Among the Ten Thousand Things (11 page)

There are cobwebs in the bushes. See them, there, in the late afternoon, when the disappearing sun spins the fine sticky threads into gold.

In Jamestown, it was taking some time learning how to look at nature. On walks, Kay kept a few paces behind her mother and watched where the sidewalks ruptured enormously to allow the roots of trees. They walked the waist of the island, from their house on the east to the quieter docks on the west. “Crosstown,” her mother joked.

Her mother joked a lot. And said, “We’re in luck.” They were in luck the very first day, finding the single red cab and lady cabdriver outside the wood-paneled Kingston station, even though Simon lost a dollar to the one vending machine. They were lucky again in the car, thinking they’d gone the wrong way, when the right sign sprang up out of nowhere, and all the signs that followed began making sense. It was hard to pull onto their street without starting to pass it; the block was so small: four or five houses altogether, leaned uneasily against a hill.

Deb had made up her mind to be lucky, so they would be.

On the three-and-a-half-hour train ride, reading time had given way to thinking time. They were barely out of Stamford when her attention drifted, book to window. Her eyes ticked telephone pole to telephone pole, the slack of cable between, and she wished she had music to listen to, Joni Mitchell, a strong voice behind sad lyrics, to better indulge her sense of story, as if she were a character and this a beginning.

So many times she’d thought she was living her story. From five to twenty-five, every wish she made—on white horses, on eyelashes, on thin candles dipped in frosting—they were one wish. Getting into the right school, the right company, the right casting year after year. Just give me this next thing. Ballet and Jack were the great arcs of her life. Motherhood was a different kind of chapter, without auditions. Possibly there should have been. Kids were the only Big Thing she didn’t have to work to get, and she hadn’t expected to find herself wanting in that old way again. Now she saw how there might be yet another arc, even two. Who could say this wasn’t the first day of something—God, not the rest of her life, let’s not say that, but something, maybe good?

She let her eyelids droop, and outside the day blurred to green.

The house at first seemed more plant than house, but behind the wisteria and morning glories stood two floors, a roof shingled different grays, peeling white trim. There was a porch with an overhang that sagged in the middle and a screen door with the screen curled half away. Bird droppings, too, to match the siding. They weren’t even sure they’d found it, because the brush had grown up over the mailbox. “Oh.” Deb worried the glass heart around her neck, tipping her head out the cab’s window. “Here? This is it.”

“How do you not
know
?” said Simon. Surprising just that he deigned to speak. He’d had to clear his throat.

Deb overpaid the woman driver, who’d talked on the ride about her own kids, all boys. “I swear, tell them one thing and they do the opposite. And me my whole life just wanting a girl to dress up.”

“They’re pretty great,” Deb said, winking at Kay, whom she never dressed up.

To Kay, the house looked broken. Inside the furniture suffocated under heavy plastic. The lights were out, but Gary had left a note on the kitchen table.
Property to see up in Boston. Back soon, make yourselves at HOME!!
Kay had no memory of Gary, your practically-uncle Gary, he used to get you toys on your birthday, remember?—Which toys?—and either Deb could not name them, or—“I don’t know, that nanoo nanoo creature, that Furby doll”—and Kay might remember the Furby but not the person attached.

“This house is
one hundred years old,
” Deb said, coming up behind her with a duffel bag. She stressed the age as if it were a good thing.

“Is it even safe?” Simon shot past them, suitcase high over his head. He let it drop onto the second-floor landing and gripped both banisters, swinging his legs out from under him.

“Of course it’s safe.”

“There could be an earthquake.”

“Simon, just—cool it, okay?” Deb said. Kay watched her mother gallop down for the last of the bags. The stairs were bare wood and rounded at the edges, without carpet or rubber grips like the kind they had at school. When she turned she was face to palm with Simon’s open hand, black with dust.

In truth the house was worse than Deb had expected. Gary, who only ever used the place for fishing trips and painting, hadn’t mentioned any water damage, but from the base of the stairs, she’d already seen brown stains ringing the second-floor ceiling, shadows like something died up there.

From the porch the water was gray and glittering as the sun slumped low behind it. Dinner hour had settled onto the street: the clatter of silver and dishes, conversations drifting from open windows and mixing with the hum of crickets. Deb found something embarrassing in bearing witness to the ritual, the smells and sounds of families gathered together and eating.

There was nothing for them to do but eat, themselves.

She took the kids to a seafood restaurant a few blocks down the main strip, with outdoor seating and Christmas lights strung around. They stood staring at the menu: mussels and thirty-dollar lobster. The nicest place in town but nearly empty with high season still a few weeks away.

“Let’s do Chinese.” Simon pointed toward an orangey brick building.

Deb squinted. “I think that’s a bank.” Then she saw the sandwich board:

PEKING EMPIRE

The Empire took up only a corner of the building, which was otherwise ambiguously corporate. At the door they passed a locked freezer and a poster board advertising ice cream cones. Inside, pictures of food hung backlit above the register—the Seafood Delight, the Happy Family Special—the same photographs as at cheaper places they’d been to in the city. “Want to take it out by the water?”

“I could eat here,” Simon said.

Kay nodded yes, here.

So they stayed in, though it was clearly more of a takeout spot, with just the one table, a yellow fiberboard that pallored everything. Red tassels dangled limply from a television mounted to the ceiling. The reception was poor and they tried to guess at the movie. The food was like anything they could have ordered at home, which was what Simon and Kay seemed to like about it.

They walked back in the darkening with Popsicles the shapes of comic book characters, gumballs for eyes. To Simon they were leaving the mother ship, lo mein and Coca-Cola, comforts of home. He carried with him two spare cans of soda, fearing there’d be nothing at the house but tap. One fell as they came around a bend near their street, detonating and spraying the sidewalk, the hedges, his shirt.

“Whoopsy-daisy,” his mother said, in a funny mood. “And then there was one.”

The house had only three bedrooms, so the kids would share the one with twin beds. The overhead light had gone out, but luck struck yet again when Deb dug a pair of flashlights out from the supply closet under the stairs, one with batteries that worked.

Simon and Kay had never shared a room before, and when they got back it seemed they were sharing it with yet another hulking someone, the mass of Simon’s clothes heaped on one of the beds. Before dinner he’d unzippered his bag and dumped everything out in one piece, sandcastle tight.

He heaved himself onto the other mattress, thinking how stupid it was that, before leaving, he’d sent Elena a message and that now, in this stupid house, his phone was out of network, and he could not get online.
Let’s try to go without for a little while,
his mother had said,
like pioneers.

Kay shone the flashlight on the back of his head. “Where are you sleeping?”

“I don’t care.”

“You have to pick one.”

“I pick two.”

“Simonnnn.”

“Obviously I can’t sleep on both beds, Kay.” He bounced off the thin mattress and grabbed the flashlight from his sister, shining it onto his block of clothes, geological evidence of his packing order. An oak dresser in the corner waited to steep his clothes in its weird, rained-on smell. He wanted only to leave things as they were, to each morning excavate socks and underwear without ever upsetting the cube, sliding the empty case over it like a lid when this trip was finally over.

Instead he knocked the pile onto the floor. He flapped the sheets his mother had laid out over the mattress, not bothering with the corner parts, while his sister went out to change in the hall. By the time she came back, he was under covers, in the same clothes he’d put on in New York that morning, remembering what he’d written to Elena. He’d seen her the day before, sitting on the sandy dirt by the gym with Jared, when he was coming out of his geometry final.

His message had started:

heyhey. whats good?

“Simon?”

“What?”

“What are you thinking?”

“It’s not your business. Nothing.”
heyhey. whats good? survive finals ok? what are u doing this summer? i’m gonna do some traveling, u?
It was too many questions.

“Simon?”

“What, Kay? I’m trying to sleep.” He heard her turn away from him. Loudly he said, “I don’t know what you want,” though sort of he did. His sister wanted to talk about their parents, but Simon didn’t think there was anything to say. He couldn’t explain why he didn’t care, that there was something make-believe about all this that felt to her so real. He couldn’t explain how it was like they weren’t even there. Real life was his friends, school. He switched the flashlight off. A few minutes later, he switched it on again. He put it down on the floor between their two beds, pointed up at the ceiling, where it stayed on until morning.

The day they left, when he could no longer hear the elevator noises of his family falling away from him, Jack made himself a bowl of cereal and watched the morning shows, like a man who’d have the apartment to himself for a couple hours. There had been a moment in the hall when he’d thought of turning to his daughter. Just hugging her. But he’d been afraid of what Deb would say. He’d be accused of, what—physical influence? Something like that. Pressure by proximity.

Of course there was time yet, to fix everything. They’d stay up there, what, a week? A week tops. Or maybe they’d call and he’d come and join them. Definitely tonight Deb would call.

He picked up the paper from yesterday and read again the piece about his show. “Don’t Take the Bayt.” Very clever. Bravo. And they say journalism has gone to shit.
“We deeply regret what’s happened. We were assured by the artist that the explosives had all been detonated and accounted for well in advance of the show, and we’re looking now into what could have possibly happened.”
Stanley, you ninny. Well, throw me under the bus.
The artist.
Fine.

He sucked milk from his spoon and returned the Cheerio fossils to the bowl. There was one of those talk shows on, with its women, all white and one black, all liberal and one conservative, all postmenopausal and one who still got her period. They were talking about postpartum depression, which Jack knew had nothing to do with having babies and which he got every time he finished a project.

He walked to the kitchen and added more milk, came back to the living room and lay down. Maybe it was the milk that made him sleepy, or it could have been all those women’s voices. Maybe he was only sad.

Anyway, he slept.

Stanley was usually at the gallery Sunday mornings, and that was where Jack caught him, early, just opening up.

“Please, Jack, not before my coffee.”

“One more go. A few weeks.
A week.
”

“Jesus, not before my vodka soda.”

“People will come.” Jack hit his palm against the hot brick. The sun made neither of them more agreeable. “Stanny.”

“People
would
come, just not for the reasons you want.” Stanley shook out his keys. “Rubberneckers. You want rubberneckers?”

“I’ll take rubbernecking.”

“My lawyers won’t,” he said, sliding open the heavy door. “Not until we know for certain this woman isn’t building a case.”

Inside it was not even cool. “Christ, you cancel the air in here too?”

Stanley pulled a triangle of handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “Everything’s backed up for me right now. Emily’s on vacation.”

“Emily who?” Jack asked. Stanley pressed the cloth to his forehead, blotting away the shine. “You know no one alive uses those. You iron those?”

“I’m going to Venice
,”
Stanley said, running up around the white spiral stairs, “for the
biennale.
”

“Hey, who’s Emily?” Jack called, hovering his hand over the receptionist’s desk, her silver cup of cheapie pens.

“You
know
Emily.” The AC clicked to life from the second floor. “You’ve met her a hundred times. My assistant, Emily?” Cold air began to fall.

“Oh, sure,” Jack mumbled. This was
Emily’s
desk. There was his note slid under the mouse.
NO ONE MUST TOUCH THE DEBRIS.

“I fly out late Thursday.” Stanley was spry coming down the stairs, knees high. “You know, Jack, maybe you should take a vacation.”

“The bee-ehn-ah-lay? No thanks.”

“Or whatever. You guys have a house. Take the kids and go. The city’s a terrible cunt in the summer. Already it’s murder.” Poor Stanley. He was shining up again, surveying the room for what else to say. Jack looked down at the desk.

“Yeah, thanks, Stanny.” He shook the mouse until the computer came awake, the desktop a beach scene, palm trees. “Thanks. I think that’s just what we’ll do.”