Dark Water

by Laura McNeal

  It was a joking way to put it, but the air in the room had changed. It was all prickly and electrified now, like a wire. I didn’t pick up the tuna or finish opening the box of crackers.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I caught him,” Robby said.

  Eight

  He said it happened two weeks ago when his mother was on her way to Paris and his dad was supposedly gunning his motorbike on trails. Robby wasn’t supposed to be home, either, because the Redlands Symphony orchestra was performing in the auditorium at the high school, and Robby, as a band member, was an usher who was going to audition afterward for a spot at the music camp the conductor was involved with somehow. Except that Robby got all the way to the high school, which is a twenty-minute drive from the ranch, and discovered he forgot the reeds for his clarinet. The band teacher is this cranky bearded man named Mr. Van der Does who is always telling Robby that what stands between Robby and success is a lack of commitment, because Mr. Van der Does, like my father, believes that disorganization is a sign that you don’t really care.

  So Robby drove back to the ranch, trying to hurry so that at least he could hear the second half of the concert and do his audition, and he left the Ford Packrat parked on the dirt road that led from the house to the grove because he thought that’d be quicker. When he ran up the hill to the house, he noticed a strange car, but he didn’t give it a lot of thought—there was no extra parking for the guesthouse, so if somebody came to visit me or my mom, they parked in Robby’s driveway. So Robby opened the front door and went up the stairs to his room for the reeds, and then he looked in the mirror and saw that he’d sweated completely through his only white shirt. His room was next to his father and mother’s bedroom, and he decided to borrow one of his dad’s shirts, but the bedroom door was shut.

  “It’s never shut during the day,” Robby said. “They don’t ever close it except at night when they go to bed.”

  It struck him as odd, so Robby stood there for a second. He knocked. He heard noises—not voices, but shifting noises. His dad opened the door just a crack and came out, closing the door behind him. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked.

  “I forgot my reeds,” Robby said. “I thought you went out on a ride.”

  “I got a flat tire,” his father said.

  “Can I borrow a white shirt? I got this one all sweaty, and I’m really late.”

  Robby waited for Hoyt to open the bedroom door and walk into the room with Robby, get the shirt out of the closet, and hand it to him. But his father didn’t open the door. He stood in front of it like a bad actor in a high school play. “Sure,” Hoyt said. But he still didn’t open the door.

  “I’m really late,” Robby repeated.

  “I think my dress shirts are downstairs,” Hoyt said. “In the laundry room.”

  Robby turned and went downstairs, and his dad followed him, but there weren’t any shirts. “I thought your mother said she was going to iron them,” his dad said.

  “Never mind,” Robby said. He walked out the front door, and he saw the strange car again. It was just an anonymous silver-green-gray Toyota, but he noticed the name—Avalon—because of our mock global launches of new cars: the Ford Estrogen, the Dodge Hootenany, the Honda Dust Bunny.

  “Whose car is that, anyway?” Robby asked his dad. Hanging from the mirror was a red and white graduation tassel. Fallbrook High colors.

  “I don’t know,” Hoyt said. “Maybe somebody visiting Pearl or Sharon.”

  Some people can lie, and some people can’t. My father was a world-class liar, for instance. We never suspected a thing until the day of the Talbots dress. For some reason, though, Robby felt the off-ness of the conversation and looked hard into the Avalon as he walked past. He saw that the number on the tassel meant she’d graduated two years ago. He saw a sticker on the windshield that permitted the driver to park at Cal State San Marcos. He saw a tennis racket in the backseat. He said, “See ya,” and ran down to the truck with the box of reeds in his hand.

  “I decided I would just pretend to leave,” he told me. “I would sneak back to the house and hide in the xylosma hedge and watch who got into that car. That’s when I called you, remember?” he asked.

  I broke a cracker in half and shook my head. I walked over to the desk calendar where my mother used to write down what days my father would be home and when my after-school art classes were and where she now wrote down appointments with the attorney, the forensic accountant, and the court-mandated psychiatrist. Sunday, April 15, was blank.

  “You were at Major Market,” Robby said. “You said your mother was asking Alfredo whether it was true that grocery stores throw away perfectly good produce.”

  Alfredo was the produce manager and he’d been sprucing those vegetable displays my whole life. “That’s right,” I said. I remembered standing far away from my mother behind the floral department, inhaling the scent of crushed carnations and wondering if my mother was going to start scavenging for food in Dumpsters.

  “You were in a big hurry to get off the phone,” Robby added. “So I did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Parked the truck and walked back to the house.”

  Robby was sitting up by this time and looking like the Greek god of unhappiness. He picked up one of my mother’s wooden spindles and played with the fluffy bit of roving she was trying to turn into yarn.

  “So you hid in the bushes?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I sat in the hedge. For a while, it was like a desert island except the water pump was cycling on and off. Then I heard the front door and some high-heeled shoes.”

  “What did she look like?” I asked.

  Pretty much anyone who’s ever seen my aunt Agnès has remarked on her looks. The pink lips that Robby has are a direct gift from her, plus she has a stunning figure and sophisticated clothes of a kind you’d never buy around here and skin kept young by I don’t know what kind of Parisian secret creams. What kind of man needs more than that?

  Robby said he was too far away to see much, so he didn’t know except that she seemed really young. “They kissed, which made me want to upchuck, and then she drove her Toyota Succubus away.”

  “It was a bus? I thought you said it was an Avalon.”

  Robby looked annoyed.

  “Oh,” I said. “I get it,” though I didn’t. I thought he’d made it up. Eventually, I came across the word in lit class and learned it’s a medieval she-demon who seduces you when you sleep. “So you’ve got no idea who it was?”

  “No, none, could hardly see her, like I said.”

  “Are you going to tell your mom?”

  Robby shrugged. “It’s hard to picture myself doing that. Would you be the one to do that to her?”

  I’d never thought of myself as having the power to do anything to Agnès. “Are you going to ask your dad about it?”

  Robby looked glumly at the spindle in his hand, the frayed bit of fluff. “I thought about it. I considered just bursting out of the bushes like a policeman or something. ‘Nobody move! Hands in the air!’ ”

  “What did you do?” I was too hungry not to eat some tuna. I scooped up the lukewarm stuff on a cracker and tried to chew quietly. I can eat when I’m upset is the problem.

  “Sat in the bushes awhile longer, then walked to the truck.”

  “Did you miss the audition?”

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew he’d really, really wanted to go to that camp. And Mr. Van der Does has a seriously long memory. If you’re two minutes late for a madrigal practice, you can kiss your solos goodbye. But after my father left us, after we found the receipts, after the forensic accountant did the math, after eleven (repeat eleven) of my mother’s friends said, “Is he gay?” it was hard to care about madrigal solos. Sometimes it was like my blood had turned to sand.

  “Where’d you go?” I asked.

  “You mean when I drove around?”

  “Yeah.” I thought he’d say the riv
er. We started going there when he first got his license, and it was what I was looking forward to when I turned sixteen, just driving over to the Santa Margarita and hiking to the place where the river fans out green and wide. I liked to walk down into the reeds and sit with my bare feet in the cool shallow streams and watch the tadpoles scoot around. I could spend a whole hour on the table rock that splits the current in a wide bend of the river, crouching there like a bird and just listening to the water gurgle and staring at the clear brown rocks all speckled and shiny under the surface. Spring was the best time because the willow fluff catches on the wind and snows itself through the air.

  “I spoke to … this ostrich,” Robby said, kind of sheepishly.

  He startled me out of my river thoughts. “Metaphorically?”

  “I didn’t mean it metaphorically.”

  “So you literally spoke to the ostrich?” We’re both scornful of people who say they literally freaked out or they literally jumped out of their skins. I offered Robby a cracker lightly spread with tuna, but he shook his head, so I ate it. Robby touched his blocky fingertips together in this way he has. It’s like one hand is a mirror image of the other hand: tap, tap, tap. All five fingers checking to see if the other five fingers still match.

  “In that big pasture to the south of us,” he said. “You know, the one you can see from the freeway?”

  “Where the cows are sometimes?” It was a place I liked staring at from the car, actually, because it didn’t have any houses on it or even a golf course, so it was soothingly au naturel.

  “Yeah. There’s this honest-to-God ostrich living there, too,” he said.

  “A talking ostrich?”

  Robby lay back down on the sofa and closed his eyes. The silkworms sounded like Pop Rocks in an open mouth. “No. Not a le talking ostrich.” He sounded deeply annoyed.

  “No offense,” I said. “Pardonnez le moi.” I ate another cracker and wished for coffee.

  Robby started up again. “I was just driving along that frontage road, you know, planning how far I could go on a tank of gas and thinking I could hang out in Tijuana for a while, maybe busk my way down to Ecuador, and then I looked over and I thought, No way. It can’t be. I pulled over and there’s this ostrich. Right there by the fence. Staring at me with its big freaky eyes.”

  I wondered whether you could even busk yourself to the next town with classical clarinet, but I decided he was too touchy to be teased about that. “So what did you, um, say to it?”

  “Nothing,” Robby said. “Nightclub patter. What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”

  I hoped nightclub patter wasn’t going to be part of his busking routine. “It was a girl?”

  “No idea.”

  I started to make coffee. My mother says I’m going to stunt my growth and I say, Good. It keeps that feeling at bay, sometimes, the sand piling up in my veins. “Then what?”

  “I guess I startled it. The le bird ran away.”

  “Maybe you could tame it. I think people used to ride ostriches, didn’t they? In Africa or somewhere. Or maybe that was the Robinson Crusoe movie.”

  “I’m going to le fall asleep now,” Robby said.

  “You don’t want any coffee?”

  “Staying awake is the last thing I want,” Robby said. “The very last thing.”

  So I unfolded a quilt and laid it over him and he didn’t say a word, just turned his head deeper into the pillow like a little boy. I knew that feeling when you can’t move your mouth anymore or your eyes. I poured coffee into a mug, added too much cream and too much sugar, and then poured another one and fixed it the same way. I knew who I was looking for and who I definitely didn’t want to see. If I ran into my uncle, I knew he would look different to me now, as my dad did, and I hated, hated, hated that feeling. I supposed that was why Robby told me about it. You want someone else to share your bitterness at learning this person you’ve idolized your whole life is a big fat fabricator. Now I wanted to be with someone I couldn’t even talk to, someone who didn’t know anything about me or my family of unreliable men.

  It was either the ostrich or Amiel, so I took one coffee in each hand.

  Nine

  The avocado grove looks nothing like it did that day. Nine hundred of Hoyt’s trees burned in the Agua Prieta fire. Lavar Mulveen’s white-shingled house, the needlepoint rug, the sofa, the three pictures I had saved of my father and me, the dish shaped like a heart that I made for him in sixth grade, the silverware, and every book we owned. Robby’s Tintin figures. My mother’s lock of her grandmother’s hair. All burned. The wrought-iron fence melted, then hardened into a roller-coaster rail, and the prickly pear cactus that grew along the ridge liquefied and sank into ghastly skin-colored piles. But the avocado trees didn’t completely die. The workers stumped every single one and painted them white. They replaced the sprinkler pipes that shriveled up like dead snakes, and they stacked the charred logs in neat pyramids beside the white, still-living trunks.

  But on that April day the trees outside the guesthouse spread their green fluttering limbs high above my head. The leaves underfoot were copper-colored and the light was amber where the canopy broke apart and made an aperture for the sun. It wasn’t too difficult to find Amiel, but it was hard to approach him. First of all, he was still working with Gallo, whom I totally forgot, and I hadn’t brought three coffees. They turned at the sound of my feet crushing many layers of dried leaves. I held up both cups, and they nodded. They looked so hot and sweaty that I wondered why on earth I hadn’t brought water, but if they wondered the same thing, they didn’t say so. They leaned back on two different tree trunks and sipped. They didn’t look at me or at each other. I could tell they were waiting for me to go away, which was normal. Why would I stay?

  “Hot,” I said in Spanish.

  They nodded and Gallo said, “Sí, caliente,” though he might have thought I meant the coffee. I wished I knew the words for How long have you been here? or What’s wrong with your throat?

  I realized the obvious, finally: getting to know a mute person was going to be tricky. I forgot about my heterochromia, too. I forget about it more than you might think because it’s not a limp or a missing finger or a port-wine stain on my arm. I can’t see the eyes myself. I remembered my freakishness a half second after I realized that Amiel was looking into my eyes with searing interest.

  “¿De dónde eres?” I managed to say.

  “Acapulco,” Gallo said, which of course he’d already said that morning.

  Amiel pointed to his own matching eyes and then, gently, at mine.

  Gallo nodded and studied me intently, as if making a medical diagnosis. He spoke to Amiel in Spanish, and I’d love to say that I translated every word in my head, but I just nodded pseudo-wisely until finally I gave up. “¿Cómo?” I said, which is Spanish for “Huh?”

  Gallo pointed to my eyes again and then at the sun, or maybe the treetops. I understood the word for “cat” and the word for “worlds.” I was like a cat of the world? I belonged in cat world? Amiel was looking at me with the kind of interest that made my mouth dry up. I was Braille and his eyes were fingers.

  I guess there’s not an easy way to mime “You are of two worlds,” which is what Gallo said after he compared me to a cat. In the beginning, what I would do is memorize the sound of a Spanish phrase, and then I’d get someone at school to translate. Later, I learned words and grammar.

  Amiel studied me for a second, and then he finished his coffee. He didn’t say anything to me that day. It was a while after that, at the river, when Amiel said it over and over again to me slowly, in his damaged voice that is like a whisper: Tú eres de dos mundos, tú eres de dos mundos, tú eres de dos mundos.

  Ten

  I woke up at 1:15 a.m. to see my mother watching the silkworms. I slept in the living room on a foldout couch, and she used the single bedroom that I guess was old Lavar’s. Usually if I woke up in the middle of the night, she was in her bed with the light on, readi
ng nonfiction paperbacks about women who start their lives over in canny new business ventures instead of the novels she used to like. But that night she was sitting on a kitchen chair by the tray of worms, wearing the peach chenille robe my father and I gave her on Mother’s Day so many years ago that the sleeve is ripped at the armhole and the cuffs are dingy.

  She looked over her cup of hot Postum at me. Postum is what the label calls a “grain beverage,” and she wanted me to drink that instead of coffee. Postum’s not bad in hot milk if you add enough sugar, but I had trouble staying awake, while she had trouble staying asleep. We needed different cures, it seemed to me.

  “What are the worms doing?” I asked.

  “Eating,” she said.

  “Weren’t they doing that all day?”

  “Yes.” She sipped her Postum and leaned forward to point at one of the white creatures. He held his head up and swayed as if he were hearing a wonderful holy voice. “That’s called the praying position,” she said. “He’s waiting to shed his skin and move to the last instar. If you disturb them while they’re doing this, they can get stuck or die.”

  “I thought he was begging for more salad,” I said, pretty concerned, suddenly, that I might have disturbed a few praying caterpillars while showing the collection to Greenie or adding mulberry leaves. The white caterpillar waved his strange noggin in the air and swayed like someone who was closing his eyes to shut out the material world.

  “What did you and Robby do today?” she asked, her eyes on the mesmerizing caterpillar, not on me.

  Discussed Uncle Hoyt’s adultery, I almost said because I have a powerful impulse at all times to spill the beans. It’s like I’m always under the influence of scopolamine, which, if you haven’t watched The Guns of Navarone as many times as Robby and I, is the drug the Nazis give the Allied prisoner to make him reveal when the American ships are going to attack. I knew that if my mom kept quizzing me, if she had any inkling of what was going on, I’d end up saying that Hoyt was turning out just like Dad.