She dialed her brother’s cell, knowing better than to expect him to stay home on such a beautiful day. While Alexa sought relief in domesticity, Evan needed endless distractions. But then, his New York apartment was small and depressing. No one would elect to spend time there. Alexa had offered to give it a perk-up—make curtains, show him how a few pieces from Target and Pier 1 could tie it all together—but Evan hadn’t been interested.
“Alexa!” He was breathless. He was always breathless, always in a rush.
“Hey, Evan. Is this a bad time?”
“Heading uptown to a softball game. What’s up?”
“Oh, I’ve been running around a lot and just wanted to make sure you hadn’t tried to call me this weekend.”
“No. Should I? Was there something with Mom?”
“Nothing important. But I thought you might get a little unnerved, my school being all over the news.”
“Your school? Christ, was that your school? Oh, my God, Alexa, I didn’t put it together. I mean, yes, Maryland, but when it wasn’t Bethesda–Chevy Chase and when it wasn’t Baltimore…I always think of you as being in Baltimore.”
“I am in Baltimore,” she said lightly, letting him off the hook. “It’s the school that’s in the suburbs.”
“Did you see anything? Were you there?”
“I was in the office when the call came in, saying there were shots. And I’m going to coordinate the grief-counseling effort.”
Evan started to laugh, then caught himself. “I’m sorry, Alexa, it’s just that—I don’t know, I’ve never understood the need to qualify counseling with the information that it’s about grief, you know? It’s not like there’s a lot of joy counseling.”
She could have reprimanded him for his insensitivity or pointed out that there were, in fact, other types of counseling. Job counseling for one, as Evan should know, having changed careers three times so far. He currently worked as a graphic designer in downtown Manhattan, a job he had managed to hold for a personal best of four years, even after his firm cut back positions in the wake of 9/11. The day the towers fell, Alexa and her mother had tried frantically to call him, encountering overloaded cellular systems and no answer on his landline. Turned out he had slept through it all. Stranger still, he had not really known anyone among the dead, not intimately. “I haven’t lived in the city that long,” he said, unconcerned about his lack of connection, but that detail had bothered Alexa. She worried that Evan was more like their father than he knew, simply skipping the wife-and-family part and going straight to a selfish, solitary existence.
“I’ll let you go,” she said, keen to say it first. “I’m laying a new floor.”
“Is that all you’re laying these days? What’s wrong with Baltimore men?”
“Evan!”
“I’m serious. I’ve been to Baltimore. You raise the city’s aesthetic standards by several percentage points.”
“Bye!”
She dawdled on her back steps, less than eager to go in and confront her crossways pieces of Pergo. When she did return, she found that something—the tea, her brother’s heartening belief that her solitary state said more about her surroundings than it did about her—had soothed her, and the task fell into place. By day’s end her living room had a maple-hued floor. And only the most eagle-eyed spoilsport could identify it as anything other than the wood it pretended to be, much less find the spot where she had to cheat it, just a bit.
Fuck Evan, she thought as she began to prepare that night’s dinner, a Thai recipe modified from the New York Times’ Mini-malist column. Grief counseling mattered. She was going to help the students of Glendale get through this tragedy, making up for the way the school had botched a more ordinary situation a year ago, when three star athletes had been killed in a car crash. Then, still shy about asserting herself, Alexa had hung back and watched as Barbara Paulson did everything wrong, encouraging an atmosphere of hysteria and gossip that only summer’s arrival had stemmed. This time they would get it right, allow students to express their feelings without encouraging their paranoia.
And, when the opportunity arose, she would find a quiet moment to talk to Eve Muhly, see if the girl really did know more than she was telling. It was hard to see how she could—a middling junior such as Eve would have had little contact with outstanding seniors such as Kat and Perri, or even Josie. But there was no doubt in Alexa’s mind that Eve had wanted to confide in her and could feel that way again, given the opportunity.
16
Out-of-towners have been known to compare the train’s eye view of Baltimore to Dresden, circa 1946, but Peter had always loved Amtrak’s approach into the city. For Peter the butt-ugly scenery was charming—the old Goetze’s caramel factory flashing past, then the backyard views of dilapidated rowhouses, the occasional church spire. He began to gather his things when he saw Johns Hopkins Hospital high on its hill, prim as Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers movie.
He had been astonished, upon entering NYU four years ago, to find out that Baltimore had a kind of retro cachet. Who needed to know that he was really from the suburbs, and a distant one at that? True, New Yorkers could be a bit patronizing, even when professing admiration for a place; when they cooed about Baltimore’s charms, they sounded as if they wanted to bend over and pat the city on its collective head. But Baltimore had a disproportionate amount of work for actors, with a movie or television show almost always in production there, and solid Equity theaters. The guy who had won the Tony this year had done Peter Pan at Center Stage less than a year ago. You couldn’t build a career here, not yet, but maybe that would change. His mother would like that. But, for now, he had to go to Toronto, where the dollar was strong and the scenery versatile.
He was actually a little nervous about telling his parents about the job—and about the money he needed, short term, before the paychecks started. That was part of the reason he had decided to do it in a grand way, show up for Sunday dinner with…well, with just himself, as it turned out. Penn Station no longer had a florist, go figure, and there was nothing in the newsstand that would make a suitable gift for his mom. Hey, Mom, here’s a Goldenberg Peanut Chew. No, not even his self-indulgent mother would be impressed by such a lame gesture.
A cab to Glendale was at least forty dollars, which wouldn’t seem like a lot of ducats in a few weeks, but try explaining your prospects to an ATM. Peter decided to take Light Rail to the end of the line, where he could summon a cab for the rest of the journey. Best of both worlds—he could arrive in style and still have some money in his pocket.
The ghost-white train, near empty as usual, wended its way north. Things were so green here, so lush, and the wooded hills buzzed with the roar of seventeen-year cicadas, a phenomenon that hadn’t reached as far north as New York. Peter was never conscious of missing the countryside while in New York, but he was always glad to see it when he returned home. Other kids at NYU seemed to get a kick out of knocking the places they were from, disavowing them, as if that were part of the New York ritual. To be truly cool, you had to reject your hometown. Unless, of course, your hometown was New York, in which case you just spent the first semester sneering at people who had never ridden the subway or eaten soup dumplings in Chinatown.
Short, eager, and a quick study, Peter had seen immediately that he shouldn’t talk about his high-school glory days, that reminiscing about your past accomplishments merely indicated that you didn’t think you had any future ones. Everyone at Tisch had been a star back home. Some already had done professional gigs, usually commercial work. Simone had a line in Good Will Hunting, when she wasn’t even in high school yet. No one needed to hear about Peter’s Tony in West Side Story, his Billy Bigelow in Carousel, or his Biff in the community-playhouse production of Salesman. They were all former Billys, they were all former Biffs—and Romeos and Don Quixotes and Lieutenant Cables.
But they were not, Peter realized, all good-looking. And he was, not that he would ever be the kind of asshole who said such
a thing out loud. Instead he pretended not to know, ducking his head sheepishly when girls talked about his long eyelashes and tight curls, the lone dimple in his left cheek. He pretended not to know, and they pretended not to know that he was pretending not to know. But when he finally got his height, it was almost disingenuous to claim he didn’t recognize the effect he had just walking into a room. It was a weird responsibility of sorts, being good-looking.
That was another thing he could never say without being judged a Grade-A asshole. But it happened to be true. Sometimes, when he was with a girl, just at that moment when things were beginning to cross over to the point where something significant was going to happen—not necessarily intercourse, but definitely some sort of satisfaction—he would catch this look on the girl’s face, something wistful and confused. It made him feel bad, as if he had led her astray somehow. Yet it wasn’t his fault that girls projected things on him because he was handsome, because they had seen him onstage and they thought they were making out with Curly or Tony or the Rainmaker, and he was really just Peter Lasko, and he wasn’t going to sing some ballad to them when it was all said and done, wasn’t even going to spend the night if he could help it.
Kat wasn’t like that, he reminded himself. Yeah, but you never got with Kat, the no-bullshit part of his brain chimed in. Never got below the waist at all.
Well, Christ, she was only fifteen. For all he knew, even the lightweight stuff they had done that summer was illegal. Her father had certainly tried to suggest as much in that scary little heart-to-heart that Mr. Hartigan had claimed was all about his interest in Peter’s future. He had faked being buddy-buddy, but Peter had never doubted that the guy would have come at him if he hadn’t gotten his way.
The Light Rail slid into the Hunt Valley station. It was only seven, the sun still bright and high above the ridged countryside to the west. His family sat down to supper early on Sundays, and his mother had never gotten out of the habit of putting on a huge spread, even after Peter left home. It was great when he was in a production, especially something where he was moving a lot, and he could come home from a Sunday matinee, fall facefirst into his mom’s food. Some Glendale kids had been weird about his mom’s being Cuban—and the fact that she was a green-eyed blonde, one of the hot moms, really messed with their minds. But once they came over and had arroz con pollo, or frijoles negros, not to mention plantains, they wanted to join the family. His dad had met her in Miami, while visiting Peter’s great-grandparents, and she didn’t have an accent or anything. But that Sandoval name had its advantages, especially when he was applying to colleges. He always assumed that lucky little biographical detail had pretty much cinched NYU for him.
It turned out there was no taxi stand at the end of the line, and it took almost forty-five minutes for Hunt Valley Cab company to dispatch anyone, so it was after eight when Peter pulled up in front of the house. His plan was to come through the front door, super casual, and yell “I’m home!” like he was coming back from lifeguard duty or rehearsal. His mom would practically burst from happiness, he figured, despite seeing him at graduation a month ago. And his dad would be on the verge of tears, too, although he would try to hide it. They were cool, his parents. Well, not exactly cool—his father actually wore a pocket protector to work—but warm and loving in a way that Peter no longer took for granted, not after knowing Simone and some even freakier girls at NYU, girls who had grown up in empty mansions and thought the Gossip Girls books were documentaries.
The front door was locked, which was unusual. Maybe people in Glendale were spooked after the shooting, although it wasn’t as if some maniac was at large. No problem. It would be more in keeping for him to go through the garage and into the kitchen, where his mother was probably still puttering with the dishes and his father was trying to read the Sunday paper and watch television at the same time. Peter punched in the garage-door code, grabbed the key that his mother still hid beneath a Frisbee on the utility shelves, and let himself in.
But while both cars were in the garage, no one was inside the house. And something about the stillness—not to mention the air, which was warm and stuffy, the thermostat set unusually high for a June night—told him no one had been here for at least a day or two. There were no newspapers piled on the kitchen counter, no glasses in the sink. (His dad was a bit of a chauvinist, just put his dishes in the sink and figured Peter’s mom would get them into the dishwasher. She did, muttering to herself but not really minding.)
Peter wandered through the house, looking for clues to his parents’ whereabouts. There was no notation on the calendar, and only a few days’ worth of mail had been dropped through the slot. Mail slots had been a huge controversy in Glendale back when Peter was a kid. All the developments had started out with community mailboxes. But no one really wanted to commune by the mailboxes, it turned out. The Glendale Association had finally surrendered, and door companies had done a thriving business in the older sections.
Glancing through his parents’ bedroom window, Peter saw the neighbor to the north, Mr. Milford, come out into his backyard and start his sprinklers. Peter ran downstairs and into the backyard, calling to him over the fence.
“Why, Peter Lasko!” Mr. Milford said. “I understand you’re a college graduate now. What brings you home?”
“I wanted to surprise my parents. But they seem to have surprised me. Did they run away from home? Join the circus?”
“Your dad won a golf trip to Hilton Head in the United Way raffle down at his work. Isn’t that something? Me, I couldn’t win a goldfish at one of those carnivals where everyone wins the goldfish. Four days and three nights. I think they come back Tuesday. You need anything?”
Money, Peter thought. A good meal. But he still had twenty dollars in his pocket, and there was always plenty of stuff in his mother’s freezer. He’d last until Tuesday.
But the freezer, while packed with leftovers, didn’t intrigue him. It was one thing to have your mom bring all the goodies to the table, hot and ready, another to defrost them in the microwave and eat them alone, in front of the television. And his father’s liquor cabinet wasn’t anywhere near as intriguing as it used to be when Peter was underage. Besides, he wasn’t eager to drink again, not after Friday night’s excesses. Saturday had been a bit of a lost day, and alcohol was hell on the complexion. Peter hated having to think that way, but his appearance was his business, no different than his father having to know the tax codes for inventory, or whatever it was that he did know.
He slipped his mother’s key ring from the pegboard next to the refrigerator and helped himself to her Jetta. Even now he wouldn’t dare touch his dad’s car, although it was nothing special, just a Buick. But dad’s car had always been off-limits. When Peter got rich, he was going to buy his dad a car, something so extreme it would make him laugh that he had ever prized the Buick so much. Peter drove aimlessly, thinking he might get a sub at Dicenzo’s, then remembering they weren’t open on Sundays. He went to the Dairy Queen instead, the one on Old York Road. Now, here was something you couldn’t find in New York. He settled at one of the picnic tables with two chili dogs and a Snickers Blizzard, although he’d pay for it all with double workouts tomorrow. In the meantime…heaven. Thomas Wolfe didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Everything was just as Peter remembered it.
Except, of course, Kat, who was dead. He hadn’t thought of her consciously for some time, but he realized now he had been looking forward to her hearing about Susquehanna Falls, maybe feeling a little wistful toward him. Suffer, as Conrad Birdie snarled to his adoring, panting fans in Bye Bye Birdie, twitching his hips all over Sweet Apple, Ohio. Peter had played that part, too, back in middle school. His first big role, when he was a total runt, and no one knew that he could sing and dance and act, least of all Peter himself.
Of course he had seen Kat, in passing, over the last three years. She was always polite, always sweet. Given the way they behaved, people who didn’t know the story might have as
sumed she dumped him, instead of the other way around. That was Kat, the ultimate good sport. Besides, what was the big deal? They had gone together less than two months, just a summer fling. He was going to be a sophomore in college. She was going to be a sophomore in high school. It wasn’t fair to her, he had said more than once, and she had nodded, as if she believed that Peter was the kind of guy who worried about what was fair for others. But that was how summer romances were supposed to go. It was one thing to run around with a fifteen-year-old girl the summer you were nineteen, to regress to dry-humping in the backseats of cars, fighting for every inch of skin. Freshman year at NYU had been one long drought, his classmates going with older boys. But it wouldn’t always be that way, Peter knew. And, sure enough, he had met a girl his first week of sophomore year, a girl who came to his room just to fuck, like it was a study break or something. And then Simone, with her Jules and Jim fantasy. Who needed a fifteen-year-old virgin, no matter how beautiful, no matter how sweet?
The problem was, he had fallen in love with Kat, just a little. And Kat, for her part, seemed to be the first girl, the only girl, who had loved Peter, as opposed to some stage version of him. She didn’t want Tony or Biff or Conrad. She liked Peter, the lifeguard at the Glendale pool. There were moments, wrestling with her in the backseat of his mother’s car or in her family’s empty house, that he had been torn between wanting to force her to do something, anything, that might give him some release and wondering if they should get engaged. Which was crazy but might have at least persuaded her to sleep with him. That’s how insane she had made him.
To the Power of Three Page 16
