Holly says she wants to revisit the idea of building onto the existing structure, though it would cost twice the original amount of money and necessitate the hiring of subcontractors. Kalie stands between Alison’s legs and sucks her thumb, swaying slightly and staring at Holly. Oliver unfolds his latest plans, experiencing the full fury of his hangover and trying to tamp down the conviction that there’s something wrong with taking these ladies’ money.
Fiona has gone into the kitchen. Holly calls for her to come back into the room. “You should be in on this,” she says. “We’re talking about the house.”
“You decide everything,” says Fiona from the kitchen. “I’m tired of wrangling about it. I’m making something here.”
So, it’s Holly who settles finally on the partition and agrees to a start date for the work. She says, “Done.” Then: “Decided.”
A drinking glass rolls with a little rumbling sound across the space of the wood floor, from the entrance to the kitchen into the dining room.
It comes to rest against a shard of the broken one. For an extended, embarrassed moment, no one says anything.
Holly rolls her finger in the air around her ear, but, when she speaks, her voice is full of honey and pleasantness. “You dropped something, sweetheart.”
“Don’t anybody even think of leaving,” Fiona says sweetly. “I’ve poured iced tea and fixed some snacks.”
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So they stay and partake of the cheeses and different crackers that Fiona has arranged on a big platter, and they drink iced tea. The two old ladies talk in loving tones about how sweet life will be when there’s a wall between them. They don’t put it that way, but Oliver knows the subtext. How fine it will be, Fiona says, to get up when she wants to without worrying about waking anyone or disturbing anyone. How pleasant to fix her own breakfast her way, whenever she likes. Yes, Holly says, and how good she’ll feel knowing that she can leave the television on into the early-morning hours, for the sound of it, while she reads in bed. She has always loved reading in bed, and that has been denied her of late, since the light keeps others awake. Fiona says she’ll sleep so peacefully in her dark bedroom. It goes on like that for a time, and then Alison asks, “Will you have different phone numbers?”
No one seems to have the answer.
But then Holly says, “Well, of course.”
“That might be hard to arrange,” Oliver says. “At least where payment of the bill is concerned.”
“You take the phone,” says Fiona. “You talk on it more anyway.”
“No, you,” Holly says, but with an edge of sarcasm. Then: “I think we’ll find a way to put two phone lines in.”
“I was talking about the bill,” Oliver puts in.
“Oh, well, I pay the bills.”
Holly’s son, Will Butterfield, comes to the house with some home-improvement books that Holly asked for. Oliver recognizes him immediately, with his shambling walk, and he remembers the roses, the pretty wife making out the check. He notices that Butterfield doesn’t seem to recall meeting him. The two men shake hands, and Oliver is about to move to one side when Butterfield pats his shoulder and says, “I’m so damn glad you got the call that day.” It makes Oliver smile. And over the next few seconds, he watches the way the younger man frowns as the two old ladies speak about their project, and as Fiona begins talking about Elizabeth, who hasn’t come to visit in weeks.
“School’s started,” Will Butterfield says. “You know how that is.”
“She seems tense every time I see her now.”
“She reacts that way to fall,” says Will. “The change of seasons.”
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Butterfield obviously wants to say more—it’s in the vague restive-ness of his stance, the way his hands move to his face and down the front of his white shirt.
“My Jonathan is in her English class,” Alison says to the room. “He loves her.”
“Well,” says Fiona. “She has a headache every time I see her.”
“You noticed that, did you?” Butterfield says.
“Amazing,” Holly says. “Fiona noticed something. Isn’t it amazing?”
Oliver looks across at Alison, who busies herself with Kalie, making no eye contact with anyone else. “We ought to go,” he says, understanding his daughter’s fretfulness.
Butterfield says, “You all don’t have to leave on my account.”
“Well,” says Oliver. “Kalie needs her nap.” They shake hands again.
He covers Butterfield’s hand with his left, wanting to express his liking for the other man. “I gave the rose to Alison,” he says.
Butterfield seems momentarily at a loss, but then he remembers.
“Oh, good,” he says. “That’s great.”
“Thanks again,” Oliver tells him. Then he and Alison and Kalie make their way to the truck and climb in. Abruptly, when he sees the weary, sweat-shining countenance of his granddaughter, it seems to him that this going back and forth in a pickup truck is actually a kind of indignity he’s put upon them. Something they endure because they want to be with him. “Are you all right?” he says to Alison.
“Sure,” she says, arranging herself, buckling in. “Why?”
h a l f a s t o l e n c a r
1.
Toward the end of October, Gail calls to say that she’s uncovered a strong lead as to the whereabouts of her mother. She’s pretty sure her mother lives in Newark, New Jersey. The woman she has been working with at the agency has been very helpful. She has managed to gain access to the missing woman’s credit history. It’s not good. There have been several judgments, which is fortunate, since they contain contact information, year by year. There’s one from Portland, Oregon, another from Santa Cruz, California. One more from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The trail disappears after this for several years. But this new lead is a strong one: a woman who worked with Elizabeth for a time wrote to say that she’s pretty sure Elizabeth moved to Newark last year with a boyfriend.
Butterfield listens to all this in silence, and when Gail pauses and waits for him to speak, he keeps silent.
“Well?” Gail says.
“Amazing,” he says.
“I told you I’d find her.”
“No, it’s amazing that you called me with this, Gail. Are you on something?”
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“What?”
“Are you taking something?”
“Yes. Prozac, if you must know.”
“What’re the side effects? Does it take away your sensitivity to the feelings of others? Don’t call me with this shit. Okay? Is that clear enough? Don’t call me with anything like it again.” He starts to say more but then realizes that she has broken the connection.
That evening, he mentions the call to Elizabeth, who, an hour later, develops a migraine. There’s a slow rain outside, leaves dropping heavily from the wet trees. She tells Butterfield that it’s just the weather. He doesn’t believe her. “I wish we could go somewhere for a few days,” she says. And then she covers her eyes. He determines to settle Gail once and for all about this business of finding her biological mother.
But there’s also the Crazies. The work on their house has commenced now, and they’ve already run into unexpected costs. They enlisted Butterfield to accompany them to the bank, where Fiona frightened a poor teller into calling his superior over. The superior hashed it all out and, because the ladies have capital and Fiona has a trust fund she has never used, they get the money they need. Elizabeth knows this means that he’ll be kept busy with these worries, along with the inevitable disputes.
“Oh, God,” she says. “I can see it now. One blind headache after another for three months.”
He rubs the muscles of her upper back and shoulders, and then goes into the kitchen and fixes her a bowl of soup. But the headache has made her nauseous, and she can’t eat. Nor can she read h
er student work. She can’t lie still, and, finally, the headache won’t let her do anything else. He pads back and forth in bare feet, shirtless, bringing her water and heavy doses of aspirin, feeling elderly and halting, dull.
Maybe they should think about having a child. The thought discourages him in some elemental way, at the blood level, and he supposes it has to do with his specific history: the first Elizabeth leaving that way. Mother of his children. Even now, after all these years, the strangeness of it can surge through him like a spell. He doesn’t want to go back there.
He avoids looking at his own reflection in the mirror when he crosses the living room. Toward dark, the phone rings. He decides not to an-130
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swer it. Elizabeth has fallen asleep on the couch, a cold washcloth folded across her forehead. The phone stops, then starts again. She stirs, moans softly, and sighs. He decides to go ahead and pick it up before one of the Crazies appears on his doorstep. The voice on the other end is female, familiar, dimly impatient and weary. It takes him a moment, even as she explains it to him, to realize that this is Oliver Ward’s daughter.
Quite quickly, he understands that she’s calling in an official capacity.
“Yes?” he says. “Alison. Yes—what is it?” Something tips over under his heart. She clears her throat and explains, in that drained voice, that she’s been on the phone with Holly for the last twenty minutes, trying to convince her that there is no provision in the law of any land, no practical way provided for in the statutes of one civilized society anywhere—
not to mention the Third World—for a person to report half a stolen car. There is no workable concept of a car being stealable by halves, or divided in such a way as to make it possible for one to report it as such.
“I know they’re dividing the house,” she says. “But this. It isn’t doable, not even in the case of somebody with Holly’s strength of personality, and not even for the sake of friendship. No one can steal half a car, and therefore—I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound official—no one can report such a thing. I like your mother, Mr. Butterfield. I do. Or I would’ve told her to call whoever the car is registered to. Well—and exactly who is it registered to, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“They were coming over from England and I put the money down for them.”
“You’re saying it’s registered in your name, then.”
“I guess so, yes.” It’s an admission he feels is painful enough.
“Well, your mother assures me that Fiona is at least sober.”
“But she’s somewhere out there in the car. They share the car. They both drive it.”
“So Fiona took the car and Holly wants to report her half of it as stolen.”
“That must be it.”
He’s glad, for the moment, even in his embarrassment, that it’s Alison Holly spoke to. Because, to Alison’s colleagues, his mother and great-aunt are characters, comic figures. “I think that Fiona, if she’s in t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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one of her snits, is a danger in that car or any car and for all I know her license has expired.”
“Do you think we should bring her in, then?”
Butterfield waits a beat. Elizabeth stirs on the couch, moans low; she’s suffering the migraine even in her sleep, dreaming pain. It’s in her features, and in the way she turns, face into the cushions, trying to shut out sound and light. “No,” he says. “No, I’ll settle it. Or they will. I’m sorry they bothered you.”
“Oh,” Alison says. “It’s no bother at all, really. Slow night here, you know.”
He can’t help saying, “Must be pretty funny down there.”
“I know it’s no picnic for you and your wife.” The kindness in her voice unnerves him. He feels chastised by default.
“I’ll get to the bottom of it,” he tells her and is aware of the words’
other meaning—the bottom indeed. And where would the bottom of his troubles with the Crazies be?
“Do you have an idea where she might go?”
“She probably just went to a movie,” Butterfield says. “She’s done that before.” He doesn’t go on to say that back in April, in one of her tantrums, she went to a bar and grill called Macbeth’s, got stinking, and talked an out-of-work furniture salesman into driving her home in her car. The salesman, it turned out, was as impaired as she was, and he drove off the road, through a thick hedge. The car vaulted a small hill, taking to the air like a rocket, and landed upside-down nine feet off the ground, wedged in the forking trunk of a very large old oak tree, with sprigs of the hedge trailing from it like green flags. Fiona and her new transient friend were found an hour later peacefully asleep upside-down in their seat belts, suspended, happily secure, and, no doubt, half-consciously enjoying the sense of weightlessness. The driver who found them thought they must be dead. And, although the car required new door panels on both sides and it took two road crews and most of a night to get it extricated from the tree, neither of them had received a scratch.
“She might’ve just wanted to drive around,” Butterfield says now to Alison, and he hears the note of prevarication in his voice. He strives to seem unconcerned. “Or she’s already back home. Could’ve gone out 132
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to buy a bottle of wine. She likes wine. Wine is usually her drink of choice.”
“Mine, too,” says Alison.
Now there seems nothing at all left to say. He wonders if she knows about the tree incident. Certainly there must have been talk about it at the police station—a red Subaru in a tree, nine feet off the ground. He has the sense that if he mentions it, she’ll remember it, and then put together the fact that the woman involved was Fiona. “I wish Fiona didn’t like it so much,” he says.
“Did you say her license has expired?”
“I think I said that for all I know it has.”
“But you did say you think she’s a danger whether or not. If she’s in a snit.”
“Well, yes.”
Silence.
“So where does that leave us?” he asks.
“The car’s in your name. That means you probably ought to try locating her. I think I’ll put something out on the radio, too.”
“You’re going to arrest her?”
“Not if she has a license and is obeying the traffic laws and isn’t under the influence.”
“I wouldn’t want to be the one that stops her if she isn’t breaking any laws.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll make certain it’s not me.”
Butterfield hears the note of concern—after all, the woman’s father is working for Fiona.
“Meanwhile, if you need us for anything,” Alison goes on, “—well.”
“I hope I don’t,” he says.
“It’ll probably be fine,” she says.
He thanks her. It’s mechanical, and, oddly, rather forlorn. He feels unpleasantly inauthentic, a man striking false notes out of some elemental dishonesty. She tells him again that she knows this is no picnic.
When he hangs up, Elizabeth lifts her head and stares at him. “Well?”
“I’ll be back,” he says. “Fiona took the Subaru.”
She buries her face in the cushions. And she doesn’t move when, a t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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minute later, he comes past her with the car keys, wearing his running shoes and a T-shirt.
2.
Macbeth’s is a stylized English pub in a newer quarter of Point Royal, tucked into a line of upscale shops and antique stores, at the edge of a parking lot far too expansive for the amount of traffic it ever receives.
Butterfield has only been in the place a couple of times, but he has driven by it at night, when the few cars outside it are the only ones in the parking lot. As now. The Subaru is there, an invitation to trouble.
That’s how it strikes him. He parks his own car next to it and sits there for a few minutes, feeling like a polic
eman on a stakeout. Macbeth’s looks closed, even for the group of parked cars. No one arrives, and no one comes out. When he steps out of the car, he hears bagpipes and remembers that on the occasions he visited the place, an enormous, barrel-chested, red-headed man wearing a kilt came out every few minutes, playing the thing, while everyone looked on in the enforced silence the instrument always produced. He waits until the music stops, leaning against the side of the car. The night air is balmy, cool, even pleasant, though it contains the redolence of exhaust and gasoline. There’s a filling station at the far end of the street, sending its harsh luster, the pale shape of a chalice, up into the moonless dark. Butterfield looks at the stars.
When he’s fairly certain the music has stopped, he makes his way to the entrance of the pub, opens the door, and peers in. It’s surprisingly crowded and loud, and the smell of cigarette smoke and beer is strong; he glances back at the clutch of cars, momentarily confused about how that small number could translate into so many people—he has an image of each car arriving packed with riders. Fiona’s at the bar, flanked by two young men. She’s talking to them, disputing, it seems. Butterfield walks over and puts his hand on her shoulder. She’s startled by this and nearly drops her glass—it’s whiskey.
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“Fiona?” he says. “What’re you doing now?”
On the bar next to her wrist is a twenty-dollar bill. She says his name to the two young men, and then recites their names without indicating clearly which is which. They are Abe and Ronny. Butterfield doesn’t want to be confrontational. He shakes hands.
“What happened to you and wine?”
No response. She speaks to Ronny or Abe. “My niece’s son is here to collect me.”
“Buy me a drink?” Butterfield says.
Her gaze is dismissive, yet she holds up one hand to get the bartender’s attention. The bartender is a slender, dark-haired woman with deep, black eyes and a full, sensuous mouth that she seems quite aware of; she draws one side of it back in a crooked smile as she approaches. There’s something oddly forward and even scheming about it, as though she and Fiona are old friends in on a joke. Her features remind Butterfield of those wiry, tough, fierce-eyed women one sees on TV newscasts. High cheekbones, luxuriantly black brows, long neck, sharp chin. Striking without being quite beautiful, and so much of a type as to produce a blur.
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