Death by Eggplant

by Susan Heyboer O'Keefe

  “No, she did not,” I said. I remembered Indra’s words. Maybe both she and my mother were right. If I had to get into this, I might as well get into it big. “Cleo watched me fail a spelling test and wouldn’t give me a single hint.”

  “Bertie,” Mom sighed. She pulled into a parking spot, turned off the car, and faced me. “You don’t learn by cheating. Besides, you shouldn’t be teaching your little sister such things.”

  “I’m joking,” I said, rolling my eyes. “And I don’t have a little sister. I have a sack of flour.”

  “Visualize, Bertie, visualize! Not a flour sack, but a baby! And jealousy between siblings is a natural part of growing up. It’s very healthy for you to express it,” she said with a face so straight it worried me. “It was only when I admitted to Dr. Garth my own jealousy about your Aunts Minerva and Debbie Lu that I made any progress at all.”

  Dr. Garth had been last year’s therapist, in between some flake I used to call Sufi Master Alakazam and the current Dr. Zimmerman.

  Still in the parking lot, I strapped Cleo into the shopping cart’s baby seat, just in case we ran into Mrs. Menendez. My father wasn’t home yet, and if I didn’t have Cleo with me, Mrs. Menendez would probably want a notarized receipt from a babysitter.

  Once inside the store, I explained the situation to the manager. I didn’t want him thinking I was shoplifting when we tried to leave. He took one look at how my mother kept patting the top of the bag and cooing, then waved us on. “Class project—sure,” he said.

  First stop was fruits and vegetables. I often didn’t decide ahead of time what I was going to cook. I had to see first what was fresh, what was ripe, what called to me softly as I passed by. Bread was a good example of the opposite of this. Bread was always waiting and ready to be made, like a faithful dog who waited for your return home each night. As long as you nurtured your yeast, bread would always be there. The thought couldn’t help but tug at my heartstrings a bit, and I looked at Cleo.

  But fruits and vegetables weren’t like bread. They were fickle. I didn’t like to arbitrarily decide on a Tuesday that on Friday I would make pears flambé. I liked to see the pears first. Were their pale green skins smooth and unblemished, free from bruises that would darken the fruit? When held and hefted, were they solid and firm, yet did they yield slightly to gentle pressure? Were they almost ripe enough to perfume the air? Only then might I decide to make pears flambé. So it was with most fruits and vegetables.

  Today I wouldn’t look at the eggplants, no matter how plump and purplish black they were. Nope, I wouldn’t even listen to them.

  And if I didn’t think about eggplants, then I also wouldn’t think about that, I told myself, steering the shopping cart out of the vegetable aisle. Nor was I going to ask my mother if any mail had come for me. After all, a watched pot never boils. I was firmly and absolutely putting all thoughts out of my mind . . . about that.

  I headed for the baking aisle next. I needed turmeric and fenugreek seed to restock my spice rack. Exotic, yes, but I was out, and never knew when I might need them.

  “How about cornbread?” my mother asked, picking up a box of ready mix with dancing corn muffins on the label. “You know how much your father loves it.” She smiled to herself, as if cornbread was a secret joke between them. It probably was.

  “Okay,” I said. I took the box of mix out of her hands, put it back on the shelf, and instead gave her a bag of yellow cornmeal. Cornbread from scratch was so simple, they should shoot whoever decided it needed instant mix. Quickly I planned the full menu. Cornbread went well with roast chicken, another of Dad’s favorites. I would fix buttermilk skillet cornbread to go with the chicken, a simple classic, always good.

  Mom dropped the bag of cornmeal into the cart. I was just about to make a joke about its being Cleo’s long-lost cousin, when the sound of Nick Dekker’s voice assaulted me from the next aisle.

  “No, I don’t wanna buy that for you while you get fruit,” I heard Dekker say loudly. “Why can’t you buy both? Better yet, why can’t I just wait in the car?”

  I panicked. Dekker had left me alone all day, which could only mean that he was busy calculating his next move. But he would never pass up a chance to get me here without Mrs. M. around.

  When he stopped talking, I couldn’t tell which way he had headed, and so which way I should run. What if Dekker caught me here? Where had my mother suddenly gone? And what in the world could I do with Cleo? I couldn’t let Dekker find me with a flour sack strapped into a shopping cart full of baking ingredients.

  Silence, then the squeak of shopping cart wheels, which spooked me to action. I grabbed the sack and shoved it onto the shelf of flour with all the other bags. Then I left the cart where it was, ran down the aisle—

  —And slammed smack into Dekker. He was carrying several cans and some five-dollar bills, which I knocked right out of his hands.

  The smart thing would have been to run before he saw who had bumped him. But I have never been known for doing the smart thing. Instead Nice-Guy Bertie automatically stooped to help pick up the money and cans. I read the words on one of them: “Diet DeLite! Complete Meal Appeal!” He grabbed the can from me.

  “Watch where you’re going, Bertha!” His face suddenly turned shades of red, like a Christmas quilt that forgot the green.

  “Sorry.” I began to back away. My mother appeared behind Dekker and began to study the encyclopedia that came a book a week with your groceries. No, no, no, don’t come over to show me, I silently begged. Stop visualizing! Cleo can’t even read yet!

  My eyes must have bugged because Dekker started to turn to see what I was looking at. I had to get his attention now.

  “So, Nick,” I said, poking him. “Shopping, huh?”

  He looked at me as if I couldn’t be more stupid. “No, I’m bowling, wuss,” he said. “Thought I’d use your head for the ball.”

  I had his attention. That was as far as my brilliant plan went.

  “You know, there’s a special on soft-shell crabs,” I babbled. “It’s a little late in the season for my taste, but, you know, a good rémoulade sauce can hide a thousand flaws. It’s not nearly as hard as the name sounds, it’s just that it’s French and—”

  Rémoulade sauce? What was I thinking?

  Muttering that I better not be contagious, Dekker once more started to turn. Desperate, I grabbed his shirt collar.

  “Tough stain,” I said. “Laundry detergent’s in aisle five.”

  He knocked my hand away as if I had cooties.

  “Yeah? I think you left your brain there,” he said.

  My mother finally disappeared down the natural foods aisle. Relieved, I stepped away. But I had already pushed Dekker too far.

  “Not so fast,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Nothing. Bowling, like you said.”

  His expression turned suspicious. “You alone?”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be? How about you?”

  “Yeah, I’m alone,” he said.

  I had maybe the first flash of self-preservation in my entire life and didn’t contradict him. But I couldn’t help looking down at the cans of diet drinks he was holding. He tossed them onto a shelf of canned vegetables as if they were red hot. His scowl dared me to say a word.

  “Well, I guess I’d better be going,” I said.

  Before he could beat me up, I ran outside. The automatic doors couldn’t open fast enough, and I almost made a new exit. I ducked round the corner and waited. People streamed in and out. Finally Dekker appeared, carrying a bag. As he headed toward the parking lot, I sneaked back inside.

  I found my mother in front of the lobster tank, tapping on the glass to get their attention. She never even knew that I had left.

  “C’mon, let’s finish up,” I said.

  I led her back to the baking aisle. Mom let out a shriek.

  “She’s gone!”

  “Who?”

  “Your sister! H
ow could you have left her?”

  “It’s okay. She just wanted to take a closer look at the flour bags,” I joked. “Family reunion, you know?”

  “Well, get her back,” Mom said, hands on her hips, obviously not amused. “You know she shouldn’t be talking to strangers.”

  I moved the shopping cart aside and reached for Cleo on the shelf. The space was empty. My flour sack wasn’t there.

  I stepped closer, looked harder. Maybe someone had pushed the sack aside to get to the cake flour or something. Or maybe someone had been looking for another brand.

  Or maybe someone had bought Cleo.

  I thought of all those people who had left the store while I was hiding from Dekker. Any one of them could have been a flour-sack-babynapper.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be right back!” I told my mother, with more belief than I felt, then raced to the checkout lines.

  Let her be here, I prayed. I did not want to fail math. I did not want to go to summer school. I did not want to have to put flour-sack-baby pictures on milk cartons.

  I began at the express line, hopping around to see what each person carried, then worked my way backward. I tried asking.

  “Did you see . . . ? Did you happen to pick up . . . ? Were you looking for flour?”

  Suddenly I spotted her—being held upside down as a clerk repeatedly tried to scan her bottom.

  I pushed my way to the front of the line.

  “I’m sorry, but that’s mine,” I said, reaching.

  A huge hairy hand clamped shut on my wrist.

  I looked up and saw a six-and-a-half-foot wall of black leather, from steel-tipped boots, to studded pants and motorcycle jacket, to the cap on a shaggy bearded head. The guy was a giant, like a super-villain from the comics, Berserker Biker Bob. Probably a hundred cows had died just to dress him.

  “It’s mine,” he rumbled.

  “No, please.” I pulled out of his grip. “She’s my school project. I put her down for just a minute.”

  “Her?” the clerk said. I felt my cheeks burn. Somewhere in my panicked dash throughout the store, I had changed Cleo from an it to a her.

  The clerk snickered. He had black spiky hair, two diamond studs in one nostril, and a row of silver hoops through each lip and each ear. He made me think of that cool guy Pinhead from the horror videos. Then I saw his rock band T-shirt under his store smock—Dead Babies. Not a good sign. Besides, he was pointing to the face I had drawn for Cleo. His snickers escalated to snorts. “Art project, huh? Like, yeah. Time for extra credit, I think.”

  “She is the extra credit. Look, you can’t even scan her. She’s not in the system.”

  “Everything’s in the system. Even you.” He flashed the scanner and blinded me with the red light. “Big Brother is watching.”

  “Sure, but she won’t scan. Let me have her back.”

  “That’s mine,” Berserker Biker Bob repeated. “I’m making dumplings for the old folks’ home.”

  Dumplings? A fellow cook? No, he was probably making dumplings as a side dish to serve with old folks, not dumplings for old folks.

  “Please?” I repeated.

  Pinhead shrugged. He had given up scanning and was trying to enter the code manually. “It still won’t come up. You need a different bag anyway,” he told Berserker Biker Bob.

  “But this is stone-ground,” the other rumbled. “From Dutch’s Old Time Oregon Mill.”

  “I’ll run back and get you a different bag,” I wheedled. “Just as good for dumplings, I promise.”

  He shook his head. “I want this bag.”

  “No!” I said, scared enough now to grab Cleo from the clerk. Again a gigantic hairy hand closed over my wrist. Then a smaller hand with long red nails appeared from nowhere, closed over his, and squeezed hard.

  “Drop it, buster!”

  The three of us—Berserker, Pinhead, and me—looked up. It took me a moment to recognize my mother.

  “Don’t you dare touch my son.” Her squinted eyes threw off icy cosmic rays.

  Berserker Biker Bob and my mom stared at each other. I wasn’t sure what happened between them in the silence, but the clerk kept looking back and forth as if following a tennis match. In the end, Bob dropped my hand and muttered an apology.

  Mom reached out and took Cleo, cradled her in her left arm, and motioned for me to follow her.

  On the way to the car, I found myself looking over both shoulders and scanning both the parking lot and the trees surrounding it to make sure that Dekker wasn’t there.

  Maybe I needed to take intimidation lessons from my mom.

  DAY FOUR

  “You should have seen her!” I crowed, flipping a pancake onto Dad’s plate with enthusiasm. “This guy was like ten feet tall and all leather. I expected chains and whips and spikes—he was that scary. Mom made him crumple with just a look. She was as scary as he was. Scarier, because he backed down.”

  My father hadn’t heard what had happened till now, since he had worked late last night, past midnight. Now he had to be on the golf course at seven. He hated golf, but sometimes the company president wanted him there to explain probability to a client. My father preferred to explain things at work. If he had two hands on a golf club, he had no hands left for a keyboard or cell phone.

  That’s why I usually got up early on golf mornings to make him breakfast before he left. I didn’t have many other chances to talk to him. And besides, I make incredible pancakes, if I do say so myself. Too much handling, too much checking and flipping, made them tough, but I had an instinctive feel for when to make my move—when the tops dried to a weave of open bubbles and the bottoms were exactly a perfect dark gold, ringed with crispy brown. Plus I had a secret ingredient: I folded a cup of quinoa grains into the batter at the end. When you eat them, the quinoa pops in your mouth.

  “‘Don’t you dare touch my son,’” I mimicked, trying to make my voice threatening and Momlike all at once. “And the whole time, they’re holding Cleo upside down and trying to scan her bottom.”

  “Cleo?” Dad said, between bites. Apparently, he had blocked the memory of discovering he was a father again.

  He was saved by the ringing of the cell phone.

  “Yes, yes, Jake, I’ve got the figures on me. Projections from Plan 1, versions 3.5, 3.6, and 3.72,” he said. “No, no, I won’t mention a single number till at least one-fourth of the group has played the seventh hole.”

  “What time will you be back?” I nudged his shoulder. “Mom wanted me to ask.”

  “What time? No, not you, Jake, wait a minute.” Dad pressed the receiver against his chest. “What?”

  “Mom wants to know if you’ll be back by noon. Dr. Zimmerman wants to meet us.” It must have been pretty important. He was the first of Mom’s therapists to ask to see the whole family.

  “Dr. Zimmerman?” Dad said.

  His expression was so blank I couldn’t help myself.

  “You know, the baby doctor for Cleo. Because she’s so pale.”

  “Something’s wrong with the baby?” He clicked the off button and tossed the phone to the side. The cell began to chirp at once. He waved at it. “I’ll cancel the golf game.”

  “No,” I said in alarm. “It’s all right. It’s just a joke. There is no baby, remember?”

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “I’m sure, Dad. Ask anybody.”

  After he left, I put the rest of the pancake batter in the refrigerator, loaded the dishwasher, then took my math homework outside to the backyard. I had tried doing it last night as I waited for Dad, but it was late and my eyes had stung just looking at the problems. This morning it didn’t look any easier. X equaled 4ab to the power of grapefruit when X equals 666? That didn’t make sense. “Algebra” was probably just a code word for how to torture seventh and eighth graders.

  My father had tried to help me with math many times, but we spoke different languages. In my head, I could multiply and divide teaspoons, ounces, cups, and quarts, and a
djust any recipe to any size crowd. I just couldn’t put that crowd onto two trains, both traveling north from different starting points at different speeds, and tell you which one would get to Boston first.

  Math book and notebook under one arm, I dragged a lawn chair to the middle of the yard. The day was sunny and warm, yet early enough that the grass was still damp with dew. Bees buzzed from flower to flower, humming while they worked. I opened my book, but the morning sun slanted into my eyes and forced them closed. It was a crime that school was still in session in June.

  I didn’t remember feeling sleepy. But the next thing I knew, something bumped my toe. The buzzing, which had gotten much too loud, suddenly stopped. I bolted up and shut my mouth, which for some reason was open.

  “You were snoring.”

  “What?” I blinked hard, looking up into the sun.

  If I was snoring, I must have been sleeping. And if I was sleeping, I must have been dreaming. Only that could explain the sight of Indra Sahir standing over me. She wore pink shorts and a pink top. Her brown arms and long brown legs looked like they had an end-of-summer tan, except it was the beginning of summer and that was their color all year long. I remembered every joke I had ever heard about my being Moby Dick, the great white whale.

  “I said you were snoring,” she repeated. “Soooo loudly. That’s why I poked you. Before you attracted the bees, you know? You sounded like a big one yourself.”

  “A big what?”

  “A big bee,” she said patiently.

  I finally realized that I was awake and that Indra was no dream. Well, yes, she was a dream, but I wasn’t dreaming about her at the moment. I sat up straight and wiped my chin. No drool. Good.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

  She shrugged. “Walking home from my piano lesson,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  She had walked home from piano through my backyard? Sure. Then it hit me: She had come here deliberately to see me. Indra Sahir had come to see me, Bertie Hooks. It was time to say something witty and memorable.

  “I didn’t know you took piano.”