Invisible Boy (14 page)

She told me about the time he’d French-kissed her when she was eleven, the time he’d pressed his hard-on against her leg and
asked her if she liked the way a real man felt.

I asked her if she’d told Mom about that, or about the time we got left with him for a long weekend, when Pagan said she’d
fallen asleep in their bed after we’d all been watching TV together, and Pierce woke her up by sticking his hands between
her legs.

“I told her all of it,” she said, taking another sip of beer.

“What the hell did she say?”

“It was a pretty bizarre conversation, actually.”

“Like how?”

“Well, she started out being all Mama-Bear protective, but only right at first, then it felt like she was tuning in and out,
changing her mind.”

“Changing her mind about what?”

“About whether what I told her had actually happened,” said Pagan.

“Wait a minute. Mom thought you made this
up
?”

“It was a long conversation.”

“I don’t care how fucking long it was—that’s completely insane. I mean, your kid comes to you and tells you something this
awful…
Jesus
.”

“I don’t mean she accused me of lying, more like I had to keep trying to convince her, and the longer we talked, the more
she didn’t believe me. Or maybe didn’t want to believe me? It got… slippery. She was sliding away from it, in her head. From
me. By the end of the conversation I felt like she was completely gone, and I still wanted to pin her down, make her say ‘Yes,
I understand that this really happened, and it was wrong and I’m angry enough to do something about it.’”

“Did she?” I asked.

“No.”

“So what happened? How did it end?”

“She got pissed at me, asked why I had to be such a drag and concentrate on the negative stuff, and then she wouldn’t talk
about it anymore.”

I gripped my empty beer bottle tighter, wanting to throw it across the room. Or at our mother. “When was this?”

“A few years ago,” she said. “I was in college.”

“Have you guys talked about it since?”

“I’ve tried a couple of times, but it seems pointless. Besides being painful. The fact that she’s so squirrelly about it is
horrible.”

“Squirrelly how?” I asked.

“Like, she’s actively choosing not to believe it, but won’t say ‘You’re lying’ to my face, because then I could call her on
it.”

“And she still hangs out with him,” I said. “Every time she goes back to California.”

“Right. And then she’s gotta
tell
me about it, you know? All bubbly about how much fun it was, having dinner with Pierce and his new wife or whatever, and
expecting me to be chipper and shit. I mean, this is like—if somebody had
stabbed
me, would she still be going to
parties
with him?”

I scooted my feet over to her, pressing my toes against her hip.

I’d spent vast amounts of time and energy despising Pierce Capwell, never once realizing how tremendously fortunate I was
that he’d loathed me from the moment we met.

“Pagan, I am so goddamn sorry,” I said, my anger on her behalf so fierce that I burst into tears.

W
e hugged each other good night around one, and I lay in bed for hours wondering whether I owned anything worth pawning for
a plane ticket west so I could bludgeon Pierce into a flat bloody slick of pulp with the rounded end of a ball-peen hammer.

I remembered him needling Mom about how spoiled we were until he’d coerced her into giving us more household chores. In any
other household that would have in and of itself been perfectly fair.

It was the way he gloated about it, sitting on at the kitchen table every night during my week to do the dishes, long after
everyone else had left to go watch TV, for instance. He’d take a seat out of my direct line of sight, drawling on and on about
“what a tiger your mother is in bed,” then have the gall to complain when I rushed through the task, neglecting to clean bits
of food out of the strainer in the bottom of the sink.

He’d fish the slimy dregs out with his fingers, calling Mom back into the room so he could shove them in her face to underscore
my brazen disrespect for the moral worth of a job well done.

But as vain and cruel and depraved as he’d been—with his ridiculous pompadour and his skinny legs and his too-carefully-kept
Vandyke beard—we kids were still better off than Teddy Underhill.

Pierce had splashed me with constant vitriol, he had molested my sister, but he hadn’t killed us.

I thought of Teddy’s shattered bones, and I knew that in the greater scheme of things my siblings and I could count ourselves
lucky.

Our mother had chosen a lover who was merely vicious, repellent, and morally bankrupt. She hadn’t trusted our welfare to a
man who wanted us dead.

It took every ounce of moral fiber in my being to drag my ass out of bed the following morning. Dean had already sprinted
uptown to meet Christoph. I was still on the early shift at the Catalog, which meant I was supposed to be in midtown by seven-fifteen.
Sue had another hour to sleep in, and Pagan more than that because she wasn’t on the work roster that day.

The inhumanity of the hour struck me as supremely sucky vindictiveness on the part of the entire universe. I tossed back pint-the-second
of my signature “light sweet crude” Café Bustelo following a blistering shower that had done nothing to resurrect so much
as a shred of my mental acuity.

I slapped on my Walkman headphones and cued up some Mozart, hoping to quell the sour burn of unrequited rage in my belly.
Maybe if Astrid didn’t go to Rome she could spot me a ticket to California. I wouldn’t need any luggage, just a nice fat Louisville
Slugger as a carry-on.

I was not now nor had I ever been a morning person, but I was even more grateful than usual that Manhattan so rarely called
upon me to endure extemporaneous gouts of
A.M.
chirpiness from my fellow commuters. Had any cheerful misguided tourists offered me so much as a flicker of cornfed-Rotarian
eye contact on the Fourteenth Street uptown 4-5-6 platform that morning, I would’ve gripped them firmly by the necks of their
EVITA/CATS/MISS SAIGON
sweatshirts and body-slammed them headfirst onto the third rail, then pissed on their respective pointy green souvenir-foam-rubber-Statue-of-Liberty
halos to ensure adequate electrical conductivity.

It was, in short, already shaping up to be what Pagan’s Greek college flatmate, Marilli, referred to as “one of those don’t-fuck-me
days.”

Yong Sun was the only other person in our half of the office for the initial two hours, and as we were backed up in Fulfillment
with a humongous new shipment of books from Baker & Taylor, I manned the phones solo.

This turned out to be a good thing. Barring one pissed-off Quebecois who deeply resented my having suggested the works of
Robertson Davies in response to her request for a reading list of “Canadian literature,” the people calling in that morning
were universally hip and funny and courteous.

By nine o’clock the Bustelo had fully kicked in and I was yakking it up with a noir-fan insomniac on Maui.

I’d just talked the guy into a copy of Charles Willeford’s
Cockfighter
.

“What else should I get?” asked my new sleep-deprived buddy in Lahaina.

“Have you tried any Jim Thompson?” I asked.

“Throw me a couple of titles,” he said. “I never remember authors.”

“Well, off the top of my head:
Pop. 1280
,
The Killer Inside Me
,
Texas by the Tail
,
A Hell of a Woman
—”

“And you like this guy, ya?”

“Pinkie swear,” I said. “Thompson kicks
major
pulp ass.”

My Maui pal and I settled on five Black Lizard reissues.

“You’re gonna love this guy, I promise,” I said, closing out the order. “He’s ‘the Dimestore Dostoyevsky.’”

Not to mention the perfect guy to emcee my next family reunion.

Around eleven-thirty I called Cate about meeting up that afternoon.

When we’d hung up, Yumiko pointed at my phone. “Some
other
psycho white bitch wants you. Line two.”

She lit a Marlboro, fairly dripping with disdain.

I picked up, only to get an earful of same from the other end.

“Madeline,” said Astrid, “what sort of
odious
persons have you been forced to consort with at your horrible little job?”

“Ruffians. Trollops.”

“That snippy little bitch put me on
hold
.”

“And are we having a jolly time this morning, on the H.M.S.

Feudalism
?”

“Oh, bugger
off
,” she said.

“Cool,” I said, hanging up.

Line one lit up again, instantly.

“Don’t fucking look at
me
,” said Yumiko.

I lifted the receiver. “You’ve reached the offices of
honi soit qui mal y pense
. How may I abase myself indulging your slightest imperial whim?”

“Kiss my ass,” said Astrid.

“Oh, like you
have
one, scrawny bitch.”

That made her laugh. “Chrissy wanted me to invite you and Dean out to Southampton this weekend.”

I crossed my fingers behind my back, having despised all things Hampton since toddlerhood. “And we’re so very pleased to accept
your kind invitation.”

“You
do
have a car somewhere?”

“In Locust Valley.”

“How the mighty are fallen.”

“Ah,” I said, “but how the tiny are risen.”

“Camilla says kiss-kiss.”

“Goody gumdrops. Tell her I want my fucking nose back.”

“You’ll have the whole weekend to tell her yourself, Madeline. We’re driving out together right now.”

O joy. O rapture.

“Please God,” I said, “let me have some Percodan left.”

“What?”

“I merely said, ‘
Poor
Antonini, all by himself in Rome.’”

“Mad.Uh.
Line
.”

“Sweetie, please,” I said. “You
know
my lips are sealed.”

Astrid didn’t seem to find comfort in this assertion.

“Some things are sacred,” I continued. “I mean, good
God
, woman, we
prepped
together.”

This time she hung up on me.

Southampton.
Fuck
.

Cate had copied out Mrs. Underhill’s home number for me. I pulled the slip of paper from my pocket and started dialing.

T
wo hours later, I was on a sidewalk outside Jamaica Station scrutinizing the passing traffic for Cate’s car, still thinking
about the coming weekend with Astrid.

I had been
so
not kidding about the Percodan.

Here’s how much I hate all things Hampton: if someone told me “You’re getting five root canals, followed by lunch at the Maidstone
Club,” I’d hoard the anesthesia so I could shoot it up all at once in the ladies’ room, hoping to black out face-first into
my lobster salad.

And Southampton specifically? The place was downright feral, an overpriced Trump-skanky trailer park peopled exclusively by
Dobermans with the Hapsburg lip.

The prospect of girding my social loins for two full days of
The Astrid and Cammy Show
would’ve been excruciating in the happiest of times: forty-eight hours of gossip about people I didn’t know and places I
couldn’t afford, larded with inside-joke punchlines in all the latest slang of languages I didn’t happen to speak.

Coming right on top of the one-two-punch revelations about Teddy and Pierce, it might just kill me. And I’d have to gut my
way through it with a smile on my face because Dean needed the job, and we both needed his fucking paycheck.

I stepped back from the edge of the curb when a car that wasn’t Cate’s pulled up right in front of me.

The passenger window slid down and I heard a woman call out, “Yo, Madeline.”

My ride was Skwarecki.

“Is Cate okay?” I asked, worried.

“She’s fine, I just thought she looked a little busy so I offered to come instead.”