Keeper of the Keys (12 page)

“Why? Why did we move so much?”

Sighing, Esmé said, “You were so young and made friends easily. I guess it was kind of callous, dragging you around so much, but what I don’t understand is why—” She paused, thinking, why can’t you leave it alone! “What do you want from me, honey? Details? We moved from Norwalk because I didn’t like the traffic there. We moved from Redondo Beach because the chill bothered me. We moved from Downey because I found a place with cheaper rent.”

“The house on Bombardier? I went inside.”

Shocked, she sat down. “You did? How?”

“I kept the key.”

“You still have that old key collection?”

“I just remembered. You used to call me keeper of the keys.” He looked surprised by the memory.

She nodded. “Like the Roman god. Janus.”

“Who?”

“He had two faces, one looking toward the past, the other toward the future. You were such a serious boy. Ray, please don’t tell me you found the key and used it to break into the house.”

“That’s exactly what I did.”

“My God! Have you gone crazy? You really have been so strange lately—”

“I was invited in by the residents, actually.” He held up a hand. “Forget about that. That’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about a tape I found there.”

She flashed back to the tract house in Norwalk, the porch, his worst tantrum ever, the circus tent she put up in the living room at Christmas, her first safe place. “A tape,” she repeated to buy herself a moment.

“Yeah, remember that loose board? Under the rug in your bedroom? You hid things.”

“You knew about that?”

“I paid attention.”

Esmé said nothing for a few moments. Ray had phases. Every few years he would start pestering her about the moves, bringing this up, bringing that up, and now he was back into it, and it was apparently worse than ever. Now he had broken into somebody’s house and retrieved a tape she had forgotten all about.

Her life for so many years had had a serenity and peace lacking in her early years as a mother. She felt like someone peacefully gazing at a lovely view, when a lunatic appeared out of nowhere to push her over a waterfall.

“You and a guy talk,” Ray said.

The oven beeped. Her cake had finished. Esmé reached into a drawer for hot pads. Carefully opening the oven door, she pulled a round pan out. Perfect. She set the pan on a wire rack. The crusty yellow surface, evenly toasty, smelled of the brown sugar and savory fruit that lurked on the bottom. Carefully, she turned the cake upside down onto a platter.

“Invert it right away,” Ray said.

“I taught my boy right.”

“I was five when we lived there. That made you twenty-six.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“The man threatens you.”

“You listen to some old recording and you make assumptions, and they’re just plain wrong. Haven’t I warned you often enough to use your imagination to serve you, not to make your life harder? Well, I don’t know anything about any tape. I don’t remember back that far.”

“Oh, no?” Ray’s face wore the pinched look of a furious teenager, and Esmé thought, after all I’ve done, I’ve failed my son. He’s stalled and it’s my fault.

“Enough.” She pulled the pan off a little roughly, taking some pineapple with it, Ray watching without engagement, eyes glazed. “Smell that,” she said.

He looked at the table, his hands. She became afraid for him. Not knowing what else to do, she examined the cake critically, then went to the pantry to find a jar of cherries and roasted pecans, which she used to stud the cake. “Now it looks as good as it smells,” she said into the tension.

“You tell him you’ll call the cops. He calls you a liar.”

She dropped the wire rack into the sink. The noise startled them both. Inserting clean beaters into her mixer, she whipped cream in a cold bowl, scooped some onto a piece of cake, and handed him the plate, which he took, both of them acting mechanically. The ordinary moves calmed her enough to say, “Some things parents don’t discuss with their children.”

“He scares you,” he said. “Did he hurt you, Mom?”

She slopped another glob of whipped cream onto his plate. “Needs a little more.” Why did he do it, come here like a child having a tantrum spoiling the day, the meal, the visit, trying to spoil his whole life that she, Esmé, had worked so hard to keep safe and happy?

The anger simmering in his voice attained full boil. “Was someone stalking you? Who was it?”

“I will not discuss this any further with you. Now, do both of us a favor. Don’t go looking for some magical answer to your troubles by digging up the past, trying to make our very ordinary lives into some big adventure! Don’t ruin your life, getting into trouble with those damn keys, either! You have a future—count your blessings and focus on making it good.” She shoved the plate in front of him again. “This is best when it’s fresh. Now you eat this cake I made for you. You eat a bite of this delicious cake.”

He shook his head, all the anger appearing to drain out of him. He sat down again, took up his fork, and chewed and swallowed with all the pleasure of someone swallowing bile.

She wiped her hands on her apron, disappointed, wishing she could do something, anything, to make things right for him. She said, “I’ll pack some up for you, okay? Freeze it and eat some later. Some people say it’s even better then. Do you know I posted this recipe on the Internet? I get comments from people who have tried it, mostly complimentary. It’s the fresh pineapple. I was right, I have to say.”

Ray jumped up, knocking over the stool. His uneaten cake fell to the floor. She heard the door slam and the cat springing off the couch, wondering what was going on.

Driving home from her sister’s place through a blessedly cool and empty darkness, Kat thought about Raoul and Jacki’s pick, Zak Greenfield. Only a year older than her, he had a confidence that she rarely came across and found quite attractive. He seemed to have a firm grasp on life, a plan. Guys like him with actual professions and that air of having figured things out always had friends like Jacki, offering unsolicited, sisterly advice on future prospects.

Zak seemed to like women. He had teased Jacki, did the man-to-man work-talk thing with Raoul, made them all perk up. And he had paid a lot of attention to Kat, touching her arm, asking a lot of questions.

He was interested. Unusually, Kat’s legs had first drawn his attention, which flattered her so much she wanted to lie down on the floor and expose their entire length to his inspection and evaluation. They had laughed and talked until eleven-thirty while the fans blew air that kept Kat’s hair moving, until Jacki’s eyelids dipped closed and Raoul put his arm around her.

Time to go, and they were leaving at the same time. Kat had just decided that the evening really ought to continue, when suddenly Jacki stepped in. Her bulbous tummy came between them at the door.

“Zak has an early day tomorrow, don’t you, Zak?” Jacki nudged him out.

Zak frowned slightly, but, unable to deny a woman with such an awesome and unassailable physical presence, finally agreed, saying, “Oh. Yeah, I sure do.”

How could Kat not feel drawn to such a man, one who instantly honored Jacki’s demented sisterly requirements in spite of the fact that Kat stood panting after him not three feet away?

Once home, Kat took her shower and put on a nightie several guys had enjoyed, the white cotton one with Victorian buttons. Her little brass Buddha sat on its stand and her Zafu cushion awaited. Thirty minutes a day, she had been told to meditate. She went toward it but somehow veered off into bed instead. She had two new men to think about, and what to do about Leigh huddled like a lump of dough in her craw.

8

R
ay drove the Porsche straight from his mother’s to Stokes Avenue in Downey, a distance of about fifteen miles. He took it at a steady sixty-eight, not wanting to attract any official attention. It was almost ten.

The internal pressure that had got him onto the freeway made him feel fresh and energetic. He felt exultant, actually, because he knew that he was doing the one thing that would relieve his misery and need. His mother’s cake, far too rich, had left a metallic echo in his mouth. Pineapple always tasted that way to him, like someone had sprinkled aluminum shavings onto fruit. He never had the heart to refuse his mother’s food—she made the offerings with so much love. He didn’t even like sweets anymore, but he tried at her house.

He hadn’t expected Esmé to tell him the truth. Stubborn at times as she was about changes to her precious house, she had a temper as volatile as his own and the same sense of privacy. But now—the tape—

He burped several times, checked his mirrors for patrol cars, and sped up. They had lasted only seven months in Downey before he came home one afternoon from school to find his mother tight-lipped and packing. He packed his two allotted boxes and drove with her to the next identical place a couple of towns over. He went to another school a lot like the old school, and there was a new bully, messed-up math courses that repeated what he already knew, the usual mountains to climb.

Revisiting these scenes felt like playing with an aching tooth, painful but irresistible. Maybe if something made sense, if he could understand—what?

Was his life simply a random series of events strung together but ultimately unrelated? Or did the series add up to something meaningful?

This red-haired girl on his doorstep tonight—what a time she had picked to decide to make up with Leigh. He hoped she would go home and get laid and forget about them.

He turned on the defroster to clear the ocean fog off his windshield.

“So where is she now?” he had asked Leigh once, referring to Kat.

“No idea. Sometimes people you care about get lost,” Leigh said. She sat on the rug in front of the fireplace in the great room, drying her hair, wearing her pink satin robe. She had given Ray a present that day, a silver-trimmed comb from the thirties. They had been married three months, and he thought he knew her well by then. She had married him on the rebound and he didn’t care because he knew—knew in his gut as well as his head—that she loved him anyway.

“That’s it?”

“No, that’s not it, but—off-limits, Ray.”

Kat’s timing couldn’t have been worse. She had the look of a crusader. She hadn’t liked what Ray Jackson told her.

Well, what else could he have said?

He took the off-ramp he had noted on the map, got lost, and had to pull over to figure out his way, stopping on a street like a million streets in L.A., lined with a row of dingy lookalike tract homes built in the early sixties, one-story houses with one tree in front, a wide driveway, and a double-car garage like almost all the houses he and his mother had rented long ago. In the daytime, relentless California sun would keep the shrubs and lawns brown-tinged, and the few living trees struggling for height. At night, residents hid behind blinds, too tired to socialize with their neighbors after fighting the traffic home.

He found his place on the map and negotiated his way out of the maze of replicant streets. Cruising past the gas stations and the chain-store strip mall that passed for a downtown, he took a left and slowed. The trees on Stokes Avenue had grown a lot—there had only been new twiggy things to protect the bare lawns from the hard sun when he lived there.

The house, a new color, paler, looked about the same, and good news, showed no lights in its windows. He parked several houses away. As soon as he stepped outside the Porsche he started worrying about the dark clothes, realizing he looked just like a criminal scoping the place out.

Do it fast. He rattled around in his pocket, searching for his keys, striding swiftly up the open walkway and onto the small porch. He tried key one. No luck. Key two. Nothing.

Sirens started the neighborhood dogs howling. For one electric second, Ray feared they were coming for him, so he stopped what he was doing, slowed his breathing, and listened. He stood frozen below an aluminum overhang by the front door, grateful for the cover. Fog rippled through the warm night air like steam.

The sirens got louder. Were they coming here? Was it possible? Bass notes of his heart thrumming in his chest, he peered past a scruffy acacia tree toward the street.

He closed his eyes as the sirens receded. His breathing once again functioned. As he stood trying to blend into the overgrown juniper bush beside the railing, a memory hit hard.

They had moved to Downey in September, so he began school toward the beginning of the year for a change, at least one small relief. Still, the strain of his first day at a new school had worn him out. After getting off the bus, he had walked home fast, looking forward to a haven from yet another new place and all new people, making for the first yellow house with faux brown shutters he came upon. He had walked inside the unlocked door, raised his head, and confronted a nightmare.

Here stood their new place, but wacky, the kitchen on the left instead of right, his mother’s furniture, always lightweight so that you could move it easily, replaced by leaden-looking antiques.

Shocked, he couldn’t move anything except his eyes for a minute. Here stood his home, reversed. His present life, overhauled in a day. Unfamiliar furniture. Strange portraits on the walls: a man with a mustache, babies in dresses. At first he had shifted his books from one hip to the other, as if adjusting their weight could shift things right, but the setting remained deviant, looking-glass unreal.

Had his mother moved without him?

Left him behind?

She could move very fast but even she couldn’t make a house with a garage on the left into one with a garage on the right. Logic should have kicked in about then, that he had stepped into an identical house with a reversed house plan, on the same street, a few doors down from his own house. He didn’t belong at his new school. He didn’t belong here. Where was his home? Lost like him.

His eight-year-old self had stood with the door open behind him for a long time that afternoon, lawn sprinklers fizzing all around the yards behind him. Where was he? They moved so much, he didn’t know. He had walked into someone else’s house and now, unsettled, he doubted everything. Was this the right street? Had he gotten off the school bus at the wrong stop or taken the wrong bus entirely? How would he find their house? He didn’t know.