White Picket Fences (10 page)

“So at last we will talk about this, eh, Chase?”

“What?”

“I was beginning to think you were never going to ask.”

“I…I was waiting for
you
to bring it up.”

“Why?”

Chase opened his mouth and then shut it. He didn’t really know.

Josef tipped his head. “Come anytime. Bring your friends. Bring your camera. I have been waiting.”

thirteen

O
kay so here’s how I see it.” Matt lay on Chase’s unmade bed with the one-page criteria for the sociology project lying across his lap. It was wrinkled and dog eared and stained with a splatter of Mountain Dew. “We can maybe open with some stills off the Internet. You know, pictures from concentration camps fading in and out, with our own commentary providing the prologue. Then we bring in pictures of Josef and Eliasz. And then we add their voices. And we can ask them questions, but not have it be part of the audio. Have it be a text image, white on black. We can add in stills of your great-grandfather as they’re talking.”

Chase leaned against his computer desk, arms folded across his chest. Tally sat on the floor by his feet, stroking the Janviers’ snoozing cocker spaniel. He was about to tell Matt he had seen too many mediocre documentaries when Matt continued.

“Then we just let these guys go to town. I bet they can talk for hours about this stuff. So we just let them talk. We’ll probably have a couple hours of footage for a fifteen-minute video, and the hardest part about the project will be trimming the content, not coming up with it. It will be a piece of cake.”

Tally kept her eyes on the dog. “I really don’t think this project will feel like it’s a piece of cake.”

“Okay. Bad word choice. But you know what I mean. It’s not going to take hours and hours of our time. And I’m telling you, I’ve got two AP courses that are killing me. And a job and soccer practice. This will work out great.”

“I don’t want to use stills off the Internet,” Chase said.

Matt sat up. “Why not? People do it all the time.”

“I don’t.”

“Hey, even the History Channel uses other people’s stuff.”

“From museums and private collections maybe, but they don’t go trawling the Internet for pictures.”

“Chase…,” Matt began.

“Besides, that intro has been done to death. Old pictures fading in and out, dissolving to an old guy in a wheelchair, remembering.”

Matt swung his legs around. “That’s because it works. That intro works.”

“I don’t settle for what works; I want what makes an impression.” Chase looked down at his cousin. Tally’s hand still rested on the dog’s back, but she was looking at him.

“I suppose you have a better idea for an intro?” Matt asked. “And no weird film-noir crap, either. This thing has to have a point any ten-year-old would get.”

“Of course I have a better idea.”

“Let’s hear it, then.”

It had taken only a few moments of speculation to come up with an idea for the opening of their video. The idea came to him when he saw Tally looking longingly at the answering machine when they got home from school. She’d hoped it would be
blinking. Without a word he knew she was hoping to hear from Bart. But there was no message.

“We open with nothing but violin, high and ethereal, like we’re in somebody’s dream,” Chase began. “Then we fade to a man walking through a cemetery. We don’t see the man’s face, just his feet. We see him step through fallen leaves, and we see the trail he makes with his footsteps. He’s looking for the headstone of his grandfather who died at Treblinka. He’s been to many cemeteries. This is a man who’s looking for truth. He wants to know the truth. His grandfather died behind a wall of oppression, and no one mourned. He wants to know the truth of what happened behind that wall, of what happened while everyone looked away and pretended there was no wall.”

Chase looked down at his cousin. She was staring at him, mouth half open.

“That would be cool.” Matt looked past Chase to a place in his mind. “That would actually be very cool… Oh. Hey, I get it. The man in the cemetery is your uncle Bart. Awesome. Yeah. That’d be awesome.”

“No,” Tally whispered, her eyes still on Chase.

Matt turned to look at her. “Yes, it would be awesome. Trust me. I know Gimble. He’s going to love this.”

Chase held his cousin’s gaze. Something secretive hung there. “Why not?”

She shook her head, her eyes still locked with Chase’s. “I don’t want my dad brought into this.”

“How come?” Matt asked. “It’s the perfect setup.”

Tally turned to look at Matt. “I don’t want to make this
about my dad. Let’s keep it about the guys at the nursing home, okay?”

“It’s about truth,” Chase replied. “It’s about what’s true. Your dad is just one little part of it. You can’t pretend he’s not. His grandfather—our great-grandfather—died at the hands of the Nazis. That makes Uncle Bart part of it. Makes
us
part of it.”

“If I’m part of it, then I want to make it an anonymous man who walks through the graveyard. We don’t have to say it’s my dad.”

Chase just looked down on her, wordless. But Matt was quick to argue. “Yes, we do. It makes our project personal. It will stand out. We have to.”

“No, we don’t,” Tally said. “There are probably tens of thousands of people like my dad who are looking or have looked for relatives who died during the war. An anonymous man can represent all of those people.”

Matt shook his head. “No. I like it better that it’s specific. This is what’s going to set our project apart.”

“But that’s not why he’s there!” Tally said angrily.

“Then what’s he looking for?” Chase’s tone was calm and measured.

Tally lifted her eyes to him. They were anxious, her eyes. He wondered again what secret she carried. He knew she wouldn’t tell him.

“It has nothing to do with what happened in the concentration camp, okay?” she said.

“Then why’s he there?” Matt’s facial features were crossed with curiosity.

“He has his reasons.” Tally resumed stroking the sleeping dog.

Matt hesitated a minute and then leaned toward her. “Is it illegal? Is that why you won’t say?”

“Matt,” Chase said.

“What? That would explain why he’s missing.”

“It’s not illegal,” Tally replied.

Matt turned to her again. “Hey, my uncle’s a lawyer. And I’m not just talking an ambulance chaser. He’s in international affairs. If your dad needs a lawyer…”

“I just told you it’s not illegal!”

The dog awoke and lifted its head.

“Then why haven’t you heard from him? What if he needs help?”

“Matt!” Chase raised his voice also.

“What?”

“Chill.”

Matt raised his hands. “Fine. Just trying to help.” He lay back on the bed and huffed. “A guy tries to be nice…”

“We can make the man in the intro anonymous, representative of everyone on the search for truth,” Chase said evenly. “It’s not going to make or break the project.”

“Fine,” Matt mumbled.

Tally looked up at Chase. She didn’t smile or whisper a thank you. He half expected her to, but she didn’t. Then she turned her head toward Matt, who was sprawled on the bed.

“He’s not into anything illegal. This is just how my dad is, Matt. I’m used to it.”

“Used to what?” Matt didn’t look at her.

“Used to him not doing what everyone expects him to do. He’s never done that.”

Matt sat up halfway and spoke in a lighter tone. “He always does what people never expect?”

Chase saw a half smile on Tally’s face materialize as she realized what she was saying. You could expect her dad to do the unexpected.

A knock sounded at his door, and his mother poked her head in. “Matt, would you like to stay for dinner? We’re having manicotti. I know you like it.”

Matt smiled. “Sure, Mrs. J. Thanks.”

“Dinner in ten, then. You guys making headway?”

“Yeah,” Chase said. “We’ve got a plan that will work.”

“That’s great.” His mother smiled at him, her eyes lingering as if she wanted to say more. But then she turned to Tally.

“Tally, you want to come pour the milk?”

“Sure.” Tally rose from the floor and followed his mother out of the room.

Matt flopped back down on the bed. “I’m telling you, dude. Your mom is Mother of the Year.”

“Right. Mother of the Year.” Chase turned around and started rifling through DVD cases on the shelf above his desk, looking for an unused one for their project.

“Hey,” Matt continued. “Why do you think Tally won’t say why her dad’s in Europe? If it’s not illegal, why won’t she say? Think she doesn’t know?”

Chase found a fresh DVD and began taking off the shrink-wrap. “No. She knows.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

“Why do you think he’s there? It probably has nothing to do with your relatives, does it?”

He crumpled the shrink-wrap and tossed it into a trash can under his desk. The plastic immediately began to uncrumple itself. “No, that part is true, I think.”

“So why’s he there?”

“Why does anybody do anything?” Chase turned to his friend. “He wants something.”

Later, just before ten, Tally came to his bedroom and leaned against the door frame as he powered down his computer. His mother was already in bed, Delcey was in the bathroom, and his dad was in his woodshop, where he’d been since dinner, sanding a rocking chair for the church nursery.

He looked up at her and waited.

“You already knew my dad’s not in Poland researching the concentration camp, didn’t you?” she asked.

“So? Anybody with a brain can see that. If he was just there to look up records in a museum, he wouldn’t be missing.”

“He’s not missing.”

“Nobody knows where is. Including you.” Tally recoiled, and he wished he hadn’t said the last two words. “Okay. Sorry. It’s obvious your dad is looking for
something.
That’s cool. I really don’t care. And I don’t care that
you
know what it is.”

“It’s nobody’s business.”

“I didn’t ask.” Chase closed his laptop and pushed it to the middle of his desk.

“He asked me not to say anything.”

“Then don’t.”

Tally hesitated only a moment. Then she turned, went into Delcey’s room, and closed the door.

fourteen

T
he concrete wall warmed Tally’s back as she waited for Chase to get out of his last class. Around her, throngs of students laughed and chatted, either in groups or on their cell phones, on their way to parking lots and bus lines. They stepped around her, noting her presence without looking at her.

The third day at school was as unremarkable as the two before it. What she had hoped for was happening. She could be anonymous here. There were other brunette girls with magenta streaks in their hair who carried tattered backpacks and spoke in class only when necessary. She could actually blend in without any conscious effort.

There were probably a couple hundred girls like her at Chase’s school: anonymous observers who earned average grades and flew below the radar. It would be very easy to leave here when her father came back.

She leaned her head against the wall and let the radiating heat massage the back of her head.

Sometimes when Amanda looked at her, she could tell her aunt was imagining what her life must be like with just Bart for a parent—and without a mother, since being a mother seemed to nearly define Amanda’s existence.

There had been only a couple of times when Tally thought
perhaps a mother figure might enter her life. Both times it hadn’t worked out that way. The first woman she could remember was when she was nine. Her father had taken a job as a doorman for a resort in Cape Cod, and the two of them lived in a cottage with three other hotel employees, including a woman who was the hotel’s hairdresser. When she wasn’t working, Connie would braid Tally’s hair into cornrows or curl it into ringlets or tease it into a cone or dye it different shades. And whenever she fussed with Tally’s hair, she’d tell her all the things she would do if she had a little girl like Tally. Tally remembered asking her dad if he was going marry Connie. After six months of Connie’s affections, Tally had thought it was a pretty good idea.

Her father laughed and frowned at the same time. “You’re a cutie, Tally-ho,” he said. “But I can’t marry Connie. She’s already married. Besides, I don’t love her.”

Her father handed her a hot dog wrapped in a slice of Wonder bread—the menu for dinner that evening—and told her that Connie’s husband had stolen money from his company and was doing time. Tally hadn’t known what doing time meant, but she was more interested in why he didn’t love Connie.

“It wouldn’t make any sense to love a woman who’s married to someone else, would it, Tally-ho? That’s just asking for trouble.”

Six months later Connie left the cottage to go live with her sister in Miami. Six months after that, her dad heard a new casino was opening in Reno and they were looking for blackjack dealers. Her father quit his job at the resort, bought a used car, and pointed it west. They never made it to Reno. The car broke down outside Tulsa, and by the time Bart had money to fix it,
he had met some people who were opening a sports bar and grill and they wanted him to work there. They stayed in Oklahoma for two years until Bart met Mellanie, an underwear model from New York City who was in Tulsa for the wedding of her college roommate.

On the night of the rehearsal dinner, the wedding party came to the sports bar to unwind, and Mell and Bart fell into a conversation that lasted until dawn. After the wedding on Saturday, Mell came to their little apartment and invited Bart to come to Manhattan to be her bodyguard, valet, chauffeur, escort, and live-in assistant. Bart told her it sounded like a great job, but he couldn’t come without Tally. Mell had winked at him and told him she only had a two-bedroom condo, but Tally was welcome to the guest room.

Tally had looked away. She knew what Mell meant. Even at twelve she knew Mell was asking Bart to share her bedroom. Her bed. She knew enough to be embarrassed by Mell’s little wink.

After Mell left the bar, her dad made hot chocolate and asked her if she wanted to go live in New York.