Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

  “They’ll send you back too,” he said to her, his face turned to the window. “Sooner or later.”

  After Cal died, there was never any mention of Jeanette and Holly and Albie going back to Virginia. Every now and then their father would fly out to Los Angeles and take them to SeaWorld and Knott’s Berry Farm, take them to that restaurant in West Hollywood where girls swam in the giant fish tank along the wall while you ate your dinner, but the endless unsupervised summers of the commonwealth were over. Albie, of course, moved back later for a single, disastrous school year after the fire, and Holly went back for two nights as an adult in an attempt to measure just how much peace and forgiveness she had mastered through the dharma, but Jeanette wrote off both the state and its residents, including, but not limited to, her father, both sets of grandparents, her uncles and aunts, a handful of first cousins, her stepmother, and her two stepsisters. Goodbye to all that. She hunkered down with what she considered to be her real family: Teresa, Holly, and Albie—the three people who were with her in the house in Torrance when she brushed her teeth at night. It was a funny thing but until that point she hadn’t fully understood the extent to which her father was gone, that he had left them years ago and would never come back unless it was to spend the day at an amusement park. Her mother slept alone in her room like Albie slept alone in his. Jeanette, thank God, had Holly. She would lie in her bed at night watching Holly breathe and make a promise to herself to hate Albie less. Even if he was simultaneously irritating and unknowable, he was also her brother, and she was down to just the one.

  But those were lean years for emotional charity, and no matter how many nights Jeanette tightened down on her resolve to be kinder, kindness failed. Without her father, without Cal, the four remaining members of the Southern California Cousinses became more profoundly themselves, as if whatever social ability each had achieved in his or her life had been wiped away in the time it took a bee to sting a boy. The speed at which their mother ran from work to school to the grocery store to home had doubled. She was always arriving, always leaving, never there. She couldn’t find her purse, her car keys. She couldn’t make dinner. Holly found a box of cancelled checks in the desk drawer in the living room and practiced her mother’s signature, Teresa Cousins, Teresa Cousins, Teresa Cousins, until she could do it with exactly the right amount of pressure, the pen angled perfectly against the paper. Holly’s hard work at the art of forgery meant they could still go on field trips and turn their report cards back in. Holly, who believed in credit where credit was due, took her good work straight to her mother, and Teresa put Holly in charge of paying the bills without ever telling her if it was punishment or reward. Teresa’s inabilities in household accounting were legendary, going back to the time when she and Bert were happily married. Before Holly took over the checkbook, third notices and disconnection warnings arrived in the mailbox and were promptly misplaced, so that once or twice a year the house snapped into darkness. The electricity wasn’t such a loss if you didn’t count the television, and candles flickering in the middle of the table while they ate cereal for dinner made them think of the very rich and the very much in love. But when the toilets stopped flushing and the showers went dry, well, that was intolerable. Everyone agreed the water bill had to be paid on time. Holly, who at almost fourteen was good at pretty much everything, was good at math. She started balancing the checkbook the way she’d been taught in home economics (a class that had also enabled her to do emergency mending and make inventive casserole suppers). When she was able to identify the disaster that was their financial state, she taped a rudimentary budget to the refrigerator every week just like her teacher Mrs. Shepherd had told the girls they would need to do later on in their married lives. The last line Holly wrote in red Magic Marker: This is what we have to spend: $___. Even Albie paid attention to that.

  For her part, Jeanette dragged the kitchen stepladder out to the backyard and pulled the low-hanging oranges off the trees, then carried them back to the kitchen in a bucket to make juice with the old metal juicer. It was a lot of work but she did it because orange juice was the way it used to be in their family. At night their mother took the pitcher out of the refrigerator and made herself a screwdriver. She never asked which one of them had been so thoughtful as to make orange juice, and Jeanette, unlike her sister, couldn’t bring herself to say. Their mother was still capable of responding to a situation—had she spilled the pitcher of juice she would have mopped it up—but she exhibited zero curiosity. She never wondered about anything except Cal.

  For the most part she didn’t talk about Cal, but there were little things that gave her away, like the fact that they used to get stacks of Tombstone frozen pizzas from the grocery store and now their mother visibly flinched if they so much as walked by them in the freezer aisle. Was it because Cal had eaten so many Tombstone pizzas with sausage and pepperoni, or was it really just the name she couldn’t stand? Not discussed. Now they called for delivery and the pizzas came to the door.

  But then one night when they were all eating pizza and watching television, their mother came right out and said what was always on her mind. “Tell me about Cal.” They had been watching an old Jacques Cousteau program. It had nothing to do with anything.

  “What about him?” Holly asked. They really didn’t know what she meant. It had been more than six months since he’d died.

  “What happened that day,” Teresa said, and then added, in case they didn’t understand what she was talking about, “At your grandparents’ house.”

  Had no one ever told her? Hadn’t their father explained things? It wasn’t fair that everything fell to Holly but it did. Jeanette kept her eyes on her plate, and Albie, well, Albie didn’t know the story either. That was when Holly was grateful to Caroline for having given her a script to follow. Otherwise she wouldn’t have known what to say. She told her mother the girls had left the house after Cal because Franny decided she wanted to go back and change into long pants because of the ticks, and how there were two ways you could go to the barn from the Cousinses’ kitchen door, how Cal and the girls had taken different routes because they found him when they were coming back. Her mother knew the Cousins house, of course. She and Bert had been married on the front porch and danced in front of two hundred guests beneath a tent on the lawn. There was still a cream-colored leather album of wedding pictures in the hall closet. Their father was handsome. Their mother, freckled and pale, with her tiny waist and dark hair, had been like a bride in a fairy story, a child bride.

  “Why would you wait for her to change her pants?” their mother asked. “Why wouldn’t her sister have waited with her?”

  “Caroline did wait,” Holly said. “We all did. The girls stayed together.” She told her they saw him lying in the grass, and how at first they thought he was playing a joke. The other girls ran back to the house but Franny stayed with Cal just in case.

  “Just in case what?” Teresa didn’t like the fact that it was Franny who stayed.

  It was hard for Holly to say the words because they came from a time in her life when she still believed in the possibility of a different outcome. “In case he woke up,” she said.

  “I saw it,” Albie said, still looking at the television screen. It was a commercial, a pretty woman spreading peanut butter onto a slice of bread.

  “You didn’t see anything,” Holly said. Albie hadn’t been with the girls and he hadn’t been with Cal either. Albie had been asleep. On this point everyone was clear.

  “I left before you got there. I saw everything that happened before you came.”

  “Albie,” their mother said. Her voice was sympathetic because she thought she understood the way he felt. She too had been shut out of the story.

  “You were asleep,” Holly said.

  Albie spun around and threw his fork at his sister, threw it like a javelin in hopes of piercing her chest but it bounced off her shoulder without incident. Albie was ten and his gestures tended to be sloppy. “He go
t shot and I’m the only one who saw it.”

  “Albie, stop that,” their mother said. She pushed her hands through her hair. She was regretting having asked them, the children could see that.

  “It’s fine,” Holly said, cool and dismissive in a way that made Albie’s head burst into flames.

  “It was Ned from the barn!” he screamed. “He shot Cal with dad’s gun. The one from the car, the gun that Caroline got out of the car! I saw it and you didn’t see it because I was the one who was there. They didn’t even know I was there.”

  Jeanette and Holly were both crying then. Their mother was crying. Albie was screaming that he hated them, hated them, and that they were liars. That was how it ended.

  On that worst of all August days in Virginia, Caroline had already decided to become a lawyer, and so she told the other girls—Holly and Franny and Jeanette—exactly what had happened even though they’d been right there. This was after they had run fast as horses to the house and Ernestine had called the ambulance, after they had taken Ernestine back to Cal. Ernestine, fifty pounds too heavy and in ill-fitting shoes, was running with the girls through the back field while Mrs. Cousins waited at the house to direct the ambulance. Somewhere in all of that Caroline had worked out the story in her head. When did she find time? While they were all still running? Once they were back in the house? Cal was in the ambulance speeding away with the lights spinning and the siren wailing for no reason (oh, but he would have loved it though), and the Cousinses were in their car following Cal’s ambulance to the hospital. Ernestine was trying to find Albie who somehow, in all the confusion, was missing. Their father was running through the parking lot of his law office in Arlington to jump in his car and race to Charlottesville to see his son for the last time. No one knew where Beverly was. That was when Caroline rounded the three other girls into the upstairs hall bathroom of the Cousinses’ house, pushed them in and locked the door behind them. Only Franny was crying, presumably because she had spent those extra fifteen minutes with Cal while the other girls had run to the house and then run back again. Franny alone understood that Cal was dead. Even the people from the ambulance wouldn’t say the word dead when all they had to do was look at him. Caroline told her sister to shut up.

  “Listen to me,” Caroline said, as if they didn’t always listen to Caroline. She was fourteen that summer. Her voice was sharp, rushed. Flecks of cut grass were stuck to her legs and tennis shoes. “We weren’t with him, do you understand me? Cal went to the barn by himself. We came up later and we found him in the grass right where he was, and when we found him we ran straight back to the house to tell. That’s all we know. When anyone asks us, that’s what we say.”

  “Why do we have to lie?” Franny said. What was there to lie about when they weren’t supposed to lie anyway? Weren’t the facts of the day bad enough without compounding them? Caroline, with the full force of her frustration at both the circumstances and Franny’s stupidity, slapped her sister hard across the face. Franny hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t braced herself, and the blow spun her sideways and knocked her head into the door of the linen closet. The knot on her left temple began to inflate before their eyes. It would be one more thing to explain.

  Caroline was irritated by the crack her sister’s head had made against the door when she was working to keep them quiet. She turned back to Holly and Jeanette, the more reliable two. “We can be as upset as we want. They’ll expect us to be upset. But we’re upset because we found him, we’re upset because it happened, that’s all, not because we were there.” At that moment she could have told them that their only way out was to grow tails and swing through the trees and they would have done it. Caroline was thinking of their culpability, and maybe, because she was Caroline, how it might affect her own college admission. She would be in high school in the fall.

  “Tell me again what happened,” Teresa said one evening to Jeanette. By this point it had been well over a year since Cal died. As a rule the people in her family didn’t ask Jeanette anything. Holly was studying at a friend’s house down the street, and Albie was riding his bike with the pack of boys he had recently assembled. Jeanette and her mother were for the moment alone together even though they were pretty much never alone. Her mother said it so casually, like it was just another thing she’d forgotten. Where is my lipstick? Who was that on the phone?

  Jeanette could still see Caroline in the bathroom, hear the barking clarity of her directions. She could see how sweat had dampened Caroline’s hair at the temples and soaked through the collar of her yellow T-shirt. But she couldn’t see Cal anymore. In just a year his face had slipped away from her. “I wasn’t there,” Jeanette said.

  “But you were there,” her mother said, as if Jeanette had forgotten.

  “If you want to find the person who did it, you have to ask the same questions over and over again,” Franny had told Jeanette one summer when they were in Virginia. It was years ago, before Cal died. It was one of the police skills Franny was trying to teach her, along with breaking into cars and taking apart the phone receiver so that you could listen in on other people’s calls without their knowing. “Sooner or later someone always slips up,” Franny had said.

  Jeanette wondered if her mother was trying to slip her up.

  “He got tired of waiting for us,” she said. “He was going to go see the horses and we were going to catch up.”

  “You caught up,” her mother said.

  Jeanette shrugged, an awful gesture given the circumstances, disrespectful. “It was too late.” It was after Cal died that her mother finally lost her freckles, as if even they had abandoned her. Jeanette was looking at the bridge of her mother’s nose, trying to stay focused, trying to remember what she had looked like before all this happened.

  “So who gave the pills to Albie?” their mother asked.

  “Cal,” Jeanette said, surprised by how good it felt to tell the truth about something. “He always did that.”

  With all that had happened that day, no one cared that Albie was missing except Ernestine. After checking in the attic and the cellar, she said he must have gone with Beverly. No one knew where Beverly was. She’d taken one of their grandparents’ cars and hadn’t told anyone she was leaving. If she’d gone into town she must have taken Albie with her. If it had been any other day the very thought of Beverly taking Albie with her anywhere, ANYWHERE, would have cracked the girls up.

  * * *

  The Goddamn Boys on Bikes is what the neighbors in Torrance called them, and later it was what they called themselves. They heard the words yelled after them as they cut over lawns, flashed between cars to the high-pitched skid of slamming brakes, swooped across grocery-store parking lots in fast, tight circles for the pleasure of terrorizing the mothers with loaded carts. People simultaneously wanted to kill them, believed that they had almost killed them, and were afraid of being killed by them. Albie, a member of the Mattaponi tribe, Raul, El Salvadoran born on this side to parents born on that side, and two black kids, the smaller, handsomer, sleepier-looking one called Lenny and the other, the tallest of the four, Edison. They had all started riding together when they were eleven and ten, when they were still just irritating boys whose mothers wanted them out of the house in the afternoon. They were dangerous right from the start, forcing the cars they cut in front of to swing hard into people’s lawns. One car jumped the curb and went straight into a phone pole while the boys sailed on, whooping the way they imagined the Indians would. The summer they were mostly twelve a car door opened unexpectedly and sent Lenny straight up in the air. The other three slammed on their brakes in time to see their young friend tumble gymnastically across the backdrop of blue sky. It should have killed him, would have killed him had he landed anywhere near his head, but instead he reached out his right hand to catch himself and snapped his wrist so that the bone came through the skin. Albie crashed not two weeks later, a sudden downpour pulling up the oil embedded in the pavement and sending his bike spinning out from
under him. Albie broke his shoulder and tore back one ear, which required thirty-seven stitches to reattach. Edison and Raul pedaled carefully around the bike paths in the park for the rest of the summer, scaring no one, not even themselves. Edison came to Albie’s house to visit and stood beside the recliner in the darkened living room. Albie had to stay in the recliner pretty much all of the time because of his shoulder.

  “Everybody has a bad summer sometimes,” Edison said, and Albie, who knew this to be true, gave his friend a Tylenol with codeine while they watched cartoons.

  By the time they had graduated from Jefferson Middle School, Albie and Lenny and Edison were fourteen and Raul was fifteen. They were tall but not as tall as they would be. From a distance it was impossible to tell if the bicycles were ridden by boys or men. They went too fast, and since they were always trying to see which one could outdo the other, the pack of them shifted in furious rotation, like the lead men in a race.

  The Goddamn Boys on Bikes stole less candy after middle school, concentrating instead on the cans of Reddi-wip they slipped into the kangaroo pockets of their sweatshirts when they went to Albertson’s. Later they would ball up together on the floor of Albie’s bedroom to take in the small, sweet kick of fluorocarbons, or huff airplane glue from paper lunch bags. Each of the four mothers despaired at the bad crowd her son had fallen in with and, with the exception of Teresa, each of the mothers believed the other boys were entirely to blame.

  Then one hot day in the summer they were mostly fourteen, Raul’s bike slipped its chain. They were miles from home, on a narrow service road that ran beside a field that stretched out wide behind an industrial park. The boys waited while Raul squatted beside his bike and worked on the chain. The field was unmown and given over to tall grasses and various weeds, all of which had died months before. That was Torrance. Albie lay on his back on the pavement, which was maybe two degrees away from being hotter than he could stand. It felt good on his shoulder. He wished he had sunglasses but none of them had sunglasses. He took a blue Bic lighter out of the giant buttoned pocket of his long shorts. He had a little pipe in there too, with a little wooden slide over the tiny mesh basket, but that was just for show. He was long out of pot and out of the money he had stolen from Holly’s babysitting stash to buy more, so instead of getting high he raised his arm straight up and flicked his lighter at the sun.