The Cake House (29 page)

Ever since I had first met him, I’d sought to understand Alex, wanting to crack his code as if he were a safe with a treasure inside. At night, in my bed, with his sweat on my skin, when he smiled at me, when we sat together in his room or in mine and he sang for me or asked me to sing—these were moments I came close to understanding him but never truly could, not in any way that lingered.

Mother and son existed in their own bubble, excluding Claude and me and the world, and I realized that finally, I’d gotten my wish. I understood him now. It was there, in the way he turned to her with his heart willingly given: She was the key that unlocked Alex Fisk. He had been waiting for her.

“Do you have anything you want to bring with you?” she asked, as if she and Alex were continuing a conversation from earlier, private to themselves.

“Five minutes,” said Alex. “I’ll be right back.” He ran from the front room, his footsteps thundering up the stairs.

It took a moment for me to understand, the dominos falling one after another: Alex’s mysterious phone calls, his mother’s sudden presence and the car outside, her question to him. Five minutes, he’d said. She was there to take Alex away.

“Dahlia, Rosie, could you give us a moment?” asked Claude. He hadn’t looked away from Catherine since walking into the room. I had a momentary flash of anger at this woman who could capture both Claude and Alex so effortlessly.

“Of course,” said my mother with a stiff nod as she crossed the room, waiting for me to go ahead of her. I had no choice but to move.

Out of sight, I pressed against the connecting wall. My mother pinched my arm, whispered that I should get away, but I fended her off. After a moment, she gave up and we both pressed our ears to the paint to listen. At first there was nothing, until Catherine spoke again.

“How have you been?” Catherine sounded cool and mildly curious.

“Just as you see,” he said. I always pictured Claude’s anger like a red squall raging wild and uncollected. But with Catherine, he pulled back; he became small.

“Still the same?” she asked. Like her violin, Catherine’s voice struck a strong and sorrowful chord. I pictured how she must look on stage, how she was so compelling you couldn’t look elsewhere. “I always wanted to know how you were doing,” she continued, her tone honest. “You had such dreams. It was what I liked best about you. Your plans, big and small, and the people you would help.”

“I remember you never cared.” Claude’s voice was flat.

“He’s been calling me.”

“I know,” he said. “I know what he’s like when he leaves you a message and you don’t return his call. What right do you have, waltzing back in here like you have any claim on him? You abandoned him.”

“Don’t pretend as if that wasn’t exactly what you wanted. I know what I did. I would have come for him earlier, but—” She hesitated, and I heard the first hint of vulnerability. Then, as if she stood straighter, her voice dropped in timbre. I heard the rustle of paper. “He’s my son, and he’s coming with me. I had my lawyer draw up these forms. Please sign them.”

“What is this?”

“They release you from any right to Alex.”

“I won’t sign these.”

She paused. “If you dare fight it, it would only take one phone call. He’s told me everything. I know all about your so-called business. Did it never bother you, using your own son? Was it a pride thing? A chip off the block, so like his father. Except he’s nothing like you. I’ll make sure of that. Do you really want the authorities to know how those families became your clients? And why?”

I remembered Alex’s earlier conversation with Claude in the car. Claude lied to his clients. He lied to my mother. Had he lied to my father? Did Alex ever lie to me?

Next to me, my mother stepped away from the wall, her expression turned inward. She didn’t look surprised or upset. Instead, she seemed deep in thought as she crossed the room. I watched her leave, then pressed my ear back against the wall.

“You wouldn’t risk Alex just to get at me,” said Claude, strained but in that dismissive way of his that tried to regain the upper hand in a conversation.

“Well, you’re right there. I wouldn’t. Risk him, that is. I wouldn’t need to, because you’ll sign those forms.” She paused, then added, with a tone of condescension, “I’m sure he’ll call you.”

I pushed away and ran up the stairs, bursting into Alex’s room. He had laid out a suitcase on his bed and was moving from dresser to suitcase with his arms full of clothing and whatever else he could grab. The suitcase overflowed with T-shirts and jeans, his shoes stuffed around the edges. His music books were zippered into the suitcase’s net pocket, as was the framed photograph of his mother.

His room, always so clean and ordered, with nothing on the walls, nothing out of place, and the bed always made. As
if he lived in the guest room. He had been prepared to leave, at any moment, after any phone call. It was something I should have noticed and never let myself see.

“Are you leaving?”

“Yes,” he answered, without hesitation.

“You’re going to leave me here?” I accused, trying to catch his hands and hold him still. He danced out of my reach. If I had ever thought I could hold him, I was wrong. “Why didn’t you tell me about her? You never said anything. I would’ve understood.”

He pushed me aside but squeezed my arm. His smile—I always craved his smile, and there it was. He was radiant in his freedom. “I guess I got used to never talking about her. I hated her. I thought I hated her.”

“Then why are you going with her now?”

He returned to packing without answering. It hit me then, that I wouldn’t see him tomorrow. That if I waited for him later that night, he wouldn’t appear next to my bed. This hollow feeling, this rending of limb from limb, must be what Tina had felt that day he broke up with her.

He shut his suitcase and placed his guitar case next to it.

“Wait,” I said, desperate to keep him with me for as long as I could. I wanted to give him something, anything that would remind him of me, anything that might change his mind about leaving. My mind raced through everything that I had that I could give him, that could possibly bind him to me, but I came up blank.

He cocked his head to one side as he looked at me. From his back pocket he took out the picture I had given him for Christmas, the one of the two of us leaning against the fountain’s brick wall. He held it out for me to see; then he put it back in his pocket.

There was no warmth in his face, no love mixed with his bruises and the bloodied Band-Aid over his eye, which already needed to be changed, but he came close and took me into his arms. I listened to his heart beating, just a little faster than mine. We were off tempo.

There had been moments when I thought I hated him even as I loved him. But now, as he was leaving, I wished only that I could go back in time and relive every second so that it wouldn’t end.

“You can keep the records,” he said, touching his lips to my neck.

“Why?”

He picked up his suitcase with one hand and his guitar with the other. “Because I don’t want to be here anymore,” he said, and hesitated for only a moment before stepping into the hallway.

His room was empty except for a few sheets of crumpled notes on his desk, his handwriting near illegible. They were parts of songs he had written, unfinished or abandoned. I folded the pieces of paper, over and over again, into a small square and put it in my pocket. His desk faced the window overlooking the driveway and the street. I didn’t have to wait long for Alex to appear below on the front lawn, followed by his mother. A chauffeur took Alex’s luggage. A moment later the car drove away.

WHEN CLAUDE PULLED UP TO
the curb of the school, I touched the door handle but didn’t open it. Claude was hunched over the steering wheel. In the gray morning light, I thought I saw a second face next to his, like a double exposure
in a photograph, superimposed, one on top of the other. Which one was Claude?

“Rosie?” he asked when it became clear that I wasn’t exiting the car.

“Can I go with you instead?” I didn’t want to go where I would automatically search for Alex in the hallways and in the courtyard, where his absence would be keenly felt.

He stared at the other parked cars, looking pained, both of his hands on the steering wheel. “All right,” he said. “Just this once.”

“Just for today,” I agreed.

When we reached his office, I sat on his swiveling chair, passing my hands over the files left there and tapping on the keyboard of his computer. I wondered how many hours my father and Claude shared together in this office. Were they friends? Did they know they both liked to take pictures? I didn’t think I would ever know the answers to all my questions.

“This is where you meet your clients?”

Claude stood facing me, his back leaning partly against a filing cabinet.

“Yes,” he said.

“This is where you talk them into giving you their money.”

“Rosie,” he said, shaking his head. “What are you trying to get at?”

I spun myself around and around, and faster and faster, pulling my knees and legs close to keep them from hitting the desk drawers.

“Stop it. You’ll make yourself sick.”

“What are you supposed to do with their money?” I asked.

“I said stop it.”

Toes on the ground to stop my spinning, I waited for his answer. He passed his hand over his hair again, longer than it should be and grown almost to his ears. I was surprised he hadn’t made me leave his office yet.

“I invest their money for them. I help people,” he said. “I give them hope, make their dreams come true.”

In his world, he helped his clients by taking from them. Did he have a patchwork bag of his own, made from the pictures of those he helped? I thought of Mrs. Wilson with her wide, purple-tinted glasses, the grip of her strong hand on my shoulder.

“But you don’t give their money back. Did my father help people too? Did he have an office here where he met clients too?”

“Rosie,” he started, then paced a little, but he was like a caged animal and couldn’t go very far. “He didn’t … he helped …” Claude faltered, stopped moving. Our eyes met across the office.

“He worked for you. I know he did. Don’t lie to me. I know he worked for you.”

“Enough,” said Claude, and he slammed his hand down on the filing cabinet. It banged, a loud metallic
clang.
“I don’t know what you think happened. I don’t know what lies you have heard. Or—”

“I see his ghost sometimes,” I interrupted, and Claude fell silent. “My father’s ghost. He appears and he talks. I’ve seen him around you.”

Claude paled, in fear or confusion, and the anger that was there a moment ago bled away. His eyes were dark, as dark as the shadows in the office. I dropped my gaze and saw the framed pictures on his desk, the one with the smaller, child
version of Alex, sullen and unhappy and probably frightened by the large costumed creature behind him.

“That was taken when he was five, not long after he came to live with me,” said Claude, speaking into the silence.

“Why did she leave him with you?” I asked.

“She appeared one day on my doorstep. Said she was going on tour and asked if she could leave him with me for a little while. Four months over the spring; then she’d collect him again. After the four months ended, she called. It would take a little longer. A little longer happened, then a little longer again, until she stopped calling.”

“Would you have let her take him if she had come back?”

He started to answer, then stopped. “I don’t know.”

“You didn’t even fight for him. You just let her take him.” I wanted to yell and felt tears crowding my throat.

“Rosie,” he said, uncomfortable. “It’s not that simple. He didn’t want to stay.”

“That’s your fault. You made him want to leave. You made him work for you, the same as my father. It made him hate you.”

“No,” he said, but his voice was raspy. “We were good together. We were a good team.”

All those cryptic conversations between Claude and Alex made sense now. The truth that I had struggled to learn—and struggled to ignore—settled against my chest like a ton of bricks: Claude had used his son as a source to find clients for Global Securities.

“You made him want to leave. I know you did. He must have been waiting for her all this time.”

Claude bowed his head. I saw my father’s ghost step out from within Claude as if he had been hiding inside him. The ghost stared straight at me. Every other time I had been
afraid of the ghost, with his bloody stare and his truth-filled words, but this time he gave me courage.

“You used my father. And you used Alex. And now they’re both gone.”

Claude’s chest rose and fell, so I knew he was breathing, but he didn’t move. Then he twitched and swatted at the air, swatted at the ghost.

Someone knocked on the door to the suite, calling out. It took a moment for Claude to respond to the knocking.

“Go into the copy room,” he said.

I did as he asked, but once inside the copy room, I left the door open so that I could peek through the door hinge. It was the gray-haired man with the deep-set raccoon-ringed eyes who had shown up the last time.

“Come in, Harold,” said Claude, backlit by the light from the window. “I was expecting you.”

I could see only a sliver of Harold’s profile, coming in and out of view.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.

Claude stepped back. “No worries. Sit down.”

He guided Harold into his office, leaving the door open. I could no longer see, so I stepped out of the copy room, inching close enough to watch Harold rub at his gray slacks.

“I hope this doesn’t come as too much of a shock, but I’ll need to cash out.”

There followed a long, rigid silence. “Everything all right?”

Harold’s voice was like sand over gravel. “I just thought better of it—that’s all.” He paused. “Been talking to a few others. You know, there was that car accident. Helena Myers’s girl is in the hospital. She’s been talking, telling everyone you stole their money and won’t give it back.”

I heard papers shuffled, drawers opening and closing. “What happened to the Myerses is a tragedy—no one’s denying that. They’re distraught, and who can blame them? I’ve tried to help; I’ve done everything I can to help them. They need our compassion right now, so I’m being forgiving. They’ll get their money. No one needs to worry about that. But their decision shouldn’t have any bearing on you. I’ll do as you ask, but you’re my client. It’s my job to stop you from making any decision you’ll regret. Cashing out right now is inadvisable; you’ll incur heavy fines. You haven’t given your investment enough time.”