Trail of the Spellmans (21 page)

“And Henry never knew?”

“We were in a bit of a standoff. Neither of us wanted to be the messenger.”

“I see.”

“Now, that’s my story,” Gerty said. “What’s yours?”

“Huh?”

“You and Henry have to have an honest conversation one of these days.”

“I know,” I replied.

“What are you waiting for?”

“I know how it’s going to end.”

Just then Henry walked through the front door. It wasn’t clear to me
what my role in all this should be. Was I supposed to stay and help make peace or give them their privacy? I’ve always been better at leaving, so I did.

“I’ll let you two be alone,” I said, collecting my coat and bag.

Henry nodded, barely making eye contact.

I sat in my car for ten minutes, still clinging to the idea that this situation could be resolved. Then it got cold and I realized I had no place to go. If Grammy Spellman were out of the picture I would have dropped by my parents’ house, but I was going to avoid contact as much as possible. Once Grammy got her claws in you, it was kind of hard to get them out.

And so I made one final, futile, and frankly pathetic attempt to solve the problem.

I knocked on his door. He opened it just a crack and looked me up and down as if I were a genuine physical threat. I did enjoy the unease I saw in his eyes.

“I don’t want any trouble,” Bernie said, raising his hands, as if this were a holdup.

“Just let me in.”

Bernie backed away from the door and silently invited me in. He grabbed a beer from the fridge, uncapped the bottle, and passed it to me.

“I got some potato chips and some Cheez Doodles,” he said.

“Not hungry,” I replied.

“You don’t have to be hungry for Cheez Doodles,” Bernie replied.

“What does she see in you?” I asked.

“I’m a nice guy,” Bernie said with an edge in his voice I don’t think I’d ever heard. “And I know how to treat a lady. I know what they need.”

“Okay. Change. Of. Subject,” I said.

I reached into my bag and pulled out my checkbook. I had two thousand four hundred and twenty-five dollars in savings. I clicked my ballpoint pen a few times to get his attention.

“What’ll it take?” I asked.

“You can’t be serious,” he said.

“Deadly,” I replied.

“Put your checkbook away,” Bernie said, taking a slug of his beer.

“Everybody has a price,” I replied.

“You might be right, Iz. But unless you’ve just won the lottery, you’re not going to be able to cover this bribe.”

“But you could be bought, right?”

“Forgive me for getting psychological on you, but it seems to me that you’re using me and Gerty as way of avoiding your own relationship issues.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I heard Henry asked you to marry him and you said you’d get back to him on it. If we both played our cards right, you could be my stepdaughter once removed or something.”

It was time to remove myself from the conversation. “This isn’t over,” I said, and then I let myself out.

It was only eight
P.M
. when I arrived at David and Maggie’s, so I rang their front doorbell.

“Isabel!” Maggie said when she opened the door. She said my name more like it was an idea than a name.

She let me in and then shouted, “Hey, David, guess who’s here?”

I’d like to think that a surprise visit from me is cause to celebrate, but Maggie was far too enthusiastic, which immediately put me on guard.

“I can come back at a better time,” I said.

“No, this is great! Have a seat. Can I get you anything? Drink? Food? Water? Or seltzer water. We have one of those machines. Bubbles all the time.”

“I’m fine,” I said, trying to gauge the tenor of the room. Something was off; I sensed danger, of all things.

David descended the stairs, carrying Sydney.

“Isabel, what are you doing here?”

“I had to get out of my house and, well, the unit’s place is kind of like Chernobyl right now.”

“I hear you,” he said.

“You know what I’m thinking?” Maggie said.

I had no idea.

“Nope,” David replied. Apparently David didn’t know either.

Maggie turned to me with pleading eyes. “Our babysitter has the flu.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I replied.

Dead silence.

I honestly had no idea what Maggie was getting at, so I misread the silence.

“It’s not serious, I hope,” I said sympathetically.

“What do you think?” Maggie said to David.

David shrugged his shoulders and said, “I dunno if that’s such a good idea.”

Maggie took her daughter from David’s arms and said, “It’s an excellent idea,” then she passed Sydney to me and said, “We need to get out of the house
now
. Please, please, please babysit. She’ll be asleep in no time flat. She’s been fed and changed. You know where the crib is. If we leave in five minutes, we can still make the movie. We’ll be gone three hours tops.”

I’m sure that some protest emitted from my lips. I know words were coming out of my mouth, but they were in competition with other words not said by me, like “Hurry,” “Where’s my sneaker?” “Wear your loafers,” “I hate being late for movies,” and “Banana.”

The next thing I knew, Sydney and I were gazing into each other’s eyes with absolutely nothing to say.

She appeared bored at first and then panicked. She began to cry. I asked her not to cry. She continued to cry. I asked her again, more politely, meaning I used the word
please
. She still cried. Then I used that strange voice that people often use with children and still she cried. I said “banana,” which I knew I was not supposed to say, and she stopped crying and said “banana.” Then it took me exactly forty-two minutes to figure out which banana she wanted. Some kind of puffed snack made out of vegetables with a pirate as its mascot.

I wasn’t sure if tiny kids brushed their teeth or not, so I skipped it. I figured since baby teeth just end up under a pillow one day, why go crazy?
¹

I read
The Cat in the Hat
twice,
The Cat in the Hat Comes Back
three times, and
Green Eggs and Ham
twice. Sydney seemed to conk out halfway through the last book, but I kept reading just to be safe. I put her in her crib, brought the baby monitor into the living room, and poured myself a stiff drink.

I spent the rest of the evening cycling through a couple hundred cable channels on David and Maggie’s fifty-two-inch plasma TV. It was a relic from David’s bachelor days—I don’t suspect he’d approve of such excess now. Still, it was the perfect salve to my brutal day of reality-facing. I’ve discovered that if you watch real people on television, you suddenly discover that you and every person around you are the picture of sanity and decency. Some of the people on TV made me think that Bernie wasn’t such a bad option. There are worse things than a cigar-smoking, strip-club-going, poker-playing, beer-bellied slob, right? Besides, Bernie said he was cutting back on the strip clubs. He was looking for a more cerebral connection.

Once again, I fell asleep on their couch. Maggie gently shook me awake and suggested I sleep in the guest room. Since I wasn’t sure what was happening back at my place, it seemed wise. Or cowardly, depending on how you look at it.

In the morning, the sound of an ill-played xylophone woke me. (It would have woken Rip Van Winkle.) Since I had actually caught more Zs than David or Maggie, I was surprised to see how chipper they were at such an early hour. “Morning,” I said as I shuffled into the kitchen. I had no idea where my shoes were located.

This house was starting to seem a bit like a footwear Bermuda Triangle.

“Thanks again,” Maggie said, pouring me a cup of coffee.

“How’d it go?” David asked.

“Fine,” I replied, “once I figured out that ‘banana’ meant ‘beer and beef
jerky’ and that her bedtime reading was Henry Miller’s
Tropic of Cancer.
”

“Tropic of Capricorn,
” Maggie said, correcting me.

“Very funny,” David said, not thinking it was funny at all. “We’re not saying ‘banana’ anymore.”

“I’ll try to respect that rule in this house, but in the real world, it might slip out on occasion.”

“What did you feed her? Because she already had dinner.”

“I gave her some of that stuff with the pirate on it.”

“And then what did you do?”

“We read the complete Dr. Seuss collection. Happy?”

David’s brow unfurled and he crouched on the floor with his daughter. “Did you have a fun time with your aunt Izzy?” he asked in a high squeaky voice.

Sydney stared at him blankly.

“Say good morning to Aunt Izzy.”

Sydney stared at me blankly.

“Remember me from last night?” I asked.

“Did you have fun?” Maggie asked.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I replied.

“I was actually talking to Sydney,” Maggie said.

“Oh, well, she’d probably agree. We had an
okay
time, didn’t we, Sydney?”

“Why can’t you talk to her like a normal person?” asked David.

“I’m the only one talking to her like a normal person. You sound like a eunuch.”

“Children respond to higher-pitched noises,” David said. “I’m not sure you have a maternal bone in your body.”

“Me neither,” I replied, feeling his comment like a cattle prod.

“That’s enough, David,” Maggie said.

“Banana,” Sydney said.

“See you later,” I said.

THE BERNIE PROJECT AND OTHER MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

Gerty was gone when I got home. Her bags had presumably been packed, her bed had been made (probably not by her, judging from the military corners), and every sign of the disorder that naturally surrounded her had vanished. Besides, the perennial note,
I’m not here,
was no longer there, which struck me as being ironic. But Gerty did send me a succinct e-mail explaining that she broke the news to her son. While I would never thank Bernie for the grenade he threw into my life when he and Gerty began their baffling affair, there was an unforeseen benefit that I couldn’t ignore.

Once Henry had choked down the news from his mother, his hunger for any form of interpersonal communication was sated. His previous desire
to talk
had been replaced by an unprecedented desire
to watch.
I found him in the living room, staring blankly at a reality television show about reformed Dungeons and Dragons addicts. A show, under specific desperate circumstances, I could imagine myself toggling back and forth to, but not Henry. I removed the remote from his hand and changed the channel to cable news, which is his standby version of escape entertainment. He explained to me once that if you watch the news on what seems like a loop, suddenly it presents itself as fiction and you stop worrying (and maybe learn to love the bomb).

In local news, the oak trees got a stay of execution while the campus authorities continued their negotiations with the tree sitters. On the national front, their fifteen minutes of fame were at least fourteen minutes shorter and clearly skewed in favor of the Man.

“You know?” I said, as a conversation starter. And, frankly, this was one of those occasions when “Some weather we’ve been having” would have been superior.

“I know.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Popcorn.”

“You need something to wash it down with?”

“Beer.”

I put on my coat and headed for the door. Then I figured I ought to say something.

“In my defense, there was no way to predict this would happen. I mean, Bernie?”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Thanks. But I promise it won’t last. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve.”
¹

“Leave it,” Henry said. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“If you say so,” I replied.

But I’ve discovered very few situations in which there’s nothing you can do.

While Henry quietly wallowed in the image of his mother with Bernie, I took action by attempting to machete every obstacle that lay in my path to . . . well, the status quo. What I wanted, I suppose, was for things to stay the same, for the universe to be in the same order it was in a few months
ago (a simpler time) and for people to behave in the manner I had come to expect. I’ve got nothing against change, but sometimes it’s totally unnecessary.

There was no dearth of projects for me to sink my teeth into. I began with the Bernie Project, making several phone calls and e-mail queries and even composing a few handwritten notes, revisiting my second-grade year, when Mrs. Averly had failed me on every English assignment simply because she found my penmanship abhorrent. As I waited for replies to my inquiries, I phoned Fred Finkel in the hopes of taking a more proactive approach.

“Fred,” I said.

“Isabel,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you agree, after your flubbed surveillance work, that maybe you owe me?”

“I hadn’t thought it over.”

“I did pay you in full for shoddy work.”

“So the scales are tipped slightly in your favor.”

“I’m happy to hear that.”

“Is that all?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I replied. “I need you to do something for me.”

“I figured as much.”

“How old are you now, Fred?”

“Twenty.”

“Excellent. Do you have other friends in your age range? And when I say ‘age range,’ I mean under twenty-one.”

“Uh, yeah. Where are you going with this, Isabel?”

“I’d like you to go to a bar—the Philosopher’s Club in particular—and order drinks. Alcoholic ones, preferably. I’ll pick up the tab.”

“Can I ask why?”

“Plus twenty an hour.”

“It’s illegal, you know,” Fred said.

“I know. Are you in?”

“Why not? I’ve always found the drinking age kind of random.”

“Do me a favor.”

“What?” he asked.

“Don’t invite Rae.”

“Hadn’t crossed my mind.”

Two hours later, Fred sent me a text: In position.