bet you eat a lot of chicken-fried steak and grits—”

“Dad!”

“Howie!”

Ely and his mother spoke at the same time. Their exasperation was good-humored, though, and that good humor lasted through dinner while Howie slung out every Texas stereotype he could think of and Ruth asked me gently corrective questions. “Not everybody in Texas lives on a ranch, Howie. I’m sure Sophie grew up in a regular house, didn’t you, dear?”

“Well, actually, I did grow up on my grandparents’ ranch in Pflugerville.”

Ruth looked at me as if I might have made up the name to tease her.

“See, what did I tell you, Ruth? Not everyone grew up in a fifth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side eating borscht and bagels. I bet you ate plenty of steak, Sophie.”

“Actually, Sophie cooks great Mexican food,” Ely said.

I was so happy that Ely was talking about something as ordinary as food that I didn’t say that I’d learned how to cook Mexican food from one of M’Lou’s boyfriends, or mention that my grandfather had slaughtered a couple of steer and pigs for our private use each year and that we had a smokehouse filled with pork on the ranch, or mention that Ely hadn’t eaten a thing I’d cooked for months. He’d been on a raw fruit and vegetable diet since I’d gotten back from the hospital, most of which he pulverized and drank in juice form. The Hyde Park bungalow smelled like carrots and wheatgrass and Ely’s skin had begun to take on an orange tint, but at his mother’s table he was wolfing down noodle kugel slathered in sour cream and washing it down with Manischewitz wine. He seemed to want to do nothing more than make his parents happy, and although I didn’t think that would extend to eating any of the brisket I saw thawing in the bottom of the refrigerator, I was hoping he might listen to them if they asked him not to go to New Mexico.

After dinner Howie dragged Ely out to the garage to see his new carpentry tools and I offered to help Ruth clean up in the kitchen. She donned rubber gloves and an apron and washed the dishes with lemon-scented soap while I dried with a red-and-white-checked dish towel.

“That was a great dinner, Ruth,” I told her for the third time. “Ely said you were a great cook.” That last part was a lie—Ely had told me next to nothing about his parents or his dead brother—but I wanted to get off on a good footing with Ely’s mother and get her on my side on the New Mexico question.

“Did he, now?” she asked, sounding skeptical, but pleased. “Well, Ely was always an easy child. Sometimes I thought too easy.”

“What do you mean?”
Easy
is not a word I would have used to describe Ely, and I wondered if his mother was seriously out of touch with what her son was really like.

“He’s always wanted to please us. Especially after his brother, Paul, died.” Ruth’s face tightened at the mention of her dead son’s name, but she went on washing the dishes, moving the sponge in counterclockwise circles along the rim of the plates.

“You mean he wanted to live up to who Paul was?” I asked, making my own circles on the plates Ruth handed me. “All those ribbons and trophies in Ely’s room—”

“We wanted to take those down.” Ruth squirted more liquid soap onto her sponge. “Of course we did, only Ely had a fit. He wanted it all to stay the same. The family counselor we saw said to leave the room as it was as long as Ely wanted it that way. We didn’t realize that would be until he went away to college! And even then he made me promise to keep it all the same when he left. I didn’t want to do anything to upset him. I know it looks bad—believe me, we’ve never done a thing or said a word to Ely to make him think we valued him one smidgen less than Paul. Never compared them or tried to make Ely follow in Paul’s footsteps. Doing math was all Ely’s idea and, truth be told”—Ruth lowers her voice and whispers—“Ely’s better at math than Paul ever was.”

Ruth handed me a dish and I noticed that there were still suds clinging to the back rim. I swiped them away surreptitiously and stole a look at Ruth. She’d set her mouth in a hard line, trying not to cry, I realized, that little betrayal of her dead son having cost her dearly.

“Ely’s never said what Paul died of,” I said, at a loss for any way to console a mother for the loss of a child. Where would I have learned? I remembered when the state trooper came to our door to tell my grandparents that my mother had drowned in the San Marcos River. My grandmother had told me to leave off playing jacks on the kitchen floor and go get the man some iced tea. Then she’d told me to sit down on the couch and sit up straight to listen to what the man had to say. The trooper, looking embarrassed to be retelling this news to a ten-year-old girl, explained to me that my mother must not have realized how high the river was.
Drunk, more like it,
my grandfather had said. When the state trooper left we sat down to our usual three-course meal of heavy food—the slightly burned taste of the pork roast the only sign that something had gone wrong.

“Cystic fibrosis,” Ruth said, handing me another plate—this one well-rinsed—to dry. “We found out Paul had it when I was pregnant with Ely. I’ve often wondered if I had known earlier…” She let the sentence go unfinished and I heard Ely’s voice saying that some of the greatest discoveries had been made through error. Ely, who would have known exactly what the odds were of Howard and Ruth Markowitz having a second son with cystic fibrosis and what his life expectancy would have been if he had been born with the disease. He must have felt the arbitrariness of his having been spared and wondered what he’d been spared
for.

“So if you’re thinking of having children,” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper again even though Ely and Howie were still out in the garage, “you ought to be tested. Ely’s a carrier. Of course we were heartbroken when we heard you’d lost the baby, but now you can be tested to see if you have the gene and then you’ll know for sure when you’re ready to try again.”

“Ruth,” I said, “has Ely told you about his plans? That he’s talking about moving to New Mexico?”

“Oh, that won’t last.” Ruth took the dish towel from my hand, neatly folding it lengthwise and hanging it over the stove handle to dry. “Not if he knows he has you to come home to.”

Howie and Ely came back from the garage then, and Ruth busied herself putting the coffee on. (The Markowitz family drank caffeinated coffee after dinner every night, which was one of the reasons I didn’t sleep the three nights I was there.) I didn’t get a chance to speak with her alone for the rest of the evening, and I knew by the time that Ely and I retired to “our room” that Ruth and Howie viewed the Tetraktys community in New Mexico as a sort of summer camp, like the United Synogague Youth bus tour they had sent Ely on in high school and the Birthright trip to Israel he took two years ago. The fact that the group was named for a Pythagorean symbol seemed to make the Markowitzes think of it as a sort of math club. And if they had any reservations, they were counting on me to be a big enough draw to get Ely back to Austin and grad school by the spring semester.

“Starting her second year already!” Howie had said to Ely, winking sideways at me. “You’ll have a lotta catching up to do. Maybe you’ll want to stop at the master’s and get a teaching certificate. There’s always work for a good math teacher and the salary’s not half bad around here.”

“Sh, Howie,” Ruth said. “I’m sure Sophie’s got family of her own in Texas she wants to stay near.”

“Just the aunt, though, right Sophie?” Howie said. “Really, the two of you should think of moving back East. I’m sure we could find Sophie a job teaching Latin—”

Ruth had halted him with a roll of the eyes and Howie shrugged. “I’m just saying!” he pleaded.

There was never any question of me taking the other bed—
Paul’s
bed. I lay awake all that night, clinging to the edge of Ely’s narrow bed, staring up at the multicolored planets spinning in the breeze from the open window, and trying to believe in Ruth and Howie Markowitz’s vision of our future. I would have been willing, then, to give up the Ph.D., M’Lou’s proximity, good Mexican food, and mild winters if it meant I could keep Ely, but I knew that the vision of that life was as far from reality as those Styrofoam balls were from being real planets. I’d felt some hope when I saw that Ely really seemed to like his parents, to want to please them, but then I remembered the way Ruth’s face had looked when she’d forced herself to say her dead son’s name. Ely would have seen that look every day of his life. He would have heard, too, the muffled weeping I heard that night coming from his parents’ bedroom next door. He’d have tried to do everything he could to make them happy—been an A+ student in the subject his father taught and that Paul had been good at, eaten everything on his plate—but he also would have known that he would always fall short. They would never be purely happy. Always the shadow of that lost child would have fallen over any chance of that. No matter what Ely ever achieved, it was not in his power to make them happy. It was a failing I knew something about, having realized myself at age ten that I hadn’t been enough to keep my mother home—or to keep her alive.

When I turned on my side, I was looking at the other bed: Paul’s bed. There was a shallow depression in the center the shape and size a thirteen-year-old boy would have made scrunched up into a fetal position. I stared at that spot all night until I thought I had its shape and size memorized.

When I wake up in the middle of the night, I’m surprised to find myself in my own room and not Ely’s childhood bedroom. I can still see, though, the shape of the depression in Paul’s bed hovering in the air and I hear Charles’s voice saying:
A lot of lost souls come here looking for something to fill their empty places.
I thought I knew the shape and size of the emptiness inside of Ely.

I get up to dispel the impression that there’s a ghost hovering in the room and walk into the study. I’d forgotten to close the shade earlier, but I leave it open for the feel of the night air wafting through the window, smelling like mimosa and jasmine—a scent that reminds me of the evening walks Ely and I used to take in the neighborhood.

Since Charles told me this afternoon that Ely has left the Tetraktys community in New Mexico I can’t shake off the feeling that he’s coming for me and that these signs—the dreams, the dead crow, Dale Henry taking the same book Ely had—are all presages of his arrival. What I can’t decide is whether it’s something I want or dread.

I click open my e-mail and see that John Lyros has sent a reply.

June 5, 2008

Salve!

I can’t tell you how pleased I am personally that you are considering joining the Papyrus Project. I’ve read your articles on Petronia Iusta and thought of you as soon as we learned that Gaius Petronius Stephanus was the owner of the villa and saw Iusta’s name mentioned in the text. I’m sure you are as anxious as we are to see what he has to say about her. I’ve directed the excavation team to concentrate on the room where this scroll was found in the hope that we’ll turn up Phineas’s waterproof trunk. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll find the scrolls Phineas was rumored to have stolen from Greece and Egypt.