Wreathed (22 page)

“You were the one to do all this, then,” I said.

“Pretty much. Would you like to take the grand tour?”

Another pinpoint of realization sparked in my brain.
Sheldon wasn’t dead.
If Sheldon wasn’t dead, then the question of who would inherit the house was moot. Sheldon would retain possession until his death. And the codicil wasn’t operative—chances were that it had never been operative. Likely as not, it was just an impressive bit of window dressing designed to lure Mother to the house on a false pretext. That meant that I didn’t have any reason not to see Adam. Ethically speaking, I was off the hook. We could go out to dinner tonight to celebrate his uncle’s return from the dead, assuming that Mother didn’t kill Sheldon dead between now and then.

“You faked your death,” I said. “You have to undo that. My mother deserves to be the first to know, and you owe it to her to tell her in person. After that, we can tell everyone else.”

“I was going to tell her. I was planning on telling her the day of the funeral. I had it all planned out, and it would have worked, if Danny showed up when he was supposed to and done what I had told him to do. All he had to do was give her the codicil that he drafted, and then walk her over here. I spent the whole day cooling my heels in the foyer, waiting on her to open the door.”

“By Danny, you mean the lawyer? Mr. Miller? He told me he had a family emergency, and that’s why he didn’t go to the funeral,” I said.

“Is that what happened? I had no idea. Do you mind if I get a chair real quick?”

“Go ahead. Knock yourself out.”

“As long as you don’t knock me out. Just a sec.”

I took my hand out of the towel and shook it. It was starting to get numb, but not quite there yet. I redistributed the ice and wrapped it back up. My breathing was finally normal, and my heart rate was down to where it had been before I went upstairs.

Sheldon came back from the kitchen with a chair, and sat in it with the back of the chair pointed towards me. “So why didn’t your mother want to come see the house?” he asked. “You were down here anyway. I would have figured anybody who inherited a house would at least have been curious about what they inherited.”

“You will have to ask her,” I said. “I would do that right before she tears you into little ribbons. And I want to be there to see that.”

Sheldon reached behind his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “Your mother will be very angry with me,” he said. “I get that. If you break it to her gently, though, it might not be so bad. Who knows, maybe she’s mellowed out in the last fifty years.”

“You didn’t see her after the funeral. She was not mellow. She was the farthest thing in the world from mellow. She was extremely unhappy. She was spouting
poetry.
”

“Oh. That doesn’t sound good.” His face twisted into a scowl. “If she’s going to be that angry with me, I can’t say I don’t deserve it. But I never meant for this to go on this long. It was supposed to be over by now.”

“Mother is going to tear a giant strip off your back and beat you over the head with it,” I said. “And she’s not alone. Think of everyone else who went to the funeral. All those nice people at the wake, from your retirement community. You have to tell them, too. You have to explain this lunatic idea of yours to fake your death.”

“Everybody else already knows,” he explained. “Danny knows; he was the one who filled out the phony death certificate. The minister at the church knows; he didn’t care so long as I threw in an extra thousand dollars as a donation. A guy I knew in the Air Force runs a mortuary in Philly; he took care of that paperwork for me, even threw in an urn for free. I filled it up with dust from my Shop-Vac, and then I told my bush pilot friend in Alaska it was coming. Ed and Hans and Paulie set up the reception; they were supposed to steer Emily over here if she went there. The newspaper didn’t care whether I was really dead or not. It wasn’t that difficult, and of course I only expected to be dead a day or two. I never expected that your mother just wouldn’t show up.”

“The entire
funeral
was phony?” I asked. “All those people
knew
you weren’t dead?”

“Not everybody. Some of those folks are senile, you know.”

“But what about Adam?” I asked. “Why would you go through with this whole crazy, numbskull idea if you knew he would think you were dead? Why hurt him like that?”

“Oh, Adam knows I’m alive,” Sheldon said. “I asked Danny to tell him after the funeral. I knew it would be difficult for him, but I’m not cruel enough to keep him in the dark all this time.”

“That’s not true,” I said, but with a little less conviction than I actually felt. “Adam would have told me if he knew you were alive.”

“Adam knows better than to say anything to anyone,” he said. “I know him. He won’t contact me until after I let him know it’s all right. But he knows I’m alive, he has to.”

I lifted my left hand and flexed it carefully. It was numb, and it had stopped throbbing and I didn’t think I had a broken bone anywhere. This was good, because if Adam had been stringing me along all this time, I would need both hands to strangle him properly.

“We’re getting in the car,” I said. “You and me. Now. And we’re going to show the world you’re not a corpse.”

“Can we stop and get lunch first?” Sheldon asked. “I haven’t eaten yet, and it’s a long drive up to your mother’s.”

“We can get you a burger on the way up,” I said. “And we’re not going straight there. We’re going to Freehold first. Adam deserves to know the truth, or if he already knows, I deserve to know why he’s been stringing me along.”

“Adam’s been doing that?” he asked. “He’s a nice kid. That’s unlike him.”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“Well, all right then,” Sheldon said. “You can tell me all about it in the car.”

“I don’t know what the story is, anymore.” If Adam had been lying to me this entire time—if he had slept with me, and let me break up with him over a will he
knew
wasn’t valid—that would be impossible. But I had just thought it was impossible for Sheldon to be alive, too. A lot of impossible things seemed to be happening lately. “What I do know is that my life started going screwy when you decided to fake your own death. What the hell were you thinking?”

“I can explain,” Sheldon said. “But like you said, it’s a long story.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but the last thing I want to do in this world is spend the whole drive up to Freehold listening to you tell me about you and my mother and what you did to each other in 1962.”

“But that’s the problem,” he said. “You only know half of what went on.”

Chapter 26

It didn’t start in 1962. That’s the first thing you need to understand. I was in love with your mother when she was in seventh grade, and I was in eighth. Now, she didn’t know who I was. She didn’t talk to me. She didn’t talk to anybody. Everybody knew who she was, and everybody knew who her grandfather was. Not that she made a big deal about being from a rich family or anything, but it impacted how you looked at her. She was treated differently because of that, and I don’t think she handled it well. That’s probably why they took her out of public school and sent her to prep school when she was old enough.

But I was in love with her, all the way back then. I had one class with her in high school. I’d failed freshman geometry the year before, and they made me retake it. I sat behind her, and I almost failed again because I spent the whole time smelling her hair. It smelled like apples and honey.

Once she went off to prep school, I figured I would never see her again. It didn’t bother me too much. I knew it would never work out. We didn’t have anything in common that I knew about. My dad always told me you didn’t ever want to marry someone that was too high above you or too far below you, because it never worked out, and I guess he was right about that. Anyway, I dated other girls in high school. I had fun. But I never stopped thinking about your mother, wondering how she was doing, that sort of thing.

I saw her one time, at the King of Pizza—I guess she was home for the weekend, having dinner with her family. She sat at the table across from mine. I spent the whole time looking at her, until my mom told me to stop staring. I think her brother saw me looking at her, too. They didn’t send him to prep school, because he wanted to play football and be on the swim team and just be a regular kid. Nice guy, you know, but he didn’t want just anyone dating his sister.

At some point, your mother noticed me. I don’t know how it happened, but all of a sudden she’s interested in me. But, being your mother, she couldn’t do something as simple as ask me out. She always had to do things the hard way. What she did was find my sister’s best friend and tell her she thought I was cute, and that was supposed to get back to my sister, who was supposed to tell me. It worked, although I supposed I shouldn’t have.

Anyway, I was not a total idiot, so I asked your mother out, and of course she said yes. So when we went out, I played it very cool. The perfect gentleman. We went out, saw a movie, and I drove her back home. I did not lay a hand on her, not once. We had a great time, don’t get me wrong, but she didn’t give me much in the way of encouragement. I was fine with that. If she wanted to take it slow, I was willing to take it slow along with her. This was 1962, you remember. Girls then weren’t forward the way they are now. But I didn’t care. I was in love.

So the day after Thanksgiving, I was sitting in my house, doing my homework, and listening to a football game on the radio. And your mother just showed up. She came in to the house, said hello, and said she wanted to go into Philly to get pizza. I figured, hey, why not. So we went and got a slice, and we just sat there again, staring at each other, not talking. Except this time, when we were leaving, she stole the car keys out of the pocket of my varsity jacket. She got behind the wheel of my car, and I had to ride along or be stranded on the wrong side of the bridge. I was a little ticked off, because I didn’t like anyone else driving my car, but I could tell she had something on her mind and I was willing to go along with it.

She drove us to this drafty deserted old house out in the suburbs, and walked inside like she owned the place. I followed her inside, because she still had my keys, and because I wanted to see what would happen. I opened the door, and your mother was standing there, in this warm shaft of autumn light. She was wearing this pure-white cardigan, and the light just folded itself around her. It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life. I can still see it, if I close my eyes, and wish hard enough. And then, when she saw me watching her, she took the cardigan off, and then everything underneath it.

“Stop,” I said. “Please. Just stop talking.”

“Oh, come on,” Sheldon said. “Your mother had a life before you were born, you know. And she had the most amazing rack back then.”

“I am
serious.
Quit talking.”

“Of course, you don’t do so bad yourself in that department. I can see why my nephew likes you.”

“Listen to me. Do you want a burger or don’t you? If you want me to stop this car and get you something to eat, you will oblige me by
not talking about my mother
that way, and especially not talking about
me
that way. You two had hot, filthy, nasty sex fifty years ago. Stipulated. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I could ask you what hot, filthy, nasty things you’ve been doing with my nephew. Is that what’s going on? You sounded awfully interested in him, back at the house.”

I hit the accelerator as hard as I could just then, trying to pass someone’s ancient red Volvo that was wallowing in the right lane. I moved back over to the right, cutting off the Volvo, whose driver honked at me. I pulled into the closest strip mall, parking my car in the first place I could find.

“Get out of my car,” I said.

“You’re crazy. You can’t just leave me here,” Sheldon said.

“I don’t intend to. Get out of the car. Now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said you were hungry,” I said. “Get something to eat, whatever you want. You are not allowed back in this car for fifteen minutes.”

“All I see is a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Chinese restaurant. There was a Five Guys half a mile back. If you could drop me off there, it would be a nice thing.”

“If you don’t get out of this car right now, I am going to pull this steering wheel off the car and beat you to death with it.”

“OK, OK. I’m going,” he said. “You want anything? Egg roll? Cruller?”

“Get out.
Now
.”

As soon as Sheldon vanished inside the Chinese restaurant, I put my head on the steering wheel and cried. I am not particularly proud of this, but I needed to cry and no one can say I didn’t deserve to cry. After about five minutes of uncontrolled tears, my head banged against the center of the steering wheel and the horn went off. I was still wearing my seat belt, which was good because otherwise I would have jumped through the soft top of the Audi. After that, I tried my best to calm myself down and wipe the tears off my face, but it didn’t work and it made me feel even worse. I cried until my body was sore from the shaking.

It’s just stress
, I told myself, but I knew that wasn’t all of it.

Sheldon is giving me a hard time, that’s why I’m crying,
I thought
.
But that was just, as they say in first-year law school, the proximate cause.

Then why are you crying?
I asked myself.

Adam. Of course. Why else?

I didn’t think Adam knew Sheldon was alive. It didn’t make sense. He wouldn’t have let me break up with him if he knew that the codicil was phony. And he wouldn’t have been as upset as he was about the bills that were owed by the estate. It couldn’t have all been an act. Could it?

If Adam was as loyal to his uncle as I was to my mother, he might have lied to me. That was something I hadn’t considered. It seemed unlikely, but it was at least possible, and I couldn’t think of any way to know for certain other than confronting Adam directly. If I was wrong, and Adam knew Sheldon was alive, then I could turn my back on him with a clear conscience and an aching heart. If I was right, and Adam didn’t know Sheldon was alive, then everything would be all right. We could take up where we left off, without any interference from the prior generation or the New Jersey Bar Association.