Betwixt (26 page)

“Well, I’m gonna go in. So …” She turned on her heel. “I’ll call you. We have to —”

Her words came out stiffer than she intended, and Morgan acknowledged this, yet so subtly Ondine wasn’t sure if she was imagining
the minute shift that had taken place between them.

“We’ll talk.” Morgan looked away, out into the street and then back again. She smiled. “K.A.’s coming back tomorrow.”

“Oh, good. Good. That’ll be good.” Ondine panicked. What had happened to her vocabulary? And K.A.? What did K.A. have to do
with any of this?

She remembered Neve Clowes. Neve had been at the Ring of Fire, too, with Tim Bleeker. A known drug dealer. Probably already
a felon. It all seemed too complicated. Too messy and screwed up. Ondine had been there, too, had willingly taken dust. Had
even believed that she was there to learn something, to find something out about herself, like the rest of them. Was she an
accomplice? Could she be arrested? She felt weak and scared and hoped it didn’t show. She didn’t trust Morgan D’Amici, she
realized. Never had.

The last words came out in a rush. “Anyway. I’ll call you later.”

“Yeah, yeah — okay.” Morgan waved brightly and Ondine felt released. She turned and walked toward the gate leading to the
back door. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t gone in the front door, as she usually did. It was almost as if she were a guest
now.

Just as she started to turn and raise her hand to wave, she saw Morgan in the car, staring at her through the windshield.
The girl smiled. No. Had already been smiling. Sitting in her Lexus, beaming.
She believes this.
Fear seized Ondine’s body, gnawed at the delicate unity of her mind. She forced herself to wave. Morgan waved in return,
glanced behind her, and pulled out. Neither girl looked back.

D
AWN CAME EARLY ON THE DAY
fate had marked Jacob Clowes to die.

The sun climbed above the Columbia River valley and spread its rays across the Willamette, infusing everything in Portland
with a pinkish orange glow. Jacob Clowes liked this time. He was at work early during the summer. Everything was twice as
busy and people liked eating pizza for breakfast — post-club, pre-crash snack — so early morning, six, seven
AM
, was the only time he had to himself.

The Cloweses lived up at the base of Forest Park, amid a tangle of ivy and blackberry. Their house was a ramshackle white
affair built during the late twenties, and eighty-odd years later it still possessed a wide-open view of downtown. The view
was probably the finest thing about the place: despite the fact that Jacob seemed perpetually to be fixing it up, the Cloweses’
house was the least fancy on their road, now mostly populated by whatever it was dot-commers called themselves these days,
as
well as a few people whom his daughter referred to as “
cool
parents.” He thought he was one.

Jacob had bought early, when you still had to dodge sleeping bums along Burnside. The only people who came to his new pizza
shop then were the hippies and gay boys that lived in Northwest; the proto-punkers (Theatre of Sheep, Poison Idea and the
Rats); and a shy, friendly guitar instructor with curly hair named Ritchie, who said his girlfriend’s Mormon grandmother had
written that druggie book
Go Ask Alice.

Jacob had loved the roughness of Portland then. Not as rough as the New York he’d left behind, which he appreciated, but rough
enough to be … what? Unformed. Maybe a little haunted, if you could say that in 1976. Portland in the year of the bicentennial
still had the air of a nineteenth-century city, a place where a man had to live by his wits. A bet had given the city its
name: One of its early American residents had been from Boston, the other from Portland, Maine. They tossed a coin; Maine
won. And it
was
another country then, teeming with loggers and wayward Forty-niners; Indians; sailors; and Chinese railroad workers; salt
dogs and rascals; men with names like “Bunco” Kelly, who, it was said, passed a wooden statue of an Indian through the Shanghai
Tunnels to a waiting captain desperate for one last man.

A century and a half later, hobos still came to town in
boxcars, but the “hippies” showed up in Mini Coopers and BMWs spackled with
SCREW BUSH
bumper stickers and, as far as he knew, liked dust more than pot. “Hipsters” — whatever those were — and yuppies were Jacob’s
mainstay now.

Portland had softened a tough Brooklyn kid, and though it was the Brooklyn in Jacob that had said, “What kind of redneck do
you take me for?” when his best friend had invited him to a
barn dance
of all things a year after he’d moved, it was the Portland boy who trimmed his beard and put on his lucky underwear and went
anyway.

Of course this was a barn dance Portland style. Most of the dancers
were
wearing overalls, but without shirts underneath — or bras, for that matter. Jacob would freely admit to not knowing much
about the modern world, but he was sure nuder was always better, so when the wild-haired woman with the ear-to-ear smile told
him the price of admission was his shirt, who was he to say no? Three years of slinging pies had not yet had the expansive
effect on his stomach that it would later, especially after Neve was born. Jacob still looked damned good with his shirt off
in 1979, or at least he thought so.

More important, so did Amanda.

She was the strongest woman he’d ever met. She’d had three miscarriages in as many years, which made the first years of Jacob’s
marriage both the happiest and saddest time of his life. It
turned out she had a heart-shaped uterus, and despite the heartache it caused them, there was some part of Jacob that loved
the fact his wife’s womb was made that way — kind of like how Amanda said she liked Jacob’s pizza gut (well, maybe she’d said
“didn’t mind”). Reaching over a sleeping Neve to rub his softening stomach in bed — after three false starts they’d been too
spooked to buy a crib, and so Neve ended up in bed with them for the first year of her life — Amanda said Jacob was a big
man, inside and outside. The less romantic way of looking at it was that Jacob didn’t have the willpower to stick to a diet,
whereas Amanda had the strength to go under the knife, and, with more courage than he could fathom, have the corrective surgery
that eventually brought them Neve. Jacob didn’t even like to go to the doctor for his physical, for god’s sake. He’d managed
to miss his appointment for the last three years. Amanda would pin the card to the bulletin board over the phone, and Jacob
would somehow “accidentally” cover it with an invoice for firewood or a sauce-spattered business card from some guy who said
he could fix that leak in the kitchen for cheap. If Amanda reminded him, Jacob would mutter something about still being a
young man, and he’d find some yard work to do. He didn’t need a physical
every single year.
He wasn’t even fifty yet. If it was true what they said about parents — that you’re only as old as your youngest kid — then
hell, he was still a teenager.

Neve was why Jacob was up now. Not the beautiful morning.
Not puttering around the kitchen making coffee. Not reading the paper, or staring out the window wondering if next week was
the week he’d start running again, or filling the hummingbird feeder like he used to, or weeding the garden, or splitting
firewood (there was just something about swinging an axe). No. This morning Jacob was cutting the grass.

Whacking it, actually. Ferociously attacking it with an unmotorized hand mower he’d picked up at a barn sale fifteen years
ago — having met his wife in one, barns remained forever dear to Jacob Clowes’s heart, often to the detriment of his wallet.
The mower was an antique, slightly ridiculous contraption. He’d bought the mower during what Amanda called his “green” phase.
He’d put in the woodstove and started splitting firewood around the same time, made a big show of turning off the boiler,
which he promptly had to turn back on when he realized it also heated the hot water. Later he installed solar panels on the
roof of the house, but he was pretty sure they warmed nothing besides a family of raccoons, and he’d even planted a vegetable
garden, which now bore only the tomatoes and cukes that reseeded themselves each spring. But neither nostalgia nor Jacob’s
eco-consciousness had led him to pull out the mower this morning; rather, the simple fact that his neighbors would kill him
if he fired up the Lawn-Boy at six
AM
. Besides, he needed to work off some of his frustration.

He was sweating now, pushing the heavy machine up and
down the hill of the Cloweses’ decidedly un-lawnlike yard, which was narrow but long and steeply pitched. The year Neve was
four there had been snow, and Jacob had made his daughter a sled out of the curved plastic lid of one of the trash cans. She
had slid the length of the yard, whooping and screaming the whole way. Maybe it was the memory of that better time that had
Jacob pushing the mower up and down the hill rather than across its slope, which would have been easier, or maybe he wanted
to tire himself out, take out his aggression on the lawn so he wouldn’t take it out on Neve when she
finally
decided to drag her ass home. He had spanked his daughter only once, when she was three and tried to light her own hair on
fire. He had smacked her hand and sent the match sputtering through the air (you could still see the burn mark on the carpet
in her room, if you knew where to look), and a startled Neve had burst into tears then run to her father’s arms for comfort.
Jacob would give anything to be able to swat this new threat away from his daughter, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen.
So, lacking a better substitute, he attacked the lawn.

It was early and no one could see him, so he had taken his shirt off and let his stomach hang over the waistband of the cargo
shorts Amanda had picked up for him at Old Navy, which Jacob, to preserve his manly identity, pretended actually came from
the Army-Navy supply store. He dropped the mower and fished his cell out of the side pocket of the shorts: 6:43, and his daughter
still
wasn’t home. He had never learned to program the thing — he couldn’t tell one silly colored icon from another — and so, with
damp, blunt fingers, he punched in the ten digits of his daughter’s number and pressed the phone to his sweaty ear. His pulse
pounded in his temples and he knew he was going to have another one of his headaches today. He’d been having a lot of them
lately.

Correction: Neve had been
giving
him a lot of headaches lately.

Hey, you’ve reached Neve …

His daughter’s innocent voice leaked into his ear without so much as a ring. She had turned her phone off. Jacob had to stop
himself from throwing his onto the flagstone terrace at the edge of the yard. After all these years of testing his boundaries,
she had found his line and marched across it without looking back.

Jamming the phone back in his pocket, he picked up the mower and attacked the lawn again. Neve was a good girl, he told himself
as he panted up the hill. Loving but shy, like a new puppy who wants to jump in your lap but needs coaxing. A little spacey.
Her SATs weren’t exactly Berkeley material, and though part of Jacob wondered if it was all that pot he’d smoked, neither
he nor Amanda had the aptitude, let alone the attitude, for college. But when Neve started going out with Phil D’Amici’s son,
K.A., Jacob had had a brief moment of calm. In six months of “hanging out” — that’s what Neve had called it — with his
daughter, the boy had never pulled into the driveway later than 10:59. Of course, they spent another hour and a half fogging
up the windows, but he was sure K.A. valued his balls too much to take them out of his pants in his girlfriend’s father’s
driveway. Her grades even improved. When she showed him her A in history at the end of the year, Jacob had made a big show
of holding it up to the light to see if the letter was doctored, but it survived inspection. The punch in the gut Neve gave
him afterward was surprisingly painful, however, and even as he wondered aloud when his daughter had turned into such a brain,
he wondered silently when he himself had turned into such a wuss.

The yard was long. And steep. And uneven. Jacob had to push the mower over the same strip of grass three times to cut it all.
He could feel sweat pooling in the seat of his boxers, and tried not to imagine what he looked like from the back. What do
you call the Jewish pizza maker’s version of plumber’s crack?

He was a “cool parent,” wasn’t he? A dad you didn’t have to be ashamed of? He didn’t even care if his daughter smoked pot
— he knew she’d grow out of it eventually. And he wasn’t stupid enough to tell her not to have sex either. Like a good modern
father, he’d sat right beside Amanda at the kitchen table while she and Neve had the talk about making your own choices and
saying yes only when you want to and using various methods of contraception. Only after Neve had fled to one of her girlfriends’
houses did he go out on the back porch and drink his
way through the last third of a bottle of scotch to erase the words “negotiated sexual contract” from his ears. Amanda had
pulled the phrase from a book called
So Your Teenager Wants to Have Sex.
God bless the woman — but come
on.

He’d managed to drink the words out of his head, but try as he might to beat the nagging sense of failure and doubt away this
morning, he couldn’t eradicate it. Maybe his mother had been right about raising her out here. His Brooklyn friends were stockbrokers
and lawyers now, despite their wild youths. And real estate. Jesus, what that modest brownstone he had grown up in in Cobble
Hill would fetch now. His friends back East sent their kids to private schools, or magnets like Bronx Science or Stuyvesant,
where Jacob himself had gone. Amanda had enrolled Neve in some extremely expensive “self-directed” program at Penwick, and
even though their daughter left the house every morning, he had the sense she wasn’t always “directing” herself to school.
It was all so “unstructured,” and as the years passed and his daughter grew further and further from him, Jacob found it hard
to remember what it was exactly that he’d loved Portland for, back when he’d been not too much older than Neve was now. Then
they’d decided Neve was going to be the picture of the Rousseau child — Amanda’s phrase, of course. In Jacob’s mind it was
even simpler: his daughter was going to have the exact opposite of his experience in New York, with a father who expected
too much of him, and a mother who expected
nothing at all. His daughter was going to be supported, encouraged,
loved.
There was no way she wouldn’t be the perfect child. And maybe that’s what would have happened, until Neve, as all children
do, grew up.