Wit's End (28 page)

By eight-thirty, Tilda had all six pie wedges. “Pwned again,” Addison said, handing Tilda her final wedge plus the ring of ultimate power.

Tilda wore the ring while she did the dishes, thus proving herself extremely unclear on the concept of total world domination. Rima cleaned up the board and cards. Addison poured herself a glass of whiskey.

Martin arrived a little after nine. “I kept dinner hot for you,” Tilda said, but he said he'd already eaten.

Martin and Rima quarreled quietly at the top of the stairs. Things got about as heated as they could and still be whispered. A pen-and-ink sketch of an old oak was hanging on the wall behind Martin. By tilting her head, Rima could make the tree appear to grow straight out of his hair. This provided a small and cheap sense of satisfaction.

Rima started the fight, unless Martin started it by being so late in the first place, for which a case could certainly be made. “Your mother expected you for dinner,” Rima said. Her tone was as unpleasant as she could make it.

Martin's was unperturbed. “My mother missed the teen years,” he said. “I'm just filling in the gaps.” He added that he didn't really think of Tilda as his mother anyway, and he wished Rima wouldn't keep calling her that. He stood, with the tree growing out of his head, stroking that stupid little stamp of hair above his chin in a way Rima could describe only as complacent. There were many reasons Rima would never grow a beard. Among them was all the annoying stroking.

Rima said that he did too think of Tilda as his mother, because no one would treat another person as badly as he treated Tilda unless that person was his mother. No one would treat a stranger or a casual acquaintance that way.

“I didn't say I wasn't her child,” Martin said nonsensically. “I said she wasn't my mother.” He'd taken a step backward, so Rima lost the edge that the tree on the wall had given her. Now she was reduced to winning on the merits.

She pointed out that his mother wasn't dead, the way some people's mothers were. Dead to you, she said, was not at all the same as dead. Someday Tilda
would
be dead, and Rima could predict with absolute certainty that then Martin would be sorry.

By now his temper matched Rima's. How often, he asked, did Rima plan to play the my-whole-family-is-dead card? Could she limit it to once or twice a day, because it was getting tiresome.

And anyway, Martin said, any idiot could see that it was worse for him because his mother
wasn't
dead. Rima's mother would have stayed if she could, but Martin's mother had chosen to leave. His situation was much worse, and if Rima weren't so focused on herself she'd see this. “Just because she's back now doesn't mean she's here to stay,” Martin said. “How do I know she's not already drinking again?”

Rima remembered Tilda with Addison's glass in her hand, sitting in the TV room in the blue light of the aquarium. If she hadn't been so angry, she might have conceded Martin the point. But what he'd said about her family was unforgivable. “I would give anything,” Rima said, “to see my mother again,” and Martin said, there, that proved it, because there wasn't a thing in the world he would give for that.

And how was any of it Rima's business?

They retired to their separate rooms, both in a state of substantial snit. The clock on the wall chimed ten.

Just after the chime at the quarter-hour, Tilda came knocking. In spite of the whispering, the argument had been overheard. “Please don't blame him,” Tilda said. “Please stay out of it.” And then, having just asked her to stay out of it, Tilda said that Martin was leaving and would Rima please come and talk him back into staying the night. Rima followed her down the stairs. Seeing Martin and Tilda by the door together made her notice how much they looked alike. Same hair, same eyes, same sad, sad expression.

It took about a half an hour of insincere groveling to get Martin to stay. By the time it was done, Rima had agreed to that wine-tasting with ghosts in the mountains on the following day. Apparently there would be not only wine and ghosts but also a piano player.

Somewhere in the back of her head, somewhere in the midst of that jumble of Glamdring and Le Pétomane and British slang circa World War II, Oliver—or maybe it was Maxwell—had come up with a new plan, but Rima wouldn't figure that out until the next day. It would come to her slowly, as she sat in the passenger seat of Martin's car, cresting the mountains on the wet, twisted road.

You know what I could do now, she would find herself thinking, if only I wasn't me? You know what someone who wasn't me could do now?

You know what Oliver would do?

B
efore Rima found herself on the slick, deadly Highway 17 in the passenger seat of Martin's old blue Civic, she'd had one more chat with Addison.

Just as she was going to bed, there was a knock that she immediately feared might mean Martin had confused insincere groveling with foreplay. He wouldn't be the first. But when she opened the door, it was Addison standing in the hallway, a glass in each hand, whiskey bottle under her arm. “You asked about your father and me,” she said, and Rima let her in, let her take the seat by the window. Addison poured a glass and passed it to Rima. Then she stared for a while in silence at the black water, the string of harbor lights, the distant roller coasters.

“My uncle always wanted his own boat,” she said finally. “When he was my father, he used to say he'd name it after me. The
Addie B.
Never could afford it, though.”

“One of my favorite books when I was little was called
The Maggie B.
,” Rima said. “It was all about a girl who took her little brother James out on her boat, and they ate a soup she made with fish and crabs, and then they slept under the stars. I don't think it was the boat I found so appealing. It was more how competent the big sister was. It was how she managed the boat and the supper and bath and bedtime. I used to love books where it was up to the big sister to keep everything together. Like
Homecoming.
” By “keeping things together” Rima meant mostly not losing people.

“I used to love books about big families,” Addison said. “
Little Women. Cheaper by the Dozen. The Family Nobody Wanted.
I used to fantasize about brothers and sisters.”

Rima sipped her whiskey without answering. This was an effort, because ordinarily Rima liked nothing better than to talk about the books of her childhood. In the conversation she wasn't having, she told Addison she'd also loved
Cheaper by the Dozen,
and what was up with the movie? She didn't know
The Family Nobody Wanted.
She asked if the Edward Eager books had been around when Addison was a girl. Because of those books, if Rima were a writer—which she never would be, Addison had nothing to worry about on that score—she would write books with magic in them.

But Rima said none of this. Rima said nothing at all. Her throat was hot where the whiskey had been. Addison too was silent, staring out the window for what seemed to Rima to be a long time.

Addison was thinking about her uncle's boat, the one he'd never gotten. After her new aunt had talked to her mother about finances and Addison had gotten the
Sentinel
job, she went to her aunt and uncle's house in their absence and looked for his canceled checks. Because he had moved so recently, things were unusually well organized. She'd found them in a box in the study closet, labeled “Canceled Checks.” She wanted to know how much her uncle had been giving her.

She'd started back a year before his marriage. He'd paid the rent and utilities on their house. No phone payments, and nothing directly to her mother. Addison didn't much notice the first check to William Riker. She didn't know who he was. But the next month there was another, and the month after that another, and every month since, her uncle had sent him two hundred dollars, the last checks having been written and cashed in the months since the marriage.

There was no William Riker listed in the Santa Cruz phone book. Addison asked at work if anyone had heard of him. “Holy City,” one of the reporters told her. “I'm sure his obit's already in hand. Look it up.”

Her uncle's politics were straight-up union, left-wing labor, and he loathed racists; there was nothing in Riker's obituary of which he would approve. This was not a man Addison would ever have imagined her uncle sending money to. It took her a couple of days to figure out what any reader of A. B. Early books would have guessed instantly.

Of course, back then there were no A. B. Early books. “You don't know half the things your parents do for you,” Addison said, and Rima didn't know quite where that was coming from, but she figured it was true.

Those checks were the reason Addison had wormed her way into the Fill Your Hole banquet, an event planned for seasoned hard-drinking reporters and not callow high school girls with part-time or summer jobs.

Which is how she'd come to know Rima's father at just that time when she had a big secret and no one to tell it to. At just that time when Addison understood what the man who wasn't her father had sacrificed for her, month after month, year after year. Not just the money, not just his own boat, but his principles as well.

“I had an enormous crush on Bim when I first met him,” Addison said finally. “Of course I was only seventeen. Prime crush years. I also liked a guy at school named Charlie Bailey, who led the debate club, and wore argyle sweaters. And the guy who bagged at the grocery. But especially Bim. And then he left and we wrote letters—he wrote great letters—and it turned into something else. Something better. He was my dear reader,” Addison said. “For a very long time, he was the first person to read every book I wrote.”

Rima had her doubts. The box she'd seen in the attic was not the sort of box you put together for your dear reader. “And then what happened?” she asked. She didn't look at Addison's face. She looked at Addison's face in the window, her ghost face, just visible underneath the bright spot of the reflected table lamp.

“I was hoping you'd tell me,” Addison said.

One day a letter Addison had written was returned unopened, along with a note asking her not to write again. She wrote again immediately, asking what she'd done, and that was returned unopened too, no note this time, just “Refused” written over the address. And then when she learned that Rima's mother had died, Addison tried again, and even that letter came back, though the handwriting on that envelope was different; she thought it might be one of Rima's aunts'.

“You must have heard something over the years,” Addison said. “You must have a guess. I'd settle for a guess.”

Rima pictured her aunts again, Oliver under the table, her mother dead and about to be buried. “She won't come,” Auntie Sue was saying. “She wouldn't have the nerve to come, today of all days.”

Auntie Lise had answered with a question. “Like she wouldn't come to the wedding?” she had asked.

Did Addison really want to have this conversation? “Were you at my parents' wedding?”

“No. Why?”

“Just something my aunts said.”

“I flew out before the wedding. Behaved very badly. But I was forgiven. All charges dropped,” Addison said. “That was a joke.”

“So when did you stop being friends?”

Addison drank again. “The
Ice City
dollhouse wasn't really destroyed in the earthquake,” she said. “It's the only one I ever dismantled. We stopped being friends after I published
Ice City.
”

Which was what Rima had always suspected. “I think it was Bim killing his wife. My mother mentioned that pretty often.” Even as Rima spoke, it didn't make sense. Her mother had mentioned it often, and just that often her father had said, “For Christ's sake, it's just a book. It's just a made-up murder in a made-up book.” He wouldn't have lost an old friend over that. Her father had seen the real world. He had perspective on the made-up ones.

“But that woman is nothing like your mother. That Bim is nothing like your father,” Addison said.

“Was my father your first reader for
Ice City
? Did he see it before you published?”

“No. He was off somewhere, back in the days of no e-mail. But he knew I was using his name. He said he was fine with it. He said he was tickled. I certainly meant it affectionately.”

“I don't think he thought he'd be killing his wife.” Rima wasn't as sure as she sounded, but she was more sure than she'd realized. Her mother had complained about the wife-killing, the zeal, the sheer electricity of it, and her father had told her not to be silly. And there had been an edge there. Every time the conversation happened, there'd been an edge.

Addison finished her whiskey. “The only man I ever truly loved is the one I made up,” she said, and there was no reason not to let her remember it that way if she chose. In point of fact, couldn't you argue she'd made up Bim too? The real one as well as the fictional?

“Maxwell's taken good care of you,” Rima said.

“Everything I ever wanted,” said Addison.

There was an empty soda can on the floor of Martin's car by Rima's feet. It rolled one way and then the other as the road turned, until finally Rima stepped on it hard. They were just pulling into a parking lot at the base of a hill. The sun was out but not insistently so. The ground was still wet from the week's rain, and the breeze was cool, sometimes cold. A strand of hair blew into Rima's mouth. She took it out.

On the hilltop, in the sun, was a lovely old villa. The wine bar at its base was smaller and more rustic. Seven other cars were parked in the lot, three of them Priuses.