“Have you talked to Mr. Buddy?” I asked. “I mean, Buddy Howard. He was the majordomo of the Drama Camp.”
“I know. I did already.” Chuck wasn’t giving anything away; his face had gone into freeze mode. “You keep mentioning him. Is there something you think we should know about him?”
“No. It’s just he spent a lot of time around Leonard, and well … I don’t know … He was kind of…”
“Phoebe?” my mother said, as she rose from the couch and smoothed the front of her skirt, “Go outside and play. I want a word with Detective Chuck. In private.”
Telling me to “go outside and play” was as odd a suggestion as telling me to be “present.” I haven’t gone outside to play since I was about nine years old. But I did it anyway, because I know for a fact that when Mom starts using phony speech like that, something real is about to happen.
I said good-bye to Officer Chuck, and though I don’t think he was quite ready to see me go, he waved me off with a cheery “be good.” Whatever that meant. I then stepped into the front yard. The whole neighborhood seemed like it was trapped in a bottle; there wasn’t a breeze stirring. There was only one way to be able to hear what Mom had to say to Chuck: Take a deep breath, creep behind the azalea bushes close to the house, crouch down in the dusty earth below the open living-room window, and listen. Which is exactly what I did.
We hadn’t recognized any of the guys in the pictures. Mom just sat through the whole thing, holding her hand over her mouth as if she couldn’t allow herself to speak even if she’d wanted to. Now she said, “How about I top off that lemonade for you, Chuck?”
He said, “No, thanks. ’S good though.”
She said, “I guess you have a list of men in your computer who have, well, assaulted girls, huh?”
He said, “We do. Why do you ask?”
She said. “Do any of the men go for girls and boys?”
He said, “It’s rare. One guy I showed you has two prior arrests. One for each. But like I said, it’s rare.”
She said, “I was just wondering.”
(There was a silence. I heard some ice rattle in a glass, which I figured was the last of Chuck’s lemonade.)
He said, “Well … I oughta—”
She said, “There is one more thing. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bring it up, and I’d appreciate it if we could keep it between ourselves. But … well … um … it may have some bearing on Leonard’s case.”
(More silence. No ice.)
She said, “It’s about my husband.”
He said, “Uh-huh. What about him?”
She said, “Well, it was never reported. We … I didn’t … it involved one of my girls. My older.”
He said, “Deirdre.”
She said, “Deirdre. Yes. That’s right. Um. This is so hard. I…”
He said, “It’s okay.”
She said, “No. It’s not okay. I never did anything about it, report it, I mean. To the police or anything. I couldn’t. For Deirdre’s sake I couldn’t. It only happened that one time, but … well, that was it. We … I … he doesn’t live with us anymore. Not after that. I never told anyone.”
She blew her nose, and from the sound of her voice, I figured she was crying.
He said, “Why are you telling me now?”
She said, “I know that Leonard was in touch with Jim. A few times. Jim is my … my…”
He said, “Husband.”
She said, “Yes. Was. Was my husband. Leonard set up this surprise meeting between the two of us. He was trying to bring us back together. The family.”
He said, “He didn’t know about—”
She said, “Of course he didn’t know. I told you, I never told anyone. But then I started thinking just now, looking at those pictures. Well, you know how the mind works. I just thought…”
He said, “I understand. I’ll check it out.”
She said, “You won’t have to report it, will you? I’d rather not dig it all up. It was three years ago, and Deirdre is just getting on with her life and all. It’s behind us now.”
He said, “Sure. No problem. It’ll be between us. I’ll look into it.”
She said, “I mean, I don’t think Jim would ever … but you live with a person and you find out they’re capable of something … it makes you wonder what else you don’t know about them.”
He said, “I appreciate your … honesty, Mrs. Hertle.”
She said, “Please, call me Ellen.”
He said, “I should get going.”
She said, “Right. Yes. Well, thanks. Thank you so much.”
And that was that.
As Chuck made his way out the front door and down the pavement to his car, I had to lie down in the dirt close to the house in order not to be seen. After his car pulled away, I heard Mom lock the front door from inside. I was alone, and the whole neighborhood was humming because every AC unit was cranked up full blast except ours, which was broken. An occasional car whooshed by our house. The passengers were sealed up and strapped inside their sports utility vehicles; and they probably didn’t notice anything unusual as they passed by. All they saw was a row of dreary houses on some suburban street. Ours was no different from the rest except that the attached garage had been transformed and then extended to the very edge of the property line so that it accommodated the salon. Big deal. Passersby might wonder who in the world would get their hair done in a place like that. They might challenge the artistic merits of Mom’s neon HAIR TODAY sign. They might even notice the CLOSED MONDAYS sign, which was displayed in the front window, and then remember that it was indeed a Monday. But no way in the world would a random person suspect that anything out of the ordinary had happened inside our house.
My head was buzzing and my mouth tasted sweet and sour at the same time. I thought I might throw up right there behind the exhausted azaleas, but then I would have to get up and go somewhere else, and I didn’t know where else I could go. So I grabbed a handful of dirt with each fist and squeezed it tighter and tighter. I squeezed it so tight that soon the pain in my hands was greater than the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
How could she? How could she have made up a story like that just to get Dad in trouble? Even after Dad set Chuck straight, explaining that sometimes ex-wives can be pretty brutal, Chuck would have Dad’s name in his blue binder. Jim Hertle would become a part of Phase Two whether we liked it or not. What a performance, I thought. Tears were a nice touch. I knew Mom hated Dad, but I had no idea that she was capable of this. No wonder she didn’t want Deirdre “present.” Deirdre would have flatly denied everything and exposed Mom for the vindictive and spiteful person that she had revealed herself to be. But like she said, you live with a person, you find out they’re capable of something and you can’t help wondering what else you don’t know about them.
eleven
“THAT YOU?” SAID Chrissie Bettinger’s voice through the sad little copper grating of the intercom in Dad’s apartment building.
“It’s me,” I said. “Phoebe.”
“Your dad’s not here.”
“’S okay. Can I come up and maybe wait for him?”
I guess she was busy weighing the pros and cons of my presence inside her apartment or maybe she was checking out her surroundings to see if the place was presentable for an unannounced visitor. In any case, there was a longish pause before she buzzed me in.
Dad and Chrissie lived in a third-floor studio apartment. It was the kind of place where all you could do was look out the window and wish you were someplace else. The view of the parking lot was not at all impressive. Once I was inside the room, Chrissie offered me a seat and asked if I wanted a Diet Coke. What could I say?
“Sure,” I replied as I pushed aside a stack of outdated style magazines featuring B celebrities with unflattering hairstyles and failed relationships. I took a seat at the table with the turquoise top and the chrome legs. It used to be our kitchen table. Years ago when I was just a kid, before Mom had redecora
ted and relegated the thing to our basement, I’d eaten all my meals off that shiny tabletop. I’d spilled drinks there, banged fists, shed tears.
Chrissie kept her eye on me all the way to the refrigerator and never stopped talking. She’d probably heard all about how I had gotten into the habit of stealing stuff right after my dad ran off, and she was afraid I’d lift one of her semivaluable knickknacks when her back was turned. But her kind of stuff was the kind I didn’t steal, which is to say that I never stole people’s personal stuff.
The mall was where I went to pocket makeup and underwear and the occasional food item. It was all just crap and I could’ve bought it all three times over. I had the money. It’s not like I was poor. I don’t know why I did it, really. Maybe it was the thrill, the feeling that I was getting away with something that I knew was wrong. Maybe Leonard was right; maybe I was just hoping to get caught. In any case, when I finally did get caught stealing a pair of earrings from the Dressbarn, they called Mom. She was pissed that she had to come pick me up, sit in an airless office, and discuss her children with people she didn’t know from Adam. I pretended like it was my first time and explained to everyone that I’d stolen the earrings to make up for the loss of my father. Mom didn’t buy it, but she recognized that my excuse was going over big with the gal in the polyester skirt who was presiding over the whole affair, so she shook her head thoughtfully and said, “It’s been a year of a lotta loss for us.” We drove home in silence, but when we got home, Mom gave me a good talking to about how I could jeopardize my future and the family reputation. It didn’t stop me from stealing, but still, never in a million years would I have taken one of Chrissie’s knickknacks.
Chrissie had a thing for porcelain dolls, china horses, multicolored blown-glass clowns, small statuettes of Indian gods and goddesses, plaster angels, paperweights, and perfume bottles in the shape of antique cars—all of it basically junk. But the way she had arranged the stuff on a series of shelves almost tricked you into believing there was something there worth admiring.
The same could not be said for Chrissie herself; she obviously put all her effort into her knickknacking. I knew for a fact that Chrissie considered herself a dead ringer for Julia Roberts. But even if Julia had been contracted to play a piece of Jersey trash who had stolen someone else’s husband, she would’ve never smoked Newports or kept Cheez Whiz in her fridge, and she certainly wouldn’t have answered the door wearing a tie-dyed halter top, cutoff jeans, and no shoes.
Chrissie had been one of Mom’s “helpers” at the salon. She started out as a part-time shampooer, worked her way up to doing comb-outs, and then made a name for herself as an ace blow-dryer. For a while there was talk about her applying for her license and taking over the spare chair in the salon. But then Dad started fooling around with Chrissie, and that changed everything for everyone.
For a while, Mom was about the only person in Neptune who was unaffected by the change; she kept insisting that there was a big misunderstanding about exactly which Chrissie everyone was talking about.
“Not my Chrissie,” she would say. “That could never happen. No. Remember, I gave Chrissie her first job.”
Also, as it turned out, her first serious relationship.
Especially in the early stages, Mom maintained a level of denial that was truly impressive. When someone said that they had spotted the two of them together walking out of the multiplex on a Friday night, Mom considered it a coincidence. When someone saw Dad pumping gas into Chrissie’s Honda Civic down at the Mobil station on Division Street, Mom held to the idea that her husband was just being a Good Samaritan. Her behavior was the stuff that keeps daytime talk shows on the air.
Deirdre and I knew better. Chrissie had once confessed to us that she thought our dad was “hot.” After that, I kept an eye on Chrissie. And Dad. Every time he entered the salon, I couldn’t help noticing how Chrissie perked up, fluffed out her dyed-red hair, expanded her bustline, and bared her teeth in an effort to attract. It was like watching one of those nature programs on public television where the bizarre mating habits of some forest-dwelling female primate seem perfectly understandable to her male counterpart, while to us they just seem gross.
Dad was acting pretty weird as well. He signed up at a gym and actually went. Who knows what tortures he submitted himself to there, but when he came home, looking exhausted and invigorated at the same time, he went on and on about the virtues of a good workout and how it was just the thing he’d been missing in his life.
Mom couldn’t see what was going on; she didn’t want to. I was only twelve at the time, and even then I knew that forcing her to face the truth wasn’t a good idea. It was June, and she was up to her eyeballs in other people’s French twists, baby’s breath, and mother-of-the-bride anxiety. June is traditionally the biggest month for weddings, and weddings are the most compelling reason for a new hairdo. There was a lot of traffic in and out of Hair Today around that time, so it wasn’t surprising that Mom didn’t have five minutes to sit down and talk sensibly with us. Even so, we knew that she was still months away from revising her opinion of Dad. She needed him to be his old self in order for her to complete her idea of herself, in the same way she needed us to shut up about what was happening so she could get on with the business at hand. Her eyes were closed to anything that didn’t support her public point of view about our family life and her business; and her point of view was that everything was just fine.
At the time, Deirdre and I made the fatal mistake of letting things run their own course. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned during my years on this planet, it is this: If things are allowed to run their own course, they will definitely go in a downhill direction.
And sure enough, that’s what happened. One hot night in August, there was a big fight that involved tears, slammed doors, and a broken floor lamp. Dad left the house. Mom packed his stuff in boxes, and the next day she left it all sitting on the front lawn to be picked up at his earliest convenience. This was major. I tried to understand what was happening, but at the time, adults seemed directed by passions and logic that couldn’t exactly be explained by my then-favorite authors. I felt like I was in over my head. Only the melodramatic goings-on of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë came close; but without the nineteenth-century setting and consumption and wild dogs baying at the moon on the untamed moors, Mom and Dad seemed like amateurs who couldn’t hold a candle to Cathy and Heathcliff. They were just Jim and Ellen, another unhappy New Jersey couple headed for divorce court.
Deirdre did nothing to help me get a grip on the situation. She removed herself from the scene, sulked in her room, and told me to stay out of it. Mom cried, got angry, and by mid-September had fallen into a major depression. For the first time in my life, I could sit in the living room and read a book for hours without being disturbed. Rather than making me happy, however, this only made me sad and caused me to wonder what the hell had happened to my family. I wanted the old life back. I wanted Dad.
A month later, Mom got out of bed and made up her mind to go on. If anyone dared to mention Dad’s name in her presence, she simply smiled. If that didn’t work, she increased her wattage and blinded them with her positive attitude about her new life. This had the desired effect of dissuading people from ever bringing up his name and convincing them that maybe it was a good thing, after all, that she was rid of the guy.
Chrissie went on to become famous in certain circles. She was branded “a home wrecker,” and though it marked the end of her career as a hair stylist, she landed a well-paying job as a cocktail waitress at a dive called Jeepers that was situated right off the Parkway.
Because Dad had set everyone’s unhappiness in motion, he couldn’t offer much in the way of comfort; and since he wasn’t around, he was no help in sorting things out. He stayed away and was very slow at returning my calls. Once when I ran into him by accident at the 7-Eleven, he jotted down his new address on a paper napkin and slipped it to me just in case I should ever need it
. Each time I considered traveling the fourteen blocks to his new apartment building, however, I felt like a total traitor and scrapped the idea. What would I have said to him anyway? Begged him to come home? Told him to leave Chrissie? None of it made sense, and so in time I learned to keep him out of my mind and just go about my business. But that day my business led me straight to him. I thought that if I could just see his face, I would be able to tell what was what and if Mom had been telling the truth.
* * *
“How’s school?” Chrissie asked, handing me a Diet Coke in a can.
“Over,” I said.
“Oh. Right,” she replied. “I’d ask how things are at home, but I better not ’cause that’s prob’ly why you’re here. ’M I right?”
I stared at her painted toenails, a deep shade of purple and definitely do-it-yourself.
“When’s my dad coming home?” I asked her.
“He should be home any minute.”
The TV news was reporting on some fourteen-year-old boy over in Oaklyn who had just been caught with an arsenal of weapons under his bed and a plan to kill a lot of people. Some gal with a blond pixie cut and puffed bangs was arching her eyebrows at us and saying how the boy had been plotting for six months and was discovered “in the nick of time.” The subtitle read PLOT FOILED. The father of the boy was up next.
After the commercial, the father’s big face appeared on the screen, and he began telling us that his son was a nice, normal kid who hung out in his room playing with the computer most of the time. Then they showed the arsenal of weapons hidden under the boy’s bed—pistols, rifles, knives, hunting gear, and two thousand rounds of ammo.
Absolute Brightness Page 12
