The Cake House (11 page)

Claude relaxed and held out his hand for Deputy Mike to shake. “Of course.”

Before Deputy Mike had turned away, I pushed past Claude. Deputy Mike looked down at me but then nodded at Claude before heading down the driveway to his car. I started after him.

Claude grabbed my arm. “Let him go, Rosie,” he said.

I started to tug my arm free, but behind us I heard my mother say, “Oh God, oh God.”

She was at the other end of the house, trying to pull open the sliding glass doors.

“I can’t breathe,” she said, fumbling with the latch.

She had been holding it together, but now that the officers were gone, she didn’t need to pretend anymore.

“I have to get out.”

Claude pushed me out of the way in an effort to reach her, but she was outside on the patio before he could make it.

“Come back inside,” he said, calm, measured, his hands held out.

“No, I can’t breathe in there.” She pushed him away, half crawling, half walking to the edge of the cement. She went down to her knees. “We should never have come here. I didn’t think things could be worse. I thought we might … But this is a nightmare.”

Claude tried to lift her off the ground, gripping with a hand around each of her biceps, but she slipped through his hold like water. “Dahlia, enough,” he said.

She shook her head, tried to say more, but every word came out malformed. To muffle her cries, she bit her hand.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, trying again to hold her. “It was an accident; we’ll get through this, please, please.”

Every ragged strip of emotion she let fall made Claude wince. In the face of her pain, he seemed so unsure. This
was something he couldn’t fix, couldn’t throw money at to make better.

She twisted her hand out of his grip. “I never should have left him. But you kept calling. And you were always there. Why? Why couldn’t you let us go? You said it would be better. But it’s not better. And now … We’re bad luck. There are policemen in your house, again, because of us.”

Claude ducked his head. I was fascinated by the way he opened and closed his hands. It was startling to realize he had something in common with my father. He thought he’d stolen her from him, but he was learning he couldn’t hold her either.

“Come inside,” he repeated.

“You don’t understand,” she cried. “I’ve even lost the notebook. I can’t find it. I can’t find it and I don’t know what to do, and he’s gone, and—”

She started to walk deeper into the garden, then stopped in the middle of the grass.

She sat down hard with her back to all of us. Claude went to her, but she shifted so she couldn’t look at him. He tried again, and again she pushed him away until he clamped his arms around her.

I had to do something. Without looking at Alex, I went to the cherrywood desk and crouched down on my hands and knees. The notebook was still there. I flattened my hand and managed to grab hold of the plastic wrapping, pulling it out from its hiding place.

Hugging my precious bundle, I turned as Claude and my mother came inside. He had one arm around her shoulders, her face streaked with trails of sooty mascara, her hair wild and loose. But she stopped when she saw me. She said my name, but then her eyes fell on the plastic
bag held at my chest. Her expression darkened with recognition.

“Where did you get that?”

“I found this and—” I realized I didn’t have a good reason for why I had taken the notebook and was only now willing to give it back. “You were looking for this, but—”

Her sadness shifted smoothly into anger. She crossed the few steps to pinch my arm with her strong hand. “You had it all this time?”

“I just wanted to look at it.” I held the notebook close, trying to twist out of her grasp. “I wanted to see what was inside; that’s all. Let me go,” I cried.

She tried to wrench it from beneath my arm. I wanted to give it back to her, as a gift, but she had to take it back, to tear it away, and that made me hold on as hard as I could.

“It’s not yours anymore,” I said. “You don’t deserve it. You’re the one that brought us here. You made him kill himself.”

She slapped me and my head flew back. She slapped me again; her ring cut my cheek.

I screamed, thrusting the notebook at her with all my strength.

Claude yelled for us to stop and grabbed hold of me around my waist. He yanked me to the side. I knocked over a vase. It shattered when it hit the coffee table, jagged pieces of porcelain flying everywhere.

Stunned silence followed. There was blood on my hands and cuts on my arms and legs. I touched my cheek and felt wetness, my fingers coming away painted red.

When she saw the welling blood from the cut on my face, made by her diamond ring, my mother closed her eyes, reaching behind her to try to find the couch.

Claude went to her. She was shaking, trying to breathe. I took one step, but Claude said, “Enough.”

His voice was like a hand against my forehead, and I stopped. I picked up the notebook from the floor and, despite Claude’s order, set it on her lap. She curled one hand around it.

Claude’s eyes passed over the shattered vase, rubbing at his jaw. “Christ,” he said. “You would do this to your mother? After everything?”

“Don’t,” said my mother. “It’s not her fault. Leave her be.”

Claude shut his mouth. He stood up and helped her stand. She started on her own for the stairs, not waiting for Claude.

“Help Rosie clean this up,” Claude said to Alex, watching my mother go. “And you—” He took a deep breath and turned to me. I braced myself for another hot bellow. Instead, he deflated to normal size. He put a finger under my chin and tilted my face up so he could see the cut on my cheek and the imprint of my mother’s hand on my face. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then turned and left.

Alex moved my limbs and guided me through the living room and up to the second-floor bathroom like I was a puppet. Pastel blue tiles, pastel blue walls. My breath wheezed. The chill that started downstairs disappeared, and I was left feeling sluggish and tired. My head drooped.

There was blood on my shirt. I was tired of blood and peeled the shirt off.

Alex wet a washcloth, turning to face me, but stopped when he saw me naked from the waist up. His pale cheeks flooded with color. He stood still. The air filled with the rasp of my breathing, with his. Then his eyes dropped.

Small lumps for breasts with dark nipples, and hips beginning to flare. My skin was peanut colored like my mother’s, but I had little of her beauty and even less of my father’s freckles or his long limbs.

I don’t know why I did it. I wanted to make him uncomfortable. To shake him up and have him really look at me. I took his hand with the washcloth, passed it over my face,
then down my neck, over my chest. His body tensed and he stepped back, grabbing a towel from the rack.

“Clothes,” he said, throwing the towel around my shoulders, pulling me out of the bathroom and into my room. He searched through the piles of my clothing for underwear, for a shirt and a pair of jeans, remembering to fish out my shoes from the bathroom. He mixed up my carefully ordered stacks of clothing, putting the yellow skirt next to the green shorts and leaving my jeans in a heap. I would fix things later.

I pulled a T-shirt over my head. I thought he would turn away, but he didn’t. Together, we went downstairs. In the back of the kitchen, he opened the utility closet and handed me a broom. We got to work cleaning, and the only sound between us came with the low tinkle of the porcelain as we swept up the pieces of the vase into a pile.

Alex bent over with the dustpan. “That vase was expensive.”

“How expensive?” I asked, picking up one piece of porcelain that was larger than the rest. One side was white and the other had yellow and blue glaze, the suggestion of a pattern.

He shrugged. “Thousands,” he said. “You probably like that.”

“You’re right,” I said. “The more expensive the better.”

He shook his head, but I could see him try to hide a smile.

THAT NIGHT
,
MY MOTHER CAME
to visit me while I was in the bathroom. The tile felt cool against my knees. My mouth tasted sour; my hair stuck to my cheeks and neck, damp with sweat. I closed my eyes and lay flat on the floor,
afraid to look anywhere for fear of seeing my father’s ghost again. It felt like a betrayal of him, to dread. The cut on my cheek throbbed.

My mother appeared in the doorway to the bathroom, her robe billowing. “Can’t sleep?” she asked, lifting me to a seated position. Her hands were cool, checking for temperature, a featherlight touch.

I wondered if I had lost my place with her. Could she forgive me for taking the notebook? She tilted my head to one side so that she could look at my left cheek. The wedding ring on her finger caught the light. As she traced the cut, her eyes searched mine, asking a question of her own:
Can you forgive me?

“I’m sorry I took your notebook,” I said. “I wanted to look at the pictures.”

It was more than the pictures, though. To me, the notebook held the secret of who my father was, hidden somewhere in one of the photographs. I thought I knew who my father was, but I understood him less every day, when I should have understood him more.

She looked at her hands: slender with long fingers that tapered to points. I put mine next to hers, but our hands were not alike. Mine were darker, with hangnails and raw cuticles, scars from cuts and scratches acquired in the garden or from my bike, or even from before, when I played with José, always a little too rough.

“He took most of those photographs,” she said. “That’s why I kept them.”

“For the yearbook?” I hadn’t realized.

“Yes. Except for those that he was in. He used to love taking pictures.”

“Why’d he stop?”

Her eyes grew unfocused. “He got bored with it. There were other things that he wanted to do more.” She opened a drawer and found a brush, passing it through my hair. “You’re so much like him,” she said.

I was nothing like my father. Not in the way he looked, all freckled and blue-eyed. I’d asked him once where his family came from, but he said he didn’t know. Something Scottish, he thought, maybe French, and for a while I dreamt there had been a mistake in heaven before I was born, that I was supposed to end up blond and blue-eyed but came out brown haired and forgettable.

My mother smiled at my disbelieving glare. “You’re both stubborn.”

Nighttime noises drifted in through the bathroom’s open window: owls, crickets, a rustle of leaves and branches that betrayed a creeping cat or some other animal crawling in the garden.

“But you hated him,” I said, no longer able to hold on to the ghost’s insistence that my parents had been happy. I knew they had never been happy. I didn’t want my mother to hate me too. I didn’t want to be like my father, filled with bitterness even in death.

She pulled back, took my head between her hands, careful with the still-tender cut on my cheek.

“What makes you say that?” she asked.

“You ran away.”

All this time, and I hadn’t stopped to wonder why we had run away on that day. I knew my parents fought all the time, I knew there were problems between them, but all that had been there before. I didn’t know what had changed. My mother had never said; I didn’t know her side of the story.

Her eyes were dark. “Maybe sometimes I did hate him.
But it was the moments I loved him that hurt. If I had hated him, it would be easier.”

She stood up. The doorway behind her was a dark, open maw. If my father’s ghost lurked, he wasn’t showing himself this time.

“I miss you, Mom.”

She opened her arms, and I sighed as I fell against her.

“If we leave right now, Claude would never know,” I said after several moments had passed. I didn’t say that if we left right then, the ghost might not know either. That maybe we could escape both of them at the same time.

Her grip tightened, and I could hear her heart speed up. “And where would we go? With what?” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice had changed, becoming thin and frail. “You may love your father, Rosaura. You should love him, but there’s so much you don’t know.”

Tell me!
I wanted to say.
Tell me everything!
But instead I asked, “Do you love Claude?”

She sighed. I thought she meant to ignore my question and leave, but then she said, “Wait here.”

The house creaked and shook. Wind spanked its sides. When she returned she carried a cardboard box. I sat on the toilet and she sat on the edge of the tub.

“This belonged to your father. I thought you might want it,” she said, handing me the box.

It held an old camera, the kind with a lens that needed focusing. The back of it opened to reveal an empty slot ready for a fresh roll of film. I put the strap around my neck and lifted it up to see my mother through the viewer. I tried to focus on her face, but she sat too close and her nose and mouth and eyes all blurred together.

Part of the black plastic was chipped, and another part had
a crack that someone had tried to glue closed. Suddenly, the memory of my father’s hands holding the camera unlocked in my mind. I remembered him taking my picture and taking my mother’s picture, asking us to stand or sit close together while we smiled and looked at the camera and said “cheese.”

The box also had a bag of film. She showed me how to thread it. I loved all the different manual parts, working together. I took my first picture of her sitting next to me, not caring that I couldn’t get it all the way in focus and hadn’t used a flash.

I took my mother’s hand in mine. We sat together until she rose.

“You should go to bed,” she said, and waited in the hallway until I stepped inside my bedroom. As she walked to the stairs, I took her picture.

IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED
, I took more pictures, thinking that perhaps I might make my own handmade bag covered in photographs. I took pictures of Claude and more of my mother despite having no way to develop them. Alex allowed for one picture, maybe two, before he would start refusing, and would not sit still or look at the camera or smile. He would not pose for me, so I had to catch him when he was least expecting it. I took pictures of him when he played his guitar, with his fingers pressing the strings against the frets.